2024 Year in Review

Read my 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 annual reviews.

I come as one but I stand as ten thousand.

2024 was quite the year, here are a few of my main takeaways:

When someone enters your life, lean into the things that make you who you are, not away from them

At the start of the year, I fell in love with a girl. Hours felt like minutes when I was with her and I’d spend much of my waking hours thinking about her.

During this time, I began to drift away from my writing and communities that brought me joy and fulfillment. These were the very things that gave me my gravity.

It didn’t end up working out between us. One of the most important lessons I’ve taken from that experience is this: when someone enters your life, it’s crucial to lean into the things that make you who you are, rather than lean away from them.

A helpful analogy is to think of a table. Your interests, relationships, and communities represents a leg supporting the table. If you put everything into one person, then you have a one-legged table. If there’s a fight in the relationship or if they leave, then the table collapses. But when you have multiple legs supporting the table, the table remains stable whether or not that person leaves. Having multiple legs supporting the table allows you to be more resilient and it also allows you to securely love someone else because your stability isn’t dependent on them.

The insight That led to Riveting: Beginners find novelty in newness, Masters find novelty in nuance

One of the biggest conflicts in my creative life has been whether to niche down or not. Every playbook on how to grow an audience says that you need to focus on a niche to grow. My beef with this idea is that having a niche feels unnatural. We’re complex, multifaceted beings with a variety of interests. Why limit yourself to a niche?

I’ve seen it happen time and time again. A creator niching down and feeling stuck because they pigeonholed themselves. They become a victim of their own success.

But now I understand that I needed a mental reframing. I wrote a post the other day on newness vs nuance that has been living in my head rent-free. Beginners find novelty in newness, while masters find novelty in nuance. Writers like Matt Levine, Ryan Holiday, and Arnold Schwarzenegger have daily newsletters they’ve been writing for years about one topic. Matt Levine writes about finance, Ryan Holiday about stoicism, and Arnold Schwarzenegger about health and fitness. Especially if you’re genuinely curious about the topic, you can go infinitely deep into it and not run out of ideas to discuss. That’s how you focus on a niche in an authentic way.

Do it in your own unique way

“Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” - Miles Davis

One of my main goals this year was to grow the Olive Tree Writing Club. We had ambitious plans and a clear strategy for making our mark in New York.

Earlier in the year, we decided to take things more seriously. But as the community became more “serious,” what had started as a fun side project turned into a source of stress and anxiety.

I couldn’t help but compare myself to others who run their own communities. One friend runs a creative community that expanded to multiple cities. Another runs a book club that started much later than ours but has already grown larger in just a few months. I kept thinking, I want what they have, but I can’t do what they’re doing.

A friend reminded me of something that shifted my perspective: You have your own unique way of doing things that only you can do. Focus on that instead of comparing yourself to others.

I realized I had been chasing growth on someone else’s terms.

So, we made a change. We stopped taking things so seriously and started having fun with it again. We got the community more involved, and instead of asking, How can we grow this as big as possible? we asked, How can we make this something that truly reflects us?

Whether it’s organizing a community, writing, or defining your personal style, the lesson is the same: comparing yourself to others is a losing game. Instead, I’m focusing on doing things in a way that’s true to me.

Here are a few highlights from 2024:

• I launched Riveting, my new menswear newsletter. 👖
• Slow growing the Olive Tree Writing Club. 🫒🌳✍️♣️
• I’m a Growth Product Manager at work. 🌱
• I hosted my first ever birthday party! Sometimes you’ve got to be the main character. 🎂
• Visited Europe, San Diego, and Chicago. I had the best meal of my life in Athens. 🇬🇷
• My style improved A LOT. 🤵‍♂️
• Starting to become more photogenic and did a photoshoot for the first time. 📷
• NYC feels like home now 🗽

Next year’s focus is on Growth:

• Grow Riveting’s audience.
• Write the first draft of How to Improve Your Style.
• Keep slow growing the OTWC.
• Become an expert on Product Led Growth.
• Keep experimenting with my personal style—try new hairstyles, tattoos, explore city boy style.