Recently I started this book called “Wintering,” surfaced to me by my therapist and explicitly done so not as a recommendation. She put it on my radar more than a year ago, but I only started it in December, perhaps because it snowed in New York, perhaps because I've been thinking about what it means to be cold in new ways. I've been cold before, I've been depressed, I've felt bleak. But this year was the year I chose to start “Wintering” and one of the first in which I have really considered the season.

Katherine May writes richly in “Wintering,” her descriptions enabling vicarity and her observations vessels for relation. Predictably, some of my most recent learnings in life have come from this book: for example, the fact that deciduous trees form buds in the summer and fall, capitalizing on long days and ample sunlight for energy production before winter arrives, waiting, ready, to burst forth the following spring. That winter is an essential natural process is unsurprising, but humans have generally been a tropical species, and the evolved ability for us to winter is cultural, technological.

I study computer vision and generative AI and have a keen personal interest in neuroscience, and I've been thinking about some practical learnings I take away from this work.

The concept of “diffusion” refers to the natural, passive movement of particles from an area in which they are highly concentrated to an area where they are less concentrated, until they are evenly spread out, i.e., in equilibrium. This happens due to the constant, random motion of particles, and doesn't require external energy.

Diffusion models in machine learning serve the purpose of generating new, high-quality data by learning to reverse a process of adding random noise. They mimic the natural spreading of matter, using a gradual addition of randomness to data and then teaching AI to undo it. I.e., standard diffusion models learn to generate data by first destroying it. They gradually add noise until it becomes pure static. Then they train a model to reverse that destruction, to learn the path from noise back to signal. In essence, they learn to create by learning to heal degradation.

There is a concept called “cold diffusion” that shares the same basic idea, but instead of random static, models use structured destruction (e.g., adding a blur, pixelation, or a fade to grey). In thermodynamics, cold means order. Low entropy. Things settling into structure rather than scattering into chaos. Diffusion is an imperfect metaphor for many reasons, but unlike the heat of summer, the cold of winter does not feel random and loose. It feels structured, a necessary degradation in which things slow in predictable ways.

I started writing this essay a couple weeks ago, in the lobby of a hotel my dad loves to get coffee, in lower Manhattan, and it's the first time I have truly enjoyed writing in a very long time. Serendipitously, it was right around Christmastime, with boughs of holly and golden lights nestled above the great wooden doors that people keep entering and leaving through, and as I paused on writing, I heard Etta James' rich and refreshing “At last,” fill the lobby. She sings, “At last…I found a dream that I could speak to.” I thought about what it means to me to write. I looked up Etta James and read a snippet of her biography. She, like many of the brilliantly acclaimed, had a complex life story, described as “rough-and-tumble,” lined with addiction, bad relationships, and a variety of health and legal problems.

2025 was a great year for me. In many ways, it was, of course, terrible. I felt confused and lost. I repeated known mistakes. I had many career successes, some triumphs in decision-making, some personal wins and many lessons.

I was living in California for about a year and a half for my work, and I moved back home to New York this year. I was reminded of what it meant to be cold, the forgiveness and embrace of California a distant memory. I feel attached to the cold right now, clung to its structure; it leaves my veins sparkling and renders the world in crystal. I almost cannot remember what spring feels like, but I will face it too when it comes, and I trust that I will be ready to burst forth like a blossom, and this is in part my first lesson, which is not just the seasonality of life but the ability to find faith and even comfort in impermanence.

I have learned many small (and some big) lessons in 2025 that have already demonstrated some level of compounding as I review them now; they have (perhaps inevitably, perhaps randomly) led me to this point, at which I write.

At last. At last, I'm writing. At last, I release the feeling of deep, consuming frustration, like I've been holding my breath for too long, and I just exhaled completely.

In fact, the highest value lesson I learned this year, measured by ease of implementation and outsized impact, has literally been to breathe better. I am still struggling with it. My dad set me up with an Ayurvedic doctor because I hadn't been sleeping well and maybe because of the years of anxiety we've painfully shared, and the doctor very calmly took me through some long inhalations and exhalations, after which I realized how shallow my typical breathing is. I realized how often I hold my breath. Every time I think about this now I breathe a little deeper, in hopes that this will become natural, instinctual.

Partially in service of this adult endeavor I'm facing, learning how to take care of myself, even relearning how to breathe, another lesson crystallized for me: that neuroplasticity is nonjudgmental, that repetition rewires the brain. Whether I write, work, argue, exercise, or invest in myself, my repetitive choices physically restructure the activity of my brain. Neuroplasticity is a remarkable, catalytic biological asset, and it by nature, like the universe, is omnipotent and neutral, meaning the brain strengthens and responds to whatever we feed it most often, whether good or bad.

So that's the effort: making good decisions, over and over and over again.

I read a few books this year presenting thoughtful, sweeping, cross-cultural economic research, across historical events, individual career learnings, and massive social projects. They have been stepping stones on a path I began a long time ago, of an ongoing lesson of embracing risk in my personal life.

One means of embracing risk, I've learned, especially as someone who is mathematically inclined, is to evaluate myself on the quality of my decisions as opposed to the basis of outcomes. Outcomes, like intentions, feel binary and inhibit honest self-reflection.

There are evolutionarily complex reasons for this. The prefrontal cortex is the newest part of the human brain. It distinguishes us from other primates and only fully myelinates in our mid-twenties. It is the seat of executive function: deliberation, abstract reasoning, the weighing of future consequences against present impulses. Using the prefrontal cortex is metabolically expensive. Evolution shaped older structures in the brain to handle rapid categorization (safe vs. threat). Binary thinking is a feature of ancient cognition, not a bug, optimized for survival under conditions of scarcity and danger, where hesitation meant death.

The human brain's default toward binaries is a sort of compression algorithm, a way of conserving costly deliberative resources. Probabilistic reasoning, including evaluating decision quality over outcome and holding space for uncertainty, requires sustained, prefrontal engagement, a kind of cognitive winter in itself: slower, more structured, more effortful.

The prefrontal cortex lets us override the ancient binary impulse, but it must be trained to do so. Over and over and over again, repeating deliberately the thoughtful, incremental, nuanced thinking.

Another book I read this year, “Thinking in Bets,” by Annie Duke, points out that winning and losing are loose indicators of decision quality. She introduces decision trees, expected values. There is a spectrum; life is probabilistic poker and not deterministic chess. I have learned to welcome the two-sided coin of life, with its heads of uncertainty and tails the certainty of change.

To make better decisions, I'm also learning how to focus on what I want. The word “decide” derives etymologically from the Latin “decidere,” meaning “to cut off,” signaling elimination and focus. If life really is probabilistic, focus is everything. Concepts like Pareto optimization exist to help us find the best solutions when there are trade-offs. Taking better risks in the face of uncertainty requires prioritization.

I also reread Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs this year. Isaacson describes one of many rituals practiced by Jobs, in which he'd take a hundred of his most valuable employees on an annual retreat to brainstorm ten things Apple should do next. Jobs would slash the bottom seven and announce, “We can only do three.” He famously said that deciding what to do is as important as deciding what not to do. It's true for companies, it's true for products, it's true for people.

Books like “Thinking in Bets” point out the objective value of uncertainty in our decision-making, but they don't create much room to explore the tension between uncertainty and faith. The two traits of ruthless focus and blind faith seem mutually exclusive, but I've convinced myself in life that they aren't. Focus is the cold, the laying bare, the “wintering” we must do; the faith is in that the object of focus will bloom. Jobs was a good example of the belief that impossible tasks were possible.

When we think about the history of innovation, much of it has been driven by definite optimism: the idea that you build the future you want. A little bit of irrational exuberance. Risk-taking.

Shifting my focus away from outcomes and to making better decisions has encouraged me to create. I don't know exactly what will happen, and that's fine.

Uncertainty is an asset, a friend to invite in for dinner, a card that wins you the hand. Why not be optimistic?

Contrary to popular belief, ideas do not emerge fully formed. We can work on them and continue to evaluate them. The desire to create easily curdles into the desire to arrive already finished. I read The Artist's Way this year too, in which Cameron highlights the creative individual's fantasy of springing forth in a debut with one's magnum opus. The small decisive steps, the energy expenditure, the commitment to produce buds for the spring in the preceding summer, sometimes feel beneath the dream.

The words “at last” connote the sense that not only was an outcome meant to arrive but that we were waiting for it, for the right one. I am wondering about faith in a probabilistic world.

I am learning––actually repeating to myself, over and over––about the compounding of effort, patience, gratitude, and faith. Sometimes I comfortably feel that there is nothing to wait for, and that each step is part of a process, a season, worth experiencing in and of itself.

At the end of the day it seems I have many more questions than learnings. After I spent the day writing, I walked in the evening to Washington Square Park and stood below the arch for the thousandth time. Inscription. South-facing side: “LET US RAISE A STANDARD TO WHICH THE WISE AND THE HONEST CAN REPAIR / THE EVENT IS IN THE HAND OF GOD / -WASHINGTON.”