What’s your vision? 🤩✨🌟🎖️

I remember meeting my friend Rachel’s boyfriend at some Kappa Sigma function and deciding that this was how I would figure him out. Did he have a plan? Was he going somewhere? Red solo cups in hand, I interrogated the poor guy about what he was going to do with his MS&E degree. At the time I thought I was screening for ambition. Speed without direction isn’t velocity, blah blah.

But these days as people have asked me “what’s the vision” post China, I find myself at a (rare) loss for words.

ye old formula 📐

First, a caveat. It’s a privilege to sit around thinking this hard about what your life should look like. Everything below assumes you don’t have a parent to take care of, or a visa clock running, or a family that needs your paycheck to clear this month. If that’s your situation, very much feel free to ignore me.

With that said:

As ambitious high schoolers with elite colleges top of mind, we ran a formula. There was an SAT number, a GPA, a sport or an instrument or a nonprofit, and a four-year plan you mostly followed. I deviated from mine, but the bones held. And the formula worked, which is exactly the problem, because it taught me that the right relationship between me and the future was prediction. Pick the outcome, reverse-engineer the steps, execute.

Nobody sat me down at eighteen and told me that this kind of thinking expires (Actually I’m sure somebody did and I just wasn’t listening.) So I spent the first half of college reverse-engineering toward an outcome I thought I wanted, only to figure out that what I wanted at the time was not a great thing to index on.

what next? 🙄

Now I’m about to move to Beijing for a year, and the question I get from mentors, peers, and other people’s parents is some version of: so what do you want to do after? What’s the ten-year plan? Even when I’m the one asking for advice, when I say how should I think about this year, the response is usually well, what do you want to do next?

I get what they’re actually asking. They want to know if there’s a shape to how I move, which is a reasonable thing to want to know about a person.

But taken literally, how the hell are you supposed to know? I’d go as far as to say that having blind confidence in a five or ten year plan is a bit hubristic, not because ambition is bad, but because you’re claiming to know three things you cannot possibly know. You don’t know how your environment will change. You don’t know what will even exist to want. And you really don’t know how you’ll change, which is the one everybody forgets. That goes double right now, given what the next decade of work looks like for anyone in their twenties.

Just because I don’t have a plan doesn’t mean I don’t have a framework. Who would I be if I didn’t? So, this is what I’m claiming:

first: the future is a process, not an outcome 🌱

Greatness cannot be planned. It actually unfolds.

(Caveat: some careers really are formulas. Medicine, some kinds of finance, anything with a licensing body and a pipeline. If that’s you, exception to framework.)

But fewer and fewer careers look like that, and more of us are what a friend and I used to call, over lunch, the aimlessly ambitious. Tons of drive, no idea where to point it. For a long time I was scared of being one of them. I’ve since accepted that all of us are a little bit aimlessly ambitious right now, me very much included, and the question isn’t how to stop. It’s how we get to being intentionally ambitious instead.

So if you, take my premise how do we operationalize this? Thus, claim two:

two: the method is learning in the right environments 🧭

I’ve been using two questions:

1. What do I want to learn next?

Not what do I want to do with my life. Just what do I want to learn next.

I love this question because it’s an internal metric and it’s in my control. Nobody hands it to you and nobody can take it away. Did I learn the thing or didn’t I? You always know the answer.

2. What’s the environment that’s actually going to help me learn it?

This one is equally important and the one I’ve learned more recently, because it takes real self-knowledge to answer honestly. You can pick the right skill and then put yourself somewhere you will absolutely not develop it, which is what I did. I was in a Computer Science master’s wanting to get better at engineering, and I had to admit something kind of unflattering, which is that I don’t really apply myself in a CS classroom. So the question stopped being how do I try harder at Stanford and became where would I actually do this without having to force myself into it.

Saying I think I’ll get more of this from working at a company than from another degree was a risk, that required me to be honest about what would actually give me the confidence to know I can do the work. I’ve learned more about how to think like an engineer at Palantir than anywhere else, because I wanted to do it.

The other thing you have to keep doing is feeding your surface area for luck. Be a good person, stay in touch with your mentors, keep putting yourself in rooms with some randomness in them.

so, what’s your vision? 👀

#Raisethestakes time — If after reading all of this you still want to stick to your plan, fine I understand. Just riddle me this: the real danger of five-year-plan thinking isn’t that the plan fails. It’s that when you don’t have a metric of your own, your own self worth comes from everyone else’s structures. We replace aimlessness with prestige insurance: Degrees, titles, fellowships the stuff that reads well to other people (I mean to be fair I’m sure my Linkedin looks like I’m a class-A fellowship jumper).

I don’t think I’ll ever stop asking “what’s your vision.” But I do expect a different answer, especially from myself.

All this to say, I do not have an answer for what will happen by August next year, never mind five years. But I can tell you the environments I’ll thrive in, and I can tell you exactly what I want to learn next.

For now, thats vision enough for me.

—DG

_______________________________________

P.S. If you’re interested in reading more from some people who say it better than me some recs:

Why Greatness Cannot be Planned, by Joel Lehman and Kenneth Stanley

“Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process” by Henrik Karlsson

What I Wish I Knew about Luck, by Tina Seelig

To my fellow young people interested in serving their country, in public service, in work that matters even when it’s imperfect:

An unfair burden has been placed on you. The burden to have conviction before curiosity. The privilege of being in process, of figuring out what you believe before you have to defend it, is no longer freely given. The internet has a longer memory than you do, and it doesn’t leave much room for revision. And in a space as polarized as national security and defense tech, the cost of curiosity has gotten very high.

I know this personally.

About a year ago, as a Stanford senior, I was co-lead of our campus Women in National Security org. A friend’s sister interviewed me for the San Francisco Standard and I hadn’t thought twice about it (perhaps not my most polished work 🤦🏽‍♀️). Then the headline dropped: “Stanford students were going to war.”

My phone lit up. Fizz, our anonymous campus app, filled with posts of insults, half-truths, and attacks not just on me but on the women I had recruited into the club. Family members were texting. The young women who had signed up to learn about cybersecurity were being called warmongers. In the moment, it was devastating. I lost friends. I felt isolated. My reputation felt like it was on the line at exactly the time I was supposed to be reveling in the end of college.

I called Greta Reich at the Stanford Daily. “You’ve got two hours,” she said. I titled it “Mission Over Money” and I meant every word, even the parts I hadn’t fully stress-tested yet. I had a position. I didn’t have true conviction.

So this Spring, I went to Palantir to put that position to the test.

Close friends doubted my decision before I even started. They asked about ICE, about the contracts, about what I thought it meant to work there. At the time, I had an answer: that having the best software enables better decisions, and that it's genuinely hard to draw the line when a company takes responsibility for institutional outcomes. But where was the evidence?

A few weeks in, a friend asked me the same question. This time I had something different. Not a talking point but an actual answer, earned from sitting down for dinner with the team doing that work and understanding what they were actually trying to do. From watching legal checks get built into the UI to prevent abuse. From seeing internal dissent happen openly, seriously, inside a company doing hard things with real ideological weight.

Palantir gave me conviction in a point of view I had started developing in college. It also gave me more curiosity. I came away wondering: to what extent do software companies have to take responsibility for the perverse, unintended consequences of how their technology gets wielded? Do we build for people, or causes, or institutions and when those three things diverge, who bears it? I don’t know if there’s a correct answer. But I know I couldn’t have asked the question clearly before I went in.

What I kept thinking about, walking around those offices, was everyone else.

I had a recent grad pull me aside before I started and ask, genuinely, whether having Palantir on her resume would close doors in government and mission work later. She is not a warmonger. She is someone trying to figure out what she believes, making sure the bet she places doesn’t cost her actual career pursuits. And I think about the people who do walk in—the 22-year-old whose parents still don’t quite understand what this company with bad press does. Who whispers their job title at dinner parties and avoids wearing merchandise in public. They didn’t sign up to be a public defender of a company. They signed up to build something at their first real job. They’re doing it in public, with their name attached, with career consequences waiting on the other side of a wrong answer.

I chose early on to be vocal about this space. That was my decision and I stand by it. But I don’t think everyone should have to make that choice just to show up to work. And I think we lose serious, talented people because we’ve made curiosity feel like a liability.

A friend pointed out to me recently that this pressure isn't unique to defense tech. The average person at a big tech company or an AI lab is starting to face versions of the same thing. Work, identity, and public image are colliding everywhere now. To a mass public, you are where you work; anyone building something with real consequences should be asking themselves these questions.

The privilege of being in process used to be part of growing up. You figured out what you believed in smaller rooms, with more forgiveness, with the understanding that changing your mind was intellectual honesty rather than weakness. That space is shrinking. And in national security and defense tech, it’s nearly gone.

I talk a lot in my writing about taking low-stakes, high-frequency opportunities: go try it, go find out, iterate fast. But the reality is that not everything feels low-stakes when you’re doing it in public with your name attached. It changes what curiosity costs.

A version of this piece has been sitting in my archives for a while. I kept trying to figure out if it was a call to action for defense companies to change the way they recruit and hire. I don’t think it is. Perhaps it is instead an acknowledgement.

It is hard to be a young person growing in public. It is especially hard to be a young person developing your point of view in national security, where the questions are genuinely unresolved and the stakes are real. If you are skeptical of this space, the community needs you—your skepticism, your questions, your willingness to push back to ultimately push forward. And all of us, I think, deserve a little more grace as we figure it out, for better or worse, in public.

Sincerely,

DG

My vision of New York has changed a lot since then. I begrudgingly finished an internship I hated, returned for my first era post grad, and am now enjoying my final days before leaving the States for a while. It has me thinking a lot about what makes this city so special, because it is truly not the easiest (nor the cheapest) one to live in.

Moving to New York City is uncomfortable at best. There is not a lot of built-in community infrastructure. No one hands you a dorm, a dining hall, or a weekly club. Every friendship here is a commute and a calendar invite, and you have to build the village yourself. There is a risk of materialism that edges everything you do. Work is hard, play is harder. And still, three things stand out to me about this city.

First: New York feels like a place where the side quest becomes the whole quest. The people I meet don’t just take an improv class on the side. They are full-time actors. It is a city where a dream can become a reality: an investment banker who makes videos on the side turns Instagram influencer with a side of money etc.

Second: you meet so many people obsessed with the craft. Not just the craft of tech and software for the sake of ambition, but craft for the sake of craft. Like Alex, the owner of So Good Coffee (a fan fav) who makes chive biscuits for his egg and cheeses every morning. It is an appreciation of beauty and art we tend to only really see outside the U.S., married with a capitalistic drive that is so purely American: a myriad of ambitious immigrants, in every sense of the word.

Third: this city lets you be your most YOU self. Scream on a street corner, dance circle in a subway corridor. Eight million people, not a single raised eyebrow. There is something so freeing about a place too busy to judge you.

As a California gal born and raised, it is not hard for me to see the flaws of this city: the heinous weather, the obsession with wealth (and legacy wealth at that, as Paul Graham would say). But the flaws were never the question. The spirit is. Is this a place where one can truly belong, or just a setting for transplants, two years and onward? What makes a New Yorker?

The answer, I think, is that a New Yorker is made, not born. Belonging here is not given. It is mastered. To master this city of 3 froyos a block, endless boutiques, and a new food trend by the hour is to master intention. To master ruthless prioritization. To lean into your individual sense of self, the biggest version of it at that. Bouncing between the D.C. and New York offices at my tech job, my D.C. peers remarked how unhappy New Yorkers seemed. They would be correct. But my friend, I ask you: was happy really the vertical? Because while New York may not be happy, it is many other things. It is spirited, it is resilient, it is busy.

It is dense, it is difficult, and it is ripe: inspiring, cultivating, synthesizing.

New York has iconically been called the city that never sleeps. I disagree. Gabriela’s closes at 4 a.m. (@Samir). It is no Berghain. It is, though, a city that never stills. Because by the time you get back at 5 a.m., the early morners are already running on the West Side Highway. New York, like its residents, is always moving.

And what could be more exciting than a city in pursuit?

I worked incredibly hard in high school, and I would not call those the happiest of times, though they were fulfilling in many senses. College gave me probably my happiest years, filled with friends and fun, and yet I don’t know if I could call them my most meaningful. So what I am looking for next in this uncertain post grad world is not a city that makes me happy. It is a city that makes me earn it. A city that makes me fight for meaning and everything that comes with it.

And that, New York does.

The reality of New York is schlepping through stuffy, sweaty subways. Lines that wrap around the block for cold yogurt. Harsh sun and harsher cold, and people similarly hardened by that weather. But the New York I remember is Catherine Debenham, knee-high boots and all, yelling at the top of her lungs on an unassuming midtown street corner: I LOVE YOU NEW YORK.

And my voice behind the camera, chuckling as I say: and I love it too.

—DG

So naturally, when I moved to New York and started clocking the froyo lines snaking out of every other storefront, I felt nothing but mild superiority. Not waiting in lines has become a personality trait of mine, and I like to think I’m #notliketheothergirls. After dinner a couple weeks ago, Eliza, Josh, and I passed one of these lines on a walk through the West Village. Josh gave them a name on the spot: froyo girls. They laughed. I laughed. But I did wonder: what made this froyo so worth waiting in line for? And what is there to understand from the froyofication of New York and other unsuspecting cities across America?

You can imagine my surprise when I found myself a mere two days later standing in line at Madison Fare with my sister Sahana, who had insisted we go. Then at Mimi’s the next day (at a peak unemployed hour, because I still refuse to wait in long lines), this time on my own, savoring an original tart with fresh cookie dough, fruit, and awesome other miniature customizable things. Then the next day walking past the (way too long, how is this possible) Myka line and crossing the street to Birdies to work through the speculoos butter topping situation instead. As I chewed on a piece of mochi, it dawned on me, against all my better intuitions, knowing that froyo is not really healthier than ice cream, desperately scrolling past the aesthetic instagram froyo reels…

had I become a froyo girl?

Those of you who know me well know about my relatively short-lived employment at Salt & Straw. Although my hours may have been few, my lessons were many. A primary one being: the line is the product.

Take University Avenue on a Friday night at 10pm. Salt & Straw would have a line out the door, and my boss had one rule for all of us behind the counter: no matter how long the wait got, every customer gets the full gourmet experience. Try each flavor if you want. Take your time. Right across the street sat Scoops Micro Creamery, objectively great ice cream with a grasshopper pie flavor that is today my go-to, and almost never a line. Why was no one going to Scoops? Was it my gourmet customer service? Those who I served would probably say no. Tthe line itself, the demand, the almost seen-and-be-seen nature of it, was the true product Salt & Straw was selling.

We want what other people want. We always have. The psychologist Robert Cialdini calls it social proof: we look to the behavior of others to decide what’s correct, especially when we’re uncertain. The line signals value before a single bite, and once you understand that, you start seeing it everywhere, not just in ice cream, but in careers, opinions, aesthetics, entire identities.

I want to clarify that we have been influenced since the dawn of time. This is not just a social media or internet age thing. Influence is human. Your closest friends shape your taste, and that can be a genuinely good thing. But what’s different now is that the infrastructure of influence has become invisible by design, and I think froyo is a particularly great example of this silent influence.

When you customize your froyo, your toppings, your portion, your exact ratio of mochi to hazelnut butter, it feels like self-expression. It’s engineered to feel that way. The choice architecture gives you the sensation of originality while delivering a product that is, if you close your eyes, roughly the same as the Wildberry in Menlo Park you grew up eating (live love Wildberry.) Froyo has become a very efficient machine for making you feel like an individual while you do exactly what everyone else is doing. And maybe the more unsettling version of this is that some of us already know that, have accepted we’re just like every other girl in line, and have decided that’s fine.

And it’s not just froyo. In the nearly identical midi skirt and tank combo on every woman in the West Village, in the 20-something desire to run a half marathon or go to Japan, the same machine is running. New York is a particularly interesting case study because for a city that claims to center individuality, with the presence of the arts, with the snake-like spectrum of careers, with the whole mythology of reinvention, we have all become remarkably memetic. I say this not as a criticism but as a realization that I myself have become these things.

The place this gets genuinely uncomfortable is when you apply it not to what you wear or eat but to what you think. Has LinkedIn psyoped me into believing that “tech meets anything” is the only viable career path? Has Spotify microinfluenced me into liking house music? Has Instagram quietly shifted what I value in other people, in myself, and even how I narrate my own life? I’ve started to wonder whether the ideas I think are mine are really just the exhaust of my endless consumption of Instagram, LinkedIn, and at this point Substack. And if the tools I use to think are trained on the same internet everyone else is consuming, does thinking with them make my ideas sharper, or just more like everyone else’s?

Being unintentional about the presence of influence in our lives doesn’t just shape what we order. It puts our entire minds on the line.

I’m not going to tell you to stop going to Mimi’s. Let’s be honest, I’ll probably be there this week at a conveniently unemployed hour. And I’m not going to tell you to go back to a classic Ben and Jerry’s either. Being reflexively anti-trend is just another form of herd behavior.

The real move is awareness. Leonardo da Vinci carried a notebook everywhere and drew what he actually observed, not what he was told to see. The pursuit of original taste, real original taste, requires rigorous observation, genuine doubt, and enough self-knowledge to tell the difference between what you actually want and what you’ve been handed.

I must confess that I, Divya Ganesan, ice cream loyalist and self-proclaimed contrarian, am a froyo girl sometimes. I don’t think that’s entirely a problem. But I do think it’s worth asking: in what other ways have I been quietly, invisibly, somewhat deliciously influenced.

—DG

Note to readers: Thank you everyone for following along with the NY adventures. I’m putting the Success and the City series on pause for the next month to try some more experimental writing, and this is the first of it. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and thank you for your support along the way. ❤️

Today, living an adult (kind of) New York (for now) life, I couldn’t help but wonder: in the uncertain abyss of the post grad world how can we increase our own serendipity surface area?

Hello, readers! After a brief Memorial Day hiatus, #SATC is back. Summer is officially in full swing. But you know what’s sexier than hot girl summer? A serendipitous one. Hear me out.

defining serendipity

Tina Seelig draws a useful distinction between fortune, luck, and serendipity.

Fortune is what happens to you. Who your parents are, where you were born. Out of your hands entirely. Luck involves more agency. For example, I think of myself as lucky to have gotten into Stanford. There was chance involved, but I prepared for it. Serendipity is something else: a fortunate event you actually do something with. Running into an old friend at a coffee shop is fortune. Sitting down, letting the conversation go wherever it goes, asking the right questions and finding out they have a job lead in exactly the field you care about—that’s serendipity.

Seelig argues serendipity does serious things for your career and social circles. She’s right. But the part that really resonates with me is something smaller. In a post-grad world where there are no dining halls, dorms, or built in cohorts, serendipity makes the world feel smaller.

the bottlenecks

I don’t think it’s a hot take to say that serendipity is good and we should have more of it. What I’m arguing is that it’s harder than it sounds, counterintuitive even, and the way we approach it has to be different in a post-grad world.

Two things get in the way. The first is time, or more honestly, the story we tell ourselves about it. We use busyness as a shield. Oh, I’m in a rush. Oh, I have a call. Oh, I can’t stop right now. (I could write a whole essay on urgency versus importance, but I’ll digress.) The point is: an overscheduled life is a serendipity-proof one. You can’t catch the unexpected if you’ve left no room for it.

The second is nerve. Every morning at my tech job in New York, I’d crowd into the elevator with a group of nine people. Dead silent. Not a hi, not a nod. I was appalled. I consider myself someone with pretty low social anxiety (ahem, business cards, iykyk) but in a post-grad world where we’re more uncertain than we let on, it takes real effort to be the one who goes first.

the conditions

Overcoming these bottlenecks requires building the habit of serendipity. And serendipity is a habit. One built through micro-intentions, small acts of presence where the only objective is kindness and connection.

Three things make it possible.

1. Slack. Intentionally leaving room and being good enough at priorities to actually protect it. This means knowing what you care about enough to say no to what you don’t, so that when something unexpected appears, you’re free to catch it. Time to listen to your instincts. Time to be pulled somewhere you didn’t plan.

2. Kindness as a baseline. Slack gives you the bandwidth to ask the barista his name, notice when someone needs help, do a small solid for no reason. My sophomore year at Stanford, a girl I’d never met stopped to help when my dress got caught in my bike chain. No transaction, no agenda. I thought about her for months and when rush came around, I couldn’t stop telling people the story. I was running around so much as a freshman, I’m honestly not sure I would have stopped for someone else. But she did. And it stuck. Kindness is your serendipity bank.

3. Presence and the willingness to initiate. In the words of Cath Dickerman: flirt with the world. Look up from your phone. Observe. Take the small risk. Say the thing out loud.

serendipity savants

Some people, those I’m deeming my serendipity savants, have figured this out so deeply it looks like personality. It can be. But more often, it’s a habit that’s compounded over time into something that looks like a gift.

Take my friend Cath. Regular work day, walking out of the subway. She clocks the cute guy next to her. They’re dressed almost identically. Without overthinking it, she looks over: “we’re matching.” He asks for her number and they end up on a date (at a church for the record) that weekend.

Or take a couple of Fridays ago, when Kyle and I were at a bar and I admitted I had no idea how to start a conversation with someone new. He looked at me and said: the Knicks game is on…just ask if they’re a fan. And I watched him do exactly that, turning a group of strangers into a whole conversation. Take the first step. It doesn’t matter what you say. Just say it with confidence.

Sometimes it’s that big. Sometimes it’s just noticing you like the person’s skirt next to you and saying so. Does it lead anywhere? Maybe. Does it have to? Not really.

the challenge (to you and me)

Let’s be honest. Sometimes we’re just not in the mood. Sometimes when I’m in line for the subway after a long day, I want to be on Instagram Reels. Some days I don’t want to go to a coffee shop and read an aesthetic book. I just want to lie in bed and watch Off Campus.

But when we’re feeling it, as the sun is out, as we go out and about this summer, I wonder if we can, in small moments, take on this challenge.

Step away from your Instagram reels and go create your live ones. Sit at a bar and ask the person next to you the best compliment they’ve ever received @Eliza @Cath @Tobey @Whit. Let the coffee shop hello turn into an afternoon walking the West Side Highway with a stranger @Samina. Say HELLO to the homie in the elevator.

Do it not for the payoff, but for the possibility. The possibility of a world that’s a little smaller, kinder, and on your side.

—DG

The answer was hometown hero Raveena Lele. She showed up, warm clothes in hand. And I am eternally grateful. Because in that moment I couldn’t help but wonder (eyeroll) — amidst all these transitions and microdecisions — how many people in my life could I actually count on to show up for me?

Hello reader—welcome back to #SATC. Today’s name of the game is reliability (we’ll ignore the irony that I’m supposed to reliably posting every Sunday).

ole reliable

“Reliable” isn’t generally the first word I’d want someone to use to describe me. Charismatic? Yes. Fascinating? Please. Ol’ reliable? That’s what I called my old car Sexy Lexy before she broke down on the way to Brown Brunch (remember @Naima and @Parthav).

The phrase actually has a history. The Louisville & Nashville Railroad — chartered in 1850 (yes across the Appalachians @Tobey), operating for 132 years — earned the nickname “The Old Reliable” by the late 1800s for its financial stability and consistent service through war and depression alike. A machine that just ran — same route, same standard, decade after decade. I think that’s actually a decent metaphor for how reliability works in people too. It’s not glamorous. It’s not a personality. It’s just what happens when you make the same right choice enough times that it becomes automatic.

Which brings me to what YOUNG reliable looks like. Older adults seem to have reliability baked into their infrastructure. What doesn’t get said enough is how it got there: choices, made repeatedly, until they became character. My take? Reliability isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill. And the sooner we decide to build it, the better.

on flaking

Flaking isn’t laziness imho (in my humble opinion for my older readers)— It’s conflict avoidance with better branding.

It was rampant at Stanford and on the West Coast — the “oh we should get coffee sometime” that happens never, the yes to a Partiful invite that means zilch. In college it was easy to get away with — if a friend wasn’t texting back, I could walk next door. My roommate was twenty feet away. Today, would I take the L train to Brooklyn to do the same now? Unlikely.

Here’s what bothers me most: we have more communication tools than any generation in history. A text takes three seconds. A voice note takes two. If anything, that should make flaking less permissible. And yet we’ve somehow used the ease of a last-minute cancel as cover for never having to truly commit to anything at all.

I have a friend who doesn’t respond to texts, only calls. When I asked about it, they said it gave them aura — like unreliability was a form of subtle social clout. I get the instinct. Nobody wants to be the person texting three paragraphs about why they can’t make it to a Tuesday happy hour. But there’s a difference between being selective and being evasive. What we’re really saying in our acts of unreliability is quiet but clear: my time is more valuable than yours. Maybe for some people that’s true. But surely not for everyone (Side note: In my experience, this skews. Women run more reliable than men — and I think it’s a maturity thing but that could be a whole article)

the wince

So why do we still flake, even when we know better?

There’s a fellow Substacker I’ve been following who describes something she calls the wince — “this visceral sense of wanting to duck away, lean out, swerve.”

I know it well. A couple weeks ago at work: traveling every week, running on fumes, came down with a fever on the first day of a new project. Said nothing — not because I didn’t know what I needed, but because I felt guilty and ashamed of being human enough to get sick. Pushed through, stayed quiet, and came across as exactly what I was trying not to be: uncommunicative. Unreliable.

The feedback stung. Mostly because I knew it was fair. I had let the wince win.

The silence I chose to avoid disappointing people I valued was the disappointment. And it was definitely avoidable.

the three principles of reliability

Reliability isn’t about always showing up. It’s about closing the gap between what people expect from you and what you actually do. We know the classic business principle: underpromise, overdeliver. What this framework loses is the middle — how and when you communicate that promise. That’s where people (ahem me in example above) actually fail it. Here’s how I think we do it:

🤝 Underpromise — be selective. Know what you can actually give before you open your mouth. The problem isn’t that people flake — it’s that they over-commit with good intentions and disappear when reality catches up. My sisters always say I’m DTM (doing too much). They’re not wrong.

☎️ Communicate — close the delta before it enlarges. If you want to leave the party early, say so at the top of the night (I could do better at this). Gonna work through dinner? Say it in the morning, not ten minutes before. The wince moment is exactly where reliability is decided. A quick honest text will always land better than silence followed by an apology.

🚚 Overdeliver — easy once you’ve done the first two. When you’ve set honest expectations, meeting them feels like exceeding them. That’s integrity in practice.

It works just as much in work settings. My dad would rather manage someone who always hits their deliveries than the smartest person in the room who’s a flake. And in friendship — in a city where nobody owes you anything — the people who show up especially when it’s inconvenient are the ones you build your life around. Who helps you move. Who remembers your birthday without Instagram. The standard is the same in both places: say what you mean, mean what you say, and close the gap.

conclusion

I think my generation has a word problem — not vocabulary (though those literacy rates aren’t looking great), commitment. We say things we don’t mean, make plans we don’t keep, and somewhere decided that being hard to pin down was a personality.

It’s not. It’s a choice. And so is the alternative.

My friend Peyton calls it being a person of your word. When I say something, can you trust it? Does it mean anything? That’s not really a question about reliability. It’s a question about integrity. And integrity is learnable. It’s what happens when you make the right choice enough times it starts feeling like instinct.

Call me old fashioned. Heck, maybe I am. But I’d be honored to be my friends’ ol’ reliable. For now I’ll settle for an imperfect young reliable.

Catch me in pursuit of being a woman of my word. 🫡

— DG

I’m a somewhat meticulous person when it comes to remembering. I track my energy weekly, put my self-reflection on public Substacks, and start every Monday with a close friends Instagram dump of the week before.

And yet, my dear reader, on this particular episode of #SATC — I couldn’t help but wonder: could it actually be healthy to develop a practice of forgetting?

Enter my icon Ted Lasso.

There’s a scene in season one where Sam Obisanya scores an own goal and costs AFC Richmond a point. He’s gutted. Lasso calls him to the sideline. “What’s the happiest animal in the world?” Sam has no idea. “Goldfish. Ten-second memory. Be a goldfish, Sam.”

I loved this so much I had a goldfish on my phone background for a week. It even became the group chat picture for a while.

So I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you — Ted Lasso was wrong.

the myth of the goldfish

Goldfish do not, in fact, have ten-second memories. Scientists at Plymouth University trained goldfish to press a lever for food — and when the lever only worked during one specific hour of the day, the fish learned to show up at exactly the right time. Their memories span months. They recognize their owners. They adapt.

Which means perhaps Ted wasn’t actually telling Sam to forget. He was telling him to do something harder: process the mistake and keep playing. The question was never how do we forget. It’s how do we dwell productively — and then actually stop.

mistake metabolism

Turns out there’s a word for what happens when the loop breaks. Actually, there are three.

Remembering isn’t really a choice. The event happened. Your brain encoded it. You don’t get a say in that — nor should you. It’s data.

Metabolizing is active. You sit with it, feel the discomfort, let it mean something. This is where caring lives, and the discomfort itself is information. It means you have standards. That you give a damn.

Perseverating is the trap. Psychologists use this word to describe the cognitive equivalent of a skipping record: the same thought, replaying on loop. In a very CS way: with no new inputs, the output doesn’t change. You’re running the same function on the same data and expecting a different result.

The healthy version of this process — what I’ve started calling “Mistake Metabolism” — goes like this:

Remember → Metabolize → Reflect → Repair → Release

(A note: this cycle applies to all kinds of experiences — but mistakes are where the loop gets stickiest, and where this matters most.)

The loop most commonly breaks at repair. When the action that would close it isn’t available, the feeling has nowhere to go — and instead of releasing, it bleeds forward.

The clearest example I have is feedback I received on the last day of a previous job: that I’d offended a coworker. Delivered on my way out, with no opportunity to repair it. The lesson was real and I took it — ask for feedback early, don’t wait until it’s too late to do anything about it. But the unresolved feeling followed me anyway. At my next job I became so careful, so self-monitored, so afraid of repeating something I’d never fully understood, that the overcorrection became its own problem.

The lesson had metabolized. The feeling hadn’t.

That’s the subtler trap. Sometimes the loop breaks not because you refused to do the work, but because repair was structurally impossible. The moment had passed. And so the feeling, with nowhere to go, bleeds forward into the next context, quietly running the show.

When that happens, I think the only move is to name it. To recognize that what feels like appropriate caution is actually an old loop still spinning. That the lesson and the feeling are two different things on two different tracks, and metabolizing one doesn’t automatically metabolize the other.

For example, I keep a running list of learnings at work — tiny behavioral rules distilled from moments that stung. Be proactive about communication. Give yourself 35 minutes for the train. Even traveling needs routines. Each one is a moment of embarrassment converted into a policy. Once it’s in the system, my brain is allowed to let go.

The cost of skipping this work isn’t just staying stuck. It’s making the same mistake twice, with the added tax of having already paid for the lesson once. As Aunty Lisa put it, skipping reflection and repair doesn’t mean you’ve moved on. It means the mistake gets a sequel.

There’s also a presence cost. When you’re perseverating, you’re not here. You’re back on the bus home from a hackathon yacht party, replaying something that already happened during a moment that’s actually happening right now. My dad would call this the opposite of being present. I’d call it paying rent on a memory with a long-standing eviction notice.

high resting mistake metabolism

So: be a goldfish. The real one — the one that learns, encodes, and moves. Not because it forgot, but because it’s done.

I didn’t start this essay convinced that we should learn to forget. I’m ending it convinced that we should learn to metabolize faster — and that those are very different things.

What I’m actually arguing for is a high resting mistake metabolism: the ability to take in failure, convert it fast, and move without accumulating perseveration residue.

The way to build that isn’t to make fewer mistakes. It’s to make more of them — and I’d even argue, to make them publicly. My favorite repair action of late has been texting my high school friends about whatever I just did wrong — and then just GOLDFISH MODE. I’ve found that the loop closes remarkably fast when you have people in your life who meet every mistake with a little humor and the implicit reminder that you’ll survive this one too.

Because here’s the thing: following your gut, making micro and macro decisions, transition-maxxing — all of it is about placing yourself in high-pressure, low-stakes environments and upping the reps. So load up.

dedicated to sam, tobes, and c dog!!

— DG

The signs started thirty minutes out. Wrong train. Phone buzzing. Are we going to the restaurant with the door in a tiger mouth?

I had been looking for a vibe — NY, swanky, great for the homies. What I delivered was a choogie, tiger-themed Thai restaurant that, mid-meal, broke into a live performance of that “azavenyaaaa” song from the Lion King.

I was certain no one would ever let me plan anything again. 🫠

Except — it was kinda lit. They serenaded Chehan.

That was weekend two in New York. Weekend six, I sent a group of friends what I thought were directions to a pregame bar in Brooklyn and what turned out to be directions to a strip club. (Oops.) Last summer, my first day in New York, I decided it would be fun to try Citi biking — and lost my phone off the bike within ten minutes. (A kind stranger eventually dropped it back at my apartment 🙏)

This is what the first month of a new city actually looks like.

Welcome back, dear reader. (Episode 4 — hooray for consistency.) Half my friends are mid-transition right now: new cities, new jobs, new versions of themselves. So let’s wonder about it together.

I am a woman of routine. Here’s the thing about routine: it reduces friction. You stop thinking about which subway, which gym, which coffee, which person to text on a hard day. The decisions become muscle memory. You forget you were ever choosing.

A transition is, in contrast, a friction event. Everything that was muscle memory becomes a decision again. The logistical calorie burn of finding a new gym, doctor etc. is quite frankly atrocious.

switching costs

My dad has been thinking about this longer than I have. When I told him about the tiger restaurant, he said something akin to the following (probably not as eloquently put):

Every transition has a switching cost — and the cost isn’t fixed. It shifts with age. At 23, switching costs are low (no mortgage, no husband — again, where the hell IS my husband), and the upside compounds over a 50-year window: every relationship deepens, every lesson informs the next decision, every piece of context you build pays interest for decades. At 50, the math inverts. By then you’ve got the mortgage, the career you’ve spent decades building, the partner whose life is also rooted somewhere, the friend group that took thirty years to assemble. The cost of moving has roughly tripled. The compounding window is half as long. The same transition that’s a great trade at 23 is a bad trade at 50.

So early in life, you maximize transitions. Not to be chaotic. Because the math says to. And in a very Tina Seelig–Lisa Solomon way (check out their podcast), each transition also increases your surface area for luck — new people, new conversations, new versions of yourself you wouldn’t have met sitting still. The point of those years is to compound the luck across the 50 that follow.

So: moving FEELS like a tax. It’s actually a compounding investment — you pay some pain now for the long-term benefit of the experiences and the surface area.

a missing variable

My good friend Emily pointed out a missing variable in my dad’s equation: transitions are also a learned skill.

Costs don’t only go up with age because life accumulates responsibilities. They also go DOWN because you get better at transitions. Just like #gut, you get reps. You build the muscle. 💪

So the actual shape isn’t a straight line. It’s two forces in tension. Responsibilities push costs up. Skill pulls costs down. The people who transition well at 50 are the ones who never stopped doing it.

Which means the argument isn’t just max transitions while you’re young. It’s max transitions while you’re young so you stay good at transitioning later. The experiences and the skill both compound. (Each transition I’ve made has taught me something the next one inherits — how to build a rhythm faster, how to ask for help earlier, how to know what I actually need before I have to scramble for it.)

But that still doesn’t tell you how many transitions to take. Or which ones.

transition physics

Case study: I have lived in the same five-mile radius for the first twenty-three years of my life.

By a strict reading of my dad’s frame, I should’ve taken bigger jumps already. More friction, more growth, more compounding. I’d be tougher.

I don’t think that’s the complete picture, though. I think I redirected the energy.

In physics, friction doesn’t destroy energy. It transforms it. Rub your hands together; friction warms them. The energy isn’t lost. It’s transferred.

The same is true of the energy you DON’T spend on a transition. What I would’ve spent on a new coast, or new weather patterns, went into hosting from year one, into being a tour guide for my friends, into already knowing my professors. That compounded too. Different shape, same physics.

Staying isn’t more virtuous than leaving. Energy just goes somewhere either way — and the switching costs frame has to make room for both. Energy is finite. Every transition you take is an opt-in to spend a chunk of your friction budget on logistics and belonging. Every transition you don’t take is energy redirected somewhere else.

I see this play out literally every week as I commute to DC for work. The energy I spend on travel — the airport, the hotel, the resetting — is energy not going somewhere else. Sometimes that’s the right trade. Sometimes I notice the bill on the back end.

The question isn’t are you transitioning enough. It’s not even are you taking enough risk. The question is: where is your energy actually going — and what are you losing in the friction?

the transition pyramid

So if transitions are a skill, and the switching costs are real — how do we actually approach them?

My answer: iteratively. And with humor.

Maslow gave us a hierarchy of needs — physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization — each layer making the next one possible. The same shape applies to transitions. I think I stole this twist from Peyton: your own personal hierarchy of what gets rebuilt, in what order. It makes the enormity of change feel a little more manageable. Mine looks something like this:

You climb this in switchbacks, not straight shots. You trip. You fall a level. And as long as you don’t get too injured to keep climbing — you just keep chugging.

Trying to skip levels is the rookie move. The seasoned move is to climb badly and laugh. The mess-ups become stories — and stories are what turn somewhere new into somewhere yours.

So, TLDR: Transitions are exhausting. The switching cost is real. And we all deserve a little bit of grace.

And I think all we can really do is lean in. Go hike that pyramid with vigor. Budget that friction with intention. Take the wrong train with a laugh.

And when you inevitably order the below-average Thai food at a choogie tiger-themed restaurant too far east on the Lower East Side, enjoy that damn serenade — and the free shot that comes with it.

—DG

What was wrong?

I had trusted my gut — just like everyone told me to. I had picked my dream school, the campus where my mom worked and my dad dreamed. So why was every single cell in my body screaming get out?

That feeling stayed with me for two weeks after move-in. By the end of freshman year, I had reached a kind of happiness I’d never experienced before in my life.

So what was that, exactly?

If I had actually trusted my gut on that bedroom floor, I would have withdrawn from Stanford on the spot — without having spent a single day on campus, without having met a single person in my dorm, without collecting a shred of actual information about the experience I was about to have. And by every measure I now have, that would have been the wrong call.

Welcome back, my dear reader, to success and the city, episode 3. If you’re a hot 20-something single living in New York, congrats on running the Brooklyn Half this weekend. If you didn’t run the half, congrats on finding other outlets for your post-grad crisis that are easier on your knees.

Anyway. Back to the gut stuff.

In episode 1, we sorted decisions — the macro and the micro. In episode 2, we sorted effort — the difference between working hard and working smart. Both rely on a third skill nobody teaches you: how to read your own internal signal when the external scoreboard is loud.

Which is to say: how to actually use your gut.

gut-belief is earned

Gut is one of those words that does a lot of work for not a lot of definition. It’s the snap read on a first date and the slower bodily recognition that you’ve found something that matters.

Every successful person seems to trust their gut. I just had a feeling. I knew it in my bones. Steve Jobs spent half a Stanford commencement address telling everyone to follow their heart and trust their intuition. We’ve internalized it as gospel. But we forget that Jobs was speaking from thirty years of taste calls at Apple, from a gut so heavily trained that of course it deserved to be trusted.

At a mere 23 I feel like I’m being told to trust a muscle I haven’t even had the chance to train.

This is why I keep coming back to Federer’s (aka my favorite tennis player and the goat) Dartmouth commencement. The line that has stayed with me most: “I believed in myself. But belief in yourself has to be earned.”

He earned his belief by hitting a forehand ten million times. Self-belief is a skill, not a feeling.

So is gut-belief.

To draw from the CS degree I never finished — you can’t trust a black-box algorithm that’s never been run.

reframe: gut is data, not directive

The gut is not a voice that arrives fully formed. It’s a pattern-matching machine — and it’s only as good as the patterns you’ve fed it. Adam Grant says test your gut, and I think that’s right. The gut sends a message. It doesn’t deliver a verdict. It’s data. The job is to take it seriously, run it through reality, and update.

This is why I quietly believe in giving yourself as many cheap shots at gut as possible. 50 first dates. Saying yes to things that scare you and seeing whether the scared was signal or static. Reps don’t make your gut infallible. They make you better at reading what it’s actually telling you.

And I swear this is relevant in our everyday post grad work lives. It’s why my tech lead can take one ten-second look at a PR I’ve spent two days on, ask *did you even gut-check this?* and clock a wrongness in the numbers I entirely missed. She’s been doing this for two years. I’ve been doing it for two days. That gap is the reps. That gap is also where gut stops being a simple decision-making tool and starts being something closer to artistry ✨✨.

My argument: we don’t calibrate a gut, this potential mechanism of artistry, by simply retreating from the world (no hate on meditation and yoga, that stuff is all good). We calibrate it by using it. The real art is in the how.

a gut graph (of sorts)

My dad gave me the following advice which I’m sure he plagiarized from another source (it’s giving Daniel Kahneman Blink vibes):

In low-information environments, your gut is valuable. In high-information environments, your preparation is.

A bar at 11 PM with someone you just met? Low info. Your gut is reading body language, energy, and a hundred other signals your conscious mind doesn’t have access to. Trust it. An interview with someone whose résumé and recommendations you’ve already pored over? High info. You don’t need your gut. You need to actually do the work.

The mistake young people make — me constantly included — is gut-ing in high-information environments where we could’ve just done the research. Sometimes the gut feeling is just impatience wearing a costume.

back to fall 2021

Which brings me back to the bedroom floor.

I have now felt the exact same dread before every major transition of my adult life. The night before sophomore year. The night before junior year. The night before senior year, when I should have known better. The night before I went to Saudi Arabia. And chances are the night before Beijing.

The signal is real. The interpretation was wrong.

It isn’t don’t go. It’s you love your routine, and your nervous system is grieving it, and you’ll be okay. It's not a verdict — it's a forecast about how the next 48 hours are going to feel. Useful information from my body, terribly translated by my brain.

I’ll be honest — I’m a data-driven, framework-minded lady. And all this analysis would suggest one thing: if gut needs reps to be trusted, and reps take years, and even seasoned guts get it wrong sometimes — why use it at all?

Because the alternative is worse.

The alternative is deferring to the external scoreboard. Letting committees and LinkedIn announcements and your parents decide what’s right for you. The gut doesn’t give you certainty. It gives you ownership.

And being wrong about something that was yours is infinitely better than being right about someone else’s version of your life.

concluding thoughts

If I could tell my 18-year-old self anything now — sitting on that bedroom floor, mid-sob, mid-spiral — it wouldn’t be trust your gut. That advice still hits me as fundamentally lazy.

I’d tell her this: unpack your gut. Identify what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it. Don’t trust the signal — interrogate it. Ask what it’s actually saying before you assume you know.

I’d tell her the dread doesn’t mean don’t go. It means you love what you’re leaving. Both can be true.

I’d also tell her: the signal will change. The night before I moved to New York, I waited for the dread. It didn’t come. For a moment I worried I’d just made too comfortable a decision — that if my body wasn’t grieving, maybe I wasn’t reaching far enough. But I think it was something else. The dread used to mean I don’t know how to do this. Now I know how to do this. The transitions don’t get smaller. The translator just gets better. 😎

You won’t always get it right. I certainly don’t.But you’ll be the one driving.

And, hey, if you don’t want to trust your gut — well, you can always just ask WWDGD. (What Would DG Do?) I find that brings people to pretty good results.

Humbly,

— DG

____

P.S. big thanks to shaurya, v money, and anybody else who was a sounding board for this article, appreciate you <3

Over the last month I’d stopped calling friends from home. I’d skipped my weekly writing. Without work, what else was there?

I wasn’t panicking because I had nothing to do. I was panicking because if I wasn’t producing,

who was I?

Happy Substack Sunday (I know it’s Monday, I procrastinated), my dear readers. Welcome to Success and the City, Episode 2 — on a topic I’ve started calling the

Sweat Olympics. 🏅🏅

Step into any wine bar in New York on a Thursday night (or for you SFers, maybe a Wasabi Bistro) and you might catch a conversation like this:

“I was in the office till 11 last night.” “11? I pulled an all-nighter.” “All-nighter? I haven’t slept since September.”

New York is a city of arts and culture. Everyone’s talking about the new show on Broadway, the exhibit at the Whitney, the ballet this weekend. But there’s one vertical nobody mentions that’s quietly thriving in every west village happy hour and Murray hill apartment elevator ride: the art of talking about how much we’re working.

Any of us who were high school sweats (aka neel-narayan-coined boba kids who stayed in on Friday nights in favor of studying and drinking boba) know the rules. Who slept later. Who took more APs. The more the grind, the more the clout.

Today’s version has a new name:

the 9-9-6 😤😤

Nine to nine, six days a week. Like many things in our lives, the 996 was #madeinChina — where Jack Ma famously called it “a huge blessing.” In 2021, after a wave of overwork deaths, China’s Supreme People’s Court declared it illegal (Fortune). And now it’s showing up in American job postings (I’m looking at you Mercor). Ramp’s corporate-card data shows San Francisco employees swiping more on Saturdays than in any recent year (Entrepreneur).

The country that invented 996 banned it. We decided to import it.

Just like the real Olympics, the Sweat Olympics isn’t only a competition — it’s a performance. And the game is about visibility. Hours are just the easiest thing to make visible. The 11 p.m. Slack message. The scheduled-send deliverable from Saturday morning.

This matters because smart work — the thinking, the judgment, the taste, the right question asked at the right moment — is almost by definition invisible. You can’t Slack-send your taste. You can’t timestamp the thirty minutes of staring-at-the-wall that produced the only insight that mattered all week.

So the game quietly rewards the visible half of work and punishes the invisible half. And in an AI age — when smart is the half that actually compounds, the half that can be uniquely you — it sometimes feels as if we’re doubling down on the exact thing we should be racing away from.

AI is a force multiplier for smart. Hours measure hard. By competing on hours, we’re optimizing for the side of the ledger that is about to be commoditized.

A needed aside— not every job is structured to reward smart over hard. Investment banking, big law, consulting — the hours are the job in many places, and that isn’t changing because I wrote a Substack. Even asking “what should we actually be measuring?” is a privilege. I know that.

But if you’ve got the privilege to ask it, you probably should.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an overachiever — or striving to be. Which means you already know the real engine of the Sweat Olympics isn’t prestige, or even visibility. It’s that we all want to work hard and feel like we’re enough. Hours are the cleanest way we’ve found to prove it — to ourselves, more than anyone else.

And hey, no judgment. I’ve been in the game.

For my first month at my defense tech company, I dove in. 9 p.m. in the office felt tiring but good. I took calls on weekends and a day off. By every externally legible measure, I was a sweat. And the hours were doing something for me beyond the work itself. They were proof that I belonged. And then that Thursday happened.

What broke me wasn’t the free time. It was realizing how much I’d already sacrificed — quietly, by default — in the name of a game I hadn’t consciously decided to play. The college friends I hadn’t called back. The substacks that remained untouched. The small things that used to make me feel like a person. None of it showed up on any scoreboard, so none of it registered as a loss. But it was.

I think this is the trap of our grindset romanticization. Sacrifice is fine. Everything worthwhile takes sacrifice — my parents taught me that, and I believe it. But there’s a difference between sacrificing intentionally and sacrificing performatively. The Sweat Olympics makes the second kind feel like the first.

I’m not here to hand you a new metric that replaces “hours logged.” I don’t have one. But I do know that I want out of these olympics. So I’ve started asking myself at the end of each week a question that, frankly,scares me more: Am I inching toward not only the career I’ve always dreamed of — but the life I’ve always dreamed of?

I grew up in an immigrant household. Our dinner conversations went from discussing dad’s two jobs while being a full time scholarship student in college to mom’s lab rat summers to put herself through medical school The grind is the joy and the path.

But I think what my parents actually passed down wasn’t hours. It was intention.

The question isn’t whether we’re working hard enough to be enough. The question is what we’re working hard for — and whether the game we’re playing is getting us to a trophy we actually care about.

—DG

PSA: In the interest of full transparency, I think this piece is a bit half-baked. But I’m challenging myself to write every Sunday #workingsmartandhard — which means some weeks I’ll land it and some weeks I’ll be mid-thought in public. Thanks for reading either way and excited to hear your thoughts.

Where should I get coffee this morning? Hot new workout class? Damn, I need a new jacket for spring. And this Saturday — aka yesterday — I found myself so busy deciding between restaurants and leather jackets that I forgot something a little more important.

Filing my taxes. 🤦🏽‍♀️

My dear readers — it’s been a minute. Good to be back. Yes, I’ve moved to New York. And with a new city comes a new series. So welcome all to the New York diaries. Carrie Bradshaw may have written Sex and the City, but the DG Files calls for a different kind of column — one I’d like to call “Success and the City.”

And so on this Saturday, as I texted my dad in a panic, I couldn’t help but wonder — were my micro decisions eating my macro ones alive?

We are facing more decisions than ever before — and it’s, as Barry Schwartz says, making us less happy not more. But I don’t think the problem is just that we have too many choices. The problem is that we’re spending our decision-making energy on the wrong ones. We’re outsourcing decisions we shouldn’t be. We’re agonizing over ones that don’t matter. And as a result, the decisions that actually shape our lives are being made for us.

Here’s what I mean. I can spend an embarrassing amount of time scrolling for the perfect dinner spot, an entire evening deliberating over spring jackets I don’t need. And then I will look up and realize I haven’t thought about — well, in a very Carrie Bradshaw way — the state of my finances.

The jacket is a micro decision. The economics of my livelihood are a macro decision. One of them got my full attention, my research energy, my taste. The other one got... forgotten. Not because I don’t care about my taxes, but because the micro decisions ate all the oxygen. And frankly, the micro decisions are a little sexier and a lot easier to handle than the big adult macro ones.

Now, I could write a whole essay on macro decisions — work, place, people — and how we make them. But for now I want to focus on the hidden cost of these micro decisions where most of us are quietly losing the plot.

A city like New York makes it worse. It is quite literally a buffet of micro decisions. Where to eat, where to drink, what to wear. Every single one of these decisions feels like it says something about you. And maybe some of them do. But (luke warm take alert) most of them don’t. And the ones that actually shape your life — who you’re investing time in, what you’re building, whether you’re taking care of your health, whether you’re pursuing the things that light you up — those are the ones that quietly slide.

Never fear, I do have a (far from perfect) framework in the works. I’ve started thinking about my decisions in three categories:

1. in-house decisions

2. friends-of-the-house decisions, and

3. decisions for the streets.

In-house decisions are mine. No one else gets a vote — not an algorithm, not even well-meaning friends unless I ask. These are the decisions that build identity. Who I spend my time with. Who I’m dating and whether I keep seeing them. My sleep and workout routine. What hobbies I pursue. These are the decisions where I’m practicing listening to my gut — building the muscle of knowing what I want before someone else tells me. Outsourcing them means outsourcing my own process of figuring out who I am.

Friends-of-the-house decisions are ones I happily delegate — but only to people I trust, people who know my taste and my values. Food is a friends-of-the-house decision for me. I’d rather outsource dinner to Tobey than spend forty-five minutes scrolling Yelp reviews from strangers. Fashion — I trust Eliza Sandell more than I trust a targeted Revolve ad on Instagram. The key is who you’re outsourcing to. A friend who knows you is not the same as an influencer who doesn’t.

And then there are decisions for the streets — the physical streets of New York or the metaphorical streets of an AI algorithm. The stuff I genuinely do not care about and will happily hand to anyone or anything. Where to get a pedicure? That’s a Claude problem. The best comedy show to go to? Guy on the subway’s guess is as good as mine. I laugh very easily. These aren’t identity decisions. They’re logistics.

The danger is when we let the streets handle what should stay in-house. When an algorithm convinces you that you need a strawberry-hojicha-blackseed-infused matcha latte when sometimes you just want a damn cappuccino (that one was for you sam). When you’re so inundated with micro decisions that the macro ones — the ones about your career, your relationships, your sense of self — just get made by whatever environment you happen to be standing in. And the environment doesn’t know what you value. It just knows what’s #trending.

Here’s what I’m learning. I’d rather go to one catch-all shop than spend a whole day shopping — but I would spend two hours researching an amazing restaurant reservation rather than settling for a mid one. I’d rather spend a weekend in Florida playing pickleball with my best friend’s grandparents than going on a two-day bender at random bars in the East Village (wellll, sometimes I’d do that too).

These aren’t big revelations. They’re small ones. But small revelations are how you find your taste, your gut!— and your gut is how you figure out your values — and your values are how the macro decisions stop getting made by default.

Now as an aside, I’m starting to notice that every one of my Substacks can probably be whittled down to: chase the signal in the noise, blah blah. Know thyself, blah blah. Find good friends, blah blah. And that is yet again probably the TLDR of this article. Must be my gut feeling! Or maybe I just need to go outside a little more.

I digress — what are we if not the sum of our decisions, micro and macro, intentional and serendipitous? We probably owe it some thought, then, to what goes where.

Enough writing for today. Now I have to go file my taxes.

— DG

At a conference we attended, I’d left a poster behind and someone else had to go back and get it. Not my finest moment. But also, in my head, not exactly a defining one.

So when my boss told me I hadn’t “left my ego at the door,” I was… angry.

Me? Entitled? Private school princess Divya Ganesan who quit working at Salt and Straw after three weeks? So THIS is what you choose to focus on after everything else I’ve done?

Then I was sad. The kind of sad where you realize — oh god, I made someone feel like I thought I was above something. And what probably hurt most was that I saw an ounce of truth to it — an insecurity I had about my own qualifications. Thus commenced the waterworks. Brutal.

Today on the #DGFiles we’ll be discussing feedback — giving it, getting it, and why it’s one of the hardest and most important things we do, especially in our twenties.

it’s not you it’s your behavior 🪞

I’ve been thinking about a line my mom used to say. I’d come home from elementary school, fuming about somebody who stole my fruit roll-up or whatever felt world-ending that day. And I’d say something like, “I HATE her.”

My mom would stop me. “No Divya, it’s not that you hate that person. You hate their behavior.”

It annoyed me at the time. But I was reminded of it sitting on that zoom call last summer. Was the feedback my boss gave me about my action accurate? Yeah. But was it a commentary on my identity? Probably not.

Leaving the poster for someone else to deal with was careless. In a fast-paced work environment, that kind of thing reads a certain way regardless of what you meant by it. As a recent grad at a national security startup where most of my colleagues were former military, maybe it was time to read the room.

The real takeaway wasn’t “don’t leave posters at conferences.” It was about awareness — What’s the gap between what I intend and what people experience?

a feedback framework 🧠

My dad has a framework for this that he likely stole from someone else 😉. He says there are two questions to ask when you receive feedback:

1. Is this feedback accurate? Do I trust this person’s judgment? Is this a pattern? Has anyone else said something similar?

2. Is this something I want to change?

These two questions help you sort through the noise. Not all feedback is created equal — both in terms of who gives it to you and who you choose to give it to. Some of it is a gift. Some of it is projection. Some of it tells you more about the giver than it does about you.

Here’s what I’d add that the graph can’t exactly capture— sometimes the feedback is accurate about the action, not about your character, and the thing you want to change isn’t who you are but how aware you are.

works in progress 🚧

I think this is especially true for those of us in our twenties.

We are works in progress. And what a gift and what a struggle that is.

The struggle is that, as Roger Federer once said, self-belief is earned. And I don’t know about you, but I still feel like I’m in the process of earning mine. We’re in — and I hate to sound like a broken record — a period of great uncertainty, wondering whether we’re actually good enough or just faking it convincingly.

When someone tells you you’re entitled, or that you don’t communicate enough, or that you came across wrong — it doesn’t bounce off a decades-long track record of knowing exactly who you are. It hits harder. And the thing we want most in those moments isn’t even a lesson. It’s validation. We just want someone to say: you’re doing fine, you belong here.

But here’s the gift side: we are more capable of change and learning right now than we may ever be again. Neuroscience tells us our prefrontal cortex — the part that handles decision-making and self-awareness — doesn’t fully mature until our mid-to-late twenties.

As Eileen Gu aptly put it, “Especially as a young person — I’m 22 — with neuroplasticity on my side, I can literally become exactly who I want to be.”

intention and action 🌉

There’s a concept I learned in Psych 70 at Stanford that I think about constantly: the fundamental attribution error. We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.

When my boss told me I hadn’t left my ego at the door, he was judging my action — and he was right to, because actions are all other people have to go on. But in my head, I was judging myself by my intention, which was never to seem above anything.

Bridging the gap between intention and action (that one was for you @Neel J), is one of the hardest things to do. The phrase “intention and action” usually refers to personal agency but I think it works well in the context of feedback as well. When someone gives you feedback, they’re telling you your actions didn’t match what you probably intended. And when you give feedback, the most generous thing you can do is assume the other person’s intentions were good — even when their actions weren’t.

the other side: giving feedback 💬

Which brings me to the other side: giving feedback. Honestly just as hard. Maybe harder.

I was in the car recently with my sisters Sahana and Avani, and Sahana said something that stuck with me: “It’s not worth giving feedback to someone when you don’t care that much about the relationship.” She has a point. Not everyone deserves your feedback — and that’s not cold, it’s honest. Feedback is an investment. You give it to the people whose growth you’re actually invested in, and whose relationship is worth the discomfort.

Example: I hosted a small event last weekend. As usual, some people showed up and others didn’t. Some communicated, some just ghosted. I could’ve said nothing. But I’ve realized that something really important to me is close friends communicating — and if I never say that, I’m just silently resenting the people I care about, which helps no one. So I told my friends they disappointed me. They’re worth the awkwardness.

I think giving feedback kindly is a form of love. Both to yourself and others. It clarifies your own standards. It frees you from resentment. It says: I think you’re capable of more, and I care enough to tell you.

We are all human. We all suffer from unsaid expectations, disappointments, and disappointing.

So, my proposal for you, dear reader is

Radically give it — early, often, and with kindness. Don’t save it for the last day of someone’s internship. Don’t let it build until it becomes resentment. Say the small thing now (to the people that really matter).

And radically receive it — not necessarily as the truth, but as a way of seeing. Someone else’s feedback is a mirror held at their angle, not yours. You don’t have to accept it as your identity. But you do have to look.

So, tldr: None of us are perfect. Some feedback is a gift. Some is trash. Such is life.

—DG

The security officer — tall, serious, exactly the guy you’d be nervous about — doesn’t ask for my visa. He takes one look at my passport, winks at me, and says: “Have fun.”

Have fun? What the hell had I gotten myself into.

As the brilliant Peyton Klein says: you gotta go to know.

In an era of information abundance and — let’s be honest — a glaring lack of cognitive discernment (see data is the new cobalt) my big bet is that the best information is what you can collect yourself. We have more capacity than ever to see the world with our own eyes. And yet unfortunately today it’s easier to scroll to know (or rather, assume) than go to know.

So in January I decided it was time for me to cut through the scroll about NEOM and the mega-projects, follow in the footsteps of Kata and Josh, and put on what my high school history teacher Dr. Story calls your “historical empathy hat” — or in this case, my geopolitical empathy hijab and abaya. Welcome to the saudistack. 🇸🇦

Gateway KSA is a fully-funded program run by the Saudi government — and, somewhat mysteriously, a Dutch consultancy— that invites a small cohort of students from elite (whatever that means) universities to spend nine days inside the Kingdom. Their website calls us “the influencers, policymakers, and leaders of tomorrow.” Aka a propaganda tour with nice branding. And what better way to kick off my #authoritarianera? Let's consider Saudi the warmer, slightly more US-friendly China pregame.

I came in with my own assumptions. I left with far more learnings than I can cover here. But if I had to encompass the experience in one word it would be

transformation.💫💫💫

That is the language. That is the brand. That is the lens through which an entire generation is being taught to understand their country.

But transformation is not a single thing. As I taught last quarter to my sectionees in Spies, Lies, and Algorithms with Professor Zegart — we must learn to see these things through the lens of intelligence analysts. Don Rumsfeld once famously distinguished between the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. Over ten days in Saudi, I encountered all three — and they don’t all agree with each other.

1) the known knowns 🎙️

(aka the narrative)

The first few days in Riyadh felt like being inside a pitch deck that someone had built a city around. Vision 2030 is the organizing principle of the country — the throughline of every panel, the answer to every question. The young Saudis we met in Riyadh spoke about their country with a conviction that startled me. I can’t name a single one of my classmates who is this excited about the future of America. The word I’d use is zealous — and it was damn contagious. Even I left wanting to join the revolution.

The vocabulary was remarkably consistent. Transformation. The big leap.

“Vision 2030 is the roadmap, not the destination.” “Specifics don’t matter — what matters is the direction.”

At a buffet line one evening in the Red Sea, a Saudi government official quietly admitted to me that sometimes those KPIs — the big projects like NEOM and The Line — are assembled with gimmicks. Designed to get attention from the international community rather than be executed perfectly.

And to his point the production value I experienced was extraordinary — five days at the Mandarin Oriental, then a Red Sea airport that looked like a beach resort, dates and coffee on arrival, luggage sent automatically to your hotel…

But here’s where the picture starts to get odd, and it comes down to the (of all things) McKinsey in me. The Gateway program itself was partly run by a Dutch consultancy. One of the expat consultants helping run this “family office” investment conference admitted he’d arrived only three days prior. And you could tell — hotels switching last minute, no buses back from the conference, growing chaos underneath the luxury. Why were all these exogenous forces running this internal identity-defining transformation? Which brings us to..

2) the known unknowns 🔀

(aka the switching costs)

If you focus too much on the macro transformation, you miss the micro one. The one being felt on the ground.

The #1 complaint (not that there were many explicitly stated) from our panelists? Traffic. 400,000 people are migrating internally to Riyadh and other urban centers, reshaping a society that was, within living memory, organized around tribal and family structures. The “Londonization” of Riyadh is real, and it is felt by longtime residents before it is celebrated.

Not everyone is on board. A friend I met at the Salam center— a young management consultant (essentially a poster child for Vision 2030)— told me privately that his parents were not happy with the pace of change. The generational divide is sharp: the youth are bought in, the older generation is holding on.

At the Red Sea Investment conference, speakers including Prince Turki Al Faisal struck a very different tone from the pro-Western messaging of MBS — talking openly about the demise of the Western liberal world order and strategic disarray.

The Saudi Arabia being sold to Western delegations and the Saudi Arabia being discussed internally are not always the same country.

3) the unknown unknowns 👀

(aka what broke my frameworks)

This is where we get into what Professor Kotkin aptly calls the perverse and unintended consequences of the “transformation.”

I’ve written about drowning in data in Western societies — too much noise, not enough signal. In an authoritarian system, the problem may be inverted. The noise has been cleaned up for you. Everything looks like signal. And the real information is hiding in what’s absent.

Here’s the noise I had to work really hard to pick up.

I did not see a single homeless person in Riyadh. Not one. In a country of rapid urbanization and massive wealth disparity, this tells you something about the social safety net and the family structure—but it also makes you wonder who is invisible by design.

The Saudi equivalent to Hinge is young people AirDropping their Snapchat handles to strangers in McDonald’s parking lots. There is no alcohol anywhere and yet the nightlife works —shisha bars packed past midnight, rollercoasters running at 1 a.m., families out later than most New Yorkers. A whole generation has built a social life around constraints that would paralyze an American college student. It was, honestly, kind of inspiring. 🎢

Then there were the things that made the analyst in me sit up straight. At Effat University in Jeddah, I met students who had never heard of Jamal Khashoggi (it had been taken out of the school curriculum). The third language on airport signs in Riyadh? Not Spanish, not Hindi. Chinese.

And everywhere I went, a sense of energy, identity, and belonging among young people that I found myself envying. Not because the system was perfect. But because these young Saudis knew what they were building toward. They had a national project. A strong family structure. A faith that organized their lives. I kept thinking: where is this feeling of purpose and vision in America?

onwards ✈️

There is so much more here than one article can hold (and if you made it this far — good on you, I know this is a long one 😅). The demographics alone deserve their own piece — Saudi’s fertility rate is dropping dramatically, and in work I did with Katharine, Jonathan, and Daniel at Stanford’s Hoover Institution on what we call the “senior bulge,” the cascading pressures of that shift on labor markets, social systems, and cultural identity are seismic. Everyone I met was talking about tech programs and AI academies. Nobody was talking about vocational training. As my friend Aidan likes to say, WHO’S gonna carry the logs—or, say, construct a city in a damn line—when everyone's only being trained to consult on one?

Moreover, you cannot hold culture constant while transforming the economy. Economic change drives cultural change, whether you plan for it or not. That is the switching cost absent from the hype videos.

Now this has become far more thought piece than reflection, so let me bring it back to the personal for a second.

On the second day of the trip, Shura Council member Al-Hulaisi took questions from our group. I was the first to raise my hand. I thought I had a strategy — start with misconceptions, then follow up with the hard stuff. I co-founded a program called Real Talk with my classmate Eliza in high school to have exactly these conversations. I spent a summer in rural Texas doing exactly this. This is what I was trained for.

It went sideways. She turned the question back on me, and instead of listening I started listing associations I had with Saudi — corruption, Khashoggi, projects that might never get built. The room shifted. Our conversation suffered: this is not your country. These are not your problems to name.

What I’ll remember most isn’t the uncomfortable moment itself — it’s that my friend Jackson took the time to pull me aside afterwards, debrief and even give me some honest feedback: what exactly was the answer I was looking for?

I hate to be cheesy but Anthony Bourdain put it best: “We learn as much about ourselves as the world when we travel.” And perhaps my most transformative takeaways from this very foreign land were about myself and the people around me.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t express the deep gratitude I have for the people I met — program managers, speakers who fielded our questions with patience, the incomparable cohort who made every car ride and late-night conversation worth it. I would recommend this program to anyone.

The true things I will carry from Saudi are the long walks at sunset along the Red Sea. The bus rides talking about existential life things with people I’d met four days prior. The tour guide in old town Jeddah who pulled us into his house for coffee because that’s just what you do. 🥹

Blah, blah blah, shed a tear. Let’s cut the sap—back to the analytical. 😤

Here’s what I’m still sitting with as I start my next chapter in defense tech and head to Beijing this fall. 🧳

1. Saudi is a startup country — small, wealthy, engineering transformation top-down with a single vision and a generation of true believers. China has been running that experiment for decades at continental scale. In systems thinking, feedback loops compound. What does transformation look like when the friction has had time to compound — or be buried?

2. In an authoritarian system where the noise has been curated out, how do you find the signal hiding in what’s not being said?

3. And when everyone is building the knowledge economy, who builds the physical one — and what happens when the demographic foundations underneath it all start to shift?

Time to go to know. 🫡

—DG

These are not unserious women. These are Harvard Law, Stanford Business, Forbes-cover-millionaire women. And the hot topic at dinner is still often weight, skin, and appearance.

I used to eavesdrop on these conversations and think, how vain. Is this really what all accomplished women talk about?

Well, that was until last week... when I got a nose job (#NewNoseNewYork iykyk, #TriggerAlert for my haters).

Maybe that feels off-brand for the national-security, thesis-writing, authenticity-forward DG you know. It kind of felt off-brand for me at first too.

I’m not writing this because I owe anyone an explanation — to each their own with what you want to do with your body and your face. I’m writing this because the tension between being an ambitious woman and still caring about how you look is something a lot of powerful women feel and nobody says out loud. Luckily, I am loud (and have been cancelled before and would do it again, yolo)!

FOBB (fear of not being a boss b*tch)

My real fear with the surgery — and I think a lot of women share this — is that caring about how I look makes me less of a boss b*tch. That surface and depth can’t coexist. That the woman who writes about AI governance and national security shouldn’t also care about her side profile in an interview.

I grew up with the honor of being surrounded by women (raised by a village, Hillary Clinton style). Seven years at an all-girls school. Two younger sisters and a mom who put herself through eight years of medical school as a first-gen immigrant. I didn’t think I was pretty at 13 — I don’t know if anyone felt their most beautiful at that age — but quite frankly, I didn’t need to be. I was president of my school. A straight-A student. What more could I need?

And yet — I secretly wanted to be beautiful. And to feel wanted. Not instead of being smart. Alongside it. And I could never figure out why that felt like something I had to hide.

god forbid a girl wants security

I hate to bring it back to Saudi but I’m gonna bring it back to Saudi because it was a pivotal trip. Sitting in a hotel lobby, talking about how different cultures view marriage. One of my friends on the trip — a Muslim woman — said honestly, simply, that she wanted a man with financial stability. My majority-male cohort was triggered. One guy in particular came at her. Gold digger. How could you say that?

But I got it. Isn’t it just... honest? Isn’t wanting some security in a partner one of the most basic human — dare I say feminine — desires? She said the quiet part out loud and got shamed for it.

Saying “I care about how I look” in the rooms I’m in — and hoping there’s an implied “I am also competent and have a high IQ” — feels like the same kind of risk. An honest want that’s somehow become unspeakable.

hating the game

Here’s what nobody says out loud: men in power get to opt out of appearance entirely. Zuckerberg in a hoodie. Obama in the same gray suit (”I’m trying to pare down decisions”). Dorsey in a beanie at TED. The world calls it focus. Genius. Discipline.

Now think about every woman you’ve ever seen stand next to one of those men at a conference. Skirt suit. Blowout. Heels. Nobody calls her focused. She’s just doing what’s required. (The exception to this might be my fellow thister Elizabeth Holmes — but I’m not sure we want to claim that girlboss success story.) I digress — Elle Woods walked into Harvard Law and her femininity automatically dismantled her credibility.

The research backs this up. Researchers at Harvard’s Gender Action Portal documented a “beauty tax” that gets higher the more powerful a woman becomes — women who climb the professional ladder are required to invest more in appearance, not less, and the demand is far higher than it is for men. And the cruelest part: a study out of Arizona State found that women who visibly try to look good are perceived as less moral. Less trustworthy (and probably less effective too 🤣🤣)

So you’re penalized for not being beautiful enough and punished for trying. Talk about a lose-lose.

on dating (new territory alert)

I haven’t talked a lot about dating, love, and partnership on this Substack, and frankly it’s about time — because I do strongly believe that your partner is one of the most important choices you make in your life (I mean, doesn’t that determine your chosen cohort?).

Even as an ambitious, type-A, “I can do it myself” woman — I want my partner to call me beautiful. Yes, intelligent. But also beautiful. And I don’t want the fact that I’m crushing it (inshallah) to make him feel smaller.

I think that’s a tightrope a lot of ambitious women walk — wanting to be powerful and wanting your partner to feel powerful too. I don’t have a clean answer for how to navigate it. I just know I’m done pretending the tension isn’t there.

what about the men?

Last month, on a particularly rainy evening, my car got stuck in my friend Akshay’s driveway. He told me to call our friend Connor (we’ll call him this for the sake of the story). I felt bad — the man has a dinner, he has a life. Akshay said: “No, you’re going to actually make his day.” He was right. Connor came (the actual GOAT), used cables to pull my car out, and was genuinely happy about it. I was afraid of being needy. He just wanted to be useful.

I don’t think this is just Connor. I think for a lot of men, the deep desire isn’t to be seen as beautiful — it’s to be seen as needed. Capable. High-utility. The one who shows up and fixes the thing. And that desire is just as primal and just as hard to admit as a woman’s desire to be called beautiful.

[Pause. Saving space for my male friends to disagree with me here (you are seen, you are heard).]

the theory (obvi there’s a theory)

I don’t think anything I’m saying is novel. I think it’s just become unpopular to say outright. So I’ll say it.

The most ambitious women I know still want to be called beautiful. The most successful men I know still want to feel needed. Ergo:

It’s not a catch-all. There are a thousand exceptions and I want to hold space for them. But the tension between who we’re supposed to be and what we quietly want is more real than anyone admits. And somewhere along the way, we got so careful — so curated in what we’re allowed to desire — that saying any of this out loud feels like a confession.

I want to be a thinker and doer of depth and substance. To make impact at scale.

I’m also just a girl.

Thoughts?

— DG

We’ll be at the mosque in 10 minutes, inshallah. I graduate in June, inshallah.

Yes, I went to Saudi Arabia and there is a Substack brewing on it (who asked 😅)—but before I give the full download, I want to talk about this one word. Because underneath its softness is actually a profound message: there is a certain amount of uncertainty baked into everything we do, and all we can really do is hope to God. Literally.

I think this matters because it names the profound shift that happens when you graduate college. I spent fourteen years of my life on an 8am to 3pm class schedule, bookended by 3 to 6pm extracurriculars, and then made the bold 🤦🏽‍♀️ decision to do the exact same thing a mile down the road at my university. Some class periods changed, but my life felt set. I would do well in school. I would get straight A’s. I would spend four (ok, four-plus) years at a top college and then—

And then what?

If you know me, you know I’m the type of person who wakes up on Monday, goes to Barry’s, comes back, has the same breakfast, and executes my routine in 30 minute increments. My favorite question to ask people used to be “what’s your vision?”—that’s how much I believe in planning. And yet here I am: I left my CS master’s program at Stanford. Took three months off. Went to Saudi Arabia. I’m moving to New York for six months and then spending a year in China, where I know not a single person nor a single word of the language. What is the vision once I graduate (inshallah) in one year? I have no effin clue.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but here’s how I would describe what I like to call the post-grad waffle: it simultaneously feels like every door in the world is open to me and that if I take one step toward any of them, the ground beneath my feet will crumble and I’ll fall to the rock bottom of a mundane, lonely, dare I say mediocre and not cosmically relevant life 🙃 (that one was for you longo).

Every TV show from Friends to New Girl—and Meg Jay’s entire Defining Decade thesis—tells us our twenties are supposed to be the most formative years of our lives. And I’m sure they will be. But they’re also the most uncertain, which I don’t think automatically means we’re the happiest. Laura Carstensen’s research at the Stanford Center on Longevity actually found that people get happier as they age, in part because they have less ambiguity to stress about—they’ve made their peace with life’s big questions. Which means your twenties, by design, are the stretch where the most is unresolved.

Most of us don’t really know what we want to do, haven’t found our person (truly where the hell is my husband), don’t know where we’ll be in two years—or honestly, which friends will last past the proximity of a dorm room (hell, even my face isn’t certain right now iykyk.).

And it’s not just us. The world seems to be in mega inshallah mode. I think back to hearing Prince Turki al-Faisal speak about a new world order at the Red Sea two weeks ago—”a period of uncertainty” is all I kept hearing. Marco Rubio is calling it the same thing. AI is rewriting the rules faster than anyone can follow them. So my claim is this—fellow young readers: not only are we in the most uncertain period of our lives, we are also living through some of the most uncertain times, period. Nesting dolls of uncertainty—personal, generational, global—all stacked inside each other.

I’ve been told for a long time that I need to get comfortable with this. When I was fifteen, my high school teacher Stacey Kertsman had a phrase she’d repeat to us Type A Castilleja girls—embracing ambiguity. I can still picture myself and Raveena eating churros in the dining hall, saying it cheekily to each other like an inside joke. We laughed then but at some point “embracing ambiguity” stopped being something I giggled at over churros and started being the reality of how to adult.

Maybe it was the moment I had to make a college decision and had a full mental breakdown. Or maybe it was realizing senior year that college was actually ending. Or maybe—most recently—it was sitting in Jeddah, hearing inshallah over and over, and realizing it was the Arabic version of what Ms. Kertsman had been trying to teach us all along—that the uncertain parts aren’t the obstacle to a meaningful life. They’re the texture of one.

I’ve actually had a bit of a mindset shift on this. I used to think the greatest sign of ambition was to have a plan so airtight that nothing could shake it. Now I think it’s equally important to be ready for the plan to change. To borrow from Kenneth Stanley’s Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (thank you Shaurya for the rec 🫡): greatness cannot be planned—it is discovered.

So how do we find peace and groundedness in the face of all this uncertainty? Some of it, I think, lives in the people who stay—our rocks, our family, the friends who show up through the moves and the mess and the in-between. Alhamdulillah for them.

Maybe it gives you some solace that uncertainty is the great equalizer—that every single one of us, no matter how put-together we look, is navigating some version of this. Uncertainty isn’t just a stage of life. It’s the very nature of it. Even for the Type A, color-coded, printed-planner, blue-skirted Castilleja girl that I am.

So (channel katharine sorensen as you read this)…yallah! Let’s go. And mashallah for uncertainty—life would be pretty boring without it.

—DG

I was sitting in my weekly Mayfield Fellows class session, trying to focus on Mia Bhuta’s thoughtful presentation while my heart hammered against my ribs. I’d been waiting for this call all morning—texts from peers trying to coordinate, then the deafening silence that followed. By mid-morning, I’d resigned myself to disappointment. If I didn’t get the call during this class, I told myself, it wasn’t meant to be.

I slipped out of the room and answered.

“Divya? This is Amy from Schwarzman Scholars.”

What happened next—the offer, the wave of relief and joy—was special, yes. But what I remember most vividly is what came after: walking back into that classroom, beaming with pride, and telling my cohort I was going to China (shoutout class of 27) .

The way they embraced me. The way they knew the full story—my startup struggles, the rejections, the long conversations about what came next. It wasn’t just special that I got it. It was special that I got to celebrate it with people who were genuinely invested in me.

That moment clarified something I’d been circling for years (although Peyton had been telling me for months)—a simple theory about how we experience our lives: we don’t remember moments in isolation. We remember them in cohorts.

cohort theory 💡 (a definition)

A cohort is not a club, mailing list, or a logo on your LinkedIn.

A cohort is a small group of people who enter something at the same time, move through it together, and stay long enough for trust and context to accumulate.

Three things make cohorts work:

• shared timing: you start together

• mutual visibility: people see your wins, your stagnation, your failures

• sustained buy-in: participation is expected, not optional

There’s a fourth piece we don’t like to say out loud: constraint. Real cohorts are filtered. Not elitist or exclusionary for its own sake, but bounded. Without limits on size and exit, buy-in collapses.

Psychology backs this up. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that humans can only maintain about five intimate bonds, fifteen close friendships, and roughly 150 meaningful relationships. If you’re spread across ten clubs (trust me as a freshman I definitely was), you’re not building cohorts—you’re likely collecting acquaintances.

Networks give you access. Cohorts give you community.

my spicy🔥🌶️ take: most college clubs are co-working spaces for the overcommitted

aka productivity theater.

They’re meetings that could have been emails. Groups where attendance is optional, responsibility is diffuse, and everyone is busy without being meaningfully invested. They allow us to feel productive while doing very little that compounds.

Pre-professional clubs are especially guilty of this. They optimize for signaling, not cohesion. You show up, add a line to your resume, and leave. No one notices. Nothing is lost. And I say this as someone who helped start a club.

The incentive structure makes this outcome predictable. Clubs want to be inclusive, so they lower commitment. They want to scale, so they avoid friction. They want to retain members, so they demand very little.

Optionality feels good. It just doesn’t build anything that lasts.

why some groups actually work

There are clear exceptions.

Groups like Stanford Sierra Camp, the On Call staff, FashionX (or the cyber super girls 😉)—teams built around real labor—tend to form actual cohorts. Not because the people are better, but because the structure forces interdependence.

They work because:

• presence is non-negotiable

• absence has consequences

• effort is visible

• shared hardship creates memory

As social psychologist Kurt Lewin put it, “the essence of a group is not the similarity or dissimilarity of its members, but their interdependence.”

Being placed in the same dorm doesn’t make you a cohort. Choosing to show up for each other does.

what to look for (and how to build it)

Once you see cohorts clearly, the tactical implications are surprisingly concrete.

First, a constraint most people ignore: attention and relational capacity are finite. If you are spread across ten clubs, five Slack groups, and three “casual” communities, you are not building cohorts. You are accumulating weak ties (which can be useful for other reasons see prev.article but I digress).

Real cohorts tend to share a few structural traits:

• bounded membership
  There is a clear sense of who is in and who is not. Size is limited because visibility matters.

• repeated cadence
  Weekly beats monthly. Rhythm beats intensity.

• visible contribution
  People can tell who prepared, who showed up, who carried weight.

• exit costs
  Absence is noticed. Leaving means something.

This is why certain formats work so reliably. Thesis groups work because you have to produce a thesis. Dance teams work because rehearsal is not optional. These structures force interdependence without needing constant motivation.

This matters even more after college, when institutional scaffolding disappears. Large organizations implicitly understand this. Analyst classes and onboarding cohorts aren’t just HR conveniences—they’re cohesion machines. Smaller or flatter environments don’t provide this by default, which means you either build cohorts intentionally or drift.

This logic holds even at the highest levels. While writing my honors thesis on AI governance, I interviewed executives from firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google about why they joined the White House voluntary AI safety commitments.

More than one executive described it, verbatim, as “the White House cool kids club.”

They didn’t join primarily because of policy nuance. They joined because being part of the recognized cohort mattered. Even billion-dollar companies respond to the same forces: bounded groups increase buy-in; buy-in changes behavior; behavior reinforces identity.

The question isn’t what you can join. It’s where people will invest in you, and where you’re willing to rise to that investment.

concluding thoughts 🙌

I visited my little sister Avani’s dorm room the other day and chuckled to myself when I saw five different club memberships taped to her door. Heavy deja vu.

I’m tragically prone to doing more. More commitments, more meetings, more groups that feel important in the moment. Life eventually filters a lot of that out for you. But this is one lesson I wish I’d learned earlier: when it comes to cohorts, less really is more.

I sometimes think back to that Tuesday morning and wonder what would have happened if I didn't get that call. It wouldn't have been the first time I'd faced rejection. But honestly, there's no group of people I trust more to comfort me and help me navigate whatever comes next. Whether celebrating the wins or processing the losses, they show up—not because they have to, but because we've built something worth maintaining.

So, as with all things that compound, choose wisely, invest early, and stay long enough for it to matter.

—DG

I don’t think I could claim I was the most liked person at Stanford. But I was, by most definitions, pretty well known. I’ve never really minded being visible. In fact, being known has brought me far more opportunity than discomfort, as long as you can handle the occasional eye roll (or lets be honest cancellation) that comes with it.

Let me take you back to Fall 2021. Enter 18 year old Divya Ganesan, freed from the confines of a 60 person all girls school, with one very specific goal: meet everybody. How? Business cards.

I printed them. I carried them. I handed them out at early, dry dorm parties on Meyer green. It worked, technically. I met a lot of people. I even won Crothers freshman council representative. I also received a healthy number of prank calls, which in hindsight feels like a fair trade.

Later that year, people started telling me something interesting. “You’re actually super chill. When we saw the business cards, we thought you were kinda fake and transactional.” Ouch. Thus I had to ask myself: did the way I show up to “connect” sometimes made people question whether I was genuine?

Over time, the “DG business card” became a symbol for my unapologetic approach to putting myself out there. I may or may not have thrown them around senior year yelling, “These will be valuable in ten years.” No hate to the business card—but I’d like to think I’ve also matured in the way I think about connection building especially in a post grad world.

At its core, networking (as icky/transactional as it sometimes feels) is just being kind to people, staying in touch, and trusting that relationships compound over time. It’s not about extracting value on demand. It’s about building something that might matter later, even if you don’t know how yet.

So how do we know and become known in a way that feels authentic and kind rather than transactional?

Here’s what I’ve learned

1) Treat people like people.

This is the foundation. People aren’t roles, resumes, or future favors. They have interests, families, stress, and lives outside whatever context you met them in no matter how accomplished they are.

The most practical version of this rule is simple: reach out to people when you think of them (thank you @Allison for the reminder). If someone crosses your mind, there’s usually a reason. A quick text. A call. An article you think they’d like. Most of the time, there’s no ask attached — and that’s exactly why it works.

People remember how you make them feel long before they remember what you wanted. This alone keeps relationships from sliding into something transactional.

It also means remembering small details. Asking how something went. Treating mentors, professors, and peers like actual humans instead of checkpoints.

2) Follow the principle of generosity and reciprocity.

This framing comes from Lisa Solomon, and it’s how I now think about most relationships. Sustainable networks are built by giving first and trusting that things come back around over time.

Generosity doesn’t have to be big. It can look like:

• Following up after a conversation

• Making a thoughtful introduction

• Sending a thank-you note

This is where follow-up matters. Staying lightly in touch creates what Tina Seelig calls “luck surface area,” but I think of it more simply as not disappearing. Opportunities tend to find people who stay present.

Asking for advice fits here too — when you do it well.

Asking for help isn’t weak. Vague asking is draining. “Can I pick your brain?” puts all the work on the other person. “I’m deciding between X and Y and would love your take on one specific tradeoff” shows respect for their time and judgment.

3) Do interesting sh*t, and do it well.

This one comes before everything.

Adam Grant tells a story about Pejman Nozad—Persian rug dealer turned founder of Pear VC— not because he was deep in tech, but because he deeply understood rugs, built trust with his clients and was memorable.

As young people, we often feel insecure about how little we know. But doing things that are genuinely interesting to you, and doing them well, gives people a reason to talk to you — and a reason to keep talking to you.

This also reframes networking anxiety. If you’re focused on doing good work, learning deeply, and following your curiosity, conversations become easier. You’re no longer selling yourself. You’re sharing what you’re building.

The best networks grow around the work itself.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with the business card. Or ambition. Or wanting to be known. Those things only feel off when they show up without the rest of you.

The difference, I’ve learned, is what comes with it: curiosity, follow-through, specificity, and treating people like people even when there’s nothing to gain.

Subscribe, share with you friends, and most importantly keep ballin’

—DG

Subscribe now

I signed up for improv because my best friend, Tobey Solomon, took it last spring. When I shadowed the class with her, I found myself fully alert and present for the first time in a while.

It reminded me of my middle and high school debate years: listening to NPR on 2× speed (my debate partner @Eliza will remember this one), on my toes, ready to react during a public forum crossfire. I realized I’d missed that mental posture. What I expected to be a three-week pop in and drop out during my last quarter at Stanford turned into something more lasting — not just a class, but a way of approaching moments.

At first, improv felt like a lighter version of debate: fast reactions and thinking on your feet, without the weight of international news. Over time, I came to see it as the kind of environment we as early adults should seek out more often — high pressure, low stakes. A place to practice decision-making without real consequences.

Improv ended up shaping more of my life than I expected: how I interview, how I talk to people, how I make decisions, even how I teach section. It turned uncertainty into something I could sit with instead of trying to control.

If you have the chance to take this class at Stanford, I couldn’t recommend it more. But for those of you who are already at 22 units for the next four years or post grad, here are my takeaways:

🙌 Lesson 1: Accept the Offers Around You

People tend to think improv is about saying yes. Yes matters, but what mattered more to me was learning to work with what’s already there — the ideas, cues, and information people give you in a moment — instead of wishing the situation were different.

In improv, an “offer” is anything your partner gives you: a suggestion, a detail, a tone, even a small assumption about who you are or where you are. Accepting an offer isn’t passive. It’s a choice to trust the people around you and build with what’s in front of you.

I also learned that the value of an offer isn’t in how interesting it sounds, but in what you make of it. A scene set in a kitchen can be better than one set at an absurd festival if you commit to it and take it seriously. Specificity beats novelty.

As a very type-A person, this lesson translated quickly outside the classroom. It pushed me to pay attention to the signals already being given around me rather than rushing to introduce my own. In dating, in conversations, and in social settings, the question shifted: am I here to assert my perspective, or am I here to listen and respond?

🎁 Lesson 2: Attention Is the Greatest Gift

To listen well and react meaningfully, you have to be paying attention. That sounds obvious, but improv made it unavoidable.

Some of the most impactful exercises were also the simplest. In one, you had to mirror your partner’s movements exactly — down to the smallest details — for fifteen minutes (shoutout Rana). There was no room to drift. You were either fully present or visibly off.

Improv reminded me that real attention is rare. Not performative attention, but the kind where both people are genuinely inside the same moment.

In class, remembering someone’s name or noticing small shifts in tone mattered. You play for your partner’s delight, not for applause or even laughter.

🥊 Lesson 3: Strong Hits, Lightly Held

Closely related to attention is the idea of commitment without attachment.

Improv rewards strong choices — clear entrances, confident character decisions, sometimes even an accent — but it also teaches you to let go the moment the scene changes. You commit fully, and then you release just as quickly. Be decisive, but don’t cling.

The more familiar version of this is “strong convictions, held lightly,” and it’s the phrase that stayed with me all quarter.

It mirrors how I’m learning to make decisions more broadly. Choose something with intention. Move toward it. But stay open to new information. Commit, then pivot. Commit, then pivot. Now there’s a version of this that goes too far (I’m thinking Steve Blank lean startup method over pivoting). But overall this mindset feels especially relevant as I think about post-grad life, where meaningful progress often comes from making bold bets — and having the flexibility to change course when needed.

🧐 Lesson 4: Discovery Over Control

If the earlier lessons are about commitment, this one is about releasing the need to optimize.

In improv, there is no “right” or “best” move. The goal isn’t optimization; it’s discovery. Trying to be right shuts down curiosity and flattens the scene before it has a chance to develop.

We talked in class about how the obsession with being right means you’re not in discovery. Assumptions and guesses aren’t shortcuts; they’re how you remain engaged and responsive. One of my favorite reminders, said half-jokingly, was: “It is so beautiful to see a brilliant mind in panic” (in the context of a scene on stage). Not because panic is ideal, but because it reveals someone thinking in real time.

There’s something freeing about letting a scene unfold without gripping the steering wheel. When I stopped trying to direct everything, the better outcome often emerged on its own — funnier, warmer, more human. I noticed myself practicing this during senior spring, especially in awkward gaps of time (AGOTs). Letting things unfold didn’t come naturally to me, but it felt necessary.

🧱 Lesson 5: Constraints Breed Creativity

After learning to release control, improv reintroduced structure — but in a different way.

We spent a surprising amount of time miming objects, building invisible landscapes, and working with “platform and tilt”: first establishing a shared reality, then shifting it just enough to create movement. Many of the exercises imposed clear constraints. In some scenes, you could only respond using a fixed number of words. In others, every line had to follow a specific pattern, like alphabetical order.

What these exercises made clear is that limits don’t reduce possibility; they sharpen it. Too many options dilute attention. A scene with endless choices turns into noise that dilutes the true signals (yes everything comes back to signals vs noise) of creativity.

The same is true outside the classroom. A life with too many open paths becomes what we jokingly called “offer soup.” Improv gave me a structure to work with: build a foundation, then introduce tension. Make a grounded choice, commit to it, and move forward — knowing you can always adjust later.

✅ Lesson 6: Yes Isn’t Everything

By this point, I had learned that “yes and” is only the starting point.

The beginner rule is to say yes. The more advanced lesson is knowing when not to. Sometimes you follow the energy by saying no. Sometimes you block a suggestion because it breaks the scene. Sometimes you decline an audience prompt because it isn’t true to the world you’re building.

This was unexpectedly comforting for me. My instinct is to maximize openness — to keep options available for as long as possible. Improv reminded me that boundaries can be collaborative. Not every idea needs to be pursued. Not every moment needs to be accepted.

What matters is being in an environment that offers you the right inputs, and being tuned in enough to know where your energy is actually pulling you. Choosing how to respond — yes or no — becomes part of shaping the story with intention and intuition, rather than reacting out of obligation.

🌎 Lesson 7: Improv Is Practicing Being Human

If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that improv helped me move through uncertainty with more curiosity and less fear. It taught me to trust the moment, trust the people around me, and trust myself even when I don’t know where things are headed.

That said, this wasn’t a personality overhaul. I already thought of myself as fairly spontaneous, and I won’t claim to be a changed woman. You’ll still find me every Monday at 8:20 a.m. at Barry’s and every Thursday at the Stanford pool. But I do feel more open to presence and change. In some ways, improv released a version of me — the inner theater kid — that never really had space to show up.

What surprised me most is how orthogonal improv feels to much of what I’ve been trained to do. In my national security work, I’m taught to prepare, to think things through, to frame problems carefully. There are right and wrong answers, and judgment matters. Improv doesn’t replace that. But it adds something different and necessary: the ability to react to new information, trust your instincts, and adjust in real time.

For driven, type-A people, improv offers a kind of agency. It creates space for intuition, for small course corrections, for taking life a little less rigidly. It rewards commitment without punishment for changing your mind.

More than anything, it made me braver and more open. It helped me see relationships as co-authored stories rather than situations to manage. It gave me language for how I want to show up: attentive, adaptable, and willing to move with what’s in front of me.

TLDR: the best parts of a story rarely come from planning. They come from stepping into the scene and responding to what’s actually in front of you — sometimes with a yes, sometimes with a no, but always with attention.

So as this break settles in with conversations, family dinners, and the quieter moments in between, I hope you’ll stay open to the offers being made around you. Trust yourself to say no and when it feels right maybe say yes (yes, yes, yes, yes).

Happy holidays!

—DG

Somewhere between those two scenes, life stretched. I graduated (kind of). I found a new family in Mayfield. I swear I’ve started feeling my prefrontal cortex clock in for work.

So here we are again — year two of this birthday tradition.
Everything I’ve come to know about life at the ripe age of 22:

1. I’m not perfect.

2. No one is perfect. Give them (and yourself) grace.

3. Make big bets.

4. The biggest bet you make should be on yourself.

5. Communicate early and often. Unsaid expectations are the source of most conflict.

6. Be careful what you say to reporters. 🤣

7. Stand for something.

8. Be willing to change your stance when new information arrives.

9. Your attention is your greatest asset. Stop scrolling, start reading.

10. The only true constant in life is change.

11. So, don’t just act. REact.

12. Constraints breed creativity.

13. You can lose the point and win the match.

14. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. (@Shaurya)

15. Borrow great lines and say them confidently. People will think you are wise. (learned this one from the best @Venky Ganesan)

16. Feedback is a gift.

17. Not all gifts deserve shelf space.

18. Kill the tree, win the debate. Preparation is performance. (that ones for you @Jonathan)

19. Ask yourself: what are the perverse unintended consequences?

20. A call is worth a thousand texts.

21. Put peoples’ birthdays in your calendar. Big life requires small actions of love.

22. Be preposterous.

23. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

What is 23 supposed to be? Twenty-one celebrated using a real ID. Twenty-two has a Taylor Swift anthem. Twenty-three frankly feels just like we’re starting to get old.

But I love a reframe. So I’m deeming 23 a transition year, a year of becoming. I’m manifesting a data-driven, defining, daring year of discovery. High pressure, low stakes…I’m calling 2026 to be a year I’ll remember even with an age that seems to be forgotten.

My goals for this next year (keep me accountable) are the following: 1) get comfortable sitting with uncertainty and practicing patience (yawn but needed) 2) hone in and follow my gut instincts and 3) invest in building peak moments with the people I love even as post-grad life gets more real.

And I’ll end with the feeling that’s defined 22 more than anything else: gratitude. Thank you for being along for the ride. Let’s see how all of this holds up in a year.

—DG

I. Why This Matters to Me

Decision-making is hard. I felt that at 18 trying to choose a college, and I’ve felt it even more this year watching people make high-stakes decisions with real consequences.

What surprised me wasn’t how little information people had. It was how much they had, and how little that seemed to help.

At national security software startup Vannevar Labs, I sat next to analysts who had procurement records, OSINT streams, entity lists, and classified feeds open across three monitors. They weren’t struggling to find information. They were struggling to figure out what actually mattered in the next hour, for the next decision, for the next briefing.

In an environment shaped by hiring freezes, burnout, and budget uncertainty, it often felt like our tools weren’t just helping them search. We were being outsourced a piece of their discernment. The people we worked with were smart and committed, but they were also exhausted. The data kept growing. Their capacity did not.

Meanwhile, in Spies, Lies & Algorithms, a political science class I am TAing this quarter, I watched students chase more sources, more facts, more indicators—now with AI as a research copilot—as if truth would eventually reveal itself through sheer accumulation. When they got stuck on a memo, their instinct wasn’t to sharpen the question. It was to open another tab or ask ChatGPT. You could see it in the writing: more content, less analysis.

Over time, both experiences converged into the same realization:

👉 The problem isn’t access. The problem is discernment.

• Which signals do you trust?

• Which do you ignore?

• Which actually change a decision?

Some of the most meaningful work I saw at Vannevar wasn’t “advanced AI” at all. It was sitting with analysts and helping them separate signal from noise—building tools that supported human judgment instead of overwhelming it.

Teaching reinforced the same lesson from the other side. Students come into the course imagining that intelligence is about omniscience. By week three, they realize something messier and more honest: intelligence is the art of making calls under uncertainty, and living with the fact that you will rarely have enough data.

When the stakes involve nuclear false alarms, crisis escalation, or geopolitical misreadings, the distinction between “signal” and “noise” stops being a metaphor. It becomes the whole game.

II. The Inflection

Here’s the shift I’m watching—and the one shaping national security, tech, and policy:

We’re moving from a world defined by data abundance to a world defined by data discernment.

Raw information is no longer rare.
Trusted information is.

At Vannevar, we brought new and previously inaccessible datasets to government clients: narrow OSINT slices, procurement visibility, even ways to proxy other “internets.”

But, we rarely paused to ask the more fundamental question: What data do we truly need for this mission, this question, this decision?

A common worry is that LLMs make the problem worse by simply amplifying whatever data exists. That’s partly true. But as Stanford Professor Mykel Kochenderfer who teaches a famous course called “Decision-making under uncertainty” reminded me, LLMs don’t just amplify data—they unlock previously unusable unstructured data. They radically expand what we could use.

The problem is that we’ve expanded capacity without expanding judgment.

Or as Mykel put it:

“The story isn’t about collecting more. It’s about making data usable.”

III. The Shift — What’s Actually Changed

Supply Side: Cheap but Noisy

We’re on track to generate 175 zettabytes of data by 2025 (IDC via Network World). Most of it is unstructured, redundant, or meaningless.

Storage is easy.
Signal extraction is not.

AI now ingests unstructured data at unbelievable scale. But our workflows haven’t caught up. We still think in dashboards, not decisions.

In national security and healthcare, this is dangerous.

Operators do not need more feeds.
They need interrupts, alerts, and prioritized signals. Defense tech is having a moment, but the hardest problem—trusted decision-support in high-stakes contexts—is still under-served.

As former intel official and current Google risk analyst Yong Suk Lee told me:

“Data is like a sewer—garbage in, garbage out.”

Demand Side: Attention Is the Real Scarcity

Even high-quality data can become a liability.

• 83% of workers feel overloaded by information (StudyFinds)

• Knowledge workers spend 20–30% of their time searching for information they already have (Cottrill Research)

• Information overload directly degrades cognitive performance (PMC / National Library of Medicine)

In my psychology of addiction class this quarter, we’ve talked about how our generation’s attention capacity has eroded even as our information environment has exploded. That combination—more data, less focus—is a brutal setup for serious decision-making. And if history is any indicator, the consequences are high in magnitude.

In 1983, the Soviet early-warning system misread what looked like incoming U.S. missiles. Stanislav Petrov dismissed the alert because previous false alarms had conditioned him not to trust the system (we call this the “cry wolf” syndrome in Spies and Lies). His judgment may have prevented nuclear war—but the takeaway is unsettling:

Too much noise makes the real signal invisible.

At US Central Command in Tampa, during my Hacking for Defense project, I saw the modern version. The ops floor was full of dashboards and feeds: maritime traffic, missile alerts, intelligence updates, logistics. Each system showed something important. Very few helped answer the question, “What should we do next?”

What worried me most was how often assessment was effectively outsourced to contractors and tools that felt bolted on, rather than integrated into the mission. It was “graded homework” masquerading as independent judgment.

More information slowed decision-making instead of accelerating it.

IV. The Under-Appreciated Part

Most people assume this inflection is about better algorithms.
It isn’t.

It’s about process, interface design, and organizational judgment.

At Vannevar, the teams that consistently shipped the most useful tools weren’t the ones furthest from the mission. They were the ones sitting closest to it—forward-deployed strategists who literally sat with commands like INDOPACOM in Hawaii and watched how analysts actually worked. They understood the friction points in the workflow, not just the abstract requirements list.

Good tools teach users how to ask sharper questions.
Bad tools give them an ocean and call it empowerment.

Harvard Business Review summarized this well:

Disorganized systems—not missing tools—are the real productivity killer.
(HBR)

Trusted data has to be contextual, specific, and time-sensitive. Otherwise it’s just background noise with better branding.

V. How the Ecosystem Is Reshaping

The value chain is reorganizing around what actually matters:
refinement → interpretation → judgment.

1. The Data-Quality Layer

Companies like Snorkel, Arize, and Galileo focus on labeling, drift detection, traceability, and integrity.

Their thesis is simple: performance bottlenecks are upstream, not downstream.
If your inputs are messy, your models will be too.

2. Domain-Specific AI Firms

In defense, healthcare, and finance, the winners are the ones building for operators, not executives. Their tools are embedded in real workflows and answer, “What should I do now?” rather than “What’s happening in general?”

3. The Judgment Layer (the frontier)

The emerging frontier is the judgment layer—the layer that decides:

• what counts as a signal

• how that signal is ranked

• when it should surface automatically

Palantir’s Foundry is an early version of this idea—ontology, lineage, and operations in one environment—but it is still mostly pull-based. You have to know what to look for.

The future will be push-based:
systems that bring signals to the operator before the operator even knows to ask.

At Vannevar, I saw how rare this mindset was. Most government users are overworked and underpaid; they are not sitting around proactively hunting through tools for the next obscure threat. They need systems that say, “Here is the thing you can’t afford to miss, and here’s why.”

More preparation beats more repair. And a good judgment layer is preparation embodied.

The companies that control trusted data flows—not just data warehouses—will own the real moats.

VI. Where the Next Startups Will Win

I’ve seen enough dashboards. Every senior official wants a pretty map. The real question is always: and then what?

The next wave of national-security startups will be agentic-native, not dashboard-native. They’ll begin with:

👉 What decision needs to be made, and what signal must surface to make it?

Three clusters are already emerging:

1. OSINT Signal Platforms

Recorded Future and Blackbird.AI are trying to score credibility and coordination, not just amass feeds.

2. Provenance-as-a-Service

RKVST and Truepic focus on authenticating data at the moment of creation. They solve “garbage in, garbage out” at the source.

3. Analyst Copilots

Primer Delta, Anduril Lattice, and Vannevar Labs are compressing triage, search, and briefing into tools that feel more like copilots than static dashboards.

But the market is still fragmented. No one has built the true end-to-end judgment layer that connects upstream signals to downstream decisions in a way that feels inevitable and trustworthy.

VII. Conclusion

In 2006, British mathematician Clive Humby famously said that “data is the new oil,” referring to its growing role as a fuel for economic growth and technological progress (Steinberg, 2025). But oil was scarce and fungible; whoever extracted it held the advantage.

Cobalt, by contrast, is plentiful but difficult to refine and dangerous to mishandle. Data has become the same: abundant, noisy, and valuable only when processed into trusted, actionable insight. In today’s intelligence and national-security environment, the problem is no longer how to collect more data—but how to refine it into knowledge power.

“Data is the new cobalt.”

We’re living through a broader crisis of trust—trust in institutions, in media, in expertise, in the idea that anyone is actually “on top of things.” Young people feel this intensely. It’s not that information is scarce. It’s that we don’t know what, or whom, to believe.

The intelligence community is wrestling with the same problem, just in more technical language. Underneath the talk about ontologies and observability is a basic question: What can we trust enough to act on?

If we care about national security, the answer cannot be “more tools” or “more feeds.” It has to be proactive tools that protect and amplify human talent—systems that help the people we trust to make hard calls think more clearly, not think less.

— DG