The moment you tell someone your plan, you give them the chance to influence it, criticize it, or copy it. Smart people understand that information is leverage, and leverage is best preserved in silence. They don't want validation; they want uninterrupted execution.

The cost of authenticity is rejection.

LLMs are ruining our capacity for deep work. Before, coding was constantly engaging. You designed the architecture and implemented every function by hand. When you got stuck, you dug in and discovered. The reward of the fix felt so good. Now, you stare, bored and impatient, using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V through a sloppy app, watching the AI think for you. This waiting game we play with our LLMs is destroying our capacity for flow state. There’s no fight, no goal, and there’s no reward. We are no longer learning; we are becoming lazy, apathetic bums who feel burdened by the simplest tasks. Our AI generated code still might compile, but the engineer inside of us is rotting. This loss of struggle is going to kill us.

Your capacity for rest defines your capacity for work. The modern success narrative optimizes for relentless output and constant broadcasting until the delay in emotional processing and biological repair becomes fatal. You can't heal a nervous system with more 'grind.' The only way out is to deliberately introduce deep pauses to drive down that internal latency and bring the system back to baseline.

Classical code is deterministic. It is a monologue where we dictate instructions. An LLM is not a set of instructions; it's a structure for evolution. Interacting with it is a dialogue. We poke it, it responds in ways we never intended, and we adapt. We are now confronting the problem of other minds, but the other is one we created.

You live your entire life in an ocean of air, and so you are never thankful for it. Gratitude is a foreign word. It is only when you are held underwater, when the lack becomes a crushing, burning, absolute void in your chest, that you finally understand the true and total importance of a single breath.

The most contagious impulse is not fear, but desire. You see others chasing, and your own system begins to run the same code of restless seeking. You become particularly fooled when you confuse something that is hard to achieve, with something that is genuinely valuable. Remember: the most dangerous infection is the one that convinces you that you are fundamentally incomplete.

Balance is the act of treading water, safe on the surface. You are stuck because you feel entitled to the air. Progress is the deep-sea dive. It is the unbalanced, deliberate, and dangerous act of strapping on the weight and sinking into the crushing, dark pressure of the abyss. The creatures of the deep are not found in the shallows.

Do not be disturbed that the fire is hot or that people are self-interested. Accept their nature as a given. The appeal to fairness is a complaint against reality. The alignment of incentives is the act of using reality to your advantage.

The purpose of the axe is to chop; the purpose of the man is his function. All else is decoration.

Competence gets you in the door. Character keeps you in the room. We spend years honing our skills (intelligence) but often neglect our disposition (character). In a crisis, no one cares who the smartest person is. They look for the most stable, reliable, and calm person. That's who they follow. That's the real leader.

The man who has only known warmth cannot feel the bliss of the fire. The hard things are not a tragedy. They are the necessary, abrasive polishing of the lens of perception.

Stop re-reading the first draft of your life with shame. The "you" who wrote those flawed, early chapters is dead. You are the Editor now. Your job is not to regret the old story. It is to pick up the red pen and write a masterpiece of a new one.

Your soul is dyed by your thoughts. Your attention is the solvent. The media you consume and the ideas you entertain are the reagents you dissolve in it. Your soul is simply the final, potent solution you create: either a poison of anxiety or an elixir of peace.

Stop chasing the supernova of success. That is just the end of the story. The real work is the stellar furnace. It is the billion years of unseen, high-pressure, internal fusion — the relentless combining of small, daily habits until they are forged into an element that cannot be broken.

Gold and diamonds are not found in safe, surface-level soil. They are forged in the crushing, high-risk mantle of the earth. The price is the willingness to leave the safety of the surface and drill into the zone of immense, dangerous pressure. The shallow life yields only dirt.

This is not a game of chance. This is a game of pressure. You are not asking for success. You are applying such an immense, systematic, and unrelenting volume of force that failure becomes a structural impossibility. The obstacle doesn't yield. It breaks.

Truth is often inadequate. "I love you" is true. "I'm angry at you" is also true. Both can be true simultaneously, but saying only one is a lie by omission. The deepest deceptions aren't falsehoods. They're incomplete truths presented as the whole picture.

ALWAYS question the narrative. The leaders of the Al boom promise a revolution. Look closer, and you might see a hall of mirrors. NVIDIA's valuation is driven by unprecedented demand from all Al giants (OpenAl, Meta, Google, etc.). In turn, those giants' valuations are justified by their ability to secure that very compute, which is essential to build their products. We have to ask ourselves: Is this a new economy, or just a feedback loop where giants get rich selling picks and shovels to each other?

You arrive on stage without a script. You spend a lifetime improvising a grand performance, chasing applause and collecting props. But in the final act, the curtain falls, the audience vanishes, and all the props are returned to the house. The only thing you take with you is the character you became during the play.

The captain does not curse the storm for being a storm. He lashes the wheel, trusts his compass, and holds the heading. Stop complaining about the chaos of the world; that is the weather. Your only work is to calibrate your internal compass—your principles—and hold the line.