Some reflections on 2023

In my pursuit of personal growth, I realised that while I ruminate over ideas and experiences a fair bit, I don’t write about them enough. Whenever I do though, I have found that the translation to the written form has two benefits:

  1. I can move forward effortlessly by imbibing the key learnings and archiving the details.
  2. It helps others get a condensed perspective on something that they might not have been exposed to.

I am on my customary year-end break. I spend it doing things that I love but don’t find enough time or energy for during the rest of the year. I read, cook, explore Old Delhi, write, code and spend time with family and friends.

This is also a time for reflection on the year gone by.

Reflections are important. Year end reflections more so.

When living life in real time, it is not always possible to pay attention to the subtle details, the underlying premises and the second order consequences of events/actions.

Reflection allows me to adjust my assumptions and update my operating algorithms. I take a moment to bask in the glory of my achievements and forgive myself for the mistakes. I let go. And most importantly, it is an opportunity for me to be grateful for everything that I have and that are beyond my control.

I have found Steph Ango’s 40 questions to ask yourself every year to be a comprehensive list for doing this exercise. I thought about these, went through my notes and camera roll, and played back the events of the year as part of my reflection session. If I exclude the private parts, following are some of my takeaways from 2023, documented here for posterity.

  • This was the toughest year that I have gone through for reasons that are beyond the scope of this post. It made me more resilient. I am exiting with a lot more self-belief in my ability to handle difficult situations and get through them. I wrote about my experience here - How to get out of a rut and When to not recalibrate
  • Two of the happiest days were my birthday and the day I flew to Singapore for a family trip. I don’t usually get happy or sad by events. I am fairly stable emotionally-on-most-occasions. However, both these days were outliers. The common theme was that I was doing fun things with people I love–probably something that I should seek more.
  • I realised that events affecting close friends (of 10+ years) have an impressionable impact on me. Whether it is the joy of them getting married or the sorrow of them losing a parent–for some reason, these feel personal. I find this to be a beautiful part of our living experience and something that gives a lot of meaning to my life.
  • I learnt that while personal growth requires you to sometimes be what you are not, this diversion from your equilibrium state should be within the bounds of your authentic self. Orthogonal adjustments lead to worse outcomes.
    • For me, this understanding occurred when I was constantly being given the feedback that I need to let go of my conflict aversion tendencies and be assertive in demanding situations. As a result, I started engaging in a way that is not typical of how I am in heated moments–leading to bad outcomes for everyone in both personal and professional settings.
    • I now know the distinction between internalising this feedback and coming up with contextualised redressal mechanisms for it. There are many ways to solve the same problem and I need to have the self-awareness to choose what will help me operate from a position of strength.
  • I learnt a lot about communication, conflicts and human behaviour. I feel that I have a bad emotional quotient. I operate in binary states of 0 and 1. I am not comfortable with fuzziness in situations and relationships. But if the complexity of our lives is multiplied by the complexity of other people’s lives, we are left with dynamics that are continuous functions. They can’t be resolved to the discrete states of 0 and 1 as easily. Hence, there is a requirement for us to be immensely patient and have a high threshold for tolerance of ambiguities.
    • There are two ways to learn this:
    • For me, a culmination of both have taught me. Events were the trigger and books/interviews were the post-facto remedial steps. Ideally, one should lead with the books/interviews so that events can be prevented. I am still assimilating the learnings and trying to apply them as and when I get the opportunity. I will be writing about them in a post soon.
    • I have been a very impatient person all my life owing to the kind of career path that I have had. JEE, B-School entrances, startups and consulting are all high-octane situations requiring a strong bias for action and that leads to impatience becoming a defining trait of individuals on these paths. But as I grow older, this virtue that is a strength in professional settings is turning out to be a weakness in personal relationships. I am making a conscious attempt to identify this and other such aspects of personality that play conflicting roles in the two dimensions of life.
  • I was deeply inspired by Lee Kuan Yew, the first Prime Minister of Singapore. He was a visionary who led a small island nation with no resources of their own to a developed country almost single-handedly. I read his book From Third World to First where he outlines how he approached the multiple aspects of nation building–from army and religious harmony to infrastructure and education. It is a must read for all builders–whether you are building a business or running programs for the government.
  • I quit Instagram. It was a difficult decision, but totally worth it. I didn’t post much but I used to consume a lot of content. I figured that it was having a detrimental effect on my life. I ran a personal experiment before coming to this decision. Anecdotally, these are some pointers that helped form my decision:
    • My baseline level of happiness is higher now than it used to be when I was constantly browsing through Instagram. There can be other factors contributing to this but I know deleting my profile is a major one.
    • Meta recruits the best engineers and data scientists to design gamified loops to keep users hooked. There is a science behind it. A part of my job is to do the same with the businesses and products I am building. Add to this the ingenuity and creativity of the brands and creators who have huge monetary incentives to use these tools to create engaging content. Using your willpower to counter this is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. Any average user has no chance.
    • My screen time reduced from an average of ~5-6 hours per day to < 2 hours per day.
    • There is a push by Meta to algorithmically promote soft-porn content. You can check this by creating a new account and looking at your ‘Explore’ feed. Porn is addictive.
    • I realised at one point that my wants were being shaped by the content I was consuming. These were not inherent wants. Just because I was seeing other people do something or go somewhere, I wanted to do the same. And this was getting reinforced through the same or related content appearing multiple times. This may be hard to discern for most people, yet it remains true.
    • The downside is that you lose track of what is happening in your friends’ life. In my case, I am lucky to have close friends who either don’t use Instagram themselves or are kind enough to keep me posted on what is going on in their lives. For the second degree connections like batchmates and other acquaintances, it is much harder to be up to date. However, on the balance, I still feel that quitting is a net positive decision.
    • This is a very good video (by an ex-Instagram power user) that captures some of what I said and adds more colour to the decision.
  • This year taught me the meaning of contentment. I have always believed that contentment and ambition are the antithesis of one another–they can’t co-exist. For me, ambition has always mattered more. My belief changed when I was revisiting the mathematical concept of local and global maxima. Contentment is about realising that given the current context of your life, you are at the most optimal point (local maxima) that you can be at. Ambition, on the other hand, is about knowing that there is a more optimal point (global maxima) but in a different context. So while ambition fuels the pursuit of global maxima, I am content that I am at a local maxima.
  • Fitness was a top priority this year and given the constraints of a hectic work-life, I managed to do decently well.
    • I consistently strength trained 3x per week in Feb-March and from Sep-Dec. I am lifting heavier weights than I ever have.
    • I was making good progress while running - clocking 4 km in 30 mins (until the Delhi pollution ruined things). The goal was to run 5 km under 30 mins but this will have to be achieved next year.
    • I read a life-changing book on nutrition and completely flipped my diet. I now eat high protein meals (pulses, paneer, egg, chicken, soya) with low glycemic index carbs (millets, quinoa, brown rice), almost no sugar (no refined sugar, jaggery/date sweetened desserts) and unsaturated fats (olive oil).
    • This is the first time in my life that I am taking supplementation seriously and it has had a massively positive impact on my life. Some supplements that I take are whey protein, Vitamins (B12, D3), minerals (zinc, magnesium) and fish oil (Omega-3 - EPA, DHA).
  • Oppenheimer and Air were two movies that I absolutely loved.
  • “A shoe is just a shoe until someone steps in it” is a quote from Air that I thought about a lot. The question of doing work that matters and has an impact on the world is something that I have been grappling with for long. This quote presented a wonderful insight into how the creation of something as trivial as a shoe can also be so meaningful when you orient your perspective the right way.
  • This was the year of short form reading. I discovered and read a lot of amazing essays. Some that I really liked were:
  • Mitraz’s tracks helped me get through the year (if you haven’t heard of them, they are an upcoming Indie duo making some wonderful music). Prateek Kuhad’s Mulaqat was my favourite song.
  • And finally, ‘Sometimes’ by Sheenagh Pugh is the best poem that I read and fittingly sums up the year:

Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail. Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war, elect an honest man, decide they care enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

  • Here’s to continued learning, growth and prosperity in 2024!

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