2023: Finding Lucid

2023 was a year of contrasts and reconstruction. It was inspiring yet exhausting, wicked yet thoughtful, and expensive yet enriching. Reflecting on this year's journey, I navigated various challenges and triumphs, setting a path towards personal and professional growth, by completely reconstructing some things.

The year began with extreme zeal, fuelling early achievements. However, this burst of energy ebbed, leading to struggles with certain goals. Nevertheless, I learned invaluable lessons, particularly in valuing friendships and relationships, which significantly contributed to my successes.

Despite the positives, the year had its share of challenges. I'll reflect on these first, seeking lessons to carry into the future. Notably, balancing relationships and managing procrastination emerged as areas needing attention.

I'll split this article into three parts; Personal, Tech Career, and Startup Experiences.

Personal Insights

Last year, I wrote about ‘Rollercoasters, with lessons’. It was a nice roundup of the whole year, and I wrote about the bad and a few ways I hoped to work on making them better.

While I made strides in some areas, I faced familiar hurdles in relationships and procrastination.

But unlike last year, where relationship struggles were self-inflicted, external factors played a major role this year. I was also an extremely accommodating person, and this brought a lot of bad experiences. In all of my personal dealings this year, I learnt that not all friendships could be salvaged, leading me to adopt a term I called 'Fair Strictness' in future interactions.

We can't ruminate too much over the lapses, so I'll highlight my positives, on a personal scale.

In 2022, I had several concerns about my education and the quality of my grades. This was because of my negligence towards school while trying to put my complete focus on Tech/Career.

On the academic front in 2023, I refocused on my studies, making commendable progress with support from friends like Blaise and Olumide. My aim for 2024 is to elevate my academic performance even further.

Habits to Address

Addressing my habits, both good and bad, remains a priority. Though, the key steps to improvement include:

• - Tackling procrastination
• - Avoiding last-minute deadlines
• - Reducing subtle laziness
• - Spending less time indoors
• - Eating earlier
• - Improving communication
• - Limiting screen time

A few don't need explaining, but others may seem like peculiar habits. I plan to address these by adopting healthier routines and possibly taking breaks from social media.

In 2024, I hope to take some time to address the consequences of my bad habits and develop a plan to improve them in the coming year. At the same time, I will focus on maintaining and building upon my positive habits in certain areas, to take them to the next level.

My tech career: A cinematic journey

My tech career in 2023 resembled a movie, complete with highs, lows, unexpected pivots, and some defining relationships.

I experienced a loss of energy and missed some opportunities to upskill. This wasn’t a shock to me though, as I spent a lot of time overworking myself at the beginning of the year. It took a while to realise and adjust my habits on this, but I had already lost some zeal by then.

There were a number of consequences from this loss of zeal though, including;

• - Getting into some hackathons and being burnt out completely, while at them
• - Due to this burnout, I mostly ended up underperforming and not submitting projects
• - Fumbling some really good opportunities
• - Getting some job rejections (I don't count this as bad anymore, lol)
• - Missing out on some important opportunities due to a lack of proper upskilling.

While I experienced the bad side of things, I also celebrated victories, such as;

• - Winning hackathons
• - Engaging with industry experts
• - Building some good projects
• - Getting much better as a developer
• - Handling a workshop at an international event (which I flopped lol)
• - Organizing community events
• - Picking up Golang, and enjoying it
• - Getting an upgrade to my workspace (getting a monitor, and a Dell XPS to improve my workflow)
• - Starting a blockchain community alongside some industry experts

Happily, I also embraced firmness and open-mindedness, leading to significant growth and achievements, while trying to manage procrastination and the habit of leaving too many courses incomplete, even after spending a lot on them. Moving forward, my focus is on leveraging the positive traits to amplify my career. The Goal remains 10X.

2023: Startup Life: Lessons and Progress

The startup journey was the most exhilarating part of my year, as 2023 came with a lot of lessons, including some success behind the scenes.

'Anti Trenches', a group a couple of friends and I joined, played a crucial role in my growth, since it helps us continuously stay in check and keep tabs on each other. A large part of my improvement came as a result of this group.

I absorbed insights from startup luminaries like Elizabeth Yin and Paul Graham, which influenced my ventures with Cryptea and Clover.

I launched Cryptea; a crypto payment infrastructure for businesses, early in the year. We had some good numbers, before taking some time to rebuild and restructure.

Clover; a management tool for DAOs, was a project my friend (Joel) and I built in a hackathon which also got us invited to Filecoin's mainnet builders cohort.

Clover has since gone through various changes over the year, and would still undergo a couple of changes, before getting to a good point in the journey.

Although these projects faced challenges, they provided invaluable learning experiences. My goal for 2024 is to apply these lessons and achieve further growth.

Conclusion

Reflecting on 2023, I recognize the importance of setting realistic goals and embracing my human limitations. With renewed focus and lessons learned, I step into 2024 aiming for 10X growth in all facets of my life.

Lucid.