Lessons from 2024
Seven reflections from an interesting year
Happy New Year! I promise this will be much more uplifting than Lessons from 2022 & 2023, so let’s get started!
The List
1) The best thing to do is to let people be themselves. This will also help you decide who you want to spend your time with.
2) Skills diminish without training, but you also need to decide what "good enough" means.
3) Trying to be humble in life while writing resumes for job applications is an exercise in cognitive dissonance.
4) Trust but verify. Most people don't change because change is hard.
5) Beware of novelty-seeking behavior.
6) Time is always more consistent than we are. Planning for optimal performance and adding, instead of replacing time, leads to failure.
7) Gratitude is hindsight bias, but it's useful if it can help with future optimization.
Let People Be Themselves
I don't travel much anymore, but at the beginning of the year, I went to Asia for a wedding with my wife and her friends, visiting Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. Ironically, we were there during the Malaysia Open, and though we didn't watch the tournament, we saw stray athletes in popular areas in Kuala Lumpur. We even ate at a restaurant the same time as the Canadian players! What a coincidence!
We weren't together for the entire time as a group, but some parts of the trip included travel together, and other parts where we would meet up for activities. This balance worked well, as it allowed for people to have enough time to do their own thing.
You really get to learn more about people when you travel with them, because you often see how people are in unfamiliar environments. You see how they treat other people, and sometimes what makes them tick. Trying to make group decisions is always a pain, no matter where you are, because you are trying to optimize for everyone. If I learned anything from linear programming, sometimes your answer will have no solution.
Let’s use finding a place to eat as an example. Relaxing constraints will help with optimization, and if I were to remove my preference of where to eat, it would make decision making easier for the group. However, I have made a substitution: eating together as a group is more important than eating something I like. We often make these substitutions without noticing. Although some people want to compromise because they don't like conflict, this doesn’t apply for our example because you can't argue rationally about what to eat on vacation, because rules get thrown out the window. Choose your battles.
This can be similar in on-court coaching situations in a tournament. Especially in doubles, juggling your opinion, your partner's opinion, and your coach's opinion can be difficult. The stakes are significant and you can't just opt out in these situations. However, sometimes it's best to let people be themselves. Your partner will be your partner. Your coach will be your coach. We can't control what other people do, which gives truth to the adage:
You can't change other people. You can only change yourself.
Isn't this the dichotomy of control? Control your own choices and how you respond to situations out of your control. There were some instances where I defaulted to the group, but there were other times where I took a stance and declined. There wasn't anything wrong with the group breaking off and meeting up later, and by taking action, it allowed for others to do the same. We did what we could together, but we also found time to do the things we wanted. Sometimes we shared food. Sometimes we didn't.
Now imagine if people blindly accepted something, only to complain about it later. For example, some people say things like, "read the room", "should have known", or other mind-reading techniques. Are we playing charades? Worse, there are those that make silent assumptions, make an expensive decision, and force the group to split the cost.
Let people be people, but not everyone is worth spending time with. Choose wisely.
Skills Slowly Get Killed
Without training, skills get worse over time. Training doesn't necessarily improve skills either. Sometimes you can only maintain your ability, or slow down decline. I experienced this in 2024 with the steady decline of my badminton. Fitness, strength, technique, and shot quality have diminished without consistent training. I've done pretty well because many of my skills are still automatic, but automatic doesn't necessarily mean improvement.
Driving, whether in badminton or with a vehicle, is difficult when you learn, but over time and practice, they become largely automated. In badminton, drives (hard, flat shots) will be automatic based on the level you play at, and driving a car becomes easier because you need less attention to do the same things. Where improvement happens is what you do with the extra cognitive freedom because your skill has been automated. In badminton, this might allow you to make small tactical adjustments, such as changing pace or direction of the shot in a drive rally. In driving a car, we can use that extra cognitive freedom to make better decisions when driving, but we tend to do things that distract our driving. The key difference between driving in badminton and driving a car is the consequence of a mistake.
Just because it's automatic doesn't mean it's better. It means you're doing it a certain way out of habit. In badminton, automatically driving is a terrible strategy against opponents with stronger drives. In driving a car, you may pick up bad habits from many years of driving. Jordan Baker in the The Great Gatsby suggested, “It takes two to make an accident,” to illustrate that carelessness is a joint probability. But if more people become careless, the probability compounds, making accidents more likely.
As for my badminton skills, I have to decide how much training I need to maintain a certain level of performance. My first goal is not to get injured, and adapting my style of play to fit my current abilities is the priority. It may hurt my performance at tournaments, but if I really wanted to win, more training is required. For now, I'm glad to play and get as far as I can without getting hurt. That’s the trade-off.
If you want to be the best, you need to constantly improve yourself. Automaticity doesn't mean improvement necessarily, but allows for more room to improve as you can build on top of the automatic skills and take them to another level.
The Cognitive Dissonance of Self-Promotion
It's good to be humble. We can be better. We can do more. However, to be humble when writing a resume in today's job market is... conflicting. Thank goodness I'm already married. I can't imagine online dating.
Question: if most people are cheating, are you at a disadvantage if you don't cheat?
It depends, of course. I am not my profile picture. I am not my resume either. Understandably, it's the same on the other side. Employers have to look for the best employee, and in a game where everyone is allegedly cheating, non-cheaters are the least likely to succeed. That's what it feels like. But I know I could be wrong.
My humility told me so.
Regardless of what you want to do, keep building different skills and improving yourself. Hopefully each resume revision is an improved version of you. Whether someone hires you or not isn't in your control, but being better than before is. For those struggling, don't give up!
Trust Me Bro
This one is interesting because it’s situational. Communication can be powerful—sometimes for good, but other times to deceive. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. The adage applies to scams and some people, many who pull off scams! When it comes to assessing character, the easiest patterns to detect are found in people with a history of deceit. But does a history of cheating guarantee someone will continue to cheat? Not necessarily. Evaluating behavior requires context, patterns, and probabilities rather than fixed labels.
This is similar to how binary classification works in machine learning algorithms. In this case, we classify someone as a 'cheater' or 'non-cheater.' A history of cheating might weigh heavily in the decision, but other features contribute to the prediction like current actions or patterns of behavior. Machine learning models use these inputs to calculate probabilities, and predictions depend on thresholds (such as 50% in our case). But just like with people, these models only deliver estimates based on patterns.
Instead of obsessing over these people, we can focus our time on those who demonstrate trustworthiness and integrity. After all, whether in life or in machine learning, improving outcomes often depends on choosing better inputs. Choose wisely and beware of those who only talk the talk. Understand what metrics are used to measure success, and if you cannot get that information, be weary. Call people's bluff and verify their claims. Be careful of who to trust, especially with those that can transfer their risk to you. Don't take responsibility for someone else's mistake.
But take responsibility for your own. Mistakes are inevitable, as are stupid people. There are arrogant people that will blame you for your mistakes, even after admitting that they made one too. Avoid these type of people at all cost because there is no upside. In badminton, mistakes happen, but nobody intends to make a mistake. Even the most improbable shots have an intention of success. Taking accountability for your mistakes is a great way to improve. It means you know you can be better, and you can train to improve your likelihood of success.
Beware of Novelty
At the root of it, it's probably anticipation and the release of dopamine. My neuroscience is rusty so I could be wrong, but that's my best guess. Regardless of the science, novelty-seeking behavior tends to lead to more of the same behavior in a positive feedback loop (reminiscing Grade 12 Biology). Things tend to escalate over time, and sometimes this can be problematic if it turns into a full-blown addiction. However, this isn't my area of expertise, and if you think you have a problem, please find a professional instead of taking random advice from a badminton player.
It seems like many of the most addictive things remove barriers for engagement, as greater difficulty would allow for a chance to break out of the cycle. For example, breaking away from scrolling on social media can be a struggle at times, myself included. Due to infinite scrolling, it's easy to just tell yourself, "just one more", and then repeat indefinitely. Gacha games operate on a similar principle, and that also includes things like Pokemon cards and collectibles. A 1-in-45 chance for a collectible chaser for $20/toy would cost an average of $900.
However, I'm not telling you what to do, because we value different things. Perhaps badminton is a novelty for me, because every game is a bit different. Every tournament presents different challenges, and the chance to win is worth the entry fee to participate.
The irony is that there are those who produce products and services that exploit novelty to sell to others, while trying to abstain themselves from participating. It's like a drug-dealer trying not to take their own drugs. This is more of an ethical dilemma. Imagine if you could make the best tasting chocolates in the world. Because they are so good, some people binge eat them to an unhealthy amount.
What do you do?
For more insights, a good read about this is Stolen Focus by Johann Hari.
I Just Need Time
Time is more consistent than we are. No matter how much we optimize, we will never be perfect. Planning is often skewed for optimal performance, not reality. Things take longer than we expect because we add things without necessarily understanding what we need to replace them with. For example, committing to read 30 minutes every day requires substituting 30 minutes of something else!
What are things you regret spending time on? This year, I regret spending excessive time on TV, video games, and scrolling on YouTube and social media. I didn't regret reading books, learning courses, doing projects, exercising, and spending quality time with people.
The lists are obvious, but there's hindsight bias. How do I know what's good or bad until I do them? Do I regret watching Squid Game 2? No, because I watched with my wife and she enjoyed the series too. Might this change later? Of course. If we had to choose between spending 7 hours of time on TV, or to learn something new, most would say that it's better to spend time learning. However, few of us (including myself) would take the hard route. It's easiest when we don't start something new, but we'd be stuck in the explore versus exploit dilemma again. To be fair, there were some great shows, video games, and social media content that I don’t regret consuming. However, how much time is spent to find what we want? That’s the curse of novelty.
Remember, we value different things, and that's 100% okay. Understand that the time versus resource trade-off will change depending on where you are in life. The choices I make now are very different from when I was an aspiring athlete. All I needed to do was train and compete, and although I reminisce on that simplicity, it wasn't easy being an international Canadian badminton player. Things are different today, and we have our own challenges to work through.
The general lesson is that time goes on for all of us, and if we can do more of what gives us value and meaning and less of what doesn't, that's an optimal strategy. Additionally, things that are constantly neglected on our "to do" lists are never going to be done. We will never get more time; we have to make time.
The Attitude of Gratitude
Be grateful for the good things. This isn't to replace bad things, or to always find the silver lining. Rather, they can be separated. Good and bad things will happen to us, and if they're normally distributed, things tend to go back to the average. This concept is called “regression to the mean” and applies for both the good and the bad.
When we experience rare events, positive or negative, why is it that the bad ones hurt more? Due to loss aversion, a concept from behavioral economics, we typically feel the pain of losses more intensely than the joy from an equivalent gain. Loss aversion may serve as a defensive mechanism to protect us from trauma. Although there is some research suggesting the body "remembers" trauma, I tend to ignore it because it's not helpful.
I find it more useful to take a teleological approach—one that views behavior as goal-oriented rather than bound by past events. My interpretation of Adlerian psychology suggests that even though bad things happen, we aren’t defined by them. Despite circumstances I cannot control, I can still choose the person I want to be regardless of the outcome.
That's why gratitude helps. It's not meant to balance the bad because bad things have more weight. Gratitude works in hindsight too, and if we are going to use hindsight to our advantage, why not remember the good things? The key is to capture both good and the bad, and try to optimize for new situations in the future. That's how we learn from our experiences. For example, if you get black-out drunk and don’t remember anything, then get less drunk next time! This is obvious, but the not-so-obvious part of it is to reflect on what really gives meaning: creating memories with friends, or consuming large quantities of alcohol. “Correlation is not causation” applies here.
A better example is if you didn't play well in a tournament, make sure you’re more prepared next time. You can still be grateful for the opportunity to compete and the time you spent on court.
Your mileage will vary. I'm not telling you what you need to do, I'm only giving you suggestions what you could do if you find it helpful. That's really what coaching is, and it's no different in badminton. Sometimes we have our own systems in place and they run efficiently. If the strategy is working, there is no need to change, unless you predict something else to change in the future. If you play a winning strategy, at some point, your opponent will need to change. You can continue until they find a counter strategy, OR, you can make a prediction and change when they do, giving you a new winning strategy. It’s like playing rock-paper-scissors.
It's still a guess. What we each choose will depend on what we have and where we are. There isn't really a right or wrong answer, we just have to pick something because time waits for nobody.
Things I'm Grateful For in 2024
In memory of 2024, here’s a random list of things I'm grateful for experiencing:
Traveling to Asia.
Competing in 12(!) badminton tournaments. Thank you partners! 🙏🏼
Video Games: NieR Reincarnation, Stellar Blade, Resident Evil 4 Remake.
Anime: NieR Automata, Blue Box, The Quintessential Quintuplets, DanDaDan.
Started figure collecting (this MIGHT be a future mistake 🤣).
Anime conventions and half-cosplaying (I really just wore an apron).
Graduating with a Master's in Management Analytics.
Completed 3 Professional Certificates, 2 Specializations, and 1 Certification Track including topics in machine learning, data analytics, business intelligence, and dashboarding.
Organized and ran four badminton tournaments.
Launched my Substack and revived my YouTube account.
Trying to play piano songs from NieR and Stellar Blade (do you see a trend here? 😏).
Cooking new recipes including soy sauce chicken, steam garlic shrimp, and lasagna; and learning how to use a barbecue (I've never had to until now)!
Spending time with good people, new and old. There really is no excuse of being an introvert, because with the right people, it doesn’t matter. With good people, it's never a chore and they encourage me to be the best I can be, so I can give back to others, including them. Thank you. 🙏🏼
All the best to everyone in 2025! I don't have New Year's Resolutions because I've already started something else, but that'll be for another time!
Good read Toby.