Against the Herd

Given my inclination to overplanning, most won’t be surprised that I spend my Decembers evaluating and learning from the current year while, more importantly, contemplating and planning the following year.

But, it feels different this time; the 2024 to 2025 transition feels more significant, even monumental, to me…and, after some contemplation, I understand why.

If I think of my life as consisting of four books each covering a roughly 25-year period (if I’m so fortunate to make it that long), I begin to appreciate the significance of my current life stage.

Here’s how I think about these books, each with its own unique chapters that occur in different places with a broad range of characters that are part of my journey.

Book 1 (ages 0 to ~25): Becoming

This book started out in Cairo, Egypt; explored France and England during my childhood; and culminated in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA for my adolescence and early adulthood.

It was about exploring who I was, what I was good at, what I liked to do, and how to get better. It was about becoming an adult who’d hopefully give more to society than he’d take from it.

This was such a difficult book: it involved a great deal of insecurity and anxiety, loads of hard work, incredible amounts of rejection and setbacks, and a focused determination on education as the most valuable tool available to me to achieve my potential.

Book 2 (ages ~26 to ~51): Adulting

This book saw me transitioning from Salt Lake City to Park City, Utah, and beginning to figure out how to become an adult. To me, that included marrying my life partner, building a family together, and transitioning from a focus on education to one of professional and career growth.

I’m not sure I can objectively say if this second book was even more trying than the first or not, but let’s just say it had incredible ups and downs. I do think I can say that it was more fulfilling than the first book because it involved more self-actualization and more exploration. While the first book was more prescriptive (e.g., I had fewer personal choices in that book), this second one felt like it was mine to author.

2024 was a special year because it marked the last pages of Book 2: our children are now adults, I departed from the company I founded nearly a decade ago, and I closed out the “traditional career” chapters of my life. It’s been an incredibly meaningful year that marks a monumental transition in my life.

Book 3 (ages ~52 to ~75): Fulfillment

2025 will mark the first pages of the first chapter of Book 3, a book that will be more about prioritizing fulfillment through family, community, and impact. In the first two books, fulfillment had to take a back seat to discomfort, hard work, and sacrifice. In this book, I will try to construct a life that prioritizes not just my own fulfillment, but the fulfillment of those who’ve sacrificed for me over the last 50+ years.

So that makes 2025 a very special year…

2025: the MVP for the Third Book

By MVP, I don’t mean “most valuable player”; instead, I mean “minimum viable product“. My goal for 2025 is to construct the MVP for the next quarter century: what will my days and weeks look like, where will I spend them, with whom will I spend them, and what will I do with my time to optimize for fulfillment?

I hope you won’t laugh too hard when you learn I have constructed a special calendar called “Bassam’s prototype week” that identifies timeframes for the activities I need to make sure are prioritized: time for family, friends, community, working out, alone time, writing, sleeping, and so on.

To build the MVP in 2025, my plan is to iterate and refine that prototype week as I do my best to live it; over the next 12 months, I hope to create a template for what the perfect week looks like. I appreciate how structured this might seem to most but, for some reason, structure still provides me comfort even at this age.

Book 4 (ages ~76 to …): Legacy

I won’t describe this book in detail yet but it’ll focus on legacy: like all of us, I aspire to know that my life mattered, that it made a difference to others, and that I can relay all I’ve learned to the next generations so they don’t have to make the mistakes I did.