It’s been a challenging year.

A year that caused lots of misery and the long term implications are still going to be discovered in the future. Nevertheless, I’m trying to focus on the hope we see just around the corner.

As for books and running/biking and swimming, it was all ‘virtual’ events. The Ironman race I was registered to do at Santa Rosa was first ‘pushed’ to ‘later this year’ and a after few months it was canceled.

As we learned during this year, it’s best to have patience (and endurance). Looking backward, there were quite a lot of new events that we managed to do. Both Strava and Zwift saw their platform taking an uplift. The new (or old) way to do a group ride: Zwift and Discord is quite cool. It won’t replace the real thing, but with the ‘new norm’, it’s quite a nice option.

Virtual Races

This year moved ‘everything’ into ‘virtual’. Sports events are just one example.

Since all the official races were canceled I did some virtual ones.

In total: 25 Ironman (virtual) events.

Some were 70.3 distance, some Olympic and some Sprint distance. It was a very unique experience. The good news is that I have got personal results that will give me a solid incentive to try and replicate them in a real race. Hopefully soon.

…and the biggest climb of 2020:

Maybe, next year we will go for the full Everesting challenge.

Books

I read quite a lot of good books this year. The one that I plan to read again (soon) is:

It’s a great example of a story that gives you many good ideas and points to think about.

It’s not a book about poker it’s a book about the relationship between luck and skill in life.

It makes the reader ‘better’ in the sense that it gives us a way to think more like Maria (without doing a PhD at Harvard).

Some ideas that I liked:

“People failed to see what the world was telling them when that message wasn’t one they wanted to hear. They liked being the rulers of their environment. When the environment knew more than they did—well, that was no good at all. Here was the cruel truth: we humans too often think ourselves in firm control when we are playing by the rules of chance” – In investing we see these cases very often.

“The benefit of failure is an objectivity that success simply can’t offer” – In startups, we see it over and over again. A founder that had the experience of a failed startup learned much more than a ‘lucky’ one who made it on the ‘first-round’.

“The more you learn, that harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are” – This is true (vividly) in sports but it’s also valid in any area in life. In design/programming/gaming you get to learn it fast when you improving your skills. However, this “improvement function” is not liner but rather logarithmic: it’s start with rapid growth (=in skill) but as you get better it’s becoming harder (=slower) to keep improving.

I wish you “Less certainty, more inquiry” moving forward.

Happy 2021!