It’s my last day of writing for the year, so I’m going to try keep this one quick – it was knocked out over three hours, so I hope you can forgive me if it’s a bit clumsier than my usual writing.

For some strange reason, one of the few clear memories I have from growing up in Malaysia is a particular moment when I was seven years old. It was the first day of school for the year, and I was studying at Sekolah Kebangsaan Batu Lanchang, which in English is “Batu Lanchang National School”. When you’re seven years old, being told that you’ve got to wait an hour to see your best friend is an insurmountable obstacle. It feels like forever. The year it would take to go up another grade is, accordingly, so long that it’s not even imaginable.

I recall thinking, probably in simpler language, “I probably won’t make it to eight years old. A year is way too much time for something random to happen. I’ll get hit by a car or something.” To round out this brief moment of uncharacteristic sobriety, is it very likely that my next thought “Blastoise is obviously better Pokemon than Venusaur and Charizard because he has big cannons.”

Now I’m 31 and the years are flying by so fast that I have to desperately seize their trailing collars so that I don’t suddenly find myself seventy without noticing. So, as is becoming tradition, what happened this year?

I.

But hell I’m just a blind man on the plains, I drink my water when it rains, And live by chance among the lightning strikes.

– Burden of Tomorrow, Tallest Man on Earth

For the first time, I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next year.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been right about what’s going to happen next year, but I’ve always thought I had an idea. I thought I was going to be a failing student in Southeast Asia because I hated mathematics, maybe become a journalist, then presumably a corpse with 2.5 children.

If we run the tape back, I ended up in Australia, getting deeply into sabre fencing, and somehow became an extremely un-failed student in psychology and then statistics, before earning a bajillion dollars in software. Then I was locked in an apartment for a year by a global pandemic, somehow became at least a not-totally-unknown writer, threw away the bajillion dollars to the absolutely horror of my very conservative all-doctor family, got into improv theatre, rejected a book deal, and started a software consultancy.

At the start of every year until now, I’ve had some sort of plausible social script for how the year was going to go, and it has never, ever gone that way, but I nonetheless allowed myself a fresh misconception on January 1st. This year, I really have no idea, and I’m not going to bother wasting any time trying to figure it out. Not a clue what’s going to happen next year. Maybe I’ll start a recruiting agency and make a million dollars. Maybe I’ll get to February and run into a crippling illness.

It’s very freeing in a lot of ways, particularly for someone that got into the works of Taleb at a young age. I surf chaos full time now. For example, despite all the marketing work we did, our biggest contract this year happened because I got a message on LinkedIn about a data engineering job, which would normally have been totally unsuitable for a whole company to work on. Except over a year ago, I was asked to get coffee with Mel Kendell and Martin Foster, who allowed me to give a talk at a Meetup where Dan Prager and Martin Chesbrough1, and they both worked with the messenger.

I scarcely bother to plan anymore. I’ll either earn a million dollars or become homeless next year. I don’t know, I don’t care, bring on the lightning strikes.

II. Mortality Salience and Going Beyond Yourself

’…I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.’

– Christopher Hitchens

I’m at the age now where the older people in my life are starting to get sick. Me and my friends find ourselves in hospital lobbies more often – there are emergency flights, sterile hospital waiting rooms, and trying to figure out what it means when a doctor says that someone is “stable”.

Relax, I’m not going to be a downer. I know I don’t have to explain how it goes. And if I do, you’re probably twenty, in which case hoo boy, you have got some experiences headed your way.

What I’m getting at is that I’m coming to terms with is the fact that we’re all running out the clock in one way or another. We know, to some level of precision, how the story goes. The general term for this is mortality salience, i.e, the realization that there’s a hospital bed or worse at the end of the rainbow, and we’ve got to make do with the time we’ve got. Sometimes it can be a little bit confronting, but it clarifies things too.

There’s a story from David Whyte that I absolutely adore2.

We were towards the end of our meal on the Saturday evening, and I was in a kind of reverie. I was realizing that I needed to help my father out. Almost to the ceiling, I spoke out:

“You know, my dad’s in a bit of trouble. I’m thinking of giving him some money.”

John immediately leaned across the table and said, “How much are you thinking of giving him?”

My father was in Yorkshire, in England. “I dunno — one thousand pounds,” thinking I was being very generous.

John looked at me and said, “Go against yourself. Give two.”

I said, “Thank you, John” (laughing). “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”

Then John looked at me again and said, “Go against yourself again. Give four.”

I took a big gulp.

Part of the spirit of our meetings — these philosophical writing meetings, walking meetings — was to push each other. In the spirit of that, I said, “I will,” and we shook hands across the table. John made sure we were committed.

Sure enough, I went away and gave the four thousand to my father, and you could have knocked him down with a feather. I was often giving him money, but in drips and drabs. He was always falling down financial holes and having to climb out again, and I’d have to help him climb out. But this four thousand actually transformed his financial life, because he was able to sort himself out — and he never fell down the hole again.

I said to myself, “Wasn’t that a great thing for a friend to do?” One of the qualities that lies at the heart of friendship is encouraging your friend to be the best part of themselves — to be more generous — and to be a witness to that. John had done that for me, and I thought, “Wasn’t that a marvelous thing for a friend to do?”

It wasn’t nine months later that we were at dinner again. John had obviously forgotten about this conversation, because towards the end of the meal he looked towards the ceiling and said, “You know, I have a good friend in a bit of financial trouble, and I’m thinking of giving him some money.”

I said, “How much are you thinking of giving, John?”

He shook his head. “I dunno — one thousand euros.” He was in Ireland.

I looked at him and said, “Go against yourself, John. Give two.”

John looked back across the table and said, “Jesus, Holy and Saint Mary, Joseph — tonight I’m in this for four.”

I’ve done this a few times this year — that is, quadrupling the money I’ve sent someone that needed it — which may prove to be unwise in 2026 if our revenue dries up, but for now I don’t have any regrets.

III. Making It Alone

I was raised up believing I was somehow unique Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes Unique in each way you’d conceive

And now after some thinking I’d say I’d rather be A functioning cog in some great machinery Serving something beyond me

– Helplnessness Blues, Fleet Foxes

Two years ago, I was adamant that I wanted to “make it alone” when I started a business, largely because I wanted to lay out a blueprint for anyone to succeed, not just people with well-known blogs. This has quickly turned out to be utterly ridiculous. No one makes it alone.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a huge amount of generosity for the past two years, and it would be ridiculous to pretend that isn’t the case, or that it’s even possible to succeed without that being the case. I was briefly tempted to start listing all the people that have helped me out this year, from helping me keep sharp on my software skills, to editing help, to preventing me from making horrible contractual blunders, but I realized that it would take me literal hours even if all I was doing was writing down their names and pasting links to their websites in.

I’m generally pretty good at accepting help, but a big lesson from this year is to lean into it entirely. It’s going to be insufferable. Every other post is going to be banging on your doors demanding help with sales, obscure programming questions, and book recommendations.

IV.

I’ve been holding back a lot of my thoughts on things because I was experiencing the first-world problem of being self-conscious about having too much writing go viral. I’m not going to worry about this next year, and oh boy, have I got thoughts on things.

V. Smite Evil

I don’t like being told that it’s my duty to love my enemies. No, we have to hate our enemies and try to destroy them before they destroy us.

– Christopher Hitchens

Next year, I’m going to try and put my enemies in the dirt.

Earlier this year, we had a very unpleasant run-in with a competing consultancy in Melbourne. They have far more staff than us, but were running years late on their deliverables, were putting small, greenfield clinics on SSIS in 20253, and had a contract that said they owned all the SQL in client systems so the clients could never migrate away.

When it happened, I really wanted to stick the knife in. It was very much everything I’m opposed to in the industry – at best, incompetents, at worse, grifters, taking advantage of medical institutions.

With a bit of distance, I’ve realized that the people there didn’t even know they were doing a bad job. As far as they were concerned, SSIS is state-of-the-art, and the fact that they didn’t have to learn how to code was pure upside, and every project they had ever been on was late so they weren’t being particularly ineffective. Sure, I’ve run into people with actual monstrous views about making money – an executive told me on Christmas Eve that there’s no room for ethics in a business4 – but my enemy is generally not individual people. It’s the ideas and systems that create people with worldviews so comprehensively myopic.

I am probably not going to be able to destroy them by taking all of their business in one swoop – it’s hard to compete with people that will lie for sales, advertently or not. Nor will I be able to have an impact if I do what I’ve been doing this year – paying my team a good wage, with no intention of ever growing. So what is there to do, if I’m not happy just giving myself a ton of money and watching the world slowly erode?

Going into the next year, I want to grow our team until we have enough leverage to make hires, develop our own philosophy of engineering, and lay out a blueprint for how to run an ethical, human-oriented business for other people to follow. There is some size where every business turns evil – even mine would turn evil, if we got large enough to become acquired and our founding team quit – so all I can think of is to lay out the playbook for your peers to kill you during the full moon, when you’re selling Azure consulting and GenAI SEO platforms.

What does that actually mean? I have no idea, we’ll figure it out somehow. All I know right now is that the goal is to make sure that everyone on my team is compensated around their corporate salaries by the end of 2026, that we’re in a position to comfortably support a few good people who need a good place to work by 2027, and that we have enough about the process documented that anyone with a bit of fearlessness can replicate our process.

Then I’m going to stick in the knife and take all their business. I have had it up to here just having to watch Musk-and-Altman-types flounce around, lying and absolutely fucking everything up, and if I need to start obtaining a huge pile of money to engage them in mortal combat on the astral plane, then fine, someone needs to get on this. The theme for next year is generosity and preparation for economic damage.

In any case, I hope you all had a great Christmas, are headed into a great new year, and that you also decide to choose violence in 2026.

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I’ve been talking to Martin for over a year, and I swear to God, he has told me that he’s the “Principal Intern” at Everest Engineering every single time. I have no idea what he does when though my team is literally subcontracted through Everest and I am what passes for our CEO. ↩ 1.

I had to spend ages tracking this down and transcribing it by hand – I think it’s the only full transcription of the story on the internet – so you’d better enjoy it, okay? This is, genuinely, a Christmas present from me to you. I paid a gross amount of money to even access the audio. ↩ 1.

For the non-data-engineers in the audience, all the specialists who read this just visibly winced. ↩ 1.

This is true if you’re incompetent and have no leverage. Sucks to suck. ↩