Inside your head. I woke up overwhelmed today. Too many things. Unable to move anything forward. I somehow ended up on my Obsidian writing down what's in my head. Turned out it was 3-4 things that needed doing. I started with the easy one. And soon enough, they were done, at
The trap of comprehensive. A professional mechanic figures out what's wrong with your vehicle and fixes it. She isn't trying to be comprehensive. She is being effective. Comprehensive feels productive. You are dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's. But is that needed? Or
Thinking and doing. It's not efficient to do both together. Claude Code is excellent at doing the work. It's super eager to get things done. But it's extremely bad at slow thinking. It drives fast but doesn't know how to wait to figure out where
I assume... We assume things all the time. Sometimes, we go and verify them. Mostly, we don't. And these assumptions end up becoming the basis for our thoughts and actions. We may think that we are choosing our assumptions, but most of this is happening on its own, subconsciously. A
Positivity bias. Our brains and culture default to a negativity bias. We tend to imagine the worst-case scenarios with any situation or person. And then, most times, we feel a temporary relief when they don't pan out. What if we embrace the opposite? Intentionally build a positivity bias? Imagine the
As a reader. As a writer, you are trying to craft something that can get the message across. You are looking to refine it, structure it well. There's hard work in that. But the harder part is empathy. It is being in the reader's shoes, trying to understand how
Carefree or careless? If you are careless, you don't care. You won't show up on time. You won't get the work done. You just don't care. But if you are carefree, you care... You just don't let the care overwhelm you. You work
Customer traction. Are the people you seek to serve eager to engage with your work? If yes, do you want to keep them waiting? What's the minimum WOW version you can make live now? If they feel the wow, would they be eager to bring their friends in? Wow doesn&
Going beyond anxiety. Ask yourself, in this moment, in the 5 minutes that you read this, do any of the following feel true... You are meant to live in peace. You are not in trouble (in this moment). You are a spiritual being having a human experience. Take a deep breath and exhale
Hall of mirrors. As Martha Beck explains in her book, Beyond Anxiety, anxiety creates a hall of mirrors inside our brains. One stimulus makes us afraid, and the internal mirror reflects it to make up another thing we can be afraid of. Soon, these reflections compound with each triggering the amygdala (fear centre)
Eureka! Once Archimedes discovered the buoyancy principle, it seemed obvious. He should have known it already. It was right there. Eureka is not about finding complicated solutions to problems. It's to uncover the elegant solution that's hiding in plain sight. It takes hard, messy work to find
Finding joy. There's joy in play. But more importantly, there can be joy in work. Mostly, it shows up when we care about the process more than the outcome. The attachment to the outcome is what kills the joy. It can even make play feel like work. What is it
Human + AI. A MacBook is a powerful device. But it's only as powerful as the human using it. So is AI. Generic AI is generic. It's the human who interacts with it that makes something meaningful with it. Most humans are worried about AI taking their jobs, especially
The ME Mindset. The Minimum Effective (ME) mindset is the antidote to overwhelm and anxiety. There's always a ME version of things in front of us. It cuts through the noise and focuses on what matters. The keyword here is not minimum, but effective. The "what's it for&
Now that you are here... ...what are you going to do? You can worry about the what ifs, about what should have happened, about why things are not justified. Or you can see what you can do next. Only one will help you move forward. What are you going to do?
What's next? What's next? This one question is the cure for overwhelm. If you don't have a clear answer, finding the answer is what's next. Nothing else. We move forward one thing at a time. And we get stuck when we don't know what
With calm. Your decision-making gets better. You communicate better. Your relationships become better. You become happier. Your work gets better. If you can choose to be calm, is there a reason you won't?
Never-ending. The noise from the world is never-ending. One thing after another. One urgency after another. And it's easy to get bogged down in the mess and hope that you'd get a clear day someday to do the work. That's unlikely to happen. What you
Reminders... We all read words of wisdom, sometimes in books, sometimes elsewhere. What really helps though is to keep them in our visual field. Here are a few that I need to remind myself daily... From Martha beck: * You are meant to be at peace. * You are not in trouble. * You
Navigating ambiguity. There's no ambiguity navigating on the highway. There are paved roads, signposts, and GPS guidance. And most importantly, we can see the other cars going in the same direction. That's not how projects work, though. The reason they are projects and not jobs is that there
Backburner. If you put too many dishes on the front burner, even if you put two on high heat, you are more likely to ruin at least one. If everything is urgent and everything is important, nothing is. If you had to pick one, which one, if not done, will make
One thing after another. That's how life is. There's always one thing after another. The thing, though, is... if we proactively work through them, we get to a place where we intentionally put one thing after another. By choice. It's hard to see why we would do that.
Getting to the other side. It's not easy. It doesn't feel obvious, even though it might be. The one thing that takes us to the other side is the non-negotiable intent of getting there. Everything that comes in the middle is a hurdle to navigate, not a hard stop, not a
Ground shifting. Some changes are incremental. They grow on you over time. You can become used to them. And then some are drastic. Like moving apartments. There is no incremental version. It all happens in one go. And it changes so much. The ground under your feet is literally shifting. The key
Charging the scooter... When the electric scooter is out of battery, the accelerator doesn't work, not matter how much you rotate it. It needs fuel. it needs to charge. That's what the writer's block is. You are out of fuel. Here's some fuel to get
