Reflections on 2024, plans and predictions for 2025
What I did in 2024, my hopes for 2025, A list of the books I've read, and some AI and geopolitics predictions for 2025.
Every year, I do some reflection in my journal. This is the first time I’m publishing it. I’m doing it because it seems like everyone is doing it, and also because for some weird reason I always seem to really enjoy reading these kinds of things from others.
What I did in 2024
Writing:
In the first 2.5 months of 2024 I posted on LinkedIn every single day. It was easier to post daily then to try and post 3x per week (or something like that). My follower count went up by about 500, and I reached a lot of new people. But I stopped doing it and went back to posting maybe once every two weeks or so. I just ran out of content.
I started writing on Substack in July, and that seems to be sticking. It’s fun to do. I enjoy it and people tell me regularly enough that they saw something they liked to keep going. However, I don’t feel like I’m getting better at writing. It even feels sometimes like I’m getting worse. Maybe I should put a bit more effort into the actual writing style, word choice, etcetera.
I’ve been writing and publishing sporadically since 2018. In 2024 I finally feel like my relationship to writing has emerged. Writing is nice, it’s quick feedback. It’s rewarding for its own sake, seeing an argument take shape with clarity. It’s comfortable, you can do it from anywhere, it doesn’t make you hungry or cold. You don’t have to deal with other people very much. But I also finally realize that I find it somewhat hollow, and devoid of purpose and that’s why I start rebelling and procrastinating every time I set any kind of target or goal for writing. I truly cannot imagine doing it for money and I have abandoned any ideas of trying to grow and monetize my newsletter, or even my follower count.
Learning to code:
This has been unexpected, and wasn’t part of my plans for the year. It really just happened organically.
It has been an incredibly rewarding new hobby that enables me to use almost all of my prior experience across product, design, copywriting, marketing, financial modeling, logical thinking, and more.
I feel like coding reconnects me with my creativity unlike anything else I’ve done in a long time. I am enjoying it for the pure fun of the puzzles, and for the pure satisfaction of seeing the app come alive.
When I build a cool feature and it works, I get an incredible rush. I remember that feeling from: building something cool with LEGO/some other thing as a kid, composing a really cool song or hook with Cubase/FL Studio as a teenager, building a really cool financial model in my early career, doing wireframes/UX for Ox Street. Writing something good and publishing it also gives me a mild version of that rush, but it’s nowhere near as strong as with these other activities.
Becoming a second time dad:
I was lucky enough to have a solid 2 months paternity leave this time (as opposed to managing a major marketing campaign and facing several show stopping bugs the first time around). That was very nice and I got to experience those first months a lot more mindfully. I also got to spend a ton of time with my oldest throughout the year and that was great as well.
It has been surprising how different both kids were almost from day one. The youngest is now almost one, and is just so different from her brother in almost every way. It’s amazing, and I (jokingly) said already it’s almost tempting to try and have more kids to see what else is possible given our genes.
It can be very chilled out to just do the same basic thing many times, like taking the subway to a park, having a coconut at the same place, and then going to the same restaurant for lunch before going home for the kids nap. Young kids love that predictability and I just enjoy being together without too much stuff to arrange. Young kids are also these amazing randomness generators that it’s never boring.
Fitness and health:
It was a very alcoholic year. During parental leave, there really wasn’t any reason not to open a bottle of wine at 1pm, so that’s what we did.
We kept drinking quite heavily, albeit not exactly until late or getting very drunk. Just steady recreational alcohol use throughout the year. For most of the year, at least I stopped drinking on Monday and Tuesday and went running or working instead.
I kept up the running habit I started in 2023 and my VO2Max has stayed pretty acceptable in the mid 40s, vs an all-time low of 37.5 in April 2023.
However, I was hoping I’d get it to 50. It turns out I would need to put in significantly more time running and cycling, and I just didn’t want to make that trade-off with spending time with my family.
I was planning to get back into strength training after reading so much evidence that doing that is as important as cardio for longevity, and even more important to prevent ‘frailty’ kicking in early. I was making a typical Gijs mistake which is to put expectations too high, trying to build in 4x per week training sessions and additional daily bodyweight training. This was a fail though, I did not do any strength training whatsoever for the entire year. I could have course-corrected at various points. But I forgive myself for it, we had our second kid this year and I’m still young enough to catch-up.
Productivity / ‘the system’ / other stuff
I used one sec to get my phone screen time back under 2 hours per day. It introduces a 6 second delay before opening selected apps, in my case Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. I also used the Arc browser’s ‘zap’ feature to zap all content out of reddit on my browser. When I open reddit, it just shows nothing but a blank screen.
Continued journaling in Reflect most days. Wrote a lot less introspective things toward the second half of the year. I noticed that I’m not working on anything specific internally recently. Have been happy and comfortable with myself and everything that’s going on in life. This happened over the course of the year, and a big part of it has been finding a new sense of purpose in building my own apps.
I bought a Quad Cortex, a super advanced Guitar Amplifier modeller. I also build a ‘Partscaster’, buying a second hand Guitar body and gathering up all the extra parts by myself. It’s a $1,000 guitar that sounds and plays like a $4,000 one. It was fun and the result actually kind of blew my mind.
I made a solid leap in my guitar playing, especially in improvising, but I stopped practicing in Q4 when building Magicdoor took over most of my free time.
New gizmos and cool stuff I’ve been using:
spent time setting up perfect Focus Modes on my phone,
talking to my devices,
lots and lots of AI powered workflows (meal planning, training schedules, quick questions, travel planning)
Upgraded iPhone from 13 Pro to 15 Pro. Upgraded iWatch from 8 to 9. Got both phone and watch from Carousell Certified / Buyer Protection which was an awesome experience!
Got the latest Kindle Paperwhite (12th gen) for my birthday
Jumped on the Owala waterbottle hype, loving it
Lululemon Pacebreaker shorts, which I basically live in now
Work at Carousell
It has been very nice to have a ‘back office’ and much more tech oriented set of roles in CX.
I’ve had (and have) the opportunity to really work on deploying Generative AI at significant scale. That has been a huge privilege and catalyst for what I’m doing with AI in my spare time.
The reason I use the word privilege is because with a ‘captive audience’ of 160+ agents I get to see first-hand what works at scale. Which types of AI uses really stick with front-line people, which ones are very hard to get people to use, basically what type of products have product-market fit in the enterprise.
It’s great to have colleagues and and an office to go to. That’s the biggest drawback of coding at night in your underwear, there’s an element of loneliness to it.
What I want to do in 2025
Keep writing on Substack. No paywall, no set schedule, just whatever comes naturally.
Continue to prioritize spending lots of time with my kids.
Continue running. Get and keep my VO2Max above 45 (from 43.8-44.6 in 2024). One way to do that is to do a bit more interval training. I would also like to reduce my weight quite a bit from 77-80kg to 70-73.
Strength training, just 2x per week.
Keep shipping code. I believe that if I just keep shipping, I will grow Magicdoor and/or other projects to become a meaningful source of extra income in 2025. The only metric that matters is time spent.
Cook more often. Invite people to come and eat the food a bit more often.
Organize drinks at outdoor bars, bringing together groups of 3-8 where not everyone already knows each other.
Travel a little bit further. Last year we stayed in Asia and in 2025 Australia and Europe are being planned.
Books I read in 2024
I tend to start far more books than I finish, because I never pressure myself into finishing a book I don’t like. Especially with non-fiction books, I put them down once I feel confident that I’ve gotten the key wisdom and/or what I need from them.
The Pathless Path by Paul Millerd was the book I kicked off my year with. It’s a great book about leaving a career that hits all external expectations of success for a life of uncertainty, adventure and search for a fuller, more authentic life. It was validating to read and I recognized a lot of the experiences and thoughts Paul shared from my own journey.
Tuesdays with Morrie is a wonderful book about an exceptionally kind and wise person who reconnects with an old student after getting terminally ill. The book is based on the author visiting every Tuesday and just talking with Morrie. It has one simple and powerful core message: nothing else really matters except your relationships with others in life. It was heavily references in the Pathless Path, that’s how I found it.
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. A very famous book from 1946 that tells the story of Frankl’s time in the Nazi concentration camps. I wasn’t sure if I was going to finish it, but it was a remarkably easy read. Although the horrors of the Nazi regime are clearly on display, it doesn’t get graphic or focuses on that too much, instead really going into the search for meaning in a broad sense.
Million Dollar Weekend. It’s about launching stuff in a very lean way. If you have a business idea, try to get a few friends to wire you money for it before you even start building anything. It takes the lean startup idea to an extreme, and it’s excellent.
The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman (quit at 37%). A book about what is happening with AI from one of the founders of Deepmind. This guy has been at the bleeding edge of AI development for almost 15 years, and yet… This was by far the most disappointing book I opened last year. I don’t know who to blame, a publisher, editor, or Suleyman himself, but this book made a tragic mistake. It tries to be a very high-brow prediction of the future, somehow referencing past precedent. But it is mind numbingly bland and boring. I do not want to read a recount of the Cuban missile crisis just to end on a very obvious point that something could go wrong with AI if control systems are bad. The reason I use the word ‘tragic’ is because the book has a few passages where Suleyman recounts his own personal experience of building Alpha Go, or adventures from the early days of DeepMind, and those parts are amazing! How I wish he just would have written a memoir of his experience at the forefront of the Machine Learning revolution that led to today. But sadly he went full Yuval Harari on us and delivered something seemingly overambitious and ultimately hollow. I was over this book about 10% in and continued until 25% in hopes it would get better, and then continued hate-reading it for another 10% until I was finally done with it.
Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. Goggins had a horrible, abusive youth, went into the army, then got out and got super, super fat and down in life. He worked as a bug exterminator and ate fastfood with milkshakes every single day. Then he saw one commercial about the Navy SEALs, lost some insane amount of weight in just 3 months and eventually got into the SEALs. He later became an ultra-runner, pushing his body to the edge of dying a couple of times. This guy is an insanely impressive athlete…….and also a total nutcase and accidental comedian. He is responsible for one of the funniest accidentally gay moments ever recorded: “I want to get a bunch of men together, who are the hardest of the hard. Men. And I want to be with these men.” The unintended(?) comedy of his videos notwithstanding, I enjoyed reading his story, and it made me realize that Goggins, and a lot of other influencers are somehow wired to be extreme, and I am really just not wired that way at all.
Never Enough by Andrew Wilkinson. This was my favorite book of the year. It was almost like reading a book about a much richer version of myself. In almost every situation that the book described, I find myself identifying very, very strongly with Andrew. I think I would make almost the exact same decisions as him given the same problem. One example is that at one point he rented a superyacht and brought a bunch friends out on it. His conclusion was that yachts kind of suck. They are cramped, and it’s boring that you can’t go anywhere, not to mention they are absurdly expensive. If you bring your friends to a great hotel on land, you’re going to have a much better time than on a yacht. Makes total sense to me, and 100% the kind of randomly contrarian view I feel I could have come-up with too. Awesome, a real example and inspiring role model.
Good Work, Paul Millerd. The follow-up to Pathless. Loved it. Good Work is that kind of work that you love doing for its own sake. Even if you wouldn’t get paid for it, you’d still want to do it. It’s more complicated than that though. Paul found it in writing, I never did. But I have good hope that I may be on to something with building apps.
The Money Trap, Alok Sama. Recounts his time working at SoftBank, directly with Masayoshi Son. An amazing view into that fascinating organization and the incredibly eccentric Masa. His writing is also stylistically very good, I found, especially in the first few chapters.
Rework, Jason Fried and DHH the Basecamp guys (quit at 70%). Basecamp is a huge inspiration for me in terms of company culture, work methods, and being super principled about staying humble and focused. The book is good, but I felt like there was not much new insight for me there after a certain point. I’ve read too many blogposts and listened to too many podcasts from the same sort of sphere.
Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy. A surprisingly easy and fun read. Blasted through it in a couple of days. Many incredible anecdotes and principles for marketing that are still valid today.
Battlehymn of the Tiger Mother. Great book, quite crazy and with some unresolved irony. The protagonist strongly stands by her methods and principles, even when her children apparently have some of the same existential struggles she herself had. Somehow she doesn’t seem to draw the link fully despite hinting at it constantly. As a parent, this was very interesting to read and a good counterbalance to some of the extreme permissive parenting stuff that is also popular.
Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier (quit at 50%). This book makes a strong case against affirmative care when children and preteens claim to be transgender. Over the long-run there is a 0.5-1.5% of the population who genuinely cannot escape the fact that they were born in the wrong body. For those, changing gender greatly improves their quality of life. But in recent years, there has been a surge, where as much as 5% of young people claim to be trans. Shrier wrote a very compelling book that this is a social phenomenon, similar to the anorexia ‘epidemic’ in the 00s. Hence, affirming, let alone surgical or hormonal intervention in people pre-puberty is a very bad idea. It sets those people up to be sterile, suffering major hormone side-effects, crippling regret later on, and other problems, whereas the only thing they really needed was a very Dutch: “Come on, don’t be silly my dear. Have some more potatoes.”
Lives of the Stoics, Ryan Holiday (quit at 73%). I’m a big fan, proponent and ‘user’ of stoicism. This book tells the life stories of many Ancient Greek and roman stoics. It’s interesting to see how little humans have changed. Got boring after a while.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. This was an epic read about the people and all the things that were invented at Bell Labs. It’s a long book but I ate it up.
The birth of loud, Ian Port. The story of the invention of the electric guitar, and then the electric bass. Also covers the amplifiers that came along with them. Great book, a bit ‘Shoe Dog’ like.
The Dichotomy of Leadership (quit at 66%). It was ok, but a bit repetitive. Just couldn’t get through. I absolutely, deeply loved Extreme Ownership, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s first book. But their other books have been a bit disappointing in my opinion.
Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling. This is a weird science fiction novel. In a multi-planetary society, some kind of epic adventure plays out. I enjoyed the world building, for example when people go to another planet, they often need to have their micro-biome reset or replaced. Random.
Ghostman, Roger Hobbs. A novel about a bank heist (two actually). In a bid to read more fiction, I tried this based on a recommendation on Substack. It was not more than ok, I felt. Easy read though.
The Creative Act, Rick Rubin (22% in). I’ve been sniffing around this book for a while. It’s growing on me. I think I’ll keep reading a chapter here and a chapter there.
📺 Game of Thrones, start to finish. Both me and my partner had never seen even a single episode. We took the opportunity of spending lots of time at home with our new baby to watch the entire thing. It was really, really awesome and probably the best TV Series I’ve ever seen. Character development matters a lot, and most series sorely lack it. If, like us, you’ve never seen Game of Thrones I will now be the 1000th person to recommend that you do.
Predictions for 2025
When I wrote about why I like to write, one element I highlighted is this:
Writing is good for me, because I constantly synthesise the shit-ton of reading that I do into opinions about how the world works. A lot of my synthesis is half-assed, straight-up wrong, or just uninteresting. Writing it down helps me filter and sharpen my understanding of the world.
Where do I find the time to write, and why do I do it
Now, I don’t believe I am particularly good at forecasting. But I think it might be fun to expose myself to facing the truth a year from now, with 99% probability that I’m going to be super wrong. So here are my predictions for the year ahead:
Sam Altman, Satya, and the others will continue to get more and more annoying while saying less new things. It is probably going to be quite safe to tune them out.
AGI keeps getting redefined to whatever is not quite working yet. At the end of the year, there will not be AGI, and Sam will still say it is 2 years away (reminds me of self-driving cars in 2016).
Reasoning (o1/o3 style) models from other vendors proliferate. Google already has one. Anthropic is almost certainly going to release a new flagship model that does chain-of-thought reasoning just like OpenAI’s o series. It is probably going to be better than o3, but compute time-cost will become a big issue for Anthropic.
Video generation gets really usable and easy. Veo2 looks great. Cost will go down. Prompt adherence will improve. By mid-end year more and more ridiculous short videos will turn up in whatsapp groups.
No political events will happen. There will be a lot of news, but nothing meaningful will happen. Russia and Ukraine will still be at war at the end of the year. China will not attack Taiwan. Nothing really meaningful will happen with deportations, the border or otherwise in the USA.
Elon Musk and DOGE unlock meaningful but incremental cost savings (10-30%) in the US government bureaucracy. It will also fall apart and most of the people involved will go back to tech.
I'm tempted to pick up The Pathless Path because I keep seeing Paul on Substack haha. Would you recommend it?