Everything I Learned in the Last 12 Months

I've been pulling together everything that actually stuck from the last 12 months. Here's what kept coming back.

Goodhart's Law. You've probably heard it, but it hits differently when you start seeing it everywhere: when a target becomes a metric, it stops being a good metric.

You say "lose weight" and you optimize for the number on the scale. Which is fine, until you realize that cutting off a limb is technically the most efficient solution. You're chasing the symbol of the thing, not the thing itself.

And we do this constantly with money, status, relationships, all of it.

"When I hit 10k/month I'll be happy." You hit it. "Okay but 30k would feel safe." Billionaires worth a billion dollars say they'd feel safe at two. Naval Ravikant described it as making a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you achieve the thing. That framing stuck with me.

We tend to park this deferred happiness in whatever area we feel most deficient. Single? "If I had a girlfriend." Broke? "If I had money." Out of shape? "If I lost 20 lbs." Fill one gap, the goalpost moves to the next one. Every time.

Meanwhile the highest-return activities are sitting right in front of us. Train consistently for a year and you'll be in the top 10% physically. Spend real time with people you care about and you feel it immediately. Walk outside. Free dopamine. None of it costs anything. We ignore it because it doesn't feel like "the goal."

Felix Dennis made hundreds of millions. At 83 he said: "I would swap places with you in an instant. You have time. I could've sat in a cabin writing poetry at 30 instead of chasing all this."

Worth reading his book if you haven't. One of the most honest things ever written about money.

None of this means stop playing the game. Set goals. Build things. Chase what matters to you.

Just don't stake your happiness on hitting the target. Because the second you do, the goalpost moves again. That's not a bug in the system, it's how desire works.

The question worth sitting with: what are you actually optimizing for? Not the metric. The outcome underneath it.

If you're chasing money to buy freedom, you might already have more freedom than you're currently using.

Most people are just too busy chasing to notice.