25 Ideas that Shaped my 2025 (Part 1): Living a Full Life

I want you to imagine that tomorrow, you step outside. It’s a day like any other day. Then a car swerves erratically and you’re killed instantly. Is the life that you have lived to this point, one that you would be happy to claim as your own?

Historically, I’ve struggled mightily accepting the life that I have lived. Not because It wasn’t filled with wonder, amazing moments, and people. But because my internal dialogue was intensely negative and I had not built a healthy mental frame to see life through. In the first of the four part series on ideas that shaped my 2025, we’re going to explore the ideas related to living a full life that I acquired or reinforced throughout 2025.

Some people play the game of life where they marry their high school sweetheart and have a family by 25 and work a steady job to provide. Others focus heavily on their career and are comfortable taking bigger risks. There are also people who are so committed to a dogmatic belief that they’ll dedicate the entirety of their lives to furthering that body of work. Jesse Itzler refers to these three types of life as: Fun Normal, Fun Striver, and Global Greatness. First, notice how the first two incorporate the word “fun”. Many of us will choose a corporate job over decades as the game we choose to play. If you’ve chosen that game, then you shouldn’t feel like you failed at creating the next iPhone. When you were never even competing in that arena.

This idea piggy backs off the first idea. We all want to be rich, ripped, and adored. Some of us actually get to have all three. That does not mean all of us should have all three. If you’re not someone who can consistently track calories to remain in a deficit, work out nearly every day, endlessly promote yourself online, and grind harder than over 97% of the population for YEARS. Then don’t say you want what those people have. If they reached those means in ways inaccessible to you. (e.g. they inherited generational wealth.) Then build generational wealth for your child(ren). But don’t kid yourself into thinking that their body, money, and attention are worth working towards if you’re not going to be as in love with the process as you are the outcomes.

From Shaan Puri on “My First Million”; one of my favorite podcasts. Shaan sold his first company and has moved onto second mountain quests. Whether it’s playing the piano, writing books, or spending time with his kids; Shaan’s life quests clearly deviate from accumulating wealth. I regularly think about what the number would be before I could say that I have earned the last dollar I will spend. Can I successfully combat lifestyle creep? How will I develop financially sustainable habits? What are the things I truly value vs what I can be ruthlessly shrewd about? I want a life where I’m always present for my future children. In that life, I don’t need to trade good hours for bad dollars.

I started working with a new therapist this year. Part of my rationale is that I wanted to work with a man. Nothing against my previous therapist. I will still likely meet with her on occasion. But I really needed to talk to someone who lived the experiences I’m talking about first hand. In our first two sessions, I needed to define intimacy and masculinity. Two homework assignments that really made me take a step back and try to understand some of the more powerful lenses by which I see the world through. In my definition of masculinity was the summarizing line: masculinity is intentional action aligned with my values. With the closing paragraph saying: masculinity is earned through action and lost through inaction. Time to go to work.

Your life is made up of a series of ordinary Tuesdays. Figure out what your ideal normal Tuesday looks like. Because if you can have an amazing Tuesday, you’ll probably have an amazing life.

My ideal Tuesday looks like: a not overly stressful day of work, a delicious meal, surrounded by friends, and great dialogue.

My future ideal Tuesday will involve everything in the line above but swap friends with family and three other items dubbed “The Nine Most Important Minutes of the Day” by Jaak Panksepp, PhD. These nine minutes are: When your kids wake up, when they come home from school, and when they go to bed.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals really left an impression on me. I would highly recommend people give it a read or at minimum find a high quality summary of the book. There is not a day that I don’t wake up thinking about my own mortality. For some, thinking of death is debilitating. They fear dying prematurely. But for others, the fact that we all reach the same end destination in life is liberating. I fall into the latter camp. From now until my final breath, whether it’s from natural or unnatural causes. Nobody should sit at my funeral saying that I died prematurely. What they all should be saying, is that with whatever time I was allotted, I lived a full life.

The 2025 Ideas that Shaped my 2025 is broken into four parts:

Most of the other parts are already completed. So be on the lookout for them!

All ideas and opinions in these newsletters are expressly my own. If I use AI in my writing process, I will disclose it. This post was written entirely without the use of AI.