The most meaningful things in life take a long time to build—which is precisely why they’re so meaningful.What’s more, the length and difficulty of the climb to achieve these things is essential in how it prepares you for having them.

You can’t brute force your way to success.

Always remember: Life is about direction, not speed.It’s better to climb slowly up the right mountain than fast up the wrong one.

Where do you want to get to?Think deeply about this. Be specific.What do you actually want your life to look like:Where do you live? What does the space feel like?Whom do you live with? Who are you close to?What are you doing on an average Tuesday?What are you working on?What possessions bring you joy?What does your financial life look like?With clarity on the destination comes clarity on the action.

If you aren’t clear on where you want to go, any road will take you there.You may find yourself putting in years of effort, toiling away in constant motion, only to realize you’ve been walking in circles.

I had already been through tough situations, and I knew I could overcome them again.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather taking action despite the fear. I think this applies to many virtues. So I'll only talk about my own experience with confidence. My confidence simply comes from taking action. I know I outwork everyone around me, even if I have no talent. I know I'm willing to make sacrifices, and I know I can focus my energy on a specific goal. Why? Because I've done it so many times in my life. Confidence is the memory of success

Before AI, knowledge set you apart. Knowing more meant earning more. Accumulating skills, developing expertise, and mastering frameworks got you ahead. Today, as models swallow entire fields overnight, wisdom—skills like emotional clarity, discernment, and connection—is what keeps you indispensable.

The most asymmetric rewards belong to those who are willing to confront the uncertainty and wait just a little bit longer.

Do I want the winning version of this thing?Am I willing to pay the price to get that winning version?

Put simply, my worst decisions were a result of allowing my head to outsmart my gut.

The real threat to your progress isn’t failure—it’s lack of focus. There are plenty of opportunities out there that are clear, obvious, and entirely wrong. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it.

Urgency is no longer a nice to have—it's a necessity. A requirement for survival.

This may be the good news for those that didn’t dare to fully lean into what they love and want to do. What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?

When technical execution becomes trivially easy, when anyone can spin up a startup, design a fashion line, or produce a film, the scarce resource becomes knowing what's worth doing in the first place. And what’s worth doing is typically deeply subjective.

Redefining success entirely. The most radical approach involves changing the metrics completely. I was at dinner with founders last month when the conversation turned unexpectedly vulnerable. "When everyone can do everything," one founder confessed, staring into his untouched wine, "doing anything starts to feel meaningless." After a thoughtful silence, another suggested that perhaps meaning was never about output at all, but about connection, presence, and the quality of our experience.

Time affluence over output volume. Companies like Basecamp and Buffer have deliberately optimized for employee time sovereignty, measuring success not by maximizing productivity but by creating sustainable workloads that allow for deep thinking and creativity.Well-being indices over growth metrics. New Zealand's "wellbeing budget" and Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index represent national-scale attempts to optimize for human flourishing rather than simply economic expansion.Impact depth over efficiency. The most thoughtful AI implementations I've seen don't ask "how can we do more?" but "how can we go deeper?"

When everyone suddenly gets 10x more powerful, the hard part isn't doing things—deciding what's worth doing in the first place. My friend at a high-profile AI startup told me recently that their biggest challenge isn't training better models, but figuring out which problems these models should address, and how their solutions integrate with human values and needs. In other words, “measuring what matters.“

The question isn't how to optimize the current system, but whether we need to redefine what we're optimizing for.

Each evolution in how we measure progress has pushed us further from human-scaled metrics toward increasingly artificial optimizations. We've moved from "enough food to survive the winter" (a natural limit) to "maximum possible output" (a limitless treadmill).

Leisure's opportunity cost skyrockets. When an hour of work generates what once took days, rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience. Every pause carries an invisible price tag that flickers in your peripheral vision.Productivity breeds new demand. Like efficient engines creating new energy uses, AI can create entirely new work categories and expectations.Competition intensifies. The game theory is unforgiving: when everyone can produce 10x more, the baseline resets, leaving us all running faster just to stay in place.

We're witnessing what I call the "labor rebound effect"—productivity doesn't eliminate work; it transforms it, multiplies it, elevates its complexity. The time saved becomes time reinvested, often with compound interest.

And as individuals become much more empowered, how does one stop oneself from working, that now the opportunity cost of not working becomes almost infinite?

This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work. As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims of our own efficiency.

True freedom comes from choice. The ability to choose your worship. To choose how you measure value. To live by design, not by default.

You cannot change reality, but you always get to choose how you interpret and experience it.You can choose frustration, or you can choose compassion. You can choose self-centered annoyance, or you can choose gratitude.You get to choose your thoughts.

Most of us walk through life with absolute conviction that we're right––about everything. Politics. People. Past. Future. We almost never consider the possibility that we're wrong about anything.

Life is a game of awareness and action: Awareness to understand something's importance and action to execute on that importance.

How can you use it in your day-to-day life? After you’re done reading a blog post, go to another tab or open your notebook and try to write a few bullet points about the content, from memory. If you’re learning how to code, try to read a tutorial in a focused way, then apply what you learned without looking at the tutorial. Only check the tutorial when you feel stuck. When trying to memorise anything, ask a friend to quiz you so you can generate your own answers. Or create your own flashcards to test yourself.

Whatever the origin of the Generation Effect, it has been shown to help a lot when it comes to learning and remembering information.

This approach, called chain-of-thought prompting, markedly improved AI performance.

Asserting is a generous thing to do because it gives other people something to work with. Even if someone disagrees with your assertion, you’re adding value because it helps your team come to a better understanding of the challenge or proposed solution.Insights are a dime a dozen. Suggestions are a bit better, but still let you off the hook. Assertions are the realm of professionals who navigate ambiguity and rigorous thinking.

Don't just ask questions. Professionals and A-players ask great questions, then assert how to answer those questions too. They don't claim to know everything, but they do have a point of view about how to solve the problem they just presented.

The lesson: Stop overthinking every decision. Stop overanalyzing. Stop trying to create the perfect plan on paper. Your reality will be defined on the ground. In the actions and decisions. In the moments at the testing point.

But there is one tax of life that we must actively reject:The Ignorance Tax.The Ignorance Tax is the hidden cost of what you haven’t learned or what you’re choosing to ignore.It’s the gap between where you are and where you could be if you gained the knowledge, skills, perspective, or awareness you’re currently lacking.

Where am I paying an Ignorance Tax in my life?