11 Lessons from 2025

Hello everyone and welcome to the annual lessons recap of the year. Below are 11 lessons that struck me particularily more this year.

1. Ideas are often the ceiling setters. You can be a beast at execution – in fact, you should be a beast at execution – but the idea you start with will set the tone for what you work on. In my field, some of the most seminal, timeless works are built on top of intuitive, simple, and practical ideas. These are the ideas that I could explain to a young child and they would say, “ohhh! That’s epic and makes some sense!” The execution is built through intentional practice of one’s craft, and tools like Claude Code empower the end user even more.

2. The personality latent space, consisting of N dimensions, can be used to characterize people that you meet. When you first meet someone, you eventually find a arbitrarily large personality vector that you use to describe them. When you interact with them, your model of productive and enjoyable interaction is conditioned on their vector – with different people, you talk about different stuff, have a certain degree of emotional investment, and in general, try be happy with them. When new people come along, I tend to quickly find who this new person is most similar to (we call it “vibes”), and then their vector differs from the initial person. And that vector will continue to change, because people change and your perception of them.

3. The pain cave is real in running. I felt it during a half marathon of mine this year, which I stupidly did not train for (I call it setting my cardio floor). I came to a complete stop, and somehow, what got my out of it was my girlfriend and the thought of our future kids. No other thought in that moment came close to that. Suddenly, my legs were moving, and I finished with the time I wanted.

4. The people you love are everything.

5. Most people are not very good at driving and view it as a means to an end, but there is not really anything you can do about it besides driving defensively, smoothly, and in a calm state of mind.

6. Some people will simply not match your energy, for many reasons (and it doesn’t make them a bad person either), so it is not worth spending more time with them. A great conversation will feel effortless, like walking on even ground. A conversation where both parties have to strain to keep it going is like deadlifting near your MAX all the time.

7. To me, the best challenges are ones that are slightly above your skill level, have a positive long-term effect on your health and happiness, and can be broken up into sizable chunks. The rewards of the increased competency in a challenge are at first much more frequent, but when you get better and better, the sparse rewards HIT.

8. Sometimes, you will do very well under pressure and deliver something really good. But in the times that you fail to deliver, you will remember it for quite a long time, and to be honest, it is simply something you will have to live with, and it can especially sting if you put everything into it. Take the NBA great Charles Barkley, The Round Mound of Rebound. While he is often clowned for having no championships, context reminds us that he often ran into absolute powerhouses, like the 93’ Bulls. This was a version of Michael Jordan where someone would breathe on him and he’d take it personally, and drop a 50 piece on a random Tuesday night. Barkley didn’t and couldn’t beat that, even as NBA MVP that year. And the failed ring still stings.

9. In your research career, you start off by being awestruck by every new paper – it seems like the greatest thing since sliced bread. In the next phase, you become a cynic, not finding much work impressive. Then, you lie somewhere in the middle, where you know to value great work, and take the good pieces from decent work, and provide constructive criticism for the mid-bad works.

10. People won’t hate, but sometimes they don’t expect you to do elite work, and there is often an adjustment to people’s internal expectations of you if you don’t deliver (or deliver at a high level). I believe this is ok to do, but don’t let it bring you down!! Living and learning is a free gift.

11. Lifting is quite great. I say this as someone who grew up in running and has run marathons, but lifting and building your physique is an incredible confidence builder, and an easy way to build momentum if you’ve had a rough day at work. Personally, I have found lifting to relax my normal mental state, and it has humbled me a solid amount. I’m telling you, right after a good lift, the world looks a lot more like it did as a kid, with those rose-tinted glasses. If I don’t hit the 1000 pound club next year, I’m in trouble.