New Year’s Realizations

You know those promises you make yourself on January 1st each year, only to break them within the next 24hr? Seems like it’s more than pointless to make them. New Year’s resolutions — or broad life goals over any timeframe — might be good, but to me, they only seem a setup for failure.

But what’s life if not a constant learning experience? Through the unexpected and perhaps mundane aspects of life — those same things that keep us all from fulfilling New Year’s resolutions — we’re all growing, learning, changing, and hopefully getting a bit wiser.

2013 was a rather big year for me. It was my first year of married life, complete with all the great things that brings like signing my first home lease and walking through IKEA for days and taking an incredible 2nd honeymoon this winter. It was also the year that I [launched] and [killed a Newsstand magazine], started working on Mutahhir Ali Hayat on [Let.ter] as the first app I’ve had a hand in bringing to market, and worked my 3rd and [final year] as editor at AppStorm. It’s been one of the very happiest, most exciting, and challenging years yet, and I can only wish coming years will prove it to only be a start.

But what have I learned from it? Hopefully a little at least. Here’s the realizations I came to as I pondered this past year over the last few weeks of holidays and vacation:

You’ll Never Know the Full Story, but the Full Story is Out There.

The Snowden revelations about the NSA were honestly not as shocking to me as perhaps they should have been, since somehow it almost seems self-apparent that people — both nefarious and “good” (hi, Google) — are recording every page online, every place we willfully checkin, every photo and update we publicly share, and so much more. Perhaps reading [Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938] in college and more recently [Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield] made me assume, despite my horror, that there’s so much more going on behind the scenes than many want to think.

And then, I read the surprisingly interesting new book Hatching Twitter on my holiday break. It revealed no nefarious use of private data — indeed, it focused rather on Twitter’s efforts to protect users’ privacy from government agents, despite the fact that Twitter is the most public of all social networks which makes such privacy vanishingly helpful. What it did reveal, though, was the inside struggles of the founders of the social network that’s changed the way we all look at the world, 140 characters at a time. Jack, Ev, Biz, and Noah’s stories and paths to building Twitter came to life in a way that, thanks to media appearances, one could assume was only about Jack, the guy who also made Square.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising the government has hidden power struggles that we can only hope aren’t as brutal as House of Cards portrays, when the startups that are the bread and butter of our industry — and that convinced the rest of us to share everything about our lives in public — have their own private dramas that manage to stay out of the public eye. And yet, all the data’s still there for the taking if only one will put it together and find out the full story. That’s why I can’t find the NSA so shocking, even while I’m still revolted that they’re possibly monitoring this post as it’s written and synced to Dropbox even before I’ve put it in public.

We all didn’t put the Twitter story together even though bits and pieces of it were out there. But you can bet someone did. That potential to piece together “hidden” stuff from bits and pieces of semi-public data is why I can’t imagine the NSA will truly ever cease to exist — and why, on the other hand, we should almost assume there’s other governments and private companies and basement hackers collaborating very similar data sets for myriad reasons, good and bad.

And yet, even still, the next time you hear the news or read a company blog post, go ahead and assume you don’t know the full story. You quite possibly might be able to piece together a fuller picture from any number of data you could piece together, but you can almost guarantee a single report on a revolution or war or company pivot is really the full story.

Profit is Far More Challenging than Just a Great Idea

After starting and subsequently shutting down a magazine project of my own, and then having my employer shut down the site I’ve worked at for three years, it’d seem that this is the lesson most obvious to me from 2013. It’s easy to come by an idea these days, and even easier to launch the first vestiges of a business and product on the internet. It’s far, far harder to turn those ideas and ventures into profitable businesses.

And it makes me fear for the many, many brilliant, tiny apps out there — some can turn into a tiny business, sure, even one that’s moderately profitable, but paying back millions of venture money? Somehow I can’t imagine every startup we know and love will ever be able to.

Forums are Amazing. And Awful.

There’s a black-and-white picture that’s circulated the ‘net the past couple of months of men with their faces covered with a newspaper on a train in the late 1800’s. It’s typically used to poke fun at the idea that smartphones have made us less social. Point proven.

And yet, all is not well. Perhaps the newspapers those guys were reading were filled with yellow journalism and tabloidic headlines. And the stuff that fills the screens of our devices so often is of equally low or lesser value. That’s especially true when you spend any amount of time on forums, such as Reddit and the more sophisticated Hacker News.

I’ve read plenty of great, thought provoking and helpful article and full books this year, once that reminded me all over again why I love reading so much. And yet, for every one of those, I’ve also read through dozens of NSA rants and comments about startups and hilarious discussions about cat pictures and insane Buzzfeed (or, gasp, Business Insider) photo roundups. I’ve gained some from reading Hacker News (Reddit, not so much), but it still is an addictive time waster.

So here’s a realization that’s turning into a resolution: I want to read more quality posts and especially full books this year, and purpose to skip the junk food diet of the internet. And if I need a bit of diversion or entertainment, I’d rather follow Rands advice and [build stuff]. Because I agree: the feeling of making something is far, far better than the bloated-junk-food feeling of reading comment replies for an hour.

People are Awesome.

Regardless of how cynical the news may make you, people are still amazing. They’ll hurt you and frustrate you, sure, but they’ll also amaze you and make your life better. For every person out there that hurts you, there’s plenty more ready to help you get back out there and be stronger than before. For everyone that uses you, there’s tons more that are ready to do stuff for you for no good reason, things that’ll make you humble and wanting to go make the world a better place yourself all over again. And the more time you spend with people — and away from screens — the better. Which is why I should close this piece.

*****

So there, some major takeaways from 2013. Now, onwards and forwards to learning what 2014’s here to teach me.

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.