Picking a theme for 2024

A belated New Year's post...

A small appeal before we dive in: I’d love to hear from you, and what sorts of topics you’re interested in reading about. And if you’ve enjoyed these posts so far, I’d be grateful if you could share this article with a few friends who might also appreciate it. Thank you for reading!

***

Is it too late for a New Year’s post? 

I started this piece thinking I’ll explain why I pick only one theme to focus on each year: a silent protest against capricious New Year’s resolutions, but a recognition that we can use certain moments to reset. I find that resolutions or even goals set me up to fail, or else they risk misdirecting my focus. A theme, to my mind, lives somewhere behind our goals and resolutions, and hopefully results in many of the activities we want ourselves to take. But the attention rests on understanding why I should take certain actions rather than policing what those actions are.

Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Waterson, Published December 31, 1995

But that all fit into one paragraph, so instead I wrote about how I picked my theme for this year. It began with something I recently read that’s suck with me: We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a month. It’s another way of highlighting the famous point about compounding. Humans are linear thinkers; we fail to recognize the magnitude of small improvements multiplied over long periods of time. 

The power of compounding brings up an intriguing paradox: On the one hand, we need to take the long view to put our faith in this system in the first place. Early improvements will appear so incremental that it’s hard to believe we’re moving anywhere at all. (And to complicate matters: sometimes we’re not, in fact, making progress). Revenue growth of early stage companies follows this pattern, but so too does learning guitar or building a digital audience. 

Among other essential ingredients to success - determination, passion, intelligence - is time, which is necessary to realize compounded benefits. Stated more simply: we need to take the long view, because it might take a long time. 

But on the other hand, too much attention to time risks excusing the daily effort needed to move a project ever so slightly forward. The work may not be glamorous: sending the extra email, writing the last line of code, taking one more meeting. And that’s why the long view can be misleading. In the grand scheme of our lives, how much can one email or line of code possibly matter? 

Perhaps the answer is very little. But it’s the wrong question. Daily effort, which itself can seem like an exercise in pointless incrementalism, is the other essential and often overlooked ingredient to compounded benefits. It’s not about the value of one extra push on one day; it’s that extra effort multiplied across each day, which can lead to something much greater than the some of its parts.

When I returned from my sabbatical six months ago, I wrote a post that captured my main takeaway from my travels:

But if I have anything to say, it is this: Consider discounting your time. The point of investing in your future is to cash in that goodwill at the right time, for the right purpose, and with the right people. Do so intentionally, or else these windows of opportunity may pass by.

Without realizing, I was ultimately getting at a similar point: we should focus on what we can do today in order to make the long view possible.

My startup ideation process began fragmented and disjointed. I needed to learn how to quickly arrive at a go / no-go on a new project. I had to find the right balance between focus and breadth. I’m not afraid of long hours, but I noticed myself intimidated by hard problems because of the sheer amount of work required to solve them. But the problems most worth solving are the hard ones, and I underestimated how crucial the power of compounded effort will be. I let perfect be the enemy of good.

In order to trust the process, I’ll need to trust myself. Time and daily effort are the only two variables, and time isn’t in my control. And thus emerged my theme for 2024: win today. Solve what you can.  Focus on moving forward, even just slightly, every single day.