This week I turned 41, and this newsletter turns 3! Since we share a birthday, this has become a bit of a tradition. Once (or twice) a year, I take the liberty of breaking the usual format and getting more personal. Not because I have life figured out (far from it), and definitely not to preach. I do it because writing forces me to stop, reflect, and make sense of what I'm learning. And hopefully, by sharing it, we can learn together.

Looking back, each year seems to have had a theme. In 2024, the theme was on long-term clarity: creating a 10-year plan, getting my finances in order, strengthening my family, and figuring out what I wanted next. In 2025, I wrote about experimentation and slowing down: leaving the corporate world for a year, working full-time on things I loved, traveling, trying therapy and coaching, and moving back to Peru.

This past year has been about putting many of those lessons back into practice: returning to a full-time leadership role, adapting to life back home, watching my kids get older, and continuing to figure out how ambition, family, health, relationships, and enjoyment can coexist. So, for the third year in a row, here are 18 things I've been thinking about lately. Let's reflect together!

On Perspective

1. If you think things go well because you're awesome, you'll have a really hard time when they don't. It's easy to take success personally. "I got promoted because I'm great at my job." The problem is that if we use that logic when things go well, we have to use the same logic when they don't. The older I get, the more I appreciate how much luck, timing, context, privilege, and other people contribute to our outcomes. This doesn't mean avoiding responsibility (quite the opposite). Work hard, take ownership, learn from your mistakes. Just don't make the mistake of turning every outcome into a verdict on who you are. It will make the highs more humble and the lows much easier to survive.

Try this: When something goes exceptionally well (or badly) ask yourself: How much of this was actually me?

2. Be a long-term person in a world full of short-term people. Almost everything around us is pushing us toward the short term: quarterly targets, instant gratification, social media, algorithms, overnight success stories, the next promotion. That creates an opportunity, as most things in life actually compound. Money compounds. Skills compound. Reputation compounds. Relationships compound. Health compounds. Most of the really good things in life seem to reward people willing to keep doing the right thing long after the excitement wears off. In a world increasingly obsessed with what's happening next week, simply becoming someone who thinks in decades might be a competitive advantage.

Try this: What would you do differently today if you were optimizing for ten years instead of ten months?

3. You don't need to have an opinion about everything. Marcus Aurelius reminded himself that we have the power to have no opinion. That idea feels almost radical today. We are constantly invited to react, judge, comment, and pick a side... often on things we barely understand. I've increasingly realized that an opinion has a cost. It takes attention. It can create frustration or anger. It can make us defend positions we never needed to take in the first place. Not everything deserves your judgment. Sometimes the healthiest response really is: I don't know enough about this, and that's okay.

Try this: The next time something bothers you, ask: Do I actually need an opinion about this?

4. Your job isn't to be right. It's to update your beliefs. Changing your mind doesn't mean you were stupid before. Hopefully, it means you learned something. Yet we often become attached to our previous opinions. Once we've said something publicly (or built part of our identity around it) we start looking for evidence that proves old-us was right. I'm trying to do the opposite. The goal shouldn't be consistency with your previous self. It should be getting closer to the truth as you collect better information.

Try this: What's something you strongly believed five years ago that you no longer believe? Celebrate the update.

5. Borrow perspective from your future self. My parents are moving out of the home they've lived in for 36 years, and my mom kept everything. Going through those boxes was like meeting previous versions of myself. I found drawings from when I was nine that were surprisingly good (I have a nine-year-old now, so I have a benchmark!). Why did I stop? Then I found my grades at 15 or 16. Apparently I was doing much worse than I remembered. And a university paper I once considered Nobel Prize material that now reads...cute. It made me wonder: What will 60-year-old me think about 41-year-old me? What am I taking too seriously? What am I neglecting that he'll wish I'd protected?

Try this: Borrow your future self's perspective. What would they tell you to worry less about—and what would they tell you not to let slip away? Then live a little closer to those values today.

6. Hate usually comes from below. I came across some version of the phrase “hate comes from below.” I don't know who originally said it, and I don't interpret it as “ignore anyone who criticizes you.” (That would be a very convenient lesson). But I have noticed something: people actually doing difficult things tend to criticize differently. They ask questions. They acknowledge trade-offs. They know how messy execution is because they've been there themselves. People further ahead often seem surprisingly generous with people trying to climb. The loudest judgment, meanwhile, often comes from the sidelines. Listen to criticism, but be thoughtful about whose criticism earns space in your head.

Try this: When criticism hurts, don't just ask what was said? Ask: "Is this someone whose perspective I genuinely want to learn from?"

On Career and Adaptability

7. Adapt to the culture without losing yourself. After more than a decade living abroad, moving back to Peru reminded me how important cultural adaptability is. How people communicate, disagree, make decisions, demonstrate effort, build trust, and recognize good work changes enormously across companies and countries. For example, I came from environments where outcomes were often what mattered most. If you delivered, nobody particularly cared whether you looked busy doing it. Other cultures put more value on visible effort and involvement. You can complain that this is inefficient, or you can understand the environment you're operating in and adapt. I've come to like this tension: "Authenticity without adaptability limits you. Adaptability without authenticity exhausts you."

Try this: In a new environment, ask: What should I adapt—and what about myself do I want to preserve?

8. Principles travel better than playbooks. Related to the previous point: the older I get, the less I believe in universal “best practices.” I've worked across countries, industries, small and huge companies. I've watched approaches that worked brilliantly in one place completely fail somewhere else. That doesn't mean there aren't good principles. There absolutely are. But copying the way somebody else implemented a principle without understanding why it worked is dangerous. Culture matters. Incentives matter. Timing matters. People matter. Understand the principle. Then earn the right to adapt the execution.

Try this: Where are you following a “best practice” without considering the context around you?

9. Careers aren't ladders. Sometimes they're T-shaped (and the T keeps changing). There's a concept in career development called T-shaped skills: you build deep expertise in something (the vertical part of the T) while developing enough breadth to collaborate and operate across other areas. My career has felt less like one T and more like a series of them. Early on, depth mattered enormously. I needed to be really good at something to progress. Later, breadth became more valuable. Managing bigger teams and taking broader roles meant becoming more of a generalist. Now I'm seeing another turn. This year I had my first experiences with boards, and I've had more opportunities to speak, advise, and teach. And suddenly depth matters again. People don't invite you into those rooms simply because you're “generally experienced.” They want to know: What do you understand unusually well?

Try this: What does the next stage of your career require from you: more depth or more breadth?

10. Expertise is recognizing patterns. Something interesting happens when you've spent enough time in a field: the questions start repeating themselves. Different company, same problem. Different team, same trade-off. Different words, same underlying decision.

At some point, what once looked like 50 separate problems starts looking like five patterns. I think that's a big part of expertise. So I've started paying more attention whenever I think: Wait, I've seen this before. Those moments are worth capturing. Write down the recurring questions. Notice the patterns. Develop your own frameworks. Teach them. Write about them. Your expertise may be hiding inside the questions you're tired of answering.

Try this: What question do people keep coming to you with? Start keeping a list.

11. We regret what we don't do. For years, I fantasized about writing publicly, coaching, giving seminars, and making money from something I built myself. Then I took a few months away from corporate life and actually did it all, and something unexpected happened: I stopped fantasizing about them (even now that I am not doing it as much). I learned I could do them, enjoyed many parts, and also experienced the boring and difficult parts my fantasy conveniently left out. That's why I like the idea of regret minimization: if something keeps coming back into your head, find a reasonably safe way to try it. Doing replaces imagination with information, and even "I'm glad I tried it" can be a great outcome.

Try this: What's something you've been thinking about for years? Find the lowest-risk way to actually try it.

On Family and Relationships

12. Ask the people you dedicate your life to what actually matters. I recently asked my kids which things I do with them that they find the most important. I thought I knew what they would say. I didn't. Some of the things they valued most weren't the things I do most often. Actually, most were things I rarely do. It was a humbling reminder that effort and impact aren't always correlated. We spend enormous amounts of time trying to be good parents, spouses, friends, or leaders without asking which parts actually matter most to the people receiving that effort.

Try this: Ask someone you dedicate a lot of time to: What's something I do that matters more to you than I probably realize?

13. Don't turn your relationship into a staff meeting. Running a family requires ridiculous coordination: pickups, games, bills, handymen, calendars... it's basically a small company with terrible documentation. But running the household and nurturing your relationship are two different jobs. I've seen couples finally get a date night at a beautiful restaurant and spend it discussing who's picking up the kids on Thursday (I've done it!). Have the logistics meeting, calendars open, and figure out Thursday. Then have the date and talk about life, dreams, friends, stupid things (anything but logistics). Being parents makes you co-workers to an extent; just don't let that relationship consume the other one.

Try this: Separate your next household-planning conversation from your next date.

14. Sometimes you don't miss the place. You miss the time. For years, I thought I missed partying at the beach during Lima summers. Then I moved back and tried it again. It felt...weird. I was older, everyone seemed younger, and apparently clubs don't even have dance floors anymore (when did that happen?). That's when I realized: I didn't miss partying at the beach. I missed being that age, with those friends, with almost no responsibilities. Nostalgia can attach a feeling to a place and convince us we want to go back THERE, when what we really want is to go back THEN. We can't, but we can make this chapter worth missing someday.

Try this: When you're nostalgic for a place, ask: Do I miss the place or who I was when I was there?

On Trade-offs

15. You can have almost anything. Just not everything at once. Career. Marriage. Kids. Friends. Health. Sports. Hobbies. Spirituality. Travel. Side projects. I want all of them, and maybe across a lifetime we can have almost all of them... but trying to maximize everything at once guarantees you'll feel like you're failing somewhere. Life happens in seasons. Sometimes career needs more of you; sometimes it's your kids, health, relationships, or something else. The hardest part isn't choosing what to prioritize, but it's being at peace with what you're NOT prioritizing, without feeling guilty about it.

Try this: What season are you in? Pick the two or three things that deserve disproportionate attention and give yourself permission not to maximize everything else.

16. Check whether yesterday's decisions still fit today's life. A decision can be completely right when you make it and wrong three years later. Kids grow, careers evolve, parents age, finances change, and we change. Yet we often keep defending old decisions because changing our minds feels like admitting we were wrong. You don't owe permanent loyalty to a decision made by an earlier version of yourself. The goal isn't making perfect decisions; it's making thoughtful ones and having the courage to periodically reopen them.

Try this: Pick one major life decision and ask: If I were choosing from scratch today, would I choose the same thing?

On Enjoying Life (still in progress)

17. Enjoyment sometimes needs to be scheduled. My wife and I have debated this one because scheduling fun sounds terrible. Isn't enjoyment supposed to be spontaneous? Maybe, but with careers, kids, school calendars, and responsibilities, the things we supposedly love doing can somehow disappear for months. You love hiking, seeing friends, skiing, traveling, but when did you last actually do it? If you're waiting for a magical empty Saturday to appear, good luck. Life will happily fill every unscheduled space. I'm increasingly convinced that scheduling enjoyment actually protects it. I haven't mastered this one yet, but it's something I want to work on this year. Try this: What's something you always say you love doing but rarely do? Put the next one on the calendar.

18. Don't optimize the joy out of your life. I've spent most of my adult life obsessed with growth: becoming more effective, successful, knowledgeable, healthy, and a better leader, husband, and father. I don't want that to disappear; growth is a huge part of who I am (I literally write a newsletter about it!). But I'm increasingly interested in a different question: What if a good life isn't only one that keeps getting better, but one you actually enjoy while you're living it? I don't want to stop being ambitious. I just want to make sure that, in trying to build a great life, I don't forget to actually live it. That's what I want 41 to be about.

Try this: Ask yourself: Am I enjoying the life I’m working so hard to build?

If you read this far…you’re awesome! Send me a note to let me know which point resonated the most.

Growthfully yours,

Jorge Luis Pando

Say hi 👋 on LinkedIn or YouTube

PS: Wow, you made it all the way down here? You must really care about your personal development! Here are 3 ways I can help you grow even faster:

1. Get My Most Popular Course: Learn the exact system I’ve taught to 70,000+ professionals to take control of emails, meetings, and DMs, and reclaim 150+ hours in your year.

2. Join The Effective Collective: Our private membership is opening soon as invite-only. Get access to two best-seller courses, weekly coaching, and support to level up your performance without burning out.

3. Book Me for Coaching or a Workshop: Need help scaling yourself or your team? I offer 1:1 coaching and custom team sessions to help you work better, not harder.

Enjoying what you’re reading? Help a friend out… and you will win something for yourself too.