A turbulent and transformative year ends in tranquility

December 31, 2023

As December winds to a close, many of us - whether publicly or just privately - reflect back on the year. What went well, what didn’t, what would I have done differently, would I repeat X if I had the chance, did this year take me closer to where I aspire to be or further? Etc etc etc. The New Year is an arbitrary date to make changes, but it’s common to use it as a marker.

It’s hard to separate out the effects of recency bias, yet this year has been among the most full years of my life, if not the most eventful. Ups and downs, altibajos, at an extreme level, so much that it feels impossible to rate or sum up the year as one rather than divide it in two. The first half of the year was really rotten - while it had its enjoyable moments and I was still thrilled to be living in Spain in Valencia, it featured a major ethical and life dilemma, a car crash that put me on medical leave for more than two months, the need for a job change and personal relationship drama that I won’t share here. It was a lot to happen all at once and when not in good health (car crash), everything is amplified. Yet the second half of the year has been absolutely marvelous - I resolved the ethical/life dilemma in the best way imaginable, recovered from the car crash to run the Valencia Marathon in my fastest marathon time in more than seven years, got a new job that I love and that allowed me to stay in Spain, ended up moving to my all-time favorite place of Barcelona, found an apartment a short walk from the beach and more.

Things can change so fast, if we put in the work and the goals, and some luck falls our way. Some of what happened in the first half of this year for me was partly bad luck, some of what happened in the second was partly good luck. But there were also many, many things I did to help open the door to good luck and serendipity.

The past couple of weeks, I’ve found myself feeling something abnormal for me: calm, at peace.

That may sound silly or inconsequential, but I am closer to a mass of kinetic energy that never stops, a controlled volcano erupting. I don’t mean this in a critical fashion, it’s just a description. Being nonstop in motion and actively pursuing more, better, greater is in large part my personality as well as a choice. And it’s allowed me to accomplish a lot.

Yet there’s also a portion that stems from the way our society can operate, that you can’t take a break or with the massive burden of medical and student loans weighing on me, that I could never feel tranquil.

I truly think I haven’t felt this calm, this at peace since at least the period when I finished my MBA/grad school in May-June 2011, if not longer. At the end of June that year, I suffered a concussion that led to a stroke and left me with substantial medical debt on top of all my student loans. This event has colored all my major decisions since, one in the medical impact, which was top of mind in every breath for several years; but also in that that debt forced me to change careers and leave the sports sector (which I loved) and take jobs that I wasn’t passionate about but which enabled me to pay my bills. Is it hyper-privileged to be able to choose to do things that I’m passionate about? It is and I am.

It’s not only the concussion-then-stroke and its health and financial impact that weighed on me over the last 12 1/2 years. At times, there were other things in life that accumulated, whether a bad breakup or career strife or some other personal challenge. But that has dominated for a dozen years. I’m not quite free of all the loans, I will be done paying off the mortgage-or-larger nut per month on my student loans in a little over a year. Yet it’s within striking distance. And while I have hacked away at that (and finished paying off the medical loans), I’ve continued laying the base layers and a few more layers of the structure I’m building for my life, the life I want. It will never be done because we are never a finished product. Somehow, though, it feels like a place to stop and savor. Perhaps like Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, whose towers have reached completion in recent weeks, I’m at a good place to pause and enjoy the views for a minute.

Don’t get me wrong, I will be resetting goals for more and better in 2024. The difference is I’ll be doing it from a place of confidence, security and assuredness. Let’s see how that goes.

Reads, listens and watches for December

Articles

Podcasts

  • Davis Smith on Twenty Minute VC

  • Plain English with Derek Thompson on China’s economy, and how its “economic miracle” went off the rails 

  • John Collison speaks with Charlie Munger

  • Changing Minds In A Polarized World with David McRaney on Decision Education Podcast

  • Conflict as a Tool for Growth: Esther Perel on Pulling the Thread with Elise Loehnen

  • Charlando con Libros de Adrián Sussudio - Cómo encontrar las mejores startups con Samuel Gil

Books

  • A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan

  • La Mujer del Miliciano - by Aureli Vásquez

  • La Catedral del Mar by Ildefonso Falconés

  • Find Me by André Caiman

  • Thicker Than Water - by Kerry Washington

Watch

  • Past Lives movie

  • Gatorade commercial with Caitlin Clark, that little girl from Iowa