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For a long time, I noticed that I was (and probably still am) attached to how other people perceive me. I was trying so hard to maintain the self-image I wanted others to have of me—trying to be “cool.”

What I learned is that this is a very limiting approach.

If you’re trying so hard to maintain and uphold a self-image you created, you’re actively limiting yourself in what you do. Ironically, it likely keeps you from finding the resonance you’re really looking for with other people.

From my personal observation, people don’t want those highly curated LinkedIn-style stories. Every article there sounds the same because everyone’s hiding their vulnerable true selves behind a “formula” to get results. They try too hard—and people see right through it.

Once you stop trying so hard to maintain this fictional self-image—which ultimately just serves as a mask—your real work as a creative begins.

And yes, it might feel painful at first, because initially people may not resonate with you.

Seeing just three likes on a LinkedIn post hurts.

But it’s the more sustainable—and honestly more promising—path. It builds real value in the long run, and deeper connections with the people who genuinely want to tag along.

This reminds me of the concept of “wu wei” from Zen teachings. It translates to effortless action.

The moment you detach yourself and stop trying so hard, you ironically open yourself up to genuine momentum. The results you want effortlessly find their way to you.

I know your thinking mind probably rejects this approach because it sounds uncertain and ambiguous. But I genuinely believe in it, and I try every day to create evidence that it works.

That’s why I’m here—to prove there’s another way to create, to live, to be.

One mistake I’ve made many times—one that never led to building something people wanted—was overcomplicating my thinking about the product.

Nearly all ideas that succeed and evolve into significant companies are obvious in hindsight.

ChatGPT seems like an obvious idea when you consider large language models.

Uber is an obvious idea when you think about smartphones and the broken process of hailing taxis.

Slack is an obvious idea when you look for a better way to communicate internally than email.

They may not have seemed obvious when first conceived, but once their initial versions were built, their value became clear. That’s exactly what you need to do as a founder.

Tinker with existing technologies and painful problems people face, then build the obvious solution using the tools available today.

This approach might not invent the next generation of technology, but it does create products people actually want—products that can become viable companies. And the quality of your execution determines your level of success.

Building obvious ideas—simple to understand and specific in their purpose—is the way to go.

I’ve noticed that most people tend to act from a sense of not being enough. Their goals and motivations are tied up in a narrative in which they feel compelled to prove their worth. Although this perceived lack can be a powerful driver of achievement, it is not the foundation from which a peaceful, fulfilled life is built.

When you begin creating from a place of already feeling enough, every action becomes an unfolding expression of your highest potential, laying the foundation for the best version of your life—one you could already be living. But to create from such a place, you must open yourself to inner work.

The journey from feeling inadequate to recognizing that you are enough takes time, is unpredictable, and requires dedicated self-work. Yet it is also the path that offers the greatest return on investment in your life. Your objective should be to live peacefully and to fulfill your highest potential, rather than to exist as the sum total of beliefs the world has imposed on you. You are meant to be yourself, not a faceless average of your social circle.

At any given moment, you are already your highest potential that is accessible to you in this moment. And that is all that matters. Remove the endless comparing. The sabotaging self-talk. You can, through inner work, increase the volume of potential that is accessible. The limit of potential is endless and free available. But your task is not to judge yourself from what could be, but be peaceful with what the present version of yourself already is.

I recently began doing something far outside my comfort zone: documenting my life on camera.

And let me tell you—it feels extremely uncomfortable. In my life, I’ve excelled at a few things: designing products, building websites, coding, writing. But for the first time in years, I’m doing something at which I genuinely suck.

So why am I doing this? I believe we humans tend to get too comfortable, too quickly. There are biological reasons for it: our brains want to conserve energy by choosing the path of least resistance. Actively seeking discomfort requires effort.

Yet I also believe that the greatest rewards in life lie on the other side of comfort. Almost every dream or life plan demands that you overcome resistance and learn something you’ll initially be terrible at. Trust me—you will suck at it.

You need to find a way to be okay with being uncomfortable.

This is what it takes to uncover the unique contribution you can bring to the world, to step into a more powerful version of yourself, and ultimately to achieve asymmetric returns. Our world is built around comfort, and the few who dare not only to accept discomfort but to pursue it are the ones who will travel the farthest.

I came across a Reddit post about “YC’s hidden formula” the other day, and I thought it was the best piece of advice I’ve read on what the first weeks of building a startup should look like—and on the things that actually matter. In this essay, I’ll put that formula into context with my own experience, as a guide for founders who are just starting out and need some orientation on what the process looks like.

Simply put: startups are all about growth. That’s why they exist. Growth is the ultimate measure of a founder’s effectiveness, and the most honest metric to track is revenue—real customer value created.

Instead of inventing metrics that feel comfortable and give the illusion of progress, stick to the simplest measure: revenue. Even if you’re tempted to track DAUs or some specific usage event, your north star should always be revenue. Don’t give in to the part of you that wants to feel good about fake progress. Face the hard truth: in the beginning, this metric might not move for many weeks. But stay disciplined—treat revenue as your guiding light.

Now, here’s the “YC formula”:

Get 100 paying customers at €100/month.

It’s not about hitting a particular revenue target per se; it’s about setting a brutally honest frame for building something people want—and can’t live without. If you apply this standard, you’ll avoid the trap of working on a problem that isn’t genuinely painful to a specific customer group.

The common pitfall is building something that seems cool, but isn’t something your customers desperately need. Getting 100 people to pay proves two things: you’re tackling a truly painful problem, and you’ve validated your hypotheses with a sufficiently large sample to guide you into the next stage. You’ll only get there by focusing on what people need—by talking to them—rather than guessing what they want.

You could argue about the price point: for consumer products, €100 might be too high; for B2B, perhaps too low. The heuristic is to pick a price point that makes you uncomfortable, because you’re testing whether the problem you solve is painful enough. If people will pay a premium, you’ve validated the problem’s severity quickly.

Here’s the playbook, quoted from that Reddit post:

What's the hidden principle? Build something people want. Solve a real problem, then solve it better than anyone else. Growth is a byproduct of retention. If your first 100 users love your product, they'll stick around, and they'll spread the word.

Here's the playbook:

1. Start small. Focus on a niche.
2. Talk to your users relentlessly.
3. Iterate based on what they need, not what you think they want.
4. Charge enough to prove value. Free doesn't mean they love it—paying does.
5. Retain before you scale. 100 loyal users are better than 1,000 casual ones.

That’s what it’s all about—and what the first weeks of your startup should look like. You can tweak the numbers, but the underlying mechanism and mental model remain the same.

All problems are interpersonal relationship problems. If you want to live a good life, learning to build high-quality relationships with others is key. Here’s what I’ve learned over the years about having great relationships.

When you’re conversing, there are common things that get in the way of genuine flow:

Not being fully present, but consumed by your own thoughts.

Not being aware of your own emotional state, let alone the other person’s.

Not truly listening with the intent to understand, but rather with the intent to respond.

These barriers impede high-quality human connection. Luckily, you can learn to overcome them.

It starts with becoming aware of yourself and the state you’re in during a conversation. Only if you’re attuned to your nervous system and inner state (e.g., feeling triggered) can you notice it and redirect your attention to the present—into a state where you can listen without judgment or thought-based reactions that lead to unhelpful emotions.

You cannot control how the other person reacts—whether they approve of you, hate you, love you, or don’t see you. But you can control the quality of presence you bring. This is the foundation upon which high-quality connection can grow.

Put simply, showing someone that you “feel them” is the key to creating a safe space in which richer information can be exchanged.

The phrase I like to remember is:

“I feel you feeling me.”

When both people in a conversation share that quality, real things can flow. Ideas can evolve. Conflicts can be avoided. This is how good interpersonal relationships feel.

As with anything in life, this is a matter of practice. It’s a rare skill, but one worth cultivating—because after all, we share the human experience with others, not on our own. Magic happens when we use this connection to collaborate, support, and simply be with each other.

One key to a happy life lies here.

The only thing that matters is making better things.

Everything that does not contribute to making better things to show the world is a distraction.

This is the reason why companies exist, why creators exist, why artists exist: they all share the common purpose of making things to share with the world. And the better you get at it, the more you will be rewarded by the world in the long run.

If you think about organizing your company, optimize for this: every meeting, every process, every person has the sole purpose of contributing to making better things for other people. This is the only alignment you need.

As a founder, creator, or artist, carefully review your day and cut out everything that does not directly tie into making things better or finding a better way to share your work with the world.

This is where you create something new—real value—which will eventually be noticed by the world.

When you’re starting a company today, AI is your co-founder.

We’ve reached a point where large language models have evolved in capability and intelligence to substitute much of what a human co-founder would typically do. This means execution is both faster and cheaper.

If you have an idea for a software product you want to build, AI is your co-founder who helps you bring it to life.

If you have dozens of customer interviews you need to analyze, AI is your co-founder who extracts actionable insights.

If you want to create creative assets for marketing your product, AI is your co-founder who generates them.

Surely, we’re not yet at the point where it fully replaces human effort in these domains, but as the three progress vectors—capability, cost, and speed—continue to evolve, this new way of building companies becomes truer every day.

Regardless, even today AI is your co-founder. Founders who learn to work effectively with the cutting edge of AI will accelerate their execution, creating successful companies faster and cheaper.

This is where the alpha currently lies—exploitable by those who proactively lean into this edge, rather than reactively clinging to the wrong heuristic “AI isn’t there yet.”

One lesson I keep relearning is that, instead of trying to do more in a day, doing less is the key to getting the results I want more quickly.

Now, as I’m starting a new company, my days over the past few weeks have filled up quickly with dozens of things that need attention. I felt a strong urge to push on all fronts to reach our goal as fast as possible. After all, for a pre-revenue company, it is a fight against time to survive.

What I’ve realized—painfully—is that I was spreading myself too thin across too many tasks. My desire to accomplish a lot every day left me not only feeling overwhelmed but also deeply frustrated by my lack of progress on the things that truly move the needle for us at this stage.

I don’t judge myself too harshly. We grow up observing people around us treat the hours they work and the sheer number of tasks they complete in a day as signals of progress, status, and accomplishment. But when you zoom out from the daily grind, it becomes clear that this heuristic is flawed.

As founders navigating the world with leverage—capital, media, code—the better way to reach our goals quickly is to focus on fewer things that carry more weight in pushing us toward our objectives.

The heuristic I’m using now is simple: I start each day by asking, “What is the one thing I can accomplish today that will make everything else easier in the future?” (or some derivative of that question).

This helps me eliminate the noise of countless possible tasks and identify the action that truly moves the needle.

Resistance is an ever-present force for creatives. Writers know it well: you stare at a blank page, find excuses not to write, and before you know it, a day has passed—resistance has won, and you haven’t done your work.

I’ve adopted a simple mental heuristic: whatever I feel the most resistance toward is exactly what I should be doing.

This holds true whether you’re writing, composing music, inventing products, or building companies.

Each morning presents a choice: cling to comfort or lean into the task that triggers resistance.

Instead of treating resistance as an obstacle, see it as a compass. Lean into it, and it naturally points you toward your most meaningful path—the critical path of creation.

The people who truly make remarkable contributions are those who consistently lean into resistance and use it to guide their work.

For a long time, I believed I was the only one shaping my life—that every idea and outcome came entirely from my mind. I thought creation was a straightforward process: think of something, then make it happen. But over the years, that view changed completely.

I now see that my mind is not the true origin of ideas or life. Instead, there’s something larger than my mind, body, and soul that is the real source of creativity. We can’t fully explain this source with words; we can only experience it. Some people call it God, the universe, or the divine—use whichever word feels right to you. The key is understanding that our minds are not the starting point. Recognizing this can transform how you approach both life and work.

Rather than believing I create ideas, I’ve learned that ideas find me. My mind and body are tools that serve a deeper potential. When you pay attention and stay present, you’ll notice subtle nudges or impulses guiding you toward new thoughts. These impulses feel mysterious and can’t be completely understood, but every creative person knows what I’m talking about.

If you ever feel stuck—when ideas just won’t come—the way back to that source usually involves two habits: meditation and a regular creative routine. Whether you write, paint, code, or design, your task is to face resistance every day. Sit down, do the work, and let go of trying to force ideas. Any writer knows the struggle of staring at a blank page. The moment you stop battling and just write what comes up, that’s when your best work appears. In this sense, creating is a kind of spiritual practice—because spirituality here is not one option among many; it’s the way.

You might think, “This sounds like spiritual nonsense.” But if you talk to anyone who has made something truly meaningful, you’ll see the same pattern: they all connect to this source, no matter the words they use. In the end, they arrive at the same place I’m describing.

So don’t hold onto the idea that your ego controls everything through thinking alone. Instead, build your connection to the source as you create and live. Trust that something beyond your understanding knows how things should unfold. Show up every day—without fail—trusting and doing the work. This relieves much of the stress and doubt that often blocks creativity. To tap into this flow, you must show up. Every single day. Push past your inner resistance. Let go of trying to control how life unfolds. Start moving with its current—this river of life.

That’s how real creation happens. That’s how new ideas emerge and how better things come into being. It all begins when you use your mind and body in service to the source that connects all life.

For years—decades even—I’ve contemplated one of life’s oldest questions: What is the purpose of all this? And now, I believe I’ve found an answer. One that may spare you the long search.

There are many intelligent theories we conjure when reflecting on why we’re here—on what defines the human experience. Some say it’s to raise a family, to build something lasting, to serve others, to fall in love, to leave a mark, or simply to be there for the people we care about. All of these answers hold truth. And because purpose is deeply subjective, what feels true to you, is true to you.

Still, there are two beliefs I hold strongly.

First: it’s worth asking the question. Every human benefits from taking the time to consciously explore why they exist. That inquiry—sometimes thrilling, often uncomfortable—leads to meaning. And meaning leads to a life marked not by fleeting pleasure, but by depth. Some find their answers early. Others take a lifetime. But there’s no prize for speed. What matters is that your answer is yours.

Second: purpose is not fixed. It evolves as we do.

Over the years, my own answers to this question have shifted many times. Not because earlier ones were wrong—but because deeper truths slowly emerged. Today, I see purpose on two levels.

The first is personal and time-bound: a life task or mission. This could be raising a child, building a company, earning a degree, or committing to a relationship. These are deeply meaningful, but not permanent. When one is complete, another often takes its place. We are constantly reborn into new purposes. Most of us can relate to this.

But the second level is more abstract, more universal.

Simply put: the purpose of life is to experience.

Beneath all the doing and becoming, there is something within us that watches. You can call it soul, spirit, awareness, consciousness, God, or whatever language suits you best. But it’s not your body, your mind, or your senses. It’s the observer. The silent presence that witnesses everything. And that presence has only one task: to experience life fully.

All of it. The highs and the lows. The clarity and the chaos. The joy, the pain, the confusion, the wonder. Without judgment. Without needing to explain. Just—experience.

What I love about this idea is that it liberates us from the burdens modern life so often imposes: the need to perform, to prove, to fit in, to signal our worth. These are constructs born of lack. Of fear. Of not enough. But pure experience—awareness itself—operates from abundance. It requires nothing. It already is.

And the doorway to it is not found in status or achievement. It’s found in presence. In letting go. In becoming fully awake to the moment you are in.

For me, the most powerful definition of purpose I’ve discovered is simply this: to experience. To live it, to feel it in every cell of my body. And in doing so, I find myself becoming the most fulfilled, curious, resilient, and alive version of who I am.

Because now, even struggle has meaning. Even pain becomes part of the unfolding. And my role is not to control it or resist it—but to be with it. To witness it. To experience it fully.

That, to me, is the secret of life. And the purpose of being alive.

“The only way to get creative work done is by starting at the beginning and then continuing to do the work until it’s finished. It’s a cycle of fear and bravery, fear and bravery.” — Seth Godin

When I speak about doing the work, I’m not referring to simply crossing things off your to-do list, responding to emails, or attending meetings. These tasks, which often feel like the pulse of modern work, are abstractions of the deeper act of creation. In our current landscape, knowledge work has morphed into a process of moving information around, keeping operations running, and communicating about the work. But these are merely derivatives of the original work—the creative foundation that built the systems and organizations we operate within. Some might call this busy work, or shallow work.

Despite the fact that this shallow work is the daily reality for most people trading time for money, there is a deeper, more valuable form of work: the work rooted in creation. This form of work is creative work, and its rules and dynamics are different. Instead of earning through time, you start earning through your mind. This creative act is where meaningful contributions to the world take place—where exceptional results come to life for those bold enough to embrace creation, refine their craft relentlessly, and continue through the cycle of fear and bravery.

Let’s define the creative act. When you have an idea for something that should exist and bring it from the formless realm of thought into the physical world, you’re engaging in the creative act. This doesn’t necessarily mean inventing something from scratch. It can involve refining existing things, improving them, or combining ideas in novel ways. The key characteristic of the creative act is that you bring something—whether digital or physical—into being and share it with the world. This is what we call shipping the work. And the creative act can be driven by either artistic inspiration or functional progress.

Creating something and then sharing it with the world requires courage. To most creatives, this process feels deeply personal and vulnerable. You’re exposing your work to criticism, risking judgment from those who might not understand or value it. It’s understandable that fear arises—after all, it’s a brave thing to sit down, face your resistance, and create. And chances are, your early efforts won’t be your best. But the real challenge is not just creating; it’s sharing that imperfect creation with the world. It’s this second step—shipping the work—that is as crucial as the first. The good news? It gets easier over time. The more you practice moving from the formless plane of ideas to the physical plane of action, the more natural it becomes. You’ll improve. You’ll grow. And eventually, what once seemed like a mere aspiration will become part of your identity. This is the creative act in its infancy.

Many people misunderstand the creative act by mistaking preparation for action. You can read countless books, make elaborate plans, and conduct endless experiments in an attempt to avoid starting out with “bad” work. But no amount of preparation can replace the real work. At some point, you must expose your creations to the world—and the sooner you do so, the better. There’s no substitute for diving in, for going through the motions of the creative act: having an idea, turning it into reality, and sharing it with others.

Here’s the truth: if you commit to the creative act long enough—persisting through times when it’s not working, learning with each iteration, and improving your craft—results are inevitable. For those who never reach the level of success they desire, the missing ingredient is usually simple: they gave up too early. They didn’t stay in the creative act long enough to see it through. The creative path always has a way forward, and doing the work is the key to unlocking it. You may have lost faith in your ability to create, but deep down, if you trust your intuition and engage with the process I’m describing, you’ll find that you’re being led in the right direction.

It’s important to note that the creative act is not limited to traditionally artistic endeavors—painting, writing, music, or visual arts. Creative acts also include building organizations, developing products, crafting strategies, and shaping visions. These are all part of the same process, as long as they serve the purpose of bringing an idea to life, rather than becoming an end in themselves.

Start training your creative muscle. Break through the fear and resistance that holds you back. Begin small. Share your work with the world. Move through the cycle of creation with as much force and energy as you can muster. If you do this, you’ll travel great distances. And, in ways that feel almost magical, the results you’ve been seeking will materialize. But remember, the secret is to lead with the work—the act of creation itself.

"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Freedom is an interesting concept. If you ask people in the Western world why they do the things they do, most commonly the answer is because they seek freedom. In their minds, they justify the things they are going through with the eventual attainment of not needing to do that very thing—and being free. This tends to be linked to money, where people appear fascinated by the imagination of not being constrained by it, and being free to buy anything, anytime.

With this widespread appeal around freedom, it’s worth asking what freedom actually is—and whether it’s a worthy pursuit, or just another illusion we’ve been domesticated into chasing. One that ultimately fails to answer the deeper questions of life, which often remain unaddressed as we distract ourselves with pursuits that feel meaningful, but turn out to have the opposite effect once attained.

Unpacking the concept of freedom, we realize there are many dimensions to its meaning. One of which is monetary freedom—the ability to buy and do whatever you please. The freedom to eat out whenever you want. To go on expensive vacations unattainable for most. To purchase the finest products in the marketplace. All of these desires are rooted in hedonistic impulses, which are largely a product of imitation. Rarely are these desires truly our own. More often, they’re shaped by looking up to others and mimicking the lives they project.

This monetary freedom doubles with another powerful motive in society: status. If you own expensive things and show them to the world, you're essentially shouting that you are of higher status than those around you. Whether intentional or not, that’s the effect. And status matters. In group dynamics, the person with the highest status enjoys privileges that feed our pleasure centers—being listened to, influencing decisions, attracting interest from others, including sexual partners. All of these are consequences of signaling high status to the world.

There are two common arguments that arise around this societal and hedonistic phenomenon.

The first usually comes from those who haven’t attained this level of financial freedom. They argue that living in excess and spending money on what they deem “pointless” is wasteful or morally wrong. There’s often heavy moral judgment, rooted not in truth but in scarcity. Psychologically, they tap into a victim mindset and antagonize those who have what they cannot access. But at its core, these rationalizations often grow from competition—from a desire to have the same freedom.

The second argument comes from those enjoying material wealth. They claim it’s not about status, but about genuinely valuing quality and finding joy in the finer things. And while this may be true for a small subset, I’ve found that most people use this reasoning as a defense mechanism—something they tell themselves to avoid admitting they’re driven by status. In conversation, when you study their behavior carefully, this becomes clear. It’s just a justification, used to shut down conversations that might expose something vulnerable.

There’s nothing wrong with attaining things that signal status—it’s a deeply human, well-studied phenomenon. But the issue arises when people aren’t honest about their motives. When they’re not owning their shadows. That’s when cognitive dissonance emerges, and they unconsciously build lives where their fulfillment and wellbeing are tied to a carefully curated self-image. And everything that puts that image at risk becomes a source of suffering—because they’re attached to how others see them. In other words, to their perceived place in the social hierarchy.

Here’s the paradox: monetary freedom often leads to personal unfreedom. Many who are financially free have built prisons for themselves, held together by self-image. They lose freedom in a different, subtler dimension. This usually stems from a deep belief of not being worthy. And the coping mechanism becomes projecting status to gain validation and avoid confronting that inner wound. This isn’t a judgment—just an observation of what’s playing out in the world.

Returning to the broader idea of freedom, two additional dimensions—time freedom and self-expression freedom—emerge alongside monetary freedom. Of course, you can break this down even further, but to me, these are the three foundational pillars of our modern understanding of freedom. And it’s in those latter two that meaning is found.

That’s not to say monetary freedom is irrelevant. It matters. But money as a means, used to evolve as a person and create something meaningful—that is what leads to fulfillment. Not wealth in isolation.

True fulfillment comes from the freedom to be fully yourself. To show up with your weird interests, insecurities, worries, dreams, and ambitions. That, to me, is the highest form of freedom. When you're so grounded in yourself that you don’t rely on external validation for your self-worth, you’ve truly become free. And this is a kind of freedom you can’t buy. It can only be earned—through inner work and trusting your evolution. Everything you need is already available. Just not yet accessible. And to reach that place, you have to do the work. No one can do it for you.

As you move closer to this deeper freedom, uncertainty, chaos, fear, and resistance will inevitably appear. And what’s asked of you is courage—to trust your intuition and go further in. But that’s where the highest order of freedom lies. Not just one degree beyond monetary freedom, but many.

There is such a place. It’s accessible to everyone.

You just have to go and look.

“The certainty of misery is preferable to the misery of uncertainty.” – Virginia Satir

Our relationship with uncertainty has become fucked up. Centuries ago, uncertainty was seen as a natural part of life—ever-present and unavoidable. Today, we’ve tried to artificially remove it, creating an illusion of predictability. Society’s systems are designed to reduce uncertainty. Those systems are a reflection of our collective belief that uncertainty is something bad. Even the word risk evokes aversion if you ask society at large. As a result, we’ve become fragile. So much effort now goes into preserving the status quo and avoiding change. That fragility hasn’t just slowed our progress in creating new things—it’s also built a system that directly opposes the optimal distribution of money, energy, and time. A system that runs against the nature of the world (and markets).

Of course, this shift didn’t happen just for the sake of it. It grew from an individual preference for certainty. And that’s understandable. When playing the status game, having a predictable path to reach your goal makes success easier. There’s a blueprint to follow. And that gives our thinking mind—and ego—some peace. But once you stop playing the status game, once you shed the mimetic desires conditioned by society and start building a life that’s uniquely yours, uncertainty shows up. And with it, the illusion of a perfectly certain environment is shattered.

When you begin to follow something greater than yourself—your life’s calling, if you will—you trade your trust in certainty for a deeper trust: trust that you’ll figure things out, that something beyond your rational mind will guide you where you're meant to go. On this path, uncertainty isn’t optional. It’s guaranteed. The only certainty is that there will be uncertainty.

If we look closer at what uncertainty actually means, and how we relate to it, we’ll see it’s packed with negative associations. It’s often framed as something inherently bad. But the truth is, uncertainty isn’t good or bad. It’s just descriptive. It points to a dynamic condition shaping the reality you observe. It simply means the outcome of something can’t be reliably predicted. That’s it. It doesn’t say anything about whether the outcome is good or bad.

There’s also a curious mismatch between how we relate to uncertainty in groups versus as individuals. In society, we’re expected to have all the answers. Not knowing how something might play out is seen as weakness. We look up to those who act like they’ve got it all figured out. But that perception is based entirely on the future—something that never actually exists in the present moment. And the present moment is all we ever have. Meanwhile, in private, most people know they don’t have the certainty they project publicly. It’s a façade. One that falls apart the moment you have an honest conversation with yourself. Feeling lost or unsure isn’t rare—it’s probably the norm. This mismatch between perceived and actual certainty creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. It distorts our reality and makes it harder to navigate.

If you want to follow your highest calling and bring your unique gift into the world, you’ll need to change your relationship with uncertainty. That starts with letting go of the emotional baggage we’ve learned to attach to it. Instead, treat it for what it is: the natural state of being human. Uncertainty doesn’t have to feel uncomfortable. Many wisdom traditions suggest detachment as the antidote. Life is unfolding right here, right now. And most of the prediction-based scenarios running through your head will never happen. They only pull you away from what’s actually in front of you.

Making this shift requires courage. And self-trust. And no—it doesn’t happen overnight. But it’s worth it. Because uncertainty isn’t going anywhere. We’re surrounded by it, like fish in water. We might as well learn to swim with it. To deal with it in useful ways. To stop letting it stand between us and a life that’s actually ours.

You can make that choice: to live with the wild, undomesticated discomfort of uncertainty—rather than settling for the dead certainty of misery.

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

As you leave the world of perfectly constrained environments that have been artificially created by society and enter the world of creativity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, the rules we’ve been taught for so many years no longer apply. Nature itself is raw, unpredictable, constantly changing and evolving. So why do you believe the human experience is any different? It’s not.

Our deep need for safety, order, and certainty is artificially constructed by what we call society. If you ask anyone who dares to change the world to any degree, you will learn that the sense of certainty is an illusion. At any given moment, a seemingly stable field of work can get eroded through technological change. The way society is constructed, it tries to soft-land change and leave us with the false belief that such a thing as certainty exists. And people gain influence because of the appeal of such a world. But it doesn’t correspond to the realities of life and nature. So whenever someone promises you certainty, you should be skeptical and carefully scrutinize the words and arguments they use against the first-order truths you know to be true.

Only a fool takes the word of others at face value. When you start to go down the infinite loop of questioning the things we were taught to be true, you start realizing how many of those are based on premature assumptions that will eventually be proven wrong. This doesn’t mean that you can apply such scrutiny and care to every endeavor in life — your time and energy are limited. But it does underline the importance of questioning your perceived truth.

Moving from the nature of the world — and its certainty of uncertainty — to the world of creativity and ideas, the world we’ve entered decades ago, you start to notice that to give birth to new ideas, a component of chaos is inevitable. And it contributes to the quality of your ideas. Great ideas don’t happen in a perfectly controlled environment; the measure of their quality reveals itself only as they come in contact with nature. Rather, great ideas happen when you combine things that weren’t meant to be combined. The greatest inventions of our time — the ones that most meaningfully accelerated the human species — were often random, unplanned accidents, born of tinkering, which is unconstrained by nature. Whether it’s the invention of the light bulb, the steam engine, computers, or artificial intelligence, there were thousands of collective attempts at invention from our species, most remaining unknown and undiscovered. Even if some weren’t classified as accidents, nonlinearity in discovery — and a component of randomness and chaos — certainly played their role.

When operating on the plane of ideas, remove the assumption that the work will be linear, controlled, and structured. A component of not knowing where to go — of self-doubt, tinkering, persistence, chaos, and randomness — is always present. Neither of the extremes work in isolation. But the balance between them is what allows for the polarity that gives rise to ideas that move us forward — ideas that are an expression of your unique purpose in this world. Let chaos be. Let structure be. The right breakthroughs will appear if you consistently show up and do the work. And this belief is worth trusting in.

I’ve spent the last six months in an almost absurdly privileged situation. I could do whatever the fuck I wanted with my time—no job, financial security, travel, complete freedom to wake up and go to bed whenever I pleased, to work out when I wanted, to see friends on a whim. Six months of total liberty.

Fifteen-year‑old me would have called this the dream life: full freedom to do—or not do—anything. And at first, it felt incredible. But over time I grew comfortable.

When I was around twelve, I got my first computer. Within a year of diving into things I’d never encountered before, I transformed into the highest version of myself at that age. I woke up at 4:30 AM before school every morning to build things and learn—apps, websites, 3D design, video editing, software, anything I could get my hands on. From that obsession sprang my first freelance gig at fifteen: building websites for local businesses. I was obsessed with Casey Neistat and convinced that one day I’d live in New York City in my own creative studio, making things every single day. Ten years later, I’m basically there: I live in Berlin, I have a creative studio, I create every day, and I control my own schedule. On paper, I should feel proud and accomplished.

But the truth beneath the surface is different. By reaching this state, I’ve become comfortable. Without the pain that once drove me—like in school, when I found every subject boring and a waste of time—I slowly let my self‑discipline slip and lost my skill for self‑leadership. When no one tells you what to do and the only person you’re accountable to is yourself, you start justifying why it’s fine to stay comfortable. Life is now—why do anything uncomfortable? I feel safer and happier simply doing what I feel like doing.

Those are the stories I told myself. But after reflecting, I believe comfort is a curse. It’s as widespread and insidious as doomscrolling on Instagram or TikTok.

To me, comfort equates to an agreement to be mediocre—average. The moment you’re comfortable, you stop tapping into your highest potential. Good is the enemy of great. And since everything in the Western world is just one click away, we’ve all unconsciously agreed to be average. Why change when you have food on the table, decent friends, and endless dopamine hits? That’s exactly the problem.

What makes this so hard to see is how widespread it is. We’re wired to imitate and compare—happiness, money, success are all relative. If everyone around you is comfortable and average, you’ve allowed a powerful force into your life that will keep you exactly where you are. Gradually, your ambition, your dreams and hopes fade away, and you’re blinded by the curse of comfort.

You can’t fix this with incremental improvements. The human mind is wired differently—at least mine is. Instead, we need radical change. Bold action. One big decision that generates hundreds of smaller decisions for you: moving to a new city alone, quitting your job to spend a year in a Zen monastery. Because the curse of comfort creeps in biological ways, we need something drastic to break free. Change isn’t judged by going to the gym three times one week and then not again for three months; it’s measured by sustainable, long-term shifts that unlock a higher state of yourself.

This little rant isn’t meant to judge. If your ambition is to be comfortable and average, that’s perfectly fine—so long as it’s a conscious choice. But I’ve found most people are hungry. They have desires, wants, and dreams—but they fail to act because they’re too comfortable. When there’s nothing to lose and food is guaranteed, there’s no strong reason to push yourself. In the Western world we’ve created, everything works against action. I’m still figuring out how to navigate this—I don’t have all the answers yet—but I do know that by becoming aware of the distracted mediocrity around us, we give ourselves the chance to choose something different instead of accepting the status quo.

I recently hit a wall. I started the year with big ambitions—plans to launch a company, build an online audience, and kickstart my music career. A few months in, though, I felt disconnected from those goals, like I was stretching myself too thin across too many projects.

Here’s the lesson I’m discovering: I failed to build momentum because I scattered my efforts. Momentum, like compound interest, only grows when you consistently invest. To see real returns—and feel like you’re moving forward—you can’t work on something every third day; you need daily commitment.

I’ve talked about this before, but the angle that’s just clicked is simple: make every day count. When I skip progress on what matters, I feel unfulfilled—a wasted day. That doesn’t mean grinding seven days a week without rest. It means recognizing each day’s opportunity instead of drifting reactively through time. Meet every morning with the energy, urgency, and excitement it deserves.

If you don’t obsess over making each day count, years slip by in an instant, leaving you with that nagging sense that something’s missing. Your life is the sum of your days—if something feels off, examine how you’re spending them.

Make every day count.

I recently reflected on what separates the most effective founders from the rest—and one conclusion I reached is that exceptional founders learn to engineer “10× moves” again and again.

What do I mean by a “10× move”? It isn’t literally about multiplying any metric by ten every time. Rather, it’s a mindset of probing deeply for opportunities to improve something not by 10% or even 2×, but by an entire order of magnitude. You force yourself to ask: “What’s holding us back? And if that constraint didn’t exist, how could we explode this metric tenfold?”

This reminds me of what I hear from founders who’ve been through Y Combinator. If you show up to office hours aiming to recruit 100 new users this week, the partner will lean forward and ask, “Why not 1,000?” That simple challenge exposes invisible bottlenecks—manual processes, marketing channels you haven’t tried, product hooks you haven’t optimized—and compels you to dismantle them so you can scale in leaps, not steps.

So the real work of a high‑velocity founder isn’t just execution—it’s relentless constraint analysis. First, you pause to identify the current limiting factors in whatever you care about most: user growth, engagement, revenue, whatever it is. Second, you imagine what an order‑of‑magnitude improvement would look like if those constraints vanished. Finally, you marshal every resource and ounce of creativity to make that exponential jump a reality.

If you’re building something, carve out time each week to zoom out and ask yourself: “Given where we are now, what’s the best 10× move we could make this week?” Over time, that discipline of aiming for exponential, rather than incremental, progress becomes the hallmark of truly exceptional founders.

it’s time for something new. i’m starting the craziest, most ambitious, and riskiest company of my life.

six months ago, i made the tough decision to step away from my first startup, Jamie. not because i stopped believing in it, or due to conflict, or anything like that. rather, i felt an inner calling to explore something new.

for five years, i poured my heart and soul into Jamie. we were growing fast, reaching a scale few startups achieve, with a talented, hardworking team. it felt good—comfortable, even. but i no longer woke up with the same excitement i once did. a voice in my head urged me to move on.

after leaving, i dove into what truly excites me: music, writing, building quirky side projects, documenting my life through videos, reading, and traveling. a few months into this journey, while visiting my friend Bjoern, a new idea came up. what if we created an organization dedicated to serving humanity at its core? from those conversations, Acta was born.

at acta, our mission is to unlock human potential to create a better today. we have a long list of ideas for ventures that drive positive impact in the world, one way or another. we’re seeking founders—on both the product and business sides—who are deeply committed to this vision, not just for profit, but for meaningful change.

we’re also putting the personal evolution of everyone at acta front and center. through meditation, embodiment practices, coaching, and a focus on self-awareness, we’re reconnecting with timeless wisdom to foster more meaningful lives. this way, we’re not only driving rapid execution for impact but also nurturing the unfolding of every person in our organization.

our plan? launch dozens of highly profitable ventures over the next few years—ventures that aren’t exit-driven but are always tied to a positive contribution to humanity. we’re introducing some radical ideas, like sharing everything in public with the world. more on that soon.

yes, there are countless ways this could fail. but i’ve never felt so deeply about a company before. at its heart, acta is an experiment, and i can’t wait to share this journey with you all.

if this resonates, you can learn more about what we’re building on our website (link in comments).

for now, thank you for reading. we’ll keep you posted. much love, Louis

I've been wrapping my mind around a term that has recently become hot talk in the San Francisco startup builder bubble: "high-agency" people. This phrase describes the characteristics and mindset required to create things and build companies.

To delve deeper into what high agency truly means—and to know what to look for when recruiting for my projects—I asked ChatGPT for some insights. Here’s my rephrasing of those answers:

• They don't wait for permission, external motivation, or clear instructions to start taking meaningful action.
• They possess an internal locus of control, believing that outcomes are shaped primarily by their own efforts rather than external circumstances.
• They act quickly, decisively, and independently, even amid uncertainty and ambiguity.
• They have an inclination to proactively shape reality rather than passively accepting it.
• They demonstrate an intrinsic obsession with what they're creating, seeking to understand the ins and outs as deeply as possible with infinite curiosity.
• They get joy from doing things for their own sake, not just for external rewards.
• They care intensely about tangible results and outcomes, rather than merely staying busy without clear purpose.

High-agency people are extremely rare, but you know one when you see them. I still wonder whether high agency is a nature-given trait or a potential that can be unlocked in most people. Regardless, high-agency individuals are the ones who shape the world, achieve asymmetric success, and find deep fulfillment in their lives.

Interpersonal relationships are hard. They can be challenging at work, with a spouse, or with family.

In my experience, the most common problem is that people listen with the intent to speak rather than to understand. The reasons are many—ranging from insecurities that force us to wear a mask, to emotional states that block genuine communication. Instead of speaking with one another, we often speak at one another.

One quality I strive to embody in every conversation is listening with my whole being—to truly feel the other person rather than merely hear them. In that state of presence, I reflect back what I sense, echoing sentiments like “I feel you feeling me” or “You feel me feeling you.” I trust that when I speak, the other person senses my sincerity, and vice versa.

This is where real breakthroughs occur. Radical truth emerges, and relationships are strengthened on a foundation of compassion and truly seeing one another for who we are. It is here that the true power of relationships unfolds—a depth that remains inaccessible to most.

A good value to live by is to provide use value in excess of cash value.

This phrase comes from Wallace D. Wattles. It means that whenever you exchange something—whether a service, product, or possession—for money (the proxy we use to estimate value), you should attempt to give more than you receive in cash. Some people might simply call this generosity.

I personally believe that the good you do and the use value you provide will eventually return to you in excess. Instead of focusing on what you can take, focus on what you can give. One may call this karma, generosity, or a giving mindset. All of these capture the idea that giving first and patiently waiting without expectations will yield returns that manifest in unpredictable ways.

I have experienced this many times in my life. Beyond fostering a more peaceful state of being and a deeper connection with the world, it opens up opportunities you cannot fathom today.

Lead with generosity, and always trade use value in excess of cash value. Something beyond the human mind will take notice and return the act manyfold.

I just started my new organization (Acta) at the beginning of 2025. Over the past months, a powerful vision has emerged:

Acta is an organization that provides a structured environment to unlock human potential. We guide inner, embodied work, encourage full devotion to early curiosities, and foster conditions in which the self can be overcome.

Obsessed with long-term goals, I've attempted to articulate my wildest vision for how Acta might evolve over the next 25 years. This vision is based on assumptions, and we still have much to figure out. These uncertainties will provide new data points, but at this moment, this is what excites me:

1. Build an organization that unlocks human potential in a repeatable way and brings useful experiences to the world (target: ~100 initiatives by the end of 2027).

2. Use our generated revenue to create a new type of school for everyone at minimal cost, designed for the new world we are entering.

3. Expand this school to reach a billion people by 2050, influencing the world’s trajectory toward a purpose-driven, better future.

Just writing this feels a bit scary. I fear that anyone reading these words might make grand projections and harsh judgments. But I am here to dream—to take every risk and relentlessly pursue a meaningful, long-term upside, which I call my life's task.

Not every hour is created equal. Given a task of fixed scope, it might take you one hour or four—depending solely on the intensity you bring to it.

Extend this idea to your daily life, and you'll see that what you accomplish depends largely on how intensely you use your fixed number of hours each day.

In today's world, constant distractions have become the norm. The subconscious urge to check your phone or emails, along with other dopamine-inducing habits, undermines the intensity of your time. These habits train your nervous system to operate at a lower level of focus.

Since this state is now common, reclaiming control of your hours is extraordinarily challenging. It demands significant self-discipline and the ability to overcome ingrained behaviors. This challenge isn’t solved by intellectual effort alone; it calls for an informed recalibration of your nervous system and bodily sensations.

If you want to accomplish more, begin by assessing how you spend your hours. Consider the intensity of your effort, and ask yourself: Are you using your full potential? Which subconscious behaviors hold you back? Then, work on recalibrating your body and mind. Remember, intensity matters.

Whenever I speak with creatives about their craft—and how they can build meaningful careers if they'd just try—I most often advise them to increase the volume of shipping their work.

The magic of increasing quantity is that it turns your work into practice. It removes the perfectionism that blocks you from shipping and opens your mind to learning. Every rep gives you another shot at sharing your work with the world and finding resonance.

But quantity alone isn’t enough. You also need to improve and iterate on the work you create. If you obstinately ship your work without developing an intuition for what you could do better, you will stagnate and become frustrated by a lack of progress.

In short, quantity itself doesn’t drive progress—quantity combined with improvement does. If you aren’t getting the results you want, check whether you’re expanding along both vectors.

Your outcomes directly reflect the clarity with which you envision your future. In this post, I share the vision for Acta. My goal is that if our work intrigues you, you will sense either a clear resonance—or dissonance—with the future we imagine. In this way, the post serves as a filter to help us find the right people to join us.

Our mission is to unlock the highest potential in every human. We believe each of us can contribute to a bright, livable world. Yet, the way society and our modern economic systems are designed often obstruct this unlocking.

So where do we find this highest potential? As Goethe once said, "If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses." We believe every human has a purpose—a higher calling from the soul (or universe or God, whichever resonates with you). Following this calling not only leads you to live your most fulfilled life but also empowers you to contribute to a better world at your highest capacity.

This state reveals itself through observable signs. People who follow their highest calling—or inner genius—act for their own sake. They truly love what they do and are devoted to their work. They display persistence, infinite curiosity, and genuine, pure intentions. Rather than forcing themselves, they are naturally drawn to their craft, speaking of it with excitement and living in harmony with the world.

We believe this natural state is available to everyone, yet it remains inaccessible. Modern society has constructed complex principles, ideas, and values that are mimetic rather than born of our own desires. As a result, much of our potential remains locked away. We unconsciously trade good for great—and this is where Acta's mission begins.

We aim to create an organization that helps people reconnect with their inner child-like inclinations and design their lives around them. To do so, we draw from ancient wisdom—such as Taoism and Stoicism—and merge it with a modern understanding of the psyche and the world. We see each person with compassion, recognizing that every decision made has shaped who they are today. By combining these ideas about human potential with the insight that challenges cannot be solved by the thinking mind alone, we design tools and systems to bring you closer to your inner genius.

Acta is not an education or coaching company. Our goal is not to create transactional interactions or foster dependency on our work. Instead, Acta is a place where we play long-term games with long-term people. We strive to create an environment in which those who join us can flourish, providing a space that nurtures the natural needs and desires of the human experience. People may join or leave Acta according to their highest resonance and truth. There is no dependency—only true detachment from outcomes—because we believe in a force larger than the human mind that connects things in unpredictable yet meaningful ways. Acta is best described as an organization modeled after life in its most genuine sense: unpredictable, exciting, raw, radical, and loving. It is a space where people come together to tap into their inner genius, support one another on their journeys, and create contributions that foster a better world for all.

While these ideas may seem abstract, they represent our deepest convictions for creating this tribe. Everything that unfolds in the coming years will be rooted in this intention. Whether you find these ideas unclear or profoundly resonant, that's okay. We are actively seeking individuals who are excited by our mission. If you are one of them, please consider applying at actastudios.com/apply.

Around three months ago, I started documenting my life and work online with two intentions:

1. Just document for the sake of it (I love working visually and sharing what I work on).
2. Grow an audience that is truly invested in my journey.

Now, a few months in, I've learned one thing: whether a video captures new viewers depends on how well you answer one simple question.

What do people want to watch?

That’s all that matters. Yes, you can break it down into many variables that affect a video’s reach and engagement, but ultimately, they all aim to measure how much someone wants to watch what you’re talking about.

This question sounds painfully simple, yet it’s extremely hard to answer well. To do so, you need a clear understanding of who your audience is—and a deep understanding of what they want.

There are two ways to figure this out. You can either talk to many people in your audience and learn from those conversations, or you can radically create for yourself. I am choosing the latter approach. However, when reviewing your own work, there is a natural bias: I love what I do, yet the market tells me that I haven’t answered this question well.

If you remove that bias and explore what you actually enjoy watching from others, powerful answers begin to emerge. This is the key to gaining traction, interest, and attention with the work you share.

What makes the difference between something good and something great? One answer lies in the love for detail.

When you use a great product for the first time, it's hard to pinpoint the specific elements that make the experience exceptional. It isn’t any one detail alone, but the love for the craft that emerges as the details accumulate.

To create something truly great, you must be obsessed with the details. Those driven by external outcomes will never create something as remarkable as those who work for its own sake—the people who find love and joy in the craft, obsessing over every detail.

Simply getting the details right for their own sake isn’t enough. It’s the details that bring your idea to life in the best possible way. Love for detail only creates greatness when it serves the end product you are crafting.

Whether consciously or not, people notice. They may not be able to pinpoint exactly what it was, but greatness stands out when seen. Love for detail is a worthy pursuit.

Whenever I feel stuck in a project, craft, or pursuit, I trace it back to not doing it daily. The moment I plan to work on it only on certain days—like “every other day,” “posting a video on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday,” or “working on the product only on Mondays”—I lose momentum, energy, and progress.

What works best for me is doing it daily and lowering the bar so I can commit every day, no matter what.

For exercise, I work out for at least 10 minutes every day.

For my new startup reflecta, I code on it for at least 25 minutes every day.

For content creation, I post something every day, no matter what.

For writing, I publish a piece of writing ever day (just like this one).

Do it daily or don't.

Why is this so powerful?

I think there are four reasons:

1. You start treating your pursuits as practice, which removes most of the overthinking, perfectionism, and doubts about the final product.
2. You cast a daily vote for the kind of person you want to be.
3. You increase the volume of practice, which is the biggest driver for progress and improvement.
4. You expose yourself to the benefits of compound interest over time.

It sounds so simple—and it is. If your goal is to make meaningful progress and harness the benefits of compound interest, commit to doing it daily. Sure, some people make progress without a daily habit, but if I had to bet on one approach, it would be doing it daily or not at all.

Many people waste energy by trying to solve problems that might occur in the future. Instead of mapping out every unpredictable scenario and devising strategies to mitigate them, focusing on what is needed right now pays higher dividends.

I believe people become caught up in future problems for three reasons.

Firstly, we have an embodied, domesticated need to avoid mistakes—a trait that is neither inherently good nor bad. However, if this need leads you to spend your time on low-probability scenarios with no life-or-death consequences, you waste valuable energy. The future is unpredictable and ambiguous, making it irrational to invest heavily in preventing events that may never happen. This avoidance is rooted in fear, yet most solutions can be devised once problems arise. In the present, when all the information is available, mistakes are much easier to correct.

Secondly, those who devote energy to potential future problems often lack confidence in their ability to handle challenges. If you truly believed you could solve any problem, you wouldn’t expend energy on hypothetical issues. While you might claim to be capable, actions speak louder than words. Deep down, a doubt—shaped by past experiences, trauma, or negative self-beliefs—can undermine your confidence. For such individuals, simply flipping a switch isn’t possible; the key lies in recognizing that this doubt isn’t deeply ingrained and understanding its origins.

Thirdly, society expects you to have answers for every potential scenario. This collective belief, born from insecurity, fear, and a desire to belong, drives you to prepare for every conceivable problem in order to signal trustworthiness, competence, and intelligence. Yet, most of the scenarios you worry about will never come to pass, making the energy spent on them irrational. Our desire to fit in thus becomes an obstacle to allocating our energy optimally.

I am not saying that all planning or future-oriented thinking is worthless. The people who change the world have a clear vision of the future and let that guide their actions—only in this way can you create endeavors that take years to come to fruition. However, it is useful to audit your thoughts and actions by evaluating how many potential problems you are trying to solve before they even arise. Since time and energy are scarce resources, treat them as such. More often than not, the greatest potential lies in actions taken in the present—not in an uncertain future based on assumptions that may prove false. Solve problems as they emerge.

A powerful question I've begun asking myself and those around me is this:

Are you playing to win? Or are you playing not to lose?

At first glance, the question seems simple, yet it carries deep implications. In my experience, the vast majority of people play not to lose. They focus on protecting against the downside. Their actions and decisions are geared toward avoiding failure. Their goals are things like "keeping our current growth rate" or "continuing the success we are having." This approach is well accepted and resonates with most people's way of thinking—and in many cases, it leads to success.

But what if you play to win? When you aim to ruthlessly maximize the upside, you make bolder, more courageous decisions. Instead of obsessing over avoiding downside risks, you concentrate on increasing your exposure to upside. Your actions and decisions reflect that objective, often leading to success.

So, which approach is right? There is no absolute right or wrong—it all starts with defining your goal. Success is simply about getting what you want. If your aim is incremental improvement and finding 10% opportunities, then playing not to lose may be your winning strategy. But if your goal is to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements and discover 10x to 1000x opportunities, playing to win is the strategy. Ultimately, it comes down to what you want.

The right choice depends on your risk appetite, your courage, and your vision. In the strategy of playing to win, your mind is your only limit (aside from physical laws). I believe that being clearly aware of the strategy you choose matters because the two approaches differ fundamentally.

In my experience, those who play not to lose are driven by fear. Even if they cannot express it in those words, fear underlies this strategy. As you develop your awareness, you begin to see that over 90% of your thoughts are conditioned by fear-based responses. While fear can serve useful functions, it can also be irrational and hinder a brighter, bolder, and more fulfilled version of yourself.

Switching from playing not to lose to playing to win is not merely a mental exercise—it is a deeper process that requires exploring your fears. The goal is to fully embody this new strategy. Few reach that point, but those who do are the ones who shape our world and future in profound ways, operating on a utility curve far aside from the masses.

Which strategy are you pursuing right now?

In 2022, during my first coaching session with Matthias Müller-Lindenberg, we explored what I needed to do to help my startup, Jamie, succeed. My co-founder Benedikt and I began by making lists—writing down everything that came to mind about what was required for our venture’s success.

Many ideas emerged. As we discussed them one by one, I read aloud one of my notes: “our success will require hard work.” Matthias smiled gently and asked, “Why do you think so?” I explained that hard work and persistence are what it takes—lessons I’d learned from the successful founders I admired. I added that with all the suffering that may come, I would have to work hard to overcome it. Calmly, Matthias responded, “If you believe that the way ahead will be hard, it will be. But if you believe the way ahead will be harmonic, disciplined, yet balanced with yourself, then that is how it will turn out.”

In that moment, something clicked. I had always assumed the path forward must be hard, demanding immense work, discipline, and willpower. But I realized that this was just a belief—one not firmly grounded in reality. Sure, agency, focus, and work ethic are important when building a company, but as someone who naturally values these traits, there is no reason for the journey to be painful.

Yes, there will be painful times, and some struggle is inevitable. Yet even then, much of the suffering is self-inflicted. There is no law that building a meaningful company requires enduring hardship. It all begins with our perception and the self-fulfilling prophecies we hold deep down—most of which stem from flawed personal logic.

Your perception of the present and the future shapes outcomes in profound ways. In that sense, your perception becomes your reality. There are paths available that combine purpose, joy, and fulfillment—but only if you truly believe they are accessible. By reexamining your perception, you can see how much you might be standing in your own way, and understand the path to changing that at its very core.

I recently discovered a new concept about how life works, which I call the life curve. It’s an evolutionary pattern you can find everywhere—relationships, companies, projects, even writing—both on a micro and macro level. It holds the key to making the changes you care about happen.

I first encountered a similar idea in another context. Seth Godin talks about “the dip,” which describes the natural journey of any creative project. You begin with an exciting, easy, and motivating start, and then inevitably, you hit the dip. In that moment, you face reality and the obstacles you must overcome. Simultaneously, resistance—overthinking, perfectionism, self-doubt, frustration—creeps in. This is all part of the dip. Push through it, and things start to work. Persist long enough, and exponential growth—in any dimension you choose—will kick in, reigniting excitement and possibly exceeding even your wildest imagination.

Interestingly, a similar concept underpins startup culture. Y Combinator, for example, shows founders a similar curve to prepare them for the journey ahead.

But this curve goes beyond creative projects and startups—it’s deeply embedded in life. Relationships begin with excitement, flow, and love, then naturally become more complicated as you notice aspects that once went unseen. Your task is to work through these challenges to make space for a more powerful version of that relationship.

That’s why I call it the life curve. Nearly everything evolves in waves: initial excitement, followed by complication and resistance, and then a more potent form of excitement and impact. These waves repeat with every new initiative, idea, project, or relationship.

Once you understand this pattern, you gain the confidence that things will eventually improve. This is simply part of the journey—a test of your commitment. It’s almost as if the universe asks, “Are you sure this is what you want to be doing?” If you quit, maybe it wasn’t for you. But if you continue to show up and persist, things will get better—they always do. With an awareness of the life curve, patience becomes easier because you understand the natural evolution of things. The life curve, after all, holds the key to everything.

What makes a product truly great? Is it its many exciting features, its simplicity, its elegance, or the way it integrates into your life? Everyone seems to have a "ground-breaking" opinion. New frameworks and hot takes emerge almost daily. It can be confusing to find direction in this noise-filled environment.

At its core, I believe greatness comes down to one simple principle: focus on one thing and do it exceptionally well. The world may dress up this idea with fancy terms every few years, but the essence remains the same.

When you excel at one thing, you don’t need to be good at many. It’s an intentional trade-off. Products that try to do too much often end up mediocre at best. Spreading your focus too thin creates something that no one truly loves—only something many sort of like—which is dangerous when your goal is to make a real change.

Over time, a product can grow in complexity. Consider the iPhone: what is the one thing it is exceptional at? There isn’t a clear answer because it evolved gradually, making it an outlier you shouldn’t compare yourself to. Instead, look at the iPod. At its peak, the iPod was exceptional at one thing: playing music on the go. As Paul Buchheit points out, it had just three key attributes: it was small enough to fit in your pocket, could hold many hours of music, and was easy to sync. Every decision served its core purpose. That is what great product design looks like. Exceptionalism comes at the cost of relentless focus.

When you begin creating products and solving problems, remember this core question:

What is the one thing my product should be exceptional at?

Then deepen it with:

What are the three key attributes that serve its essence?

This approach will spark thoughtful discussion and force you to confront the hard questions of making something truly great—not just good. To achieve greatness, you must be willing to give up being merely good.

A value I have begun to embrace in recent years is radical truth. Most people agree that honesty is a cornerstone of interpersonal relationships. Yet living by this principle fully—not just 98%—proves harder than it seems.

We often find ourselves holding back. We withhold our full truth because we fear hurting others or assume it’s better not to share everything. It’s not that we lie; we simply avoid stating things as they are. We water down our radical honesty by using too many words or dancing around the point. This behavior is natural, shaped by our upbringing and cultural expectations—not wanting to hurt others.

This way of being in the world is acceptable. I’m not prescribing a right or wrong approach—interpersonal relationships are complex and a major source of suffering. However, I have learned that expressing your radical truth in the moment creates more value. And has proven most effective to my life's evolution.

When you speak your full radical truth without holding back, you open space for significant, evolutionary change. Conversely, when you compromise on that truth, you compress the vital information that should be shared. In doing so, you hinder the natural evolution of yourself, the other person, and the relationship. If you were always radically honest—without letting empathy obscure your truth—you would accelerate the intrinsic evolution of everything around you. I’m not saying you should be a jerk, hostile, or mal-intentioned. You can deliver hard truths empathetically. But when you try to control how someone reacts to your truth, you diminish the value of the conversation and close the door to the full potential in both you and the other person.

Speaking your radical truth—even when it is uncomfortable and risky—ultimately accelerates your journey toward your highest potential. Failing to do so harms not only you but also the other person and the world. This approach may inevitably lead to some relationships breaking or conflicts causing pain, but that pain is self-inflicted. It is not your task to shield someone from the radical truth.

This may sound like an idealistic standard that is hard to achieve in the real world. Yet once you detach from outcomes and enter a state of complete presence, you will see that this way of living is both accessible and beneficial in the long term. It starts with a commitment to trade short-term conflict avoidance and comfort for the long-term unfolding of potential—embracing the sometimes harsh yet ever-evolving nature of life. This is raw life.

The transition from thought to action in the real world is where magic happens. Yet it remains the part least understood by most people—the very point where many ideas die.

There are countless lessons and approaches to help during this transition. The ones that resonate with me most—and have proven most useful for both me and those I work with—are simplicity and clarity.

Let's start with clarity. When you're in a state of mental chaos (as many artists often are), taking dedicated action becomes nearly impossible. With hundreds of possible directions, a lack of clear focus means you won't achieve the results you desire. To get what you want, you must be clear about your direction and stick to it. Without that clarity, you risk constantly course-adjusting or not knowing where to begin, leaving you stuck.

Results begin with clarity. If you cannot clearly express the vision you're pursuing and the actions needed to reach it, success remains out of reach. Contemplating your vision, writing about it, or sketching out projects helps you gain the clarity necessary to succeed. It’s the essential first step.

Once you have clarity, the next step is simplicity. Overcomplicating your goals makes taking action exponentially harder. Complexity, in this sense, is the enemy of execution. Instead of setting the bar too high—like committing to 90 minutes of exercise every day when life inevitably interferes—start simple. Try just 5 minutes a day. In a world fueled by compound interest, long-term consistency matters far more than short bursts of intensity. The more complexity you add, the harder it becomes to stick with your plan.

Simplicity not only makes it easier for you to show up and do the work you are meant to, but it also makes it easier for others to join your journey. If you need 30 minutes to explain your work, you’re doing something wrong—it should be clear in 30 seconds. If it's not, then your vision isn't clear or simple enough.

By cultivating clarity and simplicity in the projects you want to bring into the world, you're already ahead of over 95% of people. Your mind may try to play tricks on you, whispering, "If it were this simple, everyone would do it." The truth is, it is that simple. Yet our thinking mind and fear-based thoughts get in the way, and negative self-beliefs can limit us in profound ways.

In your life, start with clarity and simplicity. They will take you far—but remember, this approach demands a continuous commitment to clarifying and simplifying, again and again.

Occasionally, I experience moments that offer a glimpse of magic. In these instances, I am in complete harmony with the world, feeling truly alive as everything simply clicks into place.

To me, it’s that moment when I’m creating a new track that feels undeniably right—a reflection of the emotions I’m experiencing at that time. It’s a moment of pure excitement and joy. Likewise, when an idea comes alive feels magical. Sometimes, during a conversation with a friend about their work, something new and concrete emerges—a vision is born.

These glimpses of magic are what I strive for. They are the moments when I tap into my highest potential and create something meaningful, connecting with my deepest purpose. I design my life to maximize these occurrences.

What constitutes a glimpse of magic for you may be very different. Perhaps it’s the moment you sew a new fashion piece, solve a challenging engineering problem, or teach someone a new tennis technique. Whatever it is, these moments reveal something beyond our everyday human experience—a touch of something higher, whether you call it God, the divine, the universe aligning, or another name entirely.

Living your best life by tapping into your unique highest potential is something I believe everyone should strive for. It is the practical way you connect with your purpose.

You don’t create these moments by forcing them with your mind; you discover the magic that makes you feel truly alive. Begin that search and find it—because in that discovery, you are meant to be found.

Your level of achievement stands in direct correlation to the clarity you have on the thing you want to achieve.

If you cannot articulate in great detail where you want to go, you can never reach your destination.

The clearer you are on what you want, the higher the likelihood you will achieve it.

The way you gain clarity is by contemplating your vision. In resting awareness and stillness. Not by talking about it and letting external influences rule over you. But by looking inward. Making space. And seeing what naturally comes up.

Success in this sense is a journey to the inner. To a place where you meet meaningfulness.

That’s how you “win from within” and get what you want out of life.

In the work I do, I often find myself blocked, unable to do what I set out to do. There’s resistance. Consciously, I know I should just push through. But something keeps me from doing so.

There are many reasons for this, most of which tie back to fear. It can show up as perfectionism, overthinking, self-doubt, obsessive comparisons to others, and more. I’ve found one approach that seems to break through all of this, almost like magic.

It’s the mindset of practice.

The truth is, you’re not born a master of any skill. To improve your work and make better things, you need to get better at making them. Mastery.

There’s a reality that’s both good and bad: to master anything, you need to put in around 10,000 hours. The good news is that talent doesn’t really matter as much as we think. If you spend 10,000 hours practicing a skill, it’s inevitable that you’ll master it—this is how your brain is designed. The bad news is that 10,000 hours is a lot of time. And most of us expect results after the first few hours. Those expectations aren’t just unrealistic, they also stand in the way of sticking to our work.

What tends to happen is we start a new project and feel excited; we work on it for a few days or weeks. Then, once the initial enthusiasm fades, we stop. We set the project aside. We let what we could be die.

This problem stems from one simple mistake: we’re not approaching the work from a mindset of practice. If we were, the results wouldn’t matter so much. Doing things in the mindset of practice allows us to learn, to just ship the thing, and not worry about the approval of others, or its success, or its quality. We’re simply doing it to get better. And who can judge us for that?

But when we stay in a mindset of comparison, we get in our own way. We would be better off if we approached everything as practice: building a business, writing a book, making videos, creating music. Whatever it is, we’re just practicing to get better. After 10,000 hours, then we can start judging our work. But before that, it’s just practice.

Today, we live in a world where your work might take off well before you’ve spent 10,000 hours honing your craft. But it won’t take off after just a week or two. Knowing that it will take 10,000 hours gives us patience to keep doing the thing without piling on artificial pressure.

Whatever it is you want to do, don’t let perfectionism (fear) get in the way. Don’t let it be the reason you stop working on the project you set out to do. Instead, fully embrace the reality that all of this is just practice. Your aim is not perfection, but progress. That’s what will carry you to great distances.

We are all raised with a false belief about how learning truly works. From school to university, we’re taught that learning happens by studying books, understandingmaterials, and discussing ideas. While this approach can expand our intellect, it often overlooks the essence of real learning.

Real learning requires action, and that’s true for both mind-based skills and physical abilities. A certain magic unfolds when you actually go out and do something. You get feedback from the real world, you iterate, and with enough practice, it becomes inevitable that you’ll learn. Our brains are wired for this.

Consider learning to ride a bike. You can’t master it by reading a book alone; you have to hop on the bike and attempt to ride. The same applies to starting a business: talking or reading about it isn’t enough. Real learning only starts when you take action. There’s no substitute for action.

A powerful virtue to cultivate, then, is the habit of leading with action—real action. Preparing to act is not acting. Through creation, execution, and even failure, you gather the evidence your mind needs to learn, often unconsciously, and you improve along the way. Ultimately, it all starts with taking real action.

One of the highest values in this world is devotion. When devoted to a project, relationship, or craft, you are engaging with it for the right reasons.

Instead of getting caught in a superficial cycle of pursuit and reward—where motives spring from external perceptions—you can do things out of genuine interest. You do them for their own sake. These are atelic activities, and that is what devotion is.

But there’s more to devotion than simply a motivation rooted in the thing itself. It also demands discipline and self-mastery. If you are devoted, you acknowledge the need to master yourself in order to show up and engage fully. Devotion isn’t free—it requires you to overcome yourself, day in and day out. It recognizes the inherent struggle of doing anything worthwhile. Sometimes it feels easy; sometimes it feels hard. Yet you must overcome yourself to remain devoted. You exchange simple pleasure for deeper meaning. Without struggle, there is no meaning. You cannot be devoted without struggle.

Struggle itself isn’t inherently bad. Your perception creates your reality of it. Sometimes it may feel impossible; other times it flows freely. Regardless, struggle always involves overcoming yourself.

The highest virtue to live by is devotion. Your human task, right now, is to find something worth being devoted to. That’s how you evolve beyond an endless “go-getting” cycle that robs you of the present moment. In devotion, you find harmony, stillness, and meaning. Most of your perceived problems will fade once you discover something truly worthy of your devotion. Look for it.

Complexity is the enemy of execution, and perfectionism sets us up for an unwinnable game. Here’s what I’ve learned about making changes happen—and sticking to them over time.

Let’s take a simple example: you want to work out more often. Most people have an on-off relationship with exercise. They feel motivated and hit the gym three days in a row, only to skip the next three months. Why? Because they set the bar too high. In their minds, a “proper” workout has to be at least 60 or 90 minutes long, and nothing else counts. But life inevitably gets in the way.

A better approach is to make it embarrassingly easy. Instead of letting perfectionism push the bar higher, set it as low as possible. If you’re goal is to work out, decide that doing 20 pushups counts. Yes, you can aim for more—but your baseline commitment is 20 pushups. The point isn’t perfection; it’s consistency. And when you make it easy, it’s harder to find excuses not to do it.

You might feel silly setting such a low goal, but this method is proven to create lasting change. After months of sticking to it, you’ll find it easier to build on that solid foundation. And work your way up to your ideal of 60 minute workouts every day.

Remember, complexity and perfection stand in the way of execution—and that means they stand in the way of the changes you seek. So make it easy. Make it so simple that there’s no reason not to do it, even when life gets in the way. Then, build from there. That’s how real, lasting change happens.

The silent enemy you didn't know you were fighting is called negativity.

The undeniable truth is that any form of negativity consumes energy that you could invest into more productive and useful things.

As a creative, you need to learn to allocate your energy. And there is only a limited amount of energy every day. What you spend energy on is your choice.

Any form of negativity (self-doubts, fear, overthinking) consumes significant amounts of energy. So you are better of to radically protect your energy from negativity. And the places to look for are your own mind, the people around you, and the things you consume.

There are more useful things you can do with your energy. And negativity in itself is not contributing to anything worth pursuing.

More than 90% of your thoughts are rooted in fear—even if you aren’t aware of it. Understanding this can help you live a happier, more successful life.

When I first heard Naval Ravikant claim that 90% of our thoughts are driven by fear, I hesitated. But as I reflected, I recognized the truth in his words.

Throughout the day, many of our thoughts hide behind complicated emotions. We dress them up with excuses and interpretations. Yet deep down, fear is at their core. Are we truly free from fear? Not really.

Consider these common examples of fear-based thoughts:

• “Does this shirt look good on me?”
• “I can’t quit my job because the money is too good.”
• “If only I had person X’s skills, I could start a company.”
• “What should I say? How can I express myself?”
• “I just don’t have the discipline to succeed.”

Each of these thoughts has fear at its root. Recognizing that makes it easier to challenge them. Good decisions and actions are never born of fear. When a thought arises, ask yourself: Is fear behind it? Understanding why you feel fear can rob it of its power over you.

Learn to release fear-based thoughts. They will come, but you can choose to let them go.

When you’re aiming to create change—whether you’re building a business, launching a book, or growing an audience—a powerful strategy is to identify the constraints and eliminate them radically.

Try approaching your challenges by asking, “What is limiting right now?” This simple question shifts your focus to the present and forces you to confront the immediate obstacles standing in your way. It brings three key insights into sharp relief:

• Focus on the present, not the future. Zero in on what matters right now.
• Identify the bottlenecks. Recognize the specific obstacles that are holding you back.
• Clarify your priorities. When you pinpoint what’s limiting you, you can channel your efforts where they’ll have the most impact.

This is the very question that has everyone in Silicon Valley buzzing. Once you understand your primary growth constraint (and it’s rarely about money), you can start working on what truly moves the needle. The 10x thinkers are particularly adept at this—they know that the key to exponential progress is eliminating the most critical barriers.

It’s a mental model that’s both brutally honest and remarkably effective. By consistently challenging yourself to remove constraints and revisiting this question every few weeks, you naturally steer your efforts in the direction you want to go.

2 people get off a train and walk down the same street on a rainy day in the middle of London.

The first person rushes through the downpour, determined not to get wet. Annoyed by the miserable weather, stressed, and in a hurry, he strides a kilometer until he reaches his front door. Unlocking it, he tosses his soaking-wet jacket aside, grabs a towel, sinks onto his couch, and opens his phone to scroll through Instagram. As he does, he thinks, “Well, after this shitty rain, I deserve a small break, don’t I?” Thirty minutes pass, and he resumes the rest of his day.

The second person, however, doesn’t mind the rain at all. He strolls gently down the street with calm presence, completely indifferent to getting wet. He takes in the scene—the hurried pace of passersby, the chatter at the cafes, and even two lovers sharing a kiss in the rain. When a book in a shop window catches his eye, he steps inside, buys it, and continues his leisurely walk. Upon reaching his apartment, he casually tosses his soaking-wet jacket aside, grabs a towel, settles onto his couch, and begins reading the book that somehow found him. Inspired by his journey, he jots down observations and sketches an idea for a painting—a tribute to the beauty he encountered. Thirty minutes pass, and he too moves on with his day.

Both individuals have spent the exact same 30 minutes, yet their experiences could not be more different. It all comes down to the art of noticing.

At any given moment, a world of richness unfolds around you—countless details waiting to be observed, perceived, and cherished. Yet few truly see them. We rarely consider that our perception is something we can consciously control, even though every human possesses that innate ability. The art of noticing is the art of living. To truly appreciate it, you must be present and mindful. Only by slowing down and observing with the calm eye of an artist can you witness the richness unfolding before you. And that is where the magic happens—not in the world itself, but in the way you choose to notice.

The antidote to aetiology—explaining things through their past causes—is teleology, explaining things through their present purpose.

For a long time, I believed the world and the psyche worked the way they do because of past events. For instance, you might lose your temper in a conversation because of some trauma in your psyche that triggers those feelings. But recently, my thinking has shifted.

Instead of asking, “What caused this to be the way it is?” I’ve begun asking, “What purpose does this serve today?” Maybe you lose your temper in conversations because there’s an (un)conscious goal driving that behavior, and losing your temper is the strategy you’ve learned to achieve it.

Once you stop looking for causes and start looking for purposes, you move from seeing the world as static and fixed to recognizing it as a hyper-optimized system dedicated to fulfilling countless aims.

If you want to change a behavior, the place to start is understanding what purpose that behavior fulfills right now.

I can’t think of a better book that explores this perspective than The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi. It’s based on Alfred Adler’s approach, reflecting his early conviction that trauma-based psychology often falls short and that we might gain more by shifting to a purpose-based way of understanding ourselves and others.

Whether you believe in spirituality, God, the universe, or nothing at all, you can’t deny that sometimes "luck" shapes our lives in profound ways.

Think of that one party where you met your future wife. Or that single conversation with a friend who introduced you to an investor—someone who became your first big believer. Or the one inspired idea you had while watching a documentary, which sparked enough excitement to propel you toward building your dream career.

In each of these moments, something enters our perception and ignites a spark that can transform our lives forever.

You can think of it as if the world is always speaking to you—in big ways and small. But it’s up to you to perceive, listen, and trust it. That choice, ultimately, is yours to make.

One of my favorite quotes from Rick Rubin captures this well: “To live as an artist is a way of being in the world. A way of perceiving.” And I believe it doesn’t just apply to artists, but to anyone engaging in this mystery we call life.

If someone had asked me five years ago how the world speaks to me, I probably would have thought them strange. I wouldn’t have known what they meant. But after years of meditation, journaling, and letting my consciousness evolve beyond my thinking mind, I finally understand the question.

Now, new impulses and ideas find me every day. They’re everywhere and always accessible. I just couldn’t perceive them before. If you’re not in a calm state of awareness, you miss them entirely. And life, in so many ways, is about noticing—that’s what self-awareness is all about.

The good news is that the world is always speaking to you. It’s eternally present and accessible, but only if you’re listening. The moment you shift from a stressed, attached way of living to a calm, detached state, you awaken your ability to notice and truly hear. We control our perception, and there’s light on the other side of that choice.

Remember: you don’t know what you don’t know. Letting uncertainty be an excuse to avoid seeking a better life does you the greatest disservice. Act now.

Most startups focus on removing friction. They want everything to be frictionless and easy for users. The more you strip away, the closer you get to the essence of what you’re building. This advice generally works if you’re targeting mass markets because distractions can be costly. But I see an antithesis emerging.

If your goal is to serve niche markets—which can be huge on a global scale—friction can actually create value. This is especially true in the premium segment, where not letting everyone in increases the perceived value of what you’re offering.

Take Soho House, for example. It isn’t considered high-value simply because of the quality of its offering, but also because not everyone can get in. That friction raises the perceived value.

Intentional friction points in your customer experience allow you to filter more aggressively and concentrate on the customers who truly meet your ideal profile. Would you rather have 1,000 cheap customers who frustrate you every day, or 10 premium customers willing to pay 100 times as much? In today’s fragmented markets, this isn’t a far-fetched scenario; it can be a realistic and compelling path when you’re building products for specific audiences.

Instead of chasing the masses and entering perfect competition, you can avoid that race entirely. Go deeper into your niche and define the precise type of customer you want to serve. And don’t assume your upside is limited just because you go niche—there are companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars that cater to incredibly specific audiences.

The question of friction and value ultimately comes down to one guiding consideration: what type of company do you want to build, and who are you passionate about serving? Let that be your north star. And remember, friction can play a powerful role in shaping perceived value.

There’s nothing more valuable than using your leisure time to contemplate and clarify your vision for life. Success is directly proportional to how clearly you can articulate what you want. Time spent defining your future self, the things you desire, and the life you want to lead is never wasted. This process thrives on stillness and deep reflection.

What’s crucial, though, is ensuring that this contemplation doesn’t distract you from doing your best with what’s in front of you right now. Your vision shouldn’t breed frustration with your current reality or serve as an excuse to avoid the work at hand.

Moving from where you are now to where you want to be doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a gradual process built on a single, transformative principle: adding excess value to your present place. This means doing everything in your power today to approach the things in front of you with the best of your current abilities.

As you consistently show up with this mindset, life will naturally evolve. When you approach each day with gratitude for where you are, clarity for where you’re going, and a relentless commitment to doing your best, growth becomes inevitable. It's how the world works.

Do everything within your ability each day to perform your work to the best of your abilities, even if it feels far removed from your ultimate vision. Approach every task with a giving mentality, exceeding expectations. Without expecting something in return. This is the essence of "filling your present place." Over time, opportunities will emerge, and life will present ways for you to evolve. But it all begins with what you do today, and filling your present place.

The secret to getting what you want in the world lies in cause-and-effect relationships.

For every success you want to replicate (the effect), there are specific causes that lead to those exact results. Without a clear understanding of these relationships, you’re left in a fog of uncertainty about what to do—and that is what keeps you stuck.

Success can be defined simply as the ability to get what you want. If you notice someone else achieving what you desire, study them carefully. Understand which causes produced the effect you’re aiming for.

Trying isolated quick fixes won’t get you there. Staying on the surface only yields superficial results. The way forward is to dive deeper and lead with understanding. Without a deep understanding of what creates the effect you want, you won't be able to replicate it.

How do you gain this understanding of causes and effects? Through a combination of careful study, analysis, and experience. Simply approaching any situation with the intention to learn directs your attention toward what matters.

Once you establish a comprehensive understanding of the causes behind a particular effect, you can take action. It might involve learning new skills or working in a specific way. We humans are blessed with a natural ability to learn—our brains are designed for it—and there’s no physical law stating you can’t learn whatever you set your mind to. The only real barrier is yourself and your subconscious limiting beliefs you cultivated over the years. You need to get rid of them.

I believe this deeply. Once you recognize for yourself that cause-and-effect relationships are the key to everything—and fully embrace this truth—you can achieve success. And you can get what you want in life.

The goal isn't perfection, it's simplicity. Instead setting the bar too high and failing to do something, set it lower and focus on volume. If you get the repetitions in, quality will naturally improve. But make it simple enough that you can do your craft daily. No matter how small.

Just like this writing, it's not great. It's simple. But I have showed up and have done the work. And this is what matters today. There's always days where there is some excuse coming up why you can't do a thing. Making it simple allows you to stay consistent, even on the difficult days. Show up, do the work, every day, and see your craft improve magically.

A useful exercise to clarify the vision and goals you're working toward, which I found is inspired by Graham Weaver, is actually quite simple:

You open a blank page where you can write (Apple Notes, Google Docs, Word, whatever). Then, you envision the dream unfolding of your life over the next 3–5 years. You write this as if you are writing the story of your life. It’s all about crafting your life narrative—every decision you make, the things you do, and the things you accomplish.

There are 3 rules for this exercise:

1. Write as if you knew you couldn’t fail.
2. Write as if no dream, desire, or goal is too bold or too crazy (really dream).
3. Be very specific—describe in great detail the things that would need to happen (like hiring a great team or getting funding for your idea), and how they happen.

Why is this exercise so powerful? If you don’t know where you are going, you cannot accomplish it. Writing out your dream as a narrative for your life helps you create clarity and put the pieces together. You move from an unspecific dream life to an actionable plan and narrative for how you can create the life you want.

There’s no specific right or wrong way to do this, as long as you stick to the rules above. When you are done, print it out and put it somewhere you can re-read it every week or so. Then, start taking the first steps in making this visualized narrative of your life a reality.

I come back to this exercise every few months and write it again from scratch. With experience, your dream-lined life will evolve, change, and become more specific. The story you write serves as an orientation for what you should be working on, and how to get there. Now, all that’s left for you to do is sit down, take an hour out of your day, and start writing. This is where all great things get started.

When faced with decisions about one's life, big or small, it's difficult to know when to make the decision. Often, we think about doing something in the form of a simple thought. It doesn't feel real because we seek comfort in the no-stakes environment of our mind. If you just think about something, you don't have to follow through or commit.

Sometimes, these thoughts about what you might do turn into real action. That's when you make a decision—consciously or subconsciously. The hard part is knowing the exact moment to decide. Where do you draw the line between the ease of thinking and moving into real action?

The best doers in the world have developed a way to listen to their intuition and trust it. They believe their intuition is smarter than their thinking mind, connected to something beyond rational reason. But this awareness isn't accessible right away; it needs to be nurtured over time.

I found one pattern that I believe is useful when you don't have immediate access to a deeper intuition. When you think about something and this thought reappears every other day or week, it’s proof there's some sort of energy connected to that thought that wants to be released. You can see thoughts as energy—each thought represents a set of energy in your mind. If a given thought comes up again and again in your consciousness, it's trying to tell you that there's energy that wants to emerge into the real world.

What stands in the way most of the time is fear. If we trust that crazy or slightly uncomfortable thought, life as we know it may change. And change triggers fear because there's a component of uncertainty our thinking mind doesn't like. It may also be that by trusting that thought and taking action, you show yourself vulnerable, or risk a part of your self-image.

The simple heuristic I found is not to let fear win. Fear only shows that you care; it serves a useful function and historically evolved to help us survive. But today, those tribal instincts are no longer useful in most situations.

Whenever I experience resistance to converting a thought into action, I try to sense and understand the fear that's holding me back. Am I afraid of being vulnerable? Rejected? Uncertain? Once I see what form the fear takes and can reason that nothing truly irreversible or bad is likely to happen, I reframe that fear as proof I need to act. It suggests there's something to gain by taking the jump.

When a thought comes up again and again, yet you’re not acting, it’s probably fear—and it's a proof point that the decision you're avoiding is the one you should make. It's as simple as that. Of course, it requires self-awareness, courage, and a deep trust that everything we experience serves our highest potential. These are virtues we need to cultivate.

Creatives are often the most disciplined people you can find. They rely on routine, order, and perseverance to push through resistance and tackle the work in front of them, time and time again. Without this unwavering commitment, they would never create the remarkable work they’re capable of.

Yet there is also a crucial element of chaos. Equally important as an antidote to routine is embracing moments of spontaneity. Sometimes you need to break out of the schedule and let things unfold. Maybe a two-hour studio session turns into a marathon that lasts all night, or a random chat evolves into a deep conversation about life. These are the moments where serendipity and magic emerge—and they hold real value in the creative process.

Like everything in life, it’s about finding the right balance. If you swing too far in either direction, you risk avoiding the work that truly matters.

One of the questions I’m asked most often is how to build a software idea from scratch. Usually, this comes from people with business backgrounds who have a concept in mind but no clue where to begin. Instead of having the same conversation dozens of times, I decided to write down the best answer I have today.

If you don’t have any technical knowledge or skill, there are basically two paths you can follow:

1. Learn to code yourself.
2. Find an outstanding technical co-founder.

People often counter with ideas like:

• “I’ll just hire a computer science major and pay them a salary.”
• “I’ll just work with an agency to build my product.”
• “I found this cheap guy from [insert low wage country] who’ll do it for $1,000.”

If you’re serious about building a tech company, none of these approaches ever work. Building a product isn’t like making a PowerPoint presentation with a fixed scope that’s finished after a certain amount of time. Instead, software is an ongoing project with infinite room for improvement. There’s always something to refine, remove, or add—like fixing security issues, dealing with bugs, or rebuilding features to keep up with user needs. Especially in the early days, you’ll likely pivot and iterate multiple times until you get it right.

The second reason these quick-fix solutions fail is the lack of proper incentives. If you want a mediocre product, those paths might be fine. But if you want people to fall in love with your technology, you need team members who are obsessed with the details. Typical employees, freelancers, or agencies simply aren’t motivated to go that extra mile. They aren’t invested in the long-term vision or the small details that can make or break a product.

Some might argue that there are exceptions—like the McKinsey consultant who outsourced the tech and still found success. Sure, those stories exist, but they’re outliers. If you want to maximize the odds of building a thriving company, you need internal talent that’s passionate about technology.

Even in a post-AI world, where “AI engineers” will change how we build software, you still need someone who fully owns the technical side. Yes, you might only need a fraction of the resources you once did, but you cannot sacrifice real talent if technology is a core part of your idea.

So you come back to this: either learn to build it yourself (which AI has made far easier) or find a partner who’s ready for the >5 year journey it takes to create technology people truly love.

You don’t establish meaningful connections with creatives by simply networking. Authentic bonds form when you lead with your work. What really sparks interest in someone you admire isn’t your ability to talk—it’s the substance of what you create, especially in the creative world.

The work matters because it’s the ultimate evidence of who you are. It speaks louder than anything you could say. When you create something truly great, you reveal qualities that matter:

• You show you understand, with empathy, what someone wants.
• You prove you can overcome resistance and get the work done.
• You demonstrate that you’re introspective, curious, and passionate.

A single piece of work can convey more about you than a thirty-minute conversation ever could. If you want genuine connections, start by sharing what you’ve made. It’s not about networking—though that will play a role eventually. It’s about the quality of your work and how it inspires people, creatives or otherwise, to truly connect.

We’ve all heard the crazy stories: someone randomly introduces you to an investor, a believer, or a talent scout, and your life changes. These moments of serendipity show up in every successful creative’s journey. But the thread running through all of them is this: it begins by leading with the work.

Who wins: the obsessed or the disciplined? The answer seems clear to me—obsession wins every time. Discipline can push you far, but obsession is what propels you beyond your limits. It’s what drives you to dig deeper, create better, and explore further because you’re genuinely passionate about what you’re doing.

Too often, I see young professionals trying to mask a lack of passion with an artificial sense of discipline. But this approach has a ceiling. It may work for a few years, but eventually, it falters. Discipline alone lacks the energy to sustain you for the long haul.

The better path is to find something you’re obsessed with. Obsession is passion in its most potent form, and it grows naturally from genuine interest. This is where you’ll discover what you’re truly meant to do. Discipline might help you stay consistent, but obsession is what makes you extraordinary. Obsession beats discipline—every time.

I first learned about the idea of “being on the hook” from Seth Godin. In essence, when you’re doing creative work, you’re either on the hook or off the hook.

If you create but never share your work with anyone, you’re off the hook—there’s no commitment or tension driving you forward. In contrast, if you commit to sharing your work with the world every day, you’re on the hook. You allow your work to be seen, judged, and consumed.

Being on the hook means holding yourself accountable for shipping your work. It creates a healthy tension that pushes you not only to do the work but to release it. And this is where many creatives get stuck: doing the work is just one part of the equation. If you never show it to the world, you miss out on the most life-infusing and essential component. You can only learn and improve by exposing your work to judgment.

For a creative, the magic lies in being on the hook. It’s about making the commitment to ship your project and then working hard to create the best thing you can. It unlocks your greatest creative potential—even though it can be uncomfortable. But that’s exactly where you need to look, because that’s where the magic is found.

What commitment are you avoiding regarding your creative work?

To make progress, you need to put incremental progression over perfection. The perfectionist gets stuck in endless refinement, never actually shipping their work. The incremental progressionist, ships their work and learns from the results.

If you want your efforts to be meaningful, you must put your work out there. That’s how you gain real, truthful insights. Because you’re your own worst critic, constant tweaking often leads to skewed conclusions rather than genuine truth that in turns allows you to make better things.

Being perfectionist in something new you create leads to pressure that is not useful. It's standing in front of an impossible-to-manage mountain of work, considerations, and thoughts. This leads to an inability to start. The better approach is to start small and simple. Complexity is the enemy of execution. And if you define your measure of success as the incremental progress you make, the incremental small improvements, you will get much farther much quicker.

In our age of rapid technological progress and tools that make it increasingly easier to create, it’s crucial to return to a fundamental question:

What does the world need?

You don’t want to build a solution in search of a problem. You don’t want to build something no one needs. Instead, align your actions with what people actually want—what the world wants.

A need is just a stronger form of a want, yet finding answers to this seemingly simple question can be surprisingly difficult. If there’s one skill you should get good at, it’s learning to figure out what someone wants. To do that, you must dive deep into understanding people: what drives them, and how social and cultural dynamics shape their desires. If you can answer that question, you’ll have what it takes to create meaningful things.

This principle goes beyond product creation. It applies to writing books, dating, creating content—anything that thrives within the fabric of human collaboration. It’s the driving question behind it all. Start there.

I recently studied Adler’s psychological ideas and how living in the “realm of possibility” can prevent us from pursuing what we truly want.

The basic idea is this: if there’s something you want to do but you haven’t figured out how, it might be because you prefer the safety of thinking you could do it—rather than risking the discovery that it’s not right for you. In other words, it’s often easier to stay in that mental space where you tell yourself, “I could do it if I really tried,” than it is to confront reality head-on.

If you have a dream or a goal, chances are you’re attached to it. You like the idea of yourself being an author, a musician, or an entrepreneur. In this realm of possibility, you feel comfortable. But moving from that safe mental space into actually doing the thing—and potentially finding out you’re not as good at it as you hoped—would threaten this aspirational vision of yourself. So, feeling safe and comfortable in the present overrides the desire to pursue your aspirations.

To the rational observer, this seems absurd: if you want to do something, just try it and see if it’s truly what you’re meant to do, right? But our irrational personal logic trumps this. Deep down—either subconsciously or consciously—our need for safety and our attachment to an aspirational self blocks us. Because we fear finding out it may not be true. Until you fully understand how this works in your own life, you’ll remain stuck.

The real virtue is to figure out what you’re meant to do by trying things, seeing what happens, and then trying again. It’s a continuous process of experimentation, and staying in your realm of possibility won’t get you there.

If you fail to leave that realm, years can pass without meaningful action. You might rely on self-sabotaging lies, like “right now is not the right time,” until they turn into “I’m too old to do it.” We know that near the end of life, people often regret what they didn’t do more than what they did. A fulfilled life, then, is one where you keep trying, moving beyond the realm of possibility into the flow of life—where serendipity appears and you unleash your potential. It’s not about one-shot success; it’s about a many-shot journey toward discovering what you’re truly meant to do.

So you have an idea. You’ve taken a few small stabs at it but never truly followed through. It’s no surprise—moving from idea to execution can be tough. Yet it’s also where the magic lies. Words don’t matter, only action and results do.

To move from idea to execution, you need to win against a few enemies that stand in the way. Some of which are:

• Complexity
• Perfectionism
• Fear
• Attachment

Defeating these enemies is simple. Luckily.

• Instead of diving into the most sophisticated approach, start with the simplest possible action.
• Instead of letting perfectionism stop you from ever shipping your work, set it aside and embrace incremental improvement.
• Instead of fear being an ambiguous force keeping you in the status quo, work on understanding it so you can conquer it.
• Instead of being attached to a specific outcome, you let the creative flow take over and show you the way.

These aren’t complicated cures; they’re basic, practical steps. If you find yourself stuck between idea and execution, begin by looking here.

One of the most powerful influences on your future is what you’re exposed to. This includes where you live, the people you spend time with, the media and writing you consume, and everything else that enters your awareness each day.

When you surround yourself with things that don’t support your goals, you set yourself up for an unwinnable game. No matter how much willpower or discipline you think you have, constantly fighting your environment saps energy that could otherwise be channeled into what you’re meant to do.

The single greatest factor shaping your exposure is where you live. If you want to start a tech company, move to a place where other entrepreneurs are doing the same. If you want to break into the music industry, move to a city where artists, labels, and aspiring talent all converge. Being in these environments creates serendipity: lucky connections, fresh ideas, intriguing events, and everyday inspiration. It’s far more difficult to achieve success when your surroundings don’t foster the path you’re on.

Ultimately, exposure is the input to your mind—and without great inputs, you can’t produce great outputs. Think about it: are the things you are exposured to right now truly serving the dream you want to make real? If the answer is no, there's only one thing to do: move.

I recently heard Brian Chesky say, “The best people in your life are the ones who see potential in you that you didn’t see in yourself.” I let that quote simmer in my mind for a while, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful principles to guide a life.

Reflecting on my journey over the past few years, I realize how a handful of people believed in me more than I believed in myself. They were my first investors in my earliest ventures, the ones who pushed me to make the bold—even “dangerous”—decisions. They helped me unlock a better version of myself, one I didn’t know existed. Sometimes it was easier for them to spot this potential because they had been in similar shoes or worked with founders and creatives like me. In that sense, they became prediction machines, seeing what I was capable of before I saw it myself. They gave me confidence and self-belief.

I aspire to live in a similar way. I’m still young and still figuring things out, but I see potential in many of the people around me. Whenever I can connect deeply in a genuine, authentic conversation, I try to offer a spark of inspiration—encouraging them to make that bold move, take that risk, and bet on themselves. In doing so, I pay forward the guidance I once received. That, to me, is what the best people in our lives do: they see a possibility in us that we haven’t yet noticed ourselves. Or haven't developed the confidence in what we are capable of doing.

If you’re not acting on your vision of your dream life, there’s really only one reason: fear.

Fear takes many forms—procrastination, avoidance, distraction, resistance, overthinking, self-doubt. However it appears, it's always rooted in the same: fear. And the only way to create your dream life is to face fear and conquer it, again and again.

Many people believe overcoming fear requires extraordinary bravery. They think the successful people they admire are simply "wired differently." But that’s not true. Conquering fear isn’t about banishing it; it’s about mastering it.

You can’t conquer what you can’t identify. Start by asking: What am I afraid of? Be specific. Are you worried about losing your job and compromising your lifestyle? Do you fear rejection from your social circle? Are you scared of failure? Write down every limiting self-belief that surfaces. Your goal isn’t to eliminate fear but to understand it deeply enough to take action despite it.

Once you’ve defined your fears, time for excuses is over. For every worst-case scenario, ask yourself: How likely is this to happen? How bad would it truly be? Then, brainstorm ways to mitigate those risks. This process shifts fear from an emotional obstacle to a practical challenge you can manage.

Avoid irrationality where low-probability, mildly uncomfortable outcomes stop you from pursuing the wildest vision of your life. The likelihood of success—whether moderate or extraordinary—far outweighs the slim chances of failure.

As Mark Twain famously said: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” Take the first step. Define your fear, face it, and start building your dream life today. One step at a time.

Recently, I discovered a new way to think about life: treat it like a video game. We all get to make one decision: what game we want to play and at what level. This correlates with ambition. However, the surprising truth is that the level you play at doesn’t necessarily correlate with happiness or fulfillment. A good life looks different for everyone. The real challenge is figuring out which game you want to play and at what level.

I’ve also moved away from the idea that we have much control over choosing the “best” game for ourselves. I believe this is something we’re born with—part of our DNA. Yet, as we grow up, external influences like societal expectations, family pressures, and the ideas we’re exposed to can cloud our natural inclinations. These distractions distance us from the game we’re meant to play. Much of adult life is about finding our way back to what we’ve always known deep down to be true. This journey of rediscovery often culminates in what we recognize as the mid-life crisis.

By reframing life’s purpose as rediscovering and embracing the game we’re naturally meant to play, everything becomes clearer. Once you recognize that your task is to nurture and pursue this calling, your thoughts, decisions, and actions will begin to align. But the benefits of viewing life as a game don’t stop there.

Seeing life as a game fundamentally shifts your perspective. It reduces the ego’s grip on you. After all, it’s just a game, isn’t it? This mindset gives you the courage to make tough decisions and approach life with a sense of ease. If one path doesn’t work out, it’s not the end—it’s just part of solving the puzzle. Failure becomes a natural, even necessary, part of growth. It’s how you level up. And as you move from one level to the next, you realize that what got you here won’t get you there. This realization relieves the pressure to be perfect and allows you to do better work—not for yourself, but for the game itself.

This perspective aligns with ancient wisdom traditions, which often teach similar lessons: detach from outcomes, be courageous, tame the ego, and follow your inner calling. When you treat life as a game, you embody these principles naturally. It’s worth asking yourself: what would change if you truly saw life this way? Likely, a lot.

And here’s the most liberating part: you can always change the game you’re playing. You have the privilege to decide what your life can be. So take advantage of it. Even if it doesn’t feel like it now, you have more power than you think.

What is truth?

We talk about what is true and what isn’t countless times a day. Our brains act as prediction engines, constantly assessing what aligns with reality. Yet, we often confuse objective truth with subjective perceptions and beliefs. Over time, I’ve come to define truth like this:

Truth is what has predictive power over the future.

Consider the laws of physics. These laws are widely regarded as true because they allow us to predict outcomes with precision. For instance, a moving object subjected to a known force in a defined environment will behave in a way that can be calculated in advance. The ability to consistently and accurately predict the outcome is what makes these laws true.

In business, truth operates similarly. It’s the insight or principle that enables growth or improvement—whether it’s refining a product to better meet customer needs or employing negotiation techniques proven to increase the likelihood of a desired outcome. These truths hold because they reliably predict future results.

However, as we examine truth more closely, we notice that it’s often context-dependent. What is true in one situation may not generalize to others. A business strategy that succeeds in one market might fail in another. Yet within its original context, it remains true.

This understanding of truth is particularly valuable when building companies. At its core, entrepreneurship is a research process: the quest to uncover ground truth. Only by understanding something deeply—by identifying the truths that govern it—can we create lasting value. Perception may shape how we interpret reality, but it cannot alter the underlying truths. Ultimately, the test of truth lies in its predictive power. If it reliably forecasts outcomes, it holds.

By grounding ourselves in this principle, we can navigate the complex interplay of beliefs, perceptions, and objective reality with greater clarity and effectiveness.

You will never excel at something the way someone deeply passionate about it will. Those who love what they do work harder—because for them, it doesn’t feel like work.

When your work feels like play, you gain an edge. You’ll outlast and outperform anyone less passionate because you’ll naturally put in more hours, explore more deeply, and master every nuance. You’ll produce your best work with ease because it energizes rather than drains you.

This is what I call the passion advantage. In today’s globalized world, you’re not just competing with your neighbor—you’re competing with the world. If your ambition is to achieve extraordinary outcomes, being in the top 1% of your local surroundings isn’t enough. To stand out, you need to be in the top 1% globally. Passion is what will get you there.

We only have one life, so why not build our careers around what we love? Everything improves when you follow this compass. To uncover your passion, think back to your childhood: What did you do purely for the joy of it? What made you light up? What activities held your attention for hours without anyone asking you to engage? The answers to these questions will reveal your true passion—not the one your parents envisioned for you or the one your social circle admires, but the one that feels undeniably yours.

Align your life with your passion, and you’ll become unstoppable. You’ll lead a happier, healthier, and more fulfilling life—which, ultimately, is the goal. The passion advantage is available to everyone. All it takes is the courage to act in harmony with it.

Do you remember the last time a new thought grew so loud in your mind that it spurred you to take drastic action—changing the trajectory of your life? Maybe it was the urge to quit your job, pursue a degree at a dream university, or start a side project you couldn’t stop thinking about. These are evolutionary impulses. When you act on them, they often lead to your best life.

I used to think these impulses were rare, appearing only a handful of times in a lifetime, like flashes of luck. But my perspective shifted. Evolutionary impulses aren’t rare at all—they’re all around us. The challenge lies in recognizing them, listening deeply, and then summoning the courage to act.

When a thought lingers in your mind, returning again and again, it carries a unique energy—an invitation. It might be as simple as wanting to visit a certain city or share a heartfelt feeling with someone close to you. At first, such thoughts are easy to dismiss: It’s just a passing idea, right? But when they persist, they’re more than random—they’re whispers of something significant, an evolutionary impulse inviting you to grow.

Most of us only notice these whispers when they become deafening, demanding our attention. But the magic lies in listening sooner, before the whispers turn to shouts. The moment a thought begins to echo repeatedly in your mind, pay attention. Interpret it as what it truly is: a divine nudge, beyond human comprehension, pointing you toward your next step.

Once you recognize the impulse, it becomes your responsibility to act. Fear often stands between thought and action. Fear can serve a purpose—it keeps us safe—but it’s our task as humans to transcend it. When we overcome that fear, we transform the impulse into action. This is how serendipity unfolds. This is how we create the life we desire. And this is how we unlock our highest potential.

The world is always speaking to you. The question is: Are you ready to listen—and act?

Confidence is not created the same. The form of confidence you see most around you is an illusion. People who appear overly confident in social situations are often the ones struggling most with themselves. We tend to mistake their illusion of confidence for real confidence.

From observing my inner attitude towards confidence, I came across one simple axiom: real confidence is rooted in authenticity. If you present a false image of yourself to the world, any confidence you display is an illusion. Maintaining these pictures we want others to have about us not only wastes a great deal of energy but also miscalibrates our inner sense of confidence. We are self-sabotaging ourselves.

Real confidence is found in one, and one place only: your true self. If you are truly and deeply authentic, confidence will follow. But to be our true selves, we need to overcome our fear of rejection, judgment, and countless other limiting self-beliefs we picked up as we were growing up. Our job is to work through them to reach a place where we accept and love our true selves, so we feel comfortable showing this real version of ourselves to the world. This is where real confidence is found.

Problems are not solved by prescriptions; they are solved through understanding.

We often try to solve problems by applying prescriptions. We think we need advice from someone who knows. We believe we need to study and acquire new knowledge. We assume we need better solutions. All of these are treated like prescriptions for the problem—like a medicine we can take that will magically fix everything. Essentially, we are looking for a shortcut.

Our tendency to solve problems this way is actually an avoidance of the real issue. We want to skip the hard part and look for easier fixes, but they never really work. We may be fooled into thinking the problem is solved, but on the most fundamental level, it's not.

When trying to address the problem of not being in shape, we watch videos, talk to coaches, and imagine how our lives would look if we were fit. We are seeking prescriptions. Yet after a few days or weeks, we quit the habit of working out—again. This is avoidance of the real problem: a lack of self-discipline.

The only way to truly solve a problem is by understanding it. The problem is already staring you right in the face, and you have access to everything you need to dive into it, understand it, and unpack it. Through this deep understanding at the most fundamental level, you will solve it.

Surface-level understanding of a problem is not enough. Depth is required—a fundamental understanding. This is hard, requiring you to relentlessly pursue better explanations of the problem. But it is the only way.

To solve a problem, understand it and confront it. Don't distract yourself with solutions, advice, or other forms of avoidance. It's right in front of you, and only you can dive into it, understand it deeply, and thus solve it.

There's a practice you can engage in that will fuel your personal growth and awareness like few other things in this world. And this practice is conscious journaling.

The method is simple: take time to sit alone, without distractions, and write down whatever comes to mind. The goal is to put your stream of consciousness onto paper, thought by thought, without judgment or expectation. Whatever you write down is not for anyone else to see. You don't need to review it or question what you wrote afterward. The only thing that matters is that you take physical action to write out whatever comes to your mind.

Not that hard, is it? It will feel weird at the beginning. You may find your mind jumping in and saying, "What the hell am I doing here? This is weird. Only weird people do this." If a thought like this occurs, write it down! The whole point is to bring onto paper whatever is running through your mind.

The best way to do this is daily, right in the morning or after meditation. This practice is powerful because it allows you to bring what was previously unconscious into consciousness. You reflect in a whole new way, and there's something special about the physical act of writing (on paper or your computer). You will notice that, without applying effort, things will start to change. Your mind will calm down. You will learn to separate your ego from your being, and you will elevate to new heights as you go about your life.

As life is a constant, dynamic process of becoming, change is ever-present. Personal growth and evolution are the only ways forward if you don't want to get stuck and depressed. Conscious journaling—writing down your stream of consciousness—is the best way to accelerate the process that is already unfolding. It's free. It's easy. It doesn't take a lot of effort, but the results are remarkable. Just starting with a simple commitment of journaling every morning for five days in a row will show you the impact it can have.

I recently came across a powerful frame for creative action: you are just x no's away from the future you want to build.

The truth is, anyone who wants to create a new future must deal with inevitable failures: shots that missed, people who don't believe in you, setbacks and obstacles in your way. The best people have this magical ability to relentlessly overcome these obstacles in their pursuit of becoming. What stands in the way becomes their way.

When raising capital, you are just dozens of no's away from closing your seed round.

When aiming to grow an audience, you are just hundreds of shorts away from thousands of followers.

When solving a technical problem, you are just dozens of attempts away from finding the solution.

Framing your journey from this perspective allows you to pursue your optimal rate of failure more relentlessly. Every no gets you closer to a yes. The path is right in front of you, with everything you need accessible as you break through failure.

One thing I've come to realize is that making assumptions is the source of conflict, misalignment, and falsehoods. The better approach is to live your life without making assumptions.

When leading a team, don't assume your mission and plan are clear; instead, make them explicit and remove any guesswork about whether everyone understands them as you do. Assuming that something is obvious risks gradual misalignment hurting your progress and culture.

In honest conversations with those around you, assuming that your critical feedback was clear enough is dangerous. To provoke real change, you need to be explicit and ensure the other person deeply understands the point you're making. Assuming they got it sets you up for conflict.

When building a company, assuming you already know the ground truth can lead you off track from creating something meaningful that actually works. Your primary job is to replace your assumptions with facts, even when it's uncomfortable. Great things can only be built from a truthful representation of the world—facts, not assumptions and theories.

To be effective in anything you do, don't make assumptions. Clarify. Repeat. Communicate. Be curious and exchange assumptions for facts.

When building anything, you can approach your work from two different mindsets.

The 10% mindset focuses on finding incremental improvements in the dynamics of what you're working on. It's about growing your sign-ups, improving retention, and figuring out how to run your project more efficiently. All those 10% improvements add up, making things better.

The 10x mindset is about finding improvements that yield results in orders of magnitude. Instead of tweaking an existing process to make it better, you rethink it from scratch and find an entirely new way to do something. Big decisions and conviction are what are required to make those 10x changes happen.

When solving problems, it's useful to be aware of which mindset you are using. What doesn't work is trying to approach a problem with both mindsets simultaneously. The types of work required by each mindset are just too different in nature.

And it's not that 10x should always take precedence over 10%. There are times when 10% improvements are needed to get closer to a local maximum. But to find the global maximum for your project, 10x thinking is required.

I view both mindsets as tools in my toolkit as I build with the intent to make things better. Knowing the difference and setting the right intent for whatever you are working on is an important first step.

Seneca believed fear and hope are the same thing. Both arise from our desire for certainty in an uncertain world.

Fear is an emotion caused by a future we want to avoid.

Hope is an emotion caused by a future we desire.

Both are based on the future, not the present. This attachment to a point that has not yet arrived makes us vulnerable and harms our growth. It's a barrier our thinking mind delights in spinning circles around. But in reality, it keeps us from what is accessible right in front of us.

The antidote for fear and hope is surrender—letting go. True peace and stillness are found in the here and now, not the distant future.

There are two paradigms foundational to doing good work: going with the natural flow of things and engaging in disciplined action to beat resistance.

At first glance, these paradigms seem opposing. One advocates for effortless action and achieving a fluid, unforced flow state. The other emphasizes clarity in your vision, brought to life through disciplined action in a more constrained manner. This presents a duality where both elements play their role in producing good work. But they seem mutually exclusive: either you engage in effortless action or focus on disciplined pursuit of a vision.

The magic lies in mastering this duality—finding balance. It's not that either one is superior to the other in its own way, but rather, they are two poles you need to learn to dance around. There are times when effortless action, freed from the past and the future, fully opening yourself up to evolutionary impulses as you follow the natural flow of things, is what's best. Other times, it's about disciplined action, beating resistance, and doing the work you are avoiding. The latter represents a more forceful approach required to overcome the fear-based limitations of the human condition manifesting as resistance. Those mastering this duality are the most effective, the boldest—the people who change the world.

Just as waves come and go, the states of natural flow and disciplined action ebb and flow. You need to learn what is required when, and engage with intentionality in the states that drive your best work.

If you want people to join you on your journey of building something new, confidence is what inspires great action. Not the know-it-all type, but the unbreakable belief—the knowing that you will figure it out—in pursuit of a vision that inspires, conveyed with confidence.

We are inclined to think competence beats confidence, but that is not true. Competence without deep confidence in the new, the bold, the unknown will only find local maxima on the current curve of possibility. Strong confidence paired with competence pushes the curve of possibility outward, approximating the global maxima. This is where magic happens, where asymmetric returns occur, and where we create a brighter future for us all.

As a founder, doer, maker, you need to establish this deep-seated confidence in your vision and work. It doesn't come from outside but from within. Only you can undergo the inner process of discovering that authentic confidence—that unbreakable belief in the potential you are realizing, the dent you are making in the world.

There is the Taoist concept of wei wu wei (为无为), which translates to "effortless action." The idea is simple: your best work is achieved not by forcing outcomes but by going with the natural flow of the world.

This may seem paradoxical at first. How can you do good work without effort? The answer is not to be lazy and do nothing, but to aim for a flow state where things naturally lead from one to another, where action becomes fluid and unforced. This is what true mastery is all about—like an athlete being completely present during competition, not overthinking but embracing the natural, fluid flow of actions effortlessly.

For creatives, wei wu wei represents the highest state one can be in when doing the work. You cannot force it. You cannot control it. But you can aim to surrender to the now and let the flow of life carry you to where you are supposed to go—all by action through non-action.

When we were building Jamie, an AI note-taking application, in 2022, there was a lot of talk from investors, other founders, and the press about how building "ChatGPT wrappers" was doomed to fail. People were saying that building at the application layer was challenging because it offered a small moat from a technological and product perspective. The common doubt we encountered countless times was that it was impossible to compete with big players like Zoom, Google, or Microsoft building their own native AI note-taking solutions.

All this talk led us to worry a great deal and overthink what we were doing. Luckily, we stuck to our plan and continued building from the problem we knew millions of people had: writing manual meeting notes. We largely ignored all that noise and competition and just focused on building something people wanted. As we were building for ourselves, we knew what to build best. We knew our customers better than anyone.

Fast-forward two years, and we are now serving thousands of users globally with healthy ARR and a solid path grounded in the work we've been doing to sustainably grow our company into the future. If we had taken what everyone was saying as truth in 2022, we wouldn't have made it to where we are today.

What this story taught me is that you need to recklessly ignore noise. The press, the VCs, the founders—people in the technology ecosystem—all of them are herd animals. The moment one seemingly interesting idea or perspective spreads, everyone merely copies that perspective without scrutinizing it against the ground truth, leading to a fictional perceived reality if you treat people's talk as signal instead of what it really is: noise.

When you're building a company, or any creative project of this sort, you need to learn to ignore noise. You need to develop an instinct to gather ground truth and reach your own conclusions instead of merely adopting external opinions because they seem "credible." Ignoring noise allows you to focus on what actually matters: the work at hand, building something people want. And this is what it's all about.

Serendipity is those "lucky" moments when coincidence occurs in unforeseen, beneficial ways. It's the opportunities that arise that we may attribute to fate. Being at the right place at the right time.

A good strategy for life is to work on increasing your surface area for serendipity. It's not that you can force unforeseen, good opportunities, but you can increase the likelihood of this occurrence by increasing your surface area to it.

The way surface area is increased is by doing the work. Gaining experience. Working on your ideas. Shipping your work. It's about meeting people, continuing on your unique path. Avoiding distraction and doing the meaningful work that is in front of you. This way, naturally, you position yourself so that serendipity can occur. Not forced, but by the natural flow of things.

What matters more in creative work: vision or action? Should you start with vision and derive action from that, or begin with action and let a vision evolve? I recently had a conversation with a friend about this inherent struggle for creatives, and the answer is not obvious.

The difficulty lies in the fact that both ways work. There's evidence for both approaches yielding the form of success that creatives seek. What seems to be true is that one doesn't work without the other. So it's a balancing act unique to every creative.

If you act without vision, you run the risk of taking shots in unrelated directions, ultimately slowing down the time it takes to reach your version of success. Pure action without clarity on how your actions compound and harmonize hurts your effectiveness.

Meanwhile, contemplating your vision and not taking clear action exposes you to the risk of overthinking and being stuck in "paralysis by analysis." Ultimately, it's about the work you do, not the bright future you envision.

So both elements are needed for creative success: a focus on the work and doing work for its own sake, and a clear vision that drives clarity, which in turn drives "performance" and outcomes. I conceptualize it as interacting forces that inspire one another. Through action, you can refine your vision, and your vision focuses your actions.

So what should you start with? I think action takes precedence. You need to get going first and do the work. But you need to make space and time to contemplate your vision with the new data points you gather through your actions. One doesn't work without the other. And finding the balance is a deeply individual task that may look different for each creative.

The work you do needs to have substance. Working on the surface, distracting yourself, and trying to be something you are not is not the way to yield real results. Instead, it's about depth in the work you do—the passion for craftsmanship that creates substance. Don't let yourself be fooled by seemingly impressive people who, once you look more closely, don't have substance. They will find their version of success but will never impact the world in profound ways. Substance is what you should pursue: true depth in the work you do and the person you become.

There's nothing more powerful than speaking your truth, whether it's in panel discussions, keynotes, meetings, or personal conversations. Being authentic and speaking your truth, regardless of how it may be perceived, allows your words to resonate on a deeper level.

When you speak your truth, the way you speak subconsciously changes with it. You show up with a distinct energy that is picked up by the people you interact with. Authenticity is the condition that allows for this effortless change.

I think one reason why this is so powerful is that you drop the facade you want others to see. One could call these masks. A mask or facade is when you have curated a specific image of how you want to be perceived by others and then spend a lot of energy keeping this mask alive. You do this because you think only in this way people will like you or approve of you. The problem is that masks cost you significant energy unconsciously. The moment you free yourself of the masks is the moment all this energy is set free to be spent on more useful things, allowing you to be your authentic self, which ultimately resonates more deeply with the people around you.

So whenever you speak, aim to speak your truth. Be your authentic self, and eliminate the masks you've curated. This way, you will radiate a genuine energy that resonates with people, which helps you and your words land more deeply.

The moment an idea catches you, there's an indescribable feeling of enthusiasm, dreams, inspiration, and drive. You start vividly envisioning all the things that could be created if you were to pursue the path that this idea has opened in your mind.

After contemplating this idea that "found you" for a while, things start to become clearer, and an inner voice tells you that the time to act is now. But then, at this very moment, as this thought—holding energy in your brain and representing unrealized potential—is about to transition into the real world through your actions, this wave stops for many.

The moment the idea starts getting real—as you consider the first actual steps you might take—is the moment resistance begins to show. Self-doubt, fear of failure, lack of trust in your abilities, overthinking. And most of the time, the drive of your idea drops off and comes to a halt.

This happens to everyone many times in their life. Ideas are so fragile that the moment you want to connect them to your real world, they die off because you weren't prepared to handle the idea in the way it requires.

I find myself in this position often: struggling to move from idea to first action. The status quo feels so comfortable, certain, and safe. If I were to boil down what the primary problem is whenever an idea dies, it's not being sure where and how to start.

All the theories, frameworks, and knowledge that hold in a constrained environment don't help once you open yourself up to an ambiguous, uncertain path.

The best answer I've found to this is: just get going. It doesn't matter whether you take the "right" first step or not. What does "right" even mean in this ambiguous, uncertain context? It doesn't matter that you don't have all the answers figured out, or whether you can present a clear plan for the next weeks or months.

The only thing that matters is that you take the first, real step. And this needs to be real action. Preparing to act is not acting. It needs to be a real action toward making your idea a reality.

What's so magical about this first, real action is that everything becomes easier after this. You gain new perspectives, new ideas, new experiences, new angles—all from acting, not from thinking about acting. If you manage to get going, the journey will unfold in ways you cannot see today, with all the bumps and wins along the road. But getting going is all that matters. The rest will settle.

I believe everyone has unique potential they can bring out to do something useful for the world. It may not be the first idea you have, but the most authentic idea will find its way to you once you get going. Your potential is too valuable to the world to let it die by not taking real actions on your ideas. The time is now, and the journey that's to come if you trust yourself and get going is the greatest journey of your lifetime.

Recently, a friend asked me about how I code and build products in the current state of AI. I've seen significant gains in the speed at which I can build things (2x–10x depending on the type of work) by leveraging AI to optimize my workflow. In this piece, I'll focus on practical insights. A caveat before diving deeper: as the field rapidly emerges, the optimal ways to leverage AI change quickly, often within a span of months. So the insights today may be outdated in a couple of months.

Firstly, let's take a look at the landscape and where things are headed. Today, we are in a state of AI-enhanced coding. This means that advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) help me build things, but my input, thinking, and ideas on how to implement remain important inputs. Even the most advanced systems still make mistakes today and fail when you work on things that are not well-represented in the training set, because LLMs are just a form of hyper-effective pattern matching. In the near future (a few years), there will be a tipping point. As systems become sufficiently integrated and advanced, the paradigm of how software is built will change fundamentally. Many startups are working on the idea of an independent "software engineer" agent that you feed instructions for entire features or products. Then, you allocate a ton of compute (inference) toward a given problem, and the model will come back with a solution after spending hours on it. This is a complex system to build, and no one has succeeded at it yet, but the dynamic seems to be drifting in this direction. For the sake of this article, I will focus more on the first type of AI-enhanced coding as it impacts my speed today.

Let's start with the code editor: I've changed my workflow to be entirely based on Cursor. It's a fork of VS Code, but re-envisioned with features optimized for AI-enhanced coding. It provides the best developer experience today if you aim to integrate LLMs into your workflow.

Based on this, here is a list of guidelines, insights, and tricks I use to get the most out of it. Although not complete, it provides a basic understanding of how to maximize speed:

1. Use the default tech stack that is most heavily represented on the internet (the training set of LLMs). For most web-based applications, this means React + Next.js + some Node.js backend. LLMs perform better when there's been a ton of training data, so going with the most popular choices allows you to get more out of the LLMs. It improves accuracy and therefore speed significantly.

2. Learn to become very specific with your language. If the instructions to an LLM are vague and unspecific, the results will be poor. If the instructions are clear, specific, and well thought-through, the results will be better. Once I got into AI-enhanced coding, I started to notice how I got lazy with the instructions, using poor directives to the model because my monkey brain optimizes to save energy. This way, you quickly reach a low local maximum with the benefits you get out of the models. You cannot really delegate the thinking about how to build something entirely to the model. A better approach is to think through how to build something and then write clear instructions. Then, your speed will drastically increase.

3. Use Composer mode in Cursor whenever possible. Instead of just using the chat interface to the right side of your file (which is useful for single-file edits), use Composer mode for more complex tasks. Whenever you need multi-file edits to implement a feature or change, you can load those files into context in Composer, and with the right set of instructions, it handles multi-file edits nicely. Sometimes, there are still issues and errors that appear, but if you take 5–10 iterations in Composer view, describing exactly what is wrong, you get to a good end result.

4. Add custom documentation to Cursor. When you use less-popular packages (like TipTap), the models tend to hallucinate in bad ways, which costs a lot of time. Luckily, you can add URLs of docs to Cursor, which then indexes and embeds that information so you can easily reference it in your prompts. This increases the quality of outputs for lesser-known packages.

5. Work in very small commits. When working with these models, there inevitably comes a point where the model is confused and starts breaking your code in bad ways, especially for more complicated and advanced changes. It can cost a lot of time to get the files back to a state where the thing you spent an hour on works again as you want it to. From my experience, the best approach is to work in very small commits so once the model gets something really wrong, you can just revert and start again from scratch. I often start again from scratch three or more times for complicated things until I find the right words to describe exactly what I want. Rolling back quickly is a must for that.

6. Dictate a great project structure. A unique edge humans still have over the models is having a better sense of the entire working context of a project. It matters a great deal to have a clean folder structure, typings, and good comments for all the code. The better you are at enforcing this and describing the desired structure to the model, the faster you will be. A good best practice is to be very descriptive and detailed about how you want the code structured to avoid costly refactors down the line.

7. Don't delegate thinking. I touched upon this earlier, but for most changes or features you are building, it's important to think it through in detail before using any model. You are still better at deciding how something should be implemented. The analogy is that you should still write the pseudocode in your project because it requires higher-level thinking. The models today are great at turning this highly fine-grained and detailed set of instructions into workable code.

8. Add detailed comments. Before every PR, I let the models write detailed comments on what each part is and why it is there. This makes it a lot easier for the model to handle future changes because it has more context on what is written in the code and how the different pieces interact.

9. Use V0 for fast UI prototyping. Instead of waiting for a design and then implementing it yourself, you can use V0 by Vercel to easily build good-looking and highly functional UI components. You can then copy and paste the code into your project and tweak it quickly in Cursor. This changes the design process entirely and allows developers who are not too UI-savvy to still build much better prototypes of new features.

10. Develop an intuition over time. As you spend more time building with AI and gaining experience, you start to develop an intuition about what the models are good at and how to use them in the best way. For most things, claude sonnet 3.5 is the best bet, but sometimes the new o-1 models are superior. Sometimes, you can get away with lazy instructions. Sometimes you need to think more deeply. Sometimes you can get complicated multi-file changes right in one iteration in Composer mode. Sometimes you need to take baby steps in chat to get clean code in the way you want it. There is no fixed rule when to use what and how, but there is a clear path to develop a strong intuition through experience.

The list above is a top-of-mind collection of things I pay attention to in order to optimize the speed at which I build things. This list will evolve over time, but I think it gives you a great starting point to speed up the things you build by over 5x. It is an exciting time to be a software engineer because you can build things at unprecedented speed, and the cost of building decreases rapidly. So you can do more of what you love: expressing yourself and your ideas through code.

Brands are all around us. There are strong and weak brands. Brands people remember and forget. Brands that evoke genuine connection, and brands that merely exist. Companies spend billions every year on establishing and maintaining brands. Overall, branding is impossible to ignore.

But what is a brand today? I believe brands are a means for individuals to signal their perceived uniqueness in a world of conformity and fitting in. As everyone is plagued by their desire for approval and need to belong, brands become a way to express individuality. When someone wears a t-shirt from a given brand, they want to signal to the world a certain set of values—something they believe in. And the way they intend to signal is by creating and maintaining a certain set of perceptions about themselves. At its core, brands play a deep, expressive role in our lives.

There is a set of people that value this form of expression less than others, but I would bet the vast majority of our Western world cares a lot about brands.

So how do you build a strong brand? By following the line of reasoning above, to build a brand you need to stand for something. You need to be clear on what beliefs and values you want to convey with your brand, so people can decide if these represent something they want to adopt as they show the world their perceived individuality. It's all about signaling who you are as a brand by becoming extremely clear on what beliefs you have and including this in the essence of everything you say, do, or create.

This is a profoundly useful insight. For those creating brands, it gives them the chance to get personal and contemplate the beliefs and values that excite them, and then turn this into a brand that resonates with people like them, slowly finding and building a tribe of like-minded individuals. So beyond expressing mere individuality on the local level in the conformist fabric of society, a brand also serves the purpose of creating connection among those who share the same beliefs. And this is a powerful dynamic to tap into. Combining the contemporary human need of signaling individuality with connection is the essence of what the brands that win in today's world are built on.

Brands are a deeply expressive construct that gives order to an otherwise chaotic world. They are a deeply psychological expression, yet their influence extends even beyond psychology. It all starts with becoming clear on what you believe in, and then effectively signaling that to the people it resonates with. This is how winning brands are built.

Our world revolves around the pursuit of better—a better future, better technology, a better way to live life. It's an intrinsic drive that we all share, from the individual to the collective.

A staggering truth is that nearly all the things we consider good today will have changed fundamentally over just a few decades. Looking back at history, we see evidence of this time and time again, with a clearly accelerating rate of change.

For people who want to make a dent in the universe, the pursuit of better serves as a powerful compass for deciding what to work on. Looking at your life today, the things you do day in and day out, what are the things you can make better? I'm sure there are plenty of answers.

The perspective of better is intriguing because it implies you're working on real problems. The biggest waste of time is working on a solution in search of a problem. Every improvement in the world starts with the clear identification of a real and painful problem. Solving this puts you on the path of pursuing better in this world. So just look around and solve the problems you yourself have.

The pursuit of better is an exciting perspective for humanity and the individual. It puts us on a trajectory to elevate the quality of life for all of us. And it needs makers and doers like you and me to make that change happen. The time is now to make things better by making better things.

Creativity works in waves. It's not that you can sit down every day from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and expect to do your best work. Rather, it's an ebb and flow. You still need to show up every day, but it's not about forcing it. It's about being present and letting it come to you.

The same is true for knowledge work. There's a harsh local maximum to what you can achieve by forcing work. You create the illusion of working toward the goal you've set, but the goal itself is constrained by its own nature. Working in waves follows the model of sprint and recovery—ebb and flow. It's about contemplating what to work on and then pursuing it with determination. But you need space after periods of dedicated work to contemplate, reflect, and think deeply.

Time is an interesting concept. Despite being objective in its nature, it's highly subjective in our perception and lived experience. Time can move fast or slow.

Not every hour in our day is created equal. The quality of the time we spend highly correlates with the energy we have, our mental and physical state, the surroundings we are in, and other factors. You can spend a high-quality hour filled with excitement, good work, and well-being, or a low-quality hour with stress, distraction, and dissatisfaction. The way you design every hour of your life is your choice.

I like to think of the quality of my life as the sum of the hours I spend in a day. This allows me to check in with myself honestly and remove intellectual reasoning on how happy or not I am in life. When I notice that there are too many low-quality hours in a day, I reflect on it and try to come up with something I want to change to fix this.

Framing your life through the lens of the quality of time you spend every day is helpful in making unconscious patterns visible and gives you the chance to change them. We all have the same 24 hours, but we don't spend our hours at the same quality levels. If you feel unsatisfied with your life, this is the first place to look.

We live in a time when doing something has become easy and fast.

Software that took a year to build 15 years ago can be built in a week today, thanks to AI. So the execution risk for startups has decreased.

What risk remains? Market risk. Determining what people want and transforming that into a product is still the more complex challenge.

This aligns with a common idea among creatives and thinkers: you must spend sufficient time contemplating what you work on instead of just working on it.

To many, dedicating time to think about what to work on feels like wasted time. After all, an hour spent thinking could have yielded a new customer, feature, or iteration. But this is a fallacy. It matters far more to think about what to work on than to actually work on it. Sure, the time to just go out there and execute will come. But it starts with thinking deeply and clearly about what to work on in the first place.

This is not only true when thinking about new startup ideas but also for existing ones as you allocate resources to improve your product.

When considering what to work on, there is a fine line. You don't want to make the mistake of thinking you're smarter than the market, your customers, or the world. It's not about contemplating your grand vision and becoming overly theoretical. Rather, it's about finding truth by talking to customers and closely observing how they use your product. With this ground truth, you are then in a position to effectively decide what to work on.

Regardless of the context, it's important to allocate time to think about what you should work on. If you walk faster without a map than someone who walks slower with a map, the one who walks slower is likely to reach the destination before you.

Clarity drives performance, direction, happiness, and stillness. The best starting point as one thinks about life is becoming clear on what one wants, and why one wants it.

Most people in their 20s lack exactly that. They're doing things for loose, superficial reasons. They are not intentional about why they do things. Typically, it goes back to domestication from parents, society, the people around them. And this is not bad; it's an inevitable phase that everyone lives through as they mature in their character. James Hollis puts it best: this unintentional first half of life is an inevitable mistake.

So why does clarity matter? I believe one can achieve pretty much anything if you have clarity. And clarity touches upon many areas in one's life: clarity on why you want the thing you want, clarity on how you get there, clarity on your self-awareness, clarity on the thing you are working on. Clarity is what allows us to move from ambiguity and chaos to order and ease. And clarity is what drives outcomes, not just for one individually, but also for teams and organizations. So the pursuit of clarity is the most useful thing to spend time on.

But how to gain clarity? Unfortunately, it's not a one-size-fits-all answer (surprise). As we become more aware of the unique potential we want to bring into the world, the prepackaged models and ideas no longer work. We shouldn't reason by analogy, but by first principles. Luckily, there are methods that are proven to facilitate that process of gaining clarity in a useful way. To me, it's really only two things: meditation and journaling.

Daily meditation allows your thoughts, emotions, reactions, memories, experiences, and ideas to settle. It's like dust settling in a room slowly so things become visible. There's no right or wrong way to meditate. All that matters is practicing sitting with yourself—without distraction, in silence, and making room to notice what is going on. It can start with just 10 minutes a day, ideally in the morning and evening. By meditating regularly, you open yourself up to noticing and feeling yourself more, which ultimately allows you to learn about your unique potential and how you work. It's the absolute cornerstone for an intentional life with clarity. But it's important to approach it with the right intention; it's not a quick fix to get clarity, but a more subtle, long-term way to incrementally get closer to a clear, peaceful, meaningful life.

Journaling is what allows you to accelerate your conscious development alongside meditation. What worked best for me was reserving a couple of minutes after every morning and evening meditation to write. What applies to meditation applies to journaling: there's no right or wrong way. What matters is that you just sit down and put your thoughts, the things that are conscious, into words. This way, you make your awareness visible. Written word is a powerful lever in our world and life. Conscious journaling helps you slowly gain clarity and make deep, substantial progress.

The difficult piece is that all of this takes time. It's not something where you see tangible rewards after the first few days, so most people quit these habits shortly after starting. And this is proof of how poorly wired our brains have become. With those two practices, it's not an immediate reward loop that triggers dopamine and serotonin and makes you feel good, but rather a practice that shows results if you do it for many months, even years. And pursuing something without a clear reward is psychologically difficult. So the way I like to frame it is that it is an exercise. Just like you don't see immediate results the next day after you hit the gym, it's an exercise to prove to yourself what kind of person you are. And the same applies to meditation and journaling. It's exercise for your consciousness—an exercise that allows you to reach clarity to create the life you want.

The question of what you want out of life is not trivial. Perhaps it's the most important question every human should answer throughout their lifetime. Most never do it. Some do in their later adulthood, some very early. There's no way to force it. But acknowledging that there is this implicit question life puts in front of you is already the first step to finding an answer. And the practices of meditation and journaling are tools that help you find that answer.

To summarize:

1. Clarity is what allows you to create the life you want.
2. To gain clarity, you need to work on the question of what you want in life.
3. To facilitate finding that answer (over many months and years), the daily practice of meditation and journaling are the best tools.

Start small. Just one minute of meditation, or one word journaled. What matters is that you show up every day, no matter how little. And this way, over time, everything will fall into place, and you will be living your best life fueled by your uniqueness.

Being precise and skillful with your language has always been important, but in a post-AI world, its relative importance will increase for achieving effective success.

When talking to an AI, the more specific and precise you are with your words, the better the outputs generated will be.

If you express an idea using general words that constitute average thinking and ambiguity, you will get crappy outputs from the model.

If you express an idea using highly specific, detailed words that embed good thinking and clarity, you will get good outputs from the model.

Expressing yourself through words (writing or speaking) is something you need to get great at to do great things. Your ability to express things will correlate heavily with future success.

For technologists, the biggest risk is falling in love with technology.

The moment you start obsessing over a feature and begin building your product from the root of technical capabilities is the moment you lose alignment with creating value for customers.

When you think about your startup as a pure function of technical capabilities and features, you move into the competitive landscape, which causes anxiety, overthinking, and a general fear of competitors. You stop solving real problems for customers and start playing a competitive game against all the other players in the market.

The better alternative to this is falling in love with a problem—understanding a painful problem real people have and working your way back to the technology, not engaging in innovation for the sake of innovation but for the sake of providing a better experience to your customers. This is the only obsession that drives building a meaningful company in the tech space.

Because of the thinking mind and egocentricity we're all victims of, there are three layers you can break through to delve deeply and discover your most meaningful work.

The first layer you can break through is the voice of judgment to reach a state of open mind. Instead of letting our past experiences and subconscious biases dictate our opinions and decisions, we can become aware of the voice that judges what we hear and learn to listen with a truly open mind.

The second layer you can break through is the voice of cynicism to reach a state of open heart. You begin to acknowledge the overthinking, self-doubting part of you that hinders trusting your highest potential and exploring with an open heart.

The third layer you can break through is the voice of fear to reach a state of open will. Deep down, our decisions and actions are often shattered by underlying fear. Once we learn to acknowledge this fear and let it be without becoming attached, we reach the most powerful layer where we can do our best work.

If you succeed in navigating these layers, you reach a state of letting go and allowing things to unfold naturally—in peace and stillness. This is where the best work happens and where you come closest to your highest potential.

This is what Otto Scharmer teaches in his U theory, and it applies wonderfully to creatives, entrepreneurs, and anyone seeking to delve deep to reach their highest potential.

When looking at what drives the performance of individuals and teams, one of the primary factors is clarity.

When things are clear, it's easy to perform. When things are chaotic, it hurts performance.

Clarity encompasses multiple dimensions. Firstly, it includes understanding why you are doing what you're doing. Any action, plan, or strategy must be rooted in a sound reason—your "why"—which gives meaning to your efforts. Another dimension is the clarity of scope, knowing what you say yes to and what you say no to. Clarifying values deepens this clarity, as it involves making one decision that automatically informs hundreds of other decisions through inference. Being clear on the trade-offs you are making is important to create a complete picture. Yet another dimension is clarity in who is driving what. Clear accountability and responsibility matter to create clarity that drives performance. One could delve deeper into this topic, but the point is clear.

Whether you're working on a project or with a team, clarity is what you must start with. This allows you to move quicker, more determined, more motivated, and in a more excited state.

Clarity drives performance.

For many companies, being customer centric is more of a branding slogan than a real value of the DNA of the company.

Being customer centric doesn’t mean saying you are customer centric. It also doesn’t mean that you do some NPS survey once a quarter to make “data-driven decisions”. It’s more than that.

Being customer centric means talking to your customers, and learning about their problems, life, the language they use, the things that would like to see improve, the main benefit they get from your product, and acting upon that. To be customer centric, the entire DNA of your company must evolve around talking to customers and implementing changes quickly.

If you are customer centric, your business incentives don’t come first. Neither do your investor incentives. But rather, the primary objective is making something your customers want. And not letting anything get in the way of this objective. And this needs to translate all the way down through the organisation and teams.

When you're working on making the world better by bringing new things into existence (products, art, companies), naivety is a strength.

Instead of listening to your voice of cynicism telling you why your idea won't work, you can go deeper and be what others might label as naive.

But to me, this isn't about being uncalculated in the risks you take. Rather, it's about believing in the thing you want to create and establishing a deep faith that you will overcome obstacles that may appear along the way.

Naivety helps you approach problems with a beginner's mind, which has proven to be effective when building anything.

Don't downplay your naivety, even if others try to. Acknowledge it as the strength it is, allowing you to make the leap to take action. Dare to try.

True certainty doesn't exist in this world. Yet corporations, society, and individuals create an illusion of it.

A job considered secure just 10 years ago may now be subject to radical disruption and automation.

There are short-term predictions you can make with a high probability of being true, creating a sense of temporary certainty. But ultimately, it's an illusion. The rigid nature of society, which instinctively opposes change, provides some cushioning. However, change itself remains uncertain.

To thrive in this world, you must find a way to be at ease with uncertainty. Learn to dance on the edge of change. This is the only reliable strategy for life in an uncertain world.

The limit of your achievements is your imagination. Once you realize that the true creative power lies in the creative plane of the world, not the competitive, you understand that anything can be created through thought. Thus, thought becomes the limit to what you create or achieve.

The more you free yourself from learned behaviors that limit your imagination, the more you can become and create. This path is filled with uncertainty and ambiguity, but it's our natural journey of becoming—what we're meant to pursue.

Jeff Bezos argues that a slow decision is often worse for your company than a wrong one. A company searching for a repeatable business model should optimize for speed of iteration. The faster you can iterate, the better. Taking too long to make decisions directly conflicts with what companies should prioritize in their early stages. Therefore, it's frequently better to decide quickly, implement, and learn from that decision to course correct rapidly.

However, there's an important distinction. Bezos categorizes decisions into two types: one-way doors (irreversible decisions) and two-way doors (reversible decisions). For reversible decisions, which likely constitute the vast majority, you should move fast instead of overthinking. For irreversible decisions, you should be more considerate, as they can steer your company into a tougher position.

Generally, I approach most reversible decisions by trusting my gut feeling. I know my intuition is often smarter than my analytical mind, and it's usually right. You can always adjust course with new information as it emerges. Protect the speed at which you move at all costs.

Startup valuations are notoriously difficult to estimate in the early stages. Naturally, investors and founders seek reference points to convince themselves they're making sound decisions when investing in a company. These reference points often include market benchmarks for the type of round a company is pursuing or referencing past valuations. However, given the inherent impossibility of rationally estimating a company's true value amidst the uncertainty of early stages, I believe these heuristics offer little value.

Peter Thiel presents an insightful perspective on this matter. He advises against pitching rounds based on a premium over past valuations, instead advocating for framing them as a discount on future value.

You should never approach investor conversations from the angle that your last round's valuation was Y, and now, with all your progress, you're worth 3-6 times that amount.

Instead, explain why your company will be worth significantly more in the future, framing the current round as a discount to that future value.

This approach not only facilitates finding fair valuations but also aligns with how investors should think about company value. After all, a company's worth is merely the discounted value of all future cash flows it will generate. Therefore, this perspective proves most useful when pitching a round.

Going to the gym twice a week doesn't work. Inevitably, something will come up, causing you to delay it, only to find yourself out of the habit after a while. This is true for any kind of habit.

To make something stick, you need to make it part of your identity. Whether it's learning a new skill, going to the gym, or creating something, do it daily. Only if it becomes part of your identity—something you do every day without needing to make a conscious decision—will it stick beyond the initial excitement period.

To make something part of your life, you need to make it part of who you are. And this requires doing the thing every day.

Over the past few weeks, I've been exploring solutions to the challenge of audio diarization. Diarization answers the question "who spoke when" in an audio file.

A popular solution in the field is an open-source package that implements various models to perform diarization and achieve high performance with pre-trained pipelines. While this approach performs well in controlled environments, it can face challenges in real-world settings.

When considering diarization for large-scale applications processing significant amounts of speech data, two main requirements emerged:

1. Enable near real-time processing of speaker turns for live transcription
2. Improve accuracy in global clustering (identifying the correct number of speakers)

The first requirement is relatively straightforward. Processing audio in chunks allows for timely speaker turn detection. However, overlapping speech, common in real-life conversations, presents a significant challenge. One approach to increase accuracy is to treat overlapping speech carefully to avoid introducing errors in global speaker diarization.

The second requirement proves more complex. Many existing solutions use clustering algorithms that can struggle with determining the ideal number of speakers, especially in real-world scenarios where this number is unknown. This can lead to either over- or under-identification of speakers.

To address these challenges, exploring alternative clustering methods that handle high-dimensional data more effectively could yield improvements. By refining the approach to global diarization, it's possible to achieve better results across a variety of meeting types.

Key learnings from this exploration include:

1. The choice of pre-trained model for speaker embeddings significantly impacts overall performance.
2. While local diarization is well-understood, overlapping speech remains a primary source of errors.
3. Global clustering with an unknown number of speakers remains a challenging problem for traditional methods.

These insights highlight the ongoing challenges and areas for potential innovation in the field of audio diarization.

To succeed in anything, you need to do it many times (volume). But repetition alone isn't enough; you also need to learn from each iteration, attempt, or piece of work.

It's a cycle where you create something, share it with the world, learn from the experience, and then repeat the process with your newfound knowledge. If any part of this cycle is missing, success becomes unlikely.

In the creative world, there are leaders and followers.

You either create new things (by combining, removing, bringing things into a new context, or inventing) or you copy existing things.

Leaders are rare. Less than 1% of creatives truly lead in their niche. Most of the creative work we see today simply follows others, creating copies of trends set by these leaders.

Being a follower is fine if it matches your level of ambition. But if you aim to maximize your impact on the world, you need to quit being a follower early on and commit to becoming a leader.

Leaders are the people who define culture, trends, and the world.

A common advice in business is to simply copy what works.

Instead of creating a new ad format, just copy what works for your competitors. This is both good and bad advice. It's good because you can establish a working business more quickly and avoid wasting effort on potentially unsuccessful ventures. However, it's bad because it puts you in direct competition, resulting in lower profitability and deprives you of the opportunity to create something original.

If you're in a competitive market and this is the game you want to play, copying what works is a solid strategy. You can still innovate in some areas while replicating others by copying.

If your ambition is to escape competition and create something entirely new, copying may hinder true breakthrough innovation. Yet even in this scenario, there are still some aspects you shouldn't reinvent: accounting, legal setup, communication stack, or tools. Instead, you should find a focus area where you're not copying, but creating, with the hope of eventually discovering a breakthrough idea that works.

Both strategies can be effective for different types of people. Ultimately, you should be aware of which game you're playing and understand the advantages and disadvantages that come with it.

As children, we don't think about what we do or why we do it. We're driven by natural curiosity about the world, being fully present and surrendering to whatever comes our way.

As we grow up, we're taught to use our thinking mind - to interpret, judge, think, plan, and compare. We stop being fully present and instead start to think about the world and our actions.

There are certainly positive effects to this evolution, as it helps us function as part of a social group. However, it also limits our natural creative power.

The moment we start to think about something we're creating is when we incrementally move from the natural flow state of creation to a blocked state. We attach expectations, judgments, needs for approval, and comparisons to our work. This becomes the biggest limiting factor in creating good work.

From my experience as a creative, the best work happens almost magically when we let go, detach from the thinking mind, and tap into this child-like quality of following our curiosity without doubt - simply because we don't know any better.

To create our best work, we need to let go of the limitations of the thinking mind and rediscover our present, curiosity-driven state. In doing so, we open ourselves up to what may come into existence

Making music is about capturing a feeling. It's not a predictable process you can force. Instead, it's about being in the moment and letting your emotions flow freely. Then, you capture this essence in a melody, chord progression, vocal idea, or rhythm.

Creating any form of art is magical and unpredictable. You can't force it; you can only show up and let things happen. The magic of the creative process lies in surrendering to the present moment, removing attachment, expectation, and judgment. This is how the best work emerges.

I've noticed that stepping outside your comfort zone often leads to the biggest leaps in your life. This is intuitive and something many people agree with. Yet, I observe a lack of this practice in my own life and in the lives of others.

What have you done in the last year that was truly uncomfortable?

We humans easily revert to comfort; it's what we naturally gravitate towards. Pushing beyond this comfort zone requires dedicated effort and determination. Typically, we experience this discomfort in our big life decisions and grow briefly. However, as we age, we tend to seek comfort more and more. I argue that this tendency is counterproductive for an individual's true growth and realization of their highest potential.

To fully realize your potential, you need to build your life around the idea of embracing discomfort. Beat resistance repeatedly. A key to this is regular reflection and contemplation—a rhythm you return to consistently. Your greatest contributions lie on the other side of comfort.

A stunning fact I often contemplate is that everything we see in the world is created by thought.

The reason your light turns on when you flip the switch is the result of someone having the idea to put a switch in that exact place and connect it to the lamp. The existence of this switch stems from someone's thought of creating a product. The availability of this product in its current form is due to the collective thoughts of thousands of people who made its creation possible.

You can trace this cascade for everything you see in the world.

Thought is powerful. Nothing happens without a preceding thought. A thought is simply energy seeking expression, or potential seeking actualization.

In this sequence, thought becomes the limiting factor in what you do. If you cannot conceive something in your thoughts, you will never be able to create it.

It doesn't matter where you believe thoughts come from - whether it's your genius or your soul. However, we need to acknowledge the power of thoughts and recognize that they create things in our world. Everything is created by thought.

When we're in school, we're taught an intuition: to do well on tests, avoid making mistakes. That one shot in a test is all that counts.

This intuition, however, is entirely wrong when it comes to creative and entrepreneurial work. You need to unlearn it as soon as possible.

A more accurate view of reality is that it's nearly impossible to predict the success of creative work.

Venture capital funds invest in over 100 companies, aiming to pick at least one outlier success. They can't predict which company will succeed, so their best strategy is to diversify their portfolio to increase the probability of having a winner.

Music labels sign hundreds of artists, not knowing which one will be the most successful. These are bets they make on creative success, which is very hard to predict. They construct a portfolio of creative bets.

As a creative, you shouldn't focus on taking one "perfect" shot. It hurts your chances of success if you limit yourself to working on something for a year, then releasing it to the world, hoping it will take off.

The better approach for creatives is to view their catalog as a portfolio of bets. Instead of creating one "perfect" piece of art and overthinking every detail, it's better to create 100 pieces of art you're proud of. Your probability of success increases significantly with the number of shots you take and the number of works in your portfolio.

Although this may sound like a rational approach to creativity that conflicts with its nature, I think it works in the opposite way. Volume in creative work is the biggest predictor of quality and success. As a creative, you need to learn to overcome resistance repeatedly by sharing your work. The role of volume is undeniable in refining one's craft. The good news is that this volume correlates perfectly with maximizing your chances of success by viewing your catalog as a portfolio, rather than taking a few shots and hoping to get lucky.

Every day you wake up is day one of the rest of your life.

Your choices today affect everything that follows. You are free from past obligations, decisions, mistakes, and successes because it's day one again. Today could be the beginning of a new company, a new project, or a new relationship.

Today could be day one if you make it so. And that's what you should do: treat every day as day one of the rest of your life. See it as a new beginning, a fresh start, a reset. Live more intentionally with the limited days you have.

"The less it is, the stronger." - Virgil Abloh

The ultimate form of sophistication is simplicity. It's easy to make things more complicated: add more features, colors, information, or projects. It's hard to subtract, strip away the non-essential, focus on the essential, and create space for less.

This is true in design. A great designer removes elements until the purest, simplest form of their art is reached. They remove distractions to let the main thing be the main thing and speak for itself.

This is true in products. It's not about adding "just one more feature" until users love your product. Instead, it's about getting the essence right. Focus on one job users hire your product for and let them fall in love with it.

This is true in music. Rick Rubin spends time with artists removing all the distracting elements in a track and getting down to the essence. He constrains them to work with just a couple of tracks instead of many dozens.

This disciplined pursuit of less is hard. But this is what it takes to create stronger work. Strip everything away down to the essence of the thing you are creating. And let it speak for itself.

There are two mindsets you can have in the world: the creative and the competitive. The creative mindset is based on abundance; there is always more to evolve towards. The competitive mindset is based on scarcity; to get something, you need to beat someone else.

We all start out with the competitive mindset. Our world is designed to teach us the ideas of competition as a means to motivate performance and ambition. It's a process to optimize the economic output we create as a society. Deeply rooted in our existence is the idea of comparison. Making a million dollars in an exit is impressive, but not if your old friend from school made more. We are stuck comparing, competing, and believing that there's not enough for everyone, so we must beat others to be successful in this world.

Fortunately, the world doesn't need to be this way. There is a creative mindset we can evolve towards. We can believe that in this world, which is ultimately created by thoughts arising from our infinite imagination, there's always more to be gained. For me to be successful, I don't need to beat you. Our ideas of success are different. All we do is an expression of evolving as humans. The creative mindset is the state in which you can have genuine, new ideas about how something could be better, rooted in the belief that there is always more. You don't need to compare; instead, you can focus on yourself.

I'm not here to judge one mindset over the other. But I can speak to my experience of the competitive mindset being a curse that causes unhappiness, poor life decisions, and ego-driven actions rooted in scarcity and fear. To me, a better way to live life is with the creative mindset. This is where I can envision possibilities, act from a place of abundance and courage, and put my faith in my experience in this world, believing that everything will be alright in the end. The choice is yours.

"The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding"

As a creative, you will encounter the concept of resistance. You'll have projects or works you want to pursue but find it hard to take the first step. Something powerful is keeping you from doing your work, and you don't know what it is.

One way to think about this is that resistance is what's keeping you from doing your work. Often, the amount of resistance correlates with the importance of something to your personal growth. The more resistance you feel, the more crucial it is to your evolution.

You need to find a way to beat resistance repeatedly. Not just today, but every day. Tricking yourself into doing what you're avoiding is where the magic of a creative's expression lies.

The exceptional creatives in our world are those who become very good at overcoming resistance and breaking through to the things they feel most avoidant towards. They know that this avoidance is a signal pointing to their most important work.

Today, try to sense what you feel the greatest resistance towards. Then, take the first, smallest step towards it. You're too talented to become a victim of resistance.

You need to learn to fall in love with the present. The past and future only exist as thought representations in your mind.

Looking into the future, anxiety, doubt, uncertainty, and overthinking bubble up.

Looking into the past, regret, trauma, and learning are to be found.

But none of this exists in the now; our experience of life is made up of moments like this. The moment you read these words. And are present.

Similarly, every day is day one of the rest of your life. Each day offers a chance for a new beginning, a fundamental change, a new possibility. Combined with the acknowledgment of life's finite nature, it's an empowering way to think about the world.

In my life, I aim to minimize the days where I live based on past decisions or future scenarios. Instead, I treat every day as day one of my life, inviting new possibilities into my awareness.

Treating every day as day one is empowering. It can be disorienting, but only in the context of the past. And since the past is gone, why base your life on something that is no longer real?

Every day is day one.

As you embark on your journey of creation, the world will inevitably take notice and offer responses. Most often, these are distractions.

In the case of building a company, after a couple of years, we received emails from top VC funds wanting to discuss potential investments.

Similarly, when making music, after the first few releases, some of my tracks were featured in playlists and on various social media pages.

Although these responses from the world feel great, especially after long periods of apparent indifference, they are still distractions. Anything that keeps you from making things better or making better things is ultimately irrelevant.

Certainly, there are times when these distractions can be useful. However, in most cases, it's more important to stay focused on your craft. This could mean improving processes in your company, inventing the next generation of your product, or creating more tracks for the world.

Whenever the world resonates with your work, stay on course and avoid getting sidetracked.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are still very limited. I work with these models every day, building Jamie, and I encounter limitations repeatedly that seem to constrain the next generation of possibilities unlocked by this technology.

1. Short inference context window: Currently, LLMs can only generate up to ~4k tokens as output (with some early betas reaching ~8k tokens). In contrast, the common input context window size is well above 100k tokens. Working with larger contexts requires larger inference eventually. This is a significant limiting factor at the moment, and it seems that this limit is harder to overcome than expanding the input context window size.
2. Slow inference: Despite models getting smarter, inference is still too slow for many advanced applications. For complex tasks, you typically rely on a pipeline of LLM inferences chained together. As most of these operations tend to be linear (and thus not parallelizable), those slow inference times add up quickly. For many interesting cases, we need inference times of < 1 second. More intelligent models remove the need of pipelines. And this is where the field seems to evolve to.
3. Inconsistencies in instruction following: Although models are getting better at following complex instructions, there's always a significant probability of them not doing what you want. Refining the prompts can help mitigate that risk, but you hit a local maximum for certain types of complex prompts. These edge cases are costly when building great products with LLMs.

I genuinely believe LLMs are one of the most exciting technological platforms at the moment. It's fun working with them and observing the pace at which research evolves in this space. But today, there are still hard, unsolved problems that research doesn't have good answers to. Once we figure out these limitations, we will be on our way to unlocking even more potential.

When discussing entrepreneurial and creative success stories, the concept of survivorship bias often emerges. Some use this argument to discourage individuals from taking risks and pursuing their own path. However, I believe this reasoning is not entirely accurate.

Survivorship bias refers to our tendency to focus on successful examples while ignoring failures, resulting in a distorted view of reality. This is true when looking at company success rates; the majority of startups fail, yet we're disproportionately exposed to the few successes.

Using this information to advise someone considering entrepreneurship is, unfortunately, misleading. Entrepreneurship isn't a one-time endeavor. Serious entrepreneurs typically make multiple attempts, learning from each failure. While the probability of success for a single venture is low (confirming survivorship bias), the likelihood of an entrepreneur succeeding across multiple attempts is likely much higher. This is the statistic aspiring entrepreneurs should consider, not the success rate of individual companies.

I don't want to suggest that building a successful company or project is easy; it's not. However, I believe the success probability for those who seriously pursue this path is >50% (based on intuition, not a formal study).

What constitutes a serious attempt? I think several criteria must be met to classify as a serious entrepreneurial effort:

1. Long-term commitment: Are you willing and able to dedicate >4 years to making it work?
2. Ability to learn: Are you intelligent and reflective enough to learn from your experiences without falling prey to self-serving biases?
3. Ability to improve: Can you enhance your skills based on the lessons you learn?
4. Resilience: Can you persevere through extended periods of hardship?
5. Passion: Do you genuinely care about what you're doing?

If these criteria are met, I believe success in this line of work becomes more likely than not.

I'm not suggesting everyone should start a company. Certain traits are necessary for a reasonable chance at success. However, we shouldn't discourage people from entrepreneurship by citing survivorship bias based on single-venture success rates. Instead, we need a more grounded understanding of what it takes to become successful in this field.

When building companies, products, or engaging in any creative endeavor, the correlation between time invested and value created is surprisingly small.

Someone who dedicates one hour to the truly highest-impact action will outperform someone who spends ten hours on less important tasks.

To maximize the effectiveness of every unit of time (input), it's beneficial to spend it thinking deeply about the highest-impact action and then executing it. Typically, finding an answer is easier than asking the right question.

This low correlation between time and value creation will likely become even more pronounced with the rise of modern AI models.

This weak relationship seems counterintuitive to humans.

For decades, the dominant paradigms have opposed this idea. With manual labor, there was a high correlation between time and value. However, as more complex forms of leverage (such as code and media) become available, this correlation weakens. Consequently, our thinking needs to evolve.

Your environment is one of the biggest factors influencing your life experience.

The smartest people in the world often move to San Francisco to build their companies because the city offers fewer distractions, allowing them to focus on solving hard problems.

Similarly, finding calm balance in your life can be challenging in a noisy, busy city filled with distractions. Placing yourself in a calm, natural environment is more likely to yield better results.

The same principle applies to art. If your current environment no longer inspires you to create, it may be time to move to a new one.

Your physical surroundings influence both your life experience and the quality of your work. You should align your environment with what matters to you right now. A change of environment is possible for most people, so it's up to you to make that change happen and tap into your highest potential for whatever you're currently working on.

Consciousness is the ultimate virtue. When you choose the path of a conscious life, numerous positive effects begin to unfold.

With consciousness comes self-awareness. You understand what drives you. You are present and able to sense the world around you. You tap into the power of your unconscious mind to turn thoughts into reality. You progress towards individuation, becoming your authentic self. You love from a position of self-sufficiency, not dependency.

Choosing a conscious life is the best way to live. However, it's not an easy journey. It requires years of following your curiosity to understand yourself, and dedication to useful tools such as meditation, journaling, and therapy. But as anyone who has practiced these tools in pursuit of intentional consciousness can attest, life is brighter on this side of being. Ambiguity, uncertainty, and fear don't disappear, but you're better equipped to deal with them, capable of preventing them from interfering with your best life.

Consciousness is the most powerful lever I've discovered for creating the life you want, if you have the courage to trust that path and yourself.

Everything you want to change in your life is likely available to you right now.

What keeps us from living the life we want are our learned helplessness, patterns, and unconscious ideas about ourselves.

When following the journey of becoming conscious and aware of what drives us, we start to notice that nearly everything is available to us. We are fully in charge of making the changes we wish to make.

So the limiting factor in living the life you want is you, not the world.

Through the leadership coaching sessions I've been part of in recent years, I've noticed one type of leverage that consistently increases the effectiveness of working with people and provokes major breakthroughs in one's life: depth.

When trying to understand ourselves, life, or the world, it's easy to get stuck on a superficial level of effects. We often spend time understanding effects and symptoms rather than causes, working only on a shallow plane of existence.

Yet, ultimately, the real insights and 10x breakthroughs are gained at a much deeper level. Everything we observe is rooted in something profound. This root cause often seems plain and simple, yet it's the actual source of many more complex phenomena we observe as we move up in depth.

For example, instead of merely contemplating the phenomenon of avoidance when facing a major next step in your life, there's something more primitive that's the source of this avoidance. In most cases, avoidance is an intelligent abstraction of a core emotion, typically fear. When working on breaking through barriers, the most effective approach is to go as deep as possible, removing abstractions wherever we can. This way, it becomes painfully obvious what the true barriers are—often things that were unconscious before.

When thinking about becoming effective in the world, using depth as a paradigm for the conversations you have with yourself and others is a powerful lever. Depth is what allows for meaningful breakthroughs. But it doesn't come naturally. You need to relentlessly remind yourself to simplify things and continuously ask "why" to reach the ultimate, primitive drivers and causes that are the source of all symptoms and effects you consciously observe.

There's an idea, often attributed to Lao Tzu, that if you care about what others think, you'll always be their prisoner.

I'm reminded of this from time to time. When I consider things I want to do, I notice something within me resists. Often, it's my desire for acceptance by others. Although I'd like to say I don't care what others think, there's still a powerful force working subconsciously that proves otherwise.

Not caring what others think is seen as the ultimate virtue in today's world, promising freedom. But it's incredibly hard to achieve. Simply being aware that caring about others' opinions effectively makes you their prisoner might be enough to take the first step in your personal development journey to change that. The choice is yours.

This force is accessible to anyone, anywhere. It surrounds us. To turn your life from hardship to ease, all one needs to do is tap into that force, that natural flow of life.

It's present in business, music, arts, and everywhere else. The natural intent of anything is to evolve and grow. Instead of fighting this natural force, one needs to learn to flow with it.

A useful question when faced with decisions is: "Does this path enlarge or diminish me?[^1]

One shouldn't feel shame or guilt in evolving and growing beyond the limits imposed by our domestication. Rather, we should embrace this natural force and step into uncertainty with courage.

[^1]: James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

When considering personal development, an inevitable question arises: should one double down on existing strengths or work on eliminating weaknesses?

In today's world, specificity is valued significantly more than general ability. Due to the interconnected nature of our global economy, being exceptional in a very specific skill or domain is more valuable than being average across many skills and domains. This trend continues to strengthen.

Consider this example: an actor in the market seeks specific knowledge about growing revenues. They have two potential options:

1. Someone with general knowledge of growth and marketing.
2. Someone with specific knowledge in growing revenues profitably in the exact market in which the actor operates.

The knowledge from option 2 is orders of magnitude more valuable than that of option 1. Consequently, the price adjusts - option 2 can offer their expertise at a steep premium compared to option 1.

Applying these dynamics to personal development, it becomes clear that instead of working on a rounded profile of abilities and knowledge (i.e., eliminating weaknesses), it's more valuable to double down on existing strengths. The time and energy spent on enhancing existing strengths will yield a higher return.

It's true that to be effective in a market, one needs a well-rounded combination of strengths across domains and skills. For this, collaboration with others is inevitable. However, the conclusion remains clear: doubling down on your strengths is a better strategy if your intent is to maximize the yield of your energy and time, rather than working on eliminating your weaknesses.

When I was younger, I was obsessed with stoicism. It seemed to offer a way to eliminate self-inflicted suffering by controlling my emotions. I believed that strong leaders were hyper-rational, controlling their emotions to live up to the mantra "be indifferent to the things that make no difference." This led to a desire for self-control and a focus on things I could influence, rather than wasting energy on things beyond my control.

After practicing these virtues for years while building companies and betting on myself, I've come to realize that stoicism is often misunderstood and not always useful for personal growth.

A rational focus on things within your control is undoubtedly valuable for directing your energy effectively. However, I was wrong to ignore the power of emotions in decision-making and experiencing life.

Emotions carry significant value when observed in a calm, highly aware state. They provide new insights, understanding, and opportunities for growth. Instead of ignoring feelings of upset, one should treat them as a source of self-insight. Emotions often serve as a starting point for deeper contemplation of the self, the ego, and one's behavior patterns, accelerating personal evolution.

But emotions aren't just rationally useful; they're another dimension through which we experience life. By blocking out this dimension, we lose a rich part of our human experience.

A third factor that changed my thinking about emotions is their connection to intuition or gut feeling. Emotions arise from the subconscious, which we can't consciously understand. Yet, the majority of brain activity happens subconsciously. It would be ignorant to dismiss the subconscious in decision-making or living life. I've come to see emotions as a gateway from the subconscious to the conscious, allowing us to become aware of something beyond our conscious understanding. Consequently, I now intentionally tune into my emotions when facing life decisions.

The problem with stoicism is that people often interpret it as a call to block out emotions entirely. To me, this isn't helpful. Combining the useful virtues of stoicism (like focusing on what you can control) with an acknowledgment of the value of emotions creates a more powerful operating system for life.

Most communication, discussions, and thinking tend to focus on the solution level. You and your co-worker might discuss what the ideal next step should be, losing yourselves in endless theoretical discussions about solutions.

The problem is that energy spent at this level is typically wasted. Instead, it's better to focus on the problem level. This means understanding the core issue thoroughly and ensuring everyone has the same data and facts - eliminating any divergence in implicit assumptions.

From my experience, when you spend enough time working on the problem level, the solution often becomes obvious. Rarely do people disagree on a solution if they have the same understanding of the problem. However, if disagreements persist, it typically indicates that the problem is not understood in the same way by everyone. In such cases, energy should be focused on aligning this understanding.

A practice I've started to adopt in my life is asking myself one question every morning:

What's the purpose of today?

Some days, this takes me seconds to answer. Other days, it takes much longer as I contemplate and sense what I want the purpose of this day to be.

Why is this question useful?

To me, it aligns your actions with the greater happenings in the world and your life. When running a company, it forces you to think about your greatest potential contribution on a given day. You start to consider the biggest lever you can pull, which often ends up being work on one specific constraining factor to your company's growth. Checking in on the day's purpose urges you to think beyond the daily, zoomed-in level, and go to a more zoomed-out perspective. Intrinsically, you want to optimize the quality of your day, and becoming aware of its purpose is the means to get there.

I apply this practice right after my morning meditation. This grounds me in a still, present state of being and improves the experienced quality of my day. There's nothing that energizes and motivates more than doing something filled with purpose.

You can start today. Sit down, grab a sheet of paper, or write digitally on your favorite device. Then answer: What's the purpose of today?

After running Jamie for the last few years and speaking to hundreds of investors, founders, and customers, I've come to realize an important paradigm in building companies: being present in decision-making.

When you start talking with people about your company (or idea), they often point out potential difficulties. Typically, these concerns are future-oriented scenarios, like "What if OpenAI will be able to do automated meeting notes?"

The problem is, these types of concerns are usually not useful. Why? They compare the current version of your company with a loose prediction of the future. Taking these concerns seriously assumes both that the prediction is true (which it isn't >90% of the time) and that your company will remain exactly as it is (which is also unlikely). If you start making decisions based on such concerns, you end up making fear-based choices rooted in uncertain future predictions. This is where mistakes in decision-making for the company begin.

The future is just a thought and incredibly hard to predict. You should never build a company based on the fear of a potential future scenario. If you maintain your ability to create, adjust course, and pivot quickly, you'll always be able to continue existing.

So how should one make decisions in an early-stage startup scenario? I believe the right decision is always rooted in the present moment. If you have conviction about a decision based on what you know today, stick with it. Everything you do must be grounded in the present. There are examples from more experienced individuals like Ben Horowitz in his book "The Hard Thing About Hard Things." He illustrates that you should never hire an executive because they might be a good fit in a year. Instead, hire the right people for the present moment. This is another manifestation of the same idea: rooting everything you do in the present moment and not in anticipation of an uncertain future.

I want to point out that this might not hold true for all companies. The environment I know best is the fast-paced technology landscape where velocity and speed in execution are table stakes for success. I do believe it's important to observe macro dynamics in your operating environment to align your company with the headwinds that will drive the future. However, to me, this isn't a specific prediction in itself, but rather an observation of present dynamics. So, I believe this is compatible with the presence theory.

The way I make decisions is to obsess over the present moment. I tend to dismiss specific predictions by individuals (knowing that nearly all predictions are statistically wrong) and focus on what we know to be true from our first-hand experience - from first principles. Then, rooted in the here and now, I try to figure out what the highest impact thing to do is today. Not in three months, but today. And I root everything the team does in this approach.

I don't know if this theory about decision-making is naive. But I know that thus far, it has served me well as a mental model to return to when in doubt, while giving me the liberty to not obsess over what others (investors, etc.) think and say.

As a society, we often treat numbers as the ground truth. Whether it's the economy at large, the performance of a company, or likes on a social media post, we tend to rely heavily on numerical data. The truth is, numbers are only a way for us to approximate reality, never reality itself. There is an inherent limitation in numbers. Consequently, all inferences, models, or predictions based on these numbers will carry this inherent limitation within them. And this is fine, as long as we maintain awareness that numbers are merely a proxy for ground truth and never the absolute truth itself.

I've been pondering the origin of ideas and what distinguishes those with an endless stream of them from those who struggle to generate new thoughts. After years of contemplating this question, I've developed a distinct perspective on the matter.

In my experience, ideas emerge from a higher, creative plane, rooted in something beyond our rational minds. When you speak with creatives, they often say it's not them coming up with ideas, but rather that ideas find their way to them. Frequently, they can't pinpoint or articulate where exactly an idea originated.

If you study writers in the field, like Seth Godin or Steven Pressfield, they often describe the process of getting ideas as a highly spiritual practice. It requires awareness and presence. If you're fortunate, ideas will come to you. But you don't create them; you receive them.

I've found this to be true in my own experience. I practice meditation and self-awareness daily, becoming more present and aware of myself and the world around me. Through this awareness and attention to the present moment, I'm able to notice and sense new ideas easily. It's like feeling a genuine connection to a different plane of life - a creative plane. When ideas come, I never attribute them to my own brilliance, but rather to the world around us, the universe. I'm simply the one who receives and notices these ideas. I didn't create them.

This may sound spiritual and disconnected from reality to some. However, after years of working creatively, meeting many outstanding creatives, and studying the subject, I believe this to be true. Ideas aren't created by anyone but received by someone. Receiving ideas requires awareness, control of your ego, and establishing a connection to the creative plane. This is available to anyone but requires practice in self-awareness and evolution of the sense of self.

Pain does not equal suffering. Pain in its purest form cannot be changed; it simply exists. However, suffering can be added if one doesn't accept the pain or if one is attached to something.

Consequently, suffering is a (sub)conscious choice. If you suffer, it's self-inflicted. You can end the suffering at any moment by detaching from its source, whether it's the past or expectations.

In line with this, if someone suffers based on a decision you made, it's self-inflicted on both ends. If you suffer because you feel responsible for the other person's suffering, it's your choice to suffer beyond the pain. Similarly, the other person is deciding to suffer beyond pain because they are attached to something.

Suffering beyond pain doesn't serve a useful purpose. You have the power to change it, to end it, to decide not to suffer. All suffering is self-inflicted.

When you no longer "feel it" in your work or project, it's be time to move on.

There's a distinct quality of "feeling it" - an excitement, a sense of ease, and an increase in energy you get from doing something - that needs to be present for you to do your best work. Of course, there will be challenges and difficult times. But ultimately, you should always find a connection to the source of positivity, energy, and excitement.

Over the lifetime of a project, either you or the project may outgrow the other. The thing you used to "feel" no longer feels right. Instead of receiving energy from working on it, energy is drained. This is when change may be needed.

When you no longer "feel" something, it might be better to step aside. There may be someone else who will energize and carry out the work with greater quality than you can at that point.

However, this change requires courage. It's not easy to see your identity evolving and to make decisions independent of your past. We are deeply entangled in all we have done. But this courage is what will bring you to the next level of your evolution and allow you to find something you excel at even more.

To do great things, you often need to give up good things. Whether you're "feeling it" or not can be a great indicator for making that decision.

Pseudo work is activity that appears productive but doesn't contribute directly to actual outcomes. It can be difficult to identify. Examples include:

• Having meetings about meetings
• Preparing to do a task instead of doing it
• Having meetings to review work of others in detail

Any activity not directly linked to valuable outcomes for your company should be eliminated. Pseudo work is like a disease that spreads quickly if not treated with urgency and determination.

Unfortunately, the default view of work in many organizations focuses heavily on pseudo work. Most large companies fall victim to it, mistakenly believing employees are "productive" and driving outcomes.

Business graduates are particularly susceptible to it. Many management tasks often fall into the category of pseudo work. While some companies and stages may require such activities, you'd be surprised how often they have no real impact on valuable business outcomes.

When building a company in its early stages, be determined to eliminate pseudo work at all costs. Every action should be rooted in outcomes that directly drive value for your company. Everything else is a distraction and unnecessary overhead that should be ruthlessly eliminated.

When growing up, a subconscious paradigm deeply rooted in our being is the need to ask for permission.

As children, we are taught to always ask for permission before doing something. If we fail to do so, we are often punished. This happens at school, at home, and in sports.

After repeating this behavior for many years during our formative period, it becomes so ingrained that we believe we need to ask permission for anything we want to do in this world. Despite this not being conscious, we have an inner need to get approval from someone.

Later in life, this manifests as seeking permission from friends, family, or our social circle for the life decisions we're making. It's typically hidden under the false premise of seeking advice.

One habit you need to break is the need to get permission. As you grow up and develop independence, the need for permission factually vanishes. Yet we often keep ourselves from making the decisions we want, all because we were taught to ask for permission for so many years. This typically ends in some misery that is entirely self-inflicted.

When it comes to your life, you need to realize and embody that you can do anything you want. There will be consequences, but you have the power to make the most difficult decisions by yourself, without the need to get permission from anyone or anything. Do your thing, and do it now.

As a creative, the only thing that truly counts is the work you ship.

Preparing to do the work is not the same as doing the work.

Crafting something and never showing it to the world doesn't count.

What matters is the process from idea to a finished product that you share with the world - something you've shipped.

Increasing the volume of work you ship is the key driver of your creative success.

The more things you ship, the better you'll get.

Ship your work. It's the one thing that matters most.

Every great startup is rooted in an existing human behavior pattern. It's the foundation for everything being built. If founders fail to realize this and don't focus their company, both product and distribution, on this anchoring behavior, they will likely fail to succeed in their endeavor.

At Jamie, we faced this struggle firsthand. After succeeding at building a great product rooted in an existing behavior, writing meeting notes, we started to think about ways to diversify to become more defensible because investors told us to do so. We discovered appealing problems and came up with good solutions, but they were too unrelated. At an early stage of a company, you cannot focus on more than one thing. Despite there being overlaps with our existing product, these new ideas weren't rooted in the same behavior. After realizing that every early-stage company (below $3 million ARR) must be rooted in one, and only one, existing behavior, it became clear. We slightly tweaked our other solutions to fit the existing behavior of meetings, allowing us to build the best product in the world to solve the friction points that come with that behavior.

There are countless examples suggesting that a startup can only be rooted in one behavior. Surely, you can build up and downstream from the existing behavior, but ultimately it all starts from there.

For Superhuman, the existing behavior is email. From there, they built the fastest email experience and integrated new features like AI-writing, better search, and smarter triaging. But all of these features are rooted in the existing behavior of email.

For Amazon, the existing behavior is shopping. They found a way to make this behavior 10x better through the power of the internet and diversified from there, yet largely remained rooted in the primary behavior.

Companies can branch out at later, more mature stages. But in the early days, you need to identify a primary existing behavior and build around that. Find all the friction points that exist there and make it 10x better.

Every great company is rooted in one, and only one, existing behavior pattern. Everything else is built from there.

I recently came across a list of manifestations that I found extremely useful for anyone pursuing their own ideas and creating the life they want.

Often, manifestations get a bad reputation for not being grounded in reality. Many people classify them as useless hacks intended to confuse young, striving individuals. But I believe it's quite the opposite if done right.

Everyone who has achieved something significant attributes their success to some clarity about their future and belief in the journey they were taking. To establish faith in yourself and your future, a practice like manifestation can be useful. It helps program the subconscious mind to pick up things that will get you to the destination you're manifesting. But these manifestations need to be crafted wisely. It's not a magic trick that can make external dreams a reality, but rather a compass to channel internal energy.

Without going on too long about the meta of manifestation, here are the 5 manifestations I found to be useful:

1. I can do hard things.
2. I am intelligent and capable of finding solutions, no matter the problem.
3. I am always learning, evolving, and growing.
4. I am loved: it is safe for me to share and receive love with others.
5. I trust myself and my life. This is all serving my highest good.

I have full conviction that believing in the statements above will make your life better. These are fundamental beliefs for which evidence exists supporting their role in success in life, regardless of what success is supposed to mean.

When making life decisions, such as choosing where to live, what work to do, or what subject to study, humans often fall prey to a bias that blinds them from making the best choices.

It's the bias for certainty.

As Virginia Satir aptly put it: "People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty." This certainty in misery often comes in subtle forms. It's not that you're expressly suffering from the certain path you're choosing. Rather, it's in the ordinary, subtle ways something tells you that you could become more, do more, be more. It's a quiet voice that's too soft to prompt you to make a change, so you stick with what you know. All because of the inner fear of the unknown.

The people who create the life they want and touch the world in creative ways are those who learn to overcome this bias. They're the ones who conquer the deeply rooted fear of uncertainty. Misery will come, especially when you choose the uncertain path. But the payoff is so much higher. To evolve as a person, the uncertain way is what builds character. It's the path that gives you real experience, with real skin in the game. It creates the scars and wounds that shape your character - the things that make you who you are. There's no substitute for going through this. There's no substitute for real experience.

Ultimately, this is a process of maturing. In life, you'll face decisions that challenge you: stick with the certainty of misery or dare to cope with the misery of uncertainty? Life will test you, again and again. Until one day, you dare to make the jump. And that's the day when your life truly begins.

A few weeks back, I had a conversation with one of our investors at Jamie, Bjoern Keune, about something I wanted to do in the future. After sharing in great detail what I wanted to do eventually and pointing out when I believed was the perfect time, Bjoern asked me one simple question: why not now? As simple as it seems, there's a profound point I took away from this.

The problem is that when making plans about the future, humans tend to delay them until they've reached some condition. Plans and goals often follow the template of "when I reach x, then I can finally do y".

I would call this a conditional thinking bias. For some reason, we are attached to the current version of ourselves, to the past, and expectations around us, that we start putting off the things we want to be doing based on some arbitrary condition. This, in our minds, justifies the misery and suffering we go through because there's something worth suffering for: a brighter future.

The issue is that most of these conditions we believe we must meet before doing what we want are not grounded in reality. If your life depended on it, you would find a way to do the thing you want without having met the conditions you set for yourself.

The useful question to unpack this is: why not now?

Once you start thinking about this and go through the (arbitrary) reasons you've made up, you often find that the future you're waiting for is within reach. You just need to let go of the conditions you've set to feel you have the right to be happy. Certainly, it's easier said than done in practice. But this simple question can lead to profound insight into yourself and your life.

The life you want to live is closer than you think if you remove the conditions you've fabricated in your mind. It requires detachment, courage, and self-control. Why not now?

A walk can fix so much. Getting out into nature without your phone and other distractions can be incredibly beneficial. Focus on the sensations of walking - the feeling of your feet hitting the ground, the breeze on your skin, the sounds around you. Notice when your mind becomes consumed by thoughts, then gently bring your attention back to the present moment and the physical experience of walking. No matter how bad a problem may seem, a walk can often help put things in perspective. It allows you to think more clearly, avoid overreacting, and stay grounded in the here and now.

When I speak with people about their lives, and in particular about the direction they want to take, a common impression I get is that people have a hard time articulating a clear vision for the life they want.

The awareness that clarity in one's life vision is lacking is already the first step to figuring out a compelling vision. Then, through contemplation, introspection, and reflection, the answer can become increasingly clear over months and years.

Paramount to gaining more clarity about one's life vision is asking the right question. Typically, there are two:

1. Who do you want to be?
2. What do you want to be doing?

I believe the former question is not useful and puts people on the wrong track. If we start by describing the identity we want to assume in a future stage of life, we are inclined to let our ego drive the identity we think we want. With the first question, all the expectations we have of ourselves, and domesticated, programmed behaviors from the world around us will heavily influence what we envision. We can find a certain identity compelling, but upon closer examination, we may not be particularly fulfilled by the things this identity requires us to do.

The most common example is the fresh business graduate who has convinced themselves that being a management consultant is who they want to be, for the prestige, the recognition by their peers, and status. But when examining more carefully the kind of things this fresh business graduate will be doing in this identity, it turns out it's things they don't genuinely enjoy. Thus, they set themselves up for misery in the future they want to create for themselves.

The second question proposed is more useful, I believe. In the end, your life is always about the things you do—the actions. And you should obsess over what you want to do instead of who you want to be. This allows you to get closer to your natural abilities and the things you love doing, which you will excel at.

Despite the second question being simpler for some, it's still difficult for many to pinpoint what they actually love doing. It's not as trivial as it seems. But the only way to find out is to try many things and genuinely reflect in solitude on our true feelings towards an activity.

When unsure about one's future, specifically about a clear vision for the life one wants to create, start by asking what you want to be doing in your "perfect" life, instead of asking who you want to be. Whether it's raising a family, writing books, building software, or helping in your local community, the question of what you want to be doing is the most important one in creating a life you love.

I believe there is a common struggle the vast majority of humans face: an inability to truly focus.

It's everywhere: in early-stage companies, personal lives, relationships, and creative pursuits. We find it tremendously hard to focus in the sea of opportunities, distractions, and external stimuli.

Focus, by definition, means saying no to other things. True focus means narrowing it down to one thing. If there's only one thing you are focusing your life's energy on, you will achieve it. However, when many initiatives interfere, and you find yourself unable to truly focus, things become hard, and you become stuck.

What is truer than ever is that you can be anything, but not everything. You can extend this to: you can achieve anything, but not everything.

This thinking implies an explicit need for choice. One needs to become clear on what their one goal is at any given time—their focus. If one cannot succeed in this, one won't succeed at anything else.

The method that works for me is this: write down the top 10 things you want to accomplish in the next year. Write it in the form as if you had already achieved it (e.g., reached 100k listeners with my music). Then, sit back and see which goal jumps out at you. This can be difficult or easy. In any case, there will be one goal that is more meaningful to you than all the others. Choose that one. The last step is to make a step-by-step plan on how you will reach that goal. Then, start working on it every day.

It's incredible to see how much one can achieve in a short amount of time if true focus is present. But it requires you to say no to many other things. Focus.

The degree of freedom one has is proportional to the degree of self-awareness one has attained.

If you are unaware of yourself and unconscious of your behavior and thoughts, your freedom is limited by your childhood experiences, societal conditioning, and other social influences. The perceived freedom one can attain in this state of mind is limited and unfree by definition.

Only by becoming conscious and self-aware of automatic behaviors, responses, and desires are you able to break through that limit and reach real freedom.

Freedom correlates proportionally to self-awareness.

As the world races towards the "perfect" Large Language Model (LLM) in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI), there are models in the foreseeable future that will have limited intelligence and capabilities.

The models we work with today will seem clunky, stupid, and incapable in a few months when more capable models emerge. This repeating process of changing expectations developers have towards models will continue.

The current paradigm popular in the community is to separate system prompts and conversations, both of which are textual ways to instruct a model to do things in a special way. When writing effective prompts, the goal is to explain a task in great detail, even providing examples and instructions on how to solve it to increase the accuracy of the inference. These are the fancy research terms like few-shot prompting or chain-of-thought reasoning.

While working with such models every day for the last 2 years, one frustration that constrains the speed at which developers build applications is poor instruction following.

You would be surprised how much time one spends figuring out why this inherently probabilistic model is doing a job right 9/10 times and then fixing the 10% of edge cases. The Pareto principle applies; you can get an LLM to work in your application with 80% reliability in 20% of the time.

The approach today is that developers iterate over prompts and validate accuracy with a test set of data. The limit to this is the textual limit of a prompt.

Anthropic and other foundational LLM companies introduced slightly sophisticated ways to make the prompts more effective. Nowadays, you can introduce information inside of tags to enhance the understanding of the LLM. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I suggest a more novel approach to breaking through the limitations of simple textual data in the prompt. The problem is that in a long prompt, LLMs struggle to differentiate between information along the dimension of importance. It requires high sophistication to understand which aspect of an instruction matters most.

What I propose is that we add a dimension of importance to system prompts, allowing the human to have better control of how an LLM follows instructions by weighing the information. This, of course, is irrelevant once models become capable enough, but it is a solution to a short-term problem we will continue to have in the coming years.

Practically speaking, just like the approach of using tags to improve the accuracy of the model in following instructions, foundational LLMs could use tags (or similar) to allow for differentiation of the importance of a given set of instructions. A simple categorization alongside importance of high and low would already solve many problems for developers today. Of course, a change to the post-training is needed, which is linked to a significant resource investment.

I believe this is a potential path that would allow developers to build better applications today by overcoming the current limitations in instruction following.

When thinking about the character traits useful for starting a company or bringing any kind of creative idea to life, two traits seem important: confidence and resilience.

I used to think that confidence and faith in your ideas were what mattered most. You need to have the ability to spread excitement for the thing you are working on to convince investors, customers, and your team. For this, confidence seems to be the important trait.

Although confidence matters, I came to realize that resilience matters more. No matter how confident you are, if you give up easily once things get tough, everything else cancels out to zero. One determinant for startup success is the ability for people to not quit. The simple fact that you figure out how to not run out of cash and continue to live increases the likelihood of success for your company significantly.

If resilience matters more than confidence, how can we test for that as investors betting on people? Unfortunately, it's hard. Testing for confidence is easy. You see it in the way someone speaks about their ideas and the way they are present. But resilience is tricky.

The best proxy I have found for the degree of resilience of founders is trusting my gut feeling. It's an unsatisfying answer, yet the only one I know of. Perhaps one also needs to accept the fact that this is the error term in investment decisions, the unknown risk.

Yet, the awareness that resilience matters more than confidence alone is already useful in itself to understand the likelihood of success of founders more accurately.

When talking to people and conveying ideas, the biggest mistake you can make is using complicated language. Yet, the majority of people take pride in doing so.

Using complicated language is not a sign of intelligence. If you believe your ideas and arguments are only compelling because you make them sound complicated, it proves that your ideas and arguments are weak in the first place.

Even if your intent isn't to make your ideas seem better than they are, it can still happen easily. When you are working on a highly technical project, there are many words you use that don't make sense to the average person. When speaking about these things, your primary objective should be to simplify how you talk about them.

The simpler the language, the more effective your words.

It's challenging, but a valuable skill to practice in writing, speaking, and creating things. The simpler the language, the better. But it takes effort and empathy.

Use simple language.

Working with other people effectively is an art. It requires skill and empathy on many levels to lead people and inspire them about the journey you want to take together. It's easy to get this wrong and only tap into a small percentage of the potential that could unfold if working together is done right.

One paradigm I believe in is that the deeper the relationship between you and the person you work with, the more potential there is to tap into the highest capabilities of both of you. In this sense, depth is understood as the quality of the relationship you have, the degree of awareness and presence that exists, as well as the level of psychological safety.

All of these are an art in themselves to establish, so for now I want to focus on a simple routine I've discovered over the years that helps me work more effectively with people, especially in the context of meetings.

And this is the routine:

At the start of important meetings, I spend 2 minutes doing box breathing with everyone. This is a method that calms your nervous system and allows you to become aware of your body and thoughts, sort of like a mini meditation. Then, we start by checking in. This consists of answering 2 questions and giving as much space as needed to everyone: "How are you here?" and "What has your attention?"

The whole routine takes a couple of minutes, and afterwards, the quality of how everyone is present and the level at which we can have the meeting is remarkably better. You create a calm state and environment to talk about difficult things, ask striking questions, and share hard truths. It's a distinct quality that allows for better work with other humans.

I'm sure an instinct is that this is wasting everyone's time, and that we're here to "work". And I respect people viewing practices like this in that light; however, I think those people miss out on truly effective working relationships. The truth is, most of our behavior and being is subconscious. We can put great effort into pushing it away to show up with our perfect self that we want in our conscious existence. And in this mode, we believe we can just get the work done and are effective. But the truth is, you miss out on the majority of the potential of people if you are stuck on that level. There's more to it - more depth, more presence, more being, more performance. And a practice like this favors surfacing exactly that level of being, allowing you to work with people on a higher dimension, more effectively, and better.

Becoming one's self can be viewed as a spectrum of differentiation from the masses.

From the day we are born, our life's virtue is to evolve as a person. This evolution involves becoming independent, figuring out who we are, and creating the life we want based on our genuine desires.

The speed and velocity at which this process unfolds vary radically - some never consciously take the first steps and remain on the side of the masses on the spectrum of differentiation. Others fly through the process in their pursuit of themselves.

The idea of differentiation implies that becoming one's self is conditional on being different from the masses, the average. This is true on some dimensions, but not all. The most notable, in my opinion, is the evolution of self-consciousness. The process of "awakening" through mindfulness and self-awareness practices allows you to see the world from a differentiated standpoint compared to the masses. You transition from unintentionally living to intentionally being. This is what differentiates everything you do because the source it is coming from has changed. From the outside, it may look like the same activities, but the quality with which one who is "awake" approaches the activities is vastly different.

If we accept the idea that differentiation is required for a person's evolution, it becomes easier to become independent and leave the tribe. It's a conscious realization that may not translate to full acceptance in your body right away, but it is the starting point for your greatest life to be lived. For a life that is not average, but yours.

Thought creates reality. Everything you see in the world has been influenced by thought. Thus, thoughts are powerful and play a significant role in shaping reality.

When thinking about your life, the thoughts you have greatly influence your reality, not only from a perceptive perspective but also from a creative one. The clearer your thoughts are about the vision for your life, the more likely it is that the reality you imagine will come to fruition.

In your leisure time, one of the most valuable things you can spend time on is contemplating your vision - thinking and dreaming about the exact details of the future you want to create through reflection and introspection. This act of contemplation will give you the clarity of thought needed to turn your vision into reality.

Once you routinely contemplate your vision and gain clarity, those thoughts become the foundation for your faith. You need to find a way to believe in your vision with a sense of certainty. If you fully align your mind, body, and soul with your vision and truly believe in it, you create the conditions required to manifest the life you want.

Then, once you have succeeded in the previous steps, creating the life you want becomes more attainable. Through conscious and subconscious decisions, events, and opportunities that arise, you will move closer, step by step, to what you want. And your success will become more likely. Yet, it all starts with contemplating your vision.

Dr. James Hollis thinks about life in two halves.

According to him, the first half of life is focused on the external world and fulfilling societal expectations. It's the time when you grow up and let your ego drive your decisions and actions. It's a period when you are unconscious and unaware of what is driving you and why you want the things you want.

Unlike the first, the second half embodies a perspective shift. In this half of life, one's focus is on the inner world and our quest for meaning and purpose. It's a time of becoming aware and conscious of one's psyche, self, ego, and thoughts. A time when one contemplates the things they want out of life and questions the norms and beliefs held previously.

To me, the order of these two chapters is fixed, but the time we need to move from one "half" to another isn't. It's up to you when you start your journey of contemplation, reflection, and awareness. The sooner, the better. Your real life starts in the second half.

My mental model of the world used to be that I'm in charge of everything I do. I used to think I could control everything and create anything I wanted, including the life I desired, by being in control. This mindset felt inspiring to me - knowing I could make anything happen in this world created a sense of creative power and the ability to decide one's fate.

Recently, my model of the world changed. I now think we are not as much in charge as we believe we are.

Through practicing meditation, journaling, and contemplating life, I embarked on a journey of becoming more aware and conscious of myself. I started to notice my self, my sense of self, my ego, and more aspects that make up my conscious being.

During this journey, I learned from my leadership coach, Matthias Müller-Lindenberg, that evolutionary impulses exist and are smart signals useful in guiding your life decisions.

The premise is this: our subconscious is much more powerful than our conscious mind. The way we can access this subconscious is through our gut feeling. This sense is one of the oldest and most powerful senses we can learn to listen to and use. Evolutionary impulses are the moments you get an idea of something you want to change. It's a thought that holds the energy of creating change, turning possibility into reality. These impulses are different from the emotional reactions you get when you are triggered in a situation; rather, they are signs that come in moments of stillness, presence, and awareness. You cannot force evolutionary impulses, but instead, you need to embark on the journey of becoming aware and still. This way, you can create the conditions to notice those impulses in the moments where they matter.

The question of where these evolutionary impulses come from can be deferred to another discussion. Some believe they come from the soul, while others believe they come from the universe. However, what all explanations have in common is that they come from something beyond our conscious self.

If we trust in these impulses, or in other words, if we trust in something beyond our conscious self, the consequence is that we are less in charge than we'd like to admit.

My feelings about this realization are two-sided: on the one hand, it feels belittling to know that you are not as much in control as you want to be. On the other hand, it feels liberating, knowing that it's not all on you and there's something larger than you and the world you consciously observe that you can trust.

Despite being in the early days of understanding this more holistically, I start to notice it in my life increasingly frequently. For all the areas that matter to me, I embrace the fact that there's something more intelligent than my conscious self that is accessible to me at all times if I'm in the right state of mind. It takes away a lot of pressure, stress, and fear because I know it's not all on me. Instead, I'm the one bringing impulses to life by noticing them and then trusting them. Trusting that my gut feeling is smarter than my conscious self and letting it guide me in my life.

Desire is an interesting concept. Fundamentally, a human desire is the answer to the question: what do you want? Desire is discussed broadly by many thinkers.

Naval Ravikant has a pessimistic view on desire, proposing that "desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want". I don't agree. Goals rooted in desires can be contracts for unhappiness but don't need to be. Becoming aware of what one wants does not imply unhappiness as a consequence.

So what do you want? According to Rene Girard's mimetic theory, none of your desires are your own. Instead, we imitate desires from others. I think there is truth to this. We grow up being influenced by the world around us and are heavily shaped by the people we are exposed to. This is especially evident in many young people. They have a clear idea of what they want, but upon deeper examination, you find out that it's not really what they want but a superficial idea they have adopted. Hence, they trick themselves into "wanting" what they think they want.

However, this is not true for everyone. If one embarks on a journey of self-awareness and develops a strong sense of self rooted in solitude, meditation, and silence, one can inspect one's desires and make space for the things they truly want. It's a long journey of contemplation, but ultimately, one can discover their own intrinsic desires. While still influenced by the individual's experiential context, these desires are rooted in their soul.

Girard also suggests that human desire is often rooted in a sense of lack or inadequacy. We want the things we don't have. This is particularly true for the superficial desires we have in the competitive mind, when we try to see where we fit in the social hierarchy. Our desires tend to originate from there.

But there's another, deeper perspective. Wallace D. Wattles proposes that "desire is possibility seeking expression, or function seeking performance". This is a positive view of wanting. When one is on the creative plane of life, this holds true. Desire can be genuine, rooted in one's inner self, and nurtured through contemplation and meditation. From this angle, a deeper, more profound element of desire can be found: the desire to express possibility, to have an idea and make it a reality. Viewing desire from this perspective makes it good - a way for us to realize possibilities and evolve.

Regardless of which view of desire you believe in, I'm convinced that there are different layers to it.

Not all desires are created equal.

Desires can be useful or harmful. To move from harmful desires to useful ones, one needs to follow the path of contemplation and introspection. This is the key to wanting things that are good for the world and for oneself.

Whenever we are confronted with change, our instinct is to keep things as they are. We become attached to the status quo and the way things have always been done. We cling to the past.

We go to great lengths to maintain the current state of affairs. We can become irrational, investing energy, time, and resources into preserving the status quo rather than adapting to new circumstances. This behavior stems from our attachment to the past.

But why are we so attached? We fear uncertainty, the unknown, and the potential changes to the established order. We fear losing control. To combat this fear, we sometimes act irrationally.

Despite all the uncertainty, one thing is certain: change is inevitable. Change will always be different from what we anticipate. It will challenge the way things have been, and it may render some past methods obsolete. However, change also opens up opportunities for new approaches to succeed.

We must train ourselves to become detached from the past and accept the hard truth that things are constantly changing in significant ways. Change affects us as individuals, our relationships, families, communities, countries, the economy, and geopolitics. Everything is subject to change.

Detaching ourselves from the past allows us to channel our energy into what's to come and positions us to benefit from it. We should embrace change rather than protect against it. Those who understand this concept the soonest and live by it fearlessly will be the ones who benefit the most.

Become detached from the past to align to thrive in the inevitable future that is coming.

Everything you see in the world serves a purpose.

Tangible or intangible, the idea of evolution ensures that things become more useful by adapting to our world. If something doesn't fulfill a purpose, it may disappear over the course of evolution.

A cow fulfills its purpose of producing milk.

A light switch fulfills its purpose of controlling light.

A river fulfills its purpose of connecting water sources.

Everything in our world has a purpose, and its sole goal is to fulfill it.

The analogy holds true for humans. Everyone has a purpose, even if it might not be clear to everyone, and it may evolve over time. But there is a purpose to be found for everyone. Once found, our sole goal is to fulfill it.

This purpose can be supporting a family, creating useful things for society, educating the next generation, or entertaining your tribe. Everyone has a primary purpose they fulfill.

Once you become aware that life is about fulfilling purpose, everything becomes easier.

You have more willpower to overcome challenges because your actions are connected to a greater purpose.

Your odds of succeeding increase drastically because your efforts are directed towards a greater purpose.

You will walk through life with more joy and happiness because your existence is connected to a greater purpose.

This is what life is all about: getting clear on what your purpose is and then fulfilling it relentlessly.

Becoming great at anything isn't complicated.

There is a straight forward way to become great is repetition.

If you do something often enough, it's inevitable that you get great at it. Even if you're not talented, if you put in more reps than anyone else, you will be great.

The way I explain this to myself is that the human brain is optimized for learning. And learning takes place through repetition. So even if you're not blessed with natural ability for a given skill, you can master it through repetition. It may take longer than for others, but eventually you will become great.

What this teaches us about life is that we should optimize for repetition in the pursuits we choose. Only if you can get reps in day in and day out, you have a shot of becoming great at something.

Greatness requires you putting in more repetitions than anyone else. That's it.

As John Maeda writes in "The Laws of Simplicity," to make a great product, education about the product is needed.

The principle of relate-translate-surprise helps in leveraging existing human instincts when crafting new products.

At its heart, you should design new products by relating to the existing products in your users' lives. Referencing this as a metaphor in designing and translating it to your context makes it more intuitive for users to understand.

The metaphor of a desktop and folders from one's personal desk for personal computers made it easy for people to understand how to organize files. It related to something we know: folders. And then it translated into the new product context, a computer.

This is good, but if you want to excel, an element of surprise is needed. Something unexpectedly useful that gives a reward to a user. Like the ability to search through all folders and files easily - something that wasn't possible before in the offline metaphor.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, reference the existing world around you when designing new products.

We live in a rapidly changing world.

The technological advancements that we witness are unprecedented and challenge our understanding of society, work, economics, and life at its very foundation.

It's hard to predict the future precisely, yet there are clear dynamics giving us an idea of what the future may look like.

There are three changes interesting to observe: media, code, and artificial intelligence.

In media, anyone today can create content easily and cheaply. It has never been more accessible. With this, the way humanity consumes information has shifted from trusting institutions to get information and be entertained to consuming directly from other people. We have this societal filter of what content should be distributed through measuring engagement. Despite this not being the best predictor for usefulness, the dynamic is clear: anyone can create media and get it seen by millions of people.

In code, the barriers to build useful products have never been lower. The rise of the web as we know it today makes it easy for any 14-year-old kid to build what they dream of in a couple of weeks. And with large language models by your side, learning the skills to build things gets easier.

In AI, perhaps the biggest tectonic shift the world will see over the coming years, we observe that many tasks that used to require humans will be increasingly augmented by intelligent systems, allowing an economy to be productive while reducing the amount of human labour required to do so.

Combining all these dynamics, one may question the idea of jobs and consequently life as we know it today.

As mentioned, predicting the future is impossible, but I have a strong conviction on what I think our world will look like:

Our world is shifting away from the conventional model of jobs in organisations to individuals making careers by following their passions.

And we see this precedent already today. There have never been so many people doing what they truly love and making a career out of it. Filmmakers on YouTube. Musicians on TikTok. Software engineers building side projects.

With this shift, our education and understanding need to evolve as well. If the purpose of education is to make young individuals fit for a successful life in our world and society, it needs to embody this change at its very heart.

The question is: who will make that change happen?

Life is ever-unfolding.

The purpose of life is to grow, to become more, to evolve, to become richer and bigger.

When you put a seed in the ground and the right conditions are met, it follows its purpose: to grow.

So your desire to want more is natural.

More knowledge. More money. More wisdom. More action.

More is good if it is rooted in the natural purpose of life.

But to let your life grow, you need to meet it with the right conditions.

Just like a seed cannot grow without rich soil, sun, and water, your life cannot grow without wisdom, courage, self-control, and justice, all underlined with awareness of one's being and the world.

The purpose of life is to grow, and so is your purpose.

When building a startup, you must have a differentiated belief about the world. Some truth that few people agree with you on, but that you know is true. Some way of thinking about the world that the incumbent products miss. And then you start building from there.

AirBnB's belief was that strangers would allow strangers to stay at their places.

Apple's belief was that people want a high-end personal computer in their pockets.

OpenAI's belief was that large language models allow for useful intelligence if you scale enough.

Those differentiated beliefs are what determine the initial spark of success when working on ideas. It may become less relevant once you grabbed a large market, and scaled. But in the early days of a company, you need a differentiated view of the world and work your way backwards.

At jamie, we believe that a specific, opinionated user interface on-device is preferred over a general voice or text AI assistant to eliminate busy-work.

We may or may not be right about this. And if we find out that we aren't we adjust. But we are building from this belief.

I would go as far as saying that every company is building from a belief about the world. Consciously or unconsciously. And the differentiated bit, in other words, is your unique selling point in the market.

When you work on companies, become aware of the differentiated belief about the world that you are building from.

Working on building my startup jamie and taking some time to reflect on the past few years, there's one realization I had: the product is the single biggest lever determining the degree of success you have. And this applies to any creative endeavor.

Channeling your energy into making the best thing you can and improving every day is what will make everything else you need to succeed easier.

The better the product, the easier it is to get people to pay for it. The better the product, the easier it is to get funding. The better the product, the longer people will stay with you.

If you make a product that is remarkable and so good that people cannot ignore it, it will be noticeable in pretty much every metric you can look at, tangible and intangible. Customers spread the word. Acquiring customers gets easier. Investors want to back you. People want to write about you. Hiring great people gets easier. The world gravitates towards you.

I'm not saying that other things aren't required for success - networking, marketing, improving processes, and branding all matter. But all of those get easier if your product stands out. If it's so good people cannot ignore it.

And this doesn't only apply to startups.

In music, if your music is incredibly good and speaks for itself, it's easier to get label deals, grow your fanbase, get bookings, and evolve.

In writing, if your book is infectious and people just cannot stop reading, everything gets easier. People will recommend your book, and you will grow incredibly fast through word-of-mouth.

What holds true, though, is that taking one shot is not enough. You need to do incredible work again and again until people notice, building up your catalog. But this is what you should get better at - making incredible things. This is the key to everything else.

I'm starting to see this more and more in everything I do. And for the last year or so, this has been my North Star: improving my craft and refining it, having high standards, iterating, and trying again and again. It is a long journey; you need to create a thing a thousand times until you become somewhat good, and thousands more times to become extremely good. But if you put in the reps, it is inevitable.

This is a great place to approach your creative work from - focusing on making better things. Everything else is a distraction.

The question I apply daily is this:

What can I do today to become better at crafting a great product?

And this extends to all sorts of creative creations - they are all products.

If you don't know where you want to go, the way you will start making will go nowhere. In your life, you need a clear vision. A destination. So you can start making your way to where you want to go. If you don't, you're wasting time and energy. On things that don't matter.

No matter what life situation you are at right now, there will be a spark of a dream in you. Some quiet voice telling you about something you want one day for your life. Maybe it's not clear yet. Maybe it's barely noticeable. Maybe it's only there on one day of year. But it's there.

What you should do in your leisure time is trying to listen to that voice. Become aware. Become present. And try listening to yourself. Contemplating your life's vision. Making the space to hear and receive it.

The clearer your vision of your life is, the easier it is for you to get there. Even if it seems far away, if you have a clear picture of where you want to be and believe in it, things will naturally gravitate towards it. Not without determined action, courage, self-control, and work. But if you live by these virtues, things will come your way.

But all this starts with a clear vision. And this is the hardest part for many. Spend more time contemplating on your life's vision. Meditate. Journal. Spend time by yourself. And write it down. Make it specific. Don't leave out details. And then work your way back from that destination. Step by step.

One thing I learned running teams is that leading with questions is more effective than leading with answers.

Whenever an opinion or decision is brought up and it's different from how you see the world, the first impulse tends to be to make statements of why it should be different and how you think about the world. The highest intent is to make the best decision. But there is often an unconscious motivation to prove the other person wrong and show how right you are. And even if this ends up being the case, leading with statements and making other's ideas small results in a lot of frustration for the people you work with.

Luckily there is a better way. Instead of making statements on what the better way is, you can lead with questions. Trying to understand the other person. In most cases, it turns out that both of you are talking about different things, or there is one simple assumption that is wrong in the thinking of someone. And this way, it's more genuine towards the other person. They feel heard, and you work together on making better decisions instead of against each other. Also, this teaches the people you work with a better way of thinking allowing them to grow.

When working with teams, or other people in general, lead with questions, not answers.

In the past weeks, I experienced rejection over and over again. As I am bringing the things to life I want to see in the world, I am reliant on other people. Naturally, there's a lot of people I ask for things, propose cooperation, or share ideas. The hardest part about this is if there's not resonance. Sometimes, I don't even get a clear no. Instead, it's silence. This is the hardest form of rejection to me.

My overthinking mind is inclined to think that I am not worthy. That my ideas suck. That I should just stop and do something else. Because no one cares, do they?

After this emotional reaction, the dust settles and I see things clearer. People are busy living their lives and it's not a rejection of me or my idea per se. Rather, it can be bad timing because they are dealing with more important things in their lives. And that is okay.

To make it in anything in this world, you need to overcome rejection easily. It will happen. Insanely often. But it's not a rejection against you or your idea. It's just not the right person for that time. In with such, you can receive it with gratitude and adjust your path. There are a million ways on how you can reach your end goal.

The Ego is something that inevitably influences important life decisions you make.

While consciously knowing that ego-driven decisions tend to be bad, it's hard for people to free themselves of that influence.

Aware or not, the way I found to beat my ego consistently is to give it space. Listen to what it has to say. When in a discussion with someone where your ego starts to make itself noticeable, let it run. Give it space. Talk it through.

The moment you give your ego space is the moment you put yourself in a position of winning against it. Because surely there are new ways to please the go that do not involve making a decision you will regret.

Today, life for many can feel like living a life not created by one self, but rather living a copy of the mean of the wants of society.

We lost our sense of self.

Few can break free from it. Most are stuck in that world of mimetic desires that aren't their own. Stuck in a life that their surrounding told them to life, not the one they actually want. And it's hard. The world's forces are working against us. Conspiring to destroy the genuine self.

With this loss of character goes along a loss of creativity, innovation, and progress. The world would be a better place if everyone would do the thing they truly love. It would be better from a happiness perspective, but also from a productivity perspective. There's this different type of energy set free if your actions align with the things you love. When you care about what you do.

Today, it feels that many lost their sense of self. How do we re-discover it?

When you commit, you are always exposed to risk.

Risk defined as the exposure to downside - to things unfavorable. When you commit, you are exposed to many risks.

There is risk to be judged, to fail, to be embarrassed, or to figure out a thing is not for you. All of which are painful to experience. Which is why many of us don't commit.

Yet, there is no upside without risk. There is nothing to be gained without committing to something.

So instead of never committing out of fear of going through pain, you need to commit and be exposed to risk. That's the only way to grow.

You can start small, but you need to, commit.

The philosopher Kieran Setiya introduces the notion of atelic activities as an antidote to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic view of the world. Without diving too deep into where these views are derived from, let’s have a more practical look at what our human lives are constituted of.

Our lives consist of many moments. A moment is the present we live in. As our lives are an accumulation of moments, our decision on how we spend a particular moment impacts how we live our lives.

When we make a decision on how to spend a particular moment, we are, in essence, deciding between activities we can possibly engage in. An activity can be doing some work, taking time to rest, reading a book, meeting a friend, or cooking dinner. Everything we do is an activity that determines how we spend a given moment that determines how we spend our lives.

You can group any activity into one of two groups: Atelic and telic activities.

Telic activities, derived from the Greek word for purpose, telos, are activities aimed at a terminal state. A state by which the activity is completed.Atelic activities, in contrast, are activities done for their own sake, not to achieve a particular end.Most of our moments in life are spent on telic activities. We always are doing something to get to the next thing.We are attaining a bachelor’s degree to get a good job.We are cooking dinner to feed our family.

We are finishing that project to get a raise.

Purely spending your moments on telic activities, however, is a path to misery. It’s important for us to do things for their own sake. It’s important for us to engage in atelic activities.Going for a hike just for the sake of going for a hike.

Paining a picture just for the sake of painting.Having a conversation with a friend just to have a conversation with a friend.

It’s important to accommodate atelic activities in our lives because those are the activities in which we find most joy and fulfillment.‍

Sales is about finding the right people. Not convincing the wrong ones.

A realisation I come across repeatedly is that sales in startups or even other businesses is more about finding the right people for your product than spending energy on convincing the wrong people.

Yes, the moments come in which you need to be convincing, but if you are trying to convince the wrong people you following a dead end.

So the prime goal of sales conversations should be to quickly find out if the person you are talking to is the right person for the thing you are offering. If they aren’t, move on. If they are, stick with them. Follow up. Be convincing.

But don’t waste your time and energy on convincing people who are not the right fit.

”Comparison is the thief of joy.” — Theodore Roosevelt

What Theodore Roosevelt put so elegantly is a fundamental lesson for life. Comparison is the thief of joy. You can enjoy the greatest pleasures of life, however, the moment you start to compare with others is the moment you sacrifice your own joy. Why? Because everything we observe and do is relative.

This inner desire to compare ourselves with the people around us is something everyone experiences to some degree. It’s human. This is the way we used (and still partially do) to make sense of the noisy world around us. And that’s okay. To a healthy degree.

It’s okay to look up to others, get inspired, learn something, and get an orientation of how you are doing. However, it is not okay to use this as your metric for happiness or success. The comparison to others is meaningless. The only real comparison that matters is to the version of yourself yesterday. Don’t compare yourself to others, but to who you were yesterday. That’s the only thing that matters.

Hand in hand with this goes the hard realization that this relentless mindset of comparison acts as the thief of joy. If you constantly try to see how you’re matching up to others, you will never fully enjoy the moment you are in. And this is a recipe for a miserable life. Listen to Roosevelt. Don’t let your desire for comparison steal the joy you’re fortunate enough to enjoy.‍