24 things I learned in 2024 and how I’ll use them in 2025

24 things I learned in 2024 and how I’ll use them in 2025

Our Happiness Enthusiast Amy shares 24 things she learned in 2024 and how she will use them in 2025. From bees to AI to stilton with ginger, there is a lifelong lesson in every one. It goes without saying that we value learning at Boo HQ. It is also our hope that learning will be applied in a way that enhances lives, at work and beyond.

1. Meaningful ways to measure a year.

I began 2024, as many do, by reflecting on the 12 months past and making plans for those ahead. I wrote about this last year, essentially making your own units of measurement depending on what matters to you the most. Inspired by Beth Kempton, here are three questions to try.

• What was the most beautiful ordinary day you had this year?
• When do you feel you really made a difference to someone else’s life this year?
• When did you feel most alive?

If you enjoyed this, there’s more here.

 

2. Task orientation vs time orientation.

I’ve long believed that time is not real yet recognised that I am as bound by it as everyone else, regardless. Our working lives are typically structured around time, often for no compelling reason. In fact, many jobs seem much better suited to task orientation. I’m going to explore this concept and its relationship to wellbeing in greater depth in 2025.

 

3. I don’t have to say the thing.

This has been the slow and steady work of several years – how to coach, how to counsel, how to listen. This year I heard it phrased like this

‘notice when your ego is trying to insert you into a conversation’.

Sometimes we want to tell someone something about ourselves because we think it will make the other person like us, but really people would rather be heard. More and more I will practice telling myself that I will neither give nor receive the most value by talking right now.

 

4. Just three months after retirement a black cabbie’s brain has gone back to normal.

A study of the uniquely developed brains of London Black Cab drivers taught us a lot about neuroplasticity, which gives us hope that you can do anything if you apply yourself enough. However, further studies have revealed that just three months after retirement, these overdeveloped parts of their brains have returned to normal. I found this startling and a bit depressing. All that effort, a lifetime of building expertise, exercising a muscle, so quickly undone.

That said, I suppose I feel less badly about the languages I’ve mastered and let drift away through lack of use. If it’s inevitable that we use it or lose it, that helps us to make more conscious decisions about what spend time and energy on – “what knowledge do I need right now in the life that I have today.”

 

5. Artificial Intelligence is predicted to be 1 billion times cleverer than the human brain by 2045.

I’ve had my head in the sand about AI until this year, not having much of an opinion on it. I now understand that it is happening, whether I ignore it or not. I need to put some thought into how I might prepare for it as an individual, and also what do we need to need to do as collective humanity to ensure AI is used as a force for good in the world.

 

6. I am a monkey.

Specifically, I learned which animal I am on the Animal wheel – (Alison & Alison, 2020)  and now I can be more conscious about how that plays out well or poorly, in my interactions with others.

 

7. We are happy when we are in Flow.

I first heard about the concept of flow a couple of years ago; possessed of a newborn once again, I recognised the absence of flow in my life. This year I was introduced to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term. It has deepened my understanding about what makes us happy, and what a fulfilling life means to me. I’ve written in more detail about this here. 

 

8. The brain has 7 blind spots.

These ‘blind spots’ shape our perception of reality. One of them is filtering. When we see a black dot on a white background we see the dot not the paper, we filter out the white/the good because we believe good to be the natural state of living to which we are automatically entitled. We are more inclined to notice the interruptions only, the spoilt bits. Yet, the natural state of wellbeing is, for most of us, the majority of the experience of our lives. This is a heartening thought.

 

9. Committed acceptance.

This is the idea that you will never be happy until you resign yourself to accepting the things that are out of your control. It might not be something that I can prepare for, but I can start by developing a respect for reality and learning to sit with some harsh truths.

 

10. Happiness can be predicted with an equation.

Happiness ≥ Your perception of life’s events –your expectations of how life should be. – Mo Gawdat

I’ve learned a lot from Mo Gawdat this year. He has given me a new perspective on one of my favourite subjects to think about (happiness) by approaching it from my two least favourite subjects – maths and physics. Understanding that our happiness is largely predictable, helps us to prepare to be the happiest we can be in any situation.

 

11. Burnout is also a formula.

 “Mathematically, we can express burnout as the point when the number of stressors that we’re exposed to, multiplied by the intensity of each stressor, multiplied by the time of application of each stressor, multiplied by the repetition of each stressor exceeds our ability to handle the stressor.” – Mo Gawdat

 

12. My mum’s favourite cheese is white stilton with ginger.

I’ve known my mum for over 40 years and I only learned this fact about her last week. It struck me that there is always more to learn about those we love, and limited time in which to learn it. In 2025 I will remember to stay curious, and store more of these meaningful things close to my heart.

 

13. Swedish maternity systems measure experiences as well as outcomes.

The Swedish Birth Register uses data from service user experiences as well as medical outcomes to measure the quality and safety of care  – and they are equally weighted. I’m keen to push for something closer to this in my local maternity system. There’s a long way to go, but I see this as year one of advocacy in that direction.

 

14. Identity mode vs instrumental mode.

This idea from  Evy Poumpouras is an interesting way of deciding how to approach someone by evaluation which ‘mode’ they are in. A person who is in the identity headspace is absorbed in their own perspective, focused on their emotions and stuck in their subjective point of view.

Someone in instrumental mode is task oriented. They are able to be more subjective, practical and direct. You can learn how to respond to people more effectively by noticing which space they are in. If they often using phrases such as ‘I feel’ then they are likely in identity space and might not be ready for you to suggest they take action. For someone who likes to ‘fix’, this is another tool for deciding when to just listen, rather than immediately trying to help.

 

15.  You can’t do it all, in fact you can do hardly any of it.

The true art of time management is learning what to creatively and wisely neglect. – Oliver Burkeman

I’m familiar with the advice that saying ‘no’ can be a liberating concept. I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of having to reject some activities or invitations that are valuable and meaningful to me. It feels like too big a sacrifice for someone determined to do everything I have the opportunity to do. Never before, however, have I faced the truth that most things there are to see and do in this world of infinite possibilities, I will neither see nor do.  I might have to practice gently letting go of my FOMO this year, with the hope of feeling less overwhelmed. This might get bumped into 2026…

 

16. The message received is the message.

I like this phrase because it so neatly sums up the truth that no matter how good you think you are at communication, what the other person understands you to mean is essentially what you said. Not a new concept to me – particularly in a maternity care context – but I’ve never heard it put so succinctly before. People can expect to hear this sentence a lot from me in 2025.

 

17. Our brain is part of us but not us.

Another Mo Gawdat gem. He treats his brain as such a separate entity that he’s given it a name and even a gender distinct from his own (Becky). The idea is to recognise that our brain thinks it’s protecting us in a way that can instead compound our stress in a modern world. He speaks to ‘Becky’ when he starts getting stuck in negative thought patterns. He says ‘give me a better thought, a more useful thought, show me something else.’ Gonna give it a whirl myself I think.

 

18. Parkinson’s Law of Time.

This is the observation that a task expands (or compresses) to fill the time you have to complete it. I recently experienced this by going from having a comfortable six weeks to renovate the house before Christmas, to suddenly having six hours before our guests arrived and half the kitchen still in the hallway. I’m not sure how being aware of Parkinson’s Law will help, since there’s also Hofstadter’s law  – everything takes longer that you think it will, even when you account for everything taking longer than you expect it to. Maybe it will help me with number 19, which is…

 

19. Most things are fine when 90% done.

We waste so much energy trying to achieve that other fraction which will make only an imperceptible difference. Learning that good enough is good enough (and trying to determine when I’ve achieved ‘good enough’) is going with me into 2025.

 

20. The nightly stars are as beautiful as the occasional aurora.

    what if the stars only came out once every thousands years? None of us would sleep that night. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

    I’m better at taking notice, now that I’m on my second dawdling toddler. It was really quite revolutionary the first time, to watch the seasons turn. This one loves ducks. Every time I see a duck now I recognise that they are indeed beautiful, and imagine if they where as rare as kingfishers.
    

    Emerson intended his quote to illustrate the importance and impact of nature on humans, but I interpreted it as a reminder to look beyond scarcity appeal and see the magic in the ordinary. This has been helpful, since I’ve managed to miss the Northern Lights both times they appeared in my garden this year.

 

21. In the Second World War, people put radar countermeasure on their Christmas trees

Enemy planes would drop aluminium strips to confuse radar signals; effectively these meant tinsel falling from sky. Wartime Brits would collect it and  – decorations being in short supply – use it to make their Christmas trees pretty. I learned this fact in mid-December and pausing in the midst of my own abundance – verging on excess- thought ‘good enough is good enough.’

 

22. A big toe is called a Hallix.

This is one of many things my six-year-old son has taught me this year. He comes home from school bubbling with information. I’ve heard about quadgraphs and googleplexes and the Kiuper Belt. Although startled at first that he knows things I do not know, I have graciously adjusted to him being the one imparting information and am looking forward to learning more from him.

 

23. Three things make planet.

To be a classified as a planet, a cosmic body 1. Must be spherical 2. Must orbit a star 3. Must be in a clear orbit, absent of any other objects of similar size (this is what downgraded Pluto). My son is currently very interested in space, and so space is one of the different worlds he’s opened up for me. This particular fact got me thinking about how we label and classify things in order to understand them, but actually they just are, and will continue to be even without our labels and classifications. Remembering this, and our relative insignificance in time and space is one of my favourite techniques to combat overwhelm.

 

24. Bees are even more interesting than I thought.

Suzanne Batra described bees as ‘eusocial’ creatures, organising their activity for the greater collective good: the most sophisticated kind of society. It could be argued that we humans do this also, with our institutions designed to relieve suffering where we find it.

However, our industrious little friends are more like cells in one organism, readily sacrificing themselves and each other for a greater purpose. Honey bees move through a pre-designed chain of occupations as they age – beginning as hive cleaners and ending as foragers, meaning the only ones we see are the ones at the ends of their lives. However, bees can all be instantly demoted down the chain if, for example, one of the bees earlier in their career dies and leaves a gap to be closed.

Being a bee is therefore admirable but not aspirational. It’s important to ‘bee’ compassionate, but also to extend that compassion to ourselves.

Maybee that’s the best thing I’ll take into 2025.

 

Happy New Year!

Amy X