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Two years ago I wrote a post about 26 lessons I learned from my 26th year.
Similarly, I wanted to do this year’s list, which naturally has some overlap but feels like an advanced version.
- 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.
- Most people who are overly optimistic usually give a strong signal of “lack of wisdom”.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 this post one year ago, but it feels timeless:
- You cannot do or say the wrong thing with the right person.
- 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.
- “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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Money = Time
- Respect > Money
- We know what we want by way of knowing what we don’t.
- Build is as important as intellect.
- Few months ago a project manager told me: “We want to fail gracefully”.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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)
- 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.
- “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.
- 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:
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being – William James