Happy New Year!

One of the benefits of the holiday break is catching up on all the things I have neglected throughout the year. I listened to every episode of Crucible Moments and Training Data between spending time with family, finding culinary delights, and working out to deserve the additional caloric intake. I also read books I didn’t have the chance to read, such as How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks (more on this another time) and some of his previous writings.

I came across one of Brooks’ articles in The Atlantic, titled You Might Be a Late Bloomer. While my parents would acknowledge I had some early starts, such as in walking and running by nine months, climbing up to the top of their dresser and jumping off thinking I could fly at year one, and skip counting at age two, they always told me that I am a late bloomer. Their data showed that I hated school and didn’t pay attention before Stuyvesant High School, didn’t decide to go to graduate school, law school, medical school, or get a job in tech, investment banking, or consulting until a month before college graduation, started dating late, married later, decided to have a child even later, had a circuitous path through startups, and started my venture career at the age of 38!

So yes, the article spoke to me. Whether you are an early achiever, an instant success, or a late bloomer like me, there are two paragraphs from the article that I wish upon you for this year and the years to come:

We have a notion that the happiest people are those who have aimed their life toward some goal and then attained it, like winning a championship trophy or achieving renown. But the best moments of life can be found within the lifelong learning or quest itself. It’s doing something so fulfilling that the work is its own reward. “Effort is the one thing that gives meaning to life,” the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote. “Effort means you care about something.”

“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once told the poet Donald Hall [and chronicled in Life Work]. “And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.”

As we kick off 2025, may you be a late bloomer and find yourself on a meaningful and impossible quest.