These are 11 ideas on happiness I'd tell my 20-year-old self at 30:

1/
Consciously choose things - Choose the sport you'd want to train, the work you'd want to do, the people you'd want to hang with, the places you'd want to spend time at. Just pick, and don't worry about changing later - only worry about not picking. Because if you don't, you'll want to do like everyone, be everywhere, and get everything. This will make you suffer - not because you won’t get what you want, but because you don't know what it is.

2/
People only post their highlights - You need just 3 seconds before opening Instagram or LinkedIn to take a breath and remind yourself that what you're going to check now are “the best moments of other people's lives.” I think these 3 seconds could re-evaluate your entire relationship with these platforms - because now you remember all people are probably suffering from the same things you suffer from, but none of them would post that, exactly like you and me - People only post their highlights.

3/
Only compare yourself to yourself - When I look back on the past 2 years, I probably changed skin a few times and grew into someone I was looking up to. I cannot help but think: If I knew I’d end up where I am today, I’d probably worry a little bit less than I did. In hindsight, worry did me no benefit. If anything, it took from my presence, my happiness, and my confidence. In fact, when I look back on the past 2 years, my happiness baseline probably went up some good points. Today, when I drive at night, sometimes I feel afloat. I feel like I really need nothing - like I'm whole. I don't remember feeling that 2 years ago, partly because I was comparing myself to everyone else.

4/
Journal more often - We have a short-term memory of events. If you don't journal, you won't keep track of how you changed. “How you change” is your entire identity. After years of journaling, you'll be surprised at how life repeats itself, and how everything from your present is tied to things from your past. We're not constantly reminded of that because we don't have detailed records of the past - only weak memories of some highlights.

5/
Build a community - It's not a luxury. One of the earliest missions young folks should embark on, as they are starting their life journeys, is to build their local community. Be open to investing in good friends, and quick to turn on bad ones. Later in life, even if everything else fails, having a local community will keep paying dividends for a long time; and, if done well, till you're old and grey.

6/
If you set out to do something great, you'll also have to sign up to be lonely in doing so - You don't get any work done by being around people all the time. Groundbreaking work is only born out of the deepest flow states. These findings don't exist at the surface; you can't focus for just a limited time and make a radical change. Deepest flow states unlock after months, sometimes years, of consistent inward work. You cannot produce good work if you're not left with your thoughts long enough. This means you'll have to know how to activate flow and how to take a breather on command. This is often easier said than done.

7/
When you shift your thinking from “life will happen” to “life is happening,” everything changes - Being ambitious doesn't have to interfere with living. For example, people like GaryVee incentivize turning off all leisure in your 20s in order to live an exceptional life in your 30s. I think this model is retarded. What if I did this in my 20s and died at 31?

8/
Days are long, years are short - Days pass fast, really fast. If you don't want to hold onto this healthy routine, or start that project, or visit that country, there probably isn't a magical time window in the future when these things finally become possible. Life is now, like really. When we're young, we like to think in abundance. But as we grow older, we slowly start realizing that our experience of life might be limited - at least more limited than we once thought. When we're young, we believe there will be many places to visit, many businesses to try, and many people to connect with. Later in life, we realize it only happens a few times.

9/
Use alignment as a means - In life, most people don't get what they want, not because they are victims of other people, but because they are victims of themselves. If you don't look at yourself in the mirror as the one who deserves that promotion, closes that deal, or achieves that success, you won't do any of it. Happiness isn’t a feeling, it's a spiritual configuration. You’re not feeling it, you’re being it. And you’re most happy when you're most aligned.

10/
When you level up, i.e., as you get more experienced in life, you start to think all people are on the same level. They are not. So key is not to expect that from everyone. When you learn something, it's hard for you to remember what it was like not knowing it. So as you get more experienced, it's easier to think everyone is also getting more experienced. This is not often correct. Many -in fact, most- people around you will still be vibrating the same many years from now.

11/
The bar has never been lower for being a good man. Nine out of ten men set devastatingly low standards for themselves - in how they talk and how they live. That's why they end up depressed. Most men don't even do the basics, although being a good man still means what it used to mean 100s of years ago: eat well, train well, be close to God, and be there for family. But over-complicating this in recent years made more people give up on all of them. It also seems that more people are noticing this.

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The program was one of the few times I've had to put my theses to the test. The whole thing was a stress-testing environment where you get to talk to as many people as possible and validate your ideas in the process. It was one of the very first times it all felt 'real' for me.

For long I've been reading stories of other people building cool things from scratch, and this is my first year to feel in the arena. It's a strange feeling because even though success is not guaranteed, I’d rather lose in the arena than be off of it.

I always read that you only fail when you decide you quit - Thus failure is not an outcome but a state. It's a decision you make. On one day you feel you can do anything, on another you second-guess yourself and everything around you; failure is the result of your reaction to that bad day.

One thing these programs teach is to constantly become in 'sales' mode - Whether they're a potential client, co-worker, or investor, you're constantly selling something; your personal story, your product, your vision, or all of them. On every micro-interaction you’d be pushing strangers to potentially join your mission.

My calendar was running for 12 hours everyday. If there's someone I could have reached out to, I already did - Those were essentially 10 weeks worth of pressure and my goal was to leave no stones unturned. I learned a lot, but the main objective of the program was the money, which I didn’t get.

On the upside I feel I’m a completely new version of myself, one that’s so different from start of this year. I also took some time to reflect on the experience, and rework a plan for me and the team to build momentum back before the end of the year. However, in this process I was reminded by a few or more lessons that I now shall never forget.

01. Don't work solo

I believe this should be applicable for any type of business, not just tech. One of the mistakes I underestimated when I started was me being a solo founder - For months I was doing everything on my own and I didn't feel it was necessary to onboard a co-founder, and I was mistaken. The amount of work needed to pull something into existence is astronomical - Effort involved is probably more than that you’d estimate in any business plan you’d put at the start. Thankfully I recently reconnected with my friend who is a sales expert; and he joined me as co-founder. Now things are much easier and more aligned; this should be the only way to start a startup.

02. Your anxiety is primarily caused by you constantly living in the past or in the future

Points #2 & 3 are closely related. It’s not easy to spend lots of time overthinking everything then recover to find it was just all you. Chances are things are probably not as bad as you might think. But we become prisoners of our own ‘what ifs.’

03. Your experience is really the story you tell yourself

Most events are neutral - The story you attach to it determines if it was good or bad. This means that it's really you versus your mind. It's on you to forever remember a trip as a good memory or a bad memory, decide whether you're suffering or you're learning, decide whether you should stop or redirect, and probably much more.

04. Don't negotiate with anyone unless you're completely ready to leave

At one point, I was having an ongoing talk with an investment partner from Antler MENA, she would tell me to book her calendar then proceed to not show up on 3 consecutive meeting occasions. I won’t ever forget this. The amount of disrespect I got from her just because she sensed we wanted this and weren’t ready to throw off the deal was insane - She proceeded to talk to other people who didn’t put as much effort into the talk. This taught me that no deal is irreplaceable.

Most importantly though, those people were in a much better position than us, so they were not faking that they could cancel on her at any moment, they were actually always close to doing it, which made them more attractive than us.

On one night I had a call with an old mentor, I filled him in with what happened and he proceeded to spit shit for 30 mins straight about them and about how I should have seen it coming. ‘Those people are a bunch of maniacs with noses in the air, you have to learn their language before talking to them.’

05. You have to know what you want

Over and over I'd find that the most successful people know how to handle this so well. Yes, sometimes things change and it becomes difficult to maintain your position on your original plan - But that’s exactly why it’s needed. You can't lose track of what you want, for multiple reasons: 1. you move much faster when you got your priorities straight and 2. a solid conviction is often reflected on everything you do or say - Which means the lack of it often puts you at risk of getting played.

For long my stance was firm that my longer term goal with this business is to turn it into a lifestyle business, which means securing just enough cash in passive income to cover for my desired lifestyle, including everything. A 'lifestyle business' is not a new concept, in fact lots of people who did multi-million dollar exits claim that after a certain number, more money makes no difference, and that if they'd start all over, they'd do just enough to let them live free.

Some examples of this are:

1. I’m rich and I have no idea what to do with my life

2. The story of Rob Fitzpatrick

3. The story of Tom Anderson (can’t find a link atm)

All of them are proof it’s never about the scale of success, and all about a good lifestyle, because success can be infinite.

Read: Startups are the new deferred life plan

Back to the point, for a vc like Antler, this is not the mindset they'd align with - They want you to be all in and go for the biggest version you could become. One of my biggest mistakes was always being on the fence - Between me and myself, I hadn’t quite decided whether I'd want to go for big, or go for just enough. This IS a mistake.

While a detail like this might seem non-important, the things you do and the way you approach problems are completely different depending on which path you choose. When you're building for scale, you prioritize systems and hiring; when you're building for lifestyle, you prioritize efficiency and autonomy.

Being unclear about your ultimate goal means you're constantly second-guessing every decision, which shows up in your pitch, your product roadmap, and ultimately your ability to convince others.

At one point one of the partners was asking me 'what number would you exit at' and I answered '$10-12 million' - Obviously these weren't the numbers they’re looking for. They're playing the long-term game with multiples of 10s in returns.

After some reflection I now know that, thrill aside, I shouldn't have joined at all unless I had finalized that decision.

06. Building a successful product is different from building a successful business

Those who care about craftsmanship tend to overemphasize on the details, user experience, and aesthetics - But when the dust settles, money doesn't care about the experience, just the sales. Lots of successful software companies don’t even care about aesthetics.

For long I have been trying to master and perfect the UX - Not because it makes us look cool, but because it's one of the most rewarding aspects of the job.

I deeply do care about how every little component of our software looks like, and how every user micro-interaction would feel. Admittedly, starting out, this took more time than it should.

07. When things don't work your way, the universe is trying to protect you

This is the type of thing you see everyone talking about until you experience it over enough time. When enough time has passed, you almost always get to ‘What happened was indeed the best scenario.’ The paradox is that you almost always can’t see it earlier.

08. Money is a sine wave, not a linear function

After I graduated, I thought that ‘more time means more money.’ I put off doing lots of things in my life on the hope that ‘if I could just wait a few more years, I’d definitely have way more money.’ That is not true.

To date, 2023 was my highest earning year, and 2024 was my lowest earning one. So I learned that money is definitely not following any linear path - Sometimes I’d run completely out of money, other times I’d be doing better than I expect.

No matter how ‘controlling’ you’d think you are over your expenses, it’s the most unexpected thing. For example, there are often some sudden events that burn big lump sums very quickly, and there are other times where you’d get big money out of thin air - Both unaccounted for.

If there’s a takeaway from this, it’s to never put off anything worth doing because you’re waiting for some certain number. Better treat money as a sine wave than a linear function.

09. You can't make good decisions when you're weak

Although I can't express how lucky I am to be surrounded by a supportive circle - And although this might not probably sound as 'potent' of a lesson, but, for long nights I have been battling my mind into what I can do and what I can not, in the most unhealthy ways.

On some nights it can get so lonely to the point I know there isn't probably anyone I could talk to that would get the magnitude of this.

On some nights I'd have to force myself to sleep knowing nothing is working and nothing seems to ever work. And whether this state of mind is right or wrong, on those nights there isn't much anyone might do or say that would change this narrative inside my mind - It was truly me versus me, so if there's someone in charge of this, it only has to be me.

Now this position is so tricky and i'll try to explain why in the most blunt way possible: When things are working in your favor, you get to experience two good outcomes: 1. good results, because of things working and 2. momentum, because of good results. That is to say, the transition between a win and another is often much smoother because of the momentum you get when things are working.

On the flip side, when things are not working, the real bad pain, especially in startups, is the loss of momentum - So it really feels like you are losing two times. Moreover, for weeks I felt a chicken-and-egg problem: You have to be mentally strong and overcome setbacks asap for better chances of winning YET sometimes you can't even seem to hold it together when it feels like you're losing. The result: The worse it gets, the harder it gets to come back, because both the effort needed and the stakes involved are now much higher 🔄

This state not only depleted my mental clarity, but also my money and body weight. Wrong decisions come at a cost, and the cost is much higher when you’re weak, because it leads to more wrong decisions - A vicious cycle that won’t break until you act quickly.

10. At some point you have to be delusional, almost out of touch with reality

Personally for me this is the biggest takeaway. No one you ever talk to can grasp your full story on one setting. You’re an entire fucking universe full of stories, scars, and dreams. THAT is the exact same reason why you can’t just take random advice from anyone.

Advice could be disastrous, lethal! Advice shouldn’t be random, and should only come from trusted sources; ones that know you well, and are ahead of you on your very path. This is the most important tip I’d give to anyone doing anything.

Bad advice at a wrong time could cost you a lot of time and money. An extremely sharp filter for advice should be your first line of defense when you’re talking to other people, especially older ones.

Today in tech, and because things are moving fast, age is no longer significant of any superiority other than some life experience and soft skills - Not resilience, not vision, not conviction, not agility, not confidence, and not innovation. All of these things you cannot learn from someone just because they’re older than you.

This builds the way for my original point: You have to believe in your story to the point that it doesn’t make any fucking sense to other people. This is the only way. If you asked any of those successful people you admire, there’s a 100% chance they also did it.

The real reason for this is: When you have this insane level of conviction, there isn’t probably anything anyone might do or say that could convince you otherwise. And even when you’re delusional AND wrong, you can course-correct through time, and through real first-hand experience, not because someone said so. This way when you get there, it’s all you, which in turn boasts your conviction even more. It’s indeed a core skill that everyone should attain and never drop.

11. Forbes lists are the devil of startups

Every game has its extremes. For startup founders in their 20s, status games are becoming almost entirely around 'Forbes 30u30' lists - It’s imposing a culture of theatrics. Moreover, it's becoming natural for those in this game to hold up to this standard as the only standard of success, which is extremely poisonous for young minds. You can build a successful business, do better than 90% of other people, get real rich real quick, with 0 theatrics. But modern media machines made it look like theatrics is the only way.

This model starts to collapse when you learn that those titles and lists are often bought with insane money. Regardless, most people who are just starting are still holding themselves to crazy expectations by having to achieve certain things by certain age. This alone could be the downfall of many successful startups. But no one talks about this stuff, because people on LinkedIn still glamorize headlines over substance. So most would naturally optimize for successful headlines, not for actual success.

What’s next

After Antler, and during the past 2 months, we reworked our plan to prioritize money from revenue rather than from funding - So far this is working, we managed to secure 3 new clients, and put a plan to get back to fundraising by end of this year.

Core products we’re working on are hyperspaces.live, the second brain app, and hyperloop.so, the infra for building AI assistants for SMBs. Over the next few months, I’m also planning to launch a tech-focused newsletter, called Interlinked. The newsletter will focus on tech and startup updates, and will be launched on substack. In the meantime, this substack will remain as my personal blog.

Till next time,

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He was frustrated. Understandably, to be honest. Nothing frustrates me as much as this feeling.

I’ve always considered this a memory problem. It’s the reason behind the overwhelm.

Think about the increasing number of information streams, and now mix it with our short attention spans. We’re becoming very distracted, and it seems to be getting worse.

This presents a challenge that I personally find interesting:

How do we ‘remember stuff’?

How ‘remembering’ works

You’ve likely had this experience when looking for an old picture in your phone’s camera roll: you navigate directly to photos in a known time frame, then look more closely forward or backward from there.

This little back-and-forth is exactly what your brain does when trying to remember stuff.

Memory generally works through associations - I automatically recall specific memories by connecting them to other events that happened around the same time frame. This is especially true when trying to remember something from long ago - I find myself remembering related events that happened around the time, then using associations to find the specific memory. However, I can't usually access the exact memory directly right away.

Here’s a small peek into what does that mean..

Below are some example scenarios where I had to remember a different thing in order to remember THE thing:

• Example I:

  Whenever I go to my grandmother's, she shows me printed old pictures from when I was young. I love them, and she makes sure to show me a different set every time. Sometimes, I take photos of the ones I particularly like. Now, whenever I want to search for photos from when I was young, all I have to do is search photos captured at my grandmother's place (location). Since each image captured already has geo-location data, I don't even need to remember when they were captured. This search often gives me photos from different points of time in the same view, and aligns exactly with how my brain works. The location acts as a crucial anchor point for retrieving the memory → My brain associates childhood photos with my grandmother.

• Example II:

  2 weeks ago I went out to have dinner (sohour) with some friends. I was lost and kept searching Google Maps for the place for 10 minutes. Then I remembered we went there at the same time last year (we only have dinner there during Ramadan). I searched my journals for "Ramadan 2024," and found it in 10 seconds. I clicked directions to the location and got on my way → My brain associates places with times of the year.

• Example III:

  I usually take team meetings from cafes. When I try to remember a specific meeting that happened weeks ago, I sometimes can't remember anything about it but the cafe name. By searching for that cafe's location in my timeline, I can quickly find the meeting details → My brain associates meetings with places.

• Example IV:

  I'm outside and hear a familiar song playing, but I can't remember its name or the artist. I happened to only remember the name of another song by the same artist (very close). I search for it, get to the artist, then finally get to the song → My brain associates similar music together.

Self-organized Life

I actually believe this associative property of the brain is interesting.

Because it means we don’t have to remember everything.

And it shades the light on the importance of ‘time’ as an organizer.

Think about this:

Time gives this dimension of context for free. As things happen in your life, you don't have to manually associate them - when time is your organizing principle, everything organizes itself.

In the photos example, if photos you previously took on your phone aren’t having any timestamps (i.e aren’t attached to time) → there won’t be any possible way to fetch your photo memories, because then it would’ve been a huge bucket of non-organized stuff, and you’d be lucky if you found the exact photo that you want!

Now this is the same challenge happening with my friend. Except that the things he’s trying to remember are not photos, it’s actually everything else: projects, conversations, files, emails, notes, etc.

There are two problems with this:

• When nothing is organized, every item is an orphan, easily lost

• There’s no way to manually organize all that stuff

Enter ‘The Timeline’

Using time as an organizing principle could be the only thing we need to stay and feel organized. And could be the only way to solve both problems.

Fact is this simple idea is transformative for every line of work.

For so long I’ve been imagining what it feels like to construct that digital timeline of ‘things’, and this concept evolved to be the inspiration behind the homepage of hyperspaces†.

Because if I have this timeline it would mean that I’d finally get rid of the overwhelm of having to organize my life.

When you don't have to care about 'where' to include everything from your digital world, you can just be. What this means is that documentation doesn't have to interfere with performing. So if I want to attend meetings, have ideas, write drafts, and plan next steps, without having to overthink it, I can just do that. My brain doesn't actually have a designated place for anything. At the end of the day, all I need is to not care about deliberately reviewing what happened during the day but also be sure that it's there somewhere such that I can always return to it at my own will.

Just by including / dumping everything in a day view (we talked about how to automate a big part of that in this post), the only dimension I need to reach out to things that happened in my past is time, not a dozen folders or apps or calendars.

Reason: Dates are great hooks for recall.

We all associate memories with time to some extent or another. So a forgotten memory may often be recovered by recalling what you were doing around that time, which can be enough of a hook to remember the rest.

This is why daily notes are so powerful, and if done right, you wouldn’t need any other structure.

Self-organized Universe

This section is about the philosophy behind using Time as an organizing dimension.

If you pay close attention, everything around us is periodic. While there are many sources that could explain this concept more deeply, the key point is this: the universe follows an eternally repeating cycle that's perfectly balanced. It's the reason behind the harmony we live in – if it weren't for this, the world would have been such a mess. This is why we have seasons, day-night cycles, and celestial motions.

In fact, time itself is cyclical (periodic).

For example, civilization is not linear - most of what we experience today in terms of hot tech is not a global maxima, but a local one. Current advancements in tech, while impressive, are just another local peak rather than an absolute high point in human achievement. This clearly contradicts the common assumption that progress is always linear and forward-moving.

Think about this: Throughout history, every civilization would ruthlessly erase the previous one from the books. In the old ages, this was done by burning libraries bottom-up. In the modern ages, this happens through systematic control of how information is being spread throughout the media and the internet. At every given point of time, "history" becomes just a narrative through the lens of the winner. And this keeps repeating.

On the smaller scale, this is also what’s happening with our very own lives.

Time repeats itself.

Since late 2020, I've been keeping a physical notebook by my side, writing daily logs of my thoughts and life events. I started this practice in late September 2020. Which means I've been doing it for roughly 1,650 days now.

What's fascinating is that when I review entries from the same season across different years, I notice strikingly similar patterns. This is evident in various aspects of life: places I visit, people I spend time with, music I listen to, work initiatives, fitness goals, and even memes!

I found myself naturally gravitating toward the same patterns and moods during particular times of the year, almost like clockwork. While external factors could occasionally affect me, I found I’d ultimately default to the same patterns. The whole thing feels like a pendulum.

It’s a simple idea yet a powerful one – those who understand their patterns are able to have much more clarity. Or better yet make use of their different states for enhanced performance and better outcomes than the rest.

The most interesting aspect about this is I couldn’t access this type of insight without zooming out the 1650 days. Only then I was able to have enough control to jump across time, compare myself to my older versions, and generally get a sense of what my life is about.

So tying back to the concept of maintaining a detailed timeline, I actually believe it could unlock much more powerful patterns and insights than what we could imagine. Think fitness, work, relationships, books, finances, travels.. the list is infinite.

I believe the main challenge though is that it’s generally not intuitive for us to think outside the realm of the physical - we cannot naturally think of ourselves as part of a bigger pattern unless we deliberately assign lots of attention and mindfulness to it.

Most of my work during the past 2 years is about exploring how technology can enhance human creativity. The most prominent insight has always been this: Everything is connected, we just need to understand how to unlock that, whatever software or tools or books we might use.

† The idea behind the naming 'hyperspaces' is that thoughts are interconnected; every thought we get could be a wormhole to a world of thoughts and ideas. Your inner mind is just a reflection of the outer universe. If thoughts are places, then the mind is constantly time traveling. In fact if thoughts are places, what are dreams, memories, and aspirations if not time travel?

In all three cases you imagine yourself going places, talking to people, doing things – Doesn't this feel like a handshake?

This is part III of the ‘Building a Second Brain’ series:

Part I – Software vs Psychedelics

Part II – How to build a knowledge library for creative work?

Update log:

• hyperspaces.live is joining antler.co starting this week – big milestone!

• We recently rolled out 2 interesting updates:

  

  1. AI Writer: You can generate text content based on older stuff on your timeline using the new AI Writer – Just reference (mention) older notes and events, enter your prompt, and it handles the rest.

  2. AI Backlinks: Notes will now auto-link themselves based on detected themes in text content, physical locations, or calendar events.

In the next few weeks I’ll be sharing more insights into this journey.

Interesting times – See you around!

Zeyad Mahran

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In July of last year, I had a cool concept for a landing page. I wanted to do it so bad I reached out to one of the best designers I know. He told me “It will take 3 weeks and will cost $2,400” – I wanted to do it because it had some fancy animations and design, but ain’t no way I’d pay $2,400 for a landing page. So I did it myself. Sure it wasn’t near the quality of something done by a designer, but I got something working and made peace with it.

Crazy to think this was just a few months ago.

Do you know how much that $2,400 landing page costs today?

$1, adjusted for AI-generated output. It's no longer complex.

Today you can record a short video of whatever complex animation you like, pass it to whatever AI tool, and you can get it done in under 5 minutes. And that sophisticated algorithm from earlier which previously took months can now be implemented in just a day.

Historically, the core intellectual property of a software product was fundamentally rooted in ‘how complex it was’ because it demonstrated how much effort went into research and product development. This complexity created the barrier needed for differentiation, such that it’s impossible for someone to wake up and decide they’d do the same exact thing without probably bleeding resources and time.

This has entirely changed. Today, we shifted from asking “is this idea feasible to implement” to “which ideas to implement” now that we know anything is possible. The barrier of entry to any sophisticated feature that used to signal competence is now almost zero.

Some people would think this is frightening, but let’s think about this: If we can now execute on complex ideas at a very high speed, then the real complexity lies in having original ideas to start with. The barrier is no longer technical – it's creative.

The new MVP

The way we used to implement a minimum viable product, i.e the simplest functional form of an idea, was this: We have an idea in mind, maybe a handful of features and a few designs, and we want to develop a simple prototype with a simple interface. It would typically take anything from a few weeks to a few months to implement this MVP - so this is the old model. This is how we used to think about implementing a prototype from scratch.

Today this has fundamentally changed. Now we can prototype at the speed of thought. With just a prompt, you can generate a complete prototype – including the entire codebase, database, and deployment, into a fully functional software package. What used to take weeks or months to build as an MVP can now be done in a few days.

This changes what defines an MVP, because no one is expecting *just* a working prototype anymore. Today the general expectation from an MVP is a mature product that’s working with almost zero flaws. Not only that but also the interface has to be so good because it no longer reflects what you had in mind when you started working – it actually now reflects how well you prompt and iterate with your AI. Because imagine having this tool that could program or design anything, and you still end up with a poor user interface – what does this tell about the product?

If you think deep enough in your prompts, it would be reflected on product quality and design. This is the new standard.

English is the new programming language

Since we’re shifting from programming languages and design languages to just pure English, this puts clear emphasis on the quality of your thoughts. Because now, more than ever, if you give your AI a bad prompt (i.e., bad English), this is what you're going to get out of it. Actually, we now have a clearer indicator of 'quality of thoughts' than any time before.

In the past, it was easy to blame poor results on team members or processes or systems, but now there are no intermediary layers, it's just you, your AI, and pure English. Even most communication within the team has been less about how to implement stuff and more about how to communicate it to AI. This wasn’t even a thing just one year ago.

Taste is now more relevant than ever

No wonder conversations about taste are recently common, because it’s probably one of the last things AI can take away from you. If your thoughts could be translated in real time into a working product, then it all comes down to what you want to see out in the world, what you want to create from nothing, and how you shape it to create value. So things that were not widely discussed before like taste, originality, creativity, are now the most important again.

Now that we already know that more than 90% of your software is probably written with AI, let’s not talk about the complexity of your software or about the feasibility of implementing it, because we know that’s possible, let’s now talk about what brings real value to your customers? what is the mixture that goes into your ‘building’ process? What’s unique enough about it that it is not replicable by a competitor?

What to do about it

I like the fact that lots of conversations are now shifting towards values rather than tech. For example, the gist of this post from yesterday by Sam Altman was that ‘agency, willfulness, and determination’ are the new differentiator.

It seems things like mindset, will, and taste were always ‘presumed’ as a backdrop to seemingly more important things like technical abilities. Now that technical abilities are moving to the backdrop, the conversation is becoming much more interesting and we are here for it.

towards a superhuman mind

Doing it right is not enough, doing it with taste is

“There’re lots of ways to be, as a person. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there” – Make something wonderful…

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a year ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · Zeyad Mahran

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Thanks for and for reading drafts of this.

What do you currently use AI for?

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Till next time,

Zeyad Mahran

Today I want to chime in to discuss a personal challenge I’ve been struggling with, which is how to come up with ideas for this newsletter, or any type of creative work for that matter. I found that the process is not often linear, it’s not like you sit down and figure out what to write about. It’s more like you read and consume lots of things, and then suddenly and unexpectedly you find you have some good insights about something.

Since I consume lots of content in different formats, and there’s probably lots of people like me, the challenge is becoming less about what to write about but rather how to manage all these inputs. If writing output is directly related to things I read or learn, then theoretically I should have lots of content and things to share. Practically though, it’s not often the case. In this post I explore why, and what to do about it.

I always try to carry around a small notebook and pen. Where I write down anything I’m inspired by or want to remember later. I often find each one of those notebooks lasts 2-3 months before I switch to a new one. So each one ends up being a small collection of thoughts and ideas I had during the time window.

Few days ago I wrote an issue of this newsletter, but then I didn’t like it, so I didn’t send it. Then today I thought of writing another one. I was searching for ideas. Only 10 minutes skimming my current notebook (started December) I had more than a handful. When I picked one topic (this post) I then skimmed it again but with a sharper filter: ideas that might be related to the topic I chose. Once again, I found several relevant ideas, which helped put together this post in under an hour.

The process I described above is the typical process of how a brain works when you create something. Remember that creativity is not coming up with new ideas, but mixing existing ones in novel ways. It’s not like you sit down and think so hard about something to create. Actually, if this is the case, no one would be able to write anything. Just the heavy lifting required to pull everything from scratch onto a blank page would be enough to prevent anyone from ever starting.

However, a physical notebook represents just one way to capture inputs – What about the 100 webpages or short videos or insights I have read or watched or consumed since December? How many ideas do you think I could’ve come up with if I also have a detailed log of all these things just like I have handwritten notes?

This made me think of the importance of minimizing friction into capturing things. Because I can’t just capture everything but I can reduce the effort that goes into capture. If those things I capture serve as building blocks for future projects, then I might as well capture as many of them as possible. But in order for that to happen, the capture process itself has to be as quick and easy as possible.

Provided that we’re able to crack this, the value of this library for ‘creative work’ is infinite. Moreover, your problem becomes what to pick from the existing pool of ideas you already have rather than what ideas to start having, which is generally a good problem to have, all thanks to the library. If I could sit down, check my library, and write a post in an hour, then there probably exist lots of other ideas I could turn into posts just by doing a small mix -or more- of some previous inputs from the same library.

If you read this and think “that’s only relevant because you write,” it’s actually safe to say that this kind of library is an essential prerequisite for any line of creative work. The thing about building such a library is that it doesn’t really matter what your output looks like. By capturing and storing ideas you come across, you make it possible for your future self to use that in whatever way they like, which could be a blogpost, a youtube video, a tweet, an email, a podcast, a presentation – the potential is infinite.

How to build a knowledge library?

The challenge, then, is this: How can we build a growing knowledge library from all the content we consume online, with as minimum effort as possible – even when we don't know how we'll use it yet?

There isn’t one definite answer. Instead, it's best to think of the solution as a set of practices. It’s also important to note that what works for everyone could be different, and that’s why it takes some trial and error. But there are some practices that lots of people have found to largely help their creative workflows. I say ‘practices’ because tools are not as important as practices. Tools are just ways to help easily incorporate practices into your daily life.

Below are some of the practices I’ve found worked well for me, listed in order of importance:

1. Highlight the web

Highlight capture tools enable saving text excerpts from any place on the internet. A highlight could be text from an essay, a book, a tweet, an academic pdf, a blogpost, etc. Then at a later point of time, you can see all your highlights in one place.

Some tools for highlighting are Readwise, Matter, and Raindrop.

2. Handwrite

Carrying a physical notebook allows for quick capture of ideas and thoughts throughout the day – no batteries or wifi required. The tactile nature of writing by hand also helps with memory retention and creative mixing.

3. Meeting notes

An online meeting is the type of event that creates a medium for sparking more ideas per minute than other events. The collision that happens between the thoughts of everyone on the call often results in you not being able to process everything until after the call. That’s why meeting notes come in handy if you want to auto-capture and revisit those insights later.

Many software tools are now making it easier to automate meeting transcriptions, take notes on your behalf, and turn them into summaries, insights, and even action items. One example I like is limitless.ai.

4. Write from conversation

You’d be surprised to know how easy it is to create written content by just speaking it. Speaking requires much less effort than writing. For this reason, you can use the speech-to-text feature available in every phone keyboard today. This enables you to draft an email, a script, a social post, or a marketing copy while you’re walking or driving or at the gym.

4. Quick capture on iOS

On iOS you can share almost anything from the ‘share sheet’ to Apple Notes (image, social post, instagram reel, webpage, etc). The reason I use this is it’s quicker than anything else to save a resource without interrupting whatever you’re doing.

5. Take screenshots

This could be one of the least favorable ways to capture, but the Photos app on iOS now enables searching text in images. This means that you can take screenshots of anything you’d want to capture or visit later, since you know you can search by certain keywords and they’ll pop up. Tip: iOS also searches text in photos of handwriting and text in videos.

6. Keep it simple – don't over complicate your system

In the end, the best system is the one that enables the least friction. Using too many tools or doing too many things can lead to diminishing returns. It’s reported that creators and professionals spend nearly one-third of their workweek on storing and retrieving knowledge. Our goal is precisely to reduce that effort, not add to it.

The practices above work towards building a library of ideas that can help you use collected material as raw ingredients for creation. This approach benefits writers, creators, entrepreneurs, students, researchers, marketers, and anyone whose primary work capital is knowledge.

As you could have guessed, this is the first step of the creation process, which is how to capture as many inputs from your world as possible. This represents the first of the three steps of building a second brain. In future posts of this series, we will explore the next steps in the creative workflow, namely ‘organize’ and ‘create’.

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Some announcements:

• I’m turning this post into a 1-hour workshop on March 13th for the building a second brain community. I first joined basb by Tiago Forte as a student in 2021 and it feels great returning years later as a guest speaker. I’ll be sharing the session summary and possibly the video afterwards.

• Just a few hours ago we wrapped an online session titled ‘Conversation to Code’ aiming to code in just pure English with some of the new AI tools. The result was a ‘meeting notes web app’ created from scratch in under an hour. Looking forward to make more of those during the next few weeks (h/t )

• We’ve been working hard for the past few months to bring all kinds of capture into one interface, such that a user won’t find themselves switching between 10+ apps. This led to the inception of hyperspaces.live, a tool for effortless creative work. Here’s the link to the waitlist, but if this is interesting to you, I’d be glad to explain it in more detail and show you around. You can book a chat from here: calendly.com/zemahran30.

Reply to this email directly or leave a comment if you do any of the above practices, what else do you think could be added to the ‘quick capture toolkit’?

Till next time,

Zeyad Mahran

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I found that most people I meet generally have very high expectations of their careers, partners, and friends. They hold onto a distorted narrative of what their life should look like, and thus become blind to what their life actually looks like.

Sometimes I think it's tragic how many people keep chasing an ambition they won't ever align with. Because in doing so, they deprive themselves of the chance to find what could be suitable for the way they currently live.

Back in the day, people's exposure to outlier successes and experiences of other people was minimal. For example, in the early 2000s, my parents were in their 30s and there was just no way to compare their lives with people in their 30s from other parts of the world. Chances of having crazy ambitions that kept them awake at night were almost zero.

Generally speaking, the odds of an exceptional story—a successful business, or a perfect wedding—occurring to someone from your local town at any given moment is low. When you expand your attention nationally, the odds increase. When you expand globally, your feed becomes an endless stream of highlights and extraordinary achievements, making it seem like everyone is living an exceptional life.

Today most people live as captives of their own dreams and ambitions, which are influenced by this global attention stream that never stops. This creates crazy expectations about what a normal day in your life should look like. We're no longer comparing ourselves to our neighbors or local community, but to the world's top 0.01% achievers.

It's sad how our expectations of ourselves became highly relative to stories from all around the world. Everyone does it, subconsciously or not. It's the path of least resistance to determining what we should be, do, or have.

But it feels good to know there's something to do about it: you'd be staggered to know how expectations can alter how you interpret your current circumstances.

We often spend so much time trying to change our circumstances—income, skills, etc.—and so little time managing our expectations. This feels backward considering the latter is more within our control. And more importantly, it leads to the same results from a 'happiness' standpoint.

In his book "Same as Ever," author Morgan Housel writes, "Imagine a life where almost everything gets better but you never appreciate it because your expectations rise as fast as your circumstances. It's terrifying, and almost as bad as a world where nothing gets better."

Housel continues, "My friend Brent has a related theory about marriage: It only works when both people want to help their spouse while expecting nothing in return. If you both do that, you're both pleasantly surprised."

When asked, "You seem extremely happy and content. What's your secret to living a happy life?" 98-year-old Charlie Munger replied: "The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations, you're going to be miserable your whole life."

Reflecting on the last 4, 6, or even 8 years of my life, I found I consistently achieved less than what I set out to do. I also think there are lots of people like me. If this is true, what do you think should change? If there's always this disparity between expectations and reality, isn't managing expectations a more tangible change to make than setting more goals?

Some things are certain; they never change, like how a day is only 24 hours, how our attention is limited, and how there's so much to take at a time. If anything, this sheds light on the importance of identifying what we should exclude from our expectations of ourselves rather than what to include.

Dreams are dangerous; they often serve as platters for big expectations that we have of ourselves and of people. They also have no limits; they sometimes signal extremes. So it's natural most of them never happen, yet we don't stop dreaming.

I like to think that the answer is not to stop dreaming, but rather to dream modestly. If you dream modestly, i.e., manage your expectations, it's easier to lead a fulfilled life because you would be disappointed with yourself less often.

Note that this doesn't interfere with ambition. In many cases, lower expectations are even a better vehicle for ambition, because the gap between where you are and where you want to be is smaller, making goals more achievable, and in less time.

I generally consider the word 'goals' absurd—very absurd. But if that's your thing, if you want to dream big and achieve big goals and conquer the new year and all that nice stuff, the real answer is to aim for the exact opposite of 'big'.

A golden rule I learned is: The more you accept yourself and your flaws, the more you align with what is like you. The more you align with what is like you, the greater the sense of fulfillment you're going to have in your life.

If dreams are not often adjusted due to inputs and events that happen in our lives, they remain trapped in what we think should be ideal but almost never happens. Only when you allow for your dreams to shape up, i.e., evolve and adapt based on recent inputs, learning, and life experiences, do you move toward better things and ultimately, a better life.

For what it's worth, perfect careers and friends and partners and cool cars do not follow any predetermined scripts. They don't happen by being fixated on some specific things to do.

By scripting, we underestimate the role of serendipity. This is very clear, but we often dismiss it. Think of how many times things have fallen exactly in place with little to no effort on your part. And although too many good things have already happened to you and me that were outside of our initial 'scripts', we don't seem to stop scripting.

For example, of all weddings I attended during the past few years, the ones that seemed to be following a script were the most miserable. It wasn't just that the overall energy was bad—you could almost see it on the faces of the couple getting married; they already made their day so dull and sucked so much fun out of it the moment they put a script on it. Contrast this with weddings that are not scripted; they turn out even more fun than what the couple could've anticipated.

To me, it seems that all these bad weddings are just victims of big expectations. Those are expectations that are mostly influenced by other weddings. And this would be less of a problem if those other weddings were themselves fun, which in many cases they are not.

I think it's just the same thing with life: wonderful things seem to happen when we let go of high expectations and fixed dreams. We cannot stop dreaming, but we can change and adapt our dreams. We can be more in harmony with what feels natural to us when we allow for life to unfold organically.

In that sense, a good wedding is just a natural display of presence: happy guests being themselves, enjoying the moment to the best they can. A good time is just some low-expectation, low-effort moments stacked together. And a good life is just a good flow of moments and places and people that all come naturally without any script and without much contemplating.

Thanks for reading,

Zeyad Mahran

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Instead of exploring how to manage this, I was looking into a thing that I now believe was quite far-fetched. I was searching for ways to deliberately expand the capabilities of the mind. Because I learned the brain utilizes far fewer connections than it is capable of.

Think of your brain as a vast network of roads connecting different pieces of information. While the potential for connections is enormous, we only use a small portion of them regularly. Just like muscles get stronger with exercise, your brain strengthens just the connections you use often. But theoretically, at its full capacity, your brain has the potential to outsmart any supercomputer exists today.

To me this was mind-blowing because it meant that there’s probably something to do about the original problem.

If I’d choose one topic to learn about for the rest of my life, it’d be ‘human consciousness’ – I don’t find anything as particularly interesting as practices that dig in deeper states of the mind. Isn’t it fascinating how we get to understand and remember and make sense of… things? Maybe if we understand how the mind works, lots of our problems would be solved?

After looking into ways people used over history to practically extend capabilities of their minds, I found the most obvious way was psychedelics. I read stories of how it was life-changing for some of the most influential people. Problem is, I thought, and still think, I’m not ready yet. After reading lots of stories, I learned that getting into psychedelics is not as easy as it seems.

So now that I’m going to exclude psychedelics for the time being, I found there’s no tangible way to extend the capability of the mind.

Except for one thing.

I found some people online talking about doing it with software (strange I know), and it felt kind of exciting. I later learned they were doing practices to collect and preserve all their knowledge, and then let software help them make sense of it.

The reason this felt compelling is that my only picture of a ‘more capable’ mind was for it to be able to peek anywhere and retrieve any piece of information from my entire life history. If I could remember everything from my past, this would be my definition of having a supermind. And this is where I learned software can help.

This category of software is known as “tools for thought” – these are tools that function as extensions of the mind. Think of it as if we can outsource the heavy lifting, normally done by the brain, to a piece of software.

Another name is “second brains” – And the way this works is: if we can offload lots of the information, thoughts, and ideas we have daily to an external second brain, this frees up space for our brain to do its functions without being overwhelmed. I’m going to discuss how to do that during the upcoming posts of this series.

For now, it’s important to note that, while in the broadest sense, a second brain is just a fancy name for a note-taking app, not every note-taking app qualifies as a second brain app.

The most important characteristic of a second brain is its ability to create connections between thoughts. So second brain apps function exactly like the human brain (extensions of the mind).

This is actually where all of this starts to be interesting.

Remember how we started by discussing how neural connections in the brain determine its capabilities? Therefore, the clearest answer to “why build a second brain” is to extract as many connections as possible between things we learn daily.

And we could talk about lots of other good things that come with building a second brain, like clarity of thought, enhanced cognitive ability, an organized life, and effortless output. But fundamentally, none of this would be possible without that simple concept: ability to create connections between thoughts.

As soon as you read “I want to remember everything from every time” it’s easy to think “But I don’t want that. I don’t want to remember everything. We’re made to forget for a reason” – Well that’s the beauty of it; you are the curator.

Fortunately, in software we have finer control over bad trips than in psychedelics.

In psychedelics, your thoughts roam into an infinite kaleidoscope, there's no map. Anything could happen; your teacher from third grade could show up as a tree, and your grocery list could show up as a list of philosophical questions.

But in software, you have carefully spent time obsessing over the ingredients. There’s no sneaky way your subconscious could surprise you on your trip. It’s like this calm, controlled, cultivated space that you’ve been curating for so long. So when it’s ready to be put to use, it’s all upside. Thousands of good recipes are embedded deep in the network. Your research notes from three years ago could lead to a viral discovery, your years of journals could turn into a book, and an insight you wrote during a team meeting from last week could change the direction of the company.

Inside a second brain, you can only see ideas you put in, but you cannot imagine the infinite possibilities that could result from connecting them. Most of the transformative effect from our seemingly simple ideas comes from letting them collide with each other in a space that embraces this collision.

Exactly like a real mind. The best output is always one that comes as a direct result of the mixing process that happens inside the mind. AI is not going to produce good work or novel ideas on its own. And the book you read is not going to give you superpowers on its own. But the connections that naturally emerge from all of these things simmering together is where the magic happens.

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Thanks for reading,

Zeyad Mahran

Some good news I wanted to share:

1. We recently rolled out v2.0 of Hyperspaces (a second brain app me and my small team have been developing since Jan 2024) with advanced note linking and grouping capabilities – available to users in our closed beta group

2. Hyperspaces is joining 500.co – a vibrant entrepreneurial community, with a short offline bootcamp running in Feb 2025

This is the first post in the ‘Building a Second Brain’ series. In the upcoming posts we are diving deep into practices of how to capture, make sense of, organize, and retrieve digital information. Hope to see you around.

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I started a round-table about Building a Second Brain¹. The whole thing lasted ~40 minutes. By the end of my session, there were over 30 people gathering around the table, with more standing than sitting, even organizers of other round-tables were joining.

I was there because my friend and I had received an invitation a few days earlier. At the time, we were working on a computer vision startup. By the end of this brief session, I knew two things. First, my vision-based idea hadn't received anywhere near this level of interest at the conference. Second, it seemed everyone was silently suffering from information fatigue in one way or another.

1. Pick a problem

Although at this point AI vision felt like a natural progression of my career, my pull towards starting a second-brain product was much higher. Heading out of this room, I knew it was over for the startup I was on at the time.

I kept working on both in parallel for a few months until I eventually decided to stop working on the vision company and pursued the second-brain one. During this time, and through 2023, this choice has enabled me to talk with lots of people in the personal knowledge management (PKM) space, and get deeper insights about consumer software.

While I believe there are lots of ways to start a startup, and although I’m no where near a ‘startup advisor’, I can probably pinpoint three of them: the fast way, the worst way, and my experience.

The fast way

Freelance for 18-24 months. Working for similar clients, solving similar problems, developing a deep understanding of their workflows and pain points. Ultimately you’d find a step –or more– of the pipeline that could be productized, i.e turned from a service to a product, enabling you to build once and distribute twice.

The worst way

Brainstorm ideas. Which I get the reason why young folks with high energy prefer to do it: Lower barrier of entry, and the exciting thrill of jumping headfirst into building something with friends. However, searching for ideas is considered one of the worst ways to start working on a problem.

My experience

Solve a personal problem. This comes from noticing problems that constantly bother you for so long. My problem was ‘overthinking’ which was a direct cause of information fatigue. And I found that ‘knowledge management’ was not only a possible solution but also one of a few things that had been quietly simmering at the back of my head for a few years.

The thing about working on a startup around an interest of yours (solving a problem to you) is that you won’t bother the long hours. If working to solve the problem feels like play to you, you’ll outperform everyone who does it for work.

Also, in the early days, most success from working long hours happens in spikes. Meaning a handful of rare events scattered over a long timeline. These are events where you get ‘lucky’; and they don’t happen often at the start. So picking a nagging personal problem makes sure you wake up as equally pumped on a day that’s not special, where nothing ‘magical’ happens.

Luck is just ‘opportunity meeting preparation’. And since opportunity doesn’t have a predictable way of happening, the only way to predict luck is to simply be ready (years of prep). So by way of aligning years of work around a specific focus, luck tends to happen more naturally. This is what’s often called ‘serendipity’ – where compounding from relationships you build and specific knowledge you get, leads to more of them.

So solving the right problem, at the right time, with the right people could be a wormhole to a world of possibilities.

2. Make sure it’s the right problem

I believe that, in startups, a job is just another word for ‘solving a problem’. Getting paid –by employers, investors, or markets– is the equivalent of getting rent for real estate inside your head; as you get better at what you do, you’re raising your cost for rent.

The type of the real estate is the business domain. The size of the real estate is how invested you are in the problem. The more head real estate you allocate to a problem, the better solutions you’re going to have for it, and the higher you get paid in the process.

In that sense a ‘problem’ becomes the intersection of what the world needs, what you're deeply curious about, and what you're capable of solving.

So what about the ‘information fatigue’ problem?

At some point, I realized that:

• Smart people are just normal people who know how to effectively manage their time and information

• All knowledge is connected, and the way we do our best work is by effectively managing this knowledge

• Brains have limited power connecting and organizing knowledge, so we look for external tools and systems

Given the overwhelming amount of information today, this is clearly a problem for many others. So searching for ways where software can help makes lots of sense. Now add to that how AI can help, there exists an infinite number of possibilities to move forward.

3. Keep working on the problem

Startups are a decade-long game. Most dividends from building good products are paid in 7-10 years. Less than that if you’re lucky, and about 10 if you’re realistic.

So it's not just long hours of work but also long years of commitment. So by definition, what you’d want to be doing 10 years from now should align with the kind of work needed to continue working on the problem, because it’s unlikely that you’d stop doing it anytime soon.

As for deciding what you want to be doing years from now, and although trivial, I find lots of people talking about a very simple exercise: Write it on paper.

I found the idea of writing down my values, serves as a roadmap that guides my decisions. At the very least, it helps stay on track for when I get distracted.

In an essay called What to do with your life, author Julian Shapiro, writes that just by listing values you care about, you’re able to effectively filter what projects to work on.

I did this exercise.

The values I wrote down were wisdom, freedom, and community.

Based on these values, and in alignment with the problem I picked, it felt natural for me to write down ‘Build aesthetic software’ and ‘Write prolifically’ as the focus for the next decade.

At least as long as it's there, I got a reminder; a compass.

Am I heading the right direction?

When was the last time we asked?

I’m starting a “How to build a second brain” series, where I discuss how to organize and make sense of digital information using modern tools. This post serves as an interlude. Next post is going to be about information capture. Hope to see you around.

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Let me know in the comments what are some problems from your world that are worth solving?

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Below are 8 perspectives on greatness that together form what I call the ‘anatomy of the greats.’ There’s really nothing common between all these people except for the fact that they have been part of my world – whether through books, documentaries, or software.

These are 8 blueprints that go way beyond conventional wisdom about mastering a domain.

1. Michael Jordan

“I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Much of MJ's mindset is captured in his documentary "The Last Dance”. It highlights how he spent 7 years of his career doing the same thing everyday before achieving any tangible win, practicing when no one was looking. He made his NBA debut in 1984 but didn't win his first championship until 1991.

2. Seneca

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. When it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short… Life is long if you know how to use it.”

Aside from the fact that “Stoicism” has been a rising theme across several contexts, I believe it has a lot to offer for the modern day. A good entry point for me was a book called “A little history of philosophy.” You could call it “Philosophy for dummies.” It introduces the hypotheses of several influential philosophers throughout history. The section that resonated with me most was Seneca’s.

3. Ada Lovelace

"The more I study, the more I learn that science and poetry are not distinct art forms, but rather two sides of the same universal truth. The poetic and scientific aspects of my nature cannot be separated - they strengthen and sustain each other."

The first time I knew about Ada Lovelace was through the book “The Innovators”. Ada Lovelace is the woman who wrote the first computer program in history. She recognized that machines could be used for much more than just calculations. Her notes on the first Analytical Engine provided insights on how creativity and analysis shouldn’t be two separate worlds, but complementary pursuits.

4. Paul Graham

“There's one case, though, where it's easy to say whether you should work on what interests you the most: if you want to do great work. This is not a sufficient condition for doing great work, but it is a necessary one.”

Paul Graham writes, in what I think is my favorite essay of his. He then continues: “That doesn't mean it's the right advice for everyone. Not everyone can do great work, or wants to. But if you do want to, the complicated question of whether or not to work on what interests you the most becomes simple. The answer is yes. The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that.”

5. Ben Horowitz

“The struggle has no mercy. The Struggle is when you wonder why you started in the first place. The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood. The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak. Always if you are weak.

Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle.

The Struggle is where greatness comes from.”

In his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”, Ben Horowitz of a16z discusses what it feels like when you’re going through it. It reminds me of a thing I read recently: “It’s impossible to look good when you’re getting better.” Every real win in life is downstream of misery.

6. Travis Kalanick

"Break things fast. The way to build great things is to try and have as many failures as you can as quickly as you can, but have them be affordable failures."

This defined Travis Kalanick's approach at Uber, to the point that their explosive growth repelled many employees and investors in dismissal of his actions. He’s one of the most debatable CEOs of all time, but the "move fast and break things" approach remains influential in startup culture.

Since the biggest learnings come from repetitions, the way to accelerate learning becomes not only to try as much as possible, but also as fast as possible. Which means more mistakes, which means more growth. Thus “Break things fast”.

7. David Goggins

"When you think you're done, you're only at 40% of your total potential. Going through life without calluses on your mind is being soft and living a life of lies. Until you experience discomfort in training, you will never unlock your true potential. The pain you are experiencing and running from is your ticket to actually being somebody."

Crazy how this simple concept reveals itself across different domains. The same thing expressed as “The Struggle” by Ben Horowitz, is expressed here by David Goggins as “Intensity”. I believe that Goggins is one of the most intense people on the internet. Yet indeed the kind of “intense” that you’d look up to.

8. Derek Sivers

"If you're not saying 'HELL YEAH!' about something, say 'no'. When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than 'Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!' - then say 'no.' Most people are living their life avoiding any kind of discomfort, but the best things in life require going through periods of sustained discomfort."

From a short essay dated back to 2018 by Derek Sivers. Cleverly reflects on the fact that every yes is a no, and no is a yes. Time you spend doing one thing is also time you’re spending not doing something. After ruling out your least important desires, and developing an anti-vision towards everything that you don’t want in your life, the fog seems to be clearing.

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In software, design, architecture, and art – most people often focus on getting things ‘right.’ And while we always have a clear definition of what it takes to get things right, we don’t seem to know the same about what separates good work from great work. ‘Right’ is good, but it’s not enough for ‘great’. There always seems to be an invisible component that turns ordinary things into extraordinary – and that is ‘taste’.

When Steve Jobs was asked what made Apple's products special, he didn't talk about technical specs. He said "it comes down to taste." But what exactly is taste? Is it purely subjective? Or is there something more concrete we can understand about it?

This question has become increasingly relevant with the advent of AI. As machines get better at doing things "correctly," the human element of taste –that ineffable quality that makes something not just functional but delightful– might be the most valuable skill we're not talking about enough.

The new currency isn't doing more faster—it's creating things that are delightful, original, and resonant. We frequently see designs that follow every rule but lack soul, software that functions perfectly but feels awkward, or writing that's grammatically pristine but still lifeless.

Don't you think this puts some emphasis on the fact that "doing it right" - i.e., checking all the boxes - has become not enough? It’s a deep question actually. Because we’re uncomfortable with what we don’t know. How do we know we “did it” if what it takes to produce great work is unclear?

Taste is in the aesthetics. If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need taste to make good things. Rather than viewing beauty as an abstract concept, let's treat it as a north star—how do we make -really- good stuff?

Lots of people believe taste is a personal preference because when we appreciate some creation, we don’t know why. But saying that taste is a personal preference is just a polite way to prevent disputes. It’s not true.

In fact, taste is tribal. It's essential to understand that taste varies from group to group, but is highly consistent within the same group. This means that taste only has meaning within a specific ‘tribe’ and it totally loses its meaning outside of that context. A group in this sense means a group of people united by age, location, interest, work domain, or anything in between.

We can see this pattern play out across many different areas and subcultures, think: vinyl records, mechanical keyboards, oversized clothes, minimalist digital design, modern architecture, lo-fi music, artisanal coffee, vintage fashion, and even programming languages. Each tribe has its own aesthetic preferences that might seem odd or unnecessary or extra to outsiders but are deeply meaningful within the group.

In this sense, ‘developing taste’ becomes a process of embracing innovation and staying one step ahead of the tribe. The ability to curate and shape experiences that resonate with the tribe, even before they realize it, not only develops taste but also becomes a contribution to the cult. A contribution that has high chance to gain admiration from individuals who understand it and resonate with it – that’s what we call taste.

This definition brings three main principles that are non-intuitive:

1. Taste is up to the recipient

2. There’s no ‘good taste’, just taste

3. Taste is a slow process

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Taste is up to the recipient

Appreciation is a form of taste. Creation is another. Someone could have an impeccable taste in art, without producing any themselves. In both cases, being seen as having good taste is not up to the creator. It's up to the recipient. As a creator, you can't insist you're right.

Someone with taste might create something that goes completely unnoticed by one person while being deeply appreciated by another.

Lots of people often dismiss great creations because they were under-appreciated by the wrong tribe. The keyword here is ‘tribe’. If you pour your heart and soul into something, and you also happen to consume lots of work in the same domain, what you might need isn't to change your work – but to find the right tribe that appreciates it. This principle is well-recognized across different fields: in business, it’s called ‘market fit’; in advertising, it's ‘target audience’; in publishing, it's ‘reader demographics’; and in music, it's ‘genre’.

The key is finding the right people who understand and appreciate what you're trying to create. Once you do, the conversation shifts from defending your choices to exploring new possibilities together.

There’s no ‘good taste’, just taste

When we say taste is tribal rather than subjective, it challenges a common assumption. Most people believe there's a universal scale of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste. But if taste is only defined by the lens it passes through, then broad comparisons of ‘better’ or ‘worse’ lose their meaning.

A minimalist designer's ‘good taste’ might be completely different from a classical artist's ‘good taste’ - and neither is wrong. They're simply operating within different tribal contexts.

It’s not a personal preference, it’s a tribal preference – that’s why it takes guts to contribute to the cult. To have taste is simply to say that you have a well formed opinion. So when we say someone has taste, it implies they understand and can contribute meaningfully to their tribe's aesthetic values.

Taste then becomes a sharp critique, an aggressive filter for ideas and opinions. Through that filter you do things and make decisions, like cook a good meal, enjoy a good movie, build a usable product, or put on a shirt that fits. For all of these things and most others, correctness is enough. But taste puts you in a state that's more than just correct — it adds depth and richness to why and how you made those choices.

And this is also why it’s not typical for someone to develop taste in too many things – this can be disastrous actually. Developing taste requires careful curation of what you consume and create, awareness of your environment, and an understanding of cultural trends. You cannot do it arbitrarily, else the choices you’re making will be just bad. Claiming you have an opinion about too many things, or having acquired taste in many domains, is the same as claiming you are not serious about any of them.

Because it has to come from a place of immersion and confidence, taste takes effort, curiosity, and time.

Taste is a slow process

Some people believe it’s hard to develop taste if you’re not creating anything. And they are right. The more you’re indulged into a craft of any sorts, the more you get to resonate with the tribe that creates and consumes similar works of the same craft.

There are lots of books on writing, cooking, photography, and music. But they can’t possibly help you do better until you see and taste and appreciate what you’re trying to create.

This is the reason why the most creative individuals don’t seem to have any clear boundaries between work and play. But they’re conscious consumers. Like artisans, they’re living in a world where everything is connected together, every input and output. Like a big web of nodes; everything leads to everything. In this world, it becomes super easy to come up with new software design concepts while taking a walk between modern architecture buildings, or come up with ideas for the fiction novel chapter while listening to jazz in a coffee shop. The creative process becomes fluid, where inspiration flows naturally between different domains. Outcome becomes a reflection of a sum of experiences, rather than a calculated effort to be correct.

“Schizophrenics aren’t sunk into themselves. Associatively, they’re hyperactive. The world gets creamy like a library.” – Chris Krause

While taste is often focused on a single thing, it is formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. This process of input integration is often a ‘slow burn’. It can only happen with time, and it has no shortcuts.

This subconscious slow burn begins with intentional, conscious consumption. As diverse inputs integrate over time, new connections emerge naturally. This leads to endless possibilities for creative expression – which contributes to refined taste.

This is again evident in one of Steve Jobs popular speeches: “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

They weren't just building a computer, they were slowly creating something that would resonate with a tribe that valued both technical excellence and artistic beauty.

Everything connecting to everything else might be a symptom of psychosis, but it’s also how the magic happens – Ava Huang

Living with taste enriches our overall experience of the world. It dictates our appreciation for craftsmanship, beauty, and nuance.

“Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring.” – Brie Wolfson in Notes on “Taste”

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Expressing gratitude for & for providing feedback on the first draft of this.

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This was my view on August 9th at 7:27 PM, hours before I totaled my car.

I was somewhere on Egypt’s north coast and on my way to go meet with some friends. I had just finished cycling, then fitted the bike I just rented in the back of my car, and I got going.

I haven’t felt that good in quite some time.

At that point, I had just been away from my desk—a break I felt I deserved, because the few months prior had been filled with significant changes, in life and work. I had been living like a mad scientist in his own lab for a while. So one weekend I decided to go to the north coast to steam off, and it had been long since I went there; it’s quite the destination for that time of the year.

Around 9:30pm, I’m on the road, and I can vividly remember I had this new afro track on. I was driving at normal speed, then got a bit distracted for 1.x seconds, and it was enough to tail an entire bus full of people, on an open road, in the middle of nowhere.

So in under two seconds, lots of things I never knew could happen, did actually happen. For example, I didn’t know that the time an airbag would take to inflate is in the order of a few milliseconds, and that modern systems could have alerting engines on board that actually do work. In just one second, iOS knew that I did a car crash, contacted emergency caller IDs, called 911, and continued to make the loudest alarm sound I had ever heard come out of an iPhone.

Thankfully, no one was harmed. But it’s quite the irony when things like these happen at times when you think you are on the verge of depression. Serves like an instant reminder. Because the few months prior to this incident had me feeling low; very low. And then after the incident I was suddenly forced to revisit my definition of ‘low’.

Over the next 48 hours, I would:

• Get handcuffed

• Sleep on the floor till the next morning

• Spend 5 hours in a transport vehicle, on a 38°C day

• Lose my driving license and never sit behind a wheel for 3 months

• Drown in legal paperwork (the most painful)

It was almost surreal because for a moment it felt like a movie. I knew what was going on was not something that I’d see everyday. So I decided to just be silent and absorb all of it.

I was lucky in multiple ways. For one, I got out of the crash standing on both legs. Second, I underestimated the number of people that would show up to help me. Although it was clearly my mistake, and undeniably so, I received unwavering support from my father and many friends, far beyond what I would have expected.

Thankfully, it didn’t turn into an open case, which would’ve been more drastic. It’s normal for these situations to take up to weeks, sometimes months, to resolve, and that is if resolution is even on the table. So for it to resolve in 48 hours, and for me to get out in full health, is beyond what I could’ve hoped for.

Ironic how sometimes the bad days make you feel good, and the good ones make you feel bad.

I rarely forget the dates of my 'bad days'. These memories form a crucial timeline in my mind—a continuum that helps me maintain perspective. Keeping this continuum in my short-term memory helps me navigate the good and the bad. They remind me that life is interspersed with moments of every kind. And that I shouldn't be aiming for a life of comfort but a life of wisdom.

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You’re not entitled to anything

Here’s the ‘good’ takeaway you are looking for:

For long, I have been contemplating why some things –in work or life– go wrong, then suddenly, I had to think about the number of things that could go wrong, but didn’t.

This is huge. Because now I don’t think about the possibility of “things not working” only during the hard times, but also during the good times. It becomes way easier to appreciate every good time and every win when you remember that you’re not entitled to any of it.

What this means is, suddenly, my programming was reset, and my brain rewired. I know quite well that normally, these kinds of shifts take long, sometimes years, before you’re hit with the ‘revelation’. So in hindsight, it feels as if I underwent an extreme experience and paid the price, only to accelerate the shift. Which I cannot be ‘ungrateful’ for, see how it works?

Soft men create hard times, hard men create soft times

From an outsider’s perspective, it might seem unfortunate to hear about bad things happening to other people. From an insider’s perspective, you go through a lot and you take it all in, and ultimately these times shape who you become. I am nowhere near what I want to be, but I’m trying my best to take everything in; the good and the bad.

The stories I read about people going through near-extreme experiences and about who they became in the process, in a sense, make me jealous. So the more I grow the less I regret fuckups. And this is not to say that you should just go do whatever you feel like doing; it’s just to say that regret shouldn’t have a place in your mindset.

I came to learn that everything happens for a reason, and that whatever you go through is just meant to be part of your story.

You can be fast, or you can be distracted, but you cannot be both

For long, the open road for me was just a proxy for life. This might seem crazy but I always thought that those who are extremely cautious while driving are also slow in life. ‘And I don’t want to be slow’ – or so I was thinking.

I was generally on the reckless side when it comes to driving. I was always feeling the urge to be faster than the average speed of the road, just because I saw a reflection of everyone’s approach to risk based on their driving.

But I also believe that time has a way of telling. So it wasn’t until this day that time taught me you can either be fast or distracted, but not both. Both could be deadly; on an open road, and in life as well.

The world is as you see it

It’s always about the story you tell yourself about the memory. Your world is literally a bunch of “what you think”s. Over and over, life would remind me of this.

One of the best comments I received from one of my friends when I expressed my frustration following the incident and all the money I spent was: “Just think as if you spent it on a trip to Europe.” Strange but relieving.

Ever since August, everyday I wake up, then try to putter for some time; make a good breakfast, take a walk with the dogs, take a soak in the sun, or just sit down in silence for a little while. So far I’d say this has been one of the biggest changes into my day. It sets the tone for a day of work and reminds me that however it goes, it probably is better than many days out there.

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When we first sat down to talk, I was suffering from a severe migraine and could barely speak. He handed me a small pack of Himalayan salt—an unconventional treatment I was aware of but wouldn’t expect anyone to just casually recommend.

Then we started talking for a bit. He shortly brought up meditation and mindfulness—topics I'm interested in but also wouldn't expect anyone to discuss with a stranger during their first conversation.

Around that time I was working on an essay trying to describe what it means to be detached from modern systems, which is another way of saying 'how to live with intention in a world dominated by technology and consumerism'. I had been working on it for so long. The topic kept nagging the back of my head for a few months, which took long to articulate.

It was not about the essay though; the essay was just a proxy for my understanding. I believe I wasn’t able to finish it because my understanding was still not full.

So I decided to go on a one-week retreat to El Gouna in December—where I would meet Taimour, the off-grid man—to clear my head with the single goal of completing my essay.

I don’t believe in coincidence. But it felt crazy when fate got me on a dinner table with a man living by the same set of rules I have been trying to capture in writing for so long.

Right away I became so invested in the fact that he doesn’t use any social media, no TV screens in sight, doesn’t turn on the news, only consumes whole food, and his sleep schedule perfectly aligns with the sun.

He dressed so modestly and walked so slowly. I decided to call him a monk. Though not a literal monastery monk, he lives with standards and rules so different from most people, that calling him a monk won't be far from the truth. His lifestyle, focused on spiritual practices, simplicity, and detachment from most modern pursuits, aligns closely with monastic principles.

For example, every item on his kitchen shelf was there for a reason, every picture on his wall was captured by him, each with its own story.

About the essay I was writing back then: I was in fact writing about everything that –I think– is wrong with modern systems. Touching upon how topics like nutrition, education, media, and medicine are closely and intrinsically connected with concepts like well-being, hope, health, and faith.

I first presented my understanding through some open-ended questions and then dedicated the body of the essay to try answer them. I thought that heath could be a good entry point to the state of detachment I was trying to describe.

So naturally lots of these open-ended questions evolved around the consumption of sugar, the consumption of pharmaceutical drugs, whole-food-based diets, and detox protocols.

But it still felt as if my understanding towards what I was trying to express had been incomplete, and was starting to shape up as I was talking to him. It quickly felt as if the state of detachment I had been trying to put into words for weeks was suddenly in front of me.

For a few days straight, I wrote at night and met with him during the day.

I later learned he is living there by himself, and has been there for 6 years. Used to be married, but not anymore. He also talked about how he’s been learning the Quran for the past few years, healing, and meditating, everyday.

I kept wondering how he supported himself and eventually learned he had a candy factory, and that he used to be a marketing executive in his 30s.

What strikes me about him is that I kept thinking he must be lonely, or bored, or both – then over the course of a few days I would find that:

• He’s friends with everyone around him, invites them for dinners, even invited us; also gets invited at theirs at least a few times per week – their gatherings involve food and chit-chat

• On a given day: He meditates in front of the lagoon, plays the guitar in his hi-tech studio, cooks all his meals in his american kitchen, recites verses from the Quran before sleeping

• He believes that living in tandem with nature is the only way to find peace – Also believes in love, and that the absence of it leads to ruin and suffering

Just by noticing his lifestyle, he gave me answers about: Nutritional diet, information diet, relationships with others, relationship with oneself, and relationship with God. Answers that would directly relate to my list of questions.

For years I was under the impression that full control over my nutritional diet meant full control over my health, which turns out to be false in every sense of the word.

It turns out that what we call 'health' should be the product of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, not just one of them in isolation. So while we tend to pay extreme attention to the physical body, health is rather about body, mind, and soul. And being ‘healthy’ is about achieving a good balance between all three.

When I first learned this, I realized my health was likely in a much worse state than I had previously believed. Even more, it seems that neglecting any one of the three appears to have negative side effects, even if you're dedicating significant effort and attention to the other two.

In just one week, I was able to finish my essay. I called it: How to unplug?

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It’s ironic that most answers I reached were primarily about the fundamentals. When it comes to mindful consumption, getting rid of toxins, and living the good life, we tend to think we need millionaire morning routines or expensive products, when in fact it all lies in practicing the fundamentals.

I now believe a holistic approach to health prioritizes three key aspects: physical well-being (sunlight exposure, proper hydration, and clean eating), mental wellness (by reducing media consumption and practicing gratitude), and spiritual growth (via meditation, daily prayers, breathwork, and grounding exercises).

It’s quite alarming how most of these basics are not discussed anymore anywhere. I also found the direction that modern tech is advancing towards is disabling more and more of these holistic health practices, instead of enabling them.

It’s also alarming how many of these practices naturally puts restrictions on many of the things we are used to doing everyday (processed food, processed media, etc). As we get more comfortable and more advanced, we’re being detached from nature and everything that it has to offer.

Towards the end of my retreat, it came to me: to be away from nature is to be away from God. If the answer lies in the basics, then it’s quite obvious that modernization of certain aspects is more dangerous than useful.

In my personal experience, I took some time to incrementally incorporate one by one throughout 2024, and it worked. I tried to practice what I preach and I found the fundamentals do work. And I’m only telling this from a place of awe. That we probably don’t need anything else—contrary to what advertising and media would have us believe.

I now firmly believe questioning everything and implementing the fundamentals is guaranteed to give us a life of peace and purpose. A life that can actually amount to something and where we can feel safe raising an offspring.

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“It’s one of those moments you’d give all your money just to take a clean shower”

My neighbour told me those words while we were standing on an open-air roof trying to fix a problem that has been going on. Due to some infra changes, running water was cut off from our neighbourhood for three consecutive days. We spent the entire day trying to fill some huge water tanks on top of our building, by pumping water up from ground-level using a motorized pump.

Although it goes without saying that just tap water is one of those ‘available’ things that we take for granted, moments like these are a wake up call for all those other things that you & me take for granted. Because we’re very caught up in the high-level, like I strive for startup success but what other smaller forms of success am I missing on?

If running water is a delight, and startup success is a delight, then there sure exists in between a whole range of easy ‘daily delights’ that we rarely pay any attention to.

If we wait to get joy out of very high-level goals, then it’s a contract we will never be content through the day to day, because these goals are very hard, and take time. But if we abstract this just a few levels down, we have joy in much simpler things that can happen during the day, and even everyday. They don’t cost any money and they’re always there, it’s just that you have to re-adjust your thinking in order to see them — Everything is like a frequency and you’re like a radio. If adjusted for the right frequencies, you can find real delight in things that are all around and that never run off. Moreover, at this state, a normal typical day becomes just a transition from one simple delight to another.

So for example, yesterday was day 3 of no water. But also, in my world, yesterday was a successful day. I spent a total of 7 hours working, not 17, I spent some time in a morning sun chair, petted the stray dog, thanked the barista, tried a new protein powder flavor that has real biscuit crumbs in it, sent some good memes over the gc, ate whole food, did a successful 40-min strength workout, and listened to this live set.

Very typical, yet is a very 'successful iteration'. If I spent the next year doing what I did yesterday for 5 days per week, that would amount to ~250 successful iterations — and I can't help but think: how great could that be?

I realized that one of the biggest reasons your startup could fail is you yourself. If I did everything right for 17 hours a day for 200 days straight, and then burned out over the next few weeks to the point where I couldn't give the bare minimum, it's NOT even the equivalent of maintaining a sustainable workload over the whole period. In fact, it's much worse. Why? Because a few weeks of being "out" is more than enough for assured startup death. I believe it’s the same for many other similar disciplines.

The real move would be sustain the same positive outlook over years, without losing focus, and without losing life. And this is really crazy when you think about it. Because starting out, in our early 20s, we think life is about us versus the world, then as we grow up, it becomes more and more about us versus ourselves.

However, returning back to the concept of ‘daily delights’, I’m finding books, music, and weight training are some of the most underrated things that can save a typical day from being dull, wasted, and forgotten. Partly because, in lots of ways, if all what you ever did that day was read through a book, have a good mood, and do any form of training, that’s easily a successful day, right?

Another thing I found about books & training in particular, is that they work different for everyone. Lots of people will tell you you have to read in the morning, you have to train at 6am,… — The thing is you DON’T have to do anything. The most enjoyable time you spend reading a book is when you don’t intentionally allocate a time slot for it. For example, a friend was just telling me how he was planning on reading a few pages of a book we were discussing and then finished the whole thing in one setting. I think this level of entropy is what makes anything meaningful. You can do anything at the exact opposite of what everyone is telling and still win.

Templates, like ‘morning routines’, fuck up with the concept, because the whole point is to receive what's coming at you in whatever state you're in. Templates, by definition, state that you have to be at a specific place, feeling a specific feeling, and doing a specific thing — which, in the morning example, is not the case. A real delight is only possible due to a moment that happened with zero prep. Templates mess up both experiences and expectations. They rip joy out of a moment because it feels like you're following a script, and they put unnecessary burden of doing something every day that you don't need to.

The morning routine script is probably written or painted by a Canadian influencer who has been struggling with mental illness for so long and finally found their way back using a set of morning rituals that fit with their environment, profession, marital status, and lifestyle. This is exactly the reason why you should never follow any script from a video or a book.

A very simple proof of this: If over the following 30 days you iterated your way to a simple morning routine that fits with your environment, profession, marital status, and lifestyle, then posted it online, everyone including your friends and me, we would be ready to glamorize the fuck out of it.

The reason for this is most people don’t do the simple things, we got things backwards now. Everything that was so simple back then, like sunshine everyday, is becoming an impossible, while things that were nearly impossible, like create a human-grade intelligent chatbox, is becoming 3 lines of code.

And the second reason is, people like it when you hand them silver platters, such as: “Here’s a life changing routine that results in life changing mental benefits” — well, life-changing things happen to you and me through iteration, and iteration only. If we’re not able to iterate, then that’s it, a choice has been made.

Changing beliefs is an evident form of growth, and I bear no regret to say that for so long I was living like the guy in this pic. And for so long, I was mistaken — Now everyday I try to ask myself, what’s the most ridiculously simple change I can do to this iteration?

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I frequently have this feeling, probably you too: When I look to people around, sometimes I question where do I stand? I don’t even know if this feeling is okay. Sometimes I feel I deserve way better, other times I feel I don't deserve anything – most times I can't really decide. I can’t decide if I’m way better or way worse.

I know, different experiences result in different perspectives. I learned that work is a very important component of fulfillment and it’s worth trying to find work you love. So for years I became so firm in thinking no one should ever derive meaning from a temporary job, until they’ve found their “life’s work”. Your job is not a reflection of anything until your job becomes your life’s work. And generally speaking this proves to be a very privileged position.

The term “Life’s Work” is shockingly massively underrated. From afar it might seem like a cool concept but it could be much more than that, it could in fact be the answer to everything. To live a life with work deeply woven in its fabric could seem like the wealthiest thing anyone could have in modern times, and still lots of people would rather discuss concepts like “Work-life balance” than discuss what would it take to drop thinking about this balance in the first place, and design a life in which work already feels like play to the point that a separator wouldn’t mean anything.

You might call me crazy but the world is filled with so much resources & action that the only barrier between finding what feels like play to you and hard work to others is just your own efforts. So many ideas, it’s ridiculous there isn’t a combination of thought & action that would transform your life – I mean I could live off this simple fact for every day till the rest of my life even if I haven’t yet struck gold, than refuse to believe it and move on.

What we call our world, what we live through, is just things built by other people. Other people that are no smarter than you & me. So one of the biggest shifts in anyone’s life is when they realize they too could make things that influence this world that other people are also part of. Normally it isn’t until mid-twenties that most people do realize that that’s even possible, that the influence of their creation was probably very underestimated for so long. Imagining that this influence could poke reality is literally life-changing. Just the thought of it. If we’re living everyday through creations that are produced off the minds of other people, then it is very possible that at some point other people could live through our very own creation. And that, exactly, is what we mean by Life’s Work.

That could be the most important thing, in all of life. Because the minute you put something in the world and see it in action, you can shape it, you can mold it, you can make it better. You can influence better. Then at some point, if it isn’t for this, you wouldn’t see any point of doing anything else, because the progress of a simple thought to physicality is not only addictive but impossible to live without once you’ve adopted it, and that’s why it’s a privileged position.

How many people do you meet in your life that can at some point say this:

“I’m glad I created something from scratch that had good influence on some others”

Very few.

This is not easy to do because it really is the stuff of dreams. If you ask some of your close friends what do they dream of doing, most answers would -or at least should- include good impact on other people. Now wrapping that into something that you could at some point call your “Life’s Work” is the key to pretty much all of life’s biggest challenges. In Japan they call it Ikigai, in other cultures they call it other things, the underlying concept is still the same. And that is to spend most of life doing something that you’re proud of, has good impact, and enables good living. We can argue what good living means. For some it could mean living off private yachts, for others it could mean spending good time with friends or family, what you choose to do with the outcome doesn’t change the prerequisite, and that is to look for what you’d rather spend the next few decades on.

“You have to create an entire world that people can step into, familiarize themselves with, and spend time getting to know.” – On World Building by Alex Danco

A good question then is: “To what extent is someone’s ability to distort reality, that is to say, change or add or impact even a small subset of what we call our world?”

Reality distortion is a real thing, but the trickiest thing about it is to believe it in the first place. It means that when you put something out, when you poke the world, it responds on the other side. Either positively or negatively, but it does, it has to. And this creates a Reality Distortion Field around people who do the act. They bend things in their orbits, and it extends to anyone in close proximity to them. It’s not an abstract concept, it’s a tangible force. It pushes the boundaries of what’s possible for a few more days, months, sometimes ages. Ideas often lead to more ideas, and actions lead to more actions, so pushing the boundaries isn’t as small as it sounds, because it probably means a few hundred more possible things to do than what you had to start with. Isn’t this magical?

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Most people are so afraid of putting themselves out there, overthinking every small step even when they have nothing to lose already.

Even when modern day content seems so overwhelming and social feeds feel like an information hose and google processes 98k searches per second and youtube processes hundreds of videos per second, this doesn’t fairly put into proportion the amount of people who create stuff and try out against people who just consume stuff all day every day. Because it will be something like <1% against 99%+.

If everyone was moved to create, I think we could be looking at even more information exhaustion at a 10X fold rate, and then the battle of attention grabbing becomes the new job market. You wouldn’t be constantly looking to take on the reins of a specific role at a company, but rather be looking to take on the attention of a specific audience at a niche.

I do think that creating things is itself an act of always trying. And trying means that you’ll probably lose more than you win, but that’s okay because you probably need a few wins anyway! So it doesn’t matter how many times you’ve failed, you might as well fail as much as you can as early as you can.

From this week’s James Clear newsletter:

"You can cold email nearly anyone, but nearly everyone overlooks how powerful it can be.

Sending one email each week that feels like a stretch can change your life. Will you get turned down? Sure, most of the time. But you only need one to pay off for something amazing to happen.

Take your time, write a thoughtful message, and muster the courage to press Send."

The concept is you lose a lot to win some. And loss will always be & feel bigger in comparison; like it’s a requirement. So you have to be in peace with the fact that a positive sum comes at a cost every time.

You have to break lots of things to fix some things, try lots of things to stick with a few things, know lots of people to have a few friends, create lots of stuff to win from a few stuff, put as much messages and pieces and artifacts in the world to win big from just a few of them.

In hindsight it could feel like 95+% of efforts lead to zero results, and only <5% of efforts lead to 100% of results and you have to be comfortable with spending time and money and resources and putting in work that probably isn’t paid and doesn’t in lots of ways correlate to any meaningful output and be okay with it, each and everyday.

In 2020 I read The Millionaire Fastlane –fwiw I wouldn’t read it today just because of the weird name– and it discussed 3 lanes in which most people tend to end up in within their lifetimes: Sidewalk, Slowlane, and Fastlane.

On the Sidewalk, people are just living for the moment; they prioritize immediate gratification. Just watching life as it happens, so they do more stupid things like max out credits, little to no savings, no investments, etc. True freedom is impossible.

On the Slowlane, people follow the rules the system says it will hopefully pay off on the very long term. So they tend to conform to the average baseline of living, take a steady job at the big company, invest in the stock market, etc. True freedom is only achievable after decades worth of work.

This path looks like this:

On the Fastlane, people are going through the extreme discomfort of making their own path out of thin air, because it doesn’t even exist! They do hard things that have low chance of success and keep iterating till it happens. So that in the end, it feels like a shortcut. They find a way out to do good for themselves and their families based off of the paths they CREATE. True freedom (time & location) is attainable at a young age.

This path naturally feels like the right way to live life, and while the system (school → uni → job) got us convinced that the above path is the norm, a more realistic path will probably look like this:

Clarity

Life in the grand sum feels like a game in which a few people are engaging, failing, embarrassing themselves, winning big, taking loot home, and the entire rest of the server is just observing, commenting, ranting, complaining, congratulating – reacting to whatever happens to any player in real time. Players are busy playing, observers are busy reacting. It seems all of life is feeling more & more like this.

There’s a close & weird imitation between social media & real life in terms of proactivity & reactivity. In both, a bunch of people are building things out of nothing, and another bunch are just waiting on what to do next based on it. It seems plausible given that social media is only an extension of real life in many ways, so it was only destined to be that way since the beginning.

All advice we see in books & movies seem to be trying to get people to just move – Move and go somewhere and talk to people and create things even if the destination, or motive, or outcome are still unclear. Because clarity may present itself along the way, but it sure won’t at the start.

If this ‘creation of things’ we talked about is of utmost importance, then it seems we have to search for whatever we like to create independent of any results to keep doing it. If intensity & continuity are prerequisites even when lots of it goes unrewarded, then the reward has to come from the process of creating itself. Lots of work has to be put in the dark before only some of it gets to see the light.

Fuckarounding

Because there’s no limit on the fuckarounds you could do, and because you probably only need one event to change courses, fuckarounding is practically all upside and zero downside. You can try infinitely and you have to be right once. So you can put out a 1000 pieces of content and one will change your life, you can start 20 businesses and one will change your life, or spawn a 100 ideas and one will change your life.

This simple fact coupled with compounding makes people who understand this combo very well off very early on. When people do something significant -that is to say when people are right once-, the amount of fuckarounding to hit the next one right thing becomes significantly less. So wins generally feel like a machine with gears; when something works, other things work, and then lots of things magically start working together, with less & less effort from your side. Now far from behind it could seem like this state -of lots of things working- is so far away, even though it is probably due to few & small wins to start with.

The more you believe in abundance, the more of it you create. And because we have no reason to ‘believe’ in abundance before things start working, the first few wins are always the hardest. The first 100k is always the hardest, the first few friends are always the hardest, the first few lessons of learning a new thing are always the hardest. When we see results, even a little bit, our belief in abundance tend to increase which creates more of it, which creates more results 🔄

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Similarly, I wanted to do this year’s list, which naturally has some overlap but feels like an advanced version.

1. I personally know people my age who make north of egp 1M/mo, and are still not happy. Wealth is multi-variate: Mental, Physical, Financial, Social, & Spiritual – Which means wealth building is also multi-variate. When we focus all efforts into just financial wealth, we ultimately suffer from absence of one or more of the other four.

2. Most people who are overly optimistic usually give a strong signal of “lack of wisdom”.

3. Most people who do exceptional things still suffer from Imposter Syndrome. It probably still wouldn’t go away, so you might as well communicate your findings to the world as loud and as frequent as you can. Nobody on your social feeds cares whether you're posting too frequently. But someone will see your work and reach out for a collab or for investment. This is not possible if you don't show your work.

4. Last October, my dog almost died. In hindsight, from all the “bad” events that happened to me throughout the past few years, nothing would have been as tragic as me losing her.

5. Writing is thinking. Notes are a byproduct of the thinking process. So while you may appear to be taking notes, what you’re actually doing is thinking clearly.

6. For the past 2-3 years I have been trying separate small experiments, some of which went on to be the basis for some of my best work. If it wasn’t for the failed ones, I wouldn’t have known which were worthy. So although trying new things online or offline seems a bit uncomfortable in the beginning, and although looking back I might cringe at some discontinued experiments, every good thing starts as an experiment. True for thought, software, behavioral, and design experiments.

   
   For example, experiments I ran over the past year include: visualizing concepts for blog content, boxing, cooking 100% of my meals at home, steam room sessions, bullet journaling, LinkedIn cold intros, engaging in Discord communities, conducting user interviews, living/working by the sea for 2+ weeks, switching from Chrome to Arc, organizing my calendars on Cron, tracking 100% of my screentime on any screen, and learning Next.js.

7. This one is not new, but a pattern that applies in personal & professional contexts is that, generally, people are more interested as long as you are less interested, and vice-versa.

   
   A close friend was recently fundraising for his startup, been talking to investors for months, when eventually one investor joins as lead, suddenly all others from prior conversations are reaching out, even when he's no longer interested.

   
   It could be that we as humans generally don't want to miss out on hot things and we happen to signify "hotness" as a reverse function of interest.

   
   Problem is, for most people, this is not intuitive or natural. Wins that are results of "being free of a game" feel like they are rewards of a personality trait rather than a specific behavior. So it's not that you have to be conscious of the behavior at all times, but rather "be" that person who is always free. Which in slang means to not give a fuck.

   
   This paradox is one of the greatest paradoxes of our time, and is probably more nuanced than this. I wrote about this in this post a year ago.

8. You cannot do or say the wrong thing with the right person.

9. Taste is not subjective, it’s a universal language. Most people lack it. And it is not the same as a “standard”. Most people who have high standards still have trash taste.

   
   Taste is the aesthetics. Although we don’t hear that word much now, but we still need the underlying concept. If there is such a thing as beauty, we need to be able to recognize it. We need good taste to make good things. Instead of treating beauty as an abstraction, let's try considering it as an absolute, a north star, then figure how to reach it, how do we make -really- good stuff?

   
   Lots of people believe it’s subjective because when we appreciate some creation, we don’t know why. Saying that taste is a personal preference is just a good way to prevent disputes, but it’s not true. Whatever job people do, they naturally want to do it better. Now for those of us whose job is to design things, if taste is just a personal preference, no absolute, then everyone is already perfect, why get better? And most importantly, how to get better?

   
   As you continue to make and design things, you'll get better at it, your taste will change, and you'll know you're getting better. If that so, your older tastes were not merely different, but worse. Now since we can compare tastes, it’s not subjective. Hence there exists bad taste.

   
   One of the most important lessons I learned from my parents growing up that I got to appreciate later in life, is how to develop good taste.

10. “The more I write on this site, the more I realize that what I’m trying to do is to connect” — Manuel Moreale. We write to connect. I write in Notion & Apple Notes to connect personal knowledge. I write in Slack & Linear to connect project knowledge. I write in Hyperspaces to connect life experience knowledge.

11. SaaS (Software as a Service) is probably the highest rewarding game in tech. Ultimately, any service or product company converges to selling SaaS because historically SaaS has made more people rich than any other form of business on the planet.

12. I always thought that a good product is more important than good marketing. Eventually, I learned that good marketing beats a good product. Proof is you can find so many people using mediocre products only because they don’t know about the good ones. I thought that I’d probably spend 80% of my time on product and 20% on marketing. This year I learned I need to do it the other way around, 20-80.

13. This year I’ve started sending more DMs to people online. I’ve chatted virtually with some bloggers, entrepreneurs, and mentors that in lots of ways had something to add to me.

    
    In the worst case scenario we’ll find out that we operate in different spaces but still have a friendly chat for some time about what each of us is working on.

    
    In the average case scenario we’ll find some overlap, exchange a few resources, maybe open an email thread to send updates from time to time, or maybe one of us would introduce the other.

    
    In the best case scenario we’ll be friends, have interesting conversations, promote each others work, keep an eye on progress, or conduct more frequent meetings.

    
    Over time I’ve started receiving these random DMs as well. Ideas and actions that are produced out of these kind of sessions are not only inspiring, but also often non-reachable on your own.

14. Money = Time

    23Aug27 | Money = Time

15. Respect > Money

    23Sep07 | Respect > Money

16. We know what we want by way of knowing what we don’t.

    23Sep26 | 2023 gave me my biggest achievement so far

17. Build is as important as intellect.

    How To Develop "Man" Skills - Jocko Willink and Echo Charles

18. Few months ago a project manager told me: “We want to fail gracefully”.

19. Our conception about happiness is distorted –much like destroyed–, forever, it seems. At the same time a bunch of 25-year-olds at the cafe are comparing happiness based off of jobs they do, girls they date, or cars they drive, the happiest man on earth is probably a 41-yr old who has been sailing, living in the middle of the ocean for the past 8 months and there’s no way for them to know it.

20. At age 24, I learned and absorbed the mindset of someone called Naval Ravikant. It wasn’t until this year that I realize these learnings from 4 years ago changed my life. I didn’t do it with a specific goal in mind, but I watched all of his interviews, read his book, and went through all of his tweets in the span of a few months. Every now and then I can still vividly link a lesson in life or work back to one or more of these learnings. They weren’t anything complex, but some timeless bite-sized ideas. Naval was the main inspiration behind @visualizevalue’s vision & earlier designs, which in sequence was the main inspiration for lots of people to start discussing and visualizing concepts. This made more people talk about stuff that no one talks about.

21. In November I went on a solo retreat for a few days, during which I was mostly reading The Alchemist. It struck me that I haven’t read it earlier, and I think it’s one of those books that ought to be read once every while.

    

22. In December I was at Gouna when I got to know a 45-yr old man living there by himself – Not married, no children, not even pets. We chatted for some time and he talked about how he’s been learning the Quran for the past few years, healing, and doing nothing else. I didn’t know exactly what this man was about. To me it seemed like he’s either extremely miserable or extremely happy, I couldn’t decide. While there, me and my friend would meet with him several times and kind of pick from wherever we left the conversation. We kept wondering how does he support himself and eventually learned he had a candy factory, and used to be a marketing executive in his 30s. We were very skeptic, but in the end I think we concluded that his story checks out. What strikes me about him is that we kept thinking he must be lonely, then over the course of the next few days we found out: - He’s friends with everyone around him, invites them for occasional dinners, even invited us - He gets invited at theirs at least a few times per week - His beach house overviews the lagoon where he meditates everyday - He lives in Gouna all year long, and haven’t left it for the past 6 years - He knows about all tips of Alternative Medicine, food groups, cures, etc - He plays the guitar; composes music in his own studio everyday

23. Be the lead organizer of social events for your friends. They all probably want to hang out, they just suck at organizing things. (h/t Ali Abdaal)

24. In March I went to Dubai with some friends, my first time there, one of the biggest takeaways was how “relative” & “fragile” money is as a concept. For the past few years I’ve been prioritizing work over travel, I always wasn’t satisfied and I still am. I always considered traveling as a “treat” that I don’t yet deserve, for some reason. Although this is probably refutable, but the notion of working towards a baseline where I effortlessly do things that most people generally consider big moves has always appealed to me, and I couldn’t get it out the back of my head that traveling somewhere, enjoying a few days, then getting back seemed so far from what I want.

    
    Ultimately I learned that the best travel time I got was the time I spent working while away from home; it kind of balances out. For this reason I have Bangkok, and probably Canggu on my list for the near future.

25. “Wise men at their end know dark is right” – A part of a poem that dates back to 1951 but included in the Interstellar soundtrack. Although I have heard it many times, this year I knew what it means. With all the things that have been going on, and all the reasons to believe in light, we have to know that dark is right.

26. During the last year, I wrote 44 posts. Some were short ideas, some were long essays, but the writing I’m most proud of are those two:

    23Dec30 | How to unplug?

    24Mar28 | Time as a computing platform

    
    For me, these were not just writeups, but learning experiences. I probably spent more than 60 hours writing those two posts combined. While putting together the ideas, I was actively learning about the topics. So what ended up as a long blogpost, also gave me tons of new insights in the process.

    
    The first one is a story about everything wrong I think is going on with the world. The second is about how a time travel tool with access to 100% of our memories will be possible during the next 5-7 years. It explains the principles behind hyperspaces.live and everything I learned during the past 18 months.

27. Thoughts are like lands. Overly trying to rationalize things (overthinking) will put you under the risk of spending too much time at the wrong place. Many things we tend to think about are already only true inside our heads. Which means we already waste so much time at wrong places even without overthinking. So it just makes it worse.

    
    > Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being – William James

28. We overestimate or underestimate our roles based on outcomes. We think we deserve it whenever something good happens, and don't deserve it whenever something bad happens. We deserve both.

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I always believed the happiest man in the world is someone who works on a practice of his own, a practice that is small-scale yet fulfilling. It doesn’t have to impact the whole world, but needs to be just enough to make the man feel good. About what he’s doing, and about what he’s preaching. And makes him appreciate the world he’s being part of a little more everyday. Makes him feel like he’s moving towards something, versus being part of a financial system that is always going to be uncertain.

I'm not going to be the most successful founder.

I'm not going to be the most prolific writer.

I’m also probably not going to make a forbes list.

But I learned that being part of a game much bigger than myself is the quickest way to desperation. That must not be mistaken for ambition. Because ambition is moving towards a place where you feel more confident, more certain, and more whole, not otherwise. And that can’t just come with how most modern success games are scripted.

The game is, for the most part, rigged. No one chasing vanity metrics of the status quo became more confident, certain, or whole in the process. No one! But when a man accepts the limits & implications of his quest, all comes easy. The game then turns from having to cope with pressures & definitions from the outside to: How to maximize happiness & minimize regret over the long run?

In my current world view, a happy life would be that of an utmost freedom, for freedom is so hard to attain – much harder than money. Of course the biggest aspect of being independent is “how you make money”, but it’s not only that! The lack of freedom we’re experiencing is actually not only about money.

We want the same things, go to the same places, wear the same clothes, and generally have very close aspirations and expectations from life, which is extremely dangerous. That in itself should be alarming for the most part. That is not what freedom means.

What freedom means is:

• Healthy body, free from toxins

• Independent career, free from expectations

• Minimal material, free from comparisons

• A warm home, free from projections from the outside

• A tight community, free from hate

• Maximal exposure to nature, the soul of the world, with minimal digital distraction or noise

If that entails lots of traveling, then so be it.

If that entails a total break-free from the norm, then so be it.

If that entails instability through the modern lens, then so be it.

By now I’m at least aware that a happy life is one that is as detached as possible.

And that gratitude unlocks the fullness of life & turns what we have into enough.

When you’re independent, you don’t feel the urge to do what everyone is doing or be interested in what everyone’s interested in. When you’re independent, it feels like you’re seeing life from that 10,000-ft view – And lots of things seem like a trap.

I truly believe that it takes some success with money at a young age to get a sense of the overview. When you stack some money early on, you get to know -early on- that money is not it. For example, if you don’t feel fulfilled at your job but your total compensation is through the roof, you’d wake up everyday wishing you could trade with someone that has it reversed.

Because youth is about fulfillment rather than money. If anything, no one expects you to be mad rich at a young age; a privilege I believe everyone should take. At the time I’m supposed to explore several aspects about my life, and also the time I’m supposed to take substantial career risks, optimizing for maximal total compensation is not one of them.

Founders and early employees of tech companies often pay a high personal cost. This is heartbreaking, as most of the people in the tech startup world are in their twenties and early thirties – the prime years of their lives. I only talk about it from my perspective in Tech, but I believe it applies to all industries & domains.

I once saw this video of Michael Seibel of YC talking about how many engineers at google & meta work on products for months -or years- that never see the light of day. Imagine that the compounding of months of work would amount to a “discontinued” project. This is considered waste of life by definition. You’re even being ripped off the false positive high that comes with “Having worked on a product so small at a corporation so big, that turned out to be a success”. From a fulfillment perspective, that is catastrophic.

I’m in a group chat of 500+ brilliant Egyptian Product Managers. There was once this manager who was complaining about the gradual deterioration of her mental health for a product release at the company she works for. Her message said: “I’ve been struggling a little bit with being mentally exhausted and at the same time sort of refusing to rest because it’s such an exciting time and a lot is happening with my product” – The worst part about this is not the deterioration of her mental health; the worst part about this is that it’s not her product. I don’t understand how can anybody not see it.

I mean I’d happily trade hours of sleep or some decline in mental health for a potential upside that possibly might keep benefiting me for the next few years, but it seems that lots of people -including me- often do it for all the wrong reasons. It’s important to note that independence does not necessarily mean entrepreneurship. First thing that comes to mind when you hear “Entrepreneurship” is: material success, status, or even fame. In our view of “independence”, none of these things really matters.

It’s also important to note that I’m not talking about this in a “rich dad poor dad” sense. I can’t advise anyone to leave their job, exit the system, and start a business. And I don’t endorse hustle porn. Quite the the contrary! In fact I’m talking about it from a “Regret Minimization” perspective. I really do think that most people do chase money because in their eyes, they believe they haven’t accumulated enough money. And that is exactly the idea I’m against.

Because this behavior fuels a circular loop of: 1. there won’t be enough money and 2. there won’t be enough “lifestyle upgrades” to go with the money. This loop is so hard to break, and even gets harder as you grow older. That’s why the mix of “unlocking just enough money” + “having plenty of time left” + “being in constant search of fulfillment” reveals lots of the truth.

This is exactly what the system wants you to do. You don't want to be rich. You just want to live comfortably and have stuff that you deserve since you work so hard, but society was built in a way to make men believe they need millions asap to be happy and so they become yet other cogs in the same system.

I also believe that, if I supposedly retired tomorrow morning, and provided I don’t need to care about money ever again, there’s practically an infinite number of ways to live the rest of my days as fulfilled, and as happy as possible. It’s actually absurd that sitting in a cubicle for the major part of a life INSTEAD OF doing these things IS the norm.

The fact that burning one third of a life in hope to enjoy another third is normalized, is extremely absurd in my opinion. And it begs the question why isn’t it the case that everyone is trying to spend money for time instead of spending time for money?

If you do the math, an average graduate AIMS to spend the next 60 years like this:

20 years working

(1/3 of a life)

20 years living

(1/3 of a life)

20 years sleeping

(1/3 of a life)

This is the AIM, meaning this actually happens under the most ideal circumstances. Lots of times, they either work more, or sleep less, or both. Isn’t that supposed to be concerning? Even once in a while?

On the other hand, glorified entrepreneurship aims to spend potentially even more of those years working for another set of vanity metrics: status, recognition, ego, and of course money. But not freedom. At least most of the times it is the case. Freedom is seldom the end goal. A proof of this can be clearly seen towards the end of the spectrum of success by our modern lens: Huge companies -or startups- with billions in valuation usually eat their owners alive. It’s so clear that the upside from starting a business that has the potential to get so huge could turn into many things, but freedom is not one of them.

Now in between these two extremities, emerge The Independent. Those are people who:

• Know how to generate direct value for modest money

• Are not concerned about mad sCaLaBiLity of their business(es)

• Are not concerned about others expectations of them or of their business

• Operate towards building thriving communities around their domain

• Value “Community” & “Integrity” over anything else

Growing up, I consistently found that those are people who can easily gain my respect, and people I could look up to. Not mega-successful entrepreneurs that put theatricals over integrity. If a restaurant is putting too much sauce on your burger, it’s mostly bad meat. Same with people.

“I’ve met some amazing people, and in the last year, traveled to places like Vietnam, Bali, Thailand, Barcelona, Berlin, Tokyo, and Taipei. More importantly, though, it’s gotten me back in touch with the joy of creating things for their own sake.

Move to Paris on a whim. Bike from Hanoi to Saigon while working remotely. Build a side project and then give it away for free. Join a band. Learn a new language. Love with reckless abandon. A startup can be rewarding, but so can all of the above”

Startups are the new deferred life plan

Last year when I joined this startup accelerator -supposed to be one of the best in the region-, I don’t remember a high that’s close to that I had when I first knew we got accepted. Over the course of 4 months, I learned everything there was to learn about theatrics to compete in the rigged game, and I learned zero things about what it means to develop actual value for my customers. The dreaded level of work ethic, composure, and integrity I saw from some of the people I interacted with was horrible, and beyond description. This shall give you an idea about the places you’re supposed to go to to formally learn how to be successful in this game.

Again they might be a perfect match for someone who’s ready to be part of that culture. But it quickly felt like this wasn’t me. I wasn’t ready to compromise my views for my future for the need to go as fast as possible. Afterwards, it hit me that the reason I got involved in the first place could be because up to this point my approach to work was totally wrong. Because ultimately, the right approach is one that prioritizes independence, flexibility, and fulfillment, rather than maximizing financial gain.

A few months later, I wrote a series of small posts that would eventually contribute to my vision of Independence and the switch I’m trying to make:

• 23Mar04 | What’s the endgame?

• 23mar28 | Startups vs “Indie Hacking” for SaaS

• 23apr11 | Your current focus is either local or global

Last month, I met with a dear friend, whom I hadn’t met in a long while. He is one good example of people trying to achieve “an independent practice” through their work. Told me about how his small startup was being rejected from the same accelerator BECAUSE IT WAS PROFITABLE. They don’t want you to be profitable, they want you to be scalable. It’s like this one big joke everyone is trying to participate in. That’s why 90%+ of startups that join accelerators fail because accelerators are only playing the 10x game. They’re hoping one in a 100-startup pool would 10x. Meanwhile for a developing country like Egypt with a modest track record for such moonshots, what do you think the game we should be playing here? The very same game they play at YC aiming for $1B-startups? Of course the economic climate now is trash, but what do you think it was or will be the case EVEN WHEN the climate is good? Wouldn’t it make more sense if we aim for medium-sized businesses that achieve profitability in the near future, but have lots of them such that we can actually achieve a better record? Wouldn’t these be better odds?

No one formally talks about this stuff. But I admire anyone who’s lowkey. My friend went on to talk about how he & his cofounder are tackling their market, and we exchanged some views on building small saas products. Told me he’s experimenting with some ideas, engaging in discussions with customers in his domain, and carrying on plans to expand on his interests. To me, this sounds like the right way to think of building a startup.

I believe that riches is always going to be bound by demographics. When someone is rich, there’s a huge chance this status could change with one of the following:

• They change cities

• They grow old (but stay at the same place in life)

So age & location are direct factors in whether we’re going to call someone “rich”. But this doesn’t apply for “wealthy”. If someone is wealthy, there’s a greater chance his status can withstand demographics because it doesn’t necessarily imply “lots of money”.

Money as a concept is so fragile. Wealth implies independence; and for someone who’s independent, it doesn’t really matter if they changed cities. Thus independence is a clear factor in wealth. Independence puts foremost a set of values about an individual. Tells a lot without even having to ask. You can’t say the same about someone who is just rich. That’s why for The Independent, riches could be just a bonus, and in fact that is how it always should be.

“Although his reputation as a highly original thinker spread during his lifetime, he turned down an offer to take up a teaching post at Heidelberg University. He was so happy to discuss his ideas with some of the thinkers who came to visit him. The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz was one of these. Spinoza lived very simply staying in lodgings rather than buying his own house. He didn't need much money, and was able to get by on what he earned as a lens grinder, together with some small payments for people who admired his philosophical work. The lenses he made, were used in scientific instruments, such as telescopes and microscopes. This allowed him to remain independent, and work from his lodgings”

about Baruch Spinoza, from the book: A Little History of Philosophy

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Most answers were nice things, like:

• “I finished my MSc”

• “I moved out of my parents’ place”

• “I bought my first car”

• “I started my own small business”

But one answer really stood out. He was a 27-year old, and when it was his turn to talk, he took a deep breath and said: “I now know what I want”.

At the time I was 22, I couldn’t help but think: That must suck! At 27! And it wasn’t until now that he knew what he wants out of life! – Few years forward and I’d find that that was probably the wisest answer said on that day.

Developing an anti-vision

I very recently learned about the concept of the “anti-vision”, where you learn what you want by eliminating everything that you don’t want. It’s much more of an effective practice than it sounds. I now believe that very few people I meet probably know what they want. The rest are just going with the flow.

To create your anti-vision you have to be alone with your thoughts for a significant amount of time. You have to write them down, visualize as much of them as you can. You have to write down everything you despise and everything you want.

Much of the notion behind the “Disappear for a few months” idea in self-help context is just for you to be alone with your thoughts for as long as possible. That’s not to physically disappear but just prime your environment for focus. This is what makes a vision materializes, because you can’t have what you can’t express, and you can’t express your vision without iterating over it for tens and possibly hundreds of times. This level of iteration & depth can’t just come easy.

The anti-vision is so effective because negative emotions aren’t necessarily a bad thing. A negative emotion is probably as potent as a positive one if you’re in the right state of mind. If you feel uncomfortable every time you imagine what would happen if you didn’t take control of your life, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Working as a life game designer

When you obsess over the details of a specific vision, how you’d like your days to look like, what you want out of life and work, and how you’d like to go from point A to point B, that’s just step 0 to make any of it happen. Think of it like a prerequisite.

And it magically sorts big parts of the steps ahead; you now have a map, but you have to move and do the work to claim rewards. Now you know what the next few steps will probably look like but you have to maintain some order to make things happen. Systems help maintain that order.

But now this time is different because you’re exploring systems out of need rather than force. Self-help cults are always talking about systems, but without discussing step 0, which doesn’t make sense. If I don’t have something to obsess about, it doesn’t matter if I have the best systems. So systems should naturally happen along the way, not forced into your day because the world’s top 10 billionaires do it.

Every yes is a no, no is a yes

More we grow, the more we feel 24h/day is no longer enough. Especially during early years of adulthood when you just want to get lots of things done at once! If only we can do things in parallel!

I used to think I have all the time in the world. I used to be gracious with my time, and I always said yes because I always feared FOMO. Few years doing this, and exactly on my 27th birthday, I felt something weird. I felt like the whole world has been moving and I’m the only one who’s still. All of a sudden I felt I’m growing up so fast but still the exterior made little to no sense.

I felt like it is still wasn’t enough, although don’t get me wrong, I love my life when I’m not working. But this year I felt something for the first time, like everything I’ve done is really -really- not enough. And then I found I might be suffering from lack of execution rather than lack of direction.

It just hit me this summer that I ought to be extremely protective with my time & money because they represent the only safety in the face of adversity. Every vision is made possible by two concepts: Momentum & Compounding. Now unplanned use of resources messes up with both. I can’t state this enough but I was more reckless than I should, and I can say I regret 0% of it. I now know every phase shaped me for who I am, and if it weren’t for the short-term mistakes, I would’ve been prone for longer-term loss.

But here we are, and it’s about time I learned that every no is a yes to something else, and vice-versa. This only makes perfect sense because our resources are quite limited, so while you’re allocating your time & headspace, you’re also actively filtering things in or out, whether you know it or not. Every time you spend doing one thing you’re also spending it NOT doing something.

There was this podcast I loved about how we couldn’t have many concurrent desires. We can’t keep on wanting, at one point we’d have to choose, it’s how life works. And as much as I wanted life to accommodate my concurrent desires, time had its ways of proving me wrong. I just couldn’t do it, and I believe no one can. Life only makes it permissible to obsess over a handful desires at once.

You can always go to the next after you’re done with one, but you can’t just want everything. In fact I’ve learned that wanting everything is just a signal that you’re not serious about your most important desires. If they’re that serious, you wouldn’t ignore them for that long.

And then all of a sudden it occurred to me, that after ruling out my least important desires, and developing my anti-vision towards everything that I don’t want in my life, the fog seems to be clearing, which made my actual vision towards life & work clearer than ever.

My biggest achievement to date, at age of 27¼

I now know what I want.

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From a “Human Performance Optimization” perspective, of all my habits, journaling has constantly been the most rewarding act.

Everyone of us is the sum of their experiences.

We develop our lenses by which we see the world through our very own life events & changes. We are very different yet very similar at how we perceive the world around us.

Every experience despite how small, could introduce the biggest changes to how we think!

The act of writing enables us to relive and savor those experiences. When we write, we engage with the present moment, immersing ourselves in the sights, sounds, and emotions of the experience we write about.

Reason I say journaling is the most rewarding act is because your writings are available forever to reflect upon anytime you want. Keeping a journal involves both writing and reflecting.

When writing, you remove parts of the fog that is always cluttering your mind, you become more confident of your beliefs & views, you reiterate on your ideas & experiences providing for a clearer perspective. Writing is the catalyst for clear thinking, and without clear thinking, it’s easy to get lost in the information overload! Fog gets thicker & thicker without a reset button. Writing provides for a space to be your most authentic self, your own therapist that you can talk to about anything, and without any biases.

When reflecting, we can then revisit those experiences we once wrote about, gaining new insights, understanding, and perspective. Because there’s always new data! So reflecting is often our way to match, compare, learn, and grasp the bigger pictures. And so we can revisit our memories, reinterpret our experiences, and gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world.

Both combined, they have the ability to enhance our appreciation for life by allowing us to savor every little detail and keep our memories fresh about what matters.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment & in retrospection” – Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin was an author who explored themes of self-discovery, personal growth, and the complexities of human relationships. Her diaries, in particular, provided a glimpse into her inner thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Through her writing, she sought to capture and understand the essence of life and the nature of existence.

My experience with digital journal products

That said, back in the day I used to use only a paper & pencil for my daily journal.

For me writing on a physical paper always feels good. But my journal notes were random, unstructured, and hard to search. So I decided to explore journaling apps, and since then, I have been addicted to try every new journaling app that I know of, even if I’d try it for a very brief period of time, and even if it doesn’t offer anything new. I have probably tried all journal desktop & mobile apps, free or paid.

The difference between a normal notes app and a journal app is that the journal app provides more functionality for reflecting. This always came in form of connecting your social accounts, notification prompts for inputs that happened on this day years ago, more support for photos & videos, and maybe integrating with Apple Health & calendar.

How it evolved

Beside journaling, I am also a data geek.

I was always trying to keep track of my numbers. Any numbers.

And when I thought of the quickest way to do that, I looked no further than Google Sheets.

So around late 2019, I did a Google Sheet with the purpose of writing down numbers from my day, everyday. These are numbers I could track and keep record of: sleep hours, work hours, money spent, workouts, step count, daily macros, etc.

I tried to stick to writing down these numbers as much as possible. Although it wasn’t easy because it needs time. I would often be on & off with tracking, but the thought of automating the tracking has never left my mind. I was always thinking: maybe if I don’t have to spend the time & brain power everyday, my life would be much easier and I’d stay committed for much longer.

And at the same time, I knew that keeping a journal of my thoughts has to be a manual process, because of the nature of this type of input. It cannot be automated. Sometimes I’d write for 5 minutes, sometimes I’d write for an hour, but at the end of the day, I have to dedicate time for journaling.

💡 So I was thinking of a way to merge both: Manual Journal + Automated Tracking

Goal is to streamline the capturing of my life’s events, my performance, and my progress.

And instead of being on & off, never be off ever again.

Now this task proved to be very hard with the apps that are available today, even with the fanciest integrations & workflows, nothing achieved this goal for me.

What I wish existed

Coming from a technical background, I took strides into trying to solve this problem for me.

It was one niche problem but it kept nagging the back of my mind for a few years.

I was always more concerned about What can our current tech make possible? than What’s convenient for me?

1/ Step 1: What data can be collected?

Then I dug one level deeper and instead of just tracking some numbers, I wanted to quantify everything that could be quantified about my life.

I was inspired by examples like HowIsFelix and julian.digital.

In the middle of my curious efforts, I stumbled upon communities on the internet that are interested in something called “Quantified Self” – which means: The practice of using technology, such as wearable devices and smartphone apps, to collect and track personal data related to various aspects of one's life, including physical activity, digital activity, sleep patterns, mood, and more. The goal of the Quantified Self movement is to leverage this self-generated data to optimize and improve one's life in different areas, such as health, productivity, and overall well-being.

So I kept searching about all tools I can use to get any possible insights about my body & my performance with as much autonomy as possible (example, example, example)

2/ Step 2: What ways to visualize this data?

And then I dug one even deeper level! And thought if I have the data, I can do anything I want to do with it. Afterall it’s my day job, and this opened an infinite pool of possibilities for me, I can mix and visualize the data anyway I want!

I thought what metrics do I want to look at everyday?

How do I categorize this data in a way that makes sense?

How to quantify my performance based on the data?

Only principle I’m trying to stick with while solving this problem: Keep it fun & frictionless.

3/ Step 3: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!

And then during the last six months, massive strides happened with AI.

Stuff that wasn’t even possible when I first started thinking about the main problem. There are AI models that are now powerful enough to look at the data for you so it’s not a matter of “how to represent the data” anymore! Because AI can represent it however you want!

To prove my point, I quickly did this design in Figma more than 2 months ago, on how I imagine the next gen of journaling apps should be:

Point is we are no longer restricted by the rigid representation of data we get from fitness dashboards for example, they often provide a strict dashboard how they see fit, but we might be interested in different/new ways to look at the same data.

And then, as part of the advancements that are taking place right now in the AI world, I very recently came across a similar screen by an app I use called Rewind:

Crazy if you ask me.

Why? Because although this is not a journal app, it’s building a new way to look at the data, upon your prompt! Meaning it’s no longer “Here’s your pre-set dashboard”, but rather “What do you want to know?”.

The type of data in this case is your screen time activity. So instead of providing high-level metrics, AI is now enabling personalization!

In my point of view, journal apps are in the most prime position to benefit from this personalization power. Because afterall they are “personal” journal apps!

The next gen of journal apps

In an older post, I refer to a rumor about Apple releasing a journal app under the next iOS. The app will gather data from Apple Health, calendar events & phone calls → into an automated journal.

So that it’d make the act of writing your daily journal much easier, you’d be reminded by activity from your day, and you’d even be able to import activities right away into your journal.

Then on June 5th, Apple confirmed the new journal app.

This is going to be aggregating data from other iOS stock apps, but it validated the idea that:

1. we need a new paradigm for digital journaling products!

2. journaling is a central practice for any professional or human

And moreover, it was quite a reassurance for my vision from earlier.

What I came up with is that I’d ideally want something that can help me to keep tabs on my:

• Health & Wellness

• Day Focus

• Lifestyle

And support my decision making through my very own data, in an easy way.

Which brought me to start working on Hyperspaces, the app I wish existed when I first started journaling in 2019. What we strive for at Hyperspaces is to help you centralize data about:

• Your fitness: Sleep, exercise, and nutrition

• Your productivity: Screentime, downtime, and reading progress

• Your lifestyle: Your finances, locations, and music

• Your thoughts: Your journal notes, mental state, and mood

We’re not only concerned about the convenience of getting this data for you into one place, but also making it easy for you to benefit from it!

Mission behind this is to enhance human performance by using what tech has to offer us today, which is constantly proving to be a lot!

Waiting list for Hyperspaces is now live.

Thanks for reading!

The saved items are there, but the overall context is not!

We often can not use the very same resources we wasted precious time on!

We can’t instantly use what we captured to connect & create new ideas.

Essentially because each of these items is captured within its own directory:

• bookmarks → live in the browser

• notes → live in the notes app

• screenshots → live in the file system

• highlights → live in their respective app

It increasingly becomes hard to recapture context and continue from where we left!

And we can’t peek anywhere to visualize the whole thing. It can get overwhelming.

We’re facing an information firehose to the point where capturing is not enough practice to help us get the most out of what we consume.

Solution is: Visual tools for thoughts – Just like how Figma operates for design pieces, there are tools which do the same for your thoughts. You can group, connect, zoom out and zoom in in one view without losing the larger context of things.

One candidate I found is heptabase.com

Reason I chose Heptabase: They’re just getting started, graduated YC’22, and their founder is documenting everything.

How it works:

1. Heptabase unit of knowledge is called Card → You can put down anything you want in a card, text highlights, images, pdf excerpts, links, tables, etc

2. You can pull cards to a Whiteboard → A whiteboard is your playground, you can connect similar ideas, headline them, section them, or colorize them

3. You can see all your whiteboards on the Map → The map is the highest level view, from which you can instantly peek at anything