Hey friend,

How was 2024 for you?

Was it good?

Was it bad?

Maybe both?

Either way, I hope you're doing well. If not, that's alright too; take some time to rest before righting the ship.

Objectively, I only achieved 15% of my 2024 goals.

Most of it went towards maintaining my health habits:

• Getting my daily steps in
• Journalling every day
• Meditating regularly
• Keeping my junk food intake to a reasonably low amount

The other small percentage is for my senior thesis project, CycleOS. I've made enough progress to deploy the app to the Play Store, which I'm proud of.

P.S. I'm still looking for beta testers. If you have an Android and would like to help out, please reply to this email or DM me on LinkedIn. Thank you in advance!

Several people I've talked to labelled this lack of progress as a bad thing. They feel that I've played too small and put my foot on the brakes. Others commented otherwise, believing that "progress is progress". These extremes reminded me of a story I heard a few years ago:

Good Thing, Bad Thing

A farmer's son fell off his horse one day and got his leg crippled. All the villagers told the farmer, "It's so unfortunate your son got injured!"

Yet, the farmer only replied, "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?"

Months later, the country went to war, requiring all young healthy men to join the army.

As the villagers tearfully said goodbye to their sons, they told the farmer, "You're lucky that your son didn't get drafted!"

To which the farmer replied, "Good thing, bad thing, who knows?"

The Caveat with Labels

Labels are convenient for social interactions. Tell people you're a barista, and they know exactly what you do in your job without needing further explanation.

But somehow, we've evolved to expect people to only hold one label for the majority of their life. Even if you pivot within your industry, there's always a group of people who will look at you with concern. Depending on who you talk to, having interests outside of your work, exercising, and striving for financial freedom is exotic.

If we're not careful, these labels can become limiting. The same goes with labelling the events in our life: When we label something as "bad", we assign a negative energy to it, which can block us from learning the lessons we needed to learn—or, worse, spawn new limiting beliefs.

Was my lack of progress a bad thing?

After my semester ended in April 2024, I spent the month of May back home, meeting old friends and archiving the belongings (mainly notebooks) I'd accumulated in 2023.

I moved to San Francisco at the end of May to start my internship as a Psychology Lab research intern. I was always an engineer or tutor in my previous roles, so everything was new to me. There were a lot of things to set up and learn; eventually, work, dating, and German classes took up most of my time.

The internship ended on July 31, but I extended my stay in San Francisco to explore the Bay Area with my then-girlfriend. The relationship ended before I left San Francisco on August 21, so I spent my two-week break healing and self-reflecting before flying to Berlin.

Then on September 10, when the Berlin semester had already started, my school informed me about the US government's sudden changes in its study abroad policies. I had around 5 days to decide whether I want to move from Berlin to San Francisco to comply with the policy, or stay in Berlin and risk losing my student status.

I decided to move. It hurt—I'd originally planned to stay in Berlin for the whole academic year (8 months) and also visit Christmas markets with my sister in December.

For every turn of events, I could've labelled it as a bad thing. But I actively refrained from assigning any labels. Instead, I focused on learning and keeping myself open to what could happen next.

Above all, I held on to my faith: Faith that things will work out in the end, because I trust myself to make the most of every situation.

So yes, maybe I did play too small in 2024. Maybe my lack of progress is a bad thing.

But beating myself up like that isn't going to help. These negative perspectives only serve to trap me in the past, closing me off to the possibilities of 2025.

So, my friend—if you ever find yourself harping and ruminating on stuff in the coming year...

Learn the lessons, then let them go.

Always start from where the chess board currently is.

After all, good thing, bad thing, who knows?