With nine hours left in the year, I wanted to write something honest. This is a look back at how my website has grown, what I learned, the mistakes I made, and what I’m changing going forward, not just for the site but for me as well. Not because I’m obsessed with metrics or vanity milestones, but because building anything in public forces a kind of accountability you can’t fake; it has a way of exposing what you believe you’re doing versus what you’re actually doing.
I started this year thinking the work was mostly about publishing, consistency, and polishing the “brand”. What I didn’t fully appreciate was that the real work sits underneath: the discipline to show up when there’s no applause, the courage to say things plainly even when they’re unpopular, and the patience to keep refining a message until it stops sounding like a performance and starts sounding like the truth.
So consider this less a neat summary and more a set of receipts, the moments that nudged the site forward and the moments that pulled it sideways. Some lessons were technical: structure, clarity, and how to guide a reader without drowning them. Others were personal: where I chased perfection instead of progress, where I overcomplicated what should have been simple, where I waited for the “right time” rather than making the time. And because the internet rewards certainty while real learning demands humility, I want to mark the difference: what I now feel confident about, and what I’m still actively working out. If you’ve been reading, sharing, or quietly lurking, thank you. This is my end-of-year audit: the gains, the impairments, and the adjustments I’m carrying into the next period.
Achievements
Let’s start with some of my personal accomplishments, along with the boxes my website ticked. At the start of the year, while on a bus ride home, I was bored until I was hit with an idea: one book for 12 months. While people have crazy book goals of reading 20+ books, for me, this goal would be smashing. I have never read more than eight books in a year. But this year was different. I was more focused on reading and trying to squeeze out every last bit of knowledge the book had to offer. This year I read 15 books. I tried not to read too many of the same genres. I read books like Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, and some you might not have heard of, like Freedom at Midnight and Fame, Fortune and Ambition by Osho. I have truly read this year.
This year was also the first full year for my Pages & Perspectives and, in 365 days, I published a grand total of 239 posts (this is number 240). A big number and a ton of writing, but spread over a year, and all of a sudden it’s an hour or two a day, and this is the total you get. But it’s not about the total, it’s about learning from your work. As Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” I write and publish, but never actually care to turn back and improve. That is a goal of mine: to go back and improve previous work.
There’s more I could boast about, but I’ve done enough ego-polishing for one post. Now comes the necessary discomfort: the mistakes I’d rather forget.
Mistakes Where Certainty Took the Wheel
Is a day really complete without at least one mistake? Can a year even count as a year if you haven’t misjudged a few things along the way? This year, I certainly did.
One of my clearest missteps was using Canva’s AI to generate my front covers. At the time, it felt efficient, even clever. Looking back at those older posts now, though, the covers don’t look bold or original; they look manufactured. A bit plastic. A bit too smooth. The ideas were there, the intention was there, but the face of it all felt fake, and once you notice that, you can’t unsee it.
Worse than the aesthetic was what it quietly cost me. Relying on AI covers meant I stopped searching for images that carry a human fingerprint, paintings that feel like someone suffered, loved, doubted, or dreamed with a brush in their hand. And ever since I switched to real, human-made artwork, I’ve become slightly obsessed with a question I can’t quite shake: “If the heart could paint without restrictions, how beautiful would it be?”
Going Forward
With time slowly running out on this year, all we can really do is look back, take the lesson, and carry ourselves into tomorrow the same person… just a little better. A little stronger. A little wiser. We can be more deliberate about what we repeat, what we refine, and what we retire, and more grounded in what we’ve learned, what we’ve earned, and what we’re building next.
With GCSEs around the corner, I will not be able to write as consistently as I have always done, but that’s fine, because every article will be judged more, and so it will be more refined. I know that every single human being will make mistakes. We need to start treating mistakes as two steps forward, one step back. In mistakes, we learn and improve. I want to embrace mistakes and failures, not sure how yet, but that’s fine because at least I know what I want.
The website isn’t my only goal right now. For the next stretch, the priority is GCSEs, not because writing stops mattering, but because discipline has to be aimed at what needs it most. The habit stays, the purpose stays, but the target shifts. If I can learn to show up for revision the way I’ve shown up for publishing, quietly, consistently, even when I can’t be bothered, then I’m not just improving the site, I’m improving the person running it. The content will still be here. The question is whether I’ll become the kind of person who can balance ambition with timing, and still deliver when it counts.
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