Bye 2024

I’ve been summarizing my year privately for years, but I’ve never done it publicly. In previous years, my process for doing this looked like this:

Open Google Photos: I would go month by month, writing down the things I felt or the fun moments I experienced during each specific month.
After finishing the first part, I would create three sections: one where I wrote about what went well, another for what didn’t go so well, and finally, one for my key learnings from the year.

And that was it. But this simple exercise helped me appreciate everything I had experienced so much more—which, fortunately, is a lot.

I always choose to live fully and intensely. Maybe it’s because I don’t know any other way, or maybe because life is so short that the thought of missing out on something terrifies me.

This year, for the first time in the past four years, I changed that system. I wanted to try something different, and at the beginning of the year, I stumbled upon an article by Steph Ango where he shared the 40 questions he asks himself every year. I loved them; they felt similar to the exercise I was already doing.

After answering those questions, I’ve come to some conclusions I’d like to share here:

I’m someone who loves learning new things, but I find it hard to put them into practice. There are 2–3 things I’m really passionate about, and it’s difficult for me to make room for things I’ve never tried before. This year, however, I left that door slightly more open and realized I should do it more often.
Several family members passed away this year, and it only reinforced my approach to life: keeping things simple, as Edgar Allan Poe once said, and living with commitment, attitude, longevity, and purpose. It sucks that I have to learn these things this way, but often, there’s just no other way.
If you’ve noticed, almost every project I’ve created is connected to calm: Kalm, Silencezzz, or Natural.fm. That’s because what I’ve been seeking the most this year is silence. There’s been too much noise in my head, and I needed to sort it out. Nothing works better for that than silence, allowing everything to settle into place. As I wrote in Our Struggles Define Us:

”Those who seek calm are the ones who can’t find it. Those who want to improve their health are those who have lost it. People search for ways to sleep because, try as they might, they can’t manage to fall asleep and are all too familiar with the ceiling above their bed.”

There’s nothing like action to clear your mind. For an overthinker like me, taking action feels like an act of faith—trusting that by thinking less and doing more, even when it doesn’t seem logical, I’ll gain clarity. And I can confirm that it works. After countless mental loops, I’ve arrived at interesting conclusions, which, in turn, brought an unexpected sense of calm.

That said, I like to wrap up this final newsletter of the year by sharing a few things I’ve really enjoyed:

Articles I enjoyed this year

Books I enjoyed this year

The Idiot by Dostoevsky.
Señora de rojo sobre fondo gris by Miguel Delibes.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murakami.
The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald.
100 años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez.
Educated by Tara Westover.

Quotes I enjoyed this year

“Real artists ship.” — Steve Jobs

“I make movies for me, and the audience is invited.” - Tarantino

“People try to do all sorts of clever and difficult things to improve life instead of doing the simplest, easiest thing— refusing to participate in activities that make life bad.” - Tolstoy

Places I enjoyed this year

Hydra, Greece.
Bayonne, France.
Pum Pum Bakery, Madrid.
De Kas, Amsterdam.
Van Stapele Koekmakerij, Amsterdam.
Alma Ezequiel Montilla, Puente Genil.
Señor Cangrejo, Sevilla.

Next year, more to come

This year, I wrote 28 posts. Out of those 28, I focused a lot on sharing my reflections, but not as much on the day-to-day of trying to live off my own projects.

So, in 2025, you’ll see more of that. Additionally, based on the conclusions I’ve drawn this year, I’m going to try something new: starting a tea store. If you want to learn more, I plan to share the process in this newsletter—everything from the legal aspects to finding suppliers and all the challenges that come with it.

In addition to this, I’m working on my next software project, which will be launched next year. As I’ve mentioned many times in this newsletter, recommendations from real people are becoming increasingly important for maintaining sanity on the internet. I want to be part of this, which is why I’m creating a platform that allows you to easily share your own recommendations online, just like I did with Creare, for example.

There isn’t a specific solution for this, beyond using Wordpress, Webflow, or a few tools that require some technical knowledge, which not everyone has. I want to make it accessible to everyone, so let’s see if I can pull it off.

With all of this, I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas. I’m very excited for the coming year, and I hope you are too. Thanks for reading me.

I’d love for you to write to me and share a bit about your plans for next year. I always enjoy reading those messages.

That’s all for now, happy 2025!

Talk soon.

Alberto

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