| Sunday, 28 December 2025 |
A community-powered Sunday newsletter on mental models, self-reflection, learning, growth, photos, books, and more Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Good morning, and welcome to the last time we’ll speak in 2025. It has been a “full” year for me. In that it has been satisfying, demanding, rewarding, and frustrating in equal measure.
The First Principles newsletter has, in so many ways, been my stable anchor through it all. Committing to write every week for such a large, diverse, and discerning set of readers such as you will do that. “Defragmenting” is the analogy that comes closest, and one that I’ve used earlier.
Defragmenting used to be a periodic task we performed manually on our Windows PCs, allowing the operating system to rearrange scattered files and bytes stored on the hard drive in a way that they become more contiguous and easier to access. These days, it’s mostly an automatic, background process.
Writing the First Principles newsletter each Saturday is my way of defragmenting a week’s worth of thoughts, ideas, and work—both conscious and unconscious—so I can emerge clearer-headed by Sunday.
It’s hard for me to see these patterns play out during the weeks and months, because proximity often inhibits our sense of perspective. But now that we’re at the end of the year, was there some grand pattern or undulating wave that shaped what I wrote?
Now that I’m—we’re—in the calm, reflective, and unhurried last week of December, I think some patterns are starting to become clearer.
I started the year with a decided emphasis on careers.
January kicked off with Edition #78, which explored the end of 40-year careers and questioned traditional career trajectories. I followed this up with editions on careers as “lattices rather than ladders”, whether professionals should be willing to take pay cuts for meaningful work, and ended with a piece on the importance of “working in public”.
February continued this thread with “Changing your mind and enjoying it too,” arguing that consistency is overrated across careers. The month also introduced writing as a decision-making tool, something that would repeat throughout the year.
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