2025 Annual Letter

Dearest friends,

2025 was a quiet whirlwind with so much happening, and one of the years where I browse backwards at my photos and think, "wow I haven't even reached 2024 yet."

I feel so fortunate to be able to explore so many new places this year. Internationally, I flew to India (Delhi, Shimla) for a colleague’s beautiful wedding in the Himalayan foothills; Seoul, Korea for the first time for a work trip; Squamish, British Columbia for a climbing trip; Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka) with my family for the first international family vacation in over 20 years; and just last week, Cabo Pulmo, Mexico (Baja) for a dive trip with whale sharks and mobulas (watch this short video we made together).

Domestically, I flew to Eugene to see my 2-year-old niece five times this year and watched her grow up so fast; down to San Diego for a short weekend to be reunited with some of my best friends I hadn’t seen in years; up to Seattle for a short boys trip with some other best friends; and backpacking in Big Sur with my little brother (first time together). I had the honor of marrying two other best friends, PR'ing in a 50K trail race, and adding someone special to my life.

Moments from the year that made me smile and gave me so much life

I'm going into 2026 with this word in mind: kinetic.

The next year will be a lot of change, growth, and facing new balance challenges. I'm about to start a new job running a startup that is making what I think will be the most consequential sensor of the next decade. My partner is moving to Asia and we're figuring out how two "touch-grass" individuals can do long distance. All this will require a lot of constant transformation and taking advantage of momentum, and the conversion of potential energy into ... action. Sort of like monkey bars.

P.S. I loved receiving responses from you last year, I'm sorry if I forgot to respond but I promise I've been thinking about your dispatch all year because I kept snoozing the emails for a reply.

Mental wanderings

I’ve spent some time this year optimizing for the “thickness” of experience. This means foregoing a lot of the conveniences of modernity, and instead anchoring my reality in the physical and sensory sensations of attention and effort. Less Uber, more biking and walking. More handwriting, less thumb-tapping. I also add "thickness" by embedding a lot of memory into things I own: I have 4 jars of chili oil in my fridge and I know exactly who, where, and when I acquired them (a “thin” experience is ordering one-day shipping on Amazon). Same goes for all my houseplants, climbing gear, clothes, etc. I like buying things used, or on a trip, because it adds a dimension of experience to an otherwise inanimate object. I even stop paying attention to the news and social media, and just ask people to tell me what’s happening directly. I don’t really feel that first-to-know urge any more.
“Good enough” is actually really great, and I’ve internalized that so much more this year. Getting from 90% to 99% quality will take ten times as long as getting to the first 90%, and it’s almost never worth it. I’d rather get to 90% on ten other things. I could spend time perfecting a recipe, data analysis, a second language, an essay–or I could “A-” ten other things. The meta-pattern is that breadth compounds better than depth, simply because it can cross-pollinate with other things. I read Range by David Epstein a few years ago, loved it, and I think that seed is just now germinating that I can fully embrace being a generalist. What exactly 90% looks like is subjective, but I feel it when I’m hitting diminishing returns, and that’s when I’ll set a forcing function: I’m only spending 10-30 minutes more on this, and then I’m shipping.
An apology to gamers. I confess, for the past 15 years I thought that video games were the reagents of brainrot. But last year, I owned the first console since I was a child (Playstation 5) and I’ve been surprised at how much my problem solving and other mental faculties (e.g., navigation, acute focus) have improved. This past year my favorite games were Horizon: Zero Dawn and Forbidden West, Spiderman 2, Hogwarts Legacy, and Ghost of Tsushima. I also enjoyed playing co-op games with my little brother, like Split Fiction and It Takes Two.
Words to describe emotions are passé. Earlier this year I used this app called How We Feel that helps me label emotions (highly recommended for a few weeks just to buff up your emotional vocab). After a few months I realized how incredibly limiting it is to name emotions with a single word, and that even if I could be more granular, it doesn’t really solve the problem of the language constraint, because language is categorical by nature and trying to describe a higher dimensional experience. At one point this year I felt hurt, sad, happy, relieved, secure, and regret all at the same time, but after collapsing them to these words, I noticed the emergent properties between them: temporal, rhythmic, how those permutations affect the subtle “texture” of my breathing, the location (in my body), etc. This was such a richer experience than just trying to label it, and I’m reminded that really good poetry uses words to relay an experience that transcends words.
Attention is all you need. I took an improv class and we played a warm up game with a partner where we alternated counting off one-two-three (with different modifications to make it harder). The big learning from this is that paying closer attention to the other person's subtle cues (eye contact, tone, rhythm, etc.) is a huge leverage in creating connection, and achieving goals together like performing an improv scene. But all life is improv, and I've been applying this small hack to every connection I have with people, and it pays dividends. You can always pay more attention to someone, no matter how much you think you already are.

Recommendations from the year

Doing

15 lb steel club (direct) - This is HANDS DOWN the best fitness thing I purchased in the past few years. I swear, training with this for 15 minutes a day for 2 weeks drastically made me so much stronger overall (including climbing). There is something about training rotational movement that makes you so much more coordinated (see this related video about rope flow). I recommend starting with 10 lbs, unless you know for sure you have a strong grip and forearms. Watch this short 30 second video for different movements.
Mapo Ragu recipe (NYT) - One of the best recipes I’ve made this year, highly recommended. I’ve made it three times, and this is where I feel like the execution is so important, because they all tasted a little different every time, each one of them never “hitting” the same as the first time. My tip is to choose the sweetest onion you can (Vidalia or Walla Walla) and make sure you really cook down the onions near caramelization (aka don’t try to rush past Step 1).

I learned which colors match my skin tone the best. Also did lots of cooking and steel club workouts!

Reading

You Are Contaminated (NYT, 13 min read) - I was honored to be invited to a multi-day pollution workshop hosted by Homeworld Collective's Sarah Daniels, and it was eye-opening how many and how much chemical contamination we are exposed to, and we don’t even know the extent of it right now. Like, I thought lead pollution was a solved problem, but it still impacts the brains of 1 in 3 children worldwide.
Tying Yourself to the Mast (Cate Hall, 12 min read) - Good blog on why optionality is a “temporary weakness” and is overrated, and how commitment is a learnable skill to overcome that.

Watching/listening

David Foster Wallace on why reading feels so hard (YouTube, 2 min) - Interview clip from 2003 where DFW is talking about the feeling of dread of being in a world that’s more “hostile” to asking people to just sit quietly and think. In 2003!
Longform wood-working videos like Foureyes Furniture (YouTube, 20 min) - whenever I want to just be a couch potato, I watch woodworking videos. I find that it’s the best thing to turn down my nervous system. I find it so relaxing. This is an example of one guy I love watching: nerdy, calm, authentic.
Taking Anarchism Seriously (The Gray Area, 51 min listen) - I listened to this podcast 3 times, this is probably the first time in my life I recognized how incredibly strawmanned our usual discussion of anarchism is.
Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible, Dr. Judy Fan (MIT) (YouTube, 1+ hour) - this is probably peak-est nerd you’ll get from me (but I know some of my audience are super nerdy). I loved this seminar on the investigation of visual abstraction to communicate complex concepts, and the professor is engaging to listen to.