Half of 2025 - A Retrospective 🌗

July 1, 2025

Hey there,

As it often happens with these newsletter issues, I thought I'd have written this one way in advance — but, fortunately or unfortunately, life got busy enough for me to write this particular issue on the literal last day of Q2. So, happy 50% save-point of 2025, hope you're all making the best of it, and that your plans for Q3 and Q4 are even grander. 🎉

And now, for this rather special issue, I'll make it into a small act of self-accountability. Here I want to share the wins, the losses, and the lessons I learnt in the first half of 2025.

☀️ My expectations & goals

For context, at the end of 2024, I had saved up quite a few vacation days, so pretty much the whole of December I was away from work. This gave me all the time I needed to go into full brainstorming mode, thinking about what I want 2025 to look like, what I want to achieve, the goals and systems I'd follow to optimise everything.

I decided on following the 12-week goal-setting practice — instead of aiming for global changes across 2025 as New Year's resolutions, I decided on settling for quarterly goals. They were a more encapsulated, minimal, and trackable metric, and they allowed me to split my year in seasons. (I wrote more on this back then in Quarterly Planning Basics.)

So the bulk of my goal-setting was for Q1 — that was my most ambitious quarter, as I thought I'd have time every 12 weeks to properly reassess and plan out the next 12 weeks (spoiler alert, that was a lie). This turned out to be a ticking time bomb, though, since the most goal-heavy quarter was also the middle of winter, when some of my targets (running outside 3x/week, roadtripping) were quite the uphill battle. Also, I went through a change in jobs, which changed up my routines quite a lot — going from full home-office to being at the office 3-4 days a week meant that I couldn't multitask in the old ways. I had to exercise even more discipline to get everything done in the short intervals I set up for myself, which, with the days being at their shortest and darkest that time of year, meant my productivity HP points were sapped quickly.

Overall — Q1 was a "shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you'll still be among the stars" type of period. As for Q2, I decided to take a bit more chilled-out approach to it — instead of adding more and more targets, I wanted to finish up the incomplete ones from the previous round. This coincided quite well with the wedding of my classmate that I was invited to, right at the end of June — I saw it as a grand "checkpoint" in between all the quests, and also as an event for which I should aim to be my best self.

So, to get into the particulars:

🏆 The planned and unplanned wins

• Went from working in a corporation to working at a tech startup with my friends, where I have a lot more creative freedom, ownership, where I feel like I'm trusted and valued. 👊
• Bought my 1st car, drove quite a bit already, learned some basic car maintenance, went on 2-3 road trips with it. 🚗
• Just when I thought I'd finally be working on just 1 project at a time (my full-time job), I was contacted by a freelance prospect for a web app project, which added a bit of $ in my pocket. 💸
• Lost a bit of weight, going from ~81 kg in December to 72 kg as of these days — it was a slow burn, so it didn't take a gigantic toll on my energy levels too. 🏋️‍♂️
• Wrote 19 issues for this newsletter, Life Engineering, successfully reviving it from a ~2-year-long hiatus. 🔖
  • On this note, I think I've finally discovered the "purpose" of this newsletter — what started off as a way to try and convert people to customers for some of my projects, turned into pieces I actually want to write, so when you guys see it in your inbox, you go "Damn, can't wait to hear what Yassen has to say on this particular topic."
• Donated blood twice, one of those being for a specific cause too. 🩸
  • And in the same niche, managed to get my resting heart rate (RHR) down to a consistent 52-54, mostly because of the running and the weightloss, I'd say.
• I revamped some old projects of mine, like pokemonpalette.com, and with some good SEO and just a few posts on Reddit, managed to get it to ~9K visits/month, even hitting 15K in a single week at one point. 📈

☠️ The losses (or, the points of friction)

• Didn't hit my gym goals, like the 80kg bench press, 110kg squat, or the 10 pullups in a row.
• Managed to almost completely pull the front bumper off my car by simply backing out of a parking spot — the most damage I've done to any car I've driven so far (got it fixed, luckily).
• Hit a bit of a personality/existential crisis somewhere around March, wondering why I'm even doing any of this, and whether I'm not just paddling full-force in the wrong direction — fortunately, my support network helped me through it, and I resumed efforts on most of my projects.
• Our family pet bunny sadly passed away mid-March too, after 6 happy years of bringing us joy.
• Consistency wobbled. While Q1 was over-ambitious, Q2 sometimes felt under-structured. There were days, even weeks, when my systems felt loose. I didn't fall off entirely, but I sure was coasting.

🧠 Lessons from this half a year

1. The season-based mindset works. Thinking in Q1/Q2/Q3 makes things feel more cinematic. I just need to get better at recalibrating between seasons and protecting transition weeks.
2. Most of the processes are more internal than external — people won't necessarily notice any difference between your best and worst days, which is both a good and a bad thing. Everybody is the MC of their own life after all.
3. If you knew with 100% certainty that effort X is going to get you to result Y, then everybody would be achieving everything they set their eyes on. It's the uncertainty that gets us, and this is why a little hope goes a long way when you're pushing through. (As I wrote about in When You're in the Tunnel.)

🗓️ Plans for Q3

The vibe I'm going for in the next 3 months is to build off the momentum from the previous 6 months, and with some newfound confidence, to better leverage the already existing forces in my life.

• At work — to help the guys at the startup 3x their MRR, with cool new features and more effort on my part, not only as a developer, but as an ambassador of the company as well.
• Productise PokemonPalette — I believe it already has a solid base, great UX/UI, and with some new features, it could finally start bringing revenue, which would be a great way to achieve some passive income.
• If the freelance gig I have going right now comes to an end (most of the MVP is built already) — I will need to put more intentional effort there, so I can create a system of finding freelance work more easily, not relying purely on luck and happenstance.
• As for the more routine stuff that I've already been doing, just more of the same:
  • 12 more issues of this newsletter
  • 1 more blood donation in September
  • Daily meditations, 3x gym/week

So, all in all, this is my retrospection for the first 50% of 2025. It hasn't been perfect, but it has been fruitful, and I do believe that the next 6 months will prove even better — or at least I'll try to make them that way. ✌️

Weekly Insights

• The last days of June felt like "final preparations" in a sense — I finished up on long overdue work (servicing the car, etc), managed to hit some deadlines, and prepared for the big event in my calendar for June, e.g. the wedding of my classmate and now colleague (more on the wedding in the next issue 🎂).
• It felt like loose ends being tied up for a nice finish of Q2. Only thing I could wish for is a few bonus days at the end of each quarter, so I can properly rest and prepare for the next one.
• But oh well — this all kinda backs up my theory that life is like trying to fix issues on a vehicle while you're also driving it at full speed and trying not to crash. 💥

Movie Highlight: Lilo & Stitch

And to end this issue on a lighter note — here's the review of the actual last movie I watched, and that's the live-action "Lilo & Stitch".

It was overall a pretty cute movie — a relatively faithful adaptation, with very good CGI that puts other adaptations like The Lion King to shame. The story remained pretty much unchanged, and they managed to keep Stitch's goofy troublemaker vibe like in the animated version.

The only thing they changed up that I didn't enjoy was the fate of Nani, Lilo's sister — instead of staying as her parent-guardian figure at the end of the movie, she gets pushed away to "follow her dreams" and study abroad instead of staying with her family. Whether I agree or disagree with the decision itself is another matter entirely, but it simply felt out of character after the whole plot revolved around the concept of family and sticking together.

Overall, not a bad movie, with plenty of cute and goofy moments. 👍

Worth Watching This Week

why it (literally) pays to be happy. by Arteri — a calm dive into the surprisingly tangible upside of choosing the more cheerful version of yourself.

personal finance, for idiots like me. by Arteri — a refreshingly humble walkthrough of the few personal finance principles that actually move the needle.

Closing Thoughts

Till next week, stay safe, stay curious, and keep kicking. ✌️