Looking back at 2023

happy new year mfers

Overview of things that happened.

Wins

• Took the year off to reflect and figure out what I wanna do with life. Ended all my game publisher contracts, let go of my team and got back to building solo.

• created 3 projects (that are worth talking about)
  - Finbite: A gamified personal finance education app → Grew to thousands organically
  - Validator: GPT4 based business startup/decision making tool
  - Skive: A mobile game based on competitions you see on youtube

• Started a personal newsletter

• won s4 n&w among 17000+ other builders

• Travelled, went on week long solo trips
  - Dubai
  - Mumbai

• Met some really amazing people this year, lots of new friends

• Got into a bunch of new things I haven’t really done before, 1% sustainable incorporations into my life
  - Meditation - Check out my previous blog on this
  - Dancing - started taking bachata classes
  - Skincare - passive inclusion in daily life
  - Cooking - hosted a couple of dinner parties
  - Writing/journaling - set up a second brain on notion

Losses

• Lost a day one, someone very close to my heart - took a giant toll on my mental health and ability to function as anything beyond a potato.

• My US Visa got rejected. Apparently I have nothing worth coming back to if I ever leave.

• 2 major projects I worked on *failed*. Spent months working on them. Womp Womp

• The existential crisis I had last year still persists even after taking time off, turns out you cant think your way out of a thinking problem - but now it’s just the new baseline.

In my free time, I theorise random bs

I’ve realised why I’m stupid.

There is a correlation between how intelligent someone is and how aware someone is, up until a certain point. A point I like to call the “Awareness divergence Point” because it sounds cool. This point splits the graph into 2 paths based on the action taken per unit awareness.

The Awareness divergence point is that point beyond which being more aware actually no longer serves you without proportional action taken, and if anything, just weighs you down. What good is more information if you never apply it or adapt from it? The point bifurcates thinkers from doers.

The People in the Stupid Zone: get more info → understand what all can be done → overwhelmed with options and get stuck in paralysis by analysis, perfectionism or procrastination.

The People in the Smart Zone: get more info → understand what not to do → focus on the things that truly matter.

Conclusion: The more aware you are, the more intentionally ignorant you need to be. Or, the more action you need to take an apply proportional to your current awareness.

The distance between the smart graph line and the stupid graph line represents the distance of where you are vs where you think you should be.
And hence, I’m in the “stupid” zone. Goal this year is to shift more towards the “smart” zone.

This year is the year with high bias for action and shipping, rather than just thinking or building. Next newsletter is going to have some very *big* announcements for Skive.