It seems like just yesterday that we lit fireworks and popped champagne in our Berlin home surrounded by friends and family yet here we are one entire year later. 2024 was my best year yet. Let's unpack the top lessons I learned this year.
Before we begin, I think it's worth emphasizing that learning is a consistent process and the best leaders tend to be the best learners, as indicated by this 2024 Harvard Business study. Every moment presents an opportunity to learn and when we invest the time to reflect and consider the lessons each season brings, it often tends to be among the highest yielding investments one can make. If we're not learning, we're not living. With that, let's get into it.
Lesson 1: Honor All
At the beginning of the year on January 7th, I heard my friend Dave say something so profound. He decided he wanted to start the year talking about and carefully considering love and what it means to truly love ourselves and those around us. In his exploration of the topic, he mentioned "Love doesn't dishonor others" and then went on to explain it by example:
- When you're kind to people but then gossip about them in their absence—even just to yourself—you dishonor them.
- When you look at a person who believes differently than you and consider them ignorant without even talking to them, you dishonor them. I've seen folks complain about "those people who still wear masks! The pandemic is over! Come on!" I've heard people talk about their hatred of "blue haired people". I've watched people wish that the shooter didn't miss. All of this is dishonoring others and ultimately not loving.
- When you're contractually obligated to work ~40 hours a week and you do more or less, you dishonor your teammates. Working overtime and being a 10x engineer sets unrealistic expectations and dishonors the good work your teammates are doing. Underworking raises the workload on others and also dishonors them.
Dave clearly illustrated how we tend to dishonor others and revealed to me my own flavor of dishonoring others which I wasn't even aware of. He then flipped the script and asked what honor might look like given that we now understand dishonor. Like magic, I immediately became aware of a few things:
- Honoring others is a verb: we often talk about honor as a value when we say "he has honor", "she is honorable", etc. and while it can be a value, it's also a verb. It's something we do. It is a deliberate choice to honor others. We can do it.
- Honoring others is a process: I tend to believe most if not everything is a process and not an event. Things don't happen, but are constantly happening. We don't just breathe, we are breathing. Our cells don't divide, they are dividing. Things are processes, not events. If this is true, then honoring others is a process and not an event: I'm not going to honor you once, but it's a process and a lifestyle composed of multiple deliberate and intentional choices over a lifetime.
- Honoring others is context-dependent: my best friend JB and I grew up together. We met at age 5 and today, we live in the same city and meet each other somewhat regularly. Honoring him in the context of our friendship means we make dumb teenager jokes about each other's moms and talk nonsense. Funnily enough our moms are never actually dishonored because we both mutually understand there is no disrespect intended, just young (now, slightly older) fools being fools. This is the context we grew up in and being "familiar" in our shared historical context honors it and each other because we "speak the same language".
I sometimes go to the gym with other friends. In the locker room, honoring them might mean I whip their ass with a towel (or they whip mine) and we talk shit and laugh. I work at DataStax with a delightful team. Honoring them means I communicate clearly, have ideas, unblock and support where I can, and ship code and content at the highest quality I can. Honor is context-dependent and not one size fits all. Honoring context has shown very positive outcomes towards building unity, camaraderie, and togetherness.
A few weeks ago, Christopher Ehrlich, Will Klein and I walked around Berlin talking about random topics, laughing, and sightseeing honoring the context we found ourselves in and it was a truly unforgettable experience. When we stopped by the Berlin memorial to the murdered Jews of World War II, we honored that context with silence and reverence too.
Learning to flexibly honor as many people and contexts as I can as consistently as I can has been extremely fulfilling and has severely improved my quality of life. This is by far the biggest lesson I've learned this year, and honoring people and contexts the most significant skill I've cultivated with marvelous help.
How to Honor others
I can say with full confidence that this has positively impacted every part of my life and those around me: I am a much better friend, coworker, and family member as reported by people in those groups relative to me. I am also kinder to myself, honoring my mind, body, and spirit as often as I can by being mindful of what I consume and what I produce. If you'd like to try and cultivate this skill in 2025, the main driver that worked for me was intentionality: I firmly placed showing honor to others at the top of my mind since January 7th. I made a point to honor others (and contexts) as often as I could. What does this mean practically? When I communicate, I communicate with a person, not an avatar. I don't respond to pull requests with "LGTM". I don't half-ass greetings and send low-effort interactions like "gm".
Prompted by my intention to show honor, I've spent most of the year actually communicating with intent no matter the medium: sentences, not words, often padded with greetings and salutations to indicate that the person on the other side matters to me. After almost an entire year doing this, I've noticed that we're losing the humanity around communication in our culture today: when I intentionally honor people in communication, they end up being pleasantly surprised (that I care about them) and remark how refreshing it is. Being mindful of the actual human being I'm interacting with, and the context in which I'm interacting with them, has definitely set apart these interactions and made them orders of magnitude more impactful and meaningful to the point where people legitimately thank me and tell me they feel like "this was so special" when all I did was care. This slightly bothers me because this should not be an exception but instead be the rule.
I hate to seem like an angry old man shaking my fist at the world, but it legitimately seems like most of us are severely broke when it comes to paying attention. When I deliberately made the choice to be intentional with showing honor to people, everything else fell into place. This is also backed by research from Gollwitzer and Brandstatter in this 1997 paper that shows that literally just setting an intention makes the goal more attainable.
When Honor is too Hard
Of course, sometimes we encounter people and/or contexts that seem impossible: people with whom we fundamentally disagree on many deep levels. How might we honor them? I found myself working with such a client while trying to intentionally honor others. Most interactions required extraordinary amounts of effort to process and then respond honorably. There was constant second guessing and making sure I was treating them with honor. There was a lot of "am I the asshole?". The floor was eggshells. Can you relate? Perhaps there are people who have wronged you, cheated you, or betrayed you. If not, perhaps there are those who only communicate indirectly and you never truly know where you stand. The thought of honoring them might seem absolutely ridiculous to you and it very well might be.
In my particular situation, I found that the best course of action was to leave. To honor them was to say "we don't see eye to eye, and I cannot sustainably continue in this relationship [because it's far too taxing to do so honorably]" and suggest going our separate ways. Ironically, this was the one thing both sides agreed to in a long while and we honorably parted ways. Ultimately, it is my belief that we're really just bags of chemicals walking around and when we meet other chemicals, there's a reaction: sometimes positive, sometimes negative. This is no one's fault, so we do the best we can and sometimes we have to leave. Months later, we still talk once in a while and maintain a mutual respect for each other while having no intention of working together again. This brings up an important distinction.
Honor vs. Respect
I've spent months thinking about this: aren't honor and respect the same thing? Two sides of the same coin? While I still don't know, I think they aren't. If we consider them as verbs, honor is as described above but respect as a verb seems different? To respect someone to me seems to be to acknowledge their value and worth, which can also be done without interaction and from a distance. To honor them is to do something to/for them that demonstrates this respect and more. Honor seems like respect++. This likely deserves more thought and maybe a discussion (let me know what you think on 𝕏), but I'm comfortable with this distinction: honor is active, respect is passive.
Lesson 2: You Can Just Do Things
I've been building on the web for over 20 years at places like Spotify, Xata, Vercel, and more. Over this time, I've come to believe that my technical skills are at a place where I can build whatever I want whenever I want. I am extremely comfortable with all parts of the software stack:
- for user interface (UI) work, I'm intimately familiar with JavaScript/TypeScript and popular UI frameworks
- for web API work, I'm more than comfortable with Node.js and Rust
- for database work, I've worked at Xata and deeply understand relational and non-relational models and when to use what
- for reliability, part of my role at Spotify was deploying a tier 1 service with regional failover and redundancy
- to deploy and scale it all with devops, I'm confident in my abilities with Docker and today operate my own self-provisioned bare-metal Kubernetes cluster on Hetzner with all the controllers, TLS termination and more with a fair amount of ease
I am not trying to flex, but the truth is that none of this is particularly challenging to me. Still, I haven't really built or shipped anything outside of a job despite being able to do so. I've done quite a bit of yapping about building things sporadically, but when it came time to put finger to key I often backed away. Why? My go-to answer/excuse was "it's so easy it's boring". While that's true, it wasn't the full story.
Fear of Failure
Do you know people like this? People who—all they do is yap but don't actually do the thing? I know quite a few and I myself could be one if I'm not careful (if I don't intentionally avoid it). In fact, until this year, I was one! In a deep-dive discussion about this with my wife, she mentioned a Reddit thread where folks sounded similar: they wanted to be farmers but kept coming up with excuses and reasons not to.
Ultimately, people in the comments called them out on it and mentioned that no matter how much their excuses get refuted, they still find a way to come up with another one because to them, the anticipated/predicted pain of going through with it and failing is greater than the pain of doing nothing. While it makes sense that we want to avoid pain, I think we have enough data to know that this is just categorically false: the pain of not trying (regret) is far worse over time than trying and failing. This insight around the fear of failure was incredible because it very clearly described my own behavior. To fully understand this, we need to dig a little deeper into my past.
The Pain of Failure
One of first ever websites that I made was published in a magazine when I was 11 years old. 3 years later, I used to heavily enjoy online discussion forums about various topics: games, software, etc. I particularly remember enjoying making cool signature art. Inspired by how useful software forum solutions like vBulletin, phpBB, and MyBB were, and the advent of Web 2.0 and interactive in-place editing with AJAX, I set out to build my own forum software reimagined for Web 2.0 with AJAX as a first-class citizen: sort of like SPAs but for forum software before even jQuery. So, I built it (with Scriptaculous and MooTools if you're interested).
While building it (as good as a 14 year old could), I fell in love with it. The more code I wrote, the more I enjoyed the process. The more I saw it come to life, the more hyped I got. I eventually made this hype contagious and shared it widely on the internet. I created a countdown timer and had hundreds of people (literally around 300 at peak time) watching it tick down to the launch.
On it went,
00:03
00:02
00:01
...boom. It crashed. The server literally crashed. No Kubernetes, no replacement replicas, no failover, just a straight up HTTP 503 followed by ultimate rejection to resolve DNS and eventually, rejection from the community. I failed. And it hurt. A lot. It was a real gut punch. You'd think I'd have been used to pain given my childhood but this was different because it wasn't physical pain, it was social pain; compounded by the crumbling of my self-image: I thought I was good at this. Literally everyone around me said I was. The magazines said I was! Am I really nothing? Is what I made actually useless?
Fast forward 17 years and while there's little doubt that my skills and competencies have grown, the wound is still there. I've been afraid to fail ever since. And so sure, I could build anything I want, but ultimately I've just built a long list of excuses.
Overcoming Trauma; Toward Healing
Dr. Paul Conti, trained at Stanford University and having served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School before opening his own clinic, defines trauma as a loss of control: you're not in the driver's seat—your agency is robbed from you and you're controlled by external forces.
This was me.
The solution then is to take back agency, but how might one reclaim their agency unless they know it's been taken from them? We often live in cages that we don't see. My wife, this Reddit thread, the yappers, all joined together to show me my own cage and once I saw it, it immediately lost its power; exactly as described by the great psychologist Dr. Carl Jung, who emphasized that evil's power operates primarily through our psychological blind spots. When we become conscious of the darkness within ourselves, we gain the ability to transform it.
I can say that in 2024, this prevalent trauma for the last 17 years has finally healed through:
- Becoming aware of my cage
- Recognizing that the cage is a lie: significant growth has happened since
- Intentionally making the effort to break it down
I wonder if this is relatable at all and if you've got your own cage. Maybe one you don't see? Let me know on 𝕏. In any case, now that the cage is broken and I'm free to build whatever I want, I've thoroughly enjoyed building so many things that bring me joy happily, including:
- the blog portion of this website
- I've written some wonderful articles that I enjoy recently
- I made a game: an AI-first multiplayer movie quiz called UnReel
- I've been working nights and weekends outside of normal operational employment hours on a marketing SaaS product that I'll likely launch in 2025 if I can safely do so considering legal matters and Intellectual Property (IP) clauses with my employer. When we clear this, it'd be fun to launch it and see where it goes. I'm already talking to HR about it and I'm sure we'll figure something out. I've already shown this to friends and family and folks are often blown away and excited to use it. It's definitely a good sign.
Of course this time, I probably won't build it in isolation and then overhype it but instead invite people I respect to give me feedback and slowly onboard the first 100 users, listening to feedback and iterating along the way before a bigger launch, learning from the earlier RadiantBoard debacle. The very fact that I'm doing this at all is evidence of healed trauma and a lack of fear failure. 2025 will be a good year.
Lesson 3: People are the Thing
Last but finally not least is a lesson I knew, but one I continue learning anew: meaningless, meaningless; everything under the sun is meaningless. I spent some time in SF this year and, respectfully, the zeitgeist smells of bullshit: there were a non-trivial number of conversations about "agents" and related topics where each person had a different context and working definition than the next, a vastly different experience level than the next, but the hype and confidence levels were equal.
One person described an agent as a custom GPT: it doesn't use tools, it doesn't model reasoning, it just has a knowledge base against which it can perform RAG which is—to this person—an agentic action. It smells like bullshit. Just like the Rabbit R1, the Humane pin, Apple Intelligence, and so many cases of overpromise and underdeliver. I think the hype cycle is bullshit. I think tech bro posturing with esoteric language to appeal to VCs is bullshit. I think the grind is bullshit. There's just so much bullshit under the sun.
Let's reconsider from first principles. To quote the great Carl Sagan about the Pale Blue Dot, take a look at this picture for a few uninterrupted, quiet, reverent seconds:
Now, read his words:
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
Look at it again and think about that for a moment.
Now bring it back to the AI hype cycle and tell me you have the same perspective as before. I bet something changed. Don't get me wrong: AI is great, tech is great, ambition is wonderful, builders move the world forward. This is all well and good, but ultimately, we have to ask: who are we doing it for? Is the dog wagging the tail or is the tail wagging the dog?
My favorite study is the Longevity Project from Stanford University: a groundbreaking eight-decade research study that began in 1921 when Stanford Professor Lewis Terman started tracking 1500 children to understand the factors that lead to a long and healthy life. 80 years later, the findings were that healthy relationships were the strongest predictor for longevity, and that their quality, not quantity, were the most weighted.
To reinforce this fact, they also discovered that children whose parents divorced during childhood generally had shorter lifespans. TL;DR? People are the thing. There's no real reason to participate in any Silicon Valley-style rat race and grind like a sigma giga Chad at the cost of human beings, relationships, and human flourishing. We do what we do for a purpose above the sun, because everything under the sun is meaningless.
There's a similar study from palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware conducted between 2009 and 2012 who documented the most common regret among dying patients. The results?
- People regretted not staying in touch with friends
- Many had let valuable friendships slip away over years due to busy lifestyles
- By the final weeks, only love and relationships remained significant
- Men consistently regretted working too hard and missing their children's youth
- They lamented missing companionship with their partners
- Physical details and material concerns fell away (no one was talking about AI agents)
- Financial matters became secondary, mainly addressed for loved ones' benefit
- The only things that truly mattered in the end were love and relationships
Death is a humbling experience. It makes you question what you want out of your time here. I grew up constantly questioning this and I still do sometimes. All of what I do is almost always exclusively for people. Nothing else. People are the thing. Human beings are it. Life on planet Earth and whatever other planet we may move to is a gift, and we only get it for as long as we get it. What are we doing with it in 2025?
Top comments (1)
This is very important message, thanks for that Tejas. I like the way you communicate with your guests at ConTejas Code so much.
Have a great 2025 🫴❤️