2025 Wrapped

It’s December 26th, 2025, and I’m taking some time off at my parents’ house to pause and reflect on the year: the lessons learned, the different perspectives and worldviews, and just overall the things I’ve learned.

Overall, it was a great year. A lot of progress was made financially, not so much in terms of my fitness, but the huge improvement is in my mindset, my ego (the software we use to interpret reality), my level of consciousness, etc.

With that said, here is a recap of some of the things I’ve learned and incorporated into myself this year.

We become what we think about most of the time

Our entire reality is shaped by the thoughts in our mind. We are like antennas, always attracting the things that are in concordance with our dominant thought, our frequency: the people we meet, the opportunities we have. We can achieve anything we put our mind to. We just have to believe, align our frequency with the frequency of the thing or person we want to have or become, and take massive action. It’s really that simple, yet most people don’t truly believe in it. The fun fact is that it’s a law, so it works 100% of the time. You can either use it to your advantage, or sit down and let things you don’t want happen to you because you don’t understand how powerful this is.

Money is not scarce

A thing I was very focused on this year was destroying my scarcity mindset around money. Coming from a relatively poor background, I was programmed to believe money is scarce, programmed to think that making 200k FCFA a month is a perfect situation, and programmed to think money is evil. But all of that is wrong. It was just a mindset problem: I was thinking like a poor person, not seeing the abundance this world is made of. Once you start hanging around people who make your yearly salary in a month, you start to realize money is not scarce. Money is abundant; you can have as much of it as you want.

From my current level of consciousness, I understand that making money comes down to two things. First, mindset: like I said, understanding money is not scarce, tuning your frequency to think like a rich person, going to the places rich people go, listening to the music they listen to, doing all the rich-vibe things. Second, value creation. I love this Earl Nightingale quote:

Your reward in life will always be in direct proportion to your contribution, your service.

Earl Nightingale

In other words, if you want to make more money, you need to increase your contribution: provide useful services, start a business, make people’s lives better. Move from someone who just consumes to someone who understands that, as human beings, we are creators and can add positive value to this world. That is what I’m trying to do right now: I’m building an IELTS preparation platform to help people prepare for their IELTS exams. This is my first attempt at creating value. Let’s see how it goes!

Just start, you don’t need more information

I used to think that to do something, I first had to collect a lot of data about it. If I wanted to learn how to build a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) system, for example, I would spend a considerable amount of time reading about RAGs, the different architectures, the best way to build one. I’d take notes, read them, and do anything except actually build the thing. As you can guess, this is not the optimal way of learning. Life is lived in the arena: you only learn by doing, and action produces information.

My current framework for learning is: read only the principles, then build a project and learn everything necessary along the way, then get feedback (what did I do badly? how can I improve?), integrate the feedback, and go for another iteration.

Very few things actually matter

I realized I spend a lot of time thinking and worrying about things that don’t actually matter. It’s better to spend your energy on the 20% of things that give 80% of the results you want than on the 80% that give 20% in return. I decided to delete as many things as possible and keep only the core activities leading to the life I want to live. Right now, the only activities that matter to me are:

• Improving my physique: gym, eating well, etc.
• Improving my finances: building services, making people’s lives better
• Improving my mind: reaching a higher level of consciousness and understanding
• Improving my skills: becoming a better engineer and problem solver

Experimentation is king

You can’t keep delegating your thinking to other people. You can’t blindly consume information without figuring out for yourself what works, what doesn’t, what is true and what is not. The only way to do that is to experiment, study, and come up with your own conclusions, even if they are the complete opposite of what most people think and believe.

Survival shapes who we are

As humans, we don’t only survive on the physical level like animals do; we also survive on the mental level. Our ideas, worldview and ego want to maximize their survival at any cost. We are so attached to them that they have become an important part of who we are, and any rejection of them by someone else feels threatening. If we firmly believe in God and someone tells us God doesn’t exist, we feel threatened. We want to defend the idea at any cost, because it is now part of our identity, and any rejection of it is a threat to our survival.

Get serious with your learning

You have to actually put your head down and do the work, the serious work.

Take a time window of about four hours, with a piece of paper and a pen.

No phone, no music, no distractions.

And just do the work.

Learn to see the big picture, aka going meta

I actually learned this at work. As a junior, when given a task, I wasn’t concerned with understanding the full picture and the full problem we were trying to solve. My only concern was: when do I code? When do I apply machine learning? This resulted in a lot of inefficiency. I spent a lot of time on things that didn’t actually solve the problem, because I couldn’t see how my task was part of a whole, which was itself part of a whole, contained in a bigger whole, and so on.

That’s why going meta is so important. By going meta, you see the full picture and how each part interacts with the others. It forces you to climb levels of abstraction, which forces a better understanding. Even in social interactions, going meta matters: you can step out of a discussion and see yourself and the others, each defending their identity and worldview, not actually trying to get to a point.

Work will consume a lot of your time, and if you don’t pay attention, you’ll end up in a very bad place

If you do just the minimum at work, don’t be surprised or frustrated when people treat you like that minimum version of yourself

Pretty quickly at my job, I realized I wasn’t going to work on machine learning problems all day, and I wasn’t going to meet more experienced machine learning engineers to work on interesting things with and learn from. So I adopted a mentality of doing just the minimum, performing way below my abilities, and just getting paid.

That attitude had side effects. First, if you like being the guy in first place, like I used to, it’s terrible for your ego. Since you’re operating way below your abilities, someone will outwork you, and that creates an inner fight between the ego that wants to prove you’re better and the part of you saying you’re wasting your time, just do the minimum. Second, you lose your manager’s confidence. Your manager slowly loses faith in your ability to get things done and sees you as someone smart who doesn’t want to work hard. Knowing people don’t trust your ability anymore is one of the worst feelings.

So if I have one tip for someone reading this: always try to do your best work.

Some people are very comfortable at work and don’t want any greater challenges, and that’s fine too

Something that really amazes me at my job is how everybody at my company worships it. For me, my job is just my job, and I have other aspects of my life to develop. But for them, it doesn’t seem to be the same thing. These people have completely merged with the company. Their work is everything, especially for the older ones. I don’t feel they realize there is more to life than work, that they could quit and still succeed, that they are totally in control of their lives, that they are the ones bringing the value, not the job. Or maybe I’m just wrong here. Maybe it’s me being young and not really understanding. Maybe I’m just a really bad employee…

Detach yourself from your ideas and core beliefs to understand the other person’s perspective

Don’t embrace any idea, belief, job or religion as your identity. It narrows your vision and filters in only the things in perfect concordance with whatever you’ve adopted. You stop seeing reality, only an interpretation of it through those lenses.

Levels of understanding

When it comes to understanding things, I think there are different layers.

The first layer is when you just acquire the information. You read somewhere, for example, that you become what you think about most of the time. You don’t question it, you somehow like it, and you blindly repeat it, a bit like a child.

The second layer is when you actually understand what is being said. You take the information, put it through a set of logical rules, and see whether you agree with it or not. The difference between the first and second layer is questioning: you don’t blindly accept things, and you don’t blindly reject them either.

The third layer is direct feedback from your own experience, when you can actually relate to what the information is telling you. You don’t just question it like in the second layer; you use it, run experiments, see how it works, where it applies and where it doesn’t. This way you truly understand the thing and see its impact on yourself.

Thanks for reading,

Clinton