My Annual Birthday Check-In: 11 Lessons From 33 Years on This Planet

Some practical, non-obvious lessons I learned in the last year.

You’ve probably heard that Bill Gates quote: “People overestimate what they can get done in a year and underestimate what they can get done in five years.”

And as I reflect on the last five years of my life, it certainly rings true.

As many of you know, I've been doing annual reflections for the last five years (check out 32, 31, 30, 29, and 28), and my life today looks dramatically different from the first time I did a birthday review in 2019.

In the last five years, I’ve quit my job, started a business, gotten married, published a book, had two kids, and moved out of (and back to) New York City.

And just like that, I turn 33 years old on Saturday.

In the last year, I’ve put a premium on learning by reading more books, diving deeper into interesting subjects, and putting together comprehensive guides on skills I wanted to sharpen.

They include:

• How to Become More Likable Using 9 Techniques From the World’s Most Charismatic People

• 11 Public Speaking Techniques from the World’s Greatest Speakers

• How to Become a Master Negotiator Using These 7 Practical Negotiation Techniques

• 10 Interview Techniques From the World’s Best Interviewers

As I reflect on the last year, I’m so thankful to have a family that loves me and work that fulfills me. No one is luckier than me.

I hope you find my insights useful, and I look forward to hearing from you.

1. Before you can radiate, you need to absorb

Legendary director James Cameron has coined something he calls the “creativity law of thermodynamics.” He says: “Before you can radiate, you need to absorb.”

It’s a good reminder that before you undertake any creative act, you need to have undergone a number of challenges, have had interesting relationships, and have found people endlessly fascinating.

Only then can you turn your unique life experiences into meaningful art for others.

Similarly, author Stephen King says the requirement to be a great writer is "the ability to remember the story of every scar."

He adds, “Writers remember everything — especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he'll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones, you get novels."

The best storytellers are unafraid to look at their scars, to examine them, to confront them, and most importantly, to discover meaning in them.

Before you can radiate, you need to absorb.

2. The road to hell is paved with good intentions

You know the saying, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It highlights the delta between what someone intends to do and the actual outcome of their actions.

In the last year, I’ve been learning to apply this to communication. It’s not enough to have good intent and look at your actions in isolation. You need to constantly be zooming back and forth and understanding how the other person perceives your words.

As James Clear wrote in a recent newsletter: “Communication is about what is received, not what is intended. If there is a gap between what you are saying and what they are hearing, you have to find a new way to say it.”

3. No one single event will transform your entire identity

So many cool things have happened since I published my book, Hidden Genius, last year. I saw it on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. The Rock congratulated me. I did a book tour where I met many of you! I spoke at conferences. I spoke at The Strand. I got to see it published in Bulgaria, where I was born. It was translated to 14 languages and sold tens of thousands of copies.

So naturally, the question I am most often asked since publishing the book is: “How does it feel to be an author now?”

The truthful answer? It feels the same as it did before anyone considered me an “author.”

I’ve done so many things in the last year, but my identity hasn’t shifted in the least.

I’ve learned this lesson so deeply: No one single event will transform your entire identity. Rather, the habits that will transform your identity are so tiny and so minuscule that they’re nearly invisible to the naked eye. They are often extensions of a seemingly ‘life-transforming moment’ but never the moment itself.

Your life changes in the most subtle ways over a long period of time.

I heard someone once say: “If you ask God to give you patience, he’ll give you a line at the bank.” In other words, if you’re looking to become a better person, you won’t magically become one by getting married, writing a book, having kids, or getting a gold medal at the Olympics.

You’ll become a better person by being subjected to the reality of everyday life — dealing with a screaming toddler or handling constructive criticism — over and over again until you’ve gained new skills and become a different person.

4. Anxiety is loud, while intuition is quiet

How do you distinguish between anxiety and intuition? I recently saw a quote that highlighted the difference between an intuitive thought and an intrusive thought. In her book, The Mountain Is You, Brianna Wiest writes:

• “Intuitive thoughts are calm. Intruding thoughts are hectic and fear-inducing.”

• “Intuitive thoughts are rational; they make a degree of sense. Intruding thoughts are irrational and often stem from aggrandizing a situation or jumping to the worst conclusion possible.”

• “Intuitive thoughts are ‘quiet;’ intruding thoughts are ‘loud;’ which makes one harder to hear than the other.”

• “Intuitive thoughts usually come to you once, maybe twice, and they induce a feeling of understanding. Intruding thoughts trend to be persistent and induce a feeling of panic.”

• “Intuitive thoughts solve problems; invasive thoughts create them.”

For an over-thinker like me, this is a great checklist to consult when I’m starting to panic out of nowhere.

5. Conducting an ‘integrity cleanse’ can transform your life

I went on an “integrity cleanse” this year, and I’ve never felt better.

Life coach Martha Beck defines an “integrity cleanse” as a process of practicing honesty in thoughts, words, and actions.

Many of us don’t lie about big things, but rather, we lie about the small, everyday things, and struggle with this push-and-pull: Do I say what I think or do I just let this one go? Do I give them accurate feedback or will they think I’m a jerk? Do I say the truth or do I dress it up with apologies until it’s unrecognizable as the truth?

Here’s the reason many of us avoid saying what we really mean: We think we’ll become insufferable jerks. As evidenced in the Esquire article, "I Think You're Fat," you can pretty much destroy every relationship in your life when you walk around the world with no filter.

But it doesn’t have to be so black and white.

Radical candor isn’t what most of us have to do to live in more alignment with our true selves. We don’t have to be rude, mean, or cruel to get our point across. It’s just being more intentional with our words because those words shape our thoughts and behaviors. Martha Beck says, "Consider if what you have to say is an improvement upon silence."

There’s very few things that would be an improvement upon silence. If you don’t agree, stay silent. If you have nothing constructive or useful to say, stay silent. It’s hard but necessary.

Before answering, Beck says she asks herself if her response is 1) true, 2) kind, and 3) useful. Rarely is something all three.

We all know that living in alignment with our truth is what we ultimately want. But it’s so hard to do — especially if you’re a person who seeks external validation.

Beck offers a warning: “Depart from your truth in any way — offer a fake smile, flatter your awful boss, marry for money — and you become two people: the truth knower and the lie actor. That’s duplicity. And duplicity, not social noncompliance, is the real enemy of joy.”

6. All love stories are destined to end in tragedy

Two family members who meant a lot to me passed away this year. Since February, my family and I have been trying to navigate the waves of grief that strike at the most bizarre moments.

For the last few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that life is equal part love story and equal part tragedy. Each is a different side of the same coin.

I once heard author Nicholas Sparks say this in an interview:

“To me, love and tragedy are linked. You can’t have one without the other. And the greater the love, the greater the tragedy.

“You see, every day millions and millions of people around the world die, and we all go on, we all show up to work, we don’t care. But the moment that it’s someone you love — your sister, your spouse, your grandparents, your friend — it’s like your world collapses. And the greater the love, the greater the tragedy.

“So, by definition, all love stories have to end in tragedy.”

The most impressive people to me are those who have undergone tremendous amounts of tragedy yet they’ve managed not to get hardened by it. Unfortunately, the reaction that comes most naturally is to turn toward the dark side of the self — anger, volatility, and withdrawal.

It’s (much) harder to maintain a light-hearted approach to life and radiate even more kindness in the face of impossible sorrow. This is a lesson that I feel like will take me a lifetime to learn.

7. Things tend to get worse before they get better

Private equity investor Graham Weaver said something interesting, “Any change that you want to make is going to [make your life] worse first. So you’re in a relationship and you have to have a hard conversation? That particular night, your life is going to get a little worse, and then you’re going to come out the other end, and it’s going to get better.”

Whether it’s starting a new exercise habit or maintaining a healthy relationship, it all comes down to competence and understanding that your life will get worse before it gets better.

In his book, The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin distinguishes between four levels of competence:

— Unconscious incompetence – “I don’t know how bad I am.”

— Conscious incompetence – "This sucks. I know how bad I am.”

^^ this is the stage when most people quit because their life got worse*

— Conscious competence – “I can do this if I focus.”

— Unconscious competence – “I don’t remember the last 10 minutes of driving my car.”

I wonder just how many times we quit because we thought our life getting worse was permanent, not temporary. So allow this to serve as your reminder that things almost always get worse before they get better.

8. Aim to be the red line

I sent the first edition of my newsletter The Profile seven years ago.

I never thought it would lead me to quitting my full time job, seeing Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson share my work, and publishing a book, yet here we are.

One of the biggest things I've learned is that nothing in this life is guaranteed. Not trust. Not respect. Not luck.

But the one thing you can control is staying the course with a level head over a long period of time. If you focus on delivering a consistent, high-quality product, that’s when miracles happen.

I tend to be an emotional person who's rocked by every up and down (especially by the downs), but my husband once drew me the chart below and said, "The waves symbolize all the things life will throw your way. Your job is to be the red line."

It’s something I’ve kept in mind during the extreme highs and extreme lows, and it helps bring me back to equilibrium.

9. The perfect conditions don’t exist

Many people ask me how on earth I was able to write a book while having a newborn. It’s “inconvenient,” “hard,” and “not a great time.” I’ve heard it all. Truthfully, I never know how to respond except for: “I know it wasn’t the right time to write a book, but when is the right time?”

For many of us, the answer is “never.”

There’s always something going on that has the power to dissuade us from taking on a long-term project. In turn, we settle for waiting for the “perfect conditions” to start a company, write a book, or move to another city. Waiting around for the perfect conditions makes us psychologically reliant on external events.

I’d love to offer you another interesting framework I learned from Josh Waitzkin to combat this sort of thinking.

Waitzkin says it all starts in childhood. He noticed that parents would often tell their kids they couldn’t go play outside because it was raining. It was “bad weather.” "We're externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time,” Waitzkin says.

So to show his son that he controls whether he has fun or excels in something, Waitzkin takes him out to play during every rain or snowstorm. “I wanted [my son] to have this internal locus of control,” he says. “To not be reliant on external conditions being just so.”

I loved this idea, and I wanted to share it. Maybe it’s not “bad weather.” Maybe it’s not “a bad time.” Maybe it’s not “bad luck.”

Maybe it’s perfect.

10. The sweetest wins comes from achieving the goals you set only for yourself

After my son was born in November 2023, I needed a new goal to chase. I decided that half marathon training would be a great mental/physical outlet following postpartum. Plus, I found a race on April 28, which seemed like the perfect, far-away date.

So I started training in January. I shared updates about it in this newsletter and on Twitter, and Instagram. For the first time, I publicly stated my intention to run a sub-2 hour half, and I thought that would give me the accountability I needed to take the training seriously.

And I did. I ran mile after mile during the week and dutifully completed my long runs every Sunday morning.

On the evening before the race, I laid out my clothes for the following day and studied the course map one last time.

And then, of course — of course — I started feeling severely nauseous and deeply unwell. I’ll spare you the details, but my husband and I got food poisoning.

So at 4 a.m — four hours before the half was set to begin — I was Googling, “Can you run a half marathon with food poisoning?” (The answer is: you can try, but there’s a serious chance you might get dangerously dehydrated & end up in the hospital.) Given that I couldn’t even keep a sip of water down, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

Needless to say, I wasn’t able to run it. I gotta admit — it was a weird cocktail of feelings. Even though food poisoning wasn’t exactly on my bingo card, I felt really disappointed that I couldn’t close the chapter on this journey.

So then what? I kept thinking about this one part from Casey Neistat’s video Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream. In it, he talks about how he attempted to complete the New York City marathon under three hours last year, and his time came in at …. 3 hours and 1 minute. Devastating.

He says:

“It’s just an arbitrary number. I don’t need to break three hours to know who I am. What matters are the experiences. The journey. Even if I failed in the goal, see, life’s a battle, and there are times when you need to accept that you’ve been beat. ”It’s been a long road, and there’s a lot to be proud of. But I’m never going to break three. I’m just not that guy.

[he pauses, and then says:]

“Oh, F*CK THAT.”

Of course he didn’t stop. Of course he didn’t give up after that attempt. It took him 17 years and 24 marathons, but finally, at age 42, Neistat ran a 2 hour and 57 minute marathon.

Here’s the thing: I know that running this half doesn’t define me, but I am also determined to finish what I start.

So one week after my ill-fated half marathon, without telling anyone, I went to Central Park and ran the exact route of the race — two loops around the park for a total of 13.1 miles.

(And I managed to achieve my goal/personal best of sub-2 hours, running 1:58:48 with an average pace of 9:05 minutes/mile.)

No cheering. No fanfare. No medal. Just me and my family at the “finish line.”

I didn’t have to run it. It may seem meaningless, purposeless, and stupid, but it was important to me. As Neistat said:

“You do a lot of meaningless, purposeless, stupid things. You get obsessed. You spend years focused on it. And literally, no one cares but you. But you persevere anyway and you keep running. Because when you add up all those stupid, meaningless obsessions, what they add up to is your life.”

11. Above all else, trust yourself

Too many of us are nervous to take a risk or do something outside of our comfort zone simply because we start believing the negative mind chatter.

But here’s a different narrative: You have the skills to start over. You have the tools to rebuild your life. You have the mental resilience to take on whatever obstacle you encounter.

As one of my favorite sayings goes, “A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.”

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