10 Lessons From 2023

As the year draws to a close, the 65,000 readers of Faster Than Normal deserve something more substantial than another prediction deck about 2024. They deserve an honest accounting of what actually moves the needle in business and life — the insights that shift outcomes, not the insights that sound good in LinkedIn posts.

These ten lessons emerged from a year of growth, setbacks, and the kind of honest self-examination that most operators avoid. They're not theoretical. Each one changed how I approach problems, relationships, and the daily work of building something meaningful.

Burnout hit for the first time this year. Not the fashionable kind that gets discussed at conferences, but the real thing — the systematic breakdown of motivation and clarity that forces you to question fundamental assumptions about how you operate.

The coaching sessions that followed revealed something unexpected. I wasn't just dealing with negative thought patterns; I was dealing with positive beliefs about those patterns. I genuinely believed that self-criticism made me better. More productive. More likely to achieve ambitious goals.

The revelation: self-criticism doesn't improve performance. It reduces action. When you fail at something and immediately begin the internal critique, you're less likely to attempt the next iteration. Self-compassion — the thing I'd always viewed as weakness — actually accelerates learning by removing the emotional friction that prevents rapid experimentation.

Cognitive behavioral therapy maps this progression clearly: Trigger → Core belief → Automatic thoughts → Emotional, physical, and behavioral response. Most people try to change their automatic thoughts without addressing the underlying beliefs that generate them. This is why willpower fails. You can't override a system; you have to redesign it.

The practical framework that worked: identify the belief, interrogate its actual effects (not its intended effects), then consciously rewrite it. For lasting change, start with beliefs, not behaviors.

The most important career principle isn't networking or skill development — it's understanding the compound growth formula and structuring your choices around it. The equation is deceptively simple: Future Value = P × (1 + R)^T.

P equals your principal — the domain where you choose to build expertise. R equals your growth rate, determined by five factors: status and credibility within your domain, personal relationships that expand opportunity, skills (both domain-specific and meta-cognitive), accumulated knowledge, and personal traits like confidence and tenacity. T equals time.

Here's what most people miss: every career pivot interrupts compounding. You're not just changing P; you're reducing R and resetting T. The range versus specialization debate misses this dynamic entirely. Range is essential early in your career for developing broad competencies, but long-term wealth creation — financial and otherwise — requires sustained focus.

The growth rate multiplier explains why certain people seem to accelerate while others plateau. They've identified their domain early enough to benefit from exponential returns over time.

Derek Sivers cuts through the self-improvement noise with characteristic precision: "If more information were the answer, we'd all be billionaires with perfect abs." The bottleneck isn't access to correct information; it's behavior change.

This reframes how you should approach any new insight. The default question shifts from "Is this interesting?" to "How will this change what I do?" Learning without behavioral modification is entertainment, not education.

The meta-habit that accelerates growth: approach every piece of new information by immediately identifying the specific behavior you'll modify in response. No exceptions.

Brian Chesky provided the clearest heuristic for relationship health during his Diary of a CEO appearance: you shouldn't need to "catch up" when you see people who matter to you.

If you need a full briefing on the last three to six months of someone's life, you're not genuinely connected to them. Real connection means knowing the answer to two questions without asking: What's the most significant thing that's happened to them recently? How would you rate their overall life satisfaction?

This isn't about constant communication; it's about intentional attention. The strongest relationships are characterized by continuous awareness, not periodic intensity.

Every human shares one common experience: suffering. This recognition transforms how you approach conversations, negotiations, and relationship building. Instead of starting with your own needs or insecurities, you begin by identifying how the other person is struggling and what you might do to alleviate that struggle.

Joe Polish's framework — "What's in it for them?" — becomes more than a sales technique; it becomes a philosophy for building genuine influence. When you consistently help others solve problems without expecting immediate returns, you create the foundation for relationships that compound over time.

The key insight: you can always help cure someone's suffering if you care to look for the opportunity.

Self-esteem is built, not born. Social media has made this more challenging by providing constant reference points for comparison, but it's also made the solution clearer: you need a systematic way to track your own progress independent of others' achievements.

The practical tool: create a comprehensive inventory of your traits, accomplishments, and positive feedback you've received. Review it regularly. This isn't narcissism; it's data collection. When you focus on your own trajectory rather than relative positioning, motivation becomes internal and sustainable.

The difference between confidence and comparison is measurement. Confident people track their own progress; insecure people track their relative standing.

For habits that haven't stuck despite good intentions, external accountability remains the most reliable forcing function. The structure that works: daily five-minute check-ins with someone you trust, shared tracking of success rates, and meaningful consequences for failure.

The key is removing cognitive flexibility from the equation. "Usually" creates an exit ramp; "non-negotiable" eliminates it. When you tell yourself you usually wake up at 5 AM, you've created space for exceptions. Exceptions become patterns.

Most morning routines are elaborate procrastination systems disguised as productivity optimization. The test for any morning activity: does each additional minute increase your total output for the day?

A reasonable morning routine shouldn't exceed one hour from waking to beginning substantive work. Beyond that, you're likely avoiding the hard thing that will actually create results.

The question that cuts through the ritual: are you getting more productivity from this routine, or are you just getting more comfortable with delay?

Ego doesn't just make you arrogant; it makes you blind. When you feel strong emotions about someone else's success — envy, resentment, dismissal — those emotions prevent your analytical mind from understanding what made them successful.

The practice that helps: when you notice yourself having an emotional reaction to someone else's achievement, force yourself to identify three specific things they did that you could apply to your own situation. Treat every success story as a case study, not a comparison point.

The shorter lessons that shaped the year:

Clarity is kindness in personal relationships. Honest feedback creates the conditions for growth while establishing necessary boundaries.

Measurement is table stakes for improvement. If you're not tracking it, you're probably not serious about it.

Anticipatory anxiety is real. The difference between mornings with and without notifications is profound.

The splitting time fallacy: When you divide attention between two projects, each gets less than half your capacity due to hidden switching costs.

Wanting things fast doesn't accelerate timelines; it only causes you to pursue smaller goals.

Suffering arises from over-identification with thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. Detachment isn't indifference — it's the recognition that you have these experiences rather than being defined by them.

The greatest lesson might be the simplest: the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your outcomes. Everything else is execution.