Happy New Year's Eve from Brazil!

The truck is metaphorical. The medication I was taking in my last email had side effects, and it derailed my routine for a few weeks.

When my headaches and side effects finally went away, the assignments started piling in and I couldn't create the space I needed for writing.

So—here are the 3 biggest lessons I learned since my last email in October. They were actually taught and reinforced throughout 2023:

1) The Multi-Dimensionality and Non-Linearity of Progress

I've always had the dictionary definition of "progress": A forward movement toward a destination.

By this definition:

• My headaches re-appeared after a 4-month absence over the summer. That's not progress.
• My relationships had deal-breaking conflicts. That's not progress.
• My GPA dropped this semester. That's not progress.

But if I considered my life as a whole:

• The headaches made me attend Sunday service consistently. Coming from having zero me-time apart from 30-minute daily journalling, that's progress.
• The conflicts showed me what I needed from my relationships, what I want to give to my relationships, and what kind of people would be active partners in such relationships. That's progress.
• My courses gave me the skills I needed to apply the psychology and machine learning concepts I learned this semester. That's progress.

The dictionary definition of progress doesn't capture the multi-dimensionality and non-linearity of life.

Know that you can make progress in one and more areas of your life.

Know that you can make progress and have setbacks later, too.

2) The Freedom of Acceptance

The default belief is that things "should" happen in a certain way—our way.

So when things don't go our way (surprise surprise), we get anxious, annoyed, or agitated.

Those feelings drive us to exert even more force, in hopes that it will change what has happened.

Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we don't, and then we get frustrated, and the cycle repeats.

In the process, we lose our peace. We lose our sense of awe for life. We lose our happiness.

Acceptance frees us from this cycle.

It's not just saying "it is what it is". It's also about letting go: Emotionally, mentally, and also physically.

It's also about re-designing your environment and behavior so that you can protect your peace better.

When you remove "should" from your vocabulary, when you flow instead of force—that's when your freedom begins.

3) The Importance of Courage

In our noisy world, silence is viewed as a problem.

This makes a lot of people uncomfortable with silence.

In their relationships, they usually use talktime—even if it's mostly gossip—as an indicator for their relationship progress.

When they're by themselves, they distract themselves from their thoughts with a lot of consumption—social media, Netflix, books, and so on.

Filling our life with noise gives us the easy way out.

It's easier to do meaningless small talk than having a shared conversation about goals, expectations, and life directions.

It's easier to scroll through Instagram than confront your unhappiness about your circumstances.

It's easier to read yet another book about productivity than acknowledging the true reason why you haven't made a lot of progress toward your goals.

In essence, you delude yourself from reality.

Courage is one of the strongest antidotes to self-deception.

You need courage consider all perspectives to a situation, evaluate it against your own values and beliefs, and decide if you need to change or if you need to let things go.

You need courage for genuine acceptance.

I don't think there's a "courage juice" you can drink. I see courage as a skill; like confidence, it's built by making consistent, small acts of courage over time.

2024?

I've always struggled with public speaking—in-person and on-camera.

To combat this, I'll be experimenting with video in 2024. Ideally, the videos will also serve as another channel of distribution for my ideas so that I'm not overly reliant on LinkedIn.

In the meantime, I hope to resume my pace of writing one newsletter a week, and build products that will serve you better than just weekly newsletters.

Thank you for staying with me, and I look forward to spending 2024 with you!

With love, Pei