Ever since I was a little kid, I have had a weird obsession with the number 5, so naturally I was always obsessing over the year 2025. For some reason, I had it in my mind that “2025 would be my year” because to a 7 year old’s brain that just makes sense.

But then the year actually came. And I woke up on my 16th birthday, realizing I still had all the same ambitions and dreams from when I was a little kid. The same ambitions and dreams, because I really hadn’t made much progress towards them.

I suddenly realized that if I just kept daydreaming, just kept thinking, then I would never amount to anything close to my dreams or ambitions. And then I would be 80 years old one day on my death bed, with nothing but regret because I hadn’t accomplished a single thing besides dream.

Now this sounds pretty brutal, but for some reason it actually worked. It worked a bit too well, in that I spent a good portion of what was supposed to be a ski trip, focused on coding and designing UI’s in Figma.

But I was determined to make this year about accomplishing my goals, working towards my dreams, and most importantly creating the discipline for myself to be able to do this for the rest of my life.

So here’s the honest story of how that went.

Winter

The year started off with great momentum. I came back from the ski trip, energized as ever, and began maintaining daily commitments towards building my first big thing… PeakFit. For the first time in my life, I had a habit that I maintained not through environment where I was just at the rink everyday or at school everyday, but something I chose to do. And it felt really really good.

Then on January 29th flight 5342 collided with a US army black hawk. To my disbelief—and the entire skating community’s—it had on it multiple skating families and friends, 2 of which I was really close with.

After this I zoned out for quite a few weeks, not really sure what to do, the app I was building was for this community, and these friends. Going to the rink already hurt, opening up the code editor hurt even more.

I’m really grateful for all of my friends, family, and church, because without them I wouldn’t have escaped this for a much longer period of time. They showed me that it’s okay to be sad, and how powerful it is to focus on these people rather than trying to rush past them. Spencer and Eddie were two of the most kind and amazing figure skaters I knew.

Spring

Fittingly, I started coding again at the beginning of spring. HackClub was holding a global hackathon, and their flagship just so happened to be in Austin, Texas. I was a bit nervous, as I had never been to one before. But going to this hackathon might have actually been the single best thing I did all year (thus far).

I was so uncomfortable, I knew no one, went to an online school, and my social skills were seriously in need of work. But thankfully, so were everyone else’s.

I got there, and I just kind of… stood there. But as I stood there, I watched others. I watched them finish setting up the venue, I watched kids bring in the most ridiculous hardware projects, I watched them make jokes about said hardware projects and I laughed.

It was time to make our teams and I actually had courage to go up to some kids. Wow, was this hackathon pure joy. I had never programmed so much before or interacted with so many funny projects

The goal of the hackathon was to take a regular thing, and make it exceedingly more difficult. So we made flappy bird, but controlled by a tennis ball. Ultimately earning us third place and organizers’ choice award.

I finally felt ready to work on PeakFit again. For the rest of the school year I split my time between this and securing the rest of my graduation credits.

Summer

Graduation came. I had finally escaped, 2 years early at that, and somehow I—the same kid who hacked the school website—got to give the graduation speech.

I suddenly had way too much time on my hands, so I went all in on PeakFit and my skating. I didn’t really know what I wanted from PeakFit. I was scared that after all this time working on it, dreaming of it, and thinking about it, that it would fail. That it would amount to nothing, and that this whole year would prove that I wasn’t really cut out for the actually doing things department.

What I did know though was that PeakFit put me in some sort of direction, so I just kept building it.

Then at the end of August… I got this random message from another startup founder “Hey man, how are you doing?” completely out of the blue. This guy who I didn’t know just started asking me all these random questions about PeakFit.

Fifteen minutes later I was on a call with him explaining what I was building, and I guess it aligned well with what his startup was building because 4 days later I was sent a plane ticket to spend a week in Finland building with him.

Probably one of the scarier things I did this year. Going to another country by myself. Eye to eye with a customs agent who didn’t speak English, while I nervously handed over this fancy notarized doc from my parents, saying it was A-okay for me to be in Finland.

It’s funny because the guy who invited me was a part of the FR8 summer cohort, and I actually applied to to the same cohort but got rejected. Yet I still managed to spend a week there. That’s what I love most about the startup world, stuff happens spontaneously, and rules are just structure not law. I got rejected but still got to be there for demo week.

It was like 12am, demo day had just finished. I was on a walk with friends on some random trail, standing among some silent trees, and I realized just how peaceful this week had been. Don’t get me wrong it was chaotic and I spent 10+ hours coding each day. But being surrounded by these people, getting to build and laugh with them, It was really serene, and I immediately knew I would seek this feeling for the rest of my life.

So after that week, I decided to join NoLimit. A lot of people asked me why I did this, and the answer is that I want to learn from founders more experienced than I am, build a product that is being used right now, and have a guaranteed impact with what I had spent this year building. The best way to do these things was to join someone else.

Fall

You know how people say progress is slow at first but then it compounds and all of a sudden you just see it all right in front of you? Yeah, I really experienced that the last couple months of 2025.

Starting off with 1517 2e camp, truly one of the coolest weekends I have ever had, I got to meet the most amazing people, and really made a lot of memories.

It started out with a spontaneous decision to go on a 4 hour walk, rather than taking a 15 minute uber to the campsite. Nothing beats the feeling the sidewalk just suddenly ending, darkness setting in, and cellular connection gone. Yet here your best friend is, pulling out this giant bag of cookies for you guys to just munch on as you reach your halfway point.

Then the first thing said best friend does when we arrive at camp is whip out 4 different board games that he had stuffed into his backpack somehow, and starts asking people which game they want to play. 4 hours later we are all addicted to this game called “the mind”, trying to predict which numbers everyone else has in their hand.

I think the most valuable thing I left camp with was a higher value for my non tech passions, because so many people at the camp weren’t just into tech. In fact some of them weren’t into it at all. Yet all were well rounded, intelligent and truly interesting individuals.

So when I came back, I went all in on skating, determined to make what might be my last season one that I would be proud of.

Sectionals came and… it didn’t go as expected. I wish I could say that it was an astounding success, that I landed all my jumps and didn’t fall once, and that I set new records for myself. But it doesn’t always turn out that way.

What I can say though, is that I didn’t give up, even when I made some of the dumbest mistakes in my programs, and I still kept going. Then when I got off the ice I was a respectful competitor, a stark contrast to how I would have acted just a couple years ago. It seems like a bleak ending to a sport that I spent 8 years of my life doing, many of those years spent with nearly every day in the rink for greater than 6 hours.

And this was a thought that I struggled a lot with this last year: What was all this time for?? But as I write this it becomes clear. It gave me discipline, relationships and set my life on a different trajectory (imagine if I hadn’t gone to online school?). It shaped how I work, how I show up, how I handle stress, how I compete. It made me who I am, but not everything that I am.

I dont think 2025 ended up being my year in the way I initially envisioned it being. It ended up being even better.

Sure, it was really tumultuous, but I learned way more from these downhill parts than I would have without them. I saw way more opportunities come my way than I had even imagined at the beginning of the year.

So cheers to 2025 and cheers to turning 17 :)