The #yearly_roundup of things that I enjoyed in 2024 is not too different from the previous one. In fact, looking back at the yearly roundups since 2017 I see some recurring themes: reading, work, football, traveling, health, a few TV series/games, maybe a device or a service that really brought me joy. So this time I’ll try to skip those and focus only on the things that stood up in 2024.

1. Learning how to swim. Perhaps swimming it’s too much, and ‘advancing in water one lap at a time without fear of drowning’ would be a more accurate representation of what I’m doing. Either way, according to my Apple Watch, I had 64 swimming sessions in 2024, covering over 32 kilometres. I call that a win.
2. Spending more time and energy on my kids growth. I even came up with a framework covering what they should know by the time they leave home. There’s a fine line though between helping them and overdoing things. Also a lot of frustrations along the way, but definitely worth the time.
3. Finding joy in little things. That colour-changing, ambient light lamp. A scented candle. The digital frame reminding you about a random photo you took years ago. Having an unscheduled beer with the neighbour while chatting about your day. The first warm days of the year. The nice wallpapers. Magnets. The scent of the garden leaves in September. That puzzle game with your kids.
   Sometimes you need to actively look for thin slices of joy.
4. Biking. Spending less time in traffic while also doing a good workout? I’m up for it (except when it’s freezing outside, because I don’t enjoy the cold).
5. The law of unintended consequences. “People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences.” source: the Freakonomics guys
6. Data science and data visualisation.

Yearly stats 2024:

• 10.300 pages read (up from 7100)
• 33 books read (up from 17)
• 5.10m steps (down from 5.19)
• 498 exercise hours (up from 459)
• 3870 kms covered (down from 3916)
• 259 Mcal energy burned (up from 246)
• 7h 52m slept on average (up from 7h 49m)

Until the next time 👋

The subtle art of not giving a f*ck

In essence this is a book about focusing on the the things that really matter. But there are a few subtleties, as detailed by Mark here:

1. Not giving a f*ck is not the same thing as being indifferent.
2. Not giving a f*ck about something means that you do give a f*ck about something else, more important.
3. We all have a limited number of f*cks to give. Prioritise!

On top of that, there are other gems that you can find in this book:

• “it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and created”
• “happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is ‘solving’ (…) happiness is a constant work-in-progress”
• “healthy values are achieved internally. Bad values are generally reliant on external events”
• “fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense”
• “Many people might be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you”
• “When we learn something we don’t go from ‘wrong’ to ‘right’. Rather, we go from ‘wrong’ to ‘slightly less wrong'”
• “Certainty is the enemy of growth”
• “Our brains are meaning machines”
• “Work expands so as to fill up the time available for its completion” (the Parkinson law)

“If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something – anything, really – and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself”

Mark Manson – The subtle art of not giving a f*ck

Thinking in bets: making smarter decisions when you don’t have all the facts

Poker is a game of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. The primary goal in the game is to reduce uncertainty in order to make decisions easier for yourself. The secondary goal is to make the opponents’ decisions harder.

Poker players have to make multiple decisions with significant financial consequences in a compressed time frame. This makes the poker table a unique laboratory for studying decision-making.

Annie Duke – Thinking in bets

A few interesting concepts:

• Resulting = equating the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome
• Hindsight bias = the tendency, after an outcome is known, to see the outcome as having been inevitable.
• Gambler’s fallacy = mistaken belief that if something happens more frequently than normal during a given period, it will happen less frequently in the future (or vice versa).

A few more notes:

• All that matters is the quality of your decisions, not the outcome of your decisions.
• Going first in any negotiation is bad. Even kids know that 🙂
• “Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form a computation”. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do”
• The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.
• Getting comfortable with “I’m not sure” is a vital step to being a better decision-maker.