Why
WARNING
Hey, you! STOP listening to your Spotify Wrapped 2024 now! Why?
Because if you keep playing your 2024 playlist, can you guess what your 2025 Wrapped is going to look like? Overdoing it with your Wrapped 2024 is going to skew your Wrapped 2025. Duh!
I’m sure that was obvious to you. But here is an idea that might not be as obvious, and could start with a question worth pondering for all the deep thinkers, dreamers, creators, innovators, changemakers, and builders in my linkedIn network:
Where
“Where do we want to go in 2025?”
QUESTION
And an even better question: “WHO DO WE WANT TO BE IN 2025?”
Why do I bring this to your attention?
Because what we believe we can create and build is directly tied to who we believe we are. And in this era of ever-cheaper compute, AI, and the fast-approaching reality of quantum computing, the stakes (and the possibilities!) have never been higher for those who believe they can build the future.
If we keep replaying the past to answer those questions, the result will pretty much be… the same as it has always been.
I propose it is valuable to take a beat to connect with our imagination and desires and consider this: if we have been wanting to bring something new to life, something truly innovative and harmoniously impactful, something next level but in alignment with our values, something that might seem completely out of the realm of possibilities and yet deeply needed and purposeful, and do so IN FLOW, and at the scale we want… maybe we need to allow a different part of ourselves to step in and lead?
To think through this, let’s first take an inventory of all aspects of who we are without evaluating their importance or cohesiveness in the hierarchy of things. Let’s keep it to the facts.
For example, I am a Latina daughter, sister and mama, and I also have a deep curiosity for technology and the little bits of code that tie it all together.
I am a total geek in the basement and still love to go out to dance, be in big crowds, and instigate celebrations.
I can be serious, precise, and lead with a strong sense of direction and coherence, but also be feminine, soft, playful, and funny.
I can be quiet and introspective, and in those moments my capacity to listen, be present, and connect with others is at its greatest, making me feel strong, capable, and ready for anything.
If you got your list, look for the meaning and value you assign to each of the aspects of you. When I look through my list, I can clearly identify the parts of myself that through my entire life I had been pushing to the limit, making them overworked, exhausted, and given no room to renew or grow. These parts had been on constant replay, stretched to their breaking point. At the same time, I can also see the parts of me that had been left in the shadows: neglected, uninvited, and undervalued, despite their inherent brilliance and the immense potential they bring to my life.
It was only when my overworked parts were running on fumes that I had an epiphany (or what I call a duh moment): maybe, just maybe, I could try to stop shoving parts of myself aside and give them a chance to lead once in a while.
It was scary to tell you the truth. I knew if I continued with this experiment, my world would change completely. I did continue. And my world did change completely. Because I became whole and that changed me completely. And the people around me changed. The way I think changed. My capacity to hold all sorts of emotions increased tremendously. My hope and enthusiasm for the future exploded. I think I even became smarter :)
I don’t know what you’ll do in 2025, but I’m going to stop hyper-focusing on the same old one or two parts of myself that I thought were supposed to be “the best ones.” Turns out I could never succeed getting those parts to feel good, capable, or adequate enough on their own anyway. Much as I tried, all I accomplished was to cause the entire system to gradually degrade.
I’m done functioning in the world as a fragmented being, shuffling parts of myself to fit what I was believing others wanted or needed to see in me. That effort was sucking the life and joy out of me, even as I technically and mechanically achieved great things. All the while, it was I who could not bear seeing people’s reaction not so much to my parts, but to the contradictory aspects of those parts. I was the one uncomfortable having my edge cases in plain sight. I wanted so badly to fulfill the Principle of Least Astonishment. In this highly mechanistic world, I was heading in the direction of becoming a machine myself, as if that were ever truly possible.
It took me almost all of my two-year sabbatical to deeply internalize this: my strength is not found in just one or two pieces of me. Believing that was limiting me, holding me back, exhausting me, and it was entirely false.
This was a long, long, long process of seeking, learning, experimenting, and reiterating. And it was the best investment I could ever imagine making in myself!
And I know a lot of y’all are walking around with what you call impostor syndrome.
I don’t even think that’s accurate.
I think we’re walking around in a fragmented state, which makes us feel like impostors, like we don’t belong, because there are beautiful and important parts of ourselves that we don’t allow to be seen at work, or sometimes at all.
We are the ones doing this to ourselves!
And the more we keep doing it, the more we reinforce our previously internalized belief that there are parts of us that can’t be trusted.
In turn, those parts never get the opportunity to:
practice self-regulation fully integrate into our whole selves be recognized for the value they bring to our creativity
I’ve made a mindset shift: now, when I observe someone having a reaction due to a contradiction in the way they see or experience me, it feels glorious to witness.
I allow them to sit with that dissonance and work it out for themselves. Or not. For me, it’s always a W! I now find myself delighted when I get to introduce someone to a new piece of reality, however small.
Those opportunities signal to me that I’m deeply grounded in the moment, leading with intuition (system 1 + system 2 thinking) and trusting parts of myself that are best suited to serve the people and situation at hand.
If this strikes a chord, I invite everyone to create a wild go-to playlist for 2025, to try and forget who you thought you were or needed to be, and let’s reinvent ourselves for 2025! I am so fired up for the technology that we will be conjuring up and building together from a new way of seeing ourselves!
I am sharing my own version of a wild (and ever expanding) playlist in the comments!
PS: I am willing to bet that if I asked you to guess what my “overworked parts” were, you’d get it 100% correct. Not coincidently AT ALL, they are traits or aspects we typically consider markers of success. Related: I am grateful to Bryan Liles for starting to suggest that maybe it is not he who is underrepresented, but others who might be overrepresented. That idea has always stayed with me. Along the same lines, I’m starting to think that perhaps those parts are not truly the most conducive to “success”, they’re just overplayed by most of us. Lots of room for nuance here, I’m keeping it to broad strokes else this turns into a white paper. Food for thought.