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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.‍