2024 recap - The power of focus

Jan 16, 2025

Chinese Version

You can only connect the dots looking backward, not forward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

• Steve Jobs

2022 was a year of confusion, 2023 was a year of intense creation, and 2024 is a year of focus and concentration. I’ve begun to frequently contemplate my vision for future life: What kind of person do I want to become? What kind of community do I want to build? What products do I want to create? What stories do I want to write? These questions are intimately connected to my life aspirations. I’ve discovered that I enjoy continuity, the flow that comes from consistently doing one thing; I yearn for extreme focus and the satisfaction after completing tasks; I pursue unique insights and delight in sculpting them.

Beyond self-reflection, I was fortunate to read several excellent books that provided transformative nutrients for my thinking. Because of these insights, I began practicing focus - from hourly concentration to focusing on my life’s direction. I believe this is the key that has allowed my abilities to make a qualitative leap.

Like all my previous annual review articles, this is a letter to my future self. It focuses on compiling and sharing experiences, through which you can see my trajectory this year. At the same time, I’ve included many pieces of content that I find brilliant, hoping you can find nourishment for personal growth within them.

Daily Tracker

I discontinued the Daily Tracker project in early 2024, which I regret. I still believe it’s a good system and plan to pick it up again in 2025.

Highlights

Grandmother’s Passing: Bidding Farewell to Southern Rural Life and My Childhood Innocence

The three-section compound house, red spring couplets, and the sound of mahjong - these are my three impressions of our old home in Tainan. Every Chinese New Year, we would return to this ancient but well-maintained compound house. It’s a gradually declining village where you can’t see young people on the streets, only elderly people slowly walking with canes. These few days during New Year were our days of freedom - parents would remove restrictions on homework and daily life management, letting us do things normally not allowed: staying up late playing computer games, mobile games, mahjong, buying whatever snacks we wanted, without concern for weight or dietary correctness. I often joked with my brother that we were like breathing meat, to which they would reply, “Isn’t that what New Year is all about?”

Grandfather passed away early, so Grandmother’s image remains more vivid in our memories. During those New Year days, she would always be busy with ancestral worship alongside her daughters: preparing sacrificial food, folding joss paper, burning it, and sprinkling wine. Besides that, she would sit next to Father as he wrote calligraphy, complaining to him for three or four hours about her health conditions and sharing the few pieces of village gossip.

At the beginning of this year, Grandmother passed away. At the end of 2023, we had already vaguely sensed an unusual atmosphere - this might be the last New Year we’d spend in the south. Every relative more or less expressed this thought, and we seized every opportunity to interact with each other, almost obsessively trying to fill every minute and second.

In the last few days before Grandmother’s funeral, my familiar cousins, brothers, and I walked eight kilometers to the town center. There was still some New Year atmosphere there, with night markets set up for the festival not yet dismantled, still selling sweet potato balls, grilled sausages, and fried chicken cutlets. We bought several items to eat while walking, sticking together like glue, buying things together, and sharing food. We knew these moments would never return once they passed.

On the way back, there was a very winding and long road approaching the compound house. We walked slowly, not wanting this time to end so quickly. We laughed and talked about all sorts of things, but all harbored a knot in our hearts, not knowing when we would meet again.

On the last day, watching the ashes rising while burning joss paper, I bid farewell to what little remained of my childhood innocence.

Connecting Dots Newsletter

In the first half of this year, my life lacked a clear focus, often being pulled in various directions. After experiencing events like Grandmother’s passing and the Hokkaido trip, I wrote several essays based on these experiences. However, I felt these articles lacked a consistent core theme, appearing unfocused when writing, and unable to accumulate enough appeal over time.

Mid-year, I read a book called “10x Is Easier Than 2x,” and began thinking about my future vision and how to break through my current growth trajectory. Following the current execution method, I couldn’t reach my ideal goals - articles couldn’t break through existing frameworks and reach more readers. I needed to change and find key leverage points. Finally, I conceived this newsletter plan, combining my three major strengths: “ability to consistently execute something daily for years, capability to connect unrelated things across domains, and pursuit of writing,” along with my vision: hoping to meet more creators and build more meaningful connections.

I planned to write a ten-year monthly newsletter, with only 120 issues in total. This constraint prompted me to rethink various aspects of writing: material selection, quality, and structure, and drove me to continuously improve my writing skills. If you’re interested in understanding the complete journey, welcome to read this newsletter.

• Why I show up everyday. The peddle, podium, creators and us.

Aura & Doccie

These are the names of two products I tried this year. Aura is a product specifically for novelists, while Doccie is for software documentation maintainers - both highly related to writing. Aura has been temporarily set aside, while Doccie continues to progress, combining the browser automation software Playwright and Chrome Extension to address the challenges software documentation maintainers face when updating product screenshots.

Daily Harvest Project

In September 2024, my partner and I started the “Daily Harvest” project. At the end of each day, we review our experiences and record what we’ve gained.

These harvests can be big or small: they might be breakthroughs in programming development or newly learned concepts; they could also be simple daily pleasures, like treating ourselves to a bubble tea or receiving someone’s thanks. The focus of this project isn’t on the size of the harvest but on cultivating the habit of daily recording and building the ability to counter negative bias¹. I’ve found that this project not only allows my partner and me to share our joys but also helps us better understand what makes each other feel fulfilled.

Falling in Love with Skiing

At the end of March, I went skiing in northern Japan with high school friends and instantly fell in love with this sport that demands complete concentration. I experienced a quality of flow state I had never encountered before, and also developed a new shared activity with my partner - we both hope to advance further in this sport.

• Skiing Thing #1: Starting from Relearning How to Fall
• Skiing Thing #2: Living with Fear
• Skiing Thing #3: Counter-intuition and Reshaping Intuition
• Skiing Thing #4: Special Flow
• Skiing Thing #5: The Mirror of Opportunity Cost

Mindframe

10x Is Easier Than 2x

This mindset framework comes from the book “10x Is Easier Than 2x”². The author deeply explains why pursuing a tenfold growth trajectory in life is easier to achieve than pursuing doubling. The book contains many concepts that I found extremely beneficial:

• If pursuing 2x growth, we often adopt 20% new methods and 80% existing methods; but to pursue 10x growth, we need to use 80% new methods and 20% existing methods. Pursuing seemingly unattainable goals forces us to use our imagination and break through current thinking frameworks.
• We should continuously focus on what we currently have and our self-improvement during this period. Don’t fall into a “gap mindset” comparing with others; instead, embrace a “harvest mindset,” frequently reviewing our progress journey to overcome fear.
• Take your unique abilities seriously and make good use of them, as they are irreplaceable. However, unique abilities alone are not enough - to achieve growth, you must also invest tremendous focus and continuously refine their quality.

Range is a Good Thing

For a long time, I felt that my interests were too broad, preventing me from diving deep into any professional field, which became my mental demon. Deep down, I always felt there was a huge starting gap between myself and those specialized in specific fields. However, in life’s details, I could feel the benefits of broadly absorbing knowledge, but I couldn’t theorize or prove this feeling, let alone develop it into a methodology. The book “Range”³ perfectly answered my confusion and provided an explanatory framework.

• Childhood excellence isn’t a guarantee for adapting to variable environments: The author uses examples like Tiger Woods and chess players to show that childhood prodigies grew up in environments with “fixed rules.” David Epstein points out that these people compete in fields with minimal changes and clear rules, where outcomes are either win or lose. But the real world is full of variables, and outcomes are rarely black and white, often full of coopetition relationships. In such an environment, focusing too early on specific skills might not bring substantial benefits.
• Progressive learning has its value: Under Taiwan’s education system, we pursue efficient learning outcomes - achieving the highest scores in the shortest time. This approach simplifies learning from a “multi-variable process” to pursuing a “single result,” often misinterpreting current test scores as learning effectiveness. But this only reflects the brain’s current state, unable to show long-term memory formation and deep connections between knowledge.
• Excessive persistence isn’t necessarily an advantage: In our culture, persistence has always been highly valued. However, excessive persistence might lead us to invest too early in the wrong direction while reducing opportunities to try new things.
• Cross-domain ability is key to innovation and solutions: For example, Nintendo’s Gunpei Yokoi’s classic games didn’t come from entirely new technology but cleverly combined existing technologies. Similar examples are common in academia, where researchers combining seemingly unrelated fields often spark groundbreaking discoveries.

Heartfelt thanks to David Epstein and to myself for completing this book this year - it helped me recognize my unique advantages.

Dollar Cost Average

Three years ago, at the cryptocurrency market’s bull market peak, I joined following the market trend. Unexpectedly, just a few months later, the market entered a three-year bear market. During this period, I didn’t continue investing in cryptocurrency, and the assets I bought just sat in my hot wallet.

At the beginning of this year, after Grandmother’s passing, while keeping vigil at the southern compound house, I dreamed of a good friend coming to remind me that the cryptocurrency bull market was approaching. This dream awakened my alertness, reminding me that I still had many assets in my hot wallet needing proper management. So I bought a cold wallet and began searching for cryptocurrency-related resources to learn.

During this learning process, I’m most grateful to D of “Blockchain Daily News”⁴. He demonstrated the effectiveness of Dollar Cost Average investment through practical action, and how this investment method helps stabilize investment mindset. It can be said that my current investment philosophy all stems from D’s teachings.

I also invested time in researching cryptocurrency operation mechanisms, believing this technology will profoundly influence global financial operation logic in the next decade. Based on this understanding, I decided to continue investing in this field.

Race to Top vs Race to Bottom

I heard this concept in the conversation between Lex Fridman and Dario Amodei⁵. At the time, Lex mentioned industry competition, model safety, and other issues, asking Dario’s thoughts. After thinking for a moment, Dario expressed that as long as everything is a “race to the top” rather than a “race to the bottom,” things will develop in a good direction.

For example, if Anthropic invents a safety regulation and shares it publicly, and other competitors find this regulation valuable and adopt similar structures, then such regulation becomes a sign pointing toward a better future and drives upward competition. Conversely, if each participant hides their achievements, doesn’t share with others, nobody pays attention to safety, and only pursues performance, this is downward competition, which will ultimately lead us to a worse future.

This conversation benefited me greatly. Such perspective not only helps us reduce sensitivity to competition but also allows us to focus more on harvest rather than gaps, and creates positive impacts on the overall environment.

Goals

This year, while listing plans for next year, I began thinking about why most past plans weren’t realized as wished. I reached a preliminary conclusion: trying to estimate the entire year’s progress at year’s end is quite unrealistic for me. Meanwhile, this approach also overly restricts future possibilities. Therefore, this year I decided to focus on “principles” rather than “specific items.”

Deep Work

Cal Newport points out in his work “Deep Work”⁶ that to become an elite-level creator, one must possess deep work ability. This has always been a focus of my attention. For example, I start each day’s work with the day’s most important item (writing) and set a Pomodoro timer, completely avoiding distractions during that time.

However, recently while reviewing Cal Newport’s book, I began reflecting: Is my deep focus time not long enough and not continuous enough? Would it be better to extend the Pomodoro time? Also, should I reduce the number of switches between major items to lower attention residue effects⁷? Based on these thoughts, I conceived a feasible structure to optimize my work method:

1. Evening Summary and Planning: Every night while summarizing daily harvests, conceive three key tasks that need to be completed tomorrow.
2. Time Block Division and Focused Execution: Divide the day into three main time blocks (divided by lunch and dinner), each block focusing on completing one major item spanning multiple Pomodoros. Additionally, arrange some small tasks after each time block, finally paired with rewarding activities like watching videos.
3. Full Concentration Principle: Regardless of the task, always maintain full concentration without distraction to maximize focus.

Be Friend with My Own Body

Looking back at my 2024 exercise trajectory, it can be summarized in the following cycle:

Determination → Actual Action → Physical Discomfort from Over-exercise → Becoming Lazy due to Extended Rest.

I don’t think the problem lies in mindset. If not for the subsequent discomfort, I believe I could have continued exercising. The real problem is that I don’t understand my body well enough, not knowing when I’ve exceeded its limits. Meanwhile, I also haven’t taken care of my body. For example, after jogging I often don’t do cool-down exercises, just casually walking home, which has led to long-term tension in my right knee’s iliotibial band, causing pain on the outer side of my knee when running.

In the new year, I plan to strengthen awareness of my own body. During and after exercise, I will carefully feel my body’s state and appropriately stretch and relax. Besides exercise, I will also pay more attention to diet. In 2024, due to eating out too much, my physical condition declined. In 2025, I will increase the proportion of self-cooking, trying to choose whole foods. Meanwhile, to improve gut flora, I will consume more probiotic-rich foods.

Stay in the Game

This is my deepest realization in 2024, covering multiple aspects including writing, entrepreneurship, investment, and community.

The core principle is: Recognize what you’re good at, proactively choose a field that will continue to play an important role in the future world, then focus on deeply cultivating it.

In 2024, I defined four fields for continued deep cultivation, and the goal for 2025 is to further polish my abilities and improve quality in these aspects:

1. Writing: I will continue writing the Connecting Dots Newsletter, which will be my writing focus for the next ten years.
2. Entrepreneurship: Although the path of entrepreneurship hasn’t been smooth in the past, I’m certain this is the career direction I want to pursue. I love the dynamic, flexible, and challenging environment of startups, and look forward to creating products that can improve others’ lives while deriving value from them.
3. Investment: I believe cryptocurrency is the cornerstone for human society’s next stage. Its decentralization and community sharing characteristics are irreplaceable advantages, so I will continue focusing on cryptocurrency investment.
4. Community: In 2024, I began seriously managing personal social media. On one hand hoping to gain more exposure, on the other hand to meet more creators, build relationships with them and learn from them, making myself better.

I will continue deep cultivation in these four fields, accumulating experience and value.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my parents and two brothers, you bring endless joy to my life and become my most solid support.

Thanks to my love and partner Lucy, thank you for always patiently listening to my long speeches, thank you for accompanying me in realizing those crazy plans, and thank you for crazily liking my posts. Having you around is really wonderful.

Thanks to 敬智、忠安、示家, you bring me countless inspirations. Thanks to 凱鈞、尚昀, every gathering with you makes me feel warm. Thank you 適文 for appearing in my dream, and thanks to everyone who has appeared in my life.

2025, I will make this year full of abundant harvests and growth.