Quick Takes: Things I Changed My Mind About in 2025

I spent the first half of 2025 being wrong about things I was confidently right about at the end of 2024. And I think that’s worth saying out loud.

I was wrong about “focus depth” being a lifestyle choice. I wrote about deep work like it was a decision you could make, a switch you could flip. The reality is messier. Some jobs have structural noise baked in — meetings, asynchronous interrupts, organizational chaos — that no amount of personal discipline fixes. I’ve spent the last few months helping people understand that focus depth requires systems and protection, not just willpower. If your environment doesn’t support it, you’re fighting gravity. I used to blame the person. I was wrong about that.

I was wrong about most people needing a bigger goal. I sold the narrative that scaling, growth, and ambition were the antidotes to feeling stuck. This year, I watched smart people hit walls not because they lacked ambition but because they were already doing enough. The real move wasn’t bigger goals — it was choosing which goals to stop pursuing. I got this backwards when I wrote about traditional goal-setting frameworks. The framework wasn’t the problem. The urge to do more was the problem.

I was wrong about the risks of “just shipping it.” I used to push back hard on that advice — and I still do, for most contexts — but I underestimated how many people are stuck in permanent refinement mode. There’s a real failure mode that looks like “I’m improving” but is actually fear dressed up as iteration. I can still be right about bad advice and also wrong about how often people fall into the opposite ditch.

I was wrong about consistency being the primary skill. This one stung. I treated consistency like a moral virtue, like showing up was 80% of the outcome. It is important. But I watched consistent people spin their wheels on the wrong problems, and inconsistent people make real moves because they thought about direction first. You need both — but I definitely had the hierarchy backwards.

I was wrong about vulnerability in public space. I treated this writing practice as self-care, like I was being generous by sharing my struggles. This year, I realized I was sometimes performing vulnerability instead of just being it. The distinction matters. Real honesty doesn’t ask for applause. I’ve been doing both, and I only recently saw the difference.

Here’s what didn’t change: the conviction that direct truth matters more than comfortable positions. But intellectual honesty means being willing to revise, which I clearly wasn’t doing enough of. The contradictions I’m sitting with right now — that focus depth is both a systems problem and a personal choice, that goals can be too big and too small depending on the person — that’s not weakness. That’s reality.

If you build something real enough to test against the world, you’ll be wrong about something it reveals. The only question is whether you admit it or double down.

If you’ve been building something and need to recalibrate, that’s not failure. And if you’re sitting with failure from decisions you made earlier, changing your mind is how you move forward.