2024 was a year of optimism blocked by fear and vanity and a year teaching me the truth behind Frank Herbert's words: Fear is a mind-killer.
Alongside age and responsibilities, I found a fear that youth never revealed. A fear of losing, not being able to do what I thought was easy, and a deeper self-doubt. Privilege and freedom in time expenditure is an open-ended hourglass with sand sifting through, eventually bottoming out. When empty, something will happen. The options are "a 9 to 5" or forcing another, likely much harder path. Regardless, the softer path is gone.
Through 2024, the eraser closed in on the softer path ahead, with me battling vanity. I've built several things yet haven't shipped anything, fearing it might not work. Here's what 2024 looked like
- Built a verbal coach app real-time tracking how fast I speak, my use of verbal clutter (Like, just, you know, profanity etc.), engagement & verbal coherence on video calls, helping me become a better communicator.
- Built a Fitness Lockout app (accountability software), locking your laptop until you've worked out for the day. Workout or pay $$. Simple.
- Danish Salary Database creating salary transparency across jobs, sectors and industries.
- Children Book Generation mobile apps with Art & Narration where kids and parents together choose among characters & adventures. Tales right at the finger tips.
- OS Integrated rewrite assistant allowing me to select text and use AI to rewrite it in various use cases like writing emails, in-app copy, texts for my friends etc. The tone and voice is different across the use cases and the app understands it all.
- Explored building tooling for Sales & BRD, only to see SFDC release close to something I envisioned. Also, the EU AI act would have forced this to be a non-EU business.
- Consider and turned down a co-founder exploration based out of NYC; not financially viable for us to co-found out of NYC as a family of 4. Thankfully this gave us a family a clearer perspective on the ideal lifestyle for the future.
Not a boring year. Only issue is; I didn't ship of the 5 shippable things to the public. Why, fearing it might not work and my self-image would erode. Counter productive? Yes. Silly? Yes. Will I do something about it? YES!
2025 is the year where I'll ship all 4 to the public and then some! That's my pledge for 2025.