2025: A Retrospective

I don't spend a lot of time writing about my life in this newsletter, because a part of me thinks it's a waste of time to show you what's in my sock drawer. But when I was scribbling in my notebook after pulling an all-nighter the other day, I realised that maybe showing you guys the sock drawer is the point.

See, a lot of this work that we're doing:

• self-education
• cultivating a lifelong love for learning
• developing the routine/skills to stay on track
• rescuing your attention span

Most of the juice and rewards can't be placed on a spreadsheet or broadcast on social media. The main value comes from the subtle changes in our lives. It's that moment when reading got a little easier. It's that afternoon when you noticed that your mind is calmer than usual, and it's that giddy excitement when you open a book that used to scare you.

In a sense, the advice I give is interwoven with certain episodes in my life, and I can only showcase their value through my stories. So, in this post, we'll step away from the 1-2-Read format, and I'd love to sit down and share all the most important lessons I've learned in 2025 on my lifelong learning journey.

1: The path will disappear when you're headed in the right direction

I read this poem in late 2024, and without knowing it at the time, it set the tone for 2025:

This was early February. I was about to head home from London after a wild trip, and when I sat down to have a Diet Coke at Heathrow Airport, an unexpected dread started creeping in.

The trip was everything I've ever wanted. I was invited to speak at TEDx Oxford, and shortly afterwards, Bloomsbury Publishing invited me out to lunch on my birthday. After all the business was out of the way, I got dragged into a private tour of The Globe in London, followed by countless pints of Guinness around Oxfordshire. But throughout the entire trip, this poem kept taking me out of the moment.

It told me to "stand still" when I was running around London. "Wherever you are is called Here", but I had lived all my life going after there. And when I was at the airport's gate, I realised that this was it. The ambition that had kept me going disappeared, and for the first time in nearly a decade, I was out of goals to run after, and I didn't know what to do.

This is when this line of the poem made perfect sense:

"You must treat it as a powerful stranger/Must ask permission to know it and be known."

See, for most of our lives, we've always had a map. Get good grades, work hard, find a girl, settle down, and if you want, you can marry. But there will be rare moments when the map disappears. This happened to me twice: once when I was rejected from my PhD, and then twice when I was at Heathrow. My normal instinct was to set another goal and get another map, but I knew it was not the answer.

The only answer is to listen to that powerful stranger called uncertainty, and when we're really getting somewhere, the familiar path will disappear together with our old ambitions. All we can do now is to observe and listen. Learn to appreciate how strange our lives have been and ask for permission to know what lies ahead of us. And soon enough, the forest will answer:

2: Act with no hesitation when your inner voice speaks

I've been making YouTube videos since 2017, and my career exploded 3 years into my journey. But around 2024, I started to suspect that this YouTube chapter of my life might be coming to an end.

I carried this feeling to London, carried it when I started A Mug of Insights, and I'm still carrying it as I write this letter now. Whenever I bring it up with friends, family and fellow content creators, they all gave me the same answer: dude, you're living the dream. Shut up and enjoy it.

But deep down, I knew something was missing in this game of getting views, plugging sponsors into my videos, getting paid, and rinse & repeat.

"If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you / You are surely lost."

If I can't see the bigger picture of my content, then I've definitely lost sight of my vision: to revive the joy of learning and reading for my audience.

I could no longer ignore this voice in August, and that is when Ghost.org reached out to work with me. I knew from my first meeting with the team that this was the next chapter. Our visions aligned on so many levels, and this is when I decided to move my entire newsletter (previously on Substack) to Ghost to deliver a premium reading experience for my audience.

And things on YouTube took a drastic turn as well. Since October, I said no to nearly a dozen sponsorships (over 20k in revenue) and decided to focus on what truly mattered: long-form content that appeals to a much smaller audience but retains maximum value. I always restarted a podcast series I loved called Coffee Wednesday, and as I'm writing this, the syndicated podcast feed is actually getting more traction than my YouTube videos.

With that being said, taking that leap was scary. Making YouTube videos for a living was all I knew since I was 17, and learning to trust that voice that only visits us a handful of times meant saying no to money, familiarity and comfort for the sake of building something better. For full transparency, since making these recent changes, I've reduced my income by 80%, but I've never felt more aligned with my work.

Also, I'm proud to say that A Mug of Insights is now a fully reader-supported newsletter with no ad affiliations, and the project is now funded solely by paid newsletter members and those who have already jumped on board on our latest workshop series: The Sessions. Every workshop distils the absolute essence of my last 8 years of teaching in a highly actionable format. And all of it is designed to carry people from struggling to read consistently to becoming passionate lifelong learners. In other words, we're here to turn fear into clarity.

The first session is already up on how to design your dream personal curriculum in 2026, together with an early bird offer to jumpstart your journey!

And this is only the beginning! In January, the workshops will focus on the art of Analytical Reading and in February, I'm very excited to share The 5 Master Keys to Unlocking Literary Fiction. If you're as excited as I am, start your journey here:

3: Don't define who you are too early

The greatest gift I've received in 2025 wasn't something I expected.

I've always prided myself on being smart. I got good grades at school, I read a lot, I write for a living, but something was always missing. There was a dimension outside of "book smart" that I was afraid to explore.

Around June, my girlfriend started raving about this dojo around her house. She started taking self-defence lessons from a Goju-Ryu Karate Sensei, and I remembered that my reaction at the time was full-blown jealousy.

That sounds so cool, but I could never do that. I said to myself, I'll just beat myself with books until I die. But then, after spending a weekend preparing the first draft of my book at a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) in Daylesford, something snapped in me, and I signed up for my trial lessons the minute I got back to Melbourne.

My first day at the dojo was rough. I stood at the far left end of the mat with a stiff dogi and a white belt. To my right stood a retired 60-year-old with an orange belt, a 14-year-old kid with a blue belt and a mother of two with a brown belt, pulling off impossible moves with their bodies. And when I tried the same moves, I felt totally embarrassed as huge sweat drops streamed down my face onto the mat.

"On the training mat, every attempt at circumvention or overreaching is revealed; flaws are made manifest; the quick fix is impossible", wrote George Leonard about the practice of martial arts. Unlike intellectual pursuits, there are no shortcuts with Karate. The only way to get better is to put in the time and fully embrace being a beginner again. And as a reward:

"The pleasures of practice are intensified, [because] the mat... is the world, but it is the world under a magnifying glass."

Facing my imperfections at the dojo brought many aspects of my life into sharp focus. I have a tendency to rush my work to meet content deadlines. I tend to abandon ideas that have legs for new detours, and above all, I was struggling to finish my 80,000-word first draft due in December.

Yet something in me pushed me back onto the mat again and again. With time, I got 1% better after every training session. With effort, I bumped my lessons from once a week to three times a week. And with dedication, black tags started gathering on my white belt, and as I'm writing this, I'm currently training for my first yellow belt grading in the new year.

And as my Karate training took root, other areas of my life began to change. This is when I said no to sponsors, started focusing on my vocation as a writer to the point of obsession, and finally finished a first rough draft in mid-October.

It made no sense to me. How could practising a martial art impact so many areas of my life? Then, I found the answer in a YouTube video where the Shaolin master Shi Heng Yi said:

"You cannot perfect the martial art. You use martial arts to perfect yourself."

Now I'm wondering what life would look like if I stayed trapped in my self-definition. So, heading into the new year, I have to constantly remind myself that unexpected encounters will always have the final say on who I am, not my juvenile ideas.

And one of these encounters was with the path of mastery.

4: Embrace mastery

Whenever I look at high-performers in any category: martial arts, film, science and academia, my first instinct is to ask: what's their secret?

When I was at the TEDx Oxford conference, I had the rare chance to chat with some remarkable writers, founders and educators about their process. But one thing never failed to annoy me: things that seemed impossible to me looked so effortless to them. And sure, they gave me some great tricks and advice, but something was underpinning all their success that can't be written into a listicle.

Then I started reflecting on my own work: can I distil everything down to quick-fix advice? I tried to write it down, and I ended up with a bullet list:

• Train your attention span
• Build a reading routine
• Practice analytical reading techniques
• Seek out a concrete note-taking system
• Expand your reading interests into different fields

Do you see the problem here? Yeah, they're fucking boring, but they made the most difference in my life. And the problem is that it'll take many months to implement one of these bullet points and years to master it.

This brings me to the key difference between a committed lifelong learner and someone who struggles to stay consistent: time. The advice isn't flashy, but when we practice it over the span of a month, six months, a year, five years, you'll wake up one day as a totally different reader.

But the issue is that we want to become different tomorrow, so we disregard boring advice and call it quaint while thinking that it's for stupid people. Yet, I'm still struggling with these six-bullet points despite years of practice, and I'll probably continue to do so until I'm dead.

That's the path of mastery: an endless journey that makes our quick-fix culture quiver. This is true for everything I've tried to master: writing, speaking and reading. All of my progress came from practising a boring thing for years until it became an instinct. And until we learn to fall in love with the practice itself and put aside the results, we'll continue to jump around and wonder why nothing seems to be moving.

So, in the new year, expect my work to take on a more nuanced, long-term approach. My job here isn't to share a flashy technique or two, but to send you letters & workshops to re-inspire you and course correct you back onto the path of mastery because the devil is in the title:

Lifelong learning.

5: Every failure is a gift

Finally, let's talk about failures.

2025 wasn't all peachy. Here are some (not all) of the shenanigans that threw me for a loop:

• Getting rejected from my dream PhD program
• The DP at TEDx Oxford accidentally wiped his hard drive, so my TEDx talk is now lost forever.
• Missing a tax deadline and losing more than $10k overnight
• Trying to quit a horrible smoking habit I picked up from university
• Battling with clinical depression in therapy (more on this topic here)
• Receiving a delayed publishing contract, so I had to finish writing a book in six months while feeling completely burnt out from creating content

I keep most of my struggles away from the public eye, and what you get is a sanitised version of an otherwise messy life. But let all of these bullet points be a reminder that it's ok to feel like a crazy person in certain aspects of your life. In fact, each one of these points of failure led to the most amount of growth.

• The rejection made me question why I thought I needed academia to succeed, leading to a new shift in my writing & content
• The TEDx Oxford saga taught me to let go of the things I can't change
• I developed a savings system in my bank app to account for taxes from my work
• After years of relapsing, I found a quitting protocol that worked for me, and now I'm 6 months clean
• I worked with my therapist religiously for close to two years, and now I can manage all the symptoms without medication
• I built a robust writing routine that worked for the time frame, and now I get to keep the routine for all of my writing projects

There's another point that I want to add: in all of these areas, I had people around me to pull me out of those ruts. Some of you guys encouraged me in the comments on the rejection video, and the people in my life: my publisher, my girlfriend and my therapist all played major parts in making what I do possible.

So often, we love to claim the role of the chief architect for all our success, but as I've gotten older, the phrase popularised by Scott Galloway really rings true: greatness is in the agency of others. Investing in people is the single most important thing I've done in 2025, and I'll continue to try and be the best partner, best client and best friend for those who need me.

Because whenever failure and setbacks strike, I trust that they'll also be there for me. And whenever success rolls around, I'll want all of them around me, taking the share that they rightfully deserve.

This has been a long post, and if you've lasted this long, thank you. You make what I do possible, and I'll continue to perfect my work going into 2026 and beyond. I'm very excited for what's ahead, and as always,

Take care, and goodbye.

Robin