“At some point in your life, work on a startup, or at least a thing driven by a small group. Small group energy is amazing.”

— Nabeel S. Qureshi, “Principles”

On my first day at AiSDR, after a few hours of onboarding, I was reviewing a large pull request from a senior engineer. By the next day, I had shipped a change to production that roughly 50 customers could see.

That’s when I understood there was something different about startups.

I wasn’t looking for a job when I heard about AiSDR. Bohdan, who became my colleague and friend, told me about the company in a university hallway and referred me later. I was curious enough to apply, mostly because of YC. Y Combinator had always felt far away; now I could sit down with two YC alumni who had just returned from San Francisco.

They had already exited their previous company and were starting another one in Lviv, Ukraine, this time with an ambitious target: build the leading AI sales platform.

At least it sounded fun.

I edited my CV on the train to Lviv. It was still outdated when I sent it, which bothered me because I thought my CV determined 99% of my chances of getting the job. I know now that it mostly gets you into the conversation. What happens there matters more.

Even then, I was only half-serious about joining. I took the interviews seriously and prepared for them, but my main reason for going was curiosity. I wanted to see how founders like these hired people.

Then I talked to them, and my attitude changed.

Maybe YC founders learn how to do this on purpose. They talk about the company, the problem, what they want to build, and suddenly you can imagine yourself inside it. I started thinking about how much I could learn there. The idea of joining stopped feeling hypothetical.

I still thought I had failed the technical interview, or at least half-failed it. When I code live, I make mistakes that I probably wouldn’t make alone. During the interview, we could search online and ask questions, which I initially assumed was a trap. After a while, asking for clarification felt less embarrassing than continuing to write bad code in silence.

Later, I found out that our CTO didn’t expect a clean solution without mistakes. He wanted to see what I did when I got stuck and whether I could think through a problem with someone else.

My conversation with our CEO felt almost too normal to count as an interview. He asked about my superpower and my startup experience. I had tried to build things on my own a few times, though those attempts felt closer to school projects than real startups. Back then, I couldn’t see how such questions helped him make a hiring decision. Now I understand: he was trying to learn about my values and whether we had the same vibe.

At the companies where I’d worked before, onboarding took weeks. Calls and introductory tasks piled up before anyone let you touch something important. AiSDR worked differently. You started with a real problem, asked questions when you got stuck, and learned by contributing.

That was exciting. It also meant the consequences were real.

A few months later, we were building a backup for our main AI provider. If OpenAI went down, AiSDR would switch to Anthropic and keep running. At the time, though, Anthropic didn’t work reliably with the prompts we’d written for OpenAI, so we had to test the fallback carefully before customers used it.

I built the architecture and planned to enable it only for our team. Instead, I enabled it for every customer. Twice.

Once the first incident appeared to be over, I still needed to test the fallback. We hadn’t found the full cause yet, so I turned it back on and repeated the mistake. It’s embarrassing to write that now, but back then I was sure I was doing the right thing.

Part of the problem was that the button I clicked didn’t work the way I thought it did. The button I thought would enable it for us actually enabled it for everyone except us. I don’t know exactly what it cost us, but I know the incident contributed to some customers leaving.

I expected a difficult conversation with our CTO. Instead, we had a calm one. At some point, he asked:

“Okay. What do you think we can change so this never happens again?”

Nobody needed an investigation to find out who had made the mistake. Instead, we spent the conversation working out why our system had allowed it and how to prevent it from happening again.

Together, we added a safeguard. Two and a half years later, it still sits in the system and does its job.

That incident changed what ownership meant to me. You hear the word often, especially in startup job descriptions, but after that, it meant more than “Who did it? I did.” It meant doing the right thing when nobody was watching. You don’t cut a corner because a task already says “done”; you try to make the result good. A change is done when it works for the customers who depend on it, not when you can say, “It’s no longer assigned to me,” or, “I don’t have a task for it in this sprint.” And when it breaks, you stay with the mess until you’ve fixed more than the immediate symptom.

On my first day, I saw how quickly a small team could trust someone. A few months later, I learned that being trusted also means owning what happens next.

There’s a piece of career advice I return to often: earn a lot or learn a lot, preferably both. In my twenties, I decided to put my learning curve first. A young startup may not match Google or Netflix on salary, but it puts real problems in front of you before you feel ready, then lets you solve them without waiting for permission.

Recently, I reached my 1,000th day at AiSDR. The number gave me a reason to look back. I’m glad Bohdan referred me. I’m glad Oleg and Yura gave me a chance to join.

After almost three years in a place with this much trust and responsibility, where people discuss problems so openly, it’s hard to imagine work happening any other way.

Subscribe now

I started writing online daily more than 630 days ago. These are the things I wish I had understood at the beginning. If this helps even one person publish their first post or just start writing, I’ll be very happy.

Subscribe now

1. Start with one platform. Do not spread yourself. It is better to choose a platform you enjoy - LinkedIn, X, or anywhere else - and, ideally, one where you already know a few people. You can go to other ones later, but at the beginning it takes a lot of time to understand “rules” of each.

2. The two hardest things are starting and continuing. Simple, right? Starting is difficult because your mind produces lots of reasons not to post. Continuing is difficult because those reasons not to post don’t disappear after the first post. Some days they are loud; other days, quieter.

3. Consistency doesn’t mean writing every day. For many people, it means publishing two or three times a week for years. That works too. Choose a pace you enjoy and can keep even during a bad week/traveling/hiking/etc.

4. You can begin by participating. At the beginning, I thought every post should start from my own original idea. Not really. You can comment, restack something useful, or add one thought to another person’s post. It is still writing, and you learn a lot along the way.

5. Get comfortable posting from your phone. One of my friends publishes around 80% of his posts from his phone. I’ve done it only a few times, but I see the point: you can post from almost anywhere and stop waiting for the perfect setup.

6. Writing and publishing don’t have to happen on the same day. Some days I only create drafts. Some days I publish something I wrote a week ago. I still write and post every day. It’s just not always the same piece of text.

7. Scheduling is not cheating. At first, I felt strange using this feature because it meant I hadn’t technically published anything that day. I still write almost every day, but sometimes I publish something I wrote a week ago. Scheduling just makes it less chaotic.

8. Give some posts time to live in your head. Not every idea needs to be drafted and published immediately. Some become clearer after you carry them around for a while. This article is a good example. Some ideas here were in my backlog for 1-2 months. A few I deleted. A few I understood one year ago. A few became better because I added something new later.

9. It is never too late to write about something. I once posted about my work anniversary 12 days later. I also saw someone share a post about her marriage five years after it happened. Why not? I don’t think a story expires just because you didn’t publish it the same day.

10. Some people may make fun of your writing routine. Yeah, this one was surprise for me. But a good lesson is to spend less time with them. Remember that the unfollow button works both ways: you can unfollow people you no longer find interesting, and anyone can unfollow you at any time. Fortunately, every platform puts that button somewhere easy to find, so you can always point out those people to this feature.

11. Let emotions generate ideas, but not make publishing decisions. You are allowed to write something rude or unusually honest. But when I have written while upset, I have often felt a strong urge to publish something I would later (probably) regret. Write it and give yourself time before publishing.

12. Create a simple system for difficult days. When writing feels heavy and nothing seems to work, I return to three questions:

    • What is on my mind?

    • What is bothering me?

    • What would I write if there were no constraints?

    Your system can be even simpler. Its only job is to unblock you when writing feels hardest.

13. Find a few people whose writing you enjoy. Because while reading them, you start paying attention to their style, ideas, structure, or sense of humor. They can be a reliable source of inspiration while you develop your own style.

14. Experiment with formats. Try text, spacing, formatting, images, screenshots, video, lists, and short observations. At the beginning, experimenting is easier because almost nobody is watching (which is actually a good thing). Try to keep that experimental spirit later too.

15. Most writing fears don’t disappear. You may worry about what people think, how a post will perform, whether you made a grammatical mistake, whether you post too often, or whether you will break a month-long or year-long streak. After 630+ days, I still think about grammar mistakes, reach, and posting too often. The difference is that now I react to those fears less and usually publish anyway.

16. You can’t hack the algorithm (probably). At first, I thought I could do it with the perfect hook, enough value, or an aggressive posting schedule. I couldn’t. The closest thing to an algorithm hack is consistency. The annoying part is that consistency works slowly. For a long time, it looks like nothing is happening. Then you look back and realize that 100 posts did much more than any one “perfect” post.

17. Random posting times are worth testing. Not sure there is a perfect time to post. If something is ready, I think it is better to publish it now than wait for an “optimal” hour.

18. Hooks are useful until the post starts sounding like a template. I still try to write good hooks. But if a sentence feels like something I would never say, I usually delete it - even if it should “perform better.”

19. What feels obvious to you may be completely new to someone else. At the beginning, I skipped lots of ideas because they felt too obvious. Then I mentioned some of them in conversations and realized they were not obvious to other people at all.

20. Reading about writing is easier than writing. I like reading about it, but one month of publishing probably teaches more than one more book about writing. Same with sales, building products, and lots of other things.

21. AI can be an assistant without becoming the author. I use AI a lot, so obviously I don’t think it is a problem. Grammar, structure, or checking a sentence - yes. Deciding what I think and writing the whole post for me - no.

22. Practice teaches you to think in ideas. At the beginning, I often thought, “What can I post about? I have nothing. Who are going to read it?” Now I can notice an idea in a call, a book, or a random thought while walking. It is probably just practice.

23. Not sure you can choose a niche before writing anything. I would start with 2-3 topics you already think about a lot and see what is still interesting after 20-30 posts.

24. People don’t see all your posts. It was a BIG discovery for me. Everyone opens the platform at a different time and sees a different feed. Most people won’t see both posts, even if you publish them an hour apart. If you want to post twice, do it.

25. The point is not to sound like an expert. I don’t have strong confidence in lots of things I write about. Usually I’m just sharing what helped or what I noticed. “I don’t know yet” is a completely fine conclusion too.

26. Not every post needs to change someone’s life. Some can be just useful, funny, or honest. That is enough.

27. Remove unnecessary requirements. I often make writing harder by adding optional things: a hook, branded visual, carousel, tag, or perfect time. Most of them aren’t required.

28. Your first posts are allowed to be small. One lesson, one screenshot with context, one mistake, one useful tool, or one question. You don’t need a complete worldview for every post.

29. Capture ideas wherever they appear. I don’t wait for an evening writing session. Most ideas come while walking, reading, after calls, or in random notes. I guess at least half of mine come from books, so I try to capture them immediately.

30. You probably already wrote a few posts without calling them posts. Check Slack messages, emails, or explanations you sent to colleagues. Sometimes the only missing step is to copy the text and edit it a little.

31. Writing in two languages is not a problem. Choose the language that feels right for each idea. I write in English and Ukrainian. Not sure this needs a strategy. Sometimes an idea just comes in one language, so I post it in that language.

32. You can start with a question instead of an answer. Sometimes I write because I already know what I think. Sometimes I write because I’m trying to understand it.

33. Your first post can explain why you are starting. It can be very simple: who you are, what you are learning, why you decided to write, and what you may write about. That is enough for the first post.

34. You can begin quietly. You don’t need to announce a personal brand or promise 365 days of writing. Publish five posts quietly and see if you even like it.

35. Don’t judge the experiment after three posts. Decide in advance that your first 20 posts are practice. Their job is to help you find your topics, formats, and routine - not to prove whether you can build an audience with 10,000 followers. I can’t control 1,000 followers. I can control 20 posts. So I prefer the second goal.

Subscribe now

At the beginning, I said I’d be happy if this article helps one person publish their first post. So if you were waiting for some sign, maybe this is it :)

Pick one small idea and publish it. Your first post doesn’t need to be impressive.

And if someone came to mind while you were reading, send this to them 🙌

Share

The clearest lesson came from an essay about an old game-development book.

I wrote about Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia journals, shared versions in a few small Reddit communities, and something surprising happened: the author responded, people bought the book, readers came back to Substack, and the newsletter grew 38%.

That changed how I think about publishing.

Why does a good piece not automatically get seen by more people?

I know this question sounds simple, maybe even naive. But I keep returning to it because some part of me still wants the internet to reward thoughtful work. You write something useful, you publish it, and then the right people somehow find it.

If the piece is useful, it should be shared. If it took many hours to write, it should not disappear after a single read. If it can help someone, it should travel on the internet on its own.

But of course it does not work like that.

A blog post, a Substack essay, a Reddit post, or a LinkedIn post does not simply enter the world. It enters through a channel, and the strength of that channel can change everything. The same idea can look dead in one place and alive in another.

I do not want this essay to sound like I cracked distribution. I did not. I started to care about distribution because I saw how easy it is for good work to quietly disappear.

For a long time, I thought the main work was writing. Now I am starting to think writing is only half of the work. The second half is helping the piece find the people for whom it was written.

Good writing gets ignored when you do not design its first audience.

Subscribe now

Publishing Is Not Enough

This matters to me because I have already spent hundreds of hours writing, reading, thinking, and trying to build a habit around publishing. My Substack has this little sentence behind it: writing something I will want to reread in 20 years. I still like that sentence because it keeps me away from writing only for the current feed and reminds me that writing can be a long-term bet, not only a daily performance.

But even writing meant to last has to find its first readers.

Substack feels more like home now. It’s not that it magically solves distribution issues; it’s just that a blog post tends to last longer than a social media post. A good essay can still be read months later. Maybe years later. In the happy case, maybe much longer.

That is the beauty of blogs for me: the work does not have to disappear the same week it was published.

Henrik Karlsson captured this better than I can: “If you write the best thing that’s ever been written about a topic, you’ll receive repeat traffic for years to come.”

I like this because it does not treat distribution as a trick. The best distribution strategy is not just pushing harder on launch day. It is writing something specific and useful enough that people keep finding it, linking to it, and sending it to others long after it is published.

But even that kind of long-term traffic usually needs a beginning. Someone has to find the piece first. Someone has to care enough to share it. Someone has to send the first signal that the work is alive.

That is where my thinking changed.

The First Audience Is Part Of The Writing

I cannot take credit for the Prince of Persia book, of course. Jordan Mechner did the work. The interesting part for me was that I could create a doorway into that work. I could explain why this old game-development journal might matter to someone building a long-term project now. I could do the extra research, connect it to my own questions, and make it easier for a specific group of people to care.

Prince of Persia is not a topic for everyone. Most people do not care about the history of a single game, a single book, or a single long creative project.

But some people care a lot.

So instead of only publishing the essay on Substack and waiting, I narrowed the audience. I looked for rooms where the topic already had context: people who like old computers, notebooks, retro games, and artifacts from long creative projects. I shared versions of the post on r/notebooks, r/retrogaming, and r/vintagecomputing.

And it worked.

The author of the book responded to one of the posts. I thought it would already be a success if one person found the essay interesting enough to buy the book. But there were more than that. I found more people who said they bought or ordered it, and it felt much better than seeing a number go up in analytics.

A bunch of people liked it, shared it with friends, and came back to the original essay. The newsletter also grew in a way that was meaningful for its size.

That was the small lesson: the best first audience is not always bigger. Often, it is narrower. Seth Godin’s “smallest viable audience” maps well to Reddit.

What Reddit Taught Me

Maybe I will write about this later, but a few things stood out from my Reddit journey, which generated 1.5-2 million views and 4,000 karma in one month.

Reddit made the feedback loop much faster. I got roughly 400 comments, which I did not expect and had not seen in 600 days of daily posting on LinkedIn. Many people wrote real, thoughtful replies. I could see which sentence people argued with, which detail they quoted, which example made them curious, and which part made them read the full essay.

Reddit also sent early outside traffic. For some posts, it accounted for close to 80% of first-day traffic and remained around 25% after a week. That early boost helped the post get enough initial traction for Substack to start showing it through direct traffic.

The 80% number matters because it changed how I understood a launch. I used to think the home platform had to discover the post on its own. Now I see outside traffic as a way to give the post its first signs of life before Substack, LinkedIn, or any other platform has enough evidence to show it to more people.

Most importantly, Reddit rewarded specificity. A general essay about long-term projects gives people little reason to stop. A piece about Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia journal gives one community a clear reason to care before they know anything about me.

One piece can also have more than one first audience. The work does not need to be published across 10 subreddits and 10 LinkedIn posts on the day of publication. It can attract readers over a few months through versions tailored to different contexts. Another subreddit can engage with the same core idea if the presentation aligns with what that community already values.

After seeing a similar post reach 300k views across three different subreddits, I changed the question I asked before posting: not “where else can I share this?” but “where are people already likely to care about this?”

Distribution Starts Before Publishing

I used to think distribution starts after publishing.

You finish the piece and press publish. Then you ask: where should I share it? LinkedIn? X? Reddit? Family chat?

Now I think that question comes too late.

Distribution starts much earlier. It starts with asking where the first readers will come from, why they would care, what room the idea belongs in, and what title would make someone who has never heard of me curious enough to open the piece.

For my next essay, I would want a simple checklist before publishing:

1. Who is the narrowest group of people who would care about this before they know my name?

2. Which room already has context for this idea: a subreddit, a LinkedIn audience, a Substack note, a group chat, a newsletter, a community, or a specific person?

3. What is the clearest title that helps a stranger recognize the promise without making the piece feel cheap?

4. What proof, story, screenshot, number, or example makes the idea feel real?

5. Does the post give enough value to people, and can they learn something?

6. Who are 2-3 specific people I can send this to before or right after publishing?

7. When should I post it so I can stay present for the first hour, reply to comments, clarify the framing, and notice what people actually cared about?

The checklist does not end when I press publish. The first hour matters more than I expected. I try to stay around, reply to comments, clarify what I meant, thank people, and notice which question keeps appearing. Sometimes I could feel early whether a Reddit post had life just from the activity in that first hour.

Reddit also reminded me that distribution has boring prerequisites. Account age, karma, moderation rules, and community norms all shape what you are allowed to do. I used to think of karma as a silly internet number, and part of it probably is. But a newer account posting too much too quickly can get blocked, while an older account with some history looks less suspicious. My account had been mostly inactive for almost two years, with a few posts every few months, and that probably helped more than I expected.

The same is true with links. At first, I assumed links should always be removed because they make the post look promotional. Later, I left the link in some posts, and they still performed well. So my current guess is simple: the link itself is not the problem. The problem is when the link is the only thing the post offers.

Before I publish, I want the post itself to give people something useful, even if they never open the full essay. That seems better than “distribution through the first comment”.

Awareness Is Not The Point

Views alone are not distribution.

Distribution means the right people see the work, and something changes. Maybe they subscribe, share it, reply, remember it, send it to one friend, come back later, or connect the idea to something in their own life.

After roughly 600 days of posting, I still do not know whether daily publishing was better than writing two thoughtful posts a week. But the repetition gave me useful data: which ideas people remembered, which titles made them stop, and which posts led to something beyond impressions.

The better question is not “how many people saw this?” but “did it reach people who had a reason to care?”

The Part I Want To Be Careful About

All of it comes with a hidden danger.

Distribution can improve the work by forcing clarity. It makes me ask who the piece is for, why they would care, what title would help them recognize it, and which room already has context for the idea.

But distribution can also make the work worse.

It is possible to become too optimized for “stronger channels” and forget the writing itself. A better title can help people notice the piece, and a clever subreddit choice can help it find readers, but neither matters if the piece does not offer something worth reading.

I do not want to become someone who only thinks about packaging, titles, and channels. That would be a sad version of this lesson.

The work should be good.

But good writing still gets ignored when it has no path to its first readers.

And once the right people find it, the piece can keep traveling without me pushing it every day.

The kind of distribution I care about most is not only reach, but also someone seeing the work and knowing exactly who should read it next.

If this essay made you think of one person who would find it useful, you can send it to them. That is still one of my favorite forms of distribution.

Share

I won’t claim this is the most researched article about these two, or that I’m a person with decades of studying them and a shelf of Warren & Charlie biographies behind me. A lot has been written already.

So why read this one, out of the thousands on the internet?

The question I tried to answer is small and personal: what are the most inspiring ideas I took from these two people in my first year of knowing them? They made — I would say — a significant contribution to my worldview, and I’d love for you to grasp something from this little story too. The answer came out as five ideas. You can skip to whichever sounds most interesting; you may already know some of them, and that’s fine.

My girlfriend and I were arguing about that “It’s fine not to know who Charlie is, but Warren? Everyone knows him.” Turned out people don’t, and I was too optimistic about that.

So, a quick word on who they are: Warren Buffett is the famous one — the investor everyone has supposedly heard of, the “Oracle of Omaha,” the man who turned a failing textile factory called Berkshire Hathaway into one of the most valuable companies on earth [1]. Charlie Munger was his partner for over fifty years: a lawyer-turned-investor and a voracious cross-disciplinary reader. Together, they built Berkshire.

And although these two are gurus of investing, you’re not going to see any investment advice here. If that’s what you came for, the things people actually recommend reading are in the notes [2] — most of them are still on my list too.

The overall goal of my writing is to make something I’ll want to reread in 20 years. If along the way a few people find a good idea for themselves, a couple of them apply it, and for one person it changes life in a better way — that’s the best possible outcome.

(Thanks to my previous post, Learned Anyway newsletter grew by 39%. If you missed it, it’s notes from Jordan Mechner’s Making of Prince of Persia journals — and it connects to this piece more than I expected. Would appreciate your feedback!)

Subscribe now

1. The twenty bets

“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it, so that you had twenty punches -- representing all the investments you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.”

-- Warren Buffett

Now stop reading it as investment advice and read it as life advice. Twenty bets, total. Not the small stuff like buying a book or making Saturday plans — the real ones: who you partner with, what you work on, where you live, what you give years to. Two things happen when I picture this card: I hesitate longer before each punch, and every bet suddenly feels heavier, because there are so few. Focus and prioritization, right?

This is the idea I’ve thought about the most this year, and I’m still figuring out why.

My hypothesis: during my university years, I spent my punches on everything at once — programming competitions, soccer, switching into an AI engineering position, an internship at Huawei R&D, and so on — instead of focusing on even one obvious bet: actually having student years. Because of COVID and later the war in Ukraine, I finished my bachelor’s degree fully online, so I can’t say I built a strong network there. From one angle, it looks like a missed bet (even though I learned a lot along the way). From another, it opened doors to stronger bets — I got the chance to teach at a university in my early twenties, for example. And honestly, looking back at all of those, I can’t say any of them were one of my twenty. They were something else: attempts to figure out whether they were the ones. Maybe that’s what your early twenties are for.

Munger lived the investing version of this to an extreme. Poor Charlie’s Almanack describes his style as

“extreme patience combined with extreme decisiveness,”

What I love is that the punch card doesn’t actually tell you to do less (okay, maybe a little). It reveals a strategy choice. You can place several big bets early, while you’re young, and spend years making them pay off. Or you can go one at a time, carefully, and arrive in your forties having used only a handful, with most of the cards unpunched. Neither is wrong. Everyone finds their own balance. But you can’t even have that conversation with yourself until you can see the card.

There’s a quieter version of the idea that I keep circling. Sometimes the best move isn’t choosing a bet — it’s living a life so good that the bet finds you. For twenty years, investors kept recommending Poor Charlie's Almanack to each other. In 2023, Stripe Press reissued it. And Charlie never even wanted the book to exist — he refused to write one:

“I don’t have much interest in writing a book myself. Plus, it would be a lot of work for somebody like me to try and do it in my 70s. And I have plenty else to do in life. So I’m not going to do it.”

He just lived in a way that made other people want to assemble one for him. It reminds me of the line: write a book worth reading, or live a life worth writing a book about. There’s a difference between chasing the outcome and living the life that produces it — and the punch card, weirdly, is permission to do the second.

Their best business bet wasn't a stock. It was each other.

2. The Partner

They almost met twice before they actually did. Both grew up in Omaha. Both, as teenagers, worked at the same grocery store — Buffett & Son, owned by Warren’s grandfather — and never crossed paths. They finally met in 1959, when Charlie, by then a lawyer in Los Angeles, returned to Omaha after his father's death. A local doctor named Edwin Davis had effectively pre-introduced them: he’d told Buffett, years earlier, that he trusted him with his money because Warren reminded him of a young man named Charlie Munger. The two were seated together at dinner at Johnny’s Cafe. Buffett was twenty-nine, Munger thirty-five.

Buffett’s memory of it:

“About five minutes into it, Charlie was sort of rolling on the floor laughing at his own jokes, which is exactly the same thing I did. I thought, ‘I’m not going to find another Poor Charlie's Almanacky like this.’ And we just hit it off.”

But they didn’t merge anything or start building an empire right after laughing together. What excites me about this story is the patience that followed. For years they ran separate partnerships on opposite coasts, talking constantly on the phone, comparing investments, sharpening each other’s thinking long before any of it was formal [3]. In a world that rushes to define and announce every relationship, there’s something to learn from two people who simply kept showing up for each other’s thinking. The trust came first; the paperwork came much later.

This is probably the thing I love most about them, because of the contrast. I was once listening to a talk on “how to do networking in San Francisco,” and one of the tips was to take a selfie with the person and post it on LinkedIn, so people remember you, and you can meet them next time. I think it’s a circus (ukr. блазування). I wouldn’t want to build relationships that way, and these two are proof that it’s not the only way. The selfie approach optimizes for being remembered; the Warren-and-Charlie approach optimizes for being useful to each other’s thinking. Only one of those compounds for sixty years.

Munger turned the same instinct into the bluntest career advice he ever gave — three lines I’ve started treating as a filter for everything:

“Don’t sell anything you wouldn’t buy yourself. Don’t work for anyone you don’t respect and admire. Work only with people you enjoy.”

There’s a quote from Naval about long-term partners (romantic or business) that I love to mention: “If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day” [4]. Sure, you could object — some things aren’t obvious at the beginning, you figure it out together. But I think the objection misses the point: red flags at the beginning have a way of becoming the reason at the end. That said, I don’t believe Warren and Charlie were consciously running any filter. I guess it was much simpler: they just loved hanging out together — and that’s what they did for sixty years.

Here's what I keep wondering at 23: how is a 60-year collaboration even possible? I don’t have the full answer. But part of it, I suspect, is that they used the same tools. Which is the third thing I took from them.

3. Mental models

This is the idea most people associate with Munger, and it’s the one I resisted the longest.

The core of it comes from his 1994 talk at the USC Marshall School of Business, A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom:

“You can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head.”

A mental model is just a pattern of how the world works that you can reuse outside the field it came from. Compound interest comes from finance but explains skills; evolution comes from biology but explains markets.

His claim was that a few dozen big models — from physics, biology, psychology, economics, math — do most of the heavy lifting in clear thinking.

Before this sounds academic, you already use mental models; you just may not have known the name. When you refuse to keep all your savings in one place, that’s diversification. When you stay home on a Friday because you have an early start tomorrow, that's opportunity cost — the price of the party isn't the ticket, it's the morning you lose. When you notice a restaurant is packed and decide the food must be good, that’s social proof — working on you, for better or worse. So you don’t start as a beginner here. You start with a handful of models you absorbed accidentally, and the practice is making them deliberate: noticing them, naming them, sharpening them.

The failure mode Munger warned about is having too few:

“To a man with only a hammer, every problem tends to look pretty much like a nail.”

Let me be honest with you: there are probably ~90 mental models worth learning [5], and I’ve never met anyone who said: “Oh, I understood them in two days.” Getting even half of them — and by “getting” I mean really understanding them at the level of daily application — takes years. That’s also what makes it interesting: it’s one of those rare practices where you can watch your own path of understanding, the way you can with learning a language or a sport. Three models I keep coming back to:

The first is the circle of competence — knowing the edge of what you actually understand, and being honest about standing inside it. The second is compound interest, which sounds like a finance term until you notice it describes almost everything that matters: skills, relationships, reputation, and a newsletter. (Sam Altman’s “compound yourself” section in How To Be Successful is worth the detour.)

The third — and the one I used to write this essay — is inversion. Instead of asking “how do I make this good?”, you ask “how would I make this bad?” and avoid that. Munger’s version is darker and funnier:

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”

Before drafting, I literally asked myself: how would I write a bad essay about Warren and Charlie? The answer saved me a couple of thousand words. (Sure, maybe I wrote a bad one anyway — but the thing to remember: it could have been worse.)

There’s also a humility in the whole project that I find refreshing. Munger wasn’t claiming to be original:

“I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”

Here’s my honest confession about all of this. I was skeptical. I still partly am. I can read about a mental model and think, well, that’s easy — and then the moment I should use it, I resist. I find objections and make excuses. I simply forget about them in the relevant moments [6]. The truth is this isn’t knowledge you acquire; it’s a habit you build, and it’s slow. Munger basically admits the same thing:

“And nobody taught it to me, by the way. I had to learn it later in life, one piece at a time.”

If you're wondering about practical application, don't start with the list of 90. Pick one — inversion is the easiest — and apply it to whatever you're working on this week: how would I make this project fail? Write down five answers and check whether you're already doing any of them.

But models are only the frame. The frame needs new material fed into it every single day — and that was maybe their most underrated habit.

4. They were genuinely intelligent

Develop into a lifelong self-learner though voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.

(c) Charlie Munger

Question I am still trying to figure out: how do we actually decide someone is intelligent? There are lots of smart people, fewer very smart ones, and only a handful you’d call genuinely intelligent — it’s a long path between those words. Especially now, in the AI days, when fluent answers are cheap. When you meet a person and ten minutes in you think okay, this one is different — what’s the signal? I think it’s two things: they know exactly where their understanding ends (and say so), and the details they do hold are connected, retrievable, alive.

By that definition, these two are the cleanest case studies I know. People who met Buffett describe the same shock: he could recall revenue figures, managers’ names, and operating details across dozens of Berkshire companies — from memory, years later. Munger’s children joked that their father was “a book with legs sticking out.” They weren’t born with special memory. The details came from a habit.

The habit was reading at a volume that sounds made up. Buffett estimated he spends five or six hours a day reading — annual reports, five newspapers every morning, stacks of trade magazines. His advice to students, pointing at a pile of reports:

“Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

I tried the newspaper thing, by the way. I was considering a subscription, and then, honestly, I couldn’t answer the question: how is it physically possible to read a full newspaper every single morning — and remember it? I couldn’t even finish that one magazine in the end.

Munger gives an answer to the intelligence question that is almost insultingly simple. It’s not raw horsepower. It’s a daily habit:

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent. But they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were that morning. And boy, does that habit help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

And the engine under the habit is reading. Munger’s description of his partner is:

“If you watched Warren Buffett with a time clock, you’d find that about half of his waking time is spent reading. Then a big chunk of the rest is spent talking one-on-one, on the telephone or in person, with highly gifted people whom he trusts and who trust him.”

Half his waking hours, reading. The other big chunk, talking to people who make him think.

I don’t know why, but I find it so fascinating to read about how much people read. I’m trying to do the same, and here’s what I’ve learned about myself: my honest bottleneck isn’t reading more — it’s processing what I read. I’ve kept notes in Apple Notes since 2023, and the notes pile up faster than I revisit them. Reading without retrieval is just entertainment that feels like work.

Of course, they didn’t remember EVERYTHING. But they remembered far more than the average person, and that surplus is what lets them see patterns, connect ideas, and learn faster.

And there’s something I find reassuring in all of this. The thing that looks like genius from the outside is a boring compounding habit anyone can start.

So far, we have four things: focus, the right partner, models, daily learning. Plenty of smart people have all four and still end up nowhere. I think what made the real difference was a fifth thing — the least pleasant one.

5. Curiosity, concentration, perseverance — and self-criticism

Einstein once said his success came from four things: curiosity, concentration, perseverance, and self-criticism — that’s how he explained, late in life, what made his scientific breakthroughs possible. Munger loved this list, and I’m opening the last section with it because it’s the best four-word description of these two I’ve found.

If you’ve read the first four parts, you’ve already seen three of the four: they were curious down to the smallest details, they could concentrate on a few bets for decades, and they were absurdly perseverant. But those three traits describe plenty of smart people who go nowhere. The fourth one is the separator: self-criticism. They were ruthless about killing their own ideas.

Start with Munger’s test for whether he’s even allowed to hold an opinion — one I find almost unreasonable, and completely right:

“I’m not entitled to have an opinion unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people who are in opposition. I think I’m qualified to speak only when I’ve reached that state.”

Sit with that. Not “I’ve heard the other side.” I can argue the other side better than its champions. Most of us — me very much included — form an opinion first and collect supporting evidence after. He inverted the order. I’ve started catching myself doing the first version, and it happens more often than I’d like to admit.

Munger’s take on Einstein’s fourth point:

“By self-criticism, he meant becoming good at destroying your own best-loved and hardest-won ideas. If you can get really good at destroying your own wrong ideas, that is a great gift.”

Your best-loved and hardest-won ideas — the ones you’re most invested in, that cost you the most to build — are exactly the ones you should be trying hardest to break. That’s the opposite of how most of us protect our thinking. And it pairs with a quieter line of his that doubles as a rule for a good life:

“The safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want.”

In other words: if you want a great partner, be one. If you want trust, be someone people can trust. The same humility runs through everything else in this essay — the daily learning, the models, the patient partnership. They didn’t try to outsmart the world. As Munger said, they

“succeeded by making the world easy for ourselves, not by solving hard problems.”

Closing

If you copy-paste one thing from this essay, make it this:

You get about twenty real bets in life, so choose slowly. Spend them on people you’d stay with for sixty years. Learn ideas, not facts. Go to bed a little wiser than you woke up. And doubt your favorite ideas the hardest.

I find these two interesting not only as investment gurus but as a study in how to think, how to work, and how to spend a life. Like anyone, they weren’t perfect, and there’s plenty I don’t fully resonate with — even in the ideas above. But if you walked away with a single thought worth coming back to, that’s a good outcome for both of us.

I’m happy I had the chance, this past year, to learn a little more about these two people. I’d be even happier to learn a lot more.

If you found this useful, share it with one friend or hit the heart. It means a lot, thanks! And a separate thank-you to people who read the draft of this piece and shared feedback: Polina Len (❤️), Bohdan Mykhailiv and Roman Koshovskyi.

Subscribe now

Notes

1. What Berkshire Hathaway even is. It started as a failing New England textile manufacturer. Buffett bought in, the textile business kept losing money, and the company gradually became the shell through which he and Munger bought other companies — insurance, candy, railroads, a famous stake in Coca-Cola. By the time the textile operation finally closed in 1985, “Berkshire Hathaway” had fully transformed from a manufacturing firm into something closer to a fund with a permanent capital base. The name on the door is a fossil of a business that no longer exists — which, if you think about it, is the punch card again: the original bet failed, but the vehicle it created carried every bet that followed.

2. The shareholder letters. Buffett’s annual letters to Berkshire shareholders are free on the Berkshire site and widely considered some of the best business writing there is. If you only read one, start with the 2014 letter — written for Berkshire’s 50th anniversary, it includes both Warren’s and Charlie’s separate looks back at how the whole thing actually worked.

3. Wesco, and Charlie’s own writing. I have some research on Wesco (Munger’s own vehicle, where he wrote his own — shorter, blunter — chairman’s letters) and a bit of his writing I’m happy to share — just message me at domelian.com/contact.

4. The quote from Naval Ravikant and collected in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (the chapter on working with the right people).

5. The single highest-leverage thing to read. If you only read one document, make it Munger’s The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (~1995, ~50 pages). It may be 80% of the value of everything else and is shorter and sharper than most of Poor Charlie’s Almanack.

6. A personal example of leaving the circle. I once spoke with a lot of confidence about a topic I didn’t actually understand. As soon as people asked real questions, three things became obvious: I didn’t know the subject, I was talking to sound “cool,” and sounding cool while being wrong makes you look not cool at all. It was the clearest lesson I’ve had about the “circle of competence”—I was outside it. The idea didn’t help me, because knowing a concept and using it in the moment are different skills. That gap is what section 3 is really about.

Probably one person will read this and one person will go read the book. That’s more than enough. Sometimes someone tells me, weeks or months after I’ve posted something, that they found the book or article I mentioned. Each time, I feel so happy seeing that. So this is for that one person.

I read The Making of Prince of Persia in Italy in three or four days. Not all-day reading -- bits of it on trains, more of it sitting in the garden, a few entries before bed. It’s a journal by Jordan Mechner, who made the original Prince of Persia on an Apple II between 1985 and 1989. Stripe Press republished it in 2020 with annotations: Mechner at 55 writing in the margins of the notebook he kept at 21. Those annotations give the book its charm.

I picked it up expecting an inspirational story about a young man who shipped a famous game. That is technically what the book is. But it’s also a book for journal keepers, a recommendation for anyone who likes reading raw notes, and a quiet manual for how to live in your twenties (and I think if you build in public, it can be useful too).

The myth of the four-year project

Here is the version of the story you’ve probably heard: in 1985, a 21-year-old kid signs a deal to make a sequel to his hit game Karateka. He spends the next four years writing assembly on an Apple II in a Broderbund office, films his younger brother running around a parking lot to invent fluid character animation, and ships a game that goes on to sell two million copies and define a genre. Four years of disciplined obsession.

I read those four years differently after the book. They were four years, yes. But the long pauses in the middle were not a detour from the work. They were part of it.

Subscribe now

In November 1987, Mechner writes the entry I keep coming back to:

Yesterday I went in to work for the first time since I can’t remember when. I booted up the game and looked at it. It was deeply depressing.

“Think of the game as an old car you’re fixing up in your spare time,” Tomi suggested, urging me to resume work on it. This old car has an engine block that’s rusted solid. I can’t even think about how much work lies ahead.

This is the heart of the book. The “old car” line is from Tomi Pierce, a Broderbund colleague who becomes the most important person in the entire production. She catches him at the moment the game has gone cold, and gives him a frame that lets him pick it up again. The whole project pivots on that lunch.

In June 1990, with the game shipped, Mechner does the math:

In a continuing effort to gather meaningless statistics about my own life, I figured out that I’ve spent about 3,800 hours, or the equivalent of two years’ honest work, on Prince of Persia over the past four years.

Two years of honest work over four years. The other two years were the in-between. Drinks with friends. A week of staring at code and not touching it. The pages that look empty are doing as much work as the ones full of code, and the months he wasn’t building the game were doing the same thing for it.

The book is sold as a story about four years of work. It is also a story about the months when nothing got built. Both matter.

I have caught myself recently feeling some kind of nostalgia for projects with the shape of Prince of Persia -- three or four years long, one person carrying it, a clear end. I am not sure I have a project like that right now.

The journal is part of the project

Mechner started keeping a journal at 17. By the time the book ends in 1993, he’s filled dozens of notebooks. He’s still filling them today, in his sixties, on Hobonichi Techos -- Japanese planners, one page per day. He has over a hundred notebooks since 1982.

The journal in this book isn’t a record of the project. It is the project. He says this directly in a short essay called “Why I Keep a Journal” that he wrote in 2020:

In the four years it took me to make the first Prince of Persia game on the Apple II, my journal did more than record my creative process: it was part of it. I used my notebook as a sounding board -- wrestling with design challenges, discarding ideas and sparking new ones in the act of writing. In dark moments I poured out my angst, questioned whether I was on the right path, if the game was even worth finishing. More than once, my journal brought me back from the brink.

I love this. The notebook is not a passive log. It’s an instrument. I’ve been writing in Apple Notes since 2023 -- half-finished ideas, things I’m reading, what’s going on at work, what I feel -- and reading Mechner made me notice that I could improve my journaling. I’ve been recording, but he was thinking on the page.

He published his journal because Steven Soderbergh published his production journal from sex, lies, and videotape. So Mechner read other people’s published journals as fuel for his own work in his twenties. He kept his own. He read Soderbergh’s specifically, and decided to publish his own thirty years later.

If you’re reading this and you go read the book and later start journaling and maybe publish part of it in the future, the chain extends by one. I would love to read more of these.

Everything is traced from somewhere real

For me, one of the most useful entries in the entire book is November 12, 1988. Mechner sits in his office, his game isn’t fun, and he reverse-engineers what makes other games fun. He looks at Pac-Man, Asteroids, Karateka, Lode Runner, and writes:

What elements do all of the above share?

1. You can tell at any moment, by glancing at the screen, how close you are to finishing, how much is left.

2. There are setbacks and successes on the road to ultimate success. You get a smaller version of the “Whew! Did it!” when, say, you clear a difficult area, or drive a guard back with a series of blows. Some setbacks are fatal, some are just irritating. But when they happen, you feel they’re your own fault.

3. You can hold off on the next task, waiting for the right moment, before saying “OK... now” and going for it... plunging into a period of higher tension, higher chance of either a setback or success.

He follows this a few entries later with a line that should be on a wall somewhere:

Every event has to move you closer or further away from your goal, or it’s not an event, it’s just window dressing.

What’s striking is where the rest of the game comes from. Nothing in Prince of Persia is invented from scratch. Everything is traced from something real:

• The running and climbing animations come from his younger brother David, filmed in white clothes in the Reader’s Digest parking lot in Chappaqua, NY. Mechner traced the VHS frame by frame.

• The opening is Raiders of the Lost Ark (aka Indiana Jones) -- the first ten minutes are explicitly his reference for “an athletic hero in a dangerous environment.”

• The setting is One Thousand and One Nights -- the prince, the princess, the vizier.

• The sword fight everyone remembers -- the prince’s first attempts at combat were going to be a kind of jumping move. It was bad. So Mechner took six seconds of the duel between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). The combat that defines the game is a tracing of a 1938 movie scene.

Mechner writes elsewhere: “In all creative fields, innovation comes from combining things that haven’t been put together before.” The making of Prince of Persia is a brief in favor of that line.

The lunches were the network

I had a note in my reading log that the journal felt strange because it’s pre-social-media (and they didn’t have a lot of things to scroll, which is a little crazy when you remember it; so they just played games). Mechner is constantly having dinner with people. Every week, two or three named lunches and dinners. Tomi. Adam. Roland. Janice. I noted at the time that I’m optimized in the opposite direction -- most of my work conversations are asynchronous and written, and I tend to clear my week down to one or two meetings to protect time for projects.

After the book, I’m not sure that optimization is right. Mechner’s “old car” pivot happened at lunch. The “your game has no triumph” pivot happened at lunch. The composer of the Prince of Persia soundtrack is his father, the rotoscope subject is his brother, and the princess animation reference is the teenage daughter of a Broderbund manager. The auteur identity is “Mechner made it alone.” The actual production was a small village of people he sat next to and ate with.

In a 1990 entry, he writes the cleanest version of this:

The more experiences I have, the more I realize that working with people you like and respect is more important than anything else.

The journal is the place he figures things out alone. The lunches are the place where the figuring gets corrected.

What changes when the project ships

The last third of the book is the part nobody really writes about. The game ships in fall 1989. Mechner has, at twenty-five, made one of the most acclaimed games of the era. He spent 1990 as a gofer (the errand-runner on a film set) on student film shoots in New York City. He spent 1991 in foreign cities -- Italy, Germany, and Switzerland -- learning Italian, then Spanish, and then French. He spent 1992 in Paris and Madrid. The journal entries from these years are slower, vaguer, and more searching. From inside these post-ship years, he writes the entry that I have been thinking about for a while:

I’m happiest when I’m in the midst of things -- struggling, forging alliances and overcoming problems and, dammit, making something.

“What, exactly, am I waiting for?” I know what I want to do with my life. Why not just do it?

This is a 27-year-old man who has shipped one of the most influential games of all time, asking what he’s waiting for. What surprised me is that the journal entries from these years are also among the best writing in the book. It is slower and softer, but the notebook keeps going. He doesn’t yet know that more games are coming -- The Last Express (a 1997 adventure game) in a few years, The Sands of Time (the 2003 Prince of Persia reboot) a decade later -- or that he will eventually move to France and write graphic novels. Over the years, he just keeps writing it down.

One person

If you’ve read this far, I assume you’re the one person. The book is The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985–1993by Jordan Mechner. The Stripe Press edition is the one to get -- the marginalia is the form. The four-minute essay “Why I Keep a Journal” is the appetizer; read it on the train. If you’ve never played the original, SDLPoP compiles in a minute, and the first level is harder than it looks.

If you found this useful, share it with one friend or hit the heart. It means a lot, thanks! ❤️

Subscribe now

Notes

A handful of details about the book and the game that didn’t fit above but are too good not to mention.

1. Stripe Press, and why this edition is the one. Stripe Press is run inside Stripe-the-payments-company. Patrick Collison is a Mechner fan, and the 2020 republication is essentially a labor of love from inside Stripe. The original 2011 self-published edition was plain text only. The Stripe edition is functionally a different book -- the marginalia, the photos, the sketches. If you order one, order this one.

2. The journal you’re reading is curated. Mechner edited heavily before publication. He cut entries about relationships, family money worries, and a few about Broderbund colleagues he didn’t want to embarrass. So the “raw journal” is a journal-shaped artifact. The reader is seeing the version he could live with.

3. The 1989 timing parallel. Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d’Or in May 1989 and was released theatrically that August. Mechner shipped Prince of Persia in October 1989. The two journals he ends up reading and publishing are by people whose breakthrough work was happening in the same season.

4. Shadowman is a memory hack. The most iconic enemy in the game -- the prince fighting his mirror image -- exists because Mechner couldn’t fit another character’s animations in the Apple II’s 128K of RAM. He XOR’d the protagonist’s own animation against itself and called it the enemy. The image you remember is a constraint that became a feature.

5. The soundtrack is by his dad. Francis Mechner -- a research psychologist and amateur composer -- wrote the music. The Prince of Persia theme everyone remembers is by Jordan’s father.

6. The original deal was insane. No advance, no salary, just a 15% royalty. Broderbund gave Mechner a desk and let him work for free for four years on the promise of future royalties. He has since said he “feels stupid” for that deal. It worked out -- Prince of Persia sold two million copies -- but it’s worth knowing how much of the four years were financially unhinged. Eventually, his royalty from the game could be around $80,000+/month.

7. The princess is Tina LaDeau -- the teenage daughter of a Broderbund manager. Mechner filmed her the way he filmed his brother.

8. The level editor that almost shipped. Mechner originally intended to ship a level editor so players could design their own levels after finishing the game. He pulled it at the last minute. Fans eventually built SDLPoP with one.

9. The game flopped for almost a year before becoming a hit. Broderbund’s marketing department underinvested, and Prince of Persia sold poorly through late 1989 and into 1990. The journal entries from this period -- Mechner thinking he’d made a failure -- are the most poignant in the book, and the reader knows what he doesn’t yet.

10. Mechner now lives in Montpellier, France. He moved to France around 2017 and now mostly writes graphic novels. In 2024, he published Replay, an autobiographical graphic novel about three generations of his family -- including, briefly, the four years of Prince of Persia. So the journal has now been re-told a third time, in a third form. Diary → annotated book → graphic novel.

Follow-ups, if you want more. Mechner also has a prequel journal called The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982–1985, available directly from his site. And Ars Technica has a great 11-minute interview with him: How Prince of Persia Defeated Apple II’s Memory Limitations. It covers both Karateka and Prince of Persia, and you can see clearly how the lessons of the first game became the second.

I had been watching YouTube for what I thought was 30 minutes when I looked up and 2–3 hours had passed. That feeling — the one where you can’t remember what you actually watched, you know it’s gone — was the first thing about a screen that scared me.

I’m 23 now, so I’ve been in this fight for about six years.

In those six years, I installed Opal. I installed lots of Chrome extensions that sounded serious enough. I deleted accounts. I uninstalled apps. I turned on screen time, grayscale mode, and content filters. I tried app-locking apps, and then tried app-locking the app-locking apps (okay, lying, the last one I didn’t try yet).

Every single time, my brain found a way around it.

That’s the part that surprised me the most. Not that apps are addictive — everyone knows that. The surprising part is how creative my brain gets in moments of weakness. It treats every limit I set like a puzzle. ” This system is not ideal. There is a workaround somewhere.” And there always is, because I’m the one who set the rules.

I would love to read real research on what the brain is doing in those moments because it doesn’t feel like me. It’s faster. It’s smarter at bypassing friction than I am at adding it.

So the first thing I learned: hard blockers don’t work alone.

What actually works, for me, is hard blockers plus *mind work*. By mind work, I mean visualizing what I’m actually trading when I open the app. Sitting with the trigger that pulled me there — was I tired? bored? avoiding a hard conversation? — and trying to fix the trigger instead of the app.

Opal doesn’t save you. Opal, plus knowing why you were reaching for your phone at 11:47 pm on a Tuesday — that sometimes saves you.

The second thing I learned is harder to say.

The addiction changed shape as I changed. In the early years, I thought the cost was productivity — hours lost to YouTube, time I could have spent studying or building. I could do the math: *even one hour a week for six years is hundreds of hours*. I don’t love that math. “screen time” is the wrong unit. The real cost was somewhere else.

I was less present at things that mattered. I missed jokes, references, whatever was going on — which sounds small, but it adds up to a quiet distance from the people around you. I started to notice it during family dinners. There are small moments I don’t remember because I wasn’t really in them.

No screen-time report will show you that.

I have a background in engineering and an understanding of the shape of the teams on the other side. They are very good. They run experiments. They have metrics on exactly how many seconds it takes me to reopen an app after closing it. They are paid a lot of money to make sure I open the app one more time today.

I’m not going to win this the way I thought I would at 17. I’m not going to install the right app. I’m not going to build the perfect routine that locks me out of everything for good. My brain is too smart for that, and they are way too smart for that.

So I don’t have a system to sell you. I lose hours some weeks. I find the workaround. My brain is still smarter than my blockers when it wants to be.

What I can do is keep noticing. keep asking what I was actually trying to feel when I reached for the phone. keep running small experiments on myself, and keep losing some of them.

And the thing that keeps me running them isn’t discipline. It’s fear—a specific fear — of what those hours actually cost.

— dmytro

I know this because I’ve been you. For six years, I cycled through lots of productivity tools I could find. Notion, Todoist, TickTick, things I can’t even remember the names of anymore. Each time, the pattern was the same: excitement, setup, migration of my entire database from the old tool, a few good weeks, then a slow fade. Not because the app broke. Because something felt off. Something slightly didn’t fit. And then I’d spot a new one, think “maybe this one works,” and start all over again.

Tiago Forte calls this “tool churn” — the endless cycle of switching productivity systems, not because they fail, but because the novelty wears off. Research from Wendy Wood’s habit lab at Duke backs this up: the tool you use matters far less than the environment you build around it. At some point, I realized the same thing. It wasn’t about the app. It was about mindset. The kind of mindset that lets you get things done even with a bullet-point list in Apple Notes.

But here’s what shifted my thinking further: what if you didn’t have to choose someone else’s app at all?

What if you just built your own?

I’m not talking about building the next Spotify or replicating your telecom provider’s app. Those live in a different category entirely — massive infrastructure, licensed content, millions of users. I’m talking about the smaller stuff. Habit trackers. Calorie counters. Personal dashboards. Journaling apps. The kind of tools where someone’s product team made a hundred decisions about how you should organize your life — and got most of them slightly wrong.

Robin Sloan wrote a beautiful essay in 2020 called “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal.” He built a tiny messaging app just for his family — no scale, no users, no App Store listing — and argued that not all software needs to be a product [1]. After reading it, I keep thinking about building one tool that sends the same message to all my family members. Since I don’t have socials and everyone in my family uses different messaging apps, I’d find it useful to type a single message and have it distributed to all the right channels. Maggie Appleton later expanded on this idea, calling them “home-cooked apps.” Software should be personal, not mass-produced.

A year ago, that sounded idealistic. Now it’s just... possible.

My $10 habit tracker

I don’t have much iOS experience. A university course two years ago, and one vibe-coded habit tracking app. That’s it. The app is not rocket science. It’s simple. But it has exactly the set of features I want, arranged exactly the way I want them. Nothing crazy. And I’ve been using it for months.

Here’s what surprised me: I feel connected to it. Even though I built it in a few hours with AI doing most of the heavy lifting, there’s an attachment there that I never felt toward any app I downloaded. It’s the same reason home-cooked food feels different from a restaurant meal — effort, ownership, and the absence of someone else’s vision imposed on you.

My habit tracker isn’t better than Todoist or TickTick in general. It’s better for me. And that’s the whole point. Personal software fits you in a way no product team would ever prioritize, because you’re a market of one. And with TestFlight, your app doesn’t have to stay personal — you can share it with close friends, family, or your whole class without ever publishing to the App Store [2].

The math that kills subscriptions

Here’s the thing: people overcomplicate. Building your own app is just cheaper. Say you use three personal-utility apps — a habit tracker, a calorie counter, and some kind of daily planner. At $5–10 each per month, that’s $180–360 a year. Every year. And you’re still stuck with someone else’s design choices.

An Apple Developer account costs $99 a year. Build all three apps yourself, and that’s $33 per app — a one-time equivalent of three months of a single subscription. But unlike a subscription, the app doesn’t expire. It’s yours forever. You can update it whenever you want. And you can share it with up to 100 people via TestFlight for free — your family, your friends, your team. No one else pays a cent.

The more apps you build, the more absurd the subscription model looks. Five apps? That’s $20 each. Ten? $10. Meanwhile, the subscription crowd is still paying $60–100 a month for tools they half-use. The economics aren’t even close.

Not everyone can do this yet

I won’t pretend there’s no barrier. Right now, you still need the courage to download Xcode. You probably need to not be scared of something like Supabase for a backend. There’s a gap between “anyone can prompt an AI” and “anyone can ship an app to their phone.”

But that gap is shrinking fast. Tools like Replit, Bolt, and Lovable are pushing toward a world where you don’t need Xcode at all.

The strongest argument for building your own tools isn’t that it’s cheaper, though it is. It’s that personal software fits you in a way that nothing off the shelf ever will.

If you disagree or want to share your own perspective, I’d love to hear it. Happy to discuss.

References

[1] Robin Sloan — “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal” — Sloan built a messaging app for his family and argued that not all software needs to scale.

[2] Apple’s TestFlight allows you to distribute apps to up to 100 people without publishing to the App Store.

→ shipping at AiSDR (real product work, real outcomes),

→ building prototypes + testing them with people (instead of “thinking about building”),

→ writing in public consistently (and experimenting with different formats + tracking it with monthly updates),

→ growing up fast (relationships, moving, travel, and “adult” responsibilities like investing).

One small trick quietly changed everything: writing monthly updates for 1 year. It forced honesty, made progress visible, and turned “time passing” into “compounding.”

Subscribe now

Work: AiSDR (YC-backed startup)

This was a big shipping year.

I did a lot, but the important part isn’t “features shipped.” It’s that I’ve became better at (but for most work in progress, it is not trivial and not something possible to define “done”; continues learning, you know):

• decision making
  turning "i don’t know what to do" into a clear plan. frame the problem, pick direction, commit, change fast when wrong

• prototypes and testing
  going from idea to something real quickly. use feedback to decide: double down, iterate, or kill

• prioritization
  choosing the few things that actually matter. saying no more. protecting momentum because in startups focus is everything

• communication
  writing early and often. crisp updates, clear tradeoffs, fewer surprises. align faster so we ship faster

• ownership
  taking problems end to end. define success, drive the work, stick with it after launch

shipping features is cool but shipping better? that's the real win

Ideas Center UCU: talks + building

Three chapters I’m proud of:

1) Public speaking experience

I did 9 lectures/talks (IdeasLab, Venture Camp Ukraine, etc.). Speaking is underrated: it forces clear thinking and makes you confront whether you actually understand your own ideas.

2) I built the Ideas Center website

I also built ideascenter.ucu.edu.ua as a freelance project. Shipping something public that others depend on is always a good kind of pressure.

3) Helped with building IdeasLab

Since November, I haven’t worked at the Ideas Center UCU, but I'm glad to have had this experience for almost 2 years.

IdeasLab ❤️

P.S. Ideas Center UCU, founded in 2018 at the Ukrainian Catholic University, it’s an educational center for accelerating student-led startups and scaling ambitious Ukrainian entrepreneur

Building: prototypes + testing with real people

This year, I got much better at one founder skill:

stopping the endless planning loop and testing reality fast.

My loop became:

1. find a real pain (often my own),

2. build a scrappy prototype,

3. put it in front of people (and talk to them),

4. iterate based on what they do (not what they say).

I built multiple prototypes and tested them with people. Some got traction signals (including early paying). The honest truth: the next level is committing to a long enough period for compounding to take effect.

P.S. ai-calendar.com, lnksbot.com, agents for personal use, etc.

Writing: the compounding engine

I used to think writing was “content.” This year appears to be a thinking and distribution system:

• Monthly updates for 12 months

• Daily writing on LinkedIn (3600 followers with ~500,000 impressions)

• LinkedIn newsletter: 380 subscribers

• X: small audience (220 followers), surprisingly high reach (impressions way above follower count - 389,000)

The best part wasn’t metrics. It was identity: writing made me think more clearly.

Tiny habits that compound (my “operating system”)

A bunch of small systems made the year work:

• Daily journaling (clear head, faster decisions)

• Calendar-first life (scheduling helps to be more organized)

• Monthly planning (instead of pretending I can plan a year)

• No mindless scrolling (and aggressively limiting all socials: Opal, time blockers, etc.)

• Short feedback loops: build → test → learn, repeatedly

• Reading: I’ve read ~22 books and made this habit a consistent one)

When I stop doing these, my output drops fast.

Health: tennis + gym

I had strong stretches:

• tennis became a real pillar (not a random hobby),

• gym was consistent for parts of the year.

But I also learned a painful truth:

travel/moves still break my baseline

Will try to build more reliable system around that.

Traveling

• Kyiv, Cherkasy, Bukovel, Morshyn, Kamianets

• Ivano-Frankivsk (and even a goat farm 🐐)

• Poltavshchyna / Poltavchina (multiple times)

• Faine Misto + mountains trips

• Poland, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Italy, France

• moving to Poland

Investing: first real year of learning

This year I started taking investing seriously:

• built an actual pipeline (Interactive Brokers, process, learning time and share about here and here),

• started buying stocks (but made a mistake and diversified too much 😅),

• studied quality resources (including Poor Charlie’s Almanack and other investing thinking).

A few drawbacks / things I want to improve (being honest):

• I need a clearer written investing framework (rules > vibes),

• I want to be more focused and have few bets (researched, instead of “hype”),

• I also have a little domain portfolio (just the ones I like and for fun).

Relationships

I still don’t share much publicly about relationships. 🙈

But I love you, Po ❤

2026 direction

I don’t set yearly goals and prefer monthly ones. But the next year needs few bets and disciplined execution.

I want 2026 to be the year where:

• I pick fewer bets,

• I protect my baseline,

• Invest a lot into health,

• I would do more small pet projects in the scope of personal R&D.

So much interesting stuff around.

Subscribe now

Trying to experiment with different concepts of writing.

Before I’ve already been writing for the last 400 days, mostly on LinkedIn. A few months ago, I started using X. For now, I’m not sure about my goals or what I want to achieve with it, but my motivation is pretty simple: it helps me think more clearly.

Why do I think it would not work out?

1. It makes writing a little bit complicated as the process
2. I can make no difference and be useless because the newsletter format doesn’t work on LinkedIn
3. I’m bad at writing in such a format (but would be happy if I learned something along the way)
4. Will not be able to do it consistently (without it, it doesn’t really make sense)

But it's still a weekly thing, and I’m curious to try.

Today, I would also like to share an experiment I’ve tried: flexible studying hours. I’ve started reading what I like, listening to podcasts I have been interested in for a long time, and taking a deep dive into different topics, all while asking myself various questions.

It is interesting how this process brings different ideas. You find intersections with what you are working on and possible futures. Allow your curiosity to explore a variety of interesting topics.

I will try to have more of those experiences, but sometimes it is hard to find an extra 6 hours. So maybe it makes sense to have them as 1-2 hour sections.