I’ve launched a startup! It’s called Del. Del is your personal AI executive assistant. Whenever you have something you need to remember to do later, just text or forward it to Del, who will either handle it or find good times to bug you and be persistent about it.

If you run your day-to-day out of reminders you text to yourself, an overflowing Notes page called "todo," and wish you had an assistant you could delegate the boring stuff to, I built Del for you.

You can try it free for now at withdel.com.

I’m not interested in long run labor scenarios of AI, which range from cataclysm to utopia depending on the degrees of connection from your source to equity in OpenAI.

What’s clear is that in the short term, labor displacement from AI will be unprecedentedly fast, painful, and disproportionately affect entry-level roles, starting in tech.

Before this creative destruction reforms entire industries, it will first dismantle the existing talent pipeline. New-grads over the next five years will find that the old corporate nursery—where Big Tech absorbed graduates by the thousand, paid them to learn on real systems, and spat them out three years later as mid-level engineers—has largely closed its doors to them as firms reconsider the calculus of hiring juniors in the age of AI leverage. Whatever Altmanian abundant future lies beyond the horizon, the first act of AI for an entire generation of young, educated Americans is a morbid interregnum.

It’s junior job openings on the chopping block, not senior ones, because AI is complementary to calibrated judgment. The senior knows when the contract clause is subtly wrong, when the financial model’s assumptions are unrealistic, when the system design is over-engineered. Juniors ship hallucinations because they can’t tell the difference.

It's faster to teach a senior to prompt than to teach a junior good judgment. Companies chasing AI leverage will increasingly invest in experienced workers over costly apprenticeship pipelines. Slow adoption of new AI paradigms and persistent demand for legacy skillsets will shield existing workers, while opportunities start vanishing for new entrants.

CEOs like Jack Dorsey, who just laid off 4000 employees at Block, believe that only deep, ambitious restructuring rather than timid retro-fitting, will unlock the full potential of AI on organizational productivity. They’re right, though most less hard-charging CEOs will prefer a quieter and more cautious approach, using hiring freezes over sweeping layoffs to bide time while they unblinkingly watch the AI-native startups figuring out the new org paradigms on the frontier. Hovering over the entry-level roles of today, the axe will fall slowly and then all at once.

The collective fallout from this trend is an emerging generational Gramsci gap: the post-Covid cohort of new-grads caught between an evaporating old entry-level (and ZIRP regime) and a new AI-fluent entry-level struggling to be born. Without the old apprenticeship ladder to climb, these new-grads must independently cultivate AI fluency and a competitive technical skillset—that, or, perhaps, grad school as a waiting room.

Law school applicants surged 18% in the 2025 cycle and are tracking 33% higher in 20261. Business schools experienced rising application growth last year, with total applications increasing by 7% in 20252. Historically, grad school applications rise both during booming economies with rising wage premiums for advanced degrees and recessions as young people “hide” from a bad economy.

Which scenario are we in right now? At Harvard Business School, 23% of last spring's job-seeking MBAs were still looking three months out — up from 20% the year before, and more than double the 10% figure from 2022.3 So much for the return on specialization.

Yet, neither are we in a recession—not if you ask NBER4 and not if you look at the earnings reports. In Q1 2026, the estimated YoY earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 is 12.6%, soon to mark the sixth-straight quarter of double-digit YoY earnings growth.5 Mag 7 (Google, Apple, etc.) reported 27.7% YoY earnings growth in Q1 2025, beating estimates by 14.9%, while Q1 2026 estimates stand at 22.8% aggregate YoY growth.

Zooming in on cloud revenue: Azure, GCP, and AWS grew 24–48% YoY in Q2 FY2026 on backlogs totaling over $1 trillion—each growing faster than revenue itself. The three are funding the boom with roughly doubled capital expenditure year-over-year, and demand is still outrunning supply.

At the same time, new-grad intake across Big Tech is down 25% from 2023 (not just from the ZIRP peak, but from an already-corrected baseline) and new grads now comprise just 7% of total Big Tech hires, versus 15% pre-pandemic6. Meta, despite record 2025 revenue and free cash flow, just announced another 8,000 layoffs for May 20267.

This is not a story of post-COVID tech austerity but substitution. AI now writes more than 25/50/75% of new code at Big Tech, depending on who you ask8 and economists have begun describing AI as a seniority-biased technological change9—one that erodes the apprenticeship tasks that historically made junior hires economical, while raising the premium on senior engineers who can audit autonomous systems. Tech wants competent engineers more than ever, but where will they come from if new ones stop being trained now?

Tech is the leading indicator. AI is adopted first in tech because the AI-software loop closed first, but the same dynamic will reach law firms, consulting firms, banks, accounting firms, ad agencies—diffusing outward with each quarter. In Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Perez distinguishes between the installation phase of a technological revolution—when the core infrastructure is built, capital floods in, and the frontier sector reorganizes itself—and the deployment phase, when the rest of the economy absorbs the new paradigm and remakes itself around it. We’re still in installation; the junior software engineer is just the first to experience what nearly every junior knowledge worker will face within the decade.

So. The Altmanian future may still arrive; someday the AI transition will reach down to transform the entire talent pipeline, and a new entry-level job market will emerge.

But between here and there sits a decade. In every technological revolution from steam engines to the microprocessor, the sociopolitical transformation has chased the techno-economic one from behind. That lag is measured in careers delayed and years spent at home filling out job applications. The graduating classes of the next five years will enter an economy that is growing, profitable, and largely closed to them.

I’ve launched a startup! It’s called Del. Del is your personal AI executive assistant. Whenever you have something you need to remember to do later, just text or forward it to Del, who will either handle it or find good times to bug you and be persistent about it.

If you run your day-to-day out of reminders you text to yourself, an overflowing Notes page called “todo,” and wish you had an assistant you could delegate the boring stuff to, I built Del for you.

You can try it free for now at withdel.com.

Street hustlers or How I learned to respect the hustle

The photo hawkers stationed at every scenic overlook understand the first law of marketing: sell the fantasy, not the product.

They don’t pitch you on photo quality or printing speed. They wave their iPad in front of your face at maximum brightness like a halo in the night. On it, a breathless vision of beauty stands in front of the landmark—pose, hair, lighting, perfect. Squint and you start seeing yourself in the photo. What are you waiting for?

The street performers, storefront clackers, hawkers with megaphones shouting over one another know something else too: all revenue is downstream of attention. The result may be an incessant din rising to screeching cacophony at the worst of times, but I respect the hustle.

Hawkers ask very quickly whether you’ll buy or not. No elaborate pitch, no relationship-building preamble, just a fast filter to determine if you’re a prospect worth pursuing. They don’t waste time on maybes. This feels abrasive if you’re used to the padded dance of Western retail, but it’s brutally optimized for their environment. Every second spent on someone who won’t buy is a second not spent finding someone who will.

All of them know that persistence pays. The hustlers will follow you and ask once, then twice, then three times. They will keep going, right up to the moment before you start swinging, and then they will walk off and immediately accost the person a few feet to your left. To be very honest, I find this level of shamelessness absolutely exquisite.

In the West we have YouTubers embarking on 100 Rejections in 100 Days challenges. In China they try for 100 rejections in 1 hour. And then 1 out of the 100 times, it works. I know because I watched it happen—like watching Federer backhand, just pure poetry in motion. As long as they were off my ass, I was thinking to myself, I really do respect the hustle.

Why are there so many identical goddamn spicy oil stores?

Stroll through any tourist Chinese street market you’ll see what I mean.

On my trip to China, I explored 7 street markets across 4 cities and found that all of them had one core set of products that were copy pasted en-masse, like Thneedville townhouses. You’ll see a dozen 百香果 fruit juice carts packed like sardines in Guilin, or hotpot oil vendors in Chongqing, or panda souvenir stalls in Chengdu, or stinky tofu stores in Changsha.

These markets have been around a long time, so this is clearly some sort of Nash equilibrium, albeit a confusingly homogenous one. If every store looks almost exactly the same and sells the same products, shouldn’t you be incentivized to sell something else to stand out? Why compete with them?

In microeconomics, Hotelling’s Law describes a scenario in which competing sellers are incentivized to minimize differentiation to maximize their share of customers. If Vendor A sells a spicy noodle dish and Vendor B sells a sweet one, they split the market. If Vendor B moves their flavor profile closer to Vendor A’s (the “median” taste), they keep their original customers and steal some of A’s. Eventually, both vendors converge on the exact same “center” product to minimize the risk of losing the mainstream customer.

In urban economics agglomeration effects is the idea that proximity creates efficiency. If stalls were scattered around the city, a customer would have to expend energy to find them. By clustering, the market reduces the consumer’s search cost. Demand spills over between stalls even if the offering is identical. This is most exaggerated in the case of the street photographer, which can only serve one customer at a time.

Differentiation is only valuable when customers can perceive, value, and pay for it. There is low marginal return to being different in a street market because most tourists pass through once and never return. Without any digital platform to list and rank the stalls, tourists will just look for the most quintessential products by default (e.g. panda toys in Chengdu). Perhaps there’s just not much marginal return to investing in quality or novelty compared to just sticking to what works.

So that’s the game: the product is almost incidental, the business is more a commodity wrapper around distribution: how loud you can shout, whether you secured the corner spot, how aggressively you can thrust samples into hands.

At some point I realized that this was all startlingly similar to the marketplaces of generative AI apps in the US. Hundreds of minimally-differentiated thin AI wrapper companies running viral TikTok guerrilla campaigns, funneling millions of users into slick app onboarding flows optimized for converting 1 in every 100, winning on volume. Shout loudly, capture attention, convert quickly, and extract value before the user churns and never returns.

On haggling

The first time I tried to haggle I felt physically ill. The vendor quoted a price, I knew it was inflated, I knew the game was to counter, but I didn’t want to do it. My chest tightened, heat rising in my face. I pushed words about the price being too high out of my mouth but I knew, they knew, my voice showed, my face showed, that I wasn’t going to drive a hard bargain.

I paid full price and walked away feeling stupid.

Worse than that though, the feeling I probably hate the most in this world is cowardice. I have a memory from a decade ago, still crisp like 4K video, of myself in summer camp sitting on some stone blocks with a few friend-strangers, while a vibrant mass of campers dance in a circle near the center of the field. We aren’t chatting with each other, no, we’re sitting in complete silence, each of us utterly absorbed in gazing longingly at the circle.

This bleak clip loops through my head every time I let fear stop me from doing something I want to do.

Watching my mom haggle with the vendors drove it home how entirely fictional and manufactured my fears are. They’re not offended by lowball offers. They expect them. They counter, you counter, everyone knows the dance. The offense I was so afraid of causing existed only in my head. Framing it as a social ritual helped.

The lesson is simple—ask for what you want. Don’t be afraid of rejection. And definitely don’t be afraid of offending the other person or being embarrassed to propose something “wrong.”

And, I remembered a deeper truth I once read. For whatever action scares you (and isn’t life-threatening), remember this surefire way to eliminate the fear: do it 100 times.

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a personal update:

I’ve launched a startup! It’s called Del. Del is your personal AI executive assistant. Whenever you have something you need to remember to do later, just text or forward it to Del, who will either handle it or find good times to bug you and be persistent about it.

If you run your day-to-day out of reminders you text to yourself, an overflowing Notes page called “todo,” and wish you had an assistant you could delegate the boring stuff to, I built Del for you.

You can try it free for now at withdel.com.

I grew up loving to read and learn about the world. When I was 8, I asked for How Things Work encyclopedias for my birthday, and I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up.

I wish the story from there was that by following this ambitious curiosity, I found something unique to me, that I loved doing, and focused on getting really good at it. That’s not what happened though.

Over the next decade and a half, I instead followed a very conventional path—getting good grades, padding my college application with extracurriculars, chasing the prestigious university, internship, career path. When I faced rejections, I actually cursed myself for being a vacuously curious generalist with no legible spike. I relied on the world to recognize my value for me.

Consider that when you do what others do, likely it is because you just want what others want. Maybe this sounds tribal, but it is really the gravitational force that funnels people into consensus tracks from an early age. Think of the Ivy Leagues, and the offer from McKinsey, or Harvard Business School, or becoming a lawyer, a doctor, a software engineer, an AI researcher. Think of your mom, who had heard from Jimmy’s mom, that Jimmy will be spending his summer at an advanced Pre-SAT prep agency, and now she’s anxiously checking if the registration deadline has passed. We were baptized in these waters, you see.

You can tell you’re in a consensus track by looking at the gatekeepers at the entrance. These tests, which determine who gets in and who continues upward, are almost always bad tests: college applications, standardized tests, Leetcode interviews, corporate performance reviews, academic publishing, VC pitch competitions.

Bad tests aren’t concerned with measuring actual value, which is difficult and hard to scale. Instead they content themselves with measuring the appearance of value. In response, participants learn to hack the test, meaning performing value. This is memorizing exam question banks to pattern match answers instead of deeply learning the material, prepping leadership-principle STAR responses for behavioral interviews instead of deeply understanding your strengths and learning to confidently pitch them, networking vacuously over coffee chats rather than building trustworthy relationships, obsessively optimizing pitch decks and narrative over creating a valuable product.

Consensus tracks tend to be intensely competitive; the top student clubs at UC Berkeley accept less than 1% of thousands of applicants (the undergraduate acceptance rate for the school itself hovers around 11%). Athletes and entrepreneurs will tell you that competition provides strong feedback loops which accelerates growth and learning. In truth, this only characterizes a small fraction of competition in our world. Far more common is junk competition, where losing gives you little signal to grow from. What learnings are contained in a rejection from a Berkeley student club? Perhaps that your technical understanding wasn’t up to snuff, or perhaps you just weren’t attractive enough. After making it into one of these clubs and joining the recruitment team, I saw that candidate evaluation can be arbitrary and utterly divorced from the reality of the candidates.

Most damning of all, bad tests compress variance in personality and ability in order to mechanically scale the filtering and selection of people, trading exceptional outcomes for predictable results.

What happens in environments where you neutralize the idiosyncratic expression of individuals? In the prison yard, shaved inmates in homogenous orange compete in the power and status games that remain—physical dominance, gang affiliation, social manipulation. In the school yard, privileged students in uniform blazers are also competing, through appearances, cliques, social manipulation. In any consensus track that strips away meaningful differentiation with bad tests, the same degenerate games will dominate. Without an internal sense of value or identity, people will always borrow it from the hierarchy.

In the early stages of your life, your environment shapes you much more than you shape your environment—most true when you were a helpless baby, still true when you’re a fledgling adult in your twenties. Because they are a primary lever for growth, it would be wise to choose your environments carefully. Because they do not incentivize actual growth and value creation, consensus tracks are bad environments. The collateral is your future.

You, with your unfashionable strengths. Maybe you grew up with an insatiable love of learning. You didn’t go deep, not yet, you’re still only 12! But college applications are just around the corner, and did you hear that Jimmy is headed to national math camp? Now freshman year, with club admissions and internship recruitment looming already—you thought you’d have time to wander intellectually but Jimmy already has a 4 year plan to triple major in computer science, business, and economics. Better stay focused. Senior year, home for the holidays, and mom shares that Jimmy has a full time offer to join Amazon as a software engineer. You work hard at interview prep and get a job in Big Tech too. Now it’s just you, this 9 to 5, and the rest of your life. You’re surrounded by people who chose this for the paycheck, same as you. You got good at not asking what you actually wanted. When was the last time you impressed yourself?

If you are in the consensus track you are probably aware of everything I’ve pointed out to some degree. Even without consciously thinking it, you feel the opportunity cost of not doing more meaningful work as a low-grade chronic discontentment. Maybe without realizing it, you’ve adopted irony, numbing out, or escapism to cope. If you are fortunate enough to have the option to leave, why do you stay there? Perhaps golden handcuffs, low-agency, fear of failure, or just inertia. All of these will keep you in the room even when the door is open.

Only you can give yourself the permission to leave and go search for better games.

When I did find my way out it was junior year of college. It started with the realization that chasing good grades and a job in big tech were not games I had chosen. I stopped prioritizing academics and internships for the first time and instead tried to follow what made me passionate and excited. I started small but quickly found that little wins have a way of parlaying into larger ones like dominoes.

I launched a generative AI project that winter that gained 500 stars on Github. In a strange way, this gave me the confidence to decide to start my own student organization—something I wanted to do since freshman year but felt too scared to. I posted announcements in class forums, put together a founding team, recruited members, and created and taught a semester-long AI curriculum to the first member cohort, and pitched collaborations to companies. By the end of the year, we had grown to over 40 members and signed project contracts with YC startups, Google, and Netflix.

After I graduated, instead of joining Amazon, I joined a YC startup as a co-founder. I started journaling and writing to more deeply know myself and what I really want. I spent a year doing things that scared me: starting this blog, doing improv for 6 weeks, solo traveling in London, singing in public. Then, at the end of the year, having learned a lot about my values, I left my startup to find something even more meaningful.

One of my favorite quotes ever, by Steve Jobs, goes like this: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Now I can see them behind me, the dots, and the line they trace. Slowly, by achieving progressively larger intrinsically motivated goals, I built up the confidence and conviction to follow my own path.

There’s no value in winning a game that doesn’t matter to you, so what is it that you really want? Is that the game you’re playing?

a personal update:

I’ve launched a startup! It’s called Del. Del is your personal AI executive assistant. Whenever you have something you need to remember to do later, just text or forward it to Del, who will either handle it or find good times to bug you and be persistent about it.

If you run your day-to-day out of reminders you text to yourself, an overflowing Notes page called “todo,” and wish you had an assistant you could delegate the boring stuff to, I built Del for you.

You can try it free for now at withdel.com.

This is a collection of advice for first-time consumer founders. During the two years I spent building Shortbread, I read a lot of books, essays and frameworks and had the chance to talk to many successful founders. I’ve distilled it to a short list of what I think would be the most useful to a first time founder building a consumer product.

1. Distribution

Distribution should be baked into your business. Brian Balfour’s four fits model: product–market fit, product–channel fit, channel–model fit, and model–market fit, is a very useful way of thinking about it. It’s not enough to make something people want—you also need to design it so that it moves through the right channels, with the right economics, to reach the right market.

For consumer companies it comes down to the unit economics of your business, meaning the revenue and costs associated with a single customer.

Growth is a balancing act between CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), retention, and LTV (Lifetime Value). For the business to be sustainable, the amount you make from a customer (LTV) must be greater than what you spent to acquire them (CAC). The payback period, how long it takes you to earn this LTV, determines your growth rate.

As with qualifying B2B leads, make sure you know your ideal user persona and where they tend to gather (online and offline), so you’re not wasting time and money distributing to people who will never care about your product.

Beware chasing viral spikes. As with all top-of-funnel strategies and tactics, if the product is bad and users churn somewhere downstream then you’re just filling a leaky bucket. A more consistent strategy is to build growth loops into your product, where each new user creates the conditions for more users to join. Common growth loop mechanisms include social sharing, content creation, marketplace dynamics, community participation, or other network effects, but the key is repeatability and compounding.

Pinterest is a classic example: Users sign up and 'pin' content to boards which are indexed by Google Images, leading other users to find this content via search or social, sign up to create their own board, and the loop repeats.

Distribution should be founder-led (doing things that don’t scale, an old YC maxim): emailing early users yourself, pitching the first sales calls, showing up in forums, writing the first blog posts. This is vital, because it’s the tightest feedback loop for learning what works and what doesn’t. If you can’t personally get distribution working, it’s unlikely a hired marketer or salesperson will fix it later.

“Distribution is essential to the design of the product. If you invent something but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business. Superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true.” —Peter Thiel

2. Talk to users before you build

This is to help you know what problems are valuable to build solutions to, so that you don’t build solutions looking for a problem. “If you build it they will come” is often dunked on for good reason, but, as they say, there is not much signal in the rejection.

A framework from Sequoia that I find interesting and useful states that for a product to find product-market fit it must ultimately overcome noise, habit, or disbelief:

Alternatively, two common ways to fail are building something that customers do not want, and overestimating the size of a market. Both of these are solved through talking to users; your goal is to understand the domain and the problem space deeply, as if you were immersed in their world and seeing through their eyes.

More specifically to building consumer products, success requires deep insight into the psychology of the individuals in your market, as opposed to the businesses. This is why a good starting place is to solve a problem that you personally encounter and understand intimately.

How to talk to users: follow 3 principles from The Mom Test.

1. Lead with their problem, not your solution. Avoiding mentioning your idea gives you the chance to learn about their world first.

2. Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future.

3. Feature requests should be understood, but not obeyed.

When you build and begin iterating, start small; you get more signal from ten people who love or hate your product than a thousand who kind of like it. Build the simplest thing that could solve their problem and launch earlier than you want to, so you can challenge and validate your assumptions by having your solution in the hands of real users. You can launch multiple times, that one big launch is fool’s gold.

As in life, your goal should be to maximize rate of learning; since you, as a startup, are default dead and dying, everything rests on you learning enough before you run out of time. The way to maximize this is to run cheaper experiments, more often, and with reliable feedback loops.

3. Retention before growth

Unless you're building a lifestyle business with a product designed for churn (many AI consumer apps are like this, especially the ones that go viral on X for successfully using a guerrilla TikTok marketing strategy), you should just focus on building a product that retains users. There's a million tactics, playbooks, and hacks to try to be seen as valuable, but at the end of the day, there’s no hack to actually being valuable and therefore retaining users.

To that end, beware putting the cart before the horse: spending too much time developing a “personal brand”, chasing virality via TikTok ramps / the vaunted Product Launch of the day, premature scaling, paid marketing.

To measure retention, build a cohort retention chart. They look like this:

At the very least you need to have a flattening retention curve; it’s hard to build a business that eventually loses every user that’s acquired. Even better, you should research the benchmark retention of top performing products in your category. For a generic overview:

These numbers are incredibly high, but are telling of how strong the value and stickiness of the top percentile products (Facebook, Amazon, Spotify, Instagram, Notion…) are. Your early stage product won’t start out with retention this strong, but it shouldn’t be too low either (unless your CAC is super low, e.g. mostly organic growth)—significantly improving long-term retention is notoriously difficult.

This is because good retention is hard. As Marc Andreessen once said, your customers’ (screen) time is already all allocated. While you may be in a niche category, in a sense, you’re competing with the entire attention economy.

The 2 things you can do with the best chance of improving retention are:

• Improve your product value prop—make it cheaper, optimize UX, increase top feature adoption, solve more problems

• Bend the curve earlier by optimizing for activation—the magic “aha” moment of your product, when value is delivered to the user

4. A startup is a war with 1000 fronts

You can't win all of the battles, you can't even attend to most of them; fortunately, a few matter much more than the rest. As with most things in life, assume a power distribution and try to be focused on the one most important thing, the 20% that will create 80% of the results.

Sometimes, you might not be able to see the most important thing because you're too focused on lower level optimizations: A/B testing landing pages and pricing options, running experiments on trial duration to improve conversion, and building the slickest personalized onboarding, when the highest leverage problem right now is fixing D30 user retention.

My recommendation here is basic: identify the key metrics you really care about and set aside regular time to align with your co-founder on high-level strategy based on the data. You should have a notion of the altitude at which you’re operating, and intentionally ascend and descend to regularly assess priorities. No detail should be beneath you; in my opinion, this is one of the most important things a founder needs to do, maintaining massive context across the surface area of the startup, up and down the organizational/technological/strategical stack. This is what the founder mode discourse is all about.

More generally, this also means you should say be saying no a lot. Some things that are distractions more often than not: getting it perfect / over-engineering, shiny but non-essential product features, most metrics that aren’t your core KPI, attending vacuous networking events or idle VC coffee chats, hiring too early, premature scaling, and over-indexing on paid marketing before retention / PMF (product–market fit) is there.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs.

5. Hire the right people

This is the highest leverage thing you can do as a founder, starting with your cofounder.

Don’t settle; you wouldn’t for deciding your life partner, don’t do it here either. Oft compared to marriages, cofounder relationships are incredibly important to get right and, like divorces, founder break ups are more common than you probably think and can get almost as messy. It’s better to be solo than to find yourself entangled with a bad cofounder.

For all the time you’ll be spending working together in such close capacity, you may as well be temporary life partners. This is why both your professional compatibility and your compatibility as people matters a lot, and also why YC looks for founding teams that have known each other a long time. Do you like this person? Can you see yourself working with them around the clock, every day, for the next 4+ years? Do you trust them? Is this someone you’d want by your side when things are hard and your back is against the wall?

To Paul Graham the most important attribute is to be relentlessly resourceful.

“There are a bunch of useful qualities in founders, but I’ve narrowed it down to the 3 most important: determination, domain expertise, and ability to sell. At least one of you is going to have to sell.”
—Jessica Livingston

For your first employees, the same applies—don’t settle, and don’t justify settling because you feel the pressure to scale up your team. Hire slowly, fire quickly. Have high standards.

The 10x engineer cliché is trite but true: it's exceedingly rare to find an engineer who is strong or has aptitude for product, business, technology, and design, but a 4/4 is the unicorn that you should be searching for. They should be someone smart, hard-working, growth-oriented, agentic, and cares about their work.

Most likely, you won't find these people in your inbound. Look for them in your network, in strongly-filtered high-signal communities, and by cold-reaching out to them personally online.

6. Learn from others

Copy what works. You probably don’t need to innovate a unique Go To Market strategy — meaning how you get your initial customers and how you charge them. Research and copy the initial GTM strategy of successful companies similar to yours. The added benefit is that you will appear familiar to customers rather than radical.

A horde of founders before you have failed and succeeded in building technology startups in every domain and industry. Study their stories so that you may potentially avoid their mistakes or replicate their successes. Look for them on founder blogs, company postmortems, podcast and interview appearances, essays, VC blogs.

Even better, cold email them, follow up, offer to buy them coffee/lunch while you ask them questions to learn about their founding experience and listen for advice. When I was in Berlin at one point, my cofounder and I visited Ali Albazaz, CEO of Inkitt, at their office to ask questions about their early days. Despite us both operating in the same space, he was generous with his advice, and we learned a lot about successful strategies they employed.

At the same time, know that every start up is different and that the invisible details may be the crucial difference between one company's success and your flop, or vice versa. Don't average your advice, and be diligent in evaluating what you hear.

Lastly, don’t blindly fear competition — startups tend to die of suicide not murder. Unless you are in a truly winner-takes-all market, other startups working on your idea should give you some validation on the potential for product market fit. HubSpot built a $25B business in the face of Salesforce’s $250B one, amidst hundreds of others in the overcrowded SaaS landscape. Good ideas are cheap, execution is everything.

7. Timing is critical

There are lots of fun analogies here. In a fast-moving river, it hardly matters whether you’re riding a log or a fiberglass kayak—you’ll be carried downstream all the same. Experienced surfers know to wait for the right wave to catch.

So too, with technological waves: they move in long S-curves that unfold over years, with different paths to success depending on whether you’re in the start, middle, or end of the curve. The right timing doesn’t guarantee success—but the wrong timing almost guarantees failure.

This is the story of a lot of the biggest internet era companies. Reed Hastings pivoted Netflix to streaming as broadband and connected TVs crossed the threshold; YouTube rode cheap digital cameras, Flash, and rising home bandwidth to unlock UGC video; Instagram was native to the iPhone 4 era and took a winning bet on the fact that everyone would soon have a great camera in their pockets, capable of uploading images to the internet.

As these waves appear, crash, and fade, so too do markets emerge, expand, and eventually shrink. My point is, of all the ways a startup can be “lucky,” the most decisive is being on the right side of the times. Unlike most forms of luck, this one is directly in your control—choose the right wave to ride.

“The #1 killer of startups is lack of market.” In a great market, “the market pulls product out of the startup.”
—Marc Andreessen

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I have a bucket list.

On it, are things like busking on a street corner, beating a chess hustler in Central Park, and doing improv. Generally, I add what I deem to be so far out of my comfort zone or capabilities so as to be downright Herculean, like I’m manifesting some mythical vision of myself who will accomplish these heroic deeds.

Interestingly, because I’ve been maintaining it for over 6 years now, the list also roughly tracks the evolution of my self-concept and self-efficacy over time, like height markings scratched into a bedroom wall. When I look at the earlier items, I can both remember how ambitious they seemed to the younger me who wrote them down, and also notice how much more within reach they feel to the present day me. I was surprised when I first realized this; cheekily, I take it as evidence that I’ve grown.

So anyway, every year, I try to cross off at least one item. On a whim, I decided this year it would be improv and signed up for an intro class1 where I and 7 other adults spent six weeks doing silly things like pretending to be inanimate objects and giving impassioned speeches in gibberish.

Here’s a list of things that I learned.

1.

Improv is an act of surrender. In the face of total uncertainty, you surrender to yourself. In this way, improv is not all that different from the simple act of living. Life dissolves the best of plans, so plan instead to freely dance.

I was surprised how unbearable this uncertainty was for me. I was thrust into all sorts of spontaneous yet simple situations in which all that was asked of me was to make a choice—say something, ANYTHING.

I put it this way and it sounds trivial, but it’s not. It’s terrifying and paralyzing; some vestigial sentience which fears failure and rejection makes a desperate effort to strategize, plan, and manage the outcome by preparing or anticipating the "question".

What it doesn’t know is that the only way to fail is to not commit.

One time the teacher lined us up and simply asked each of us to strike a pose and make a sound. As people went, I started to panic. He did what I was planning on doing! Can I do the same thing? Wait, I shouldn’t be “planning” at all, should I? That’s not “improv”. Okay, then we’ll just do something random.

…

…

Oh god what if I can’t come up with anything when it’s my turn? Or what if I look silly? Or, what if I’m not silly enough? What’s the right amount of silliness?! …

And then my moment comes. I do something with my leg, emit a bird-like noise, and the next person goes. And I’m awash with a strange mix of relief and low-grade embarrassment. Internally, I’m glaring daggers at my inner voice, or ego, or whatever it is that’s clearly making this a lot harder than it should be. Not for the first time, I think: I wish I could shut that voice up.

A lot has been written about our social conditioning, whether from the tribal, evolutionary perspective, or the sociological, psychological side of things. From what I understand, it’s about fear, validation, acceptance, approval. The primitive ego, chittering incessantly, keeps a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, getting in the way of our authentic self.

In improv, this process of giving the mic to my authentic voice felt remarkably like doing trust falls with a friend. An exercise is given, a circle is formed, you come into the center, and now you must commit—time to say something, ANYTHING. Fall and let yourself be caught, by yourself.

Something they say in improv resonated deeply with me: leap first, and figure out how to land on the way down. True in improv and true, it seems to me, in life.

Leap first, land somehow—life is everything in between.

2.

Mistakes and failure are simply labels we choose to carry around with us.

Consider, what does it mean to fail or to make a mistake when you're just playing imaginary games with no rules? Can you fail by saying something unfunny or unoriginal? There’s no rule that says that!

Clearly, I’ve brought my set of judgements and criteria with me into the improv room. This is very silly to do, like a lawyer bringing the Code of Hammurabi, on the original stone steles, with them to a modern courtroom. I’m playing by ancient rules, many of them now obsolete–-like eye for an eye, or “everybody has to like me.”

By codifying permissions and boundaries I’ve created a zone of safety free from self-doubt, where I can simply choose from a constrained set of actions, words, outcomes. This is the world of "should"; it closes off possibilities and trades exploration for safety.

In contrast, mistakes and failures evaporate upon contact with a "could" mindset. Or rather, the label peels right off of our actions, and we can write whatever we want on them instead.

I’m reminded of the dichotomy of an open-palm vs. closed-fist stance towards life. The open-palm stance is characterized by its orientation towards receiving openly. In contrast, a closed-fist stance is about imposing constraints.

In improv, you’re asked both to be receptive to your inner chaos, as well as what the people around you do. We were encouraged to always view what our partner says or does as “gifts”, in the sense that they’re the paint strokes which fill out the scene, imperfect and beautiful if we only choose to view them so.

If I viewed life as my partner, how would I practice “yes, and”?

3.

In improv, the process is the product.

Like undergraduate college, falling in love, and freeform jazz.

I love this mindset, yet the opposite seems so much more commonplace: the process precedes the product.

Like standardized tests, dating apps, and music competitions.

These have that smell of bullshit, as if life were to be lived as a slideshow of milestones and culminations.

This is a fundamental problem I have with some of society’s prevailing notions of how to spend our time. We all know time is precious. All the same, we sacrifice our days chasing future culminations, as if a fulfilling life is something to be redeemed later if you could just stack enough chips. Slog through unfulfilling 9-5s so we can live a little after dinner and on the weekends. Trade in our 20s so we can prosper in our 30s, etc. What do I really know? I’m idealistic, naive, and only 23.

Still, what I am certain of is that no moment is ever coming back. Improv reminded me of the importance of being present—to embrace and experience each moment fully so that you don’t miss what your partner does. True in improv, true in life too. The process is the product, anything else is just deferred living.

4.

Improv reveals the gaps in your self-acceptance.

These gaps are the holes through which your spontaneous, authentic self leaks silently out of you. I did a lot of wacky and embarrassing things over the 6 weeks, but not all of it troubled me the same way. I found some things mortifying and others comparatively tame. One especially weird exercise we did was to pretend that we had a canvas in front of us, and paint on it using our voice. Standing there and trying to hurl phonemes and pitches at the imaginary canvas, I suddenly came to realize that I wasn’t fully comfortable with the sound of my voice.

And I also found that each of us varied in what we found difficult. The shades of your self rejection bleeds into your character, into the things you say (or don’t say), the way your inner critic responds to the contextual demands of the scene and so on.

Improv, then, is the process of learning to celebrate yourself. To see flaws as simply part of our design, even that our flaws make us interesting, relatable, and, if we can lean in and laugh at them, funny.

It's now been about a year since I graduated college and moved to San Francisco. Reflecting on this past year, it's been strange seeing how many of my initial ambitions—like founding a startup, going on lots of dates, and escaping past anxieties—fell away as I sought something far simpler: authenticity, and to genuinely accept myself.

This is, perhaps, the most impactful lesson I’ve received from improv: the reminder that I am enough. More than enough, even, that I can choose to view myself as a gift that I am offering to the world, in the spirit of play, in the spirit of “yes, and”, and that, truly, the only way to fail is to not commit to my authentic self.

Oops. I just found out that you're with someone new.

He looks Korean—tall, has cool sunglasses. You always liked your Gentle Monsters; I always thought they were kinda lame.

My bad, this was my fault, I went to your channel to see your face and found two. I know, I know, boundaries.

I did it because I miss you, and it's hard when you have a vlog. Like trying to quit smoking with a cigarette locked in your top drawer, and you find yourself going to "check out" the drawer every now and then, but this time the key is in your hand, how did that happen? Ah.. Well, too late now. What can you do? Only human after all.

It's confusing to feel so heartbroken by this when I was the one who walked away, twice. But, if I’m being honest, I’m still carrying you with me after all this time. I confess—I’ve been holding on: to memory, to the feeling of the memory, to the memory of the feeling. To gold, tinged with blue, dissolving ever so slowly. You haunt me, but what a pleasant intrusion you are, C.

I've been grieving you quietly in a hundred different ways, in the hollowness that dwells beneath joy, in the melancholy that creeps in when I’m not looking, in the duller green of tree leaves, and in sunsets less spectacular. I looked through my journal just now, and counted that I wrote about you on 30 separate days. Oh all the ways I tried to process you!

I once read that homing pigeons can find their way home even when taken a thousand miles away. Deep down, irrationally, unreasonably, I hold out hope we’re not so unlike that—now we just have to find our way back.

But how does the owner bear it? To wait, not knowing if your bird has been ensnared or lost, to have only your belief that one day it will come back.

Or, to abandon belief and forsake it, along with the future where it arrives home after having taken the long way back. A romantic could fritter a lifetime waiting that way.

So tell me that you’re finding your way to somewhere else now, and that I’m not your home anymore. Tell me that our story has no constellation in the sky, no conspiracy of fate. Disenchant me from kismet and red threads, from Yuanfen and 인연. We’ll roll our eyes at always and forever. The romantic dies young, and life goes on.

Summer is almost here. The cherry blossom outside my house was in full bloom and as the petals fell, I wondered how you were doing.

The weather is warmer, the days long again, C. Sunlight strikes the trees and the leaves glow that yellow shade of verdant green you know is my favorite. I stop and stare for a while, soaking in the beauty, surrendering to it. Komorebi, a Japanese word which means “sunlight leaking through trees.”

The bay is vibrant and alive, and I know a hill from which the sunset over the skyline is absolutely breathtaking. You would have liked it here—over the past year, I must have picked out a dozen cafes and god knows how many fun restaurants for us to try out. There's so much to do; all the time in the world wouldn't have been enough, and now there's no time left for us at all.

But that’s alright. Seeing you with someone new, I think back to Bruno Mars singing When I Was Your Man, which makes me laugh—to know how human it is to find myself here, how eye-rollingly common, how comfortingly trite. To live is to break and come back together, stronger, more beautiful. Kintsugi, a Japanese word which means “golden repair.”

So, I’ll leave it here. I'm happy for you, at least, a little bit. I can't mean it fully yet, but some day I will. Only human after all.

Until then.

Love,

E

a personal update:

I’ve launched a startup! It’s called Del. Del is your personal AI executive assistant. Whenever you have something you need to remember to do later, just text or forward it to Del, who will either handle it or find good times to bug you and be persistent about it.

If you run your day-to-day out of reminders you text to yourself, an overflowing Notes page called “todo,” and wish you had an assistant you could delegate the boring stuff to, I built Del for you.

You can try it free for now at withdel.com.

They start innocently enough.

You make eye contact with a stranger and offer them a polite Hello. They respond in kind and you sit down. Small talk begins.

Then, after some Yes’s and No’s, a couple What’s, and a few How’s, something starts to happen.

You recognize a peculiarity in their choice of words or some idiosyncrasy strikes you as familiar, and something intangible about the other person starts to cohere. Some part of the Language of This Person becomes legible to you, and it catches you by surprise.

Almost cheekily, you throw out some obscure shade of meaning. To your astonishment, they pick up on it.

And though it makes no sense when put in words, you begin to feel a resonance in your psychologies, like putting on someone else's glasses for fun and finding your world still clear, like two radios tuned to the same frequency.

Somehow, it feels deeper than simply matching opinions and perspectives. It’s like crossing the ocean and finding that the birds here sing the same song as in your homeland. There is wonder and marvel.

And now it seems to you that you’re no longer in the same place as before. The other person is a stranger but also your confidante. You’ve not moved from your seat, but somehow, you’ve arrived.

And you remember, that home isn’t a place, it’s a person.

These are the conversations that spend mere moments whirring about within the orbit of something mundane before reaching escape velocity and jetting off towards distant nebulae. Like books, these conversations are wormholes into another dimension—somebody else’s life.

These are the conversations that feel like a shared miracle, the ones which you remember as revelations. For a moment, you escape the prison of self to vicariously glimpse the world through borrowed eyes.

They make you feel seen, and it bubbles out of you through rapid head nods, knowing smiles, and the breathless, involuntary elation at such stunning communion.

These conversations are carried by the words unsaid. Volumes are shouted in the moments of silence; between the lines lie entire chapters. The flicker of a micro-expression alludes to a world of mutuality in lived experience.

The conversation surges forward as if compelled, aloft on a current of anticipatory frisson. A riptide sucks you out to deeper waters and you go willingly. Words exceed denotative meaning, exceed connotative meaning, become a conduit for the ineffable. Meaning blossoms in the air between you.

They’re like dialogic time machines. As you free-fall through threads of conversation, you are borne backwards in time, trading in walls for pillow forts and becoming permeable once again to whimsy and wonder. The concept of play ages in reverse, from an allotment of time, to a state of mind, to a way of being.

Suddenly, you are collaborating with someone to create something beautiful through words. You sketch the outline of a thought, and they fill it with the shades of their perspective. You go back and forth, dipping your brush in the same color palette, and drawing the same reference. Somehow, you feel certain that you’ve both painted the exact same image in your minds.

I’ve heard them described as “wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become,” and I find that pretty fitting.

These are the conversations that feel like coming home.

Since graduating and moving to San Francisco, I’ve discovered that home isn't necessarily the place where we were born or the roof under which we live. Home can also be the recognition, empathy, and the unexpected synchrony of a chance encounter.

And so, you may find home wherever you go, in someone that you meet.

Across oceans, over mountains, on the road and beyond it, the thought that home may just be a conversation away is what pushes me to talk to people more, to be curious about them, and to have wonder about their lives.

What I know about shame:

1. If guilt is about what we do, shame is about what we are. Guilt is “I did something bad”; shame is “I am bad”.

2. Shame is a deeper emotion than guilt. It is of fear - the fear of being bad at your very core.

3. Shame originates with criticism, condemnation, and rejection of ourselves, by ourselves. Even when other’s words come first, our belief in the words births shame. This inner critic, while a part of us, comes from outside of us: childhood environments, power structures, systemic messaging, and other social/historical roots.

4. Shame is sometimes related to fear of failure, in which you have not separated self-worth from your performance, and sometimes, it is fear of rejection, in which you have rejected parts of yourself and fill the gaps with external validation.

5. Shame can be resistant to logical arguments because it's not about the facts, it's about the judgment we've already passed on ourselves and the fear that feeds it.

6. Shame can disguise itself as perfectionism, which arises to preemptively protect you from doing something badly (or wrong) and being a disappointment to others.

7. Shame can disguise itself as arrogance, when we adopt the armor of “better than” as a defense against the feeling of “less than.” Arrogance can mask deep insecurity. By elevating ourselves above others, we attempt to avoid the sting of shame by flipping its direction outward.

What I know about overcoming shame:

8. The antidote to shame is offering acceptance instead of judgement to yourself. The antidote is not pride nor self-esteem (which is just another judgement we make of ourselves).

9. Accepting yourself is possible through humility, self-compassion, and authenticity. Humility says "I am human and still learning," self-compassion says "that's okay, I'm worthy of love anyways," and authenticity is the courage to live from your truth—your vulnerability.

10. Humility comes from a growth mindset—the belief that our abilities and worth are not fixed, but can develop through effort, learning, and time. It is an internal quality of lightness, born from letting go of the heavy burden of needing to be 'already good enough' and embracing the freedom to grow instead.

11. Authenticity is rooted in clarity about who you are, what you value, and in the ability to stay grounded in that truth, even you are mislabeled or misunderstood. It is an internal quality of wholeness, born of self-sufficiency and an embodied sense of alignment.

"Shame thrives on secrecy, silence, and judgment. Shame can't survive being spoken." —Brené Brown

12. Confiding in someone else by voicing your inner critic is a potent way to take away shame's grip on you.

“We are often scared of the consequences of revealing who we actually are or what we actually think. But whatever that “consequence” is also happens to be a direct path to the life where we are accepted and loved for who we are.” —Joe Hudson

13. If life is a journey, a scarcity mindset can make you doubt that a destination even exists where we are loved for who we are. An abundance mindset helps you believe it does, while a growth mindset gives you the courage to begin walking toward it. While you are putting one foot in front of the other, shame begins to evaporate like morning mist.

Have you seen it? The phrase, “you can just do things,” is once again in vogue.

It says: be audacious! Sometimes constraints are chalk lines on the ground rather than concrete walls.

It reminds me of an excellent list of things you’re allowed to do I once read. My personal greatest-hits: outsource your labor (have you considered a personal assistant?), reach out to strangers (both people you just met and famous people!), and ask for more meat at Chipotle (how to do it for free: smile at them and say it with every ounce of kindness you have in you).

I think this phrase is a part of a broader societal conversation about individual agency which has also come into focus recently amidst changing times. Agency is a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

I like the car passenger analogy a lot. When we’re a passenger in someone else’s car, we’re bound in behavior by the borders of the permission we have obtained. We ask to lower the volume, or wait for somebody else to ask. If the ride is short enough, we might even just wait for the trip to end. Meanwhile, in our own car, there are no such permissions to seek. We’re free to crank up the A/C, put our feet up on the dash, and blast music as we wish.

These external forces that low agency people find themselves waiting for, are actually just different forms of permission.

I’m defining permission a little abstractly here—a cone of light illuminating the darkness of what previously was known to be impossible, unattainable, or inaccessible.

Seeking permission is the act of negotiating this boundary between do-able, not do-able. It is an intensely personal endeavor, and what I mean by this, is that it is entirely about our perception.

We seek permission from people when we negotiate social, professional, and cultural boundaries. Interestingly, even when we are trying to negotiate boundaries inside of ourselves—what we believe we are, or are capable of, for example—we still are routing through others, or the external world.

I remember the first time I went away from home for a 4 week summer camp, I was incredibly excited because I realized that nobody there knew who I was. And to me, this meant that I could completely reinvent myself: a new stage, a new cast, a new me.

That’s interesting, why did I feel like reinvention was only possible where nobody knew who I was?

This is what low agency looks like applied to one’s sense of self. Their opinion and conception of who I was—introvert, late-bloomer, nerd—held me firmly in place. I was a passenger, waiting for someone else or for a new destination.

In contrast, true agency is internalizing the permission-granting process so that we are liberated from having to seek it from others.

Ways we seek permission

Can we really “seek permission” from reality? Who could grant such heavenly sanction?

Actually, I think this happens all the time. For example, simply seeing someone else do something that we thought was impossible expands the boundaries of our model of reality. This is the Roger Bannister Effect: shortly after Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, many other athletes suddenly broke through the same barrier.

Rather than waiting for someone else to demonstrate that our model is wrong, we can cultivate a sort of skepticism of the world by being curious and asking questions. Be willing to try things, even those that you expect to fail or go badly. By doing so, you escape the trap of confirmation bias and engage directly with counterfactual possibilities—what happens when your expectations are proven wrong.

We can also work to unearth self-limiting beliefs and let them go. The deepest self-limiting belief of all is the scarcity mindset. Conversely, the most expansive world model possible, is believing that the world, and your future, is abundant with opportunities and possibilities, and that you should bias towards exploration rather than exploitation.

Roles are the most explicit permissions that we seek. Our professional and social roles dictate what we believe we're "allowed" to do or be. The problem with this is that roles in society are square holes, or round holes, or triangular holes, and humans are more like 4D hypercubes.

I believe that there’s a place for everyone and the first step to finding your unique niche, is to let go of the idea that we must contort ourself into one of these holes that society presents to us.

When the roles we possess (external identity) become imbalanced with our sense of internal identity we feel imposter syndrome. This creates cognitive dissonance where you have been "permitted" by external forces to occupy a space that you haven't given yourself permission to inhabit. You're operating in what feels like "restricted territory" because your internal conception of self has yet to also expand.

Besides escaping to a place where nobody knows who we are, we can also overcome this by separating what we believe we are from what the world tells us we are. We can do this by striving to accept ourselves with all of our imperfections, cultivating a growth mindset that allows us to expand and “rise to the occasion”, and living in accordance with your values and what they call your “truth”. If you can do these three things, I think that your inner identity will become spacious and flexible, and thus resilient and strong.

We also seek moral permission, the conception of what is right or wrong for us to do. When we seek moral permission externally, it is usually from religion, spiritual leaders, or figures of authority in our life.

Moral permission is the boundary around our inner sanctity: the set of ethical principles we hold, including abhorrence for disgusting things, actions, and beliefs (and not allowing degradation). Like an internal Overton window, our inner sanctity is a subjective construction.

The process of internalizing moral permission feels especially violent. The first time that I drank alcohol, I felt something crumbling inside me. It was one of the pillars of my inner sanctity—the one that said “good people don’t drink alcohol at this age.” And as it fell, I felt guilt and shame and wondered if I was no longer the same person as before this shattering.

But, like a forest fire, sometimes destruction precedes creation. Eventually, I erected a taller, stronger pillar in its place which said “my inherent goodness is independent of others’ approval.”

What about the permission to be ourselves authentically, or to change who we are?

To me, seeking the permission to be authentic sounds like a whispered question: you won’t judge me negatively for this right? It’s driven by fear of rejection and the fundamental need for acceptance.

When I was visiting Berlin this winter, I discovered that my trip had aligned with the start of the Berlinale, one of the Big Five film festivals in the world. Excitedly, I bought tickets and went to see one of the showings. When the movie ended two and a half hours later (it was, to my dismay, entirely in German. Still, great visuals, 8/10), the credits rolled and the theater was silent. I wasn’t sure if it was customary to clap at the end of an official showing, so my hands stayed hovering in the air while I glanced around. Then, one person began clapping somewhere to my left, and like an avalanche, the applause began.

Why didn’t I begin clapping myself? It would have been more true to myself—I believe in clapping to show my appreciation for a good film. Instead, I waited and sought that permission from someone else, a valiant First Clapper.

When we seek this permission to be ourselves from other people, the thrill of feeling accepted, of recognition, of admiration, are like gusts of wind that lift you sky high for a precious, fleeting moment before you plummet back down. It always fades in the end, leaking through your desperately cupped hands.

When it comes from someone else, the world is not enough to etch these beliefs in your heart to stay. Who can give you that permission in any enduring, timeless way except you yourself? I know that life is stifling and gray when I find myself seeking from others the permission to be myself.

Instead, now I try to internalize that permission by believing that I am enough as I am, overcoming shame through self-compassion, and getting to know my authentic voice.

Inner permission is freedom

Call me dramatic, but clearly, along the axis of self-consciousness, First Clapper possessed more degree of freedom than I did.

Surrounding yourself with First Clappers, people who are internally permissive and liberated in ways you’re not, will slowly allow you to begin to absorb the quality of lightness, of inner spaciousness, of freedom that they emit. I believe our inner permissiveness diffuses into those who spend time with us and are open to receiving it.

Good leaders, in my opinion, are First Clappers. They grant permission by precedence, for example, by publicly acknowledging their own mistakes and clearing the way for a culture of nonjudgmental accountability.

A lot of people aspire to be this kind of leader through emulation or by reading prescriptive books like “48 Laws of Power”, "Radical Candor", or "Extreme Ownership". Not that these books don’t contain valuable information, I just think that there is another way besides memorizing rules and pattern matching to situations, which is simply to be internally freed yourself. The way to do this is through internalizing permission in all the ways discussed above.

Finally, while we’d all love to be mythical 10x agentic, ubermensches, leaping around from rooftop to rooftop, first, I think we can all aspire to be First Clappers.

For myself, next time, I hope to be the First Clapper for my fellow theater-goers, and for my friends, family, coworkers, employees, and, someday, my children.

I have 3 quotes, and 3 reflections on them.

This quote reminds me that not all choices about how we allocate our time are equal.

One morning last year, I decided upon waking that I would go for a jog. It was 7AM, February (the midst of winter in SF) and I went outside in long pants and a jacket because the cold was such that it permeated even my dreams.

Once outside, I picked a direction and got going, not knowing where I would stop and turn back; I was running more so away from something rather than towards anything.

I made it all the way to Buena Vista park, climbed the steep trail to the top, and was rewarded unexpectedly with a magical sight—San Francisco, sprawling, languid, in its waking hours, bleary with fog and dew and the grey morning light.

I got back home by 9AM, and I remember that morning feeling like a revelation. The choice to go for a jog that day cost me not 2 hours, but 200, and counting, because from then on it became my morning routine twice a week, every week.

How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives. Take care in choosing for today, that you might really be choosing for the rest of your life.

This quote reminds me of routine, and the little choices you make that end up woven into the tapestry of your destiny.

Routine is memory foam that comfortably constricts the shape and movement of our life. Routine is a choice until it isn’t; one day, it starts choosing for us.

We all know routine of action: your morning jogs, your daily coffee, gym twice a week, friends on weekends, and a cheeky outing come Friday nights.

But these aren’t the only routines looping endlessly in your life, routine of perception is the more pernicious one that settles in as we sink deeper into our chronic self.

Routine of perception is taking things for granted, like a form of sensory adaptation: your appreciation for things ossifies and the hedonic treadmill continues to drag us along. I call it pernicious because it embezzles from our agency in subtle ways.

Eventually, you find that you’ve handed your life’s "car keys” entirely over to the thing; routine becomes chauffeur, valet, Jeeves and you self-relegate to backseat passenger.

I don’t mean to demonize routine, it protects us; we save ourself from the endless negotiation with the hours of the waking day. But, routine can also be a local optimum, one which we might never break out of without first leaving our routine of perception.

Is intentionality the opposite of routine? Is it the silver bullet that can slay the time-sucking beast?

I wrote this piece because for most of my life, I’ve felt like a fugitive hiding from the insidious march of time. It might sound silly for a 12 year old to agonize that “the days are long, but the years are short”, yet I truly was haunted by the feeling, each summer break, that 2 months was so much longer yesteryear.

I found “time flies when you’re having fun” suspect, because time also flew when I wasn’t having fun. Sure, boredom felt like the minute hand’s cruel dominion over time’s passage, but nothing blurred and shrunk quite like a monotonous week: Monday into Friday (thank god!) into Sunday (too soon!), and then back to the starting line again.

So, if monotony was the villain, I thought to extend my days by crusading for novelty. But novelty is not a foundation upon which to build a life. You can choose novelty today and novelty tomorrow, but it is continuity that defines a life, not change. In other words, yes, change is constant, but enduring life requires constancy through change.

I thought also that our perception of time must be rooted in memory, because the days that go the quickest are the ones that seem to bounce uselessly off my hippocampus, leaving no groove, no record of the contents of an entire 24 hours.

I thought journaling would be my salvation. I episodically captured the days in my diary, and took photos obsessively—trying to preserve all of life’s ephemerality by etching them into silicon. This mindset backfired spectacularly simply by taking me out of the present moment, so that I engaged a little less, remembered a little less, lived a little less, and so my days continued to accelerate.

Fast forward many years, I believe I’ve found my answer in a simpler strategy—living with intention. I treat the hours and days and weeks and years like a garden; I plant and prune routines, curating with intent and attention to detail. This requires mindfulness, and it has led me back to journaling, but instead of daily summaries, I reflect and meditate on questions, decisions, and intentions.

I find that intentional living naturally produces the downstream behavior I sought to directly fix in my past: I orient away from modes of being that are auto-pilot, such as scrolling social media, and seek novelty simply because curiosity is core to me. Intentional living is a highly present way of living, which simply means that I am more mindful, engaged, appreciative, and investigative. This tends to mean that I remember my days and my life more lucidly, as another happy consequence.

I want to end this by saying that we get, if we are to be so extraordinarily fortunate, roughly 4500 weeks in a life. Of this, around 3300 remains when we enter the adult world at age 21, and by this point you (on average) will also have spent ~90% of all the time you ever will get with your parents.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, so how did you spend today?

Did you choose, today?

I want to share my most enduring, vital solace—my belief in the abundance of the future.

What do I mean by abundance?

To me, it means that the future holds all promises, that Fate has yet to play its entire hand. If I’m an explorer, searching for El Dorado and Atlantis and Shangri La, then I’m a delusional one, because I know that Some Day, I will find them.

I trust in Tomorrow.

I trust that behind that curtain lies success, reward, glory, treasure, passion, and love—all manners of blessings that dot the distant sky of tomorrow like stars overhead. I chase that effulgent sunrise even as its radiance washes out the constellations from visible sight.

I march on and, sometimes, my path forks; two roads diverge in a yellow wood and I am faced with a decision to choose but one. They may rejoin just a few hundred feet later, or they may take me to different lands entirely, I cannot know and yet I must choose, but which one?

Well, life is an endless garden of forking paths, and we are pachinko balls, falling, bouncing endlessly, while a million coin flips carry us to our final destination. You can know where you are going without knowing how you are going to get there. So, I take the road less travelled and I try to not look back—my faith in the abundant future gives me courage to do this.

I believe that further down my path lies the elusive second chance, and yes! I can scarcely believe it, but it’s true, the third and fourth chance are there too. In fact, all chances are dancing beyond the horizon, just out of sight, so I shouldn’t beat myself up for making a mistake.

There's also no need to fret, worry and wait for the perfect time to start something, anything. I can just begin now. And then, I can begin again, because I've learned so much from the first time around, and because there are always more people who I haven't reached, more ground I haven't covered, more ways I haven't tried.

The world and its people are so vast and diverse so as to be effectively inexhaustible. I'm know I’m not going to deplete this cornucopia so I try, fall down and get up again; I learn and grow and trust that is enough.

I believe that the land of the Future is always raining and opportunity falls from the sky like raindrops in a ceaseless deluge. There, it has rained for thousands of years on rich and poor alike; there, the rain will fill my cup again.

And that same rain will fill the harbor and the rising tide will lift all the boats. Trusting in this abundance allows me to let go of scarcity, and its hollow promise of safety, to try playing a positive-sum game with the world.

Meanwhile, internally, this mindset clears away certain kinds of fear and makes space for generosity, boldness, collaboration, and agency to bloom, and that is a life more worth living.

When I believe in the abundance of the future, I am more easily able to let go of my past and look forward. I know that Life and Luck can be fickle mistresses, sometimes cruel, sometimes capricious. It can feel like the universe is ultimately indifferent to our existence.

But this indifference also means that life is endlessly forgiving. It remembers no wrong and bears no grudge against me, a fresh start is mine as soon as I claim it. Indeed, the past does not shackle me unless I choose to carry its weight.

In terms of relationships, it means knowing that I share this planet with an unfathomably diverse range of people: some spurn me, some ignore me, some love me. No man is an island and on this Pangaea, you can find anybody.

It's like the old aphorism "there are plenty of fish in the sea” but applied to the opportunities of life in a general way: I cast a wide net and filter finely because I can always afford to move on.

To me, this diversity is the ultimate form of abundance because it promises connection no matter how niche or esoteric I, my idea, or my life is. I'd be hard pressed to find a part of me which I share with not a single other soul in this world.

So, this diversity liberates me from dependence on any single person's acceptance and it's hard to overstate how beneficial this is for both the relationships I build, and even more crucially, for the relationships I choose to walk away from.

When I find myself in the sort of thought spiral that is all about prematurely forecasting doom, the one consistent way out is to remind myself that I can choose how I interpret uncertainty.

Remembering that the possibilities in the future are diverse beyond imagination helps me to see uncertainty as something to embrace rather than to calculate away like an ill-fated Chess grandmaster, for this puzzle has no calculable solution. Instead, I reorient towards curiosity and appreciating the journey.

Finally, simply trusting that everything yet remains and what remains is everything is what frees me up to just be present. This is how I live in alignment with the amor fati of the Stoics, carpe diem, and memento mori, not to disregard the future and treat it with wanton recklessness and disdain, but rather to make choices here and now without fear.

After all, I can hear Abundance whispering:

a personal update:

I’ve launched a startup! It’s called Del. Del is your personal AI executive assistant. Whenever you have something you need to remember to do later, just text or forward it to Del, who will either handle it or find good times to bug you and be persistent about it.

If you run your day-to-day out of reminders you text to yourself, an overflowing Notes page called “todo,” and wish you had an assistant you could delegate the boring stuff to, I built Del for you.

You can try it free for now at withdel.com.

Consider the possibility that super intelligent AI or AGI is not only technically feasible but coming by the end of the decade.

Suppose that when it arrives, it will combine human-like reasoning with superhuman speed, perfect recall, and arbitrary scalability—a country of geniuses in a data center.

Expect that the economic value of your labor, if unadapted, will slowly trend towards zero over the next decade. Perhaps the concept of employment itself will undergo a deep societal and cultural transformation.

Not withstanding societal safety nets like UBI, how should the individual best navigate this transition?

Go Upstream

How attached are you to your craft?

I don’t mean what you do, I mean how you do it. You may have beautiful handwriting, with perfect inter-character spacing and consistent letter heights, with just the right, tasteful mix of cursive, casual scrawl, and precision, but when you need to get a lot of writing done, you go to a keyboard and start plonking words on a document.

On the keyboard you express your craft in a different way; it’s the words you choose, how you put those words together to form sentences, the ideas you choose to articulate, the perspective from which your ideas are formed, the world you see.

This is the hierarchy of craft. It starts with doing and ends with seeing.

At each level, there is a way for you to express your craft. Great researchers have something called research taste, which has much written about it, and is essentially the intuition for deciding which problems to pursue. A “filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that the filmmaker is regarded as the author of the movie” has a special name in our culture, an auteur.

At the time of this writing, AI is starting from the bottom and eating its way up this hierarchy.

In a post-AI world, you should relinquish attachment to expressions of craft lower in the hierarchy.

There is more leverage upstream. The problems there deal more directly with meaning, purpose, and judgment that remain uniquely human domains. Your competitive advantage lies upstream.

If you’re a builder early in your career, are you confident that you can out-climb AI in a race up this hierarchy? The traditional path takes many years to climb from junior individual contributor, doing low-level craft, to seniority, where higher-craft is expressed through optics, politics, and decision making.

If there are other paths, start hedging risk by keeping them open. If you see none, investigate your constraints and sense of agency.

The ultimate safe harbor is optionality—having more than one way to engage with the market. You can build towards that by investing in yourself, not your employer, whose allegiance is to the market. Build relationships, expand and deepen your network. Develop your skills, don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms.

Assets will evolve

Curation becomes sacred when creation becomes commoditized. The rise of NFTs illustrated this phenomenon extremely vividly in 2021.

The forms of asset that endure are social assets. These are assets derived from trust, such as personal brands, audiences, reputation, network.

One consequence of this is that trustworthiness becomes a sort of personal moat. As your competitive advantage over the tide of AI erodes, what will increasingly matter is how many people appreciate and like what you do, not because you are the best at it, but because they’ve come to trust you, like your favorite barber, who you know will get the job done, even though there might objectively be better ones in your city.

This also means that being able to build trust becomes increasingly important, and so I can see certain traits becoming more valuable: agreeableness, kindness, funniness, having good taste.

We will evolve

Embracing an attitude of lifelong learning with a focus on adaptability and interdisciplinary knowledge will serve you well. More importantly, cultivating high agency will be critical. In a world where the individual is hyper leveraged through being able to throw AI at anything, the ability to decide for yourself what to do and to take action despite uncertainty are strong differentiating factors.

Uniquely human skills like emotional intelligence, ability to connect/communicate/collaborate with others, leadership, humor, and storytelling could become increasingly important as the focus of society increasingly accumulates towards the top of Maslow’s hierarchy.

I think it’s likely that in one way or another, we will all become leaders of AI in our personal and professional lives. You might consider the current paradigm of prompt engineering as a primitive form of this AI leadership, in which humans act as operators that direct the flow of algorithmic intelligence. If so, then the ability to think and write clearly, as well as communicate effectively will become even more important.

Risk mitigation

Consider Pascal’s wager, a 17th century philosophical argument that advocates for a rational person living in accordance with the existence of God because of the overwhelming risk asymmetry: if God doesn’t exist they incur only finite losses but if God does exist they incur either infinite loss or derive infinite gain.

Now consider the modern version with our hypothetical machine god. Even if you don’t believe that AGI is possible, or don’t agree with the current timelines and think it is much farther away, it might still be worth mitigating your future risk by taking some proaction now.

I believe the outcomes for individuals at the end of the decade will largely be defined by how they positioned themselves towards the start of it, so look bravely ahead, stay curious and diversify yourself.

What do we do when cataclysmic change looms on the horizon?

The year is 79 and Vesuvius is trembling.

The year is 2020 and a novel virus is discovered in Wuhan, China.

The year is 2025 and a tsunami rises up over the distant horizon, shuttering the rising sun.

It is a 2000ft wave, more gargantuan than all others in recorded history. It is an agent of transformation.

At this distance it still looks small, but you have less than 15 minutes before it crashes down on the coast. You check around - nobody else is running for the hills... You don’t want to look like a crazed alarmist - Chicken Little, yelling that the sky is falling. You sit back down.

Will We See It Coming?

You might recognize these distant tsunamis by the ridiculously large shadows they cast over society. Your feed is abuzz with jokes about it, your friends discuss it frivolously, your parents call and ask you about it, and at work, the air quietly grows apprehensive.

Grappling with such exigent threats is a strange trip. Many of us fail to even try, preferring ignorance as the path of least resistance. When these possibilities crash against our walls of skepticism, we react instinctually such as to deny or modify their gravity. Ultimately, we are grasping desperately for a feeling of control.

In part, this is rooted in our biology—human cognition evolved to process linear changes over manageable timeframes, not the rapid, exponential growth that defines paradigm shifts today. We fall behind when we make incremental adjustments to our existing frameworks and worldview trying to fit exponential change into linear systems.

Why Do We Wait?

Mentally, we build bridges towards control by whatever means possible - rationality, reduction, substitution, avoidance etc. Often, these are really straw-man mechanisms - we’re constructing lesser models of the real thing so that we can characterize it, to know it and to be able to react to it, even if in ignorance.

We avert our eyes, because the thought of such overwhelming change is too terrifying. “These things always look worse than they are. Someone would have sounded the alarm by now if it were serious.” Sometimes, this works just fine; the tsunami turns out smaller than projected and washes harmlessly off the city bulwark. Other times, we drown.

We hunker down. We retreat into bunkers—intellectual, emotional, even physical—believing that, like the doomed citizens of Pompeii, we can weather the storm. “I’m high up enough that I’ll be safe from the danger,” we think, and sometimes it’s true: we were lucky enough to have been in the right spot. But, when the new water level is so much higher than anyone had imagined, others drown.

We justify inaction by convincing ourselves there’s more time than there truly is. “I’ll have years, decades, maybe a lifetime before it touches the shore.” And in that comfortable fiction, we continue about our lives, unbothered, as the faint roar of the approaching wave grows louder. It’s a bet made on borrowed time, and sometimes we’re right. Other times, we drown.

Perhaps, most naively, we think that just because it is currently so far away from where we stand, it will never reach us. When the first case of COVID broke out in early January, many people across the world believed it would never spread beyond Asia. But just a few weeks later, the outbreak had become a global pandemic, and the first case was discovered in the U.S. on January 21st.

This dynamic plays out at every level of society—not just individuals. Institutions, organizations, and governments, plagued by bureaucratic inertia and competing political priorities, too often fail to grasp the full scale of the challenge in time. Businesses and startups, driven by economic incentives, make no promises to be aligned with your best interests. In the end, whether from negligence, indolence, inertia, or apathy, the result is that we tend to fail to react, like a collective deer-herd-in-headlights.

Who Will Act?

Perhaps most telling is how we mythologize the few who do act decisively in these moments. We call them visionaries when they succeed, lunatics when they fail, but in either case, we mark them as different from ourselves. This creates a convenient narrative that absolves us of responsibility—after all, if only special people can see and act on these waves of change, what could we possibly have done?

This is really just a comfortable self-deception. Actually, many of us see the wave coming; we simply convince ourselves one way or another that the appropriate response is to wait for someone else to sound the alarm, build the ark, and lead the way to higher ground.

I think we can do a lot to secure a better outcome for ourselves when we suspect a wave is on the horizon. Before anything else, we should avoid knee-jerk skepticism of news, rumors, and headlines, sensational though they may be. Instead, be curious and ask questions - maybe your due diligence will unveil something of substance underneath the shroud of hype. Or maybe it won’t, but you’ll have dismissed it after having rationally evaluated the possibility, rather than having fallen victim to any of the mentalities discussed above.

If a change really is coming, early positioning is probably one of the most important factors in determining individual outcomes. Of those who found themselves facing down a tsunami, the ones who started off on higher ground and are strong swimmers had the best prospects.

Can you identify the second-order impacts of the change on you and your life? If so, maybe you can start to reorient yourself towards “higher ground”. Embracing curiosity, adaptability, and a growth mindset are general ways I can think of to “learn to swim”.

So take a good look at the horizon; get as high up as you can, and peer as far as possible. Do you see anything? Way off in the distance - are those mountains or waves?

The Tsunami On Our Horizon

In truth, I believe super intelligent AI (or AGI as others call it) is the distant tsunami looming on our horizon today. For most of us far removed from being able to shape its trajectory, it is like a natural disaster - inevitable, intimidating, immense.

It’s rapidly approaching, faster than your information landscape is currently modeling, depicting, or projecting it to be. At this distance, it still looks small, but it’s possible that we have less than ~15 minutes years before we will be caught in the midst of a transformation to eclipse all others.

Leopold Aschenbrenner tells it incisively:

“Everyone is now talking about AI, but few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”. They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most they entertain another internet-scale technological change. Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness.”

You’re a busy adult, but you want to learn a language. Duolingo isn’t cutting it and you don’t really have 1000 hours to spare. Is language acquisition really this hard? I propose that it doesn’t have to be.

Think of the first time you saw a neologism like “rizz” or “selfie”. How long did it take for you to reach a native-level proficiency at understanding and using the word? Likely, just seeing it a few times in various contexts was already enough to acquire a fluent sense for it. You probably didn’t need to even look up the word’s definition because the surrounding context (memes, tweets, texts) was rich enough that you successfully inferred all the nuances of meaning.

This is possible because our brains are incredibly efficient at leveraging rich contextual information to acquire new concepts via associative learning. Imagine if a few examples was all it took for you to reach fluency with any word or concept in a foreign language.

I think it’s possible and most efficient to learn languages in a way that tries to leverage this effect as much as possible. Specifically, by modeling our adult language learning strategy after how babies naturally acquire language, we take advantage of our brain’s innate affinity for pattern matching and association. We can outperform pure “smarter” rule-based learning by adding on associative learning + lots of training data.

This is the core motivation behind comprehensible input, coined and popularized by Stephen Krashen, as a method for language learning (and also the common principle behind Dreaming Spanish, AJATT, Refold, etc).

This is not to say that rule-based learning is to be entirely rejected. I think a hybrid approach that uses rule-based learning in order to bootstrap comprehensible input is necessary. This is because, while babies are able to naturally acquire languages entirely through comprehensible input and associative learning, the amount of training data they require to do this is vast, almost impossible for an adult to replicate.

Let’s take a quick detour to substantiate this point with some numbers.

In the second half of this article, I present a detailed curriculum for learning any language, that applies all of the concepts outlined here. Scroll down to “A Curriculum for Adult Associative Language Learning” if you are just interested in that.

Infant Language Acquisition By the Numbers

We can do some exceedingly blurry back-of-the-napkin math guess how many hours of comprehensible input babies receive by 5 years of age, assuming that they start to process language sounds around 6 months of age:

1. Infants (6–12 months): About 6 hours/day of language exposure (50% of 12 waking hours).

2. Toddlers (1–3 years): About 7.5 hours/day of language exposure (75% of 10 waking hours).

3. Preschoolers (3–5 years): About 8 hours/day of language exposure (75% of 12 waking hours).

In total, this sums to very roughly 12,000 hours of language exposure, as a baby’s full time job, just to proficiently acquire one language.

Let’s compare this to traditional measurements of adult language acquisition. We’ll use official estimates from language learning institutions (FSI, ACTFL, ILR, CEFR) for total hours spent to reach fluency for an English native as a baseline.

So it looks like natural language acquisition is not as efficient of a process as it seems.

However, while babies need a lot of hours, we must note that they both achieve native-level mastery (in pronunciation, cultural nuances, and subtle grammar) AND do so without ANY structured rule-based learning. They do so entirely through context-rich, interactive input and associative learning.

While adults can neither do this nor afford to spend this much time, adults can leverage explicit learning strategies that babies cannot. I think by combining both strategies, we can do much better than the official adult learning estimates given above.

A Note to CI Purists

I want to quickly respond to some who may, in fact, believe that comprehensible input is the ONLY thing you need, and that any structured, rule-based learning is counter productive (Dreaming Spanish is one platform built on this idea).

I think this is extreme, the real threat of rule-based learning is relying only on isolated vocabulary and grammar study. It’s true, relying too much on native translations for words and grammar can prevent the deeper acquisition process from taking place. This aligns with the experiences of many learners who find themselves still mentally translating even at intermediate levels.

However, I’d argue that using translations strategically—especially for high-frequency words / grammar concepts, and difficult-to-guess meanings—while engaging with large amounts of CI strikes a balance that surpasses either methods alone1. While translation does create initial connections to the native language, it doesn’t necessarily form a hard-to-undo pathway. Instead, learners can transition from translating to direct understanding, a claim which is supported by research on how we move from declarative (conscious) knowledge to procedural (automatic) knowledge in language learning2.

Studies show that this translation-based understanding fades naturally as the learner encounters more and more words in context3. Laufer & Girsai (2008) found that translation combined with explicit teaching outperformed other methods for initial vocabulary retention, emphasizing that translation can serve as a valuable anchor in early stages, particularly for vocabulary items that lack immediate context4. The same is true for explicit learning of grammar. Done initially, this serves as anchoring points to help learners recognize and comprehend basic grammatical concepts during CI. Then, repeated contextual exposure internalizes grammar so that it becomes automatic and “felt” rather than consciously processed5.

Thus, I want to introduce the idea of using rule-based learning as a starting point to bootstrap (massively jumpstart) the process of associative language learning.

The optimal approach is presented below as a curriculum that addresses each fundamental area of language learning: vocab, grammar, input and output.

A Curriculum for Adult Associative Language Learning

Let’s try to prescribe a detailed curriculum that you can apply towards learning any new language. We’ll anchor the method mainly around the discussed ideas in Comprehensible Input.

We’ll also utilize select insights from Cognitive Load Theory / Information Processing Theory.

The cognitive load theory of learning argues that our working memory has limited capacity, and too much unfamiliar information can quickly overwhelm it, hindering learning efficiency6 . By initially relying on native translations to quickly learn the gist of new words, learners reduce cognitive load, freeing up mental resources to focus on recognizing and processing the structure and usage of the word in the new language. This approach provides a quick "hook" for understanding that makes it possible to engage with more complex language content sooner, thus enabling faster vocabulary expansion and comprehension7. Learning resources like graded readers or platforms like Dreaming Spanish are meticulously designed with difficulty levels in order to provide granular graduation in CI difficulty (or cognitive load). In this sense, you could call them a sort of CI ladder - one where you stay at each rung until you are ready to go to the next. But the way I see it, native translation scaffolding adds more intermediary rungs to this ladder, so learners can move upwards faster incrementally and build more momentum (as we know language acquisition builds upon itself).

Cognitive Load Theory also argues that the formation of schemas, “mental frameworks stored in long-term memory that organizes and categorizes information” aids efficiently learning new concepts.

To leverage this, I believe that initial shallow study of translation creates a basic semantic schema—a mental “placeholder”—for new words or structures that reduces the amount of repetitions during CI for the pattern recognition machinery in the brain to deeply acquire the concept.

The second benefit of using associative learning to actually get to proficiency after having bootstrapped a vague sense for the denotation/connotation of a concept is that associative learning is an “averaging function” that generalizes rather than overfits to specific data samples (e.g. dictionary definitions, memorized rules, etc.)

In practice, this means study vocab and grammar just enough to have a rough, vague understanding of it, just the gist of it. I’ll refer to this as having “loosely acquired” the concept. You usually end up in this state when you’ve tried to memorize it previously and then proceeded to forget most of it. This is okay! From here, associative learning using rich contexts will take us the rest of the way. So, when doing CI, if you didn’t understand a word, don’t reach for a dictionary and go look it up immediately. Let it go. Trust that it will come again, and let the pattern recognition build over time.

Okay, all that said, here’s the curriculum.

A Curriculum for Vocab:

Use FSRS Anki cards for loosely acquiring the 1-2k most commonly used vocab words in your target language. FSRS is a modern variant of the famed Spaced Repetition technique with enough anecdotal support that I prefer it.

Here is the card structure:

• Front of card is the native language

• Back is 2-4 example sentences, with an image, and audio file for each sentence.

Showing the native language first forces active recall rather than recognition. This avoids something you may have experienced where after enough repetitions with a set of flashcards, you’ve found yourself overfitting to the cards themselves. You’re able to recite the back-of-card not because you’ve acquired the concept deeply, but because you’ve memorized the shape of the words, or the sequence of the set overall - in essence you’re clued in by extraneous info.

We want to maximize the richness of the context so that our brain can pick up on many sources of info to associate the unknown with. This is optimal for committing something to long term memory. Multimodality increases the efficiency of encoding the learned information by leveraging more association on a neurological level. Example sentences convey much greater bandwidth of information than lone words - grammar, connotative and denotative nuances, etc.

If possible, find, or otherwise, create a deck of the most popular 2k words in the language that follows this exact format, and start studying it in Anki with FSRS algorithm.

There is a difference between learning vocab, and acquiring it. Learning is just memorization. It is a single connection between that word and a translation - flimsy, and incomplete. Acquiring involves the pronunciation, denotative and connotative range of nuances, grammaticality, usage, etc. This happens through pattern recognition over many exposures to the word in rich contexts - this is what CI is for.

Thus, the work we do here with FSRS cards is not to acquire the vocab, it is simply to prime our brain for the acquisition of the word during CI. As a result, it is optimal to align your vocab study with the distribution of words encountered in your CI. Statistically, though, picking the top 1-2k words in the language should be “good enough”. The more important thing is to not over prioritize this. CI repetitions are more important!

A Curriculum for Grammar:

The same intuition and motivation described above for learning vocab to bootstrap our way to acquiring, also applies to structured grammar study.

The key is to keep it lightweight - Rather than learning all grammar points, focusing on high-frequency grammar structures that enable basic comprehension is most efficient. Pick the top N most common grammatical concepts and study them explicitly to further enable CI.

Additionally, we will pick up a “feel” for grammar through CI. Because our brains are pattern learning machines. From Dreaming Spanish:

“A learner will repeatedly be exposed to certain words appearing attached to certain other words. After that being reinforced over many times, the different grammatical categories are subconsciously separated in our brain. Nouns are separated from verbs and adjectives. Countable and uncountable nouns are figured out, as well as transitive and intransitive verbs, and many other categories and distinctions. It even figures out the grammar that grammarians themselves haven’t been able to. The brain figures out these patterns as a way to reduce the amount of effort needed to acquire new words and store them.”

Once the pattern has been figured out for countable plural nouns (like “chairs”, “houses” and “people”) our brain may only need one instance of the usage of a new word to figure out how to use it grammatically. For example, in the sentence “I found so many lice on my son’s hair!” the word many tells us that the word lice has to be a noun, has to be countable and has to be plural. By connecting the new word lice to the existing brain structure that represents a word’s “plural-ness”, the brain avoids having to figure out from zero how to use that particular word, saving time and storage space in our brain.

A Curriculum for Input:

This should be the MAJORITY of your time!

It is important to acquire an internal understanding of how proper speech sounds like first before attempting any output (which includes reading because of subvocalization). Raw audio input hours allows us to obtain this.

When reading comprehensible input, Krashen advocates for around 95% or more of the words should be known. For audiovisual data, this is likely somewhat lower, maybe around 80-90%. This is why video (images + audio) is the best delivery for CI (comprehensible input):

• Provides the richest contextual information for associative learning to hook into

• Because of the richer context, you can learn more unknowns at once (enables lower CI ratio of known:unknown)

• Imitates how babies learn (they see an aligned input stream of visual and audio data, think Mom pointing at the car and saying “Car!”)

• Pairs CI audio with non stop stream of images as context

  • Multimodal

  • MUCH higher bandwidth and throughput of pure information than flashcards

• Must watch without native subtitles! CI by definition should be comprehensible without subtitles.

The best video is where the imagery is maximally aligned with the semantic of the language. Think the baby’s POV watching mom talking (lots of pointing, hand gestures, multimodal delivery of CI, slow talking, repetition). This seems optimal for picking up vocab.

Look for “graded videos” (as in graded readers but for videos). Dreaming Spanish is one platform that is entirely built around this concept for Spanish, but hopefully you can find others. For Korean, there’s this Youtube channel.

A Curriculum for Output:

As soon as you understand what correct pronunciation sounds like in the language, however, you should start to practice some output. Don’t do this before you have a strong feel for what that is though! Otherwise, you risk the long term formation of a foreigner accent.

Output offers repetitive practice with retrieval, vocal muscle memory, form connections between words and structures. Crucially, a conversation gives both corrective feedback and rich, contextual, and interactive CI.

Finally, interestingly, language learning speeds up as you get better at it. For a new word you encounter in your native language, it might take only a few instances, or even just one, for you to attain a native level “feel” for the word.

Why? When you get better at the language, you’ll be more used to the sounds of the language, so you’ll be more likely to recognize the sounds that form each word. Your brain will have a much easier time remembering a word, since it will just have to put together the sounds that already exist in your head, instead of having to record the sound of each word as a completely new concept. Besides becoming familiar with the sounds of the language, you’ll also intuitively get used to what combinations of letters are likely to appear and which ones aren’t. That will make it even easier to learn new words.

CI is a cumulative process: reaching higher fluency expands your comprehensible range of input, which increases the surface area of your language input exposure.

Safety from the howling and screaming, from the blinding lights and the pitch-black everywhere. From thick, suffocating smoke, dark like the most light-starved depths of the abyssal ocean. Safety from insanity, from scratching nails on blackboards long as the Earth’s shadow and dark as nightmares.

Safety from a night that never ends, a day that never comes. Safety from chaos, from the end of structure, from cruel noise and the deafening wind, from the dark and the leering eyes in the shadow, from teeth and holes and dancing shades in the corners, behind every back, along the walls and the ceiling.

Safety from the infinite dancing behind my eyelids, from the fabric of reality—a twisting seam tying and untying itself back and forth, undulating towards eternity. Safety from the uncountable manifolds of realities splayed across the sky like stars.

The world marches forward endlessly.

Light flashes to darkness and reality collapses and reconstructs itself. Scenes of life play out like film and fade to black.

The structure of language quavers, trembles, and buckles under the dreadful weight of the infinite. A million lights flicker out of existence as galaxies of possibilities explode in a terrible brilliance, and then we begin again.

The world marches forward endlessly.

And I crave safety.

Safety in repetition, in old music. Safety in soothing calm, like soft dew and morning mist, like a mother’s caress on newborn cheeks. Safety in the carefree breeze brushing by hammocks and picnics, in grasses lush and verdant, swaying in the autumn light. Safety in the quiet celebration of life. Safety in the fireplace that keeps warmth through the night. Safety in the door that guards tender hearts from the callous wolves straying outside.

Safety in the flame we kindle together, the amber light that pushes back against the overwhelming black. Safety in reunion—in communion. Safety in the twinkling of hearts meeting and staying close through changing seasons. Safety in continuity, in friendship and family and the bonds of life.

Safety in our corner of infinity. Safety in your eyes, where there is wonder that words cannot describe and beauty that all the wavelengths of light in our universe cannot capture.

Safety in us—like a speck of stardust in a supernova, a leaf caught in a hurricane, a twig in a tree that splits infinitely in all directions. Like a dot poked into a paper that stretches across every conception of reality ever formed. Like a diamond in the riverbed, among rocks and pebbles and more grains of sand than there exist numbers to count them.

Safety in our hands reaching, stretching, meeting, together—against all odds.

A hundred million years came and went like a shooting star streaking across the sky.

The unyielding universe, vast and indifferent, proved ultimately impregnable. Humanity’s passionate flame dwindled to its last inch of wax and wick and sputtered out with a whimper.

One fateful night, in a world locked in eternal summer, a tremendous downpour coated the world, for the last time, in reflective surfaces and mute shades of blue.

Little puddles formed everywhere and on those puddles, a hundred thousand ripples shimmered into being and vanished again like stars. Each puddle was a portal to a mirror world suspended in the sky and gazing down on all the Earth—the sacred view of the gods, solemn and silent, from their heavenly terrace.

An arc of lightning ripped violently across the night and bathed the world in momentary radiance, a fluorescent midnight sun disappearing an instant later, leaving a ghostly afterimage as its only memory.

A cacophonous roar of thunder crackled and reverberated, and the world fell into an awed hush, reverent before a sky torn asunder by the death throes of creation.

Petrichor wafted up like tears shed by grieving soils. The primitive scent carried the faint echo of Nature’s ageless dominion, drifting over great concrete edifices split by ancient roots, Ozymandias buried in the abyssal depths of an ocean primordial once more, and verdant green creeping over derelict grey.

Winds laced with the scent whispered of what had been countless eons ago and what would be once more for countless eons afterwards. They taunted—humanity had been but a flickering ember; the long night awaited.

As the torrent receded before the dawn, somewhere in a rock gorge the restless wind rushed through narrow stone passageways and whistled, mimicking birdsong. It was a haunting, lilting eulogy that wandered over soaked earth and sunken nations.

And in the last morning of its kind, a resplendent sunrise came to rest upon a horizon wreathed in pastel pink and purple, a tender gradient that tried vainly to hold the fleeting night and ardent day. Puffy clouds, having wept through the lonely night, lingered ethereally in the pale morning light, holding silent vigil for the last rainfall of Earth.

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