Turning Three
24 Letters launched on this day three years ago. It was a project that came to be as I began transitioning into parenting leave with the birth of our second child. I remember working on ideas while at the hospital, waiting for my son's debut, and struggling to find the right name for the site. I had a few books with me, and I was taken with a quote in one of them by the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus Cananities:
Whenever you feel yourself getting angry, Caesar, don't say or do anything until you've repeated the 24 letters of the alphabet to yourself.
Athenodorus was an advisor and teacher to Caesar Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. That's a pretty big job, and by many accounts, the first Caesar's reign was one of prosperity and expansion for the Empire.
The advice not to immediately react to what's happening is timeless and as practical for us as it was for one of history's most important and powerful men. I wanted to be reminded of and inspired by this quote every time I wrote something that would appear on this site. Thus, the site got it’s name.
The desire to help others develop the strength of pause, self-reflection, and self-understanding has grown and continues to shape the work I do. Last year, noting a shift to broaden my focus to include journaling, I wrote:
There's so much to journaling beyond putting pen, whether digital or analog, to the page. It's about mindset, what you're reading, who inspires you, what your inputs are, and where you're trying to go. It's also about your past and how the more you can understand that, the better your future will often be. It's as much about the mistakes we make as the successes we have.
In short, it's an analog for living.
Creatively, I've continued to write here and on Threads while also launching The Journaling Guide newsletter and planning a few new ideas that fit into what I’m building. In 2024, I also fulfilled a longtime goal and guested on two episodes of the Basic AF Show, talking about the iPhone launch event and taking a deep dive into journaling. I’ve definitely got the podcasting bug, but know I don’t have the time to dive into my own show right now.
In late 2024 I returned to work, and that's been a significant shift and is why there's been less of me here since early November. I've gotten my legs under me at work, so I'll be writing more regularly.
I'll close this rambling little retrospective with a piece of advice that helped me get started. If you have an idea or a project that's important to you, start working on it now. Don't wait. It won’t be perfect, but it will grow into whatever it is meant to be and you will grow and develop right along with it.
As Voltaire wrote, "Perfect is the enemy of the good." Remember this as you set out on your journey.