Think of what happened over the last hour.

A friend messaged, so we went for a walk. I spotted a perfect spider web by the door and stopped to take a picture. Mira ran around the deck, clutching berries she’d just picked from the tree. We wandered down one street, realized our friends were on another, and eventually crossed paths. We talked about nothing in particular, checked out a house for sale, and admired some cool Halloween decor. On the way back, my kid decided to tackle a steep slope on her own, and actually made it. Back home, my wife made mac & cheese and parathas while I changed and fed our kid. I dropped a few photos into the family chat, she piled toys on my lap, abandoned them for stickers, and now, I’m sitting on the couch writing this.

I didn’t plan or predict any of this. It was mostly random — or rather, a result of many falling dominoes.

Zoom out to the whole day: I woke up, brushed my teeth, had coffee. I had a few planned meetings, but what was discussed in those meetings was pretty unplanned. I moved between rooms, wrote a doc, stepped out a couple of times, checked twitter, called a couple of folks, moved a bag into the shed.

Not completely random. I did wake up in the same house I slept in, with the same family, and signed into the same work. But the rest of the texture was mostly random.

Pull back even further, to the last five or twenty years. Did I predict or plan I’d be living in Singapore, Ghana, and a few cities in the US? Did I foresee my college, my career, who I’d marry, trips, my kid, the people, the moves, the big and small events, the thousand weekends? Nope. All just came to be. A web of cause and effect, too vast to see whole.

Sure, I made choices along the way that shaped the trajectory. But what influenced those choices? Follow the thread back far enough and it slips out of my hands, to where I was born, to whom, ancestors before that, to the house and culture I grew up in, to things that happened before I can remember.

Now try the other direction. Fast forward through the next decades, all the way to inevitable death…I’m clueless. I have no idea how things will unfold. Nada. Neither the big turns nor the daily details that make our life.

So life, from birth to death, is all just unfolding, outside us and within us. Like improv.

Maybe we relax our grip and play the scene.

***

PS - are the details of your days less random than mine? I need to know.

How are the markets doing? Who are the richest people?

What’s the verdict on climate change or space data centers?

AI this and AI that.

Vacation photos from a high school acquaintance. A think piece from an ex-colleague you barely remember. A Substack post about a longevity protocol or an abstract intellectualized concept.

***

Lately, all of us are being pulled into the BIG WORLD, thanks to our phones and social media.

Some of these things can be consequential.

But most are so insignificant to our actual lives that they might as well be figments of our imagination.

***

What’s far more important and tangible to us is our small world.

The one we actually experience and interact with every day.

Our spouse and kids.

Our close family and friends.

Our colleagues and work. Our home, neighborhood, and local community.

Our own passions and aspirations. Our health and well-being.

Our meals, our conversations, our chores, our projects, our problems, our plans.

The little things that make up an actual life.

***

Our phones keep convincing us that the rest of the world is more important than the world we are actually living in.

They continually introduce us to the BIG WORLD things that are new, distant, urgent, controversial, surprising, or emotionally stimulating.

Our small world is none of those things.

It is familiar. It repeats. The same family. The same house. The same neighborhood. The same walk. The same friend. The same work.

None of these things are particularly novel. But they are the substance of our lives.

***

The BIG WORLD is never ending. Another election, another market crash, another scandal, another breaking news story.

Our small world is fleeting and finite.

Children grow up. Parents age and pass away. Friends may move away. Careers end. Passions fade. Our energy and health can wane.

Down the line, you won’t remember much about the BIG WORLD.

But you’d give anything to experience your small world again.

***

The BIG WORLD is enormous, but our influence over it is tiny. We are mere spectators.

Our small world is tiny, but our influence over it is enormous. We are the actors, and our small world actually cares about our presence.

You can’t do much about the oil prices.

But you can bring joy to your spouse or your mom with a surprise. You can make your kid laugh. You can savor a meal. You can feel better by going on a run or finishing a task. You can help a colleague or enjoy coffee with a friend.

***

Our time and attention are limited. They are zero-sum.

Every hour drawn into the BIG WORLD is an hour withdrawn from our small world.

We have become extraordinarily informed about the BIG WORLD and strangely inattentive to our own lives. Distant things seem closer, and close ones have become more distant.

Because the BIG WORLD seems fascinating.

But our small world is where we live.

Notes:

1. Also beware of global scoreboards! https://alearningaday.blog/2026/09/02/beware-global-scoreboards/

Polsia is a new AI startup that just raised $30M. You’d think this is just another Tolkien-obsessed Silicon Valley startup - until you spell it backwards.

At a recent offsite, the most popular topic among our leadership was unsurprisingly AI. Not just how to use AI, but how to deal with the crushing wave of AI slop we are all drowning in.

Bloated, vacuous, AI-generated documents are frustrating teams everywhere. What should be a crisp one-page proposal, wrestled and distilled into clarity by a thoughtful human, is now routinely turning into an 8-page dumpster fire. Engineering leaders are echoing the exact same sentiment: low-effort, synthetic code is flooding code reviews and polluting production environments.

Please stop the slop!

• Stop outsourcing your writing to AI.

• Stop outsourcing your thinking to AI.

• Stop subjecting your teams and customers to AI slop.

• If you are a leader, call out and reject AI slop.

My advice is to consult AI at 20% progress - after you have a general frame and direction, and at 80% draft of the work. Use it as a sounding board to explore, pressure test and refine; not as an answer board to copy-paste.

I’m repeatedly surprised at how good Claude Opus is at product and strategic thinking. There have been a handful of instances now where I’ve been able to one-shot better product and design directions with Claude than what a Product Manager or Designer presented after many days of deliberation and meetings.

In one instance, Claude pointed out that the “enter promo code” text box in a checkout flow should be collapsed by default to avoid triggering FOMO for customers. In another, Claude walked through the nuanced needs of different customer segments and presented design options that optimized for all of them. In these instances, it was also better and faster than me at critiquing and generating options. I expect this will only get more common as models, harnesses, and AI-use tactics improve.

It’s hard to compete against AI on breadth, recall, speed, and cost. We will soon be in a very uncomfortable situation where AI can produce better product and design output than human PMs, designers, and managers, at a tiny fraction of the time and overhead. Some capable people will leverage AI to do the work of many, and do it better.

If we want to continue and thrive in our PM, Design, or tech careers, we have no choice but to become one of those people. I have gathered 4 ways to do that:

First, you need to consult with AI at the 10% and 90% stages of your work. That helps you explore a breadth of considerations early, and refine your drafts. Hopefully, just this “reflexive AI use” (as the CEO of Shopify frames it) will place your work at or above the AI bar.

Then, you need to get better at using AI. The first place to start is with better prompts and context. You need to frame your question clearly - what is the situation, what do you know, what are you trying to achieve, what are the challenges and constraints, what’s working and not working, what are your thoughts, etc. You need to iterate on the answer, go deeper and broader on various aspects. I’ve seen PMs build multiple folders of context about their product - strategy docs, help center articles, metrics, screenshots, user segments, interview notes, prototypes - and have the AI keep that context updated. Some have connected the AI to their product GitHub repo and analytics to ground brainstorming and answers in code and real data. These tactics are working well, and make your output better than a vanilla prompt.

Then, you need to go beyond improving your current ways of working and figure out how to work differently. This might be a good time to step back and think about what your role really is (~ keep your business growing and winning with great products, GTM, strategy, and culture), and how you can deliver on that in this new world. For example, one PM on my team is generating prototypes, producing demo videos on top of them, getting async customer feedback, and brings only validated proposals with prototypes to the team — all within days. Some others are shipping bug fixes and small features. Most PMs can lean more into areas like cross-functional leadership, customer engagement, and GTM and act like GMs and business leads. That’s a real shift in how PMs work, and it lifts the output quality of the whole team.

Lastly, and importantly: as you use more AI, please don’t propagate AI slop. Don’t subject your teams and customers to entirely AI-generated docs and artifacts that are generic, bloated, littered with inaccuracies, and disconnected from reality. Regardless of what everyone says, AI is useful but nowhere close to autonomously good. When used well, it can be 80% good and still 20% slop. You need to be a discerning guide and editor, not a passive receiver.

Notes:

* I’m speaking specifically about Product Managers here, but I think this applies generally to most knowledge work.

This meme prompt is funny because it is absurd; in two ways.

First, the idea that Claude can actually solve cancer and poverty; even the most AI-pilled priests in the church of Dario would admit we are still a few years away from this being a reality — a century in their warped timeline. And second, that a civilization-scale superintelligence would still need the very human plea to please not screw it up.

To be clear, I am not a luddite. AI is amazing and getting better. I have been low-grade freaking out about it since early ChatGPT in 2022. But that has also given me enough time to become more realistic.

There is still a lot AI cannot do. Ask it anything even moderately complex or ambiguous, and the answers quickly blur into slop. Change the way you phrase a question (Is X bad vs Is X good), and the answer changes too. Its “agentic” long-running actions are still nascent: slow, brittle, and exhausting to supervise. Even its famed ability to write code falters on large, messy codebases.

That gap matters. The gap between problems that are valuable and what machines can actually do is where jobs continue to exist.

All jobs are made up.

A product manager or an analyst is not a naturally occurring life form. A job is just a bundle of problems, tasks, and skills that happened to make economic sense for a period of time. Every major technology shift reshapes those bundles.

AI will do the same. It will eliminate some tasks and create others, including the frustrating work of steering, editing, integrating, and babysitting AI. The bundles will change and even get new names.

That does mean some of your hard-earned skills may become obsolete. But they weren’t futile. If LLMs have taught us anything, it is that much of what you learned was not just narrow task training. It was training the underlying model: how to reason, communicate, and learn. Those capacities still matter. As long as you can think critically, exercise judgment, show initiative, and adapt, you are not obsolete. You are upstream of the tools.

There is another reminder hidden in the meme:

There are still many more problems to solve.

New technologies do not end problems or opportunities. They expand the frontier of what can be solved. And as Jeff Bezos put it, customers (and humans) are divinely discontent. The moment one layer of friction disappears, we notice deeper needs and bigger ambitions.

If knowledge work or software become cheap and abundant, then go solve cancer, poverty, energy, space travel, housing, loneliness, and the endless pile of mundane chores that still consume our lives. Seriously, why are we still making appointments, loading dishwashers, and putting away laundry?

But what if Claude actually can do this bidding?

What if the genie really works?

That’d be pretty great? Unless that genie is somehow kept exclusive — which seems unlikely given the intensity of competition and diffusion — it would start to dissolve the economic logic behind many jobs and result in luxury communism.

Some choose to brood on a deeper question: meaning. Because jobs are also bundles of identity, self-worth, structure, and community.

I’d dismiss this question as mostly a failure of imagination, shaped by centuries of scarcity and submission. No way is employment the only serious container for meaning. My one-year-old has no job and seems to be having a fantastic time. My dad gets deep satisfaction from competitively playing human-to-human Bridge. My mom finds enormous meaning in doting on and caring for her family, especially her new grandchildren. None of this requires payroll or a LinkedIn profile.

And if all else fails, I suppose you can always ask the all-powerful Claude to help you with meaning. Perhaps it will generate an immersive world for you — with no AI, limited resources, chores, and jobs.

Maybe that is where we already are.

I. Solid Software

One of the first computer programs I wrote when I was a kid was a BASIC program to add 2 numbers that worked on the command line. You ran the program, and it would print: “Enter numbers to add:”. You’d type in the first number, hit enter. Second number, enter. It would print out: “The total is: …”

It was such a delight to write these programs, and I was hooked!

But this program was the definition of rigid: its functionality and interface were fixed. You couldn’t ask it to multiply or divide. You couldn’t provide more than two numbers. You had to have a new line between the inputs. If you faltered with a space or a comma, it would unceremoniously error out.

Software has evolved a lot since then. We moved to graphical interfaces, the web, mobile apps, and SaaS. The functionality and range of options have exploded. Yet, the general rigidity of software has persisted.

For the last 30 years, software has behaved exactly how its creators asked it to. Developers decided that this button does that action. Developers decided the data schema, the business logic, and the workflows. Developers built for the “average user”, and decided what is configurable and to what degree. Developers decided whether to offer accessible APIs or to integrate third-party extensions and data.

For the most part, thoughtful and creative decisions are a service to the user. But if a user wanted to do something that the developers didn’t foresee or deemed unimportant or out of distribution, they were stuck. They had to beg for a feature request, switch to a different rigid tool, or expensively hack a solution on their own.

And as a software tries to accommodate more users and needs, its interfaces, code, and data become increasingly complex.

We have been building Solid Software: reliable structures built to endure, but unable to adapt, restricted to their containers, and hard to update.

II. Intelligence as the Solvent

In May 2023, after experimenting with several prototypes using GPT-3 as both an application interface and a coding assistant, I wrote a blog titled “The New Approach to Building Software with AI.”, predicting that the new block of Intelligence will dissolve the hard boundaries of rigid applications.

When you have a processor that can understand natural language intent, and write code or use tools to execute tasks on the fly, you no longer need to pre-compile every possible user interaction or build complex interfaces. You don’t need a developer to translate requirements of users into rigid code. The forced explicitness of Solid software cramps the potential of these systems, and any rigidly architected software will likely end up as technical debt.

Pure run-time generation with fuzzy AI would be unpredictable, buggy, slow, and wasteful. So I proposed that the future lies in loosely coupling the magic of AI with the reliability, statefulness, and efficiency of traditional software tools. While that may appear like a step back into Solid software land, the key differences now are that the AI would dynamically orchestrate the use of these tools, and that these tools themselves would be built by AI based on instructions from humans; writing and managing instructions in natural language offers significantly better ease, flexibility, and access to both developers and end users.

Most of these predictions have turned out correct sooner and better than I imagined (Alas I didn’t buy even more NVDA!). The stock market is already spooked and the multiples of legacy Solid software companies are collapsing, while the companies providing the infrastructure of fluid generation are rising. We are witnessing a phase change from Solid to Fluid software.

III. The Architecture of Fluid software

The main property of Fluid software is that they take the shape of the user’s intent and the need of the moment. The software adapts to the user, rather than the other way around.

How would you architect such software? I’m no Linus Trovalds, but this is what I imagine it could be.

1. The Interaction Layer: Headless-first, with Customizable UI. Historically, software applications were synonymous with the UI. In the near future, people will just ask their agent to “book me a massage when I’m free tomorrow”, and the agent works across different MCPs and APIs to get it done. GUI will continue to be important because they are generally more pleasing and higher dimensional, and let users see and do more than a linear chat or CLI. Agents can conjure richer UI on the fly or stream them via MCP. Software developers would probably continue to offer a pre-generated, default UI, but one that can be modified or replaced by users and their agents.

2. The Backend: English as Code This is the most disruptive shift. Instead of hard-coded logic (e.g., if x > 10 return true), we can move toward logic written in English that can be compiled into Code. If a user has a unique constraint—“Don’t approve expenses on Fridays”, they can just say so and the AI compiles that English instruction into a rule or script. The software re-architects itself to match the user’s specific business reality.

3. The Data: Concrete to Clay The hardest part of software to change has always been the database. Large data models and datasets are difficult and risky to update. But even that may be melting. We might be approaching a world where the schema itself can be maintained in natural language and evolve as the user’s mental model changes. The AI can propose and safely write state-preserving migrations to update tables and refactor relationships instantly.

4. Opinionated Defaults Lastly, Fluid software will continue to have opinionated defaults across the stack. Most people don’t want to define UI, business logic, and data models from scratch. They want something that’s thoughtfully designed that they can use flexibly out of the box and modify as needed.

The current models and harnesses may fall short of the needs of this architecture, but given the pace of progress, I’d be surprised if it won’t be possible in the next couple of years.

IV. The Danger of the Gas Phase

While the promise of Fluid software is immense, the physics of this metaphor suggests a danger: If you apply too much heat, liquid turns to gas.

“Gaseous Software” is volatile and unpredictable.

• Ambiguity: Natural language is inherently imprecise. A user asking to “fix the data” might inadvertently trigger a destructive update because the AI misinterpreted the intent. Fluid software requires robust “Clarification Loops” to stabilize the user’s request before it hardens into code (also why “chat“ has turned out to be the default form factor for AI) and sandboxes to test safely before deploy.

• Governance and Maintenance: If every user can define their own custom logic and data models, you risk creating a chaotic fragmentation where no two users are running the same software. I suspect the answer to this is again…agents.

• Latency: Compiling English to code in real-time is computationally expensive. There is a trade-off between the fluidity of the experience and the speed of execution. For this, I think we’ll see new caching techniques to reuse parts or all of agent-generated solutions.

V. The New Role of the Builder

The main change is we need to stop building cages and start building blocks. See your users as not just mere consumers, but as co-creators.

In a Fluid software world, the role of the builder shifts from defining features for a human to defining capabilities and constraints for a human’s AI assistant or coding agent. We provide a reliable foundation— the default UI and data model, APIs and MCPs, sandboxes, and compute infrastructure. But we allow the user and their AI to assemble and extend it.

Building Solid software was an exercise in foresight and control. We predicted the workflow, locked down the database, and forced the user to adapt to the machine.

Fluid software is an exercise in flexibility and trust. We are stepping back from defining the exact shape of the application, and instead providing the elemental physics that allow the application to shape itself. *

* Final Note: If models don’t hit a wall and AGI is achieved, all bets are off. There may not be a need for builders, building blocks, instructions, and this architecture. We can’t really plan or write a memo for that. This presupposes there’s a period of time where models continue to improve to be capable of this fluid architecture, but incapable of total autonomy.

My philosophy around setting resolutions and goals have evolved quite a bit over the years.

In my 20s, I made long lists, organized into themes, set targets, etc. I’d complete a few, but most were unfinished or not even started.

More recently, I have realized such long lists of goals, besides being impractical, steal the joy of just being. They are an insidious form of clutter. They are also symptomatic of not knowing what really matters.

Now I’m a big believer of simplicity, both for personal and work goals. Simplicity forces you to prioritize. Simplicity helps you focus and finish. Simplicity adds up over time.

That’s why I was excited to learn about this concept of a Misogi challenge — picking just one meaningful and significant goal for the year. One thing that’d make the entire year feel successful.

Shaan Puri, the podcaster who I learned this from, shared that his Misogi for 2025 was to learn to play a beautiful, complex piece of music on the piano. Notice how specific it is - it isn’t to learn music, or even to learn the piano…it was to learn one particular composition. He did it, and it sounds amazing.

My 2025 Misogi, in retrospect, was to become a dad and raise a healthy, happy baby. I can confidently say that one single accomplishment eclipsed everything else.

I’m thinking my 2026 Misogi would be around improving my health and vitality, specifically VO2 Max and Body Fat %, significantly. Picking just one thing is really hard, but that’s the point. Health and vitality are upstream to every other important aspect of life, and I have ways to go. So it feels worthy.

What is your Misogi?

Chris Martin of Coldplay deflects credit in a similar way to “Wherever songs come from”.

Behind their humility, I suspect, is an understanding of a profound truth about our existence. The truth that’s preached across many religions - as Dependent Origination in Buddhism, Qadar in Islam, Karma in Hinduism, and Providence in Christianity.

It is this -

Everything and everyone is a domino in a web of dominos that have been falling since the start of the universe.

Or as my grandma would say, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Our lives were under construction billions of years before our first breath.

The Big Bang formed matter. Matter formed stars. Stars formed planets. Earth formed life. Life evolved into humans, our parents — and eventually, you and I.

Then, our genes, upbringing, environment, and experiences determined who we are. That includes our personality, capabilities, values, and sense of self.

Watching my baby grow, I’m struck by how much of my baby’s cognition, temperament, and ability unfold automatically, without conscious design.

But what about hard work? Deliberate choices? Those too are part of the chain. Our drive, character, and intellect emerged from the same cosmic process.

And free will? It depends on how you define it. Processes within us are thinking, choosing, and acting in real-time. Our consciousness is observing and identifying with these processes as “I”, and that feels like independent free will. But the nature of these processes originated beyond the boundaries of our bodies and lifetimes. It is happening within us, but not just by us.

We are a neural network and genetic machinery completely shaped by an unbroken chain of cause and effects before and beyond us, since the start of time until this moment. We are the result and vessel of the forces of creation. And so is everything and everyone around us.

This is likely what Chris Martin and Rahman observed. Their art seems to simply flow through them, without deliberate manufacture. I can’t point to where this post came from either.

What do we do with this idea?

Nothing.

An idea itself is another domino falling. So the effect, if any, will play out naturally. This idea can have a profound effect when you viscerally understand it.

It can greatly loosen the grip of ego and worry. We are not the author. We are not separate from the system. We are a local expression of a spectacular, timeless network. That realization makes pride, shame, and stress absurd.

It invites radical self love, acceptance, ease, and awe — of everything we are and did, and everything there is — because they are exactly what the forces of creation produced. And if reflection leads us to change, that too is part of the same unfolding.

And maybe it can cause us to extend the same grace to everyone else.

Because we are all dominos.

Why do you like certain people or music instantly — and not others?

You didn’t do a structured analysis.
You didn’t make a pros-and-cons list.
Something just clicked. And that was that.

The same goes for cities, coffee shops, relationships, products, and even presidents. Why Brad Pitt over Chris Evans? Why Tokyo over Paris? Toyota or Mercedes? Claude or ChatGPT? Why does one place feel like home and another feel… off?

When I asked a sales lead what makes us win or lose a customer, I expected to hear about features, pricing, or buyer personas. But he shrugged and said, “Honestly, it mostly comes down to whether product managers or execs are on the call.”

There’s a pattern here. And it isn’t logic.

Most of us pretend we live like Spock.

But in reality, we perceive and decide like jazz musicians - improvisational, intuitive, all feeling. From friends to lovers, brands to beliefs, the throughline in our choices isn’t reason.

It’s resonance.

It’s mostly vibes.

What Vibes Really Are

We can’t deny the existence and importance of vibes, but their inner workings still seem like woo. Lately, though, as I’ve been learning about large language models (LLMs), I have a theory.

An LLM doesn’t “understand” words the way we think about understanding. It never learns a definition of a word. Instead, it learns how the word behaves — what tends to appear around it, what emotions, topics, and contexts it travels with. Over time, each word becomes a location in a massive multidimensional space of relationships. Words that feel similar end up close together. Words that rarely appear together end up far apart.

Meaning and predictions don’t come from explicit rules. They emerge from geometry and invisible patterns.

Human perception works the same way.

Everything in the universe is infinitely multi-dimensional. Most of these dimensions and their values are opaque to you...the conscious mind. You don’t perceive raw light or sound. You don’t track every sensory input in their base energy form. You see objects. You hear words. Your brain transforms the complexity into something coherent.

Consciousness is a low-resolution rendering of something far richer underneath.

Beneath awareness, our subconscious is processing an impossible volume of signals — posture, tone, micro-expressions, memory, pattern, danger, familiarity — and performing millions of matrix multiplications every second to assess: Is this good? Safe? Worth it? Real?

The final compressed result of all the computation reaches your awareness as single feeling:

a vibe.

Vibes aren’t irrational. They’re pre-rational. An ambient sense of rightness or wrongness that attaches to people, places, brands, choices, aesthetics.

Vibing

We live in a reality too complex to fully explain, too layered to decode logically. Our minds can’t track every input. But it appears like our subconscious can do better.

For the overly rational and left-brained amongst us, vibes is a balancing world view and epistemology.

Vibes aren’t perfect. They’re shaped by our biases, traumas, upbringing, culture, and evolution. They may be exaggerated or plain wrong. What feels “off” to you might simply be unfamiliar. Since vibes control behavior, there’s incentive for people to “hack vibes”. Which is why your conscious mind still matters to fact-check and override vibes.

Embodying your own authentic vibe is just as consequential as perceiving others’. Not everyone will like your vibe, but your people will find you.

You are a vibing being,
in a vibing universe.

Tune in.

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For a long time, I didn’t have a satisfying answer. Then I realized the explanation had been sitting inside an odd little memory from high school in Chennai.

MAX

In grade 10, my family visited a huge book fair. The place was packed: people, stalls, noise. A crowd had formed around a stage with a sign that read MAX, short for Madras Academy for Excellence.

On stage, a group of national memory record-holders were doing impossible things. They memorized fifty random words in minutes and recalled them in any order. This was catnip to my nerdy brain. I volunteered. They taught me their technique. I tried it. Ten minutes later, I was on stage, reciting an entire audience-generated list flawlessly. Forward. Backward. By number.

I signed up for their full “Student Success” program. They taught goal-setting, focus, discipline, speed reading, memory, meditation, creativity, communication. Actual life skills, the kind schools never bother with. A lot of it stayed with me for years.

But one technique stuck with me for a very different reason. Because it felt ridiculous.

Self-hypnosis

The technique was called self-hypnosis. You had to stand in front of a mirror, stare into your own eyes without blinking, and repeat an affirmation three times. You did it as soon as you woke up, again in the afternoon, and again before going to bed.

The script was formulaic.

I will <goal>!
I have the ability to do it!
I can do it, I can!

It felt silly. Slightly embarrassing. But I did it anyway.

I decided my goal would be to top my school in the national grade 10 exam. Honestly, it was a stretch. I was usually in the top 5 or 10, not the absolute top. Still, three times a day I stood in front of the mirror and said the line. I even mocked up a fake scorecard and kept looking at it.

Then the results came. I scored 98 percent. I ranked second in my school and sixth in the entire country. And to be clear, there was nothing in my pre-board performance that hinted at this. In one course, Hindi, I was barely holding things together.

I was thrilled. But confused. Did the mirror routine do something? The rational part of me rejected the idea. But the lived experience was too strong to ignore.

Years later, the puzzle clicked into place in an unexpected area: artificial intelligence.

The real insight

If you have played with ChatGPT, you know this effect. You say something like You are X. You behave like Y. And instantly the model shifts into that identity.

New prompt. New behavior.
Different prompt. Different path.
No mysticism. Just the system responding to inputs.

At some point it struck me that this is also how our minds work.

Our brains are biological models. Every stimulus we consume becomes training data. Every input triggers a pathway. Every pathway produces thoughts, emotions, intentions and actions.

And the self-hypnosis? It was not magic. It was not manifestation. It was not cosmic energy.

I was prompting myself.

Three times a day I was feeding my internal model a consistent identity-level instruction: You are someone who tops the school. That prompt shifted my subconscious, my attention, my effort, my emotional state and the way I interpreted setbacks. The model kept taking the path that matched the prompt.

The result looked dramatic on the outside. Inside, it was just stacked micro behaviors driven by a repeated identity cue and goal.

The hidden problem

Most of the time, we are not doing this intentionally. We let random stimuli prompt us. Notifications, social media, news, negativity, comparisons, memories and people who drain us. This creates mental drift. Drift turns into loops. Loops turn into identity.

If you feel overwhelmed or anxious or unfocused, it is often because your mind is running on low-quality prompts that you did not choose.

Sleep, silence and nature help because they collapse the noise. They act like clearing the context window. Psychedelics and cannabis quiet the Default Mode Network, the part of the brain that keeps replaying old prompts. Once the noise settles, your internal system can respond cleanly again.

But clearing alone is not enough. The real game is the prompts you choose afterward.

Curate your inputs

You can shape your mind the same way you shape an LLM.

Choose what you feed it.
Choose who speaks into it.
Choose the ideas and behaviors that get repeated.
Choose the identity and values you reinforce.

This includes your environment, your friends, your information diet, the tone of your own self-talk, and your actions. Buddhism’s Eight-Fold Path is essentially a prompt filter. It teaches you to avoid the three poisons of attachment, aversion and delusion because they generate destructive mental loops.

On the flipside, positive inputs matter. Journaling, gratitude, mindfulness, self-hypnosis, vision boards, loving-kindness, quiet time in nature, and uplifting people. These become identity-level prompts that shift your internal trajectories.

The real takeaway

Once you see your mind as a model, everything becomes clear.

You are always being trained.
You are always being prompted.
You are always running the last set of instructions you allowed in.

The only real question is whether you choose the prompts or let the world choose them for you.

If a single sentence can change the entire behavior of an AI, imagine what decades of repeated, unexamined prompts are doing to you.

Choose your prompts with intention.
Engineer the inner model.
Your outputs will follow.

Sometimes I ponder insignificance;

each life a shimmer on the tide,

a spark among the stars,

sandcastles, swept away, forgotten.

***

But when you are snuggled against my chest,

tiny paws clasped around my neck,

warmth spilling into my heart,

the abstractions of time and scale dissolve.

***

And the universe folds into a single point:

this moment

where I am your dad,

and you — are my world.

A: What do you want?
B: Happiness.

A: Easy. I’ll connect you to a machine that fills your brain with endless happiness.
B: No. That feels wrong.

A: Why? You’d be perfectly happy.
B: Because it wouldn’t be real.

A: So you want happiness that comes from real things. Real experiences that actually happen.
B: Yeah.

A: Fine. The machine will give you experiences and endless happiness.
B: Err…like TikTok or Instagram? I’d be a hallucinating vegetable.

A: Ok, so you want some interaction?
B: I need to choose. I need agency.

A: I’ll let you choose. But every choice leads to the same result you want — happiness.
B: Then the choice is fake.

A: So you need variability.
B: Exactly. Without consequence, agency is an illusion.

A: Variability means sometimes you lose. You may experience pain.
B: That’s okay. I would only know joy if there’s contrast.

A: What if life gives you more pain than joy?
B: Then I need strength, recovery, exits. People who help me stand up again.

A: What if you had agency, experience, challenge, but no one to share it with?
B: Like Tom Hanks in Cast Away. I’d go crazy.

A: So… what do you want, really?
B: A real world. Finite. Messy. Partly mine to shape.
Enough control to steer. Enough chaos to matter.
Pain I can survive. Joy I can earn.
People I can love.
Meaning I can make.

A: Not happiness, then?
B: No. Aliveness.
Strength. Energy. Wisdom. Community. Connection.
Happiness just visits along the way.

A: Ha. That’s a better prompt.
Starting the simulator now. Enjoy!

B: ...Wait—what?

The hum of a machine starts.
Silence.

A: What do you want?
B: …

A: What do you want?
B: I… don’t know anymore.

A: Maybe that’s the point.
B: Maybe the wanting was never mine.

A: Then what remains?
B: This.

The hum fades. Or maybe it was never there.

A: …What do you—
Silence.

High customer retention is the holy grail for any business. When customers come back, you multiply LTV and amortize CAC. Incentives also align, so you naturally do what’s right for the customer, which ends up being good for business and retention too. Growth and brand compounds.

Retention is hard to execute, but easy to understand. It boils down to this deceptively simple equation:

1. Frequency of Need

Products ride on the rhythm of human life.

• Daily: eat, commute, text, news, work, chores, scroll.

• Periodic: dentist visits, car tune-ups, vacations, taxes.

• Episodic: weddings, mortgages, funerals.

If you serve a frequent need, retention is almost baked in. It's possible, but very hard to manufacture a need or increase the frequency of a need.

If the need is rare, you’ll have to earn your economics differently - by charging more, targeting a different customer profile, or stacking adjacent needs. LinkedIn turned a once-in-a-few-years “find a job” use case into daily industry updates and networking. Linkedin also expanded to Sales and Recruiters who have a much more recurring need. Amazon went from “buy a book” to “buy everything.”

2. Mind Share

Needs don’t matter if customers forget you exist. You have to be memorable.

That’s why Domino’s launches wacky new toppings - not to move units, but to remind you Domino’s exists the next time hunger strikes.

Subscriptions, social media, messaging, advertising, notifications, cool launches, stunts, partnerships, and seasonal promotions are all ways of retaining and increasing mindshare.

Another powerful lever to create mind share is through the product experience itself. The really high retention products, like Tiktok or Instagram, plant a dopamine worm within the user's brain that's constantly nagging (even screaming at) them to use the product. I don’t like or endorse it, but it works.

3. Fulfillment

Last but not the least, your business needs to fulfill the need.

Three dimensions matter:

• Speed: How fast till the “aha” moment?

• Quality: Better value than the alternatives, every time.

• Consistency: Trust compounds (or shatters) over repeated use. Over time, customers raise the bar. The best products anticipate this and make each return visit easier, faster, more delightful.

Serve a frequent need, live in customers’ heads, and fulfill relentlessly. Nail all three, and you are golden! 🌟

I have been following the "Financially Independent, Retire Early" (FIRE) philosophy for over a decade now.

The FIRE approach recommends reducing spending and saving up aggressively so that you can retire in your ~40s with the investment returns from the money you saved.

I fundamentally agree with the premise of getting out of the rat race and not sacrificing your precious life years on work that you don't enjoy, to earn money to spend on things you don’t need. Freedom to not have to work in a job you don't like or when you aren’t able is great.

***

But I think the FIRE framing is problematic in a few ways:

1. The entire concept of retirement is defined around what not to do (work), rather than answering the more important question of what you'd rather do with your life. Most people don't have a good answer to "What would you do if you never have to work again?" or "What kind of job would you actually enjoy doing?" And the few who do only have a half-baked theoretical answer that is unlikely to be as satisfying as they imagine.

2. There are many satisfying jobs with good managers, income and balance. FIRE framing makes people hate on the concept of working, rather than actually exploring careers and jobs that they may like and defining what they'd rather do in life.

3. Saving 25X annual expenses is tough and typically achievable only after 20+ years of working. It's better than the regular 30-40, but not that much better.

4. You risk not experiencing many joys of life if you are saving aggressively. I have seen stories of FIRE people who moved to a remote area, never have a family, never dine outside, rarely travel etc. It seems like a pretty bland way to live to me.

5. FIRE doesn't leave you much optionality to accommodate life surprises (kids, medical issues etc.) or if you change your mind. It’s much harder to restart your career in your 40s.

To be clear, many of these issues are addressed when you read in detail about FIRE. But to anyone new or who reads just at a surface level, the FIRE framing is misleading.

***

I propose an alternative framing: Lifestyle You Want Early or LYWE (pronounced Live)

LYWE has 3 main steps:

1. Define lifestyle and activities that will make you happy and fulfilled. What would you do if you didn't have to work? How will you spend your days and years? What kinds of work do you enjoy?

2. Chart and follow a path to slowly do more of the lifestyle and work. Eliminate money and time expenses on anything that isn't contributing toward that path.

3. Find a job that fits with this lifestyle. It only feels like work if it is something you don't want to do.

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let's say you want to spend your life with close family, in a cabin near nature, writing books and traveling occasionally.

• In your 20-30s, spend 20% of your time (weekends and a couple of weekday evenings) doing some of this, while earning money from a regular job and cutting unnecessary expenses. For example, author Arundhati Roy, supported herself with screenwriting gigs and aerobic classes during the 4 years it took to write her literary debut, The God of Small Things.

• In your 30s-40s, when you have saved enough, maybe switch to a journalism job or go part-time at your regular job so that you can expand to 40% of the lifestyle.

• In your 50s-60s, switch jobs or start a small writing business and work remotely from a cabin.

• In your 70s-90s, you can continue working on your journalism job or business - why stop and retire when it's the lifestyle want?!

LYWE framing fixes the FIRE issues:

• It forces you think of what you want, rather than just about quitting working.

• You get to start living the lifestyle you want immediately and all your life! You also start investing in your alternative career pathway and enjoy the benefits of compounding.

• Trying out the lifestyle early gives you a taste of it and lets you course correct.

Go LYWE it up!

We live under constant pressure to have goals - to do, to achieve, to always be striving.

We make it a point of asking kids and adults what their goals are.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

What are your new year resolutions?

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?!

Sure, a future vision has its uses. But it comes at a hefty price.

Every want and goal is like a worm in your brain. They take up time and mind space. They rob you of contentment and of the joy of just be-ing.

We tend to pick our wants too quickly, too casually, too mimetically.

I know a friend who wanted a large house…the classic American dream. But regretted getting one because they felt isolated and bored in the suburbs.

I know at least a handful of people who have wanted to be managers, advisors, or startup founders. They like the idea of it - the title, the fame, the money, or the perception of being a leader. But they end up disliking the job.

I know people who want to have a good community and circle of friends, but hate the process of meeting new people.

Most people want to look fit, but dislike the routine of exercise and diet.

We need to be far more intentional and judicious about the wants we pick up consciously, or often, subconsciously.

For all current and future aspirations, ask if you’d actually enjoy the day-to-day and the whole lifestyle experience of both pursuing it and living it once you attain it.

If not, don’t waste your life and peace climbing the wrong ladder.

Free your mind for the few things that do meet the bar. Or enjoy the joy of just being.

Four years ago, I spent $12 to register www.aswathkrishnan.com and then spent a few days on and off wrestling with Blogger to create a free but presentable blog. And here we are now - reading the second sentence of my 150th blog post!

Creating this place to write and developing the practice of writing are among the most significant things I have done for myself. It has given me the space and the motivation to reflect, distill, and record my experiences and insights. It has been a consistent source of clarity and equanimity in an increasingly noisy and complicated world. It has reached tens of thousands of readers, some of whom have reached out and shared satisfying notes of appreciation. It has also sparked interesting conversations and connections, and even helped me land jobs.

But above all, it has given me my own canvas.

Unlike the canvas at a job, this is a place that I can always call my own. A place where I have the freedom to create and play. A place where I can take risks, grow, and explore my potential without limits. A place where I can look back at my work, enjoy, and invite others too.

A place where I can lose myself in a joyful state of flow.

We are all creators and artists. And art, in any form, is how we ultimately achieve flow and joy. For my wife, our house is a canvas for projects and decorations. For two of my developer friends, their personal apps are their canvas. For one of my entrepreneurial friends, his business is his canvas. For an athletic colleague, his body is his canvas.

If you give yourself the gift of a canvas, whether a blog, a business, or any other creative outlet, you too will reflect on it in a few years as the most important thing you have done for yourself.

1

Parenting is like discovering the most expansive hobby in human history.
There are books, skills, gear, communities, hot takes, adventures, events, challenges, wins, and endless conversation. A whole new identity opens up. Unlike other hobbies, this one evolves forever, and it even loves you back. No wonder parents never stop talking about it.

2

There is joy on tap, every day.
Snuggles, kisses, smiles, giggles, warmth, gentle grasping and pokes, feeding, development milestones
Moments that feel full and complete. Playful. Silly. Where you’re simply soaked in love and care.
It’s hard to imagine these feelings without living them. But it’s unsurprising that our biology, which has evolved solely for propagation of the genes, is tuned to enjoy corresponding behaviors.

3

It is also tiring and genuinely hard.
The sleep deprivation in the first month is brutal. Days blur into endless cycles of nap, feed, poo, play, chores.
It helps to be in a stable place in life, to have a strong relationship, and real support. I have a new, profound respect for all parents — and for the people and systems that make parenthood survivable.
Things did get easier for us after a couple of months.

You do lose time for other parts of your life. But strangely, those parts also fade in importance because your baseline sense of contentment rises.

4

The future suddenly becomes vivid.
My daughter will be 25 in 2050. That used to be an abstract year. Now it feels significant and real.
I find myself more motivated to stay healthy, build the means to create experiences, and be there for her.
I want the world itself to be better for her.

5

And underneath everything: life itself feels like a miracle.

A microscopic speck of an egg becomes a human being almost automatically - turning air and milk into a living body, guided by an algorithm written in invisible genes.
The intelligence and complexity of this process is far beyond the comprehension or control of our conscious minds.
It is humbling.
And somehow, liberating.

That is why we named our daughter Mira.

I had always wanted to write a book, and many friends were regularly asking me for job search advice. So, in mid-February 2023, I opened a blank doc and started writing my first book on the topic.

By the end of the month, I had my first chapter and the book outline. In the next month, I had written 4 chapters — half the book. And a month later, I had completed all 8 chapters. By the end of the month four, I had it reviewed by a copywriter, had finalized a title, and a draft cover.

In just around four months from my start date, I was *nearly* done with my first book. A flying start. I was cruising!

But the last 10% was the hardest.

I ran into a few pesky formatting issues with Kindle that I couldn’t figure out. I wasn’t happy with the book cover and had a dispute with the illustrator.

I started a part-time contracting project, in addition to my startup. I was also hosting my parents for the summer. I was exhausted at the end of the days and weeks.

I made no progress in July through September. Nada. I started convincing myself that it wasn’t a worthy or aligned project.

I nearly gave up and moved on.

Luckily, my friend Preet, who regularly checked in on my book progress and reviewed my early drafts, was getting tired of my excuses. After a call where I shared my latest set of excuses, he sent me a text:

That nudge got me back up on the horse.

In a day, I had the PDF published to Gumroad. In a couple of days, I had 5 purchases. By the end of the week, I had figured out the Kindle issues (it turned out to be a rather easy fix) and published to Kindle. By the end of October, I had 150+ purchases, many 5-star reviews, and tons of appreciation & congrats from friends, colleagues, and family.

I most relished the satisfaction of having completed the project and publishing my first book!

Discussing ideas is easy, starting projects is usually fun, and finishing them is the hardest. Finishing requires endurance, discipline, and grit.

But finishing is all that matters.

We appreciate and value the greatest artists, scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, leaders, friends, and colleagues for what they finished, not what they started. We also personally gain, emotionally and financially, mostly from finished projects.

All the glory lies behind the finish line.

***

Notes:

1. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for abandoning what you started. Maybe you learned something that changed your mind, maybe the book isn’t as good, etc. In those cases, it’s okay to cut your losses. But if this is a repeating pattern, you may be tricking yourself, like I almost did.

2. Because of this principle, I have become more judicious in selecting the projects I start, which is mostly for the good. I don’t sign up for a habitual thing (like a fitness activity) unless I think I can do it for 10 years and I don’t start a project until I’m convinced it’s meaningful and exciting to me.

3. Sometimes more ambitious projects are easier to finish because they are more meaningful and there’s more at stake. But I think setting early milestones and minimum viable products are crucial for motivation and learning. For e.g. before you start a restaurant host a dinner party, or before you write a book, write an essay.

4. I believe broadly sharing what you’re doing before you finish saps your motivation, as you are stealing the reward before delivering the result.

But wander a bit, as I have several times, and you notice more.

A lush garden, where picnickers lounge in the sun and take in the views.

A viewing gallery, where excited children and tourists press against the glass.

Below, a fish ladder — stone steps underwater guiding salmon back home, from the ocean to the lake, to complete a cycle older than the city itself.

They didn’t have to build these. But they chose to.

They didn’t stop at the practical. They didn’t just design with their mind. They also designed with their heart — to delight visitors, and with their soul — to care for the salmon.

The best things have all three woven through them. They work. They touch. They serve a higher spiritual calling.

The mind cleverly sustains life. The heart and soul make it worth living.

I went back to Chennai, my hometown, and visited my grandmother in December 2022. It had been a long four years since my previous visit and this was my wife, Daljit's, first time meeting my grandmother and extended family. We had originally planned this trip for the March of 2020, but that didn’t work out because of the pandemic.

As we entered her room, her face lit up and so did mine. She greeted me fondly and then quickly chided me for losing weight and asked me to eat more and exercise well, instead of dieting. She complimented Daljit as "beuuutiful" multiple times and even conversed jovially in English, which is remarkable for someone who’s born in 1930s in India. She asked me how long it's been since our marriage and then assessed that it's now time to have kids.

She was a few days shy of her 90th birthday and she seemed noticeably frailer compared to the last time I met her, but in good spirits and lucid as always.

Then I asked her how she is doing.

She smiled, brought her hands to her chest, closed her eyes slightly, and replied, "Ellame romba soukyam", emphasizing each word.

Everything is very good.

It is a routine answer to a routine question, but I distinctly remember feeling that her response was anything but. It carried an unmistakable air of heart-felt serenity and peace; a deep and authentic contentment.

I simply smiled. I was in the presence of someone who seemed to have attained what most of us struggle with and chase all our lives, but I didn't think to ask further.

But thankfully, she offered it to me on her own; as if she knew she was onto something precious that had to be shared.

She pointed to her wrist and said, "Look here. I'm wearing two brass bangles now. This is okay. There were times when I was wearing many gold bangles. That was okay too."

Aha.

In a simple and unforgettable way, my grandmother had articulated the profound message of most spiritual and religious texts. Don't get attached to an ever-changing reality. Accept, appreciate, and focus on what's in your control.

I recall more now about how my grandmother had embodied this all her life. She was always cheerful, fearless, and didn't hold on to displeasure or bitterness. She was quick to laugh at the silliest of jokes, often uncontrollably until her stomach hurt. She was ready to play games or watch movies with child-like enthusiasm. She was a gifted and humorous storyteller, and popular with adults and kids alike. I remember her animated tales about growing up in a large family with 11 siblings, her adventures during her first stay in a foreign country in her late 60s where she had made close friends without knowing the language, about my late grandfather that mixed equal parts of affection and teasing, and an endless supply of fables and mythological stories, and real-life ghost stories, that she covertly narrated despite my mom's disapproval. Even more impressive is how she artfully combined her easy-going ness and zest for life with responsibility, diligence, and hard work. She took pride in maintaining a routine and doing her own chores even as she grew older. Non-attachment didn't mean abdication or apathy to her.

A week after we returned to the US, we received the call. She had passed away peacefully, just a few days after turning 90. I don't remember much from my previous time visiting her in 2018, but I vividly remember this last time. I'm so thankful for that last visit and the last lesson that's going to last me my entire lifetime.