Growth
There is a very important life lesson I learned about learning. it is simple enough to state in a single line: the less sensory input your brain receives before a task, the more cognitive output it produces during it.
Andrew Huberman has described this as the most important habit for productivity , that the quality of your attention right now is not just a function of how much you slept or whether you’ve had coffee. it is directly shaped by the aggregate volume of sensory information your brain has processed in the preceding hours, and even days, before the moment you sit down to work.
You’ve probably heard someone say that time management is the key. schedules, blocks, wake up earlier, compress the day. people will say this is how you build a productive life, a good life, a life where you end the day feeling satisfied. I don’t use that term, and I have never mentioned it in the most recent years. and that’s because I think it’s the wrong game entirely.
It is not time management. it is energy management. and the moment you understand that distinction, of finally knowing that how it felt, the contrast between your sharpest days and your worst, everything I need to hear was this term, and then everything reorganized.
If the first thing to accept is that you’re not managing time, you’re managing energy , the second thing is asking where the energy is actually going. because it doesn’t just disappear. it goes somewhere else. and most of the time it’s going to things you’d never guess were costing you anything.
I don’t like productivity tips. they just give you the schedule. and that’s truly like naming the car should cruise in this highway, without understanding the mechanics of how and why.
I told myself for a long time that I don’t have a type . if we vibe, we vibe. but somewhere along the way I started noticing a pattern in the people I actually love, the ones I keep, the ones I’d go out of my cave for. and when I finally held that pattern up to the light, the word that came back was potential.
This is the first time I’m forming that into a sentence.
Humans are full of love. full of empathy at their core. they were born to love, not to hate. the state of hate costs a man more than loving ever could, loving prospers, hate drains. you can feel this in the texture of any given day. the meaning you pull from it, the power you feel inside it, it traces back almost always to the love you’re carrying. for a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a lover. a man is full of those emotions.
My friend Yahia once asked me how I coordinate between everything on my plate. not how I manage the volume, he understood that part. what he wanted to know was how I handle the context switch. one hour I’m deep in SQL queries and database design. the next I’m reading a machine learning paper. how does that work, he asked. how does the mind move between places that different without losing something.