The past few months have been deeply frustrating. I’ve been trying to get into a select group of American startups as a writer to no avail. Dozens of applications sent, and still no good news. I know the US job market is brutal right now, but it got to a point where it started messing with my head.

Maybe I’m punching above my weight. Maybe I’m biting off more than I can chew. Maybe I’m just not good enough.

But these things can’t be true. I’ve looked closely at the work coming out of those teams, and my craft is better than a lot of what’s getting published. So if it isn’t skill, there must be other forces at play.

Last week I watched Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, which documents Ye’s come-up from an uncredited producer in the late 90s to a global icon. Long before anyone took him seriously as a solo artist, he had a friend follow him around with a camera to record his rise. Talk about delusional self-belief.

What struck me most was that despite how undeniably good his music was, record labels refused to sign him as a rapper. They simply didn’t believe he could sell records.

Think about that for a second: executives sat in rooms listening to early cuts off The College Dropout - tracks that would eventually redefine modern music - and still passed.

They liked the songs, but hip-hop at the time was dominated by a specific, hardened identity. Ye was just a kid in a pink polo rapping about normal, everyday life. He didn’t fit their narrow template for what a star looked like, so they told him to stick to making beats for the “real rappers.”

This made me reflect on what I’m also experiencing in life, and I came to the conclusion that rejection is rarely a true reflection of your ability.

When an institution turns you away, it is seldom a judgment on your worth. It is almost always an artifact of their own limitations - their past experiences, their unspoken anxieties, their institutional blind spots, and the sheer momentum of people who can only recognize what has already been proven. They are trying to measure an unwritten future using the rigid, outdated instruments of yesterday.

But you have to cultivate an unshakeable belief in your own ability. Other people’s inability or refusal to see your value has zero bearing on whether that value exists.

Another powerful thing I noticed is that Ye never bought into their evaluation of him. He kept pushing the reality that he was a rapper, period. Eventually, Roc-A-Fella signed him, The College Dropout dropped in 2004, and the rest is history.

When the album won Album of the Year at the Grammys, he delivered his famous “I guess we’ll never know” speech(which, by the way, he had been practicing long before his album was even released. Once again, talk about delusional self-belief).

When you are pushing past the boundaries of what a company or an industry expects, you cannot rely on external validation to fuel your engine. You have to extend grace to the gatekeepers for their temporary blindness, understand that no one owes you belief except yourself, and carry an internal flame so fierce that it eventually forces the room to catch fire. Keep building, keep creating useful things, and let your conviction outlast their doubt.

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Quote I’m pondering

"The history of our species is mistaking the limits of the known for the limits of the knowable." -Maria Popova

What I’m reading

William Blake’s Most Beautiful Letter: A Timeless Defense of the Imagination and the Creative Spirit (Maria Popova)

In 1799, the Rev. Dr. John Trusler, a moralist who favoured literal, caricature-style illustrations for his sermons, commissioned William Blake to paint a watercolour representing malevolence.

When Blake delivered a highly symbolic, allegorical scene featuring family members and lurking demons, Trusler rejected it as an incomprehensible work from the “world of spirits” rather than real life.

William was insulted by the demand to mimic cheap commercial prints for financial survival, so he fired back on August 23, 1799, with a witty, uncompromising letter defending his visionary art style and asserting that true beauty is necessarily obscure to weak minds.

Here is an excerpt of the letter:

So in the article, Maria contextualizes and analyzes William’s defiant letter, framing it as a timeless, universal defense of artistic integrity, personal genius, and the creative spirit against commercial corruption.

Song I’m listening to

“Canis Lupus” by Alexandre Desplat. I watched The Fantastic Mr. Fox earlier today and immediately fell in love with this soundtrack(don’t know why). I’ve been listening to it since. It’s a fantastic movie, by the way(no pun intended). You should check it out.

Cool things I found online this week

1/

👂👂

2/

“A memoir is the instagram version of the diary." -Maria Popova

Okay Maria😂😂

3/

Check out this website(https://www.unprompted.cool/). You spin a wheel, it throws a random topic at you, and you get a limited amount of time to learn as much as you can about it. It’s good for people like me who have this uncontrollable urge to learn about everything.

4/

I've been telling people this for a long time. There doesn't have to be a single north star in life. You can just create cool things and see where it leads you. Enjoy the mystery of being a polymath.

5/

😂😂The 'good ol' days' are different for everyone, as we can't disagree that history is filled with so much violence and bloodshed. But I think we can all agree that 2016 was a pretty good year. I miss it.

That’s all from me today.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.
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Until next time,

Bechem

The older man gestures wildly, mimicking a flipping motion; the younger one laughs, a sharp, sudden sound that cuts through the bass of a nearby car stereo, and rescues the meat. They high-five, grease-stained and grinning, before turning their attention back to a shared smartphone screen displaying line-ups.

If you spent the morning scrolling through social media, this scene should not exist. The algorithms that feed our screens are meticulously engineered on a diet of friction. They tell us, with a steady, unending urgency, that the world is broken beyond repair. We are trained to view other nations as monoliths - collections of trade deficits, border disputes, military positioning, and cultural hostility. The screen presents a map of total friction.

But out here on the hot asphalt, the monolithic “Other” has a habit of dissolving into a guy named Kenji who really cares about charcoal temperature.

Maps written on grass

We have become accustomed to looking at humanity from a safe, intellectual distance. It is easy to write off a country when it is merely a coloured shape on a geopolitical infographic. The tragedy of the modern media landscape isn’t just that it amplifies conflict, but that it convinces us that every citizen of a rival state is an extension of their government’s worst impulses.

A massive tournament acts as a violent disruption to this long-distance fiction. When a million people cross physical thresholds and land in unfamiliar suburban host cities across North America, the grand political narratives begin to fray at the edges.

Consider the sudden, viral obsession with the tournament’s smallest nations. When a breakout goalkeeper from a tiny island territory held off an athletic superpower last week, the internet didn’t react with nationalism or tribalism. It collectively adopted him. His social media following exploded by millions overnight.

Watching thousands of neutral fans in a stadium suddenly screaming themselves hoarse for a country they couldn’t have located on a map three days prior reveals something fascinating about human nature. We have an innate, deeply buried hunger to see the small survive against the giant. We want the world to be fair, even if it’s only fair inside a ninety-minute box of white chalk lines.

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Shared agony

How does a single game possess the leverage to lift decades of media-driven hatred, even for an afternoon? The answer lies in the concept of temporary collective joy.

In day-to-day life, our identities are defensive structures. We walk through the world guarded, processing information through a filter of “us” versus “them.” But a stadium operates in a different metaphysical space. It introduces what sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence” - a state where a massive group of individuals simultaneously experiences the same intense emotion.

When a ball hits the back of the net, or a crucial penalty is blocked in the 89th minute, thirty thousand people in a single seating bowl do not experience thirty thousand individual reactions. They experience one singular, massive spasm of ecstasy or heartbreak.

In that microsecond of shared intensity, your mental guards cannot keep up with your nervous system. The decades of conditioning, the news headlines, and the historical grudges require active effort to maintain. Collective joy does not. It completely bypasses the analytical brain. For a brief window, you are fused to the stranger next to you by the primitive, beautiful equalizer of shared vulnerability. You are both powerless to the same arbitrary event.

Parking lot liturgies

Step away from the luxury suites - where corporations host executives in air-conditioned, glass-walled pods - and move down into the democracy of the public transit lines and tailgates. This is where the real citizen diplomacy occurs, entirely unscripted and thoroughly messy.

It is a sensory assault of beautiful contradictions. The heavy, sweet smell of Texas brisket blends with the sharp spice of imported kimchi. Languages collide, fragment, and then miraculously resolve themselves into a universal lexicon of hand gestures: the winced eye of a near-miss, the head-in-hands of a red card, the explosive, cathartic roar of a goal.

There is a clear sense of relief in these spaces, though few would articulate it that way. It is the relief of being allowed to drop your guard. For years, we have been told to look at the foreigner with a baseline of suspicion.

Yet, when an American suburbanite insists on giving up their seat to a travelling family from Bogotá, or a local teenager eagerly introduces a group of tourists to the dizzying choices of a 24-hour convenience store’s fountain drinks, a crack forms in the doom-scrolling narrative.

People do not look like monsters when they are sharing a bag of ice in a stadium parking lot. They just look like people, slightly sunburnt and desperate for a cold drink.

I firmly believe that our world is not divided by race, gender, class or religion. It is divided by wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, gender, class and religion.

It is dangerous, of course, to mistake a football game for global salvation. A healthy dose of skepticism is required here. When the final whistle blows later this summer, the tourists will line up at airport terminals, and the cold machinery of global politics will resume its regular programming. The borders will tighten once more. The algorithms will refresh, serving us fresh reasons to look across the ocean with anxiety.

This is the bittersweet reality of the temporary utopia.

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Collective amnesia

Late in the evening, after the crowds have dispersed, the stadium takes on the quality of a cathedral after a service. Empty plastic cups rattle across the concrete in the wind. Volunteers sweep up the remnants of a party that spanned a dozen time zones.

At a transit stop down the road, two fans sit on a bench, their shoulders slumped in exhaustion, watching the headlights of passing buses. They look content, the kind of heavy satisfaction that only comes from being part of a massive, loud, living crowd. Tomorrow, they will return to their respective corners of a complicated planet.

It is easy to blame the sudden death of this harmony on the algorithms, the politicians, or the distant architects of global media. That is the comfortable exit ramp. But the more unsettling truth is that the screen only feeds us what we are willing to consume. The friction outlives the tournament because, on some dark level, division is easier to maintain than the exhausting, vulnerable work of sustained empathy.

If our default setting when thrown together on a patch of concrete is curiosity, hospitality, and shared joy, then why do we choose to remember the hostility of a world we’ve never met, while choosing to forget the grace of the stranger who stood right in front of us?

Thumbnail image: NPR

Song I was listening to while writing this: Oblivion by Gibran Alcocer and Juan Arenosa

Interesting article I read this week: The Wrath of the Gods(How reading can lead to resilience in the most trying times) by Ted Scheinman

Great quote I came across:

“Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.” - Will & Ariel Durant(The Lessons of History)

That’s all from me for now.

Until next time,

Bechem

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

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I mean, I totally enjoy the philosophical ideas embedded in them, but I just don’t enjoy the narratives or the fictional worlds surrounding those ideas.

And I kept forcing myself to like these books because of bookstagram and people online who make it sound like reading fiction is the only thing that makes you a “real reader” (whatever that means).

So I felt a ton of guilt. Like maybe I wasn’t doing it right, no matter how hard I tried.

Let’s take The Metamorphosis, for example. I’ve read it. I get the whole vibe. I fully understand what Kafka is saying about human isolation, the absurdity of modern labour, and how quickly people alienate you when you stop being useful.

But as a story? I just didn’t enjoy it the way people hype it up. I know Kafka stans are gonna cook me for this, but I’m just being honest. I would have been ten times better off just reading a dense philosophical commentary about the book than slogging through the text itself.

This is the same with almost every other fiction book I’ve read.

In fact, the last time I enjoyed reading a work of fiction was back in secondary school.

We read books like Achakasara by John Nkemngong Nkengasong (a very, very underrated book), Son of the Native Soil by S. A. Ambanasom, Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and Animal Farm by George Orwell (this is a great book, but I hate the ending. I’m a sucker for happy endings).

I really loved reading these books, and I’d happily pick them up again.

But in the past few years, I’ve enjoyed reading books like The Lessons of History (Will & Ariel Durant), The Dawn of Everything (Graeber & Wengrow), and my current all-time favourites, Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu & Robinson) and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson). I love these books soooo much and constantly revisit them.

Growing up in a poor country, I’ve always wondered why some countries are wealthy while others are trapped in poverty, despite having an abundance of raw materials and natural resources. No book has ever explained the institutional mechanics behind this paradox better than Why Nations Fail.

Similarly, I’ve always been obsessed with figuring out why some individuals crack the code to wealth and others don’t. No book outlines how to optimize your mind for both wealth and baseline happiness better than The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Fiction wraps abstract truths in metaphors, characters, and plot arcs.

But I want those truths delivered directly… so I can analyze the mechanics of human nature without the scenic route.

And look, I’m not anti-story across the board. I will happily watch a cinematic adaptation. Dune is a good example. I absolutely loved Part 1 and Part 2, and I’m counting down the days until Part 3 is released. But would I ever sit down and read Frank Herbert’s thousand pages of tiny sci-fi print? Absolutely never.

For years, this preference made me feel like an alien in book clubs.

It wasn’t until recently that I did a little digging to find out if something was wrong with me

So, is something wrong with me?

Short answer: No

In fact, my reading preferences are actually quite common

Research shows a clear split in reading preferences. Gallup polls found that when given a choice, about 46% of readers lean mostly nonfiction compared to 35% fiction.

Men especially gravitate toward nonfiction, and the preference grows stronger with age.

Psych studies reveal a double dissociation: fiction readers often score higher on empathy and social cognition (they get better at reading people through stories), while nonfiction folks tend toward analytical, systems-oriented thinking.

Neither is superior. They just train different parts of the brain. Fiction lights up empathy and imagination networks. Nonfiction hits critical thinking and knowledge-building harder. Some of us are wired to prefer the direct mechanics of reality over narrative packaging, and THAT’S OKAY.

Maybe that’s why Albert Camus is the one major exception for me. I love Camus. Even though his works like The Stranger or The Plague are classified as fiction, they function differently from a standard novel. His narratives are incredibly stripped-back, serving purely as an unfiltered laboratory for his philosophy of Absurdism. His works focus more on the idea than the plot.

He doesn’t waste your time with flowery narrative padding. He uses the bare minimum of a story as a direct pipeline to challenge your existential worldview.

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Reading is, at its core, a deeply personal exercise

Society has a bad habit of romanticizing “devouring novels” as the ultimate, superior intellectual path. It’s a myth.

Reading fiction can build empathy and theory of mind, sure, but so can deeply researched history, psychological case studies, brilliant documentaries, and keen real-world observation.

Fiction’s moral or intellectual superiority is just one of the many lies we’ve been told about reading culture.

Another classic lie is that you are morally obligated to finish every single book you start. There are literally millions of books on this planet, and given the reality of human mortality, you are never going to be able to read even a fraction of them. So why waste your limited hours on earth on a book that feels like a chore?

A truly great book has the power to permanently rewire your perspective on reality. A great book can change your life. If a book isn’t hitting that mark for you, drop it immediately, so you can have more time to find the one that will change your life.

Life is way too unpredictable to read books you think you should like.

One last reading myth I’d love to smash is the obsession with high book counts.

Seed investor Julian Shapiro said it brilliantly in this tweet some years back:

“Reading many books is the most socially accepted vanity metric for adults.”

He’s completely right. Somewhere along the line, we turned reading into a competitive sport where the person who speeds through 50 shallow books a year wins a gold medal in intellectual vanity. But reading should be more about integration and less about accumulation.

It is infinitely better to find three or four monumental, life-shifting books—like Why Nations Fail or The Almanack of Naval Ravikant—and read them five, ten, or twenty times until their core frameworks become the lens through which you view the world.

True insight comes from deeply digesting information that fundamentally upgrades your cognitive software.

So just read whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want.

But endeavour to read if you can.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

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That’s not an insult. It’s just an observation about how belief forms… socially, long before you’re old enough to interrogate it.

Think about the first time you formed an opinion about money. Where did that come from? If you grew up in a household where debt was shameful and saving was sacred, you probably carry some version of that belief right now, dressed up in your own language, justified with your own reasoning, but fundamentally the same furniture your parents had. Same goes for your politics. Your idea of what success looks like. Your instinct about who to trust.

By the time you’re consciously “deciding” what you think, most of the deciding is already done.

What feels like reasoning is usually archaeology.

Borrowed furniture

Nietzsche had a useful image for this. He described most people’s convictions as inherited furniture… heavy, old, moved in before you could protest, arranged to make someone else’s house comfortable. You live around it. You defend it if someone tries to take it. But you never chose it.

You can see this most clearly in other people, which is part of what makes it so easy to miss in yourself.

You’ve met this person: certain about their political views, can’t engage with a single counterargument without getting visibly agitated, and if you trace it back far enough, holds almost the same beliefs as the community they grew up in. They’d be offended if you pointed that out. They have reasons. They’ve done research. But the conclusion was there long before the research began.

The research was the defence, not the discovery.

And the uncomfortable part is you’ve also been that person. So have I.

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Identity is the lock

At some point, opinions stop being things you hold and start being things you are. You’re not someone who believes X… you are an X person. And once that shift happens, evidence stops working the way it should. Facts that confirm the belief get absorbed instantly. Facts that challenge it get explained away.

This is why arguments rarely change anyone’s mind. You’re not engaging with someone’s reasoning. You’re threatening their identity. And people defend their identity the way they’d defend their life.

You can watch this happen in real time during any heated conversation about sports, religion, or politics(ESPECIALLY politics). The moment someone stops responding to what you’re actually saying and starts repeating their original point louder, the topic has stopped being the topic. What’s being defended now is the self.

Trust me, I do this sometimes too. No matter how hard you try to convince me that Batman is not the best superhero of all time, or that Chelsea FC is not the best football club in the world, I will not change my mind. You’re better off watering plants in the rain.

So how do I keep myself from doing this all the time?

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1. Hold positions, not possessions

The shift that matters is learning to treat your opinions as positions rather than possessions. You can argue for a position with full conviction. You can defend it, build on it, stake something on it. But you remain willing to vacate it if something better comes along.

The moment a belief becomes a possession, you stop arguing for it and start protecting it. That’s the line worth watching in yourself.

One way to find that line: genuinely get curious about the history of your own belief.. Think about an opinion you hold with real confidence right now. When did you form it? What would have had to be different—your upbringing, your social circle, the country you were born in—for you to have landed somewhere else entirely?

That exercise doesn’t invalidate what you believe. But it loosens the grip. You start to see the belief as something that happened to you as much as something you chose. And that small shift in perspective creates room to think, rather than just defend.

2. Separate the update from the loss

The other thing worth understanding is why changing your mind feels so costly.

Most people avoid updating their beliefs not because they’ve weighed the evidence and decided they’re right, but because they’ve unconsciously fused “I was wrong” with “I am stupid.” Those are different things. One is new information arriving. The other is a verdict on your worth as a person.

They feel identical from the inside, which is why people will sometimes hold a position they privately doubt for years rather than face what feels like a humiliating public reversal.

But think about the people you actually respect most. Not the ones who were never wrong. You don’t trust those people, even if you can’t say why. You respect the ones who visibly updated. Who said, openly, “I used to think this, and I no longer do.” That quality reads as integrity, not weakness.

Changing your mind doesn’t mean the old version of you was an idiot. It means you got new information. That’s not a loss. That’s the whole point.

3. State the arguments for the other side

This is something I learned from Abhishek Chakraborty, which he learned from the great Charlie Munger, and it’s one of the most powerful intellectual disciplines I’ve tried.

Earn your opinion by mastering the best argument against it.

Before you claim a belief as your own, you must first understand the strongest possible case against it. So well that you could argue that opposing view better than the smartest person who actually holds it.

Most people defend ideas they barely understand and attack caricatures of the other side, but intellectual honesty requires the opposite. It demands that you steelman the argument against yourself, confront its best reasoning, and only then decide where you stand.

I love the way Charlie Munger put it:

“It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents.”

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One honest question

You don’t need a system for this. You just need one question, asked honestly, about any belief you hold with unusual force.

Did I actually think this, or did I just end up here?

There’s a real difference between an opinion you arrived at through genuine friction and doubt, and one that arrived in you through osmosis. One you own. The other owns you.

Most people never ask which is which. Not because they’re incurious, but because the answer is occasionally uncomfortable enough to avoid.

The good news: the asking itself is the practice. You don’t have to abandon every belief you didn’t fully earn. You just have to hold it a little more honestly — aware of where it came from, open to where the evidence leads, and clear that it’s a position you occupy rather than an identity you inhabit.

That’s all. But trust me, it’s rarer than it sounds.

Until next time,

Bechem

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

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You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

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I’ve been in Rwanda for three weeks now. I’ve visited Lake Kivu, wandered through Gisenyi, explored Kigali… and this country is stunning in ways I didn’t expect. But nothing here has moved me the way one room at the Kigali Genocide Memorial has. A room I was convinced I was ready for. I wasn’t.

I’d read about the genocide before coming to Rwanda. 800,000 people killed in 100 days, roughly 8,000 a day, which works out to five people every minute for three months. I’d processed that intellectually, the way you do with statistics that are too large to really feel. But then I walked into that room called Tomorrow Lost, and there were photographs of children. Children with names, ages, and favourite foods listed next to their pictures. A three-year-old. A seven-year-old who liked football. And next to each name, a cause of death.

I had to leave.

I stood outside in the sun for a while, not really sure what I was doing. And then a question started forming in my head that hasn’t left my mind since:

What does it take to kill a child with your bare hands?

Not a soldier following orders from a distance. Not a general pushing pieces on a map. A person. A neighbor. Someone who, six months earlier, might have borrowed a tool from that child’s father or greeted that child by name in the street.

What happens inside a human being that makes that possible? And why do I have a feeling the answer has something to do with all of us?

How to make neighbours kill each other

Before I go any further, I want you to know that what happened in Rwanda is far too complex and layered for any single article to capture honestly. What you’re about to read is one thread, not the full picture. So please, do your own digging after this. It deserves more than any of us can give it in one sitting.

The genocide wasn’t a spontaneous eruption that started in April 1994. It was built over decades.

Belgium, which colonized Rwanda, had imposed a rigid ethnic classification system on a population whose divisions had previously been more fluid. Under Belgian rule, Hutus and Tutsis were given identity cards that fixed their ethnicity permanently, turned a social category into a racial one, and created a hierarchy with Tutsis at the top. When Rwanda moved toward independence in the late 1950s, Belgian policy shifted to favour Hutus, and the ethnic resentment that followed was rooted in genuine inequality and grievance. Atrocities happened in both directions.

By the time the genocide was planned in the early 1990s, its architects had a population with decades of accumulated ethnic tension to work with. What they added was the machinery.

State-run radio, most famously Radio Milles Collines, spent months referring to Tutsis as inyenzi. Cockroaches. This was not accidental. The psychological research on dehumanization consistently shows that when you can get people to see a group as less than human, the moral inhibitions against harming them weaken.

David Livingstone Smith, who has written extensively on dehumanization, argues it’s not just rhetoric. People who have been primed with dehumanizing language show measurably different responses to images of outgroup members in brain scans. The disgust circuitry activates. The empathy circuitry quiets.

The propaganda worked in both directions. It told Hutus that Tutsis were not just different but also dangerous. That the Tutsi-led RPF rebel army was coming to slaughter Hutu families, that violence was self-defense, that killing first was survival.

This activated something even more fundamental than hatred: fear. And fear, research consistently shows, is more reliable than hate as a driver of violence. Hate can cool. Fear is self-sustaining.

Then there was the structure. Local officials were given lists. Roadblocks were organized. Weapons, hundreds of thousands of machetes, had been imported and distributed in the months before. For many participants, it came wrapped in the authority and legitimacy of the state. You were not murdering your neighbour. You were following instructions. Doing your part. Participating in something larger than yourself.

Philip Gourevitch, who wrote what is probably the definitive account of the genocide, described how perpetrators talked about it afterwards. Many of them used the language of obligation. “We were required to do this.” “Everyone was doing it.” “Those who refused were also killed.”

Some of that was self-justification. But not all of it was false.

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Monsters are easier

The easiest thing to do when something unimaginably cruel like this happens is to locate it in the people who committed it. To say: those were monsters. Sick individuals. A uniquely violent culture. Something about them that does not apply to us.

This is comforting… and it is almost certainly wrong.

Hannah Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. She expected a monster. What she found was a bureaucrat. A middle manager. A man who spoke in clichés, struggled to think independently, and repeatedly insisted he had only been following orders. She described him as terrifyingly normal. Her phrase for it, “the banality of evil,” scandalized people when she published it, partly because it was easier to believe that evil required a particular kind of person.

Eichmann was not especially hateful. He was an administrator who had found meaning and purpose in his job, and his job happened to be murder on an industrial scale.

In Rwanda, the genocide was not carried out by a small group of fanatics. It was carried out by ordinary people… farmers, teachers, civil servants, shopkeepers, many of whom killed their own neighbours, colleagues, sometimes family members.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda later documented that local officials organized and participated in the killings, that roadblocks were staffed by regular citizens who had been handed weapons, and that church leaders, in some cases, locked Tutsi parishioners inside and then allowed or invited the killers in.

These were not, by any obvious measure, unusual people.

The psychology of what happened

In 1961, the same year Arendt watched Eichmann testify, a psychologist at Yale named Stanley Milgram ran an experiment that has disturbed every psychology student since.

Participants were told they were in a memory study. Another person, secretly an actor, was strapped to a chair and connected to what appeared to be an electrical generator. The participant was told to administer increasingly severe shocks each time the actor answered a question incorrectly. The dial went from 15 volts up to 450, labelled in stages: Slight Shock, Moderate, Strong, Intense, Extreme, Danger, Severe Shock. And then, above that: XXX.

The actor screamed. Begged to stop. Complained of a heart condition. Then went silent.

The experimenter, calm and composed in a white lab coat, told the participant to continue.

65% of participants went all the way to 450 volts.

They were not sadists. Many of them were visibly distressed… sweating, trembling, laughing nervously. Some protested. But when a calm authority told them the experiment required them to continue, most of them did.

Milgram replicated the study in different countries, with different populations. The results didn’t change much.

Philip Zimbardo found something similar when he randomly assigned ordinary college students to be “guards” or “prisoners” in a simulated jail at Stanford. Within six days, the guards were so psychologically cruel that he had to shut the experiment down. These were students with no history of violence. No ideology. Just a role, a uniform, and an institution that permitted them.

James Waller, a psychologist who has studied genocide specifically, argues in his book Becoming Evil that ordinary human beings are capable of extraordinary evil under the right conditions. Those conditions tend to look similar across cases: a strong authority structure, a group identity that separates insiders from outsiders, a process of dehumanizing the out-group, and a gradual escalation that means no single act feels like the decisive step toward atrocity.

Rwanda had all of this, deliberately engineered.

No one wakes up and decides to become a perpetrator of atrocity. They make a hundred small decisions that get them there, and most of them feel, at the time, entirely reasonable.

A question I’m not sure I can answer

Now, I have to ask something that risks sounding offensive, but I think is the only honest question: what would you have done?

Not in the abstract. Concretely. You live in a country where the state has spent years telling you that your neighbours are cockroaches who want to murder your children. The radio you trust tells you the killings have started, that it’s them or you. Your local official, someone you know, someone with authority, tells you to go to the roadblock. Your neighbours are already there. The person next to you hands you a machete.

What do you do?

I find myself unable to answer that with the certainty I’d like. And I think that inability is important.

Christopher Browning studied a German police battalion — middle-aged men, not ideological fanatics, not SS — ordered to kill Jews in occupied Poland. Their commander told them, explicitly, that anyone who found the task too difficult could step aside. Almost none did. Browning’s conclusion was not that they were exceptionally evil. The situation itself was enough.

We prefer a firm line between ourselves and the people who do things like this. The research, consistently, across cultures and decades, says that line is thinner than we want it to be. Not absent. Thinner.

That is not a comfortable thing to sit with. I suspect it isn’t supposed to be.

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Kigali on a Tuesday

What strikes me about Rwanda today is not the memorial, as devastating as it is. It’s everything outside it.

You walk through Kigali and it is a genuinely functional, exceptionally clean, in many ways impressive city. The streets are organized. There’s a visible national pride. People introduce themselves as Rwandan. Not Hutu, not Tutsi. Just Rwandan. After the genocide, the government formally abolished ethnic classification. The identity cards that had sealed people’s fates for generations were gone.

On one level, you could read this cynically… as a state suppression of complexity, a forced amnesia. And those criticisms exist, and they are worth taking seriously. But on another level, there is something genuinely strange and worth thinking about here: the same country that demonstrated what human beings can do to each other under conditions of fear, propaganda, and authority also demonstrates what human beings can do with identity when that identity is deliberately restructured.

The people who lived through this, or whose parents did, have in many cases been through gacaca… community justice courts where perpetrators and survivors sat across from each other, where confessions were made, where punishments were negotiated, where people then returned to living in the same villages. This is not universal. It is contested. Some survivors refuse it. But it happened, at scale, in a way that has no real precedent.

I don’t want to romanticize this. Rwanda’s political situation is complicated. The government is authoritarian in real ways, and the question of genuine reconciliation versus state-managed silence is a real one.

But the fact that this society is functioning, that people who survived it get up every morning and go to the market and have children and run businesses, tells you something about human resilience that is just as real as what it tells you about human capacity for cruelty.

What I keep coming back to

I’ve been trying to figure out what the takeaway from all of this is, without it turning into a sermon.

I don’t think the lesson is “anyone can be evil, so be careful.” That’s too vague to be useful. I don’t think the lesson is “systems are to blame, not individuals”, because that erasure of individual responsibility is itself dangerous. It’s the same logic the perpetrators used.

What I keep coming back to is something closer to: the belief that you couldn’t do it is probably the most dangerous belief you can have.

Not because guilt is useful. But because the people who committed atrocities in Rwanda, in Germany, in the DRC, almost none of them started with the conscious intention to become that. They were moved there incrementally, by conditions they mostly didn’t recognize they were being subjected to. The propaganda worked because it wasn’t labelled propaganda. The obedience worked because it didn’t feel like obedience. It felt like a civic duty, self-defense, order.

The psychological research on moral disengagement suggests that we are all equipped with mechanisms for switching off empathy when the situation calls for it. Dehumanization, moral justification, diffusion of responsibility, and displacement of blame are not unique to evil people. They are human features, present in all of us, available to be activated.

Recognizing that doesn’t mean accepting it. It means something closer to the opposite: that the work of resistance to this is not about being a good person in a comfortable, static way but about recognizing when you’re being fed a dehumanizing narrative. When someone is asking you to see another group as less than. When authority is being used to override your own judgment. When the situation is doing your thinking for you.

The Rwandan genocide was, in the end, a story about language and institutions and fear… and about what happens when those things are aimed with precision at the worst of what humans are capable of.

But it’s also a story about the fact that those tools can be aimed elsewhere. That the Rwandans who rebuilt their country were using the same basic human software (identity, belonging, narrative), just pointed in a different direction.

I don’t know if that’s hopeful. It doesn’t feel like hope, exactly. It feels more like a responsibility.

The children in that room at the memorial had names. They had favourite foods. They were loved by specific people who are still alive and carry that. None of what I’ve written here explains what happened to them or makes it make sense. I’m not sure anything can.

But I do think the question — what makes a person capable of this? — is one of the most important questions we can sit with. Not to find an answer that excuses it. But to find one that keeps us honest about who we are.

Further reading:

• Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)

• Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992)

• James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (2002)

• Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998)

• Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (2007)

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

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Because a garden never stays “empty”.

If you clear a patch of dirt and walk away, nature doesn’t wait for your permission to fill it. It doesn’t consult your aesthetic preferences or your long-term goals. It simply populates the space with whatever is most aggressive and most immediate.

Our minds operate under the same biological and psychological laws. Silence is never truly silent. It is either a space for intentional growth or a breeding ground for the chaotic.

Today, I want to explore the structure of our inner lives. We often treat distraction as a personal failing, a lack of “willpower”, but it is actually just the default setting of an untended landscape.

We’re going to look at why discipline isn’t about being a drill sergeant to yourself, but rather about being a strategic gardener who understands that if you don’t choose your seeds, the wind will choose them for you.

Let’s walk through it.

Nature abhors a mental vacuum.

The most fundamental rule of the mind is that it is always “doing” something.

We tend to think of our attention as a flashlight we can turn off, but it’s more like a river that never stops flowing. If you don’t dig a channel for that river—through discipline, focus, or deep work—it will simply spill over the banks and flood the nearest low-lying land. This “flooding” is what we call distraction. It is the mind’s attempt to occupy itself with the path of least resistance.

When you sit down without a plan, your brain doesn’t stay neutral. It seeks the high-stimulation “weeds” of social media, trivial worries, or dopamine-heavy tasks. Discipline is not the act of forcing the river to stop. Instead, it is the art of digging the canal so the water actually goes somewhere useful.

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It is a common mistake to believe that one day, we will finally “solve” distraction.

We imagine a version of ourselves that is so evolved they no longer feel the urge to check their phone or wander off-task. But the “weeds” of distraction are evolutionarily hardwired. Our ancestors survived because they were easily distracted by a rustle in the grass or a change in the wind. We are the descendants of the hyper-vigilant.

The mind is a machine designed for survival, not necessarily for your happiness or your deep work.

If you leave your mind to its own devices, it will prioritize the immediate over the important every single time. Realizing that distraction is the “default” setting removes the guilt.

Discipline, then, is the intentional override of an ancient operating system. It is the realization that if you want a specific outcome, you have to fight the gravity of the mundane.

The specific seeds of intentional discipline.

To grow a garden that sustains you, you have to be particular about what you put in the ground.

Discipline is often marketed as a harsh, cold thing… all 4:00 AM wake-up calls and cold showers. But true mental discipline is much simpler. It is the simple, repetitive act of planting “seeds” of habit. These seeds don’t look like much when you first put them in the dirt. A ten-minute meditation, a single page of writing, or a focused hour of work feels insignificant in the moment.

However, discipline is a game of compound interest.

• The Seed of Routine: Reducing the number of decisions you have to make each morning.

• The Seed of Boundaries: Deciding what you will not do is often more important than deciding what you will do.

• The Seed of Reflection: Checking the “soil” once a week to see which weeds are starting to take root.

When you plant these seeds consistently, they grow roots that eventually crowd out the weeds. You don’t have to pull every weed by hand if the plants you actually want are taking up all the nutrients and sunlight.

Learn to love the labour of the tend.

Ultimately, the goal isn’t to reach a state where the garden is “finished.”

A garden is a process, not a destination. There will always be new weeds. There will be seasons of drought where discipline feels impossible, and seasons of storm where your progress feels washed away. The “wise” approach is to stop viewing the work as a chore and start viewing it as the point of the journey.

There is a profound dignity in the “tend.” When you decide to be disciplined, you are making a statement that your life belongs to you, not to the distractions of the world. You are choosing to be a creator rather than a consumer of your own experience.

Even if your garden isn’t perfect, the act of planting makes you the master of your own soil. Don’t wait for the weeds to take over before you pick up the shovel. Go ahead and plant it now. Own your harvest.

“And in the end, as Candide learned after witnessing every absurdity the world could offer, there is only one sane response left:

‘We must cultivate our own garden.’”

— Voltaire(Candide, or Optimism)

Until next time,

Bechem

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

The horror in those stories rarely stems from a “glitch” in the machine. It stems from our own desperate, pathetic desire for things to be easier than they are. We see characters who would rather live in a simulated heaven or a digital loop than face the jagged, unpolished reality of a difficult truth.

Watching it made me realize that we are currently undergoing a mass-atrophying of the “thinking that hurts.”

In the last decade, we have effectively automated the escape from this discomfort.

We live in the era of the Intellectual Paved Road. Our digital environments are designed by engineers who understand that “friction” is the enemy of engagement. If an article is too long, we get a summary. If an idea is too dissonant, the algorithm replaces it with something that purrs in harmony with what we already believe.

We are becoming a species with no cognitive callouses, our minds as soft and sensitive as the skin of a sheltered child.

The philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

But true attention is also a form of endurance. It requires staying in the room when the conversation turns to something you don’t understand, or reading the paragraph three times until the logic finally “clicks,” even if that logic hurts your pride.

I noticed this in myself recently while trying to read a dense piece of quantum physics(one of my biggest influences, Naval Ravikant, recommended we study physics to better understand how the world works. So, here I am). Three paragraphs in, my brain began to itch. It wasn’t even boredom. It was just this visceral, physical desire to check my email, to see a notification. To find any “easy” stimulus to distract from the hard work of comprehension. My thumb was twitching toward a “tab-close” reflex.

I realized I had lost my stamina for the uphill climb of thought. I wanted the intellectual equivalent of a downhill slide.

This eventually makes us dumber. But even worse, it makes us more brittle. It is a crisis of character.

When we lose the ability to sit with difficult thoughts, we lose the ability to communicate with anyone who doesn’t mirror us. Complexity is replaced by the “slogan.” Nuance is discarded because nuance takes time, and time spent in uncertainty feels like a wound.

The Black Mirror dread of 2026 isn’t that a malevolent AI will control us, but that we will be “comforted” into a state of total intellectual helplessness. We are being fed a diet of pre-chewed ideas, and in the process, we are losing the “teeth” required to bite into the truth.

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Rebuilding the Capacity

I don’t have a grand solution here, just a small practice: when I notice myself reaching for the easy exit—the tab switch, the summary, the dismissal—I try to pause.

Can I stay here for thirty more seconds?

Can I reread the paragraph I skipped?

Can I go over this again?

Sometimes the answer is no. Not everything deserves deep engagement, and there’s no virtue in punishing yourself with difficulty for its own sake. But I’m learning to distinguish between thoughts I’m avoiding because they’re genuinely not worth my time and thoughts I’m avoiding because they’re hard.

The writer Annie Dillard observed that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. If I spend my days choosing the easy thought, the pre-chewed idea, the comfortable position, I’m building a life of intellectual fragility. A life where I’m constantly seeking affirmation rather than understanding. Where growth stops because friction has become intolerable.

So I’m trying to sit with what hurts. To finish the episode. To stay with the difficult passage. To let myself not know, for a while, what I think. It’s uncomfortable. My brain protests. But three important things happen in that discomfort—things that can’t happen any other way.

• I stay intellectually alive. Without friction, thinking becomes mere pattern recognition. You’re just sorting new information into existing categories. The discomfort is what forces actual cognitive growth—new neural pathways, revised frameworks, expanded capacity. It’s the difference between reading and thinking.

• My thinking becomes mine. The ideas that survive the friction—the ones you still hold after genuinely wrestling with alternatives—belong to you in a different way. They’re not borrowed opinions but earned positions. And paradoxically, you hold them with more conviction and more flexibility.

• I develop intellectual humility and genuine empathy. Sitting with difficulty long enough forces you to confront the limits of your understanding. You realize how much you don’t know, how contingent your certainties are, how many reasonable people see things differently. You see the logic within what initially seemed illogical and understand why some people hold a certain perspective.

The next time you feel the urge to close the tab or block the dissonant voice, pay attention to the twitch. That is the ghost of your intellect trying to wake up. You can choose the smooth slide into a comfortable, digital sleep, or you can choose the headwind. You can be a consumer of “content,” or you can be a person who thinks.

But remember: a mind that is never challenged is not a mind that is at rest but a mind that is forgetting how to survive on its own.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

Last month, I told a friend I was learning Italian. She smiled—one of those practiced, careful smiles—and said, “Oh, that’s nice. For work?” When I said no, just curiosity, the smile flickered. There was a pause, the kind that holds judgment without voicing it. “Well,” she said finally, “I wish I had that kind of time.”

I’ve been thinking about that pause ever since.

We live in a strange moment where learning anything unrelated to productivity feels like a confession of leisure. As though the mind, like a business, should operate on clear ROI. Languages only for travel. Skills only for résumés. Reading only if it makes you smarter in some quantifiable, LinkedIn-updatable way.

But what if the most fulfilling thing we could do this year—the thing that would make us feel most alive—is precisely the thing that serves no master except curiosity itself?

What makes life meaningful?

Studies show that people find life meaningful when they’re actively engaged in activities they find fulfilling, when they’re pursuing goals considered important, and when they align their actions with their values.

What’s striking isn’t the conclusion—it feels intuitive—but how rarely we design our lives around it.

Psychologists now distinguish between three types of good lives:

• the happy life (characterized by stability and comfort),

• the meaningful life (marked by contribution beyond oneself), and

• the psychologically rich life (defined by varied, perspective-changing experiences).

We’re sold the first, told to aspire to the second, but rarely invited to consider the third.

The psychologically rich life is the one where you study astronomy not because you’ll ever use it, but because understanding deep time changes how you see your own brief flicker. Where you learn woodworking though your hands are clumsy. Where you read philosophy that doesn’t solve your problems but reframes them entirely.

When curiosity is engaged, it activates both the hippocampus, which is critical for memory, and the brain’s reward circuitry, making the mind not only primed to absorb information but also motivated to retain it.

In other words, our brains are designed for this kind of wandering. The guilt we feel is learned growing up.

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The Tyranny of Adjacent

There’s this concept in career development called “T-shaped expertise”—deep knowledge in one area, with enough breadth across other fields to make connections. It’s become a buzzword in hiring. Learn adjacent skills. Cross-pollinate. Innovate at the intersections.

It’s not wrong, exactly. But it’s insufficient.

Because what if the point isn’t to make yourself more employable, more innovative, more productive? What if the point is to make yourself more yourself?

I think about my Italian lessons. They probably won’t help my ghostwriting career. They might never lead to fluent conversations.

But they’ll help me think in different grammatical structures, different rhythms, different ways of organizing reality.

The language has conditional tenses English lacks—ways of expressing hypotheticals that feel both more tentative and more certain simultaneously.

This doesn’t make me better at anything. It makes me bigger.

The cross-pollination of ideas from different disciplines often leads to unique solutions and breakthroughs, and curiosity promotes open-mindedness by encouraging us to question assumptions.

But even when it doesn’t lead to breakthroughs—even when it leads nowhere—the expansion is its own reward.

What are we really afraid of?

The resistance to learning-for-learning’s-sake runs deeper than time management. I think we’re afraid of what it reveals:

that we’ve organized our lives around outcomes, and forgotten that we are, ourselves, an outcome worth investing in.

Every skill learned only for utility is a small betrayal of the self. Not because utility is wrong—we all have bills, deadlines, responsibilities—but because when everything must justify itself, we lose the capacity for wonder.

We become efficient machines that have forgotten what it feels like to be amazed.

Learning about different cultures and exploring various disciplines broadens horizons and enhances quality of life, with lifelong learners finding joy in discovering new interests that bring fulfillment beyond traditional measures of success.

This matters because fulfillment and success are not synonyms, though we’ve spent years conflating them.

My friend who asked if Italian was for work—she’s brilliant, accomplished, deeply respected in her field.

And I wonder if she’d be happier if she let herself learn something seemingly useless. If she studied medieval poetry or took up ceramics or spent Wednesday evenings learning about mycology for no reason except that mushrooms are strange and wonderful.

I wonder this about all of us.

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The Practice

So what would it look like to reclaim learning as an end in itself?

Start small. Not with grand ambitions—“This year I’ll become fluent in three languages!”—but with honest curiosity.

What have you wondered about lately? Not what should you learn, or what would be good for your career, but what genuinely sparks something when you think about it?

For me, it was Italian because I watched The Godfather once and fell in love with the language’s aura. For you, it might be marine biology or letterpress printing or game theory or Byzantine history. The subject matters less than the pull.

Then—and this is crucial—protect it from justification. Don’t explain it. Don’t optimize it. Don’t turn it into a side hustle or a skill for your résumé. Let it exist as pure exploration, the way children learn, before anyone taught them that knowledge needs a purpose.

Lifelong learning stimulates curiosity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, and by challenging oneself intellectually, people can maintain mental agility and improve their ability to adapt to new situations.

But the real gift isn’t the adaptation—it’s the feeling of aliveness that comes from being in conversation with something larger than your daily concerns.

I find fifteen minutes most days. Sometimes in the evening, sometimes on lunch breaks, occasionally late at night when I can’t sleep. The Italian lessons are less than thirty minutes, three times a week. Four and a half hours monthly. The equivalent of two movies.

What strikes me is how those ninety minutes feel more memorable than most of my work weeks. Not because they’re more important—they’re not—but because I’m present in them fully. No other agenda except to understand a little more than I did before.

The Gift That Isn’t One

One of my kid sisters is nine. She’s currently obsessed with knitting, specifically knitting clothes for her dolls.

Last week, she asked me why adults don’t learn about cool stuff anymore. I started to explain about jobs and responsibilities and time, and she cut me off. “But don’t you want to know things?”

It’s the simplest question. Devastating, really.

Because of course I want to know things. We all do. Humans are natural learners—curiosity alters how the brain works at a biological level, enhancing memory for both relevant and irrelevant information when the mind is engaged.

Children haven’t forgotten this. They learn promiscuously, joyfully, without concern for whether their knowledge will be tested or monetized.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to suppress that instinct. To channel it exclusively toward career advancement or practical skills. To feel guilty about the fifteen minutes spent reading about something that won’t make us money or status or security.

But watching my sister knit, I realize the gift I want to give her isn’t only more lessons or better opportunities. It’s also permission to stay curious about things that don’t seem to matter. To preserve, into adulthood, the capacity for being amazed.

And the only way to give her that permission is to claim it for myself.

What fulfillment really feels like

In surveys across seventeen advanced economies, people most often cite family, followed by occupation and material well-being, when describing what makes their lives fulfilling. These are the big structures—the scaffolding of a life.

But fulfillment, I’m learning, happens in the spaces between. In the thirty-minute Italian lesson where I finally understand why the subjunctive works the way it does. In reading a poet I’ll never meet about experiences I’ll never have.

These moments don’t build toward anything. They are, themselves, the thing.

And maybe that’s what we’re afraid of—that fulfillment won’t arrive as achievement, as milestone, as something we can point to and say “There, I did it.”

That instead, it accumulates quietly, in margins and stolen minutes, in learning we do simply because we’re human and humans wonder about things.

The most fulfilling thing you could do this year might not be the most impressive. It might not even be shareable.

It might be learning something utterly impractical, following curiosity down paths that lead nowhere profitable, giving yourself permission to be a beginner at something that doesn’t matter to anyone except you.

This year, learn something useless but interesting. Be amazed by something small. Let knowledge be its own reward, curiosity its own justification.

Not because it will make you more productive or successful or innovative—though it might, as a happy accident—but because you are more than your utility, and your mind deserves to roam free occasionally.

The Italian lessons continue. My pronunciation is still terrible. I’ll probably never be fluent. But three times a week, for thirty minutes, I’m somewhere else entirely, thinking in different shapes, and it feels like coming home to a part of myself I’d forgotten existed.

That’s fulfillment. Not the arriving, but the going. Not the mastery, but the wonder.

Until next time,

Bechem

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

No. Let me rephrase that. There’s NO TV show better than Breaking Bad.

I know that’s a bold claim in an era drowning in prestige television, but I stand by it. Breaking Bad is a masterclass in storytelling, character development, and moral complexity. Every episode feels like a chess move in a game you didn’t know you were playing.

The way Vince Gilligan transforms Walter White from a sympathetic high school chemistry teacher into something unrecognizable, all while keeping you invested in his journey, is nothing short of genius.

The cinematography, the symbolism, the pacing—it’s all so meticulously crafted that rewatches reveal layers you missed the first time.

I finished it a couple of months ago and I’ve been reluctant to watch anything else outside the Breaking Bad universe since. The bar was set so impossibly high that everything else just feels... lesser.

This is the same feeling I had when I finished Attack on Titan. Every other anime I watched afterwards felt below average, no matter how objectively good they were. AOT had set the bar too high. It had shown me what peak storytelling looks like, and now my standards were ruined. Everything else was just treading water.

And then, as if creating the greatest TV show of all time wasn’t enough, Vince Gilligan said “Let’s do it again” and gave us Better Call Saul… a prequel that somehow matches, and in some ways surpasses, the original.

I’m currently in season 5 (no spoilers, please) and it’s already peak cinema. The transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman is every bit as compelling as Walter White’s descent, just in a completely different register—slower, sadder, more inevitable.

Now, with Pluribus, Gilligan might have just said “Let’s do it again” again.

The show stars Rhea Seehorn, who was phenomenal as Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul, and just three episodes in, I’m already hooked.

In Pluribus, she plays Carol Sturka, a curmudgeonly romance novelist who becomes, ironically, “the most miserable person on Earth” tasked with saving the world from happiness itself.

Yes, you read that right. From happiness.

Take a moment with that. What if happiness—real, genuine, collective happiness—was the enemy? What if happiness required giving up everything that makes you you? What if the price of collective joy was individual extinction?

This is a question that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human in an age where we’re constantly being sold solutions to our suffering, where optimization and happiness have become moral imperatives, where the promise of connection often means surrendering autonomy.

Pluribus doesn’t just ask this question. It forces you to sit with it, to feel the weight of it, and to realize that the answer isn’t as obvious as you’d like it to be.

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Is happiness a paradox?

What makes Pluribus genuinely disturbing is that the hive mind isn’t evil. It’s not the Borg. The people who join it seem genuinely better off. They’re free from anxiety, loneliness, the crushing weight of being a separate consciousness trapped in your own skull. They’re happy. Provably, measurably happy. And they want you to join them because they love you.

That’s the knife twist. We spend our entire lives being told that happiness is the goal. Fix your trauma. Optimize your habits. The entire self-help industrial complex is built on the premise that suffering is a bug to be fixed. And now here comes a show asking: what if they’re right? What if there’s a patch available?

Would you install it?

Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“What is to give light must endure burning”

He wasn’t saying suffering is good. He was saying meaning and suffering are so entangled that you can’t surgically remove one without losing the other. The thing which makes life worth living is significance, not happiness. And significance requires stakes.

But who am I to tell someone drowning in depression that their suffering is meaningful? Who am I to say the person with chronic pain should keep enduring because it builds character? I’m in no position to do that.

And yet something in me recoils at the idea of the hive. Something insists there’s a difference between healing and erasure.

Anything that can’t be lost can’t truly be had. The hive mind offers connection without vulnerability. Joy without the possibility of grief. And in doing so, it offers something that isn’t actually any of those things.

But maybe that’s just me romanticizing suffering because I’m not in enough pain to take the exit. It’s easy to wax poetic about the beauty of struggle when you’re not the one struggling. There’s something almost obscene about celebrating pain from a position of relative comfort.

So I’m genuinely torn. This is the tension Pluribus refuses to resolve, and I respect the hell out of it for that.

We live in an age that has declared war on negative emotions. Anxiety is pathologized. Sadness is a malfunction. Even boredom—that generative state where new thoughts emerge—is something we immediately medicate with our phones. We’ve built a civilization optimized for comfort and called it progress.

I’m not advocating for a masochistic embrace of suffering. I’m asking:

Have we become so addicted to comfort that we’ve lost our capacity to be uncomfortable? And if we have, what have we lost in that trade?

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What Carol Knows

There’s a moment in Pluribus where Carol is presented with the choice directly. Join the hive or stay alone. And what breaks my heart isn’t her decision. It’s her hesitation. She’s tempted. Of course she’s tempted. She’s a lonely, difficult woman who writes romance novels because she’s never quite figured out how to have romance in real life. The hive is offering her everything she’s been missing.

And still, something in her resists.

Maybe that resistance is the most human thing we’re capable of. Not happiness. Not transcendence. But the ability to choose difficulty. To look at the easy path and say “No, I think I’ll take the hard one.” Free will includes the freedom to make terrible choices. To be wrong. To suffer unnecessarily.

The hive mind can only feel love because it can feel nothing else. But is love that can’t be withdrawn still love? Is joy that can’t be lost still joy? Or are these things only meaningful because their opposites exist?

In a nutshell

I think about Breaking Bad’s brutal honesty about consequences. About Better Call Saul’s examination of how we become who we become—one compromise at a time, one small surrender after another.

What draws me to these stories is that they don’t offer answers. They show us people making impossible choices and living with the aftermath. They remind us that being human means being uncertain, conflicted, capable of both wisdom and stupidity in the same breath.

Pluribus might be Gilligan doing it again—creating something that doesn’t just entertain but unsettles. Something that trusts you to wrestle with questions that don’t have solutions. Three episodes in, and I’m already thinking about it when I’m not watching it. That’s the mark of something real.

Maybe the point isn’t to answer the question. Maybe the point is to be the kind of person who still asks it, who resists the easy comfort of certainty, who insists on remaining complicated even when simplicity beckons. Maybe that’s what Carol represents—not the right answer, but the courage to keep questioning when everyone else has stopped.

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s everything.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

Some of these will piss you off. Some will make you question choices you made five years ago. One is in French, and I’m recommending it anyway because the ideas are brilliant. And at least two of them reveal patterns about how we’re all sleepwalking through major shifts we haven’t fully processed yet.

So here’s what’s worth your time this weekend.

1. The Art of Reinvention: When Less Became More

Did you know English became the global language basically because it got lazy?

The article opens with a hilarious fictional conversation between an Anglo-Saxon and a Viking trying to buy sheep from each other, both butchering each other’s complicated word endings until they just... give up and strip everything down to the basics. “Ok... sheep!!”

That’s essentially what happened to English. While German speakers are still wrestling with der, das, die, and French learners are memorizing seventeen forms of “to go”, English just dropped all its endings. The writer, , makes this fascinating argument about why we can verb anything, why “Google it” just works, and how we’ve somehow come full circle back to Proto-Indo-European’s four-letter word roots. History is weird.

Vīta Brevis, Wit Artefāctōrum Ætērna

TecC 35A - The Art of Reinvention: When Less Became More

In the previous episode towards the latter part of the Middle Ages, we uncovered a bunch of tensions and contradictions reflecting the soon-to-come transition beyond the end of the medieval period, including notably between Latin and the vernacular Italian, which all have a bearing with the progression of society and so of relevance to our story. Today…

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10 months ago · 10 likes · 5 comments · Ash Stuart

2. The American Dream Is Dying

, an Iranian woman who fled war as a child, finally became an American citizen this year. She thought she’d be celebrating. Instead, she felt like she’d arrived at a funeral.

That opening carries the weight of the entire piece. It’s this profound cognitive dissonance—achieving your childhood dream in a country where the dream itself is visibly crumbling. She doesn’t do political blame or nostalgia. She just lays out the math: the cost of homeownership, the weight of medical debt, the percentage of adults who no longer believe hard work leads anywhere. Even the people who “made it” are quietly leaving.

But what makes this good is that it’s not doom. It’s an invitation. She’s saying maybe the death of the old dream is a chance to build something real instead of resuscitating an illusion.

This Is Not A Memo

The American Dream Is Dying

Becoming an American citizen this past year was something I’d envisioned since childhood. But when the day finally came, it didn’t feel like victory. I thought I’d be celebrating, popping champagne, calling my family, shouting from rooftops, “I’m an American citizen…

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a year ago · 17 likes · 14 comments · Maryam Mehrtash

3. I Lost $50k+ Pretending My Strategic Genius Was Just “Freelance Work”

For 6 years, , a premium digital business manager, would walk into someone else’s chaos—scattered tools, broken workflows—and fix it. Build systems. Create clarity. But her own business was a disaster. She started passion projects and abandoned them, had brilliant ideas and never launched them, made plans she didn’t follow.

The problem wasn’t her strategy. The problem was that she saw herself as “just a freelancer” instead of a business owner. She’s unpacking the three specific mistakes that cost her over $50k: confusing planning with progress, not tracking wins, and thinking systems kill creativity. If you’ve ever blamed “not having enough time” while secretly knowing the problem is you, this one’s going to sting in the right way.

Systems Grow People

I Lost $50k+ Pretending My Strategic Genius Was Just "Freelance Work" (Here's What Finally Changed)

You know what to do. You’ve read the books. You’ve bought the courses. You’ve done the work. But somehow, you’re still stuck…

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10 months ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Mara

4. The $2,000 Book About the Richest Man You’ve Never Heard Of

Daniel Ludwig was richer than Rockefeller. He controlled more oil tankers than Onassis. He was number one on Forbes’ first-ever richest Americans list in 1982. And I guarantee you’ve never heard of him.

Why? Because he made sure of that. Today, if you want to read this book, you’re paying two grand on Amazon.

He scolded employees for using paperclips in airmail, flew economy while commanding a global shipping empire, invented a financing hack that built tankers with zero capital, then sunk over a billion dollars trying to tame the Amazon. Then gave away everything away to cure cancer. In this article captures something true about wealth: the people with the most money often want the least attention. There’s a strange wisdom in that silence.

5. Rien ne va plus

This one’s in French, but hear me out.

LinkedIn’s organic reach just collapsed by 50%. About 61% of posts are now AI-generated. And yet ’s metrics keep climbing. Her thesis is that you can’t AI your way out of becoming replaceable.

She argues that when algorithms shift and automation floods every feed, your only defense is what she calls “internal forces”—the ability to think clearly, say things people want to read, position yourself with conviction. There’s an Australian study she cites: 55% of professionals using AI at work experienced decreased self-compassion. When you delegate everything that once required effort, you start losing your sense of what you’re capable of. Performance and accomplishment aren’t the same thing. Even if you don’t speak French, the ideas translate perfectly.

Missive Bend It Like Socrate (aka BILS)

🎲 Rien ne va plus.

Hello girls and guys…

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10 months ago · 11 likes

6. I Made Perplexity Comet My Substack Assistant for a Week

AI browsers want to replace Chrome, and these guys actually tested whether they can.

For a full week, and made Perplexity Comet their only AI tool for everything—research, content analysis, market intel, draft reviews. Then they documented what worked and what absolutely didn’t. Comet crushed it at daily market intelligence (30 seconds instead of hours). Struggled hard with data extraction (kept stopping like a lazy intern). But gave surprisingly sharp writing critique that caught things he’d missed.

What I appreciate is the honesty. No sponsored hype. Just working writers admitting when the old way is still faster. Their deeper point: we’re measuring AI tools with outdated productivity metrics, when the real value might be spotting patterns you’d never see manually.

Cash & Cache

I Made Perplexity Comet My Substack Assistant for a Week - Here are 4 Workflows That Actually Worked + Prompt Templates

🧠 TL;DR…

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10 months ago · 42 likes · 12 comments · Ashwin Francis and Raghav Mehra

7. I Used Machine Learning to Make Sense of 39,000 Substack Articles

Most people wonder what’s trending on Substack. This writer built a database and let the algorithms tell her.

Using clustering and semantic search across 39,000 articles from 2,500 newsletters, mapped the platform’s entire content landscape. What she found: AI ethics has the most articles, but politics generates 10-20x more engagement per piece. About 59% of articles get fewer than ten reactions. The “sweet spot” for length is 1,500-2,000 words—unless you’re already famous, in which case you can write three words and get thousands of likes.

What’s valuable here is seeing the weather system when you’ve been walking in the rain. It’s data journalism about writing itself, showing patterns that are invisible when you’re just one person publishing into the void.

Wondering About AI

I used machine learning to make sense of 39,000 Substack articles

Disclosure: This article was written by me, a human, with an assist from Claude because it’s Friday. Also, the beginning of this article really sounds like an ad…but I need to explain the product I’m building, so you know why I have 39,000 Substack newsletter articles just lying around…

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a year ago · 133 likes · 78 comments · Karen Spinner

8. Look Down. You’re Wearing the Wrong Shoes

You’re optimizing your profile instead of your life, and wants you to stop.

The shoes metaphor is his central point: if the path you’re on requires constant stress and repeated failure, maybe you’re wearing the wrong shoes entirely. Not the wrong strategy. The wrong shoes. He’s arguing that people would rather DM potential partners than approach someone in real life. Complain about politics online than take action. Perform tolerance for the algorithm instead of being honest with the people who actually love them.

His three solutions are almost offensively simple: stop calling people who won’t call back, listen more than you talk, choose friends by values not circumstances. It sounds obvious until you realize how few people actually do it. If you’ve felt like you’re performing for everyone’s approval but your own, this will land.

Tide

Look down. You’re wearing the wrong shoes

You might experience that you’re not getting to where you want to be…

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10 months ago · 7 likes · 7 comments · Francisco

9. Barbara Osiro on Cultivating Inclusion and Leadership in AI

Most AI ethics conversations happen in boardrooms with reliable WiFi. Barbara Osiro runs them in Kenyan communities where power blackouts last for hours.

This interview by is about what inclusion actually requires when you can’t assume electricity, internet, or literacy. When the threats women face through technology get completely skipped in standard curricula. When African voices are absent from conversations about AI being built for them.

Osiro’s framework is different: inclusion isn’t just about access but also about authorship. Women shouldn’t just learn AI ethics, they should define what safety means. The wins she tracks are teachers localizing AI into Swahili, rural educators becoming trainers, mentees starting their own initiatives. When her team showed up to a training and hit a power blackout that lasted the entire session, they didn’t cancel… they redesigned everything for offline learning. That’s the difference between theory and practice.

Rebecca Mbaya

Barbara Osiro on Cultivating Inclusion and Leadership in AI

Welcome to Issue #33 of TAIS, where every Friday we spotlight visionary changemakers reshaping Africa’s tech, data, and AI landscape, one breakthrough at a time…

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10 months ago · 3 likes · Rebecca Mbaya

Bonus: The 4 Coaching Competencies That Future-Proof Your Leadership

This article by translates coaching competencies from corporate jargon into actual human behavior. What do you do when your direct report misses another deadline and your instinct is to just do it yourself? How do you build the kind of safety where problems surface before they become fires? If you’ve ever thought “my team needs more ownership” while simultaneously micromanaging every detail, this will make you squirm. In a good way.

The Silent Struggle of Mid-Level Leadership

The 4 Coaching Competencies To Future-Proof Your Leadership

The Glaring Leadership Gap…

Read more

a year ago · 12 likes · Elina

So that’s what I’ve got for you. Nine pieces that actually earned their space in my brain this week. Some will challenge you. Some will just make you think differently about something you thought you understood.

Pick one. Read it with your coffee tomorrow morning. Let me know which one hits.

And if you make it through all nine this weekend, you’re either extremely disciplined or avoiding something important. Either way, respect.

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Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

I’ve never been a big chess fan. Whenever we’d have reunions with friends, I’d be the one setting up Monopoly. I always thought chess was just unnecessarily difficult—a game wrapped in artificial difficulty with rules that felt arbitrary (seriously, stalemate, what the hell?!).

But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to learn it, mostly because it seemed like an amazing tool for social bonding.

Just imagine you’re on a 10-hour flight, stuck next to a complete stranger. Awkward silence. Nine and a half hours of pretending to sleep. Now imagine you both know how to play chess. Suddenly, you pull out a board and ask, “Wanna play?” Everything changes from there.

As someone who struggles to start conversations but excels at keeping them going—an extroverted introvert, if that’s even a real thing—chess felt like the perfect social lubricant. It’s non-threatening. It’s engaging. It gives you something to do with your hands while your mind opens up. Just pull it out, start playing, and let the conversation build naturally around the game.

So yeah, learning chess has been on my to-do list forever. But when Duolingo added it to the app, where I’ve been learning Italian for the past 590 DAYS, I knew I had to finally do it. Finalmente.

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Getting Started (and Getting Hooked)

I was already pretty familiar with how the pieces moved, so I just took a few lessons to refresh my memory before jumping into games against Oscar, Duolingo’s chess teacher. I really love how they gave Oscar a personality. It makes the whole thing feel less like you’re playing against cold, heartless code and more like you’re actually learning from someone.

I played with Oscar so many times that I literally forgot about my Italian lessons. It started feeling a bit boring after a while, not because I was dominating him (he beat me a lot, and a bunch of games ended in stalemate), but because I just wanted a different kind of challenge. I needed to play with others for some variability.

So I downloaded Chess.com after seeing GothamChess recommend it.

Chess.com has been absolutely amazing for me for three main reasons:

• I can play against other humans who are just as bad (or good) as me

• I can practice against bots at different skill levels without the pressure

• It has a bot that gives me a detailed analysis after every game, showing me all my wrong and great moves so that I can get better

• It automatically tracks my Elo rating, which is great for keeping track of my progress

My current score is 253. For context, that’s pretty terrible. I still lose 2-3 out of every 5 games I play. My tactics are sloppy. I hang pieces like a beginner because, well, I am a beginner.

But guys, this game is SO. MUCH. FUN.

I had no idea it would be this fun. Even when you’re losing, especially when you’re losing, there’s this crazy thrill in thinking through your next move, hunting for checkmate patterns, trying to figure out what your opponent is planning. Every game is like a puzzle that’s actively fighting back against you.

I’ve picked up a few strategies along the way. I know some solid opening formations now. I learned an aggressive queen-positioning technique from watching Magnus Carlsen videos (though I execute it with probably 1% of his precision). I’m learning the language—pins, forks, discovered attacks. I’m still very much a beginner, but I’m improving, and honestly? The learning itself is just as fun as winning.

But chess hasn’t just taught me how to play chess. It’s taught me something way more important.

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The Whole Board

I’ll be deep in a game, scanning the board, looking for opportunities. I’ll spot one—a chance to capture an opponent’s knight, maybe trade pieces favourably. I’ll make the move, feeling clever. And then, in the half-second after I release the piece, I’ll see it. The trap I just walked into. The bishop I completely missed sitting on the opposite side of the board, perfectly positioned to take my queen the moment I committed to that capture.

Every. Single. Time. The thought is the same: “Shit! How did I not see that??!”

The information was right there. The board doesn’t hide anything from you. Every piece is visible. The bishop wasn’t lurking in some hidden corner—it was sitting in plain sight. But I wasn’t looking at it because I was so fixated on one side of the board, one opportunity, one move I wanted to make.

And this is exactly how we mess up in life.

We make decisions based on incomplete information not because the information isn’t available, but because we’re not looking at the whole board. We zoom in on one thing—one problem, one opportunity, one frustration—and become completely blind to everything else happening around us.

But the closer you look, the less you see.

Someone cuts you off in traffic, and you’re instantly furious. But you’re only seeing one piece: their car, your inconvenience, your wounded ego. You’re not seeing the whole board. Maybe they just got a call that their parent had a heart attack. Maybe they’re rushing their kid to the hospital. Maybe they’re just a terrible driver having the worst day of their life. The board is bigger than your lane, bigger than your anger, bigger than this one moment you’ll completely forget about in an hour.

You get fired from your job. Devastating. Feels like the worst thing that could happen. Except you’re only looking at one piece: the loss, the rejection, the fear of what comes next. Look at the whole board—maybe that job was slowly killing your creativity, your health, your relationships. Maybe this forced exit is the only thing that would’ve ever pushed you to start that business you’ve been dreaming about. Maybe the next opportunity is ten times better, but you never would’ve looked for it if you hadn’t been pushed out.

Someone makes a wrong decision, and you’re judgmental, ready to call them stupid and terrible. You’re seeing one piece: their attitude right now, your wounded feelings, this moment of friction. But have the courage to look at the whole board—think about the hundred times they’ve done the right thing. One bad moment doesn’t define the entire character. Errors are due to state, not a trait.

Your field of vision is always narrower than you think it is.

You think you’re seeing the full situation when you’re actually focused on three pieces and ignoring twelve others. You think you’ve considered all the angles when you’ve barely looked past your immediate concern.

The dangerous part isn’t that we see incompletely—that’s just being human. The dangerous part is that we don’t realize we’re seeing incompletely.

We make judgments with total confidence based on partial information. We react with certainty to situations we barely understand. We draw hard conclusions about people, events, and circumstances while only looking at a fraction of what’s actually relevant.

And then we wonder why life keeps blindsiding us.

The board is always bigger than your current view of it. Always. Every situation has dimensions you’re not seeing. Every person has context you’re not aware of. Every problem has angles you haven’t even considered. The universe isn’t hiding information from you. You’re just not looking at the whole board.

I’m not saying you should be blindly optimistic or force yourself to “look on the bright side” of everything. I’m saying you should recognize that your perception is fundamentally limited, and that limitation becomes dangerous when you’re certain about things you don’t fully understand.

The worst mistakes in life don’t come from things you know you’re uncertain about. They come from things you’re completely sure about but totally wrong about.

Chess makes this lesson impossible to ignore. You can’t talk your way out of losing your queen because you weren’t paying attention. The consequences are immediate. You learn, in your bones, that attention is a spotlight, not a floodlight—and whatever falls outside that spotlight still exists, still matters, still affects everything.

So now, whenever I catch myself reacting strongly to something—anger, fear, judgment, absolute certainty—I ask myself the same question I should’ve asked before moving that piece: Did I look at the whole board?

Usually, the answer is no.

And that realization changes everything.

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You should probably play chess. Not because it’ll make you some strategic genius or massively boost your IQ, but because it’ll teach you—in a way no book or lecture ever could—that you’re always missing something. And once you truly get that, you start moving through life differently. More carefully. More humbly. More wisely.

Add me on Chess.com if you want to play(https://www.chess.com/member/BruceWayne_100).

And let’s be friends on Duolingo too and do a friend streak together:

Yeah, I’m a Batman fan. How could I not be? He’s literally the greatest comic book character of all time.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

If you’re building a newsletter and struggling to find your voice or maintain consistency, I’d recommend checking out Future Forest. A ghostwriting agency that specializes in premium newsletter content—the kind that actually sounds like you, not some corporate bot. This whole “looking at the whole board” principle applies to content too: most newsletter writing only looks at one piece (getting clicks or sounding smart), but great writing looks at the whole board (voice, value, connection, consistency). Future Forest gets that. Worth exploring if you’re serious about your newsletter game.

This really pissed me off. I had to work on my clients’ projects but I couldn’t. It ruined my day, even though there were other things to be happy about.

Then I came across a Chris Williamson podcast where he shares 21 lessons from 999 episodes. One of the lessons was that we tend to ignore the joy from simple pleasures and easily get triggered by the smallest inconveniences(like slow wifi).

In his words:

“We’re all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large.”

That is the single most powerful thing I’ve heard in a long time. It’s so true. We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. We overlook the simple pleasures as though joy must be proportionate to scale.

Yet, the smallest inconveniences ruin our day.

In this article, I’ll try to explain why this is the case from a neurological and sociological perspective, and also give us questions to ask ourselves when we’re caught up in this situation.

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Why is this the case

1. Neurology

From a neurological perspective, our brains are terrible at accounting for joy because they have evolved for survival, not happiness.

This is where negativity bias comes in. Our ancestors who paid more attention to threats—the rustling in the bushes, the bitter taste in food, the stranger approaching—survived longer than those who lingered on sunsets. Evolution favoured the paranoid, not the grateful. The brain’s amygdala, responsible for processing emotions, reacts more intensely to negative stimuli than positive ones. Studies show that negative experiences are encoded more deeply in our memory and require more cognitive resources to process. A bad event simply weighs more than a good one.

Then there’s hedonic adaptation, the psychological phenomenon where we quickly get used to positive changes in our lives. That perfect cup of coffee on Monday becomes invisible by Friday. The new apartment you were thrilled about becomes just “home” within weeks. Our brains normalize pleasure rapidly because staying alert to novelty—especially potential threats—was more evolutionarily advantageous than savouring what’s already familiar and safe.

The neurochemistry of pleasure also plays a role. Dopamine, often called the “pleasure chemical,” is actually more about anticipation and seeking than enjoying. We get a bigger dopamine hit from chasing something than from having it. This is why we’re more excited planning a vacation than living an ordinary Tuesday, even if that Tuesday contains a dozen small, beautiful moments. Our brains are literally wired to chase the next thing rather than savour what’s here.

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2. Sociology

From a sociological perspective, modern life has trained us to devalue small joys. We live in a culture obsessed with scale, optimization, and achievement. Social media shows us everyone’s highlight reels—the promotions, the vacations, the milestones—while hiding the small, unremarkable moments that actually constitute most of life. We’ve learned to measure our worth by grand achievements, and unconsciously, we apply the same metric to happiness. A quiet morning with tea doesn’t feel Instagram-worthy. It doesn’t count the same way.

There’s also something about the pace of modern life. We’re overstimulated, constantly context-switching, addicted to novelty. When you’re scrolling through hundreds of stimuli per hour, your baseline for “interesting” or “pleasurable” gets recalibrated upward. A sunset can’t compete with the dopamine slot machine in your pocket. Small pleasures require attention and presence, two commodities in increasingly short supply.

A caveat

This framework can be misused. Not every situation where someone struggles to feel joy is about faulty mental accounting. Sometimes, the absence of joy isn’t about failing to notice small pleasures but about genuinely difficult circumstances that no amount of reframing can fix.

If you’re exhausted from working three jobs, if you’re experiencing depression, if you’re in an abusive situation, if you’re grieving—telling yourself to just appreciate the tea more can feel insulting. There’s a difference between hedonic adaptation and survival mode. There’s a difference between missing available joy and not having access to the conditions that make joy possible: safety, rest, basic security, and mental health.

I’m not suggesting we gaslight ourselves into gratitude when life is genuinely hard. I want us to recognize when we do have access to moments of pleasure but our wiring and conditioning make us miss them. I want us to see the gap between our objective circumstances and our subjective experience when that gap exists.

Additionally, not all frustration with small inconveniences is irrational. Sometimes anger at slow internet or a traffic jam is displaced frustration with larger systemic issues—lack of control, injustice, powerlessness. My anger about the internet shutdown wasn’t really about the internet speed. It was about authoritarianism, about being silenced, about 40 years of repression. That anger is valid and important. The question is whether it should colonize the entire day, making us unable to experience anything else.

Questions to Ask Yourself

So what do we do with this knowledge?

Chris Williamson suggests the solution is to lower your threshold for joy. You must not have a lot going on to be happy. When you lower the threshold for joy, you don’t just get more of it; you get it now. Always.

This requires us to challenge our own accounting system. To audit what we’re counting and what we’re dismissing. Here are some questions that can help:

1. How little of a thing could happen to make your day? How much excitement could you squeeze from the smell of clean bedsheets?

This question forces you to examine your minimum viable joy. What’s the smallest unit of pleasure you’re willing to accept as real? If you wait for a promotion to feel happy, you might feel happy twice a decade. If you allow the smell of rain, the weight of a good book in your hands, the sound of a friend’s laugh to count—you have access to joy multiple times a day. The question isn’t whether bigger things bring bigger joy. They do. But what if you didn’t have to wait for them?

2. What if something small could be something great?

This is about perspective shifting. What if the thing you’re dismissing as “just” tea, “just” a walk, “just” a moment of quiet—what if that was, in fact, a form of greatness? Not because you’re lowering your standards, but because you’re recognizing that a life made of small, good moments is a great life. Greatness doesn’t only exist at scale. Sometimes the most profound experiences are the most ordinary ones, when you’re present enough to feel them fully.

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3. What would change if you treated every small pleasure as proof that life is working in your favour?

We’re quick to treat small inconveniences as evidence that everything is falling apart. Traffic jam? The universe is against me. Slow internet? My whole day is ruined. But we rarely do the inverse. We don’t treat the stranger who smiled, the unexpected song on the radio, the perfect parking spot as evidence that we’re supported, that things are going well, that life is good. What if we kept the same mental ledger for joy that we keep for frustration? What if we let small pleasures accumulate the way we let small annoyances compound?

In a nutshell

I can’t control authoritarianism. I can’t control a 92-year-old man who refuses to let go of power. I can’t control whether my country descends into chaos or finds a way forward. Those things are real, and they matter, and my anger about them is justified.

But I can control what else I let into my day.

I can control whether I notice that my tea was good. Whether I let myself feel grateful that my family is safe. Whether I pause to appreciate that despite everything, I’m still here, still working, still finding reasons to write and think and create.

And that takes a kind of courage we don’t talk about enough. The courage to be happy without permission, to let joy in even when circumstances haven’t earned it, to choose presence over the comfortable numbness of waiting.

Yes, bigger achievements can make you happier. Yes, being happy about the big deposits of joy is okay. But remember that there is joy in simple pleasures too. You can be happy about who you are, what you have, and where you are.

Remember that you can be more, but you are already enough.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

The rain wasn’t gentle. It fell in thick sheets, the kind that soaks through clothes within seconds. I remember standing there, calculating risk like a small philosopher. My grandmother appeared beside me with an umbrella—red, with yellow stripes. She didn’t tell me the rain would stop. She didn’t say I wouldn’t get wet. She simply held it out and said, “Here. This will help.”

I stepped into that rain with the umbrella over my head, and something shifted. The rain was still there. It still fell. But I could move. I could breathe. I could walk forward.

An umbrella doesn’t stop the rain. It never does. What it does is make the rain survivable. What it does is let you step into the weather anyway.

Courage works the same way.

Throughout history, every meaningful breakthrough has hinged on this: individuals confronted terror and proceeded regardless. Not through invincibility, but through deliberate steps into uncertainty.

In this article, I’ll explore why this matters deeply and share refined frameworks that have sharpened my own practice of it.

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Greatness is costly

In 1974, Karen Silkwood, a 28-year-old lab technician at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, uncovered serious safety issues at the plutonium processing plant. She found workers were exposed to hazardous levels of plutonium, a radioactive substance linked to cancer risk, and that quality control records were being falsified. Despite knowing the risks of speaking out, she acted.

In July 1974, Silkwood testified before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about these safety violations, alongside her union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW). Her allegations triggered retaliation. On November 5–7, 1974, routine tests showed she had been contaminated with significant levels of plutonium, far exceeding permissible limits, though exact figures (e.g., “400 times the legal limit”) are debated. Tests in her home also detected plutonium, raising suspicions of deliberate contamination, though no conclusive evidence confirms this.

On November 13, 1974, Silkwood drove to meet a New York Times reporter and an OCAW official, carrying documents to expose Kerr-McGee’s violations. She never arrived. Her car struck a concrete culvert, and she died in the crash. An independent investigator found rear-end damage suggesting another vehicle may have forced her off the road, but the official report deemed it an accident, noting a low blood alcohol level (0.05%) and traces of a sedative. The documents she carried were not found at the scene, fueling speculation. These claims remain unproven.

Her death sparked public outcry, leading to a federal investigation. The AEC and Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) confirmed safety violations at Kerr-McGee, and the plant closed in 1975. Nuclear safety regulations were strengthened, and Silkwood’s family won a $1.38 million settlement in 1986, though Kerr-McGee admitted no wrongdoing.

She had one umbrella available to her: the willingness to speak up knowing it might kill her. She picked it up. She stepped into the rain anyway.

That’s courage. Not hope for survival. The absolute certainty of the cost, paid anyway. Hollywood marketing executive talks a lot about this so brilliantly in her newsletter .

Pursuing impact demands accepting fear’s toll, not its elimination. To create change, you must embrace the discomfort of potential failure or worse.

How to act despite fear

1. Embrace the novice edge

Courage thrives in unfamiliar terrain. Once you’re proficient, bravery fades into routine—a seasoned pilot isn’t heroic in clear skies; they’re simply skilled.

The key? Invert the illusion that competence must precede action. Fear of inadequacy signals opportunity: it’s your cue to engage, not retreat. Silkwood wasn’t a seasoned whistleblower; she was a technician thrust into advocacy. Her inexperience amplified her risk, yet it propelled her testimony.

When dread whispers “you’re not ready”, reframe it as “this is where growth begins.” Start imperfectly—pitch that idea, voice that concern—and let expertise accrue through iteration. The novice edge sharpens decisions, stripping away overthinking.

2. Demand personal stakes

As Taleb argues in Skin in the Game, true resolve emerges when you bear the fallout. Advice from sidelines rings hollow; only when your own resources—time, reputation, safety—are at risk does clarity surface.

This filters noise: Before leaping, query, “Who absorbs the blow if this falters?” If it’s you, proceed with authenticity. If others push without consequence, pause. Silkwood’s stakes were visceral—her health, her job, her life—ensuring her actions aligned with deep conviction.

In practice, apply this to decisions big and small. Launching a project? Invest your own effort first. Seeking counsel? Prioritize voices with shared exposure. This honesty transforms fear into a focused ally.

3. Build for antifragility

Antifragility, per Taleb, means thriving under stress—not just enduring it. Design actions so setbacks strengthen you: scale risks small at first, extract lessons, then escalate.

Silkwood’s path exemplified this. She began confiding in colleagues, escalated to AEC testimony, and aimed for media exposure. Each step, though risky, built momentum and insight.

Break bold moves into testable increments. Fail a networking call? Analyze what clicked (or didn’t) for the next. Structure experiments where loss is limited but learning is exponential. Over time, what once terrified becomes navigable, turning courage into a compounding skill.

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In a nutshell

The umbrella my grandmother gave me wasn’t magic. It didn’t make the rain stop or the risk disappear. What it did was make the discomfort tolerable enough that I could move. It created a boundary between me and the chaos. It let me take the first step.

That’s what these frameworks do. They make action possible despite the fear.

Karen Silkwood’s umbrella wasn’t enough. The rain won. But she walked into it anyway, and the plant closed, and the regulations changed, and thousands of workers who came after her were safer because she stepped off the porch.

Because the porch is safe, but nothing meaningful happens there. The rain is still falling. Your umbrella might break. You might not arrive.

But you’ll never know what’s possible until you step off the porch anyway.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

But formulas work until they don’t. And I think ours cracked sometime around 2020.

The pandemic did something strange to our collective psychology. When you spend months isolated, unable to perform your life for others, you’re forced to confront what actually matters to you versus what you thought was supposed to matter. Millions of people had that confrontation simultaneously. And when we emerged, something had changed.

We’d seen behind the curtain. The emperor wasn’t just naked… he was exhausted, medicated, and wondering if the throne was worth it.

Now, in 2025, I’m watching the consequences of that realization play out. People are making different choices. Not better or worse. Just different. And the difference reveals something important about what we actually value when we’re honest with ourselves.

In this article, I’ll talk about the shift, what it means for all of us, and share some self-reflective questions to think about.

Before I continue, I'd like to share this newsletter with you. by . Maryam is a Hollywood marketing exec who has launched 1,000+ campaigns and driven 9-figure growth. Every week, she shares bold, practical insights on courage, leadership, and alignment so you can stop drifting and start leading with intention. I've read her work and loved her insights. I highly recommend you subscribe.

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The Exhaustion Economy

I had a chat recently with a former Google engineer who now runs a small woodworking shop in Vermont. When I asked about the transition, he said something that stuck with me: “I realized I’d become very good at solving problems I didn’t care about. I could keep getting better at that. But every promotion felt like a deeper commitment to something that didn’t matter to me.”

This is the thing nobody talks about when they discuss success: optimization requires sacrifice. When you optimize for external metrics—salary, title, recognition—you necessarily sacrifice internal ones—curiosity, joy, meaning. You can’t maximize both. The math doesn’t work.

For a long time, we collectively agreed the trade-off was worth it. External success would eventually translate to internal satisfaction. Work hard now, be happy later. Climb the mountain, enjoy the view.

But we’ve climbed high enough now to see that the view from the top is just... more mountain. The satisfaction we were promised keeps receding over the next horizon. So we climb harder, optimize better, achieve more. And we call that success even as we feel increasingly empty.

The shift I’m seeing is people opting out of that equation entirely.

There’s a new scorecard

Warren Buffett has this idea about internal versus external scorecards. Most people, he says, keep score based on what others think. A few rare people keep score based on what they think.

I think 2025 might be remembered as the year the internal scorecard went mainstream.

Look at what’s actually trending. The creator economy is changing. Fewer people want mass audiences; more people want small, engaged communities around niche interests. Substack writers are turning down traditional book deals to maintain direct relationships with readers. Musicians like Zoë Keating left Spotify entirely. People are trading scale for sovereignty, reach for authenticity, impressive for meaningful.

Even in corporate America, the conversation is changing. Companies that spent decades optimizing for shareholder value are now talking about stakeholder value—a tacit admission that maximizing profit while minimizing meaning is no longer sustainable. Not because executives had moral awakenings, but because they couldn’t retain talent.

The Great Resignation never ended. It just got quieter. And morphed into the Great Re-Resignation. People aren’t rage-quitting anymore. They’re strategically exiting. They’re taking the job that pays $40K less but lets them sleep at night. They’re stopping the networking and starting to connect. They’re measuring their days by whether they learned something or helped someone, not by whether they produced enough to justify their existence.

You can only ignore that signal for so long before it affects the bottom line.

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What this actually means

I’m not saying everyone should quit their corporate jobs and start woodworking shops. That’s not the point, and frankly, it would be a different kind of optimization—this time for authenticity points.

The shift isn’t about what you do but why you do it.

It’s the difference between taking a job because it looks good on LinkedIn versus taking it because the work genuinely interests you. It’s choosing to spend Tuesday evening reading instead of networking because reading actually energizes you. It’s saying no to opportunities that would impress others but drain you.

These are small decisions. Individually, they’re almost invisible. But cumulatively, they compound into a completely different life.

And I’ve noticed that people who make these shifts don’t seem to regret them. Even when it’s hard. Even when it costs them. There’s something about aligning your daily actions with your actual values—not your inherited values, not your aspirational values, but your actual values—that creates a kind of stability external achievement never could.

Why I love this

I love this shift because it’s honest.

For too long, we’ve been optimizing for a definition of success that most of us didn’t choose and many of us don’t believe in. We’ve been playing a game whose rules we never agreed to, competing for prizes we don’t really want.

This new thing, this quiet rebellion of people choosing meaning over metrics, is messy and uncertain and uncomfortable. There’s no formula for it. No five-step framework. No guaranteed outcome.

But it’s real in a way the old game never was.

I love that someone can admit they’d rather be a mediocre carpenter than a successful consultant and have that be a respectable choice. I love that “I don’t know what I want yet” is becoming an acceptable answer. I love that we’re starting to value depth over velocity, intention over ambition, enough over more.

Mostly, I love that we’re remembering something obvious that somehow got forgotten: you only get one life, and spending it trying to impress people you don’t know with achievements you don’t care about is a spectacular waste of that life.

3 questions to ask yourself

Here’s how you know if you’re living someone else’s definition of success:

1. Would you still do your job if nobody knew about it?

If your answer involves explaining how the money enables other things, or how the position leads to future opportunities, or how it’s building toward something else, you’ve already answered. You wouldn’t.

2. When you imagine yourself in five years, are you excited or just... relieved?

If your vision of success is primarily about finally being done climbing, about reaching a point where you can relax, about escaping the pressure, you’re not pursuing success. You’re fleeing failure.

3. Who are you trying to impress?

Name them. Specifically. Your parents? Your college classmates? The people who didn’t believe in you? The version of yourself who thought this is what winning looked like?

Now ask: do those people actually know you? Do they know what energizes you at 11 pm? What you read when nobody’s watching? What you’d do on a random Tuesday if there were no consequences?

If the answer is no, why the hell are you letting them design your life?

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Change is hard

Change is hard. It requires something most people aren’t willing to give, which is the courage to disappoint others.

Every choice to live more honestly is simultaneously a choice to live less impressively. You can’t optimize for both. And that’s the real shift happening in 2025—not that people are discovering what matters, but that some people are finally willing to pay the social cost of pursuing it.

In the case of the woodworker from Google, his parents still introduce him by mentioning where he used to work. In other cases former colleagues will think you “couldn’t handle” the promotion. Or even stop inviting you to reunions.

This is the price. Not poverty or failure, but something harder to bear: the knowledge that people you care about think you’re making a mistake. That they pity you. That they’ve downgraded their assessment of your potential.

Can you live with that?

Because if you can’t, none of this matters. The shift is more practical than it is philosophical. It’s waking up every day and choosing your definition of success over theirs. Again and again and again, even when it hurts.

Most people can’t do it. Most people would rather be impressive and miserable than ordinary and content. And that’s fine—there’s no judgment in that. The social cost is real, and not everyone can afford to pay it.

In a nutshell

On your deathbed, you won’t regret the risks you took. You’ll regret the ones you didn’t.

You won’t regret disappointing your parents, your colleagues, your LinkedIn connections. You’ll regret disappointing yourself.

You won’t regret the promotion you turned down, the salary you left, the prestige you walked away from. Nobody will remember any of that in five years anyway.

But you’ll remember. You’ll remember every single day that you chose to live by your own definition of enough. And that memory—the knowledge that you had the courage to bet on yourself when it mattered—that’s the only achievement that actually compounds.

The shift happening in 2025 isn’t about enlightenment. It’s about exhaustion. Enough people have gotten tired of deferring their lives. Tired of waiting for permission that’s never coming. Tired of optimizing for a future moment of satisfaction that keeps receding over the horizon.

They’re choosing now. Imperfectly. Messily. Without knowing if it’ll work out.

And in twenty years, when the rest of us are still waiting for the right moment, still preparing, still optimizing for someone else’s definition of success, they’ll be the ones who actually lived.

That’s the shift. And it’s going to make a lot of people very uncomfortable.

The question is: which side of that discomfort do you want to be on?

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

It’s 3 PM on a Tuesday and you’re staring at a screen. The document is open. The deadline is close. Your coffee has gone cold in that uniquely depressing way that suggests you’ve forgotten about it three separate times. You want to focus—genuinely want to—but your attention keeps slipping like water through your fingers.

Email. Instagram. The news. A thought about dinner that somehow leads to wondering whether dolphins have accents. Back to the document. Forward to nothing in particular.

You tell yourself it’s indiscipline. That you’re weak. That successful people have something you lack—some iron will, some capacity for suffering, some secret you haven’t learned yet.

I have good news and bad news.

The bad news: you’re fighting a natural tendency toward distraction, and that tendency is hard to overcome.

The good news: once you understand what you’re up against, you can stop fighting so hard and start collaborating with your own mind.

In this article, I’m going to use the laws of entropy as a metaphor to explain why focus can feel so elusive, and what to do about it.

Note: This is an analogy to illustrate the challenges of attention, not a literal scientific explanation of brain processes.

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The Universe Has a Direction

In 1850, German physicist Rudolf Clausius formalized the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It states that in isolated systems, entropy—a measure of disorder—tends to increase over time. This is why things naturally fall apart or become more random without external input.

Your coffee cools to room temperature. Never the reverse. Sandcastles return to the beach. Stars collapse. Galaxies disperse.

The universe has a direction, and that direction is toward increasing randomness in closed systems. But living things, including your brain, are open systems that can maintain or even increase order locally by using energy from the environment.

Still, distraction can feel a lot like this process. How many ways can your attention be arranged right now? There’s exactly one configuration where you’re completely focused on reading these words. But there are ten thousand configurations where you’re thinking about literally anything else. The notification you just heard. Whether you responded to that text. That conversation from three days ago, you’re still mentally editing. The feeling of your chair. Your breathing. That weird sound your refrigerator makes. Whether refrigerators are supposed to make sounds.

Focused attention feels like a highly ordered state—improbable and effortful, like trying to keep all the air molecules in a room gathered in one corner. Distraction feels like the more natural, scattered state.

This analogy explains why focus can feel like holding your breath underwater. Not because you’re weak, but because maintaining that order requires ongoing effort, and our minds are wired to wander in response to stimuli.

The Real Cost of “Just Checking”

When you “just check” your email in the middle of focused work, what do you think you’re doing?

Taking a break? Staying responsive? Being efficient?

No. You’re imposing a cognitive cost on your mental system, and that cost has a real energy toll that you will pay whether you understand it or not.

In physics, if you want to compress a gas into a smaller volume, you must do work. The molecules don’t spontaneously organize themselves into a corner. You force them there by applying external energy. When you release the pressure, the gas expands back to fill the available space. This isn’t a moral failing of the gas. It’s just physics.

Task switching can be thought of as a kind of cognitive “compression” in this metaphorical sense.

You have to suppress all the neural activation associated with your current task—the problem space you’ve built, the context you’re holding, the momentum you’ve established. Then you must activate entirely different networks for the new task. Then, when you switch back, you must do it all again in reverse.

But cognitive shifts aren’t perfectly efficient. Some mental resources are lost in the process.

Dr Sophie Leroy, a business professor at the University of Washington, calls this “attention residue”. When you switch tasks, part of your attention stays stuck on the previous task even after you’ve moved on. That residue isn’t a bug in your psychology. It’s a feature of how our brains handle transitions, rooted in unfinished goals and cognitive persistence.

Each switch can make your mental state feel more disordered, building up over time.

Do this enough times—checking Slack, glancing at news, responding to texts, monitoring email, toggling tabs—and you reach a point of mental overload. A state where it’s hard to extract useful work because your cognitive resources are scattered.

In other words: burnout.

That feeling at 5 PM where you’ve been busy all day, you’re exhausted, but you cannot point to a single meaningful thing you accomplished. That’s not mysterious. That’s the result of inefficient mental processes draining your energy, leaving you with little to show for it.

The Buddhists have a term: “monkey mind”. Psychology calls it task-switching costs. Either way, the lesson is the same: effort and progress are not the same thing. Distraction doesn’t care how hard you tried.

So what exactly do you do about this?

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Build Heat Sinks for the Mind

In the early days of computing, engineers discovered that processors generated heat. The faster the chip, the more heat. Let the heat build up and the system crashes. The solution wasn’t to make chips that didn’t generate heat—that’s impossible. The solution was heat sinks. Structures designed to absorb thermal energy and dissipate it safely.

You can think of similar strategies for attention.

An attention “heat sink” is a practice that absorbs cognitive distractions and channels them somewhere safe, preventing your working memory from overload.

1. The Capture System

Keep a notebook next to you when working. Not for tasks. Not for organization. For distraction management.

When an intrusive thought appears— “I should email Sarah”, “What’s for dinner?”, “Did I pay that bill?”—write it down immediately and return to your work. Don’t evaluate it. Don’t organize it. Just capture it and release it from working memory.

You’re not eliminating the thought. You’re externalising it. Your brain no longer needs to hold that information, which means more mental resources available for your primary focus.

The mind is for thinking, not for storage. Storage creates mental clutter.

2. Scheduled Chaos

Preventing entropy is impossible. Managing entropy is essential.

I work in sixty-minute blocks, then take fifteen minutes of complete entropy release. Check everything. Browse freely. Let your mind wander wherever it wants. You can choose a time block that works best for you.

By scheduling disorder, you prevent spontaneous disorder during focus time. Your brain stops fighting you because it knows relief is coming. The pressure to scatter attention right now decreases because scattering is scheduled for later.

The Japanese have a word: ma. It means negative space, the pause between notes, the emptiness that gives structure meaning. Your chaos blocks are cognitive ma. The disorder that makes order possible.

3. Environmental Temperature

Your environment has a baseline level of potential distractions, and maintaining focus in a chaotic setting requires constant mental effort.

Phone notifications are distraction injections. Visual clutter is a distraction injection. Open offices where you hear every conversation are distraction injections. Available internet is a distraction injection every time you see a browser.

Each raises the ambient “noise” of your cognitive environment. Each forces you to spend energy just to maintain your current state, energy that could go toward useful work.

Cool your environment. Single-task applications that hide everything else. Notification blocking that would make a medieval monk proud. Minimal visual fields—close tabs, clear desk, face wall. Phone in another room, another floor, another building.

This sounds extreme. But it’s just practical psychology.

Every point of environmental distraction you eliminate doesn’t just make focus easier but also cheaper. The difference between a calm environment and a chaotic one is the difference between focus that lasts hours and focus that depletes in minutes.

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In a nutshell

At 3 PM tomorrow, your attention will start sliding away. The document will still be open. The deadline will still be real. Your coffee will go cold again.

But you’ll understand what’s happening.

Your cognitive system is responding to natural tendencies toward distraction. The mind wanders, as it must in a stimulating world.

You can’t stop that entirely. You were never going to stop that completely. The game involves working with your brain’s wiring.

But you can design systems that maintain focus at lower mental cost. You can build environments that reduce baseline distractions. You can stop blaming yourself for natural cognitive patterns. You can become far better at creating temporary pockets of concentration amid the noise.

You live in a mind that tends toward wandering. That’s the game. The only game. The one game worth playing.

Focus isn’t about overcoming distraction through sheer force. It’s about dancing with it, using its momentum, building beautiful temporary structures that you know won’t last but matter anyway.

Because the mind has tendencies, yes.

But within those tendencies, there’s room for small rebellions.

For ordered thought in a distracting world.

For meaning wrested from mental chaos.

For focus, maintained not through force but through understanding, not through willpower but through wisdom, not by fighting your brain but by collaborating with it.

The coffee will cool. The room will get messy. The stars will burn out.

But right now, in this moment, you can think clearly.

And that’s enough.

That’s always been enough.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

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In 1951, British chemist Rosalind Franklin adjusted her X-ray crystallography equipment one final time and captured what would become known as "Photo 51". The image was breathtaking in its clarity; black and white striations forming a perfect X pattern that revealed, unmistakably, the helical structure of DNA.

She was close to solving one of biology's greatest puzzles. Her calculations were precise, her methodology flawless, her data irrefutable.

But "almost" has a cruel way of becoming "never."

Without her knowledge, her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed Photo 51 to James Watson. Watson and Francis Crick published their famous paper describing the double helix structure of DNA, using Franklin's data as the foundation for their model. Franklin died four years later of ovarian cancer at age 37, never knowing that Watson, Crick, and Wilkins would receive the Nobel Prize in 1962 for work that was fundamentally hers.

She had been so close that she could almost taste the discovery. The breakthrough was literally developed in her darkroom, printed by her hands. Yet somehow, inexplicably, it slipped away.

Over the past few weeks, I've found myself thinking about Rosalind Franklin a lot. Like her, I've come heartbreakingly close to breakthroughs only to watch them dissolve at the last moment. I had this work opportunity that was "practically guaranteed" until it became a polite rejection email. The project had "green lights all the way up" until someone changed their mind. It weighed heavily on me, which explains why I've been quieter than usual in the past few weeks.

There's something uniquely devastating about these almost-victories. They're not clean defeats you can learn from and move past. They're victories that got dressed up, showed up to the party, and then vanished just as you were about to introduce them to everyone you know.

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The Cruelest Kind of Loss

Psychologists have a term for what makes these experiences so particularly torturous: the "near-miss effect". Research shows that narrowly missing a positive outcome can be more psychologically distressing than a clear, decisive loss. When we almost win, our brains process it similarly to an actual win, releasing dopamine and creating anticipation, but then crash when the expected reward doesn't materialize.

It's why slot machines are designed to show you two cherries and a lemon. It's why job rejection letters say "we were impressed by your qualifications" before delivering the blow. These near-misses hack into our neural reward system, creating a uniquely frustrating form of suffering.

But they also reveal a fundamental truth about existence that most of us spend considerable energy avoiding: we are not guaranteed the outcomes we deserve. The universe operates on principles that have nothing to do with our merit, our effort, or our need for things to make sense.

Rosalind Franklin's story isn't tragic because she was denied something she didn't deserve. It's tragic because it illuminates how little control we actually have over the timing, recognition, and fruition of our work. She did everything right; was more rigorous than her competitors, more careful with her methodology, more deserving of the credit. And yet.

This is where most self-help advice falls apart. It tells us to work harder, be more strategic, network better, optimize our approach. But what happens when you've done all that and life still gives you tomorrow instead of today? What happens when the universe's response to your best effort is "almost, but not quite"?

I found my answer in the work of a French philosopher who spent his life thinking about exactly this problem.

Imagine Sisyphus happy

If you've been reading my work for some time now, you must have noticed that Albert Camus is my favourite philosopher. He gave the best possible explanation I've ever encountered for why life is the way it is and how to live it anyway.

He understood that we are creatures who desperately need meaning in a universe that offers none. We search for logic in chaos, for fairness in randomness, for guaranteed outcomes in a world built on uncertainty. This fundamental mismatch between what we need and what existence provides is what Camus called "the absurd".

For most of my adult life, I have been trying to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive. This sentence, more than any philosophical treatise, captures what Camus spent decades exploring. We exist in constant tension between the magnificent possibility of existence and its complete unpredictability.

Your almost-victories aren't personal failures or cosmic punishments. They're simply what happens when conscious beings try to impose narrative and justice onto an indifferent reality. The universe doesn't owe you the promotion, the relationship, the recognition, or the breakthrough… not because you don't deserve them, but because the universe doesn't operate on the principle of deserving at all.

This is where most of us get trapped.

We sacrifice happiness to be successful so that when we're finally successful, we can be happy.

We defer joy, thinking it's earned through achievement, only to discover that achievement without joy is just another form of emptiness. If you accidentally bite into a rotten apple, it's hard not to be cynical about the whole bunch. But cynicism about outcomes doesn't have to poison your engagement with the process.

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The Absurd as Liberation

This might sound depressing, but Camus found it liberating. Once you accept that the game isn't rigged against you, it's just not designed for you at all, you can stop trying to figure out what you did wrong and start focusing on what you can actually control. It's not your fault that life gives you tomorrow instead of today. But it's still your problem. And that makes it your responsibility to decide how to respond.

There’s so much relief in this. People love jumping, especially to conclusions about what their almost-victories mean about their worth, their future, their fundamental adequacy as human beings. But what if these experiences mean nothing beyond themselves? What if they're just data points in the beautiful, chaotic experiment of being alive?

Camus illustrated this with the myth of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a mountain for eternity, only to watch it roll back down each time he nears the summit. The traditional interpretation sees this as the ultimate punishment—futility, despair, meaninglessness. But Camus saw something revolutionary: a man who had stopped expecting the boulder to stay at the top.

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart," Camus wrote. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

The Practice of Absurd Living

Here's what this looks like in practice when life gives you tomorrow:

1. Accept your apprenticeship to greatness.

Greatness rejects all first-time applicants. Every almost-victory is teaching you something about your craft, your resilience, and your capacity to continue despite uncertainty. A cat that dreams of becoming a lion must lose its appetite for rats… not because rats are bad, but because the dream demands a different kind of hunger.

2. Risk looking foolish.

Embarrassment is an underexplored emotion. Go out there and make a fool of yourself. The fear of embarrassment keeps us playing it safe, which paradoxically makes almost-victories more devastating because we've invested our entire sense of self-worth in outcomes we can't control. There's a fine line between brave and stupid, but most of us are so far from that line that we could afford to move significantly toward it.

3. Live in the eternal now.

The past is gone and the future isn't guaranteed. We live in the eternal now. When you're pushing your boulder, you're not pushing yesterday's boulder or tomorrow's boulder. You're pushing today's boulder, right now, with these hands, in this moment. That's where your power lives. Focus on it.

4. Cultivate micro-joy.

Find increasingly small things to be increasingly happy about. The way morning light hits your window. The fact that your heart is beating without your conscious effort. The peculiar satisfaction of deleting a poorly written sentence and replacing it with a better one. When your joy isn't dependent on major victories, almost-victories lose their power to devastate you.

5. Understand productive failure.

We are too afraid to mess things up and that eventually messes things up. The fear of almost-victories creates tentative engagement, which makes almost-victories more likely. When you fully commit to pushing the boulder, knowing it will roll back down, you push with more force, more precision, more joy than when you're trying to protect yourself from disappointment.

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In a nutshell

Rosalind Franklin never saw Watson, Crick, and Wilkins receive their Nobel Prize, but she also never stopped doing the work that mattered to her. In her final years, she pivoted to studying plant viruses and made groundbreaking discoveries there too. She didn't know her DNA research would eventually be recognized as foundational. She didn't know that buildings would be named after her, that scholarships would honour her memory, that her story would inspire countless young scientists.

She just kept pushing the boulder.

Life will keep giving you tomorrow. The almost-victories will keep coming, and they will keep slipping away at the last moment. You can spend your energy raging against this reality, or you can do what Camus suggested: accept it fully, revolt against resignation, and find meaning in the magnificent futility of it all.

The summit was never the point. The push was always the point.

And tomorrow you get to push again.

So find meaning in the quality of your engagement with what is, rather than what might be.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

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You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

A woman was explaining to her friend why she couldn't start the business she'd been talking about for months: "I'm just not a creative person. I never have good ideas."

I wanted to lean over and tell her she was completely wrong. Not about her business idea, I had no opinion on that, but about not being creative. Because in the ten minutes I'd been accidentally listening, she'd made at least three genuinely insightful observations, connected two seemingly unrelated concepts in an interesting way, and proposed a solution to her friend's dating problem that was both practical and clever.

She was generating great ideas constantly. She just didn't recognize them as ideas.

This is the real problem most of us have. We think great ideas are these lightning-bolt moments of pure inspiration that strike genius minds while they're staring dramatically out rain-soaked windows. But that's not how ideas actually work.

Great ideas are everywhere, all the time. We're just terrible at noticing them.

The difference between people who seem naturally creative and those who think they're not isn't some mystical creative gene. It's recognition. It's developing the ability to spot the good stuff that's already happening in your head.

In this article, I'll show you how to become an idea detective. Someone who can reliably find the brilliant thoughts that are already there, waiting to be discovered.

This article is brought to you by Bechem’s Ghostwriting Services… one of the best newsletter ghostwriting services on the internet. CLICK HERE to find out how I can help you build authority, influence, and revenue through a newsletter that your audience actually looks forward to.

Why we miss our own brilliance

The problem is that we've been trained to dismiss our own thoughts as ordinary. We have this weird assumption that if something occurs to us, it must be obvious to everyone else too.

Instead of assuming others know what we know, we assume others think what we think. If we notice something, surely everyone notices it. If we have a reaction to something, surely that's the normal reaction.

But the truth is, your perspective is more unique than you realize. The combination of your experiences, your knowledge, your biases, your blind spots… no one else has exactly that mix. Which means the connections you make, the patterns you notice, and the problems you see are genuinely yours.

I tested this with a friend. We both watched the same TED talk, then shared our reactions without discussing them first. The things that stood out to each of us were completely different. What seemed obvious to me was surprising to him, and vice versa. Same input, totally different ideas.

Your brain is constantly processing information in ways that are specific to you. The thoughts that emerge from that processing aren't ordinary just because they're yours.

1. Embrace Boredom (Yes, Really)

We live in a culture that treats boredom like a disease to be cured immediately. The moment we feel unstimulated, we reach for our phones, put on a podcast, or find some other way to fill the mental space.

But boredom is usually where ideas are born.

Think about when your best insights actually happen. Probably not during your scheduled brainstorming sessions. More likely while you're in the shower, taking a walk, doing dishes, or lying in bed before falling asleep. All moments when your brain has nothing urgent to process and can finally make those background connections it's been working on.

I started protecting my boredom deliberately:

• Taking the taxi without headphones or reading material

• Sitting in waiting rooms without pulling out my phone

• Going for walks without podcasts

• Eating meals without entertainment

• Standing in line without scrolling

At first, this felt almost unbearable(ESPECIALLY eating meals without entertainment). I'd forgotten how to be alone with my thoughts. But as I got comfortable with mental emptiness, my brain started filling that space with connections I'd never made before.

The constant stimulation of modern life doesn't just crowd out boredom but also crowds out the mental processing time where ideas develop.

Your brain needs downtime to connect disparate pieces of information. When you're always consuming input, you're never allowing the synthesis to happen.

Great ideas need space to emerge. Boredom isn't the enemy of creativity. It's the soil where creativity grows.

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2. Become a Polymath

This might sound intimidating, but here's what I mean: develop genuine curiosity about things that have nothing to do with your work or main interests.

The best ideas come from combining insights from completely unrelated fields. But you can't make those connections if you only know one field deeply. Your creative potential is limited by the diversity of your inputs.

I started deliberately exposing myself to domains I knew nothing about:

• Studying colour vision science when I was trying to understand the origin of our diverse socio-political views

• Reading about marine biology when I was stuck on a business problem

• Learning about jazz improvisation when I needed to be more creative in my writing

• Following people on social media who worked in fields completely different from mine

Doing this will help you build a rich database of patterns, metaphors, and approaches that your unconscious mind can draw from later.

The most breakthrough ideas often come from borrowing solutions from one domain and applying them to challenges in another. Netflix borrowed the subscription model from gyms. Uber took the taxi concept and added smartphone coordination. Airbnb combined hotel stays with the sharing economy.

None of these were purely original inventions. They were clever combinations of existing elements from different domains.

When you have a broader knowledge base, your brain has more raw material to work with. The connections it makes become more surprising and more valuable.

3. The Myth of Originality

One thing that freed me from creative paralysis is the idea that nothing is completely original. Every creation is a recreation of something else.

Every great idea, every breakthrough innovation, and every piece of art you admire was built on something that came before. Creativity is combining existing elements in new and interesting ways.

Shakespeare adapted his plots from earlier stories and historical accounts. Star Wars is essentially a Western set in space, borrowing from samurai films and World War II dogfights. The iPhone combined existing technologies (touchscreens, internet connectivity, cameras, music players) into one elegant device.

Even the most revolutionary ideas are really just evolutionary. They take existing concepts and push them one step further, or combine them in ways no one had tried before.

This realization changed how I approach creativity. Instead of trying to invent something entirely new (which is nearly impossible), I started looking for interesting combinations of things that already exist.

Some of my best ideas have come from asking:

• "What if we took this approach from X field and applied it to Y problem?"

• "What would happen if we combined these two existing concepts?"

• "How might this work differently in a completely different context?"

The pressure to be completely original is not just unrealistic but also counterproductive. It makes you dismiss good ideas because they seem too familiar or derivative.

But familiar elements combined in unfamiliar ways can be incredibly powerful. That's how creativity works.

Strengthening the Recognition Muscle

Spotting great ideas is like developing any other skill. It gets easier with practice. But you have to practice the right thing.

Most people practice generating ideas when they should be practicing recognizing them.

Here's how I trained my recognition muscle:

• A Daily Idea Audit: Every evening for a month, I reviewed my day and tried to identify moments when I'd had interesting thoughts, even tiny ones. What had I noticed? What had surprised me? What connections had I made?

• The Build-On Practice: Whenever someone else shared an idea, instead of just nodding along, I'd try to build on it. "That reminds me of..." or "What if you combined that with..." This trains your brain to treat every idea as raw material for new ideas.

After a few weeks of this, I noticed I was catching interesting thoughts that I would have previously let slip by unnoticed. My recognition system was getting more sensitive.

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Timing

Great ideas have terrible timing. They show up when you're falling asleep, in the shower, during conversations about other topics, while you're walking to get lunch. Never when you sit down and decide it's idea time.

This used to frustrate me until I realized that’s just the way our minds work. Ideas emerge when your conscious mind is relaxed and your unconscious mind can work freely.

Instead of forcing ideas to come on schedule, I started working with their natural timing:

• I carry capture tools everywhere: Voice memos, quick notes on my phone, even just texting myself. That’s why Google Keep and Telegram have become 2 of my favourite apps. Aim to grab ideas when they appear, not when it's convenient.

• I pay attention to my idea patterns: I noticed I get different types of ideas at different times. Morning walks generate big-picture thinking. Late evening showers produce specific solutions.

Once you map your personal idea rhythms, you can start designing your schedule to work with them instead of against them.

Confidence

Most great ideas feel terrible when you first have them.

They feel too simple, too weird, too obvious, too impractical. Your first instinct is to dismiss them. "That's stupid. That would never work. Someone has definitely thought of this before."

I used to kill my best ideas in their cradle because they didn't feel impressive enough. I was expecting every good idea to arrive with fanfare and obvious brilliance.

But great ideas often feel mundane to their creators precisely because they're so naturally connected to how you already think. They seem obvious because they make sense within your unique perspective and knowledge.

The solution isn't to lower your standards but to delay your judgment. When you have a thought that makes you pause, even if it seems too simple or obvious, capture it anyway. Give it time to develop before you decide whether it's worth keeping.

Some of my best ideas initially felt like the most boring ones. They only revealed their potential after I spent time with them and followed their implications.

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In a nutshell

What exactly do I mean by "effortless" in the context of idea generation?

Working with your brain's natural processes instead of against them.

Your brain is already an idea-generating machine. It's constantly making observations, drawing connections, and spotting patterns. The effort isn't in making this happen but in paying attention to what's already happening.

The best ideas don't come from trying harder to be creative. They come from developing a better relationship with your own thinking.

Most of us already have interesting thoughts all day long. We're just not paying attention to them. We dismiss our observations as ordinary and miss the subtle connections our brains are constantly making.

But when you learn to notice these things, when you protect space for boredom, expand your knowledge across different domains, and stop expecting pure originality, creativity stops feeling like a mysterious talent that some people have and others don't.

The ideas were always there. You just needed to start believing they were worth catching.

Your brain is already doing the work. The only question is whether you're going to pay attention to what it's producing.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

I used to think she was just being nostalgic. Every time something broke in our house, be it an umbrella after its first storm or shoes that wore through after six months, she'd shake her head and launch into her familiar refrain: "Things aren't made like they used to be".

She'd tell me about umbrellas that lasted many years, shoes that could be resoled countless times, appliances that hummed along for years without complaint.

My small brain couldn't understand her frustration. Surely, I thought, with all our technological advancement, we must be making better, longer-lasting products now than ever before. Progress meant improvement, right?

I dismissed her stories as the selective memory of an aging mind, until years later, I stumbled across a Veritasium video that shattered my faith in technological progress. The video, titled "This is why we can't have nice things", revealed that my grandmother was absolutely right… and that the deterioration of product quality wasn't accidental.

It was systematically planned by corporations in what economists call the tragedy of the commons. What I discovered changed everything I thought I knew about why we can't have nice things.

This article is brought to you by Bechem’s Ghostwriting Services… one of the best newsletter ghostwriting services on the internet. CLICK HERE to find out how I can help you build authority, influence, and revenue through a newsletter that your audience actually looks forward to.

The invisible hand that slaps us all

The tragedy of the commons is the invisible hand strangling the quality out of everything we buy.

At its core, it describes situations where individual actors, pursuing their own rational self-interest, collectively create outcomes that are worse for everyone.

The most shocking example comes from the early 20th century: the Phoebus Cartel. This international conspiracy of light bulb manufacturers, including General Electric, Philips, and Osram, deliberately engineered shorter-lived light bulbs, reducing their lifespan from 2,500 hours to just 1,000 hours. This artificial scarcity tripled their profits while forcing consumers to replace bulbs far more frequently.

But the Phoebus Cartel was just the beginning. The concept of planned obsolescence, deliberately designing products to break down or become obsolete, spread like a virus through every industry. Today, it lurks behind the frustrations of modern life:

Your smartphone develops mysterious slowdowns just as the new model launches. Apple admitted to throttling older iPhones, claiming it was to preserve battery life, but the timing was suspiciously convenient for their upgrade cycle.

Your printer refuses to print in black when the cyan cartridge runs low, even though black ink has nothing to do with cyan. The cartridges often contain chips that report "empty" when they're still 20% full, forcing premature replacement.

Your car requires proprietary parts and specialized tools that independent mechanics can't access, pushing you toward expensive dealership repairs or premature replacement.

Your appliances use cheap plastic gears where metal ones would last forever, ensuring they'll break just after the warranty expires.

The tragedy of the commons plays out in boardrooms where executives face a cruel choice:

build products that last forever and sell fewer units, or build products that break and dominate the market. When your competitors choose the latter, you must follow or die.

The pattern repeats across industries. Individual companies acting rationally create collective irrationality. We get products designed to break, upgrades we don't need, and an economy built on waste. The commons, our shared expectation of quality products, gets pillaged by actors who can't afford to act in the collective interest.

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Why is this happening?

So why do we keep stepping on the same rake over and over again? It turns out we're fighting against some pretty fundamental stuff… our wiring, our blind spots, and the way we've organized society. Three forces that basically guarantee we'll screw this up:

1. Our Stone Age Brains in a Digital Age World

We're hardwired for immediate gratification and struggle to perceive long-term costs. When faced with a $200 printer versus a $800 printer, our ancient brain focuses on the immediate saving, not the lifetime cost of ink and repairs.

This cognitive bias extends to companies. Quarterly earnings reports often reward short-term thinking while long-term sustainability gets punished by impatient investors. A CEO who sacrifices this quarter's profits to build more durable products will likely be fired before the strategy pays off.

Natural selection in the corporate world favours the shortsighted.

Research in behavioural economics shows that humans consistently undervalue future costs and overvalue immediate benefits… a phenomenon called hyperbolic discounting. We'll choose $50 today over $100 next year, even though waiting would be objectively better. This same bias makes us choose cheaper products that cost more over their lifetime.

2. The Prisoner's Dilemma of Market Competition

Game theory explains why even well-intentioned companies can't escape planned obsolescence. Imagine two companies, each choosing between making durable or fragile products:

• If both make durable products: Both earn moderate profits, consumers win

• If both make fragile products: Both earn high profits, consumers lose

• If one makes durable, one fragile: The fragile-product company captures the market with lower prices

The rational choice for each company is to make fragile products, regardless of what the competitor does. This is the classic prisoner's dilemma, and it's playing out in every industry.

Even worse, companies that try to coordinate on quality face antitrust laws. When manufacturers meet to agree on standards, regulators worry about price-fixing cartels. The legal system hinders the cooperation that could solve the tragedy of the commons.

The company that tries to do the right thing often gets punished by market forces. So everyone races to the bottom, not because they want to, but because the system rewards it.

3. The Information Asymmetry Problem

Companies know exactly how long their products will last; consumers don't. This information gap creates perverse incentives. Why invest in a motor that lasts 20 years when customers can't tell the difference from one that lasts 5?

Marketing exploits this asymmetry ruthlessly. Products are advertised based on features customers can evaluate in the store—aesthetics, initial performance, price—not longevity. By the time durability matters, you've already purchased and the company has your money.

Consumer Reports tries to bridge this gap, but most people don't consult it, and even when they do, the testing takes years. By the time reliable durability data emerges, newer models have already replaced the tested ones. We're always buying blind.

Breaking free from the tragedy

The tragedy of the commons isn't inevitable. We can break free, but it requires action at every level of society.

Collective Solutions: Changing the Game

Government intervention can realign incentives. Extended warranty requirements force companies to internalize the costs of poor quality. When appliances must be guaranteed for 10 years instead of 1, suddenly durability becomes profitable.

The European Union leads this effort with "right to repair" legislation mandating that manufacturers provide spare parts and repair manuals for at least 10 years. France goes further, requiring companies to display a "repairability index" on products, finally giving consumers the information they need.

Carbon pricing could revolutionize product design. If companies had to pay for the full environmental cost of products—including disposal and replacement—planned obsolescence would become economically irrational overnight. A carbon tax that accounts for product lifetime would make durable goods cheaper than disposable ones.

Professional procurement offers a model for consumers. Hospitals and factories already buy based on total cost of ownership, not upfront price. They're willing to pay more for equipment that lasts because they understand the economics. Consumer markets could learn from this approach.

Individual Strategies: Voting with Your Wallet

1. Buy total cost, not sticker price:

Calculate the lifetime cost of products, including maintenance, consumables, and replacement. That expensive printer that uses cheap ink may cost less than the cheap printer with expensive ink cartridges.

2. Research before you buy:

Seek out brands with reputations for durability. Companies like Patagonia, which repairs products for life, and Buy It For Life communities on Reddit can guide you toward products that last.

3. Embrace the "one good thing" philosophy.

Instead of buying five cheap items that break, buy one expensive item that lasts. You'll save money and reduce waste while signaling to manufacturers that durability has value.

4. Support repair culture:

Learn basic repair skills, patronize repair shops, and choose products designed to be fixed. Every repair is a vote against planned obsolescence.

5. Vote with your voice, not just your wallet:

Companies pay attention to online reviews and social media. Publicly praising durability and criticizing planned obsolescence influences other consumers and corporate behavior.

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Systemic Change: New Economic Models

The ultimate solution may be changing how we think about ownership. Product-as-a-service models align manufacturer incentives with consumer interests. When companies lease you appliances instead of selling them, they profit from durability rather than failure.

Imagine if your washing machine, car, and phone were all subscription services. Suddenly, manufacturers would want products to last as long as possible to minimize replacement costs. This model already works in industrial equipment—construction companies lease bulldozers specifically because manufacturers maintain them properly.

Circular economy principles could revolutionize manufacturing. When companies become responsible for the entire lifecycle of products—including eventual recycling—they design for disassembly and reuse rather than disposal.

In a nutshell

My grandmother was right, but not in the way she thought. Products weren't better in her day because of superior craftsmanship or moral character but because the economic incentives were different.

We can return to that world, but only if we choose to. Every purchase is a vote for the world you want to live in. Every company you support is a bet on what kind of capitalism you believe in. Every policy you advocate for is a choice about whether we'll continue accepting artificial scarcity in a world of abundance.

The technology exists to make products that last for decades. The materials science, the engineering knowledge, the manufacturing capability… it's all there. What's missing is the will to use it.

We've built a world where the rational choice is often the wrong choice. But recognizing the trap is the first step toward escaping it.

The commons doesn't have to be tragic. Sometimes it just needs people who remember what nice things look like.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

Before we get into today’s article, I need to say this: thank you.

What started as me writing into the void has no

w grown into a community of over 1,000 people across 88 countries… people crazy enough to dig into human nature with me, to ask why we do what we do, and how we might do it better.

It feels less like an audience and more like a train full of fellow travellers. And I’m glad you’re on it with me.

Thank you. Thank you. And thank you. Subscribe now if you haven’t. The best is yet to come.

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Humanity's Greatest Curse

We are the first generation to have everything our great-grandparents dreamed of, and also the first to need meditation apps just to fall asleep at night.

We are living through the most prosperous era in human history. We have access to opportunities, information, and luxuries that would make ancient kings weep with envy.

Our ancestors worked themselves to death just to survive winter, and here we are ordering Thai food in our pyjamas while learning quantum physics on YouTube.

Yet, we're miserable.

Not just occasionally sad. We’re systematically, chronically, and profoundly dissatisfied.

This isn't about social media or participation trophies. This goes deeper. Way deeper.

We are cursed. Cursed by our own nature.

We are hardwired, at the most fundamental level, to never be satisfied. To always focus on what's missing instead of what's present. To run on a treadmill that speeds up every time we think we've found our rhythm.

You know that feeling that lives in your chest. That restless, gnawing sense that something fundamental is always just slightly wrong?

It's not anxiety. It's not depression.

It's what the Buddhists call dukkha - often translated as suffering, but more accurately described as the inherent dissatisfaction that comes from being alive and conscious.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer captured this beautifully in his book, The World as Will and Representation (1819). He wrote:

"All satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never positive."

What he meant is this: We don't experience satisfaction as a positive state. We experience it as the temporary absence of dissatisfaction. Like how health isn't something you feel, it's just the absence of disease. The moment you're no longer hungry, you don't feel "fed". You just stop feeling hungry until the next wave hits.

According to him, satisfaction is the brief pause between wants.

And modern life has systematically shortened those pauses. We've created a civilization that profits from keeping us in a constant state of manufactured dissatisfaction.

Every notification is designed to create a prediction error. Every advertisement works by showing you a gap between where you are and where you could be.

We've gamified our own misery and convinced ourselves we're having fun.

But why is this the case? Why exactly are we like this?

This article is brought to you by Bechem’s Ghostwriting Services… one of the best newsletter ghostwriting services on the internet. CLICK HERE to find out how I can help you build authority, influence, and revenue through a newsletter that your audience actually looks forward to.

Why we’re built this way

I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure this out, and what I found was both depressing and oddly comforting.

Our brains have this thing called the anterior cingulate cortex. Scientists call it your "neural alarm system", but I think of it as that friend who never stops pointing out problems.

Its entire job is to scan your environment and find things that could be better, threats you haven't noticed, gaps between where you are and where you think you should be.

This system evolved over thousands of years when being content could literally kill you. The caveman who was satisfied with his current food supply didn't bother foraging for more. When winter came, he starved.

The one who was always a little paranoid, always looking for the next meal, the better shelter, the safer path, survived.

We are the neurotic descendants of humanity's most successfully anxious people.

We won the genetic lottery by inheriting the brain patterns of people who were never, ever content.

But like I always say, the fact that we’ve evolved like this doesn’t mean we can’t work our way around it. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t find modern solutions to modern problems. So how exactly do we do that?

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Play Your Own Game

You cannot eliminate the curse of dissatisfaction. But you can choose which form it takes.

Right now, you're probably running on what psychologists call "introjected motivation"... pursuing goals you absorbed from your environment without consciously choosing them.

You're optimizing for metrics that were programmed into you by parents, peers, and culture, not metrics you deliberately selected.

You're playing a game where other people set the rules, move the goalposts, and decide what counts as winning.

Of course you're miserable. And you can never win because winning conditions change every time you get close.

The solution is what the Greeks called autotelos - being an end in yourself rather than a means to someone else's end.

You need to become the author of your own dissatisfaction.

Here’s how you can do that:

Step 1: Archaeological Honesty

Before you can choose your own game, you need to excavate the game you're currently playing.

Sit down and write out everything you're currently chasing. Not what you think you should want, but what you actually spend time and energy pursuing. The promotions, the metrics, the milestones, the recognition, the lifestyle markers.

Now trace each goal back to its source.

• Where did this desire come from?

• When did you first decide this mattered?

• Who benefits when you chase this particular form of success?

Most people discover they're optimizing their lives for the approval of people they don't even respect.

But you cannot find satisfaction pursuing goals you never consciously chose.

Step 2: Define Your Own Telos

Aristotle's concept of telos - the end, purpose, or goal toward which something naturally develops - was revolutionary because it suggested that different things have different natural ends.

Your telos is not the same as everyone else's telos.

Society gives you a template: Make X dollars, live in Y neighborhood, have Z followers, build a company worth this much, retire by this age.

The template is seductive because it removes the cognitive load of having to figure out what you actually want.

But templates are for mass production, not for human flourishing.

You need to define what "enough" really looks like according to your own nature, not society's manufacturing standards.

When you know what you're aiming for, you can hit the target. When you're aiming at "more", you'll miss every time because "more" is a direction you can walk in forever.

Write down specific numbers. Real targets. Concrete definitions of what would constitute a life well-lived according to your values, not your tribe's expectations.

Step 3: Embrace Memento Mori Planning

The Stoics practiced memento mori - remembering death - not to be morbid, but to create urgency around what actually matters.

You have maybe 4,000 weeks on this planet if you're lucky. How many of them do you want to spend chasing metrics that don't matter to you?

This changes everything. When you truly internalize your mortality, you stop optimizing for impressive and start optimizing for meaningful. When you remember that this is the only life you get, you stop playing other people's games and start designing your own.

The knowledge of death is the beginning of wisdom because it forces you to choose.

But instead of traditional goal-setting (which focuses on outcomes you can't control), build what Nassim Taleb calls "antifragile" systems - systems that get stronger from stress and uncertainty.

Focus on inputs you control, not outcomes you don't.

• Instead of "I want to make a million dollars" (outcome), try "I want to create value for 100 people every day" (input).

• Instead of "I want to be famous" (outcome), try "I want to share one useful insight every week" (input).

• Instead of "I want to build a unicorn company" (outcome), try "I want to solve one meaningful problem at a time" (input).

When you measure yourself by effort rather than results, you create a game where you can win every day.

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Step 4: The Practice of Amor Fati

Nietzsche's concept of amor fati - love of fate - is often misunderstood as passive acceptance. It's actually the most active philosophical stance possible: not just accepting what happens to you, but loving it as a necessary part of your becoming.

This includes loving your dissatisfaction.

Your restless energy is the engine that drives all human progress. The Wright brothers' dissatisfaction with being stuck on the ground gave us flight. Vivaldi's dissatisfaction with existing music gave us symphonies that still move people to tears.

Every entrepreneur you admire started with a burning sense that something was missing from the world.

The very thing that makes you miserable is the thing that makes you magnificent.

But amor fati applied to dissatisfaction means something specific: Instead of fighting the feeling or trying to eliminate it, learn to channel it toward things that matter to you rather than things that impress others.

Your dissatisfaction is rocket fuel. The question is: Whose rocket are you fueling?

Learn to redirect that energy toward your own mountain, your own boulder, your own definition of meaningful work.

In a nutshell

I'm writing this at 1,065 subscribers now. The number keeps growing while I work on this piece. And you know what? I still feel that familiar itch for more.

But I'm not fighting it anymore. I'm using it.

The itch is my compass. It tells me when I'm playing someone else's game instead of my own. It tells me when I'm optimizing for metrics that don't matter to me. It tells me when I've stopped growing and started coasting.

We are cursed to never be completely satisfied. We are blessed to never stop becoming.

The Greeks had a word - eudaimonia - often translated as happiness, but more accurately understood as "human flourishing" or "the good life lived well".

You don't arrive at eudaimonia. You inhabit it moment by moment through the choices you make about where to direct your inevitable dissatisfaction.

The dissatisfaction you feel is evidence of life.

Camus was right: We must imagine Sisyphus happy. But not because he stops pushing the boulder. Because he finds meaning in the pushing itself.

Your dissatisfaction is your boulder. Your life is your mountain. Your choices are what make you Sisyphus or make you free.

You can spend your life pushing other people's boulders up other people's mountains, measuring yourself by other people's scorecards, playing other people's games. You'll be perpetually exhausted and never satisfied.

Or you can choose your own boulder, define your own mountain, and find meaning in your own pushing.

The curse doesn't go away. But it stops being a curse when you stop fighting it and start using it.

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com

And that's when it occurred to me that languages have a big problem. No, it’s not that some of them are ridiculously and unreasonably hard to learn(looking at you German🤨😒)

The real problem is simpler and more profound than we think.

We don't have enough words for what it means to be human.

This article is brought to you by Bechem’s Ghostwriting Services… one of the best newsletter ghostwriting services on the internet. CLICK HERE to find out how I can help you grow your brand and business through a state-of-the-art weekly newsletter.

The Gap Between Feeling and Speaking

Think about your last conversation where someone asked how you were. Really think about it. What did you say versus what did you really mean?

I bet you said something like "good", "okay", or "busy". But what were you really experiencing? Maybe you were tired but also excited about a project. Maybe you were grateful but also worried about something you couldn't control. Maybe you were that specific kind of content where everything's going well, but you're almost suspicious of it, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

There should be words for these states, don't you think?

The Portuguese have this beautiful word, saudade. It means a deep, nostalgic longing for something that's absent. But it's more than just missing something. It's that bittersweet ache when you remember your grandmother's kitchen, or the way summer evenings felt when you were twelve. English just... doesn't have that. We say "I miss it", but that's like describing a symphony as "nice sounds".

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I started noticing this everywhere once I became aware of it. We have "love" for everything from pizza to our life partner. We use "tired" whether we need a nap or we're existentially exhausted. We say we're "stressed" when we might actually be overwhelmed, anxious, pressured, or just overstimulated. Imagine being asked to paint the rainbow with just the colours black and white. This is what it feels like.

We're trying to paint the full spectrum of human experience with a box of eight crayons.

Why Languages Evolved This Way

Languages didn't evolve to capture the full human experience. They evolved to help societies function.

Think about it. Early languages needed words for survival: food, danger, family roles, basic emotions that helped the tribe work together. Then, as civilizations grew, we needed words for trade, governance, and coordination. Modern languages are obsessed with productivity and efficiency. Look at how quickly we adopt business jargon and technical terms.

But the nuanced, personal, quietly complex parts of being human? Those got left behind. Because language is democratic in a way… words only get created and stick around if enough people need them often enough. But your specific emotional cocktail on a Tuesday afternoon while watching dust motes dance in sunlight? That's too personal, too unique to make it into the collective vocabulary.

I find this fascinating and a little sad. We've built languages that can describe quantum physics and market fluctuations with incredible precision, but we're remarkably clumsy when it comes to describing what it feels like to be alive.

There's something profound here about priorities, isn't there? What a culture names reveals what it values. And apparently, we've valued function over feeling, productivity over presence, the external over the internal.

Alright Bechem, what can I do about this?

1. Read the dictionary, every day, for 5 minutes.

I’ve started reading the dictionary. I know, I know. "Who reads the dictionary for fun?" But hear me out.

The dictionary is a catalog of human attempts to capture reality. Each entry represents someone, somewhere, trying to put language around an experience. Every definition is a small victory against the inadequacy of expression.

Reading the dictionary daily expands your emotional and intellectual vocabulary. Suddenly, you discover that what you thought was "sadness" might actually be Weltschmerz—the pain of the world. What you labelled as "tired" could be acedia—spiritual apathy or existential boredom.

You don't just learn new words… You discover new ways to think.

Five minutes a day. That's roughly 1,800 new words per year if you learn just five daily. In three years, you'll have a vocabulary that makes most people sound like they're speaking in crayon.

This has become my daily ritual. Five minutes with the dictionary, not to memorize definitions, but to discover pieces of human experience I'd never been able to name. And I’ve started thinking more clearly about my own emotional landscape.

When you can distinguish between loneliness and solitude, you make different choices about how to spend your time alone. When you know the difference between sadness and melancholy, you respond to each more appropriately.

Words are tools for understanding yourself.

I realized I'd been living with emotional crude oil for years… raw, unprocessed feelings I couldn't quite navigate because I couldn't quite name them.

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2. Create your own words

Why can't we just... create words when we need them?

Every word in every language was invented by someone at some point. Shakespeare alone gave English over 1,700 words. "Bedroom", "eyeball", "fashionable"; all Shakespeare originals. If a playwright from 400 years ago could reshape language, what's stopping us?

So I started experimenting. When I encountered an experience without a name, I'd pause and ask myself: "What would I call this?" Then I'd either combine existing roots or just invent something that felt right.

Scrollnesia: that moment when you're scrolling through your phone and suddenly can't remember what you were originally looking for.

Completionvoid: the empty feeling after finishing a project you've been working on for months.

Anticipatigue: being tired from looking forward to something.

Some of these might already exist somewhere… languages are vast. But the exercise itself is valuable. It makes you more aware of the subtle textures of your own experience.

The Ripple Effect of Precision

Since I started doing these, I noticed that precision in language leads to precision in life.

When I can accurately identify what I'm feeling, I can respond more appropriately. When I know I'm experiencing anticipatigue rather than just being "tired", I don't reach for caffeine… I practice patience with the waiting itself. When I recognize completionvoid instead of just feeling "off", I can plan for that transition period after finishing big projects.

The words you have access to shape the thoughts you can think.

I make better decisions now because I understand my internal states more clearly. I communicate more effectively because I can be more specific about what I'm experiencing. And perhaps most importantly, I feel less alone with complex emotions because I've learned that many of these feelings are universal enough to have been named by someone, somewhere, at some time.

Your thoughts are constructed from words. Your self-talk is linguistic. Your memories are stored in narrative form. When you expand your vocabulary, you literally expand your capacity for thought, feeling, and experience.

This is why reading dictionaries is therapeutic and why creating words is necessary.

In a nutshell

I'm not suggesting we all become walking dictionaries or that we start making up words for everything. But I am suggesting something more personal: paying attention to the moments when existing words don't quite fit.

Instead of defaulting to "fine" or "weird" or "stressed", what if we paused and tried to be more precise? What if we gave ourselves permission to say "I don't know the right word for this" instead of settling for approximations?

And what if, when we encounter something truly unnamed, we allowed ourselves the playfulness of creating language for it? Not to impose it on others, but as a tool for our own understanding.

Language is living, evolving, growing. It doesn't belong to dictionaries or academics. It belongs to all of us. Every conversation is an opportunity to either perpetuate the poverty of expression or to push gently against its boundaries.

So tomorrow, maybe try this: when someone asks how you are, pause for an extra second. See if you can find a word that gets a little closer to the truth. And if you can't find one that fits perfectly, don't worry.

We're all making it up as we go along anyway.

The question isn't whether we'll ever have enough words to capture everything we experience. We won't. The question is whether we'll keep trying to build bridges across the gap between feeling and speaking, between the richness of inner life and the limits of expression.

I think we should. Even if our words always fall short, the attempt itself is profoundly human. And maybe that's enough.

If you want to develop the habit of reading the dictionary every day, I created a Notion template to help you document every new word you learn in a way that makes it easier for you to continue learning.

Every feature is built to make vocabulary growth addictive, effortless, and practical:

• Quick Add Mode → Add new words in seconds without clutter.

• Deep Dive Mode → Expand with definitions, synonyms, examples, origins, and more.

• Daily Word Prompt → Wake up to one random word to master today.

• Review Mode → Smartly reminds you which words to revisit so you never forget them.

• Usage Tracker → Gamify learning by checking off words you’ve used in real conversations.

GET IT NOW

Thank you so much for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Mindcraft is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider recommending it to your network.

Share Mindcraft

You are your industry’s best-kept secret

Every week, you make decisions that took years to earn the judgment to make. You see patterns your competitors miss. You have opinions about your industry that are sharper, more nuanced, and more useful than 90% of what gets published.

None of that is visible to the people who should know you.

Not because you lack the thinking. Because translating that thinking into something people can actually read takes time you don’t have, attention you can’t spare, and writing skills you haven’t mastered.

That’s the specific problem I solve.

I’m a premium newsletter ghostwriter. I work with founders and C-suite executives to turn their existing thinking and insights into a weekly publication that runs under their name, builds their authority, and creates a channel their future clients and partners want to follow.

The process is simple: we talk, I write, you review in under 20 minutes, and it goes out. You get a growing body of work that reflects how you think, without the friction of producing it.

The executives I work with get an exceptionally good newsletter. But even more importantly, they get a distribution channel for their credibility, one that does the selling before any conversation even starts.

I currently have two spots open for this quarter.

If you’ve been meaning to build this and keep deprioritizing it, click the link below to work with me.

Work with me

I also offer a $1,000 referral bonus for any successful introduction. If you refer someone who becomes a paying client, the bonus is yours.

If earning 1,000USD for a simple referral sounds interesting, feel free to email me: bechemfabrice47@gmail.com