Failures in 2024 and Lessons for 2025

In this blog, I discuss my failed plans from 2024 and the lessons they carry into 2025. This is intended to be a personal reflection where I strive to learn and grow, but I’m happy to share it publicly. Please note that it is heavily inspired by Manki Kim's CV of Failures.

PERSONAL WRITEUPS

Ahmed Rakin Kamal

5/14/20242 min read

2024 is probably the first year in my life when I started using weekly planner. I also started using a short term planner and a year long planner. These planners were solely for lining up my career goals. Let's list the mistakes I made :

  • I spent good portion of the year working on things that I am not very interested in. For example, I spent a good amount of time on a specific project which I was not interested in but which was supposed to result in a paper. In the end, neither did a research article develop nor I could continue working on the project. Moreover, I am not even following the line of work anymore.

  • I took up more projects without thinking about my time constraints. This resulted in me working in extremely diverse topics. At some point in the year, I was working on 5 projects (4 quite different topics) simultaneously! The reasons for taking on more projects than I could handle include being interested in those directions, working on other projects when I was stuck, and trying to diversify myself. Yes, it helped me diversify my knowledge but I failed to meet my expected knowledge level in directions that I am super interested in.

  • Apart from projects, I also made horrible study plans. For example, I intended to learn about particle physics from string theory eg: construction of explicitly string models which aims to reproduce standard model. Somehow, I kept delaying this and it's now the end of the year and I have not learnt about it!

  • Another personal problem that I noticed at the beginning of the year is that if I do not work explicitly on a project, I tend to forget important details about the project. This is annoying!!!

  • I did not follow the weekly calendar rigorously and at times stopped following it. This resulted in my inability to finish some intended plans.

With that being said, let me focus on some of the lessons I learnt and intend to follow in 2025.

  • I intend to work on directions that I am really interested in. For now, two broad class of directions interest me the most. First one being string cosmology and second one being my PhD work on \alpha' corrections.

  • I only intend to work on a maximum of 3 different projects simultaneously. Unless, I move to the writing phase of a project, I will not get involve in projects however interesting things get.

  • Study plans this year will be heavily changed. I will follow some broad areas (apart from my actively working areas) like : progress in understanding swampland conjectures, dark dimension scenario, dimensional reduction and some aspects of generalised symmetries. As I have some basic knowledge on these fields, following the progress on those fronts would help me retain those knowledge and keep me updated on these things. I also intend to learn some mathematics (which I have been meaning to learn) which will help me in my research and new directions/projects that I have planned.

  • Starting from the end of the year, I will keep on customising my weekly plans. Depending upon progress, I will update my plans.

  • One of the positive aspects that I did was to make an extremely ambitious plan for 2024. This plan had a maximum of 30% success rate but I am more than happy because, looking back, this is what got me the most positive results. I will try to make the year planner for 2025 super ambitious as well.

I would like to emphasise that this plan is heavily influenced by failures. I am not sure if this is a good way to make a plan. But again, I believe we learn from our mistakes. So, if the plan about solely learning from one's mistakes fails, I will try to learn that lesson too?