Ten things I learned in 2023 for 2024
To a prosperous and joyful 2024, despite it being an election year.
As we all enter another year, I wanted to share some of the things I have learned in 2023 that I will apply in 2024. I was pushed and stretched in ways I didn't predict in 2023. Despite its many complexities and challenges, I am thankful that God continues to be more creative and colorful with my life than I imagined. What is eternally true and a key ingredient to happiness is that you are not in control, and thank God you aren't. You can only be resilient and adaptive to what the world, people, time, and nature throws at us.
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
- Romans 5:3-5 (ESV)
I hope what I learned can make your 2024 successful, materially with abundant resources and immaterially with joy and peace, as we all seek the "shalom" we lost from The Beginning.
It won’t be that bad - It is heartbreaking how much raw talent you come across in this life that never actualize their talent or see their potential. Our culture and education system should teach us to look beyond ourselves and our identity categories to more agent and merit-based measures, like what we can or should do. Instead, it teaches us to look at our isolated selves and gain merit only through genetic inheritance. We should be taught the tools to understand our capabilities and skills. Instead, our systems are obsessed with things we can't change rather than what we can because the former produces a lazy victim mindset while the latter liberates you.
In 2024, don't shoot low. Don't let fear and poor self-talk win. The worst-case scenario won't happen. Take a risk and see what happens. You will be surprised by what you can accomplish when you take a chance.
“Peace does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work. Peace means to be in the midst of all those things and still be calm in your heart.”
- Unknown
It doesn't need to be this hard - One contributing factor to not living up to your potential and cutting your ceiling short is always taking the hard road out of vanity or ignorance. Don't covet the hard road. This is not a knock on hard work and going the extra mile, but it is idiotic to make your life harder than it needs to be out of pride and ego. You can see this foolishness in the self-described "hustle culture." Bragging about how hard you work to strangers is odd. Telling strangers on social media how hard things are for you or how busy you are means you are living life wrong. I know some of the busiest and most demanded people in the world, from politicians to billionaires. They don't regularly comment on or take pride in their busy schedules. In reality, they want to be less busy and spend more time on things that give them joy and life.
Next year, don't put self-imposed weights on your ankles by taking the difficult road for the sake of it. Don't fill your life with busy work to score points in the "hustle culture." Sit still and talk to your friend or loved one. Whatever itch you have, it can wait. Strategize and play smart. Run freely, and you will accomplish way more than you thought possible.
“Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.”
- Martin Luther
You take too many risks with your personal life; not enough in other areas of your life - We underestimate the risks associated with our personal life (relationships, family, and love life) and overestimate the long-term risks in the non-personal areas of our life. We are too quick to adopt certain relationships for simple joy or beauty; however, the long-term risks of these decisions have a much more significant impact on our lives if they go sideways. In a market-based economy, errors and miscalculations with work are expected. All of us have made a bad business call or lousy stock trade. Business and economic risks are much more accessible to quantify, measure, and control than personal life decisions. There are whole professions devoted to measuring business and financial risk. For our personal life, there isn't. What is the beta or alpha of an individual? How do you judge the quality of a new acquaintance? These are tough questions and require judgment. If you get a person and relationship wrong, it can cost you dearly.
Next year, take fewer risks personally by going deeper with a smaller group of people and take more risks professionally by pushing yourself to reach higher and get out of your comfort zone.
“God never changes — so we are secure. Everything else changes — so we are insecure.”
- Elisabeth Elliot
Authenticity is winning over truth - In a world driven by shallow clicks and likes on social media, people are desperate to be seen and known with limited judgment. This cancer of brokenness and loneliness is destroying public institutions and the social fabric by eroding social capital and trust. It explains the popularity of politicians who are sparse on the truth but oversized on being their raw, authentic selves. This is the wrong sphere for bare and unencumbered authenticity, but it is among the few places people find it. We need more authenticity in private relationships and your local community. These people will show up for you when you need it, not a distant politician or a celebrity on social media you don't know. To see people who they truly are, you need to be who you actually are. This is terrifying to most people, but take heart. Courage is the rarest trait in humanity, but it is the most needed in our society today. People need help to step out and choose vulnerability.
Next year, be open and authentic to someone you know well. You will be surprised how desperate humanity is for a hug from someone who truly understands them.
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
- C.S. Lewis
Be kind, not nice - This year, I spent a fair amount of time helping Christians recover from being culturally defined as "nice" and towards honesty, decency, and honor. I wrote a popular series to help men see how they can identify this pathology and recover for a happier and healthier life. Our culture impresses upon us all an idol of "being nice" over telling the truth, being a good person, and living a principled life (I call the latter being kind). The idol of niceness teaches us to emotionally submit to other people even if we disagree or they are imposing upon us. Much of our cultural cancer can be connected to people choosing "niceness" over kindness, such as the banal political culture wars and the eccentric woke ideology destroying corporate America.
In 2024, choose not to be nice but to be kind. Be a good person, not a nice guy. Nice guys don't win; good guys win.
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
- Mark Twain
Losing friends can be a good thing - In a society that encourages us to be sentimental over truthful, amiable over moral, accommodating over good, famous over principled, you need to lose people you call "friends." Friends are a reflection of your character and what you value. In a hostile culture to virtue and integrity, you should be in a position of losing friends for stances and righteousness as our culture continues to spin out of control. This doesn't mean to intentionally wrong someone, but be totally okay (if not joyful) for destructive and unhealthy people to leave your life. Being a person of consequence and significance means you will lose friends in our shallow and amoral culture. The most significant thing our culture needs is definition. We are awash with sensations driving the mind mad, distracting us from acknowledging the truth and living in reality. The modern mind would rather be entertained over trained, distracted over edified, tantalized over refined, and placated over enlightened. Anyone who matters in today's culture is drawing lines in the sand (for better or worse, regardless of your agreement with them). How have you not lost at least some friends in the past eight years of societal insanity? If you haven't, you are not a person of consequence but an NPC adrift in an artificial life. ChatGPT is more free and more alive than you are.
This year, be okay if friends leave you for moral and good reasons.
“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”
- C.S. Lewis
Being liked over respected means you get neither - Optimizing for being desired and wanted by others will result in being disliked and disrespected by others. It works like a boomerang. Respect is a curious thing. Think of the people you respect. Often, it is others we don't necessarily like or enjoy. How someone carries themselves through challenges, setbacks, victories, and successes yields respect. Respect contains not letting what others think define you and blazing your own path. Choosing to do the right thing over immense social pressure that would crush the average soul. The best part of respect is that it is a supercharger for life if we also like or love who we respect. To be liked, the first step is to actually be respected. From this, you will eventually be wanted and loved by others. You will get neither if you optimized for being liked and loved over being respected.
In 2024, focus on becoming someone worthy of respect. This means being a person of integrity who is not afraid of the hard things of life but walks with an attitude of kindness and fearlessness. Courage creates respect; anxiety and "being nice" kills respect.
“Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
- C.S. Lewis
Contempt is a social cyanide - Contempt is one of the most self-destructive forces in the world. Contempt is a poison for the soul. It is incurable with only secular methods because it is warped by self-righteous narcissism. Contempt is the opposite of hope, joy, and love. Be warned if you are around people who struggle with contempt for you or others. They will take you down to Sheol with them. They won't stop until all of your life is spent and will abandon you once they have taken their fill because this is their mission is clear - to seek and destroy. Avoid and set up boundaries as fast as possible. If you struggle with contempt, God help you. Jesus is the only cure I know. If you humble yourself as a sinner before Christ, you will experience liberation with the power of forgiveness and grace. Knowing you are forgiven and received mercy is the vaccine.
This year, remove contemptuous people from your life immediately.
“Forgiveness says you are given another chance to make a new beginning.”
- Desmond Tutu
Jealousy is thriving and deadly - Jealousy is an unspoken and accepted sin in our culture. Social media promotes envy and narcissism without batting an eye. Our expert class and media companies are obsessed with quickly selling ideas and products based on your feelings and promoting precarious sophism. Banning jealousy is one of the forgotten Ten Commandments because it fuels our modern unhappy culture. From the social media influence culture to pop culture obsessions, our contemporary currency is envy, driving deep unhappiness and destruction. Jealousy doesn't get you anywhere. Clear evidence is that many social media influencers are caught with entirely fake lives. They do whatever it takes to earn envy currency: likes, views, and attention. Jealousy and envy are typically based on a self-imposed illusion, and this delusion will destroy you. God viewed jealousy and envy as essential to put on the same list as murder, adultery, stealing, and idol worship. Head His warning.
In 2024, choose to be thankful, not jealous. The former will set you free, and the latter will ruin you.
“Envy is resenting God’s goodness to others and ignoring God’s goodness to me.”
- Rick Warren
Care about fewer things but with more intensity - Reduce the number of things you follow or care about. Our culture has too many concerns or issues for a single person to pay attention to. Most of these issues won't matter in the long run, and the probability you can impact the outcome of anything reported in the news is basically zero. Our culture pushes us to be emotional about shallow and wide topics rather than discerning by going deep and focused. You see this problem in our useless public intellectual class, which lacks wisdom and discernment. A shallow mind cares more about credentials than expertise and wisdom. If you care about what an astrophysicist says about religion and morality, you are part of the problem. Not caring about some issues or letting others take the lead frees you to spend time on things that matter to you and will impact your life. Don't waste your time trying to win the race of vain credentials over true expertise and wisdom. Learn the phrase "I don't care" and use it judiciously. It liberates you to live the life you want and not be controlled by others because of issues that concern them and not you.
In 2024, say "I don't care" more.
“Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”
- Francis Chan
I hope you spend welcoming 2024 with those you love and enjoy. The most common New Year's resolutions always focus on building a happier life with others we love and a healthier life for ourselves. I hope you started 2024 by remembering the power of love to transform your life and those around you.
“For nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God than friendship for the friends of God.”
- Simone Weil