Something about making art has to do with with overcoming things.

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The month of April went by within a blink. When I tried to reflect on it, I realized I didn’t read much except one half finished book of Art & Fear and a few pages of multiple different books. As if nothing was hooky enough to continue reading.

Still there were 4 things that I did (Let’s call them experiments):

1. Creating videos on Instagram

2. Writing religiously every morning.

3. Walking & creating a streak (unintentionally)

4. Doing cold outreach with meme decks

1. Videos on Instagram

In the first 2 weeks, I posted 9 videos on Instagram and 6 of them performed way better than expectation. My sister who is 15 tried to enlighten me about consistency, she said: “This is so good! You should be consistent. All good things come when you show up consistently”

Although I agree with her, that was not my goal with these videos. I was feeling a strong blocker in reaching out to people I want to work with. I was not able to send my usual pitches with loom videos.

So I thought, let’s just try creating videos for fun. Maybe I will get in the groove and be able to send pitches again.

It worked, eventually I did send a loom video in my cold outreach.

Right now, Instagram is giving a big boost to new accounts. If you have ever thought about creating video content. Now is the time. I am surely be making use of this. You can follow along at @akanksha.notes

2. Free flow writing

In the past few months my journals were filled with too much negativity. I would only write when I was confused, angry, irritated or upset. I would have so much angst and troubled emotions while writing, it became like a vent box.

A venting box calms you in the moment but you are left directionless and you keep repeating the cycle.

In these few months I became the person who went from winning to whining.

I don’t know what came over me or what inspired me but somehow I started writing every morning. I wrote whatever came to mind in free flow. And voila, a pattern emerged:

First few days were the same, a lot of negative writing. When I say negative I count things that make me distrust myself, engage my mind in petty distractions and stop me from feeling alive.

After that came the phase where I am motivating myself, feel good stuff, making empty promises. The intention to do better was there, but the actions weren’t.

So one day, I decided today is going to be a No Task day. I was not doing what I am supposed to do. So what if I just allow myself to not do anything. Let myself be.

That day I floated around. Did whatever I wanted. Without feeling the pressure of I am supposed to do something but I am not doing it.

The next day though, things changed. I did all the backlog tasks without any mental declarations. I did them effortlessly.

My writing from this moment onwards also changed. I started dabbling with ideas and work. A few negative emotions came but nothing significant. A larger part of my brain had been shifted, I am now able to focus for much longer than before.

If I had to map out the phases I would say:

Negativity -> Motivating myself -> Letting myself be -> Fresh ideas.

I had so many ideas from the reflections, I have noted some of them down below.

3. Health Reset

Habits stack on other habits. When I started writing religiously, I also started going on thinking walks. I was finishing 6-8K steps without even trying.

I studied a bit about fiber intake in food. Made a slight tweak of eating a lot of salad in lunch and dinner. It had such marvelous effects on my health that it was unbelievable. Eating fiber stabilizes your glucose levels. Instead of sudden spike of energy that makes you feel exhausted after a few hours, you release energy throughout the day.

4. Meme Deck

In my outreach efforts, I used to send simple text emails or loom videos. Now I have started sending meme decks to prospects. It’s showing some pretty good responses.

If you would like to send one yourself, here’s a guide you can refer to.

Now, it’s time for the reflections:

1. Think on Paper

Think on paper is never a wasted advice. AI makes you an option picker. You pick the best out of what’s given. You are not exercising your brain enough.

Make it hurt. Think hard.

The strain you feel when facing the blank page, it’s like the burn of a muscle in the gym. The pain is the signal: you are about to get stronger.

Let yourself feel the strain as often as you can. Always think yourself first before turning to AI. Even for writing simple emails.

2. Compounding in reverse.

AI’s responses are about 90% correct. We always consider the 10% error because of hallucinations. Which means if you give the AI response to another model, and then another model. The accuracy will become:

90% x 90% x 90% = 72.9%

Now imagine this mathematical equation in our life. Every time we do things half heartedly and give less than our 100%. We keep diminishing our abilities.

90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 90% = 59.04%

The beautiful thing about this equation is we can start changing it from any moment. This is where we are right now:

90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 90% = 59.04%

With one effort of 110%, the equation will become:

90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 110% = 64.95%

Another event with 110% the equation will be:

90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 110% x 110% = 71.44%

Multiple such events & the equation will become:

90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 90% x 110% x 110% x 110% x 110% x 110% x 110% x 110% x 110% = 126%

It’s magical to think that we can start building or destroying our lives at any given moment. We are either growing or dying, there’s no in between.

3. Keep it casual

The more importance I attach to something, the more I have the urge to run away from it. So, I have started to keep it casual. No pressure tasks. The same tasks but with the idea that if I sit and do them, it could be fun.

The importance I attach to the task comes from the outcome it can create for me. So, I slice up the outcome and put it in the back. No focus needed on that.

That’s a wrap for April!

Excited for May

- Akanksha

March 2026 was so slow that I was able to travel for a week, fall sick for a week, take time to recover, read a few books and learn a few things all in one month.

When I try to reflect on March a few significant things come to mind:

1. A realization

2. Reading the book: The Goals

3. Hosting the Raycast session

4. Family trip to Puri & Bhubaneswar

5. Breaking the spell of “no clients”

1. The Realization

I am an irrational person. I give a lot of weightage to my emotions and feelings in the moment. It has often done more harm then good for me.

I don’t regret it. It’s just a pattern that I notice now.

I have faced repercussions for reacting to my emotions instead of processing and doing what’s best for me.

In second grade, I did not go to the school’s annual function because I was angry that I was not selected for the dance group because a kid removed my name. I held resentment and I didn’t go. I was angry the whole evening!

If I had just let go of that anger, I could have enjoyed my evening, watched some performances, and eaten some good food with mumma. But I didn’t go and I took her chance of spending a good evening as well.

This is one such instance, I have countless others. I am not able to let go of that turbulent child in me who becomes petty when things don’t go her way.

Even right now as I am writing this I want to kick a pebble and say, “Who wants to be rational anyway, it’s Boringggg....!”

2. Reading ‘The Goals’

Every once in a while you come across a piece of art, book, film or drama that grips you for a long time and all you can say about that art is “Brilliance.”

When you look at the cover of the book, you will think it is some self-helpy non-fiction book. But it’s anything but that.

It’s the most interesting FICTIONAL book

... on manufacturing plants.

This book will educate you about business principles by never answering your questions directly.

It has socrates methodology of teaching with a story and asking questions.

I have never understood the crux of business better than now.

The ultimate goal of every business is to make money. If our idiotic ways of productivity or efficiancy doesn’t add to that than it’s a idiotic waste of time.

It’s a 100% recommend-worthy book for me.

3. Hosting the Raycast Session

I am not a bad speaker or host. But when you let your skills rest for too long. It gets rusty. I hosted a session after a really long time.

The crazy part? People joined in even after I had to postpone the session because of thunderstorms and power cut.

Surprisingly a lot of Raycast members also joined the session.

The session went well. But I fumbled quite a few times and that nervousness wasn’t leaving me.

I only see one way out of this. Doing more sessions.

4. Traveling to Puri & Bhubaneswar

It was a nice family trip with the usual family shenanigans. A little bit of fights, some love, some good food, some stories spread all around.

Travel truly shows you the hidden aspects of people close to you. For one reason or other, you turn to admire them more. Or there might be this one moment where someone opens up and now all of the previous conflicts just make sense.

Family trips never seem to be just about the destination.

5. Breaking the spell of “no clients”

In December, I left my last job at an influencer marketing agency. I thought I will work on Hugsy (an app for couples) and alongside find a few freelance gigs.

For about 2 months, I wasn’t able to break the spell of “no clients.”

Then I was talking to a friend and telling her about all the cool things you can do with the combination of claude code & n8n.

She told me about the problem at one of her client’s shopify stores. They had an inventory of 8000+ products. It needed to be categorized, along with tags, descriptions and creating smart collections.

Two people were already working on it manually for about 6 months.

I said, “It’s easy, we can use Shopify’s API along with claude code agents to write the descriptions, do the tagging and create collections too.”

This became my first automation project in March. Totally different from my previous gigs of content and marketing but super fun.

Cluade wrote 60+ python scripts.

Well, that’s it folks.

I am hoping to make April more interesting. I am posting short videos on Instagram now. if you would like to see, you can check them out at @akanksha.notes

Poitu Varen (I will go & come back)
Akanksha

I read this tweet somewhere that roughly said, “if you want to excel at coding, have your fundamentals strong, have clarity on what you’re doing, and practice a lot! Spend 4 to 6 good hours coding manually, without the aid of AI or with the aid of AI, whatever, but spend time doing the thing which you want to learn.”

Right now, coding is the most outsourced task. Literally anyone can code using plain english.

I don’t have a strong desire to learn how to code. Because I don’t see it as a leverage for me. AI does and is going to do a much better job at it than me.

But when I think about writing. Writing has also been disrupted by AI. But I see it as a leverage for me because writing helps me think clearly, make decisions, it helps me amplify everything I do.

So, I want to be phenomenal at writing. I want to have my fundamentals strong, have clarity on what I am doing, and practice a lot!

I am choosing what skills I want to be exceptional at and what skills I want to leverage with AI.

That’s the rule of skillmaxxing:

You have to decide which skills are important to you and which you want to leverage.

Because there’s one more shift happening with the AI revolution that’s going unnoticed.

AI is making us worse at stuff

Anthropic did a trail where they made two groups of programmerscompete against each other.

They examined how quickly they picked up a new Python library with and without AI assistance, and whether using AI made them less likely to understand the code that they just wrote.

On a quiz that covered the concepts they just used, the group that used AI scored 17% lower than those who coded everything by hand.

The AI group was less engaged, less fulfilled and low on skillmaxxing.

They found that when you use AI assistance, it leads to decrease in mastery.

Anthropic didn’t do research on writing or thinking but you must have observed already that anything you give AI to do too much, whether that’s talking about your feelings or thoughts or taking help for writing, you are not getting better at it. You are just there from where you started, or you have gotten worse.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Humanity has always used technology to improve their ability to do things at the cost of the core skill.

Think hunting, sewing, fishing, farming. These are life skills that kept our ancestors alive. It protected them and put food on the table.

Earlier everyone was practicing these core skills for survival, but not anymore, because it has gotten easier with the technology.

When’s the last time you shot an arrow to catch a rabbit? We don’t have to anymore. No wonder we’re not good at it, huh?

Humans learn by practice. Iteration. We learn while doing the thing.

So when we use AI to complete our task, it hinders our ability to learn while doing the task.

AI is trained the same way. It also learns by practice. In fact, when I watched this documentary called, The thinking Game by Deepmind, I got to know how AI models were made to play 90s games to train it. They played the same game thousands of time. That’s how they recognize patterns and learn how to win.

If you’re trying to learn something, make it difficult. You have to approach it from different angles. And ideally, you would do most of that hard work yourself because how else is your brain going to grow?

AI improves your leverage, but it does so at the cost of eroding your core skills.

You pick and choose what parts of your life it makes sense to hand off to AI.

So, which skills you want to excel at and which you want to leverage with AI?

Poitu varen (I will go and come back)
Akanksha

This is a recap of my life in the month of Feb.

1. An analysis of my goals

2. Projects I made

3. Books I read

4. Movies & TV shows I liked

At the start of the month, I had beautiful goals:

1. Wake up and walk in the sun

2. Send 2 cold emails daily

3. Walk 7-10K steps

Here’s what happened with them

1. Wake up and walk in the sun

The day I wrote this goal was the first day in a very long time where I woke up and had an urge to bask in the warmth of the sunlight. And it felt good. I wanted to do it more often. But that was the only day I did it.

Sometime in 2nd week of Feb, I got obsessed with the idea of sleep discipline. If I fix my sleep, everything will be alright. I would be able to regulate my emotions and I will be taking a step towards making my life better in general.

I ended up sleeping at 5 PM in the evening and waking up at 12 or 1 AM in the night. This became my routine.

The place where I am at right now, physically and mentally. I experience a lot of noise surrounding me. It constantly keeps me on edge. So waking up when it was all quiet around me helped. It helped a lot.

I got the same comfort every morning that I got from basking in the sunlight.

But honest case scenario, this goal was written on a whim and not completed. ❌

2. Send 2 cold emails every day

This is something I did regularly. I had to put in a lot of reps to get the results I am used to getting. I also created a claude code skill that deep researches on a prospect. Gets highlights from their podcast appearances. And saves me a lot of time. It is fine tuned based on my winning emails of the last 10 years.

So far, whenever I have sent an email using this outreach system it has gotten a 100% reply.

This is new, so I have to stress test with a bigger data set. But so far so good. I love it!

This goal was achieved successfully and better. ✅

3. Walk 7-10K steps

I spent most of my evenings sleeping. This goal was not achieved at all. I didn’t even attempt. But an adjacent player took its place.

Out of my own free will, I started working out every morning.

And I am happy about that.

Even though this goal deserves a cross. Let’s just give it a smiley. 😊

👩‍💻 Projects I made

I love how this month was so symmetrical in terms of weeks.

So, in the last week of Feb. I went underground. No WhatsApp. No Twitter. No Instagram.

I spent all that time learning how to regulate my emotions and claude code skills.

And I created some projects around that time. Some are related to claude code, some are not.

1. A telegram bot to track my wake up time, exercise and sleep time. It feeds all data into a Google sheet

2. A portfolio website. It’s not live yet. I will be making more changes but what do you think of the homepage?

3. A writing habit tool. It’s work in progress. I love the theme switcher in this, it’s like day and night by pulling a plug.

4. An internal cold outreach system. The kicker of this system is: it’s based on my past winning emails. And so far it has it has a 100% reply rate. (I sent 3 emails so far 😂)

   

📕 Books I read

1. The defining decade by Meg Jay [Reread]
   

   I first read this book in 2021, it’s about what your priorities should be in your 20s. How wanting to be extraordinary begins with taking actions and doing the ordinary. Whenever I feel stuck, the book has always guided me in some way.
   

2. Normal People by Sally Rooney [In progress]
   
   First few chapters seem interesting, but it got boring after a point. A lot of people seem to see a certain depth in her writing. But I didn’t feel like indulging in it much so dropped it. If you have a different take on Sally Rooney’s books. Do let me know. This was my first one.
   

3. Discipline is destiny by Ryan Holiday

   
   Nice, self helpy book with good stories. Can fire you up for a while. Even if only one story jumps out to you and grabs you for a lifetime. It’s enough for you to keep going and keep showing up.
   

4. Only dull people are Brilliant at Breakfast by Oscar Wilde
   
   It has funny and altrustive statements. You can think of it as a book of jokes, thoughts and statements. I read random pages of the book every once in a while. It has things like:
   
   ”Praise makes me humble but when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.”
   
   ”The aim of love is to love, no more, no less.”
   
   ”Ultimately the bond of all companionship whether in marriage or in friendship is conversation…”
   
   ”There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people one has ceased to love.” This one line jumped out to me the most. It explained to me Dorian Gray from the book “The picture of Dorian Gray” was able to just stomp on the emotions of someone he loved so dearly. I couldn’t understand the author’s mind. But this one line from the same author explained everything to me.
   

5. Can’t hurt me [In Progress]
   
   The writing somehow is just too good. It begins with the author’s story. I am still at that. Couldn’t read further because it’s intense. The author’s story is intense.
   

6. Rework [Chef’s Kiss book]

   
   Damn good business & life lessons. Some ideas are outdated but what’s applicable is still gold.

🎬 Movies & TV shows

1. Whiplash: It’s movie about obsession & ego.

2. My liberated notes: You can find my thoughts about this show in this mini essay.

The title of this newsletter “I am my biggest enabler” is inspired by reading Pat Wallis blog: Think Week

There he said, “I am my biggest obstacle” And I thought I am going to be my biggest enabler.

I like Pat Wallis because of his thinking and how he built a business with writing and ideas. His company Starter Story is now been sold to Hubspot. You should check out his after acquisition podcast he did on My First Million.

Alright folks, this is it.

If you are tinkering with AI and claude code. I would love to connect and share notes. Just reply to this email.

See you soon!

— Akanksha

if you don’t know who Punch is or just have some vague idea about him, let me bring you up to speed.

punch is the name of the monkey that’s just 6-months old. he was born in july 2025 and was abandoned by his mother at birth. the zookeepers who raised him gave him an ikea plushie of an orangutan: a toy monkey that’s soft, has long hairs and is easy for tiny fingers to hold onto.

the zookeepers named the toy ‘ora mama’.

ora mama is like a surrogate mother for punch (the monkey). he sleeps with her, plays with her and buries his face into her fur when the world gets too much to handle. he finds comfort in her because that’s the only creature that hasn’t hurt her and he has full control over her.

punch went viral on the internet when he tired to communicate with other monkeys but got bullied by older monkeys.

you see, among japanese macaques, social hierarchy is everything. young monkeys learn by observing their mothers: who grooms whom, who defers to whom, who belongs. when punch was introduced to the zoo’s monkey mountain in january, he lacked that social roadmap since birth.

so that’s why you can see in the videos, how he cautiously approaches other monkeys only to be swatted away or ignored.

when I first saw punch fighting his battles with older monkeys and taking comfort in the soft toy. i cried.

i cried because that feeling of abandonment, fighting your battles alone, not having friends, seeking comfort, wanting comfort so badly that you’ll take it from anything that doesn’t hurt you... all of it felt like a punch in the gut.

punch didn’t go viral because the internet suddenly developed a conscience about animal welfare. animal kingdom brutality isn’t anything new to us, we’ve all sat through nature documentaries where far worse things happen. but they don’t make a dent in our lives because we don’t relate to it.

punch tells us a relatable story.

he is the hero we can root for. he is the hero who is beaten up by the circumstances: mother abandoned him, older monkeys pick on him. he lives like as if he is an orphanage. a few people comfort him but that innate need of someone or something that can curb away his loneliness.

in spite of all this, our ideal hero... he survives. he wakes up everyday, and he fights and saves himself and his one toy.

we see ourselves in him. the kid who ate lunch alone and pretended to read so it looked like a choice. the adult who feels a flicker of panic when a text goes unanswered for too long.

we don’t care about punch because he is suffering. we care about him because his suffering has a shape that we recognize.

the emotional needs

in 1958, harry harlow ran one of the most disturbing experiments in behavioral science. he took baby monkeys from their mothers at birth and placed them in an enclosed space with two surrogate “mothers.”

one was built with cold wire mesh but had a feeder attached to it. the other one was a monkey shaped doll, wrapped in soft terry cloth. warm and huggable but completely useless for feeding.

the theory at the time was simple: babies form attachment to those who provide them with biological needs, such as food and shelter.

harlow challenged this theory by suggesting babies need care, love and kindness to form attachments.

harlow was right.

the babies spent 70% of their day clinging to the clothe mother and visited the wire one only when hungry.

turns out love is not a by product of being fed. just because parents provide for their children. it doesn’t mean they give them love too. love is a need in itself.

punch is living this experiment in real time. the plush toy doesn’t give him food or protection from the older monkeys but she is soft. she is always there and she has never once pulled away from him.

response from the zoo

people demanded punch to be separated from the troop. they called it cruelty. they wanted intervention. some even wanted to adopt him as a pet.

the zoo’s response was much more thoughtful than the outrage it was answering.

they explained that mother-infant rejection is a documented natural behaviour in wild japanese macaque populations, especially among very young or stressed mothers. if this had happened in a forest instead of a zoo, punch would almost certainly be dead within days. just a baby monkey who didn’t make it. which is, statistically, how most of these stories end when we’re not watching.

they also reframed the “bullying.” what people saw as cruelty was in macaque social terms, boundary-setting. “when punch approached another baby monkey from the troop in attempt to communicate, the baby monkey avoided him. after which he was scolded and dragged by an adult monkey who was probably the mother of the baby monkey.

the letter from the zoo also said: “while punch is scolded, he shows resilience and mental strength. when you observe these disciplinary behaviors from other troop members toward punch when he tries to communicate with them, we would like you to support punch’s effort rather than feel sorry for him.”

animal behaviour expert carla litchfield said: if punch cannot reintegrate into his troop, he risks being permanently othered. seen as a “messed-up, weird little guy” who never learned the social rules.

i think punch will be okay.

he’s trying.

on most days that’s the bravest thing any of us can say about ourselves.

poitu varen (i will go & come back),
akanksha

what do you think about punch the monkey?

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Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. We all know Walt Disney whose movies inspired all of us. But there are actually two Walts at Walt Disney Studio. Walt Disney himself and Walt Stanchfield. Walt Stanchfield was the trainer, mentor, the free spirtied guy & coach for the animation department for 20 years. He used to give handouts every week filled with things that would inspire, educate & inform the animation crew of Disney.

   Those 20 years of lessons are jam packed into two wholesome books called: Drawn to life: Volume 1 & 2.
   
   Walt Stanchfield was a firm believer that “We should not SPEAK or THINK negatively about our drawings.”
   

2. Disney has eleven decades of storytelling experience. It went from creating black and while silent cartoon movies to B&W movies with sound and then first full colored movie “Snow White & the seven Dwarfs” There are three videos you should watch: The women behind Disney Movies, Snow White: The making of Walt’s first masterpiece and The animation process from 1938
   

3. The clues to a great story by Andrew Stanton: It’s a TED Talk that you should watch right away. Too many lessons in 19 minutes. The best part is you experience the storytelling first hand and learn alongside. God! What I wouldn’t give to be a good storyteller.
   

4. Anxious avoidant essay: We all have certain patterns in our romantic relationships that either help us float our relationship boat or borderline sink it. This essay explores one of those patterns & it resonated with me. It has explorative writing as well. Makes you think about the topic from multiple different direction.
   

5. How to end your extremely online era: We all seem to have a subconscious need to be less online, craving a breath of fresh air and looking the world less through pixels and more through our presence. This essay will convince you and guide you on how to do that.
   

This is a tiny attempt to curate what my mind pays attention to. Feel free to suggest more interesting things in the comment.

See you next week with another list,

— Akanksha

If I leave you in a room for 2 hours and play Shake It Off on a loop. You will end up humming ‘haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate’ till the next decade.

I was listening to her song, The Fate of Ophelia and the boost of self confidence I got at: “I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I” is something I haven’t felt in a long time.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia was a young noblewoman in love with Prince Hamlet. He also loves her back. Life is good.

But then, Hamlet’s father is murdered by his brother Claudius and Hamlet spirals into rage & gets obsessed with revenge. Ophelia gets caught in the wreckage as her father uses her as a pawn to spy on Hamlet.

Hamlet who was already paranoid turns on her. Tells her he never loved her and humiliates her publicly.

Then he accidentally kills her father.

So now the man she loves has rejected her and murdered her father. She is completely alone in a court full of people playing power games who see her grief as an inconvenience.

She loses her mind. Wanders the castle singing broken songs. And then she drowns.

She never fights back. Never gets to choose. Every man in her life used her for his own purpose and when she was broken beyond repair, they all looked away.

She became one of literature’s most famous casualties.

Taylor looked at that story and said: No.

She flipped the script of her tragic ending by making Ophelia own up to her agency: “I swore my loyalty to me, myself and I”

Most of the time Taylor gives a modern woman, the confidence to slay. Almost all of her songs affirm this:

• tolerate it was inspired by the book Rebecca, the du Maurier novel about a woman drowning in devotion to an indifferent husband.

• In my tears ricochet a dead woman narrates her own funeral. But this ghost doesn’t drift away into nothing. She haunts back.

• In *mad woman,* the world tells her she’s crazy for being angry. She doesn’t accept it.

Taylor writes a lot about boy trouble. Messy relationships, betrayal, heartbreak, being gaslit, being discarded, being the other woman, being the one who stayed too long.

But the boy trouble is never the end of the story.

It’s the middle. The complication.

The end of the story is always the woman standing back up or just a simple happy ending to a tragic love story.

Taking inspiration from books & tragic stories is not enough, her lyrics hit the right chords in our minds and heart because of how they are written.

Taylor’s biggest strength is how specific she gets in her descriptions of moments, places, and sensations in her songs.

Instead of telling you, “this relationship made me constantly anxious because I never knew where it was going,” she makes you feel that anxiety by singing the words:

are we out of the woods yet?
are we in the clear yet?
— Out of The Woods

Instead of saying, “I was doing well after our breakup, but then you called me, and I felt sad again,” she sings:

You call me up again just to break me like a promise
— All Too Well

Instead of “I was lonely and broken, but then you made me feel loved again”, she sings:

And when I felt like I was an old cardigan
Under someone’s bed
You put me on and said I was your favorite
— cardigan

The woman treats the entire world like raw material. Novels, overheard conversations, maths class, someone’s grief essay. Everything becomes a song.

Her own philosophy borrows from Nora Ephron: “Everything is copy.”

I kind of love that.

If this essay made you want to go listen to Taylor Swift on repeat, good. That was the intent.

Poitu Varen,
Akanksha

Even if you are the most talkative person in the room, it’s possible that you are not saying what you truly want to say. And you just want someone in your life, whom you can tell everything. Every dark thought. Every light and stupid thought. With just no filter.

Now imagine you are able to see inside this person’s mind and then how they are interacting with the rest of the world.

The show has less of a story and more of character arcs. People talk less with each other and more with themselves. So their is less dialogue and more inner monologue.

At times you will feel like, you are intruding on someone’s me time. But also understand them in a very compassionate way.

You have to be in a certain mindset or certain point of life to relate to it. Because every character’s story in some way revolves around, “I don’t know where I am stuck but I want to be free.”

Every scene is the show seems too realistic. The nature sounds, sitting in the sunlight, cooking, chopping vegetable, washing, drinking water. As if there’s a certain elegance and romantic edge to the everyday ordinary life and you just need the lens to see it.

It might seem too slow for you.

But that’s why I said, you can only relate to it if you are feeling a strong sense of wanting to break free of something. You don’t know exactly what but you feel stuck.

Some lines that stayed with me, since I heard them:

“I just want to talk to someone. Anyone”

You have been talking all this time. You talk all the time. You still want to talk more?

“I’ve never said what I really wanted to say. I don’t want to just say things to feel like I exist. I want to talk to relax.

A conversation...

Words that make you feel relaxed.”

“The words sit on the tip of your tongue, wanting to come out. But when you swallow them back down, that’s when you know you’re an adult.”

“I don’t have a specific goal in my life. Money, honour, women. Nothing. Do I have to have a goal? Can’t I just live without one?”

“It feels like I’m stuck, but I don’t know how to get out. That’s probably why I hope everything ends all at once.”

“Just once, I want to hear someone say they adore me.”

“I don’t care where I’ll go after I die. I want to see heaven while I’m alive.”

“Sometimes I think the people who are damaged are much more honest than those who live their lives happily.”

“Fate is nothing more than a person’s outlook on life.”

If you watch the show, do let me know your thoughts on it.

Poitu Varen,
Akanksha

The word ‘perform’ comes from the word performen. It means completing a duty, fulfilling a requirement, accomplishing something.

So, performance by definition, has a beginning and an end. A task begins and gets completed.

But when Shakespeare said,

“All the world is a stage”
“All the men & women merely players”
“They have their exists & their entrances” (Death & life)

Shakespeare grounded the fact that performance is a continuous process. It begins with life and ends on death. There’s no off switch.

A kid learns to perform in his front of his parents and as he grows older he keeps performing in front of friends, lover, colleagues, bosses, maybe even a stranger.

“You are such a good boy”
“You are such a good friend. I am lucky to have you”
“You are an ideal lover. I love you”
“You got the marks. You are put in college”
“You got us our biggest deal. You are promoted”
“You are so kind. We have never met before, still you helped me out.”

We collect all these scorecards based on our performance. As if it’s game of snake & ladder. You have to keep scoring high and go up and up, the moment you fuck up or life fucks you (snake bites), you are pulled down by a level or two.

How good you are performing in life is generally decided by 3 entities:

1. You

2. People around you

3. How life choses to reward you or punish you

1. We are our biggest critics

Before someone else can judge us. We ourselves hang a score card around our neck and choke ourselves. We have to negotiate with our fears and the self-given scorecard to do something we are pulled towards doing. Something that’s scary, risky but has the potential to make you feel free or give asymmetric rewards.

We also have these tiny scorecards for the small stuff. It’s our ledger in which we overthink:

“I should have said something smarter.”
“I was laughing too loudly, what will he think of me?”
“I was too quiet. They probably think I’m boring.”
“Man! I shouldn’t have overshared”

I get such thoughts all the time, so I have made a rule for myself, “To take a bat and beat these thoughts.” It happened already. Let’s not mop around it.

2. Others judge us, but they also forget us.

Whenever I think I am going to be embarrassed with what I am going to do. But I really really want to do it. I think:

“They are going to die tomorrow. They won’t remember.”

Or if it’s just me, I will disappoint. I think:

“I am going to die tomorrow. Do I really want to be curious about this stupid thing at the end?”

Thinking about death solves half of my life problems.

3. Life

Life - the chaos ball of randomness, your decisions, luck, fate, emotional judgement. The scorecard life throws at you is sometimes predictable. Most times unpredictable.

You can do all the right things and still get bitten by the snake.

You must have seen people who are crazy good at their work. But they still got laid off. Someone who is an ideal lover still their partner left them. Someone who is known to eat clean & exercises daily, still gets a heart attack.

Life doesn’t grade on effort. It doesn’t grade on fairness. Sometimes it rewards laziness and punishes diligence just to remind you it can.

The problem with scorecards is that they demand comparison.

A score only means something when it is relative to another score. So you can’t just perform, you have to perform better. Better than yesterday. Better than expectations.

When you perform being a good friend. A good partner. A good son or daughter You keep track of what you are doing because at the end you have a scorecard to make to measure performance:

“I planned the last three dates.”
“I always reach out first.”
“I remembered their birthday. They forgot mine.”
“I listened to their problems for an hour. They only listened to mind for ten minutes.”

Te other person might not be keeping score. They might just be living. Loving messily, inconsistently, without tracking who owes what.

And now you resent them for not playing the same game. You’re exhausted from performing and they seem to just... exist (unbothered & uncaring).

Or worse they are keeping score too. And now the relationship becomes two accountants comparing ledgers. “I did this.” “Well, I did that.”

“Are you enough without the performance?”

I am not. I don’t expect others to be either.

All performance doesn’t bother me. It’s just the external pressure to perform that comes with expectations that guts me. As if someone is dimming my light. And I am not able to see what I want.

I am selfish. I want to do what I want more than what others want of me.

Hope you had some good food for thought.

Poitu Varen
Akanksha

At the beginning of the month, I had 3 goals:

1. Increase my speed of work

2. Don’t eat sugar

3. Walk 7-10K steps daily

Here’s how they went:

1. Increase my speed of work

I am conventionally a slow thinker, slow writer & slow doer. But this self shaped identity was getting in my way of getting things done quickly.

If I want to scale a product (hugsy.app) I need to keep some parts of me (slow thinker, slow writer) and let go of others (slow doer).

Speed over perfection.
Speed over perfection.
Speed over perfection.
Speed over perfection.

On 20th Jan I broke down. Thinking I am not able to increase my speed of work. The essays I was publishing regularly, I had stopped doing that as well. It was a miscalculation from my end. I have surely improved in some ways, it’s just I am not there where I want to be.

But how can I be? When these slow habits had years to prosper in me, how can they change themselves at once?

So, I will mark this goal as not done. ❌

And give myself a quarter to keep working on this. I really want to be the person who snaps her fingers and gets things done.

2. Don’t eat Sugar

This one is funny, the more I decided not to eat sugar, the more I ended up eating cakes, banana bread & sweets.

I have a sweet tooth, BUT…

I don’t eat too much sugar on my own. It’s like, if it’s out of sight it is out of mind.

As if, if this goal didn’t exist, I would have eaten less sugar.

I will mark this goal as not done. ❌

3. Walk 7-10K steps daily

This one I religiously followed except one day. That day was so much packed with work & meetings I couldn’t get a moment out till 12 AM.

That was the day my streak broke.😭

Otherwise, my total step count is 1,72,063

What I read in Jan:

1. Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

2. Keep Going by Austin Kleon

3. Sweet Venom by Rina Kent

4. Is this anything? by Jerry Seinfeld [In progress]

5. How to take smart notes [in progress]

1. Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

This book was a gift by a friend. The hardcover with sprayed goden edges is so beautiful that one look at it and you would want to devour that book.

Now the book is old, written in 1843. And it has beautiful descriptions whenever describing the scenery where the action is happening.

I took one such description from the book and gave it to gemini (word to word):

The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh’s daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures.

And look how beautiful it is:

The book is about a rich miser who has become anti-social, doesn’t celebrate christmas. He is visited by 3 ghosts who make him question his life again.

Merry Christmas! What right you have to be merry? What reason you have to be merry? You are poor enough.

What right you have to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.

One instance that jumped out to me in the book was:

“Why do spirits walk the earth?”

It is required of every man. That the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide, and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world and witness what it can’t share but might have shared on earth and turned to happiness.

This was Dickens first book that went popular. I am looking forward to reading more of his books like:

1. David Copperfield

2. Oliver Twist

3. The old curiosity shop

4. A tale of two cities

2. Keep Going by Austin Kleon

This book was left somewhere half read from a few years ago. This time when I picked it up on a whim I couldn’t keep it back.

As the name suggests, the book is about how to keep going in our creative endeavours.

I guess the effect showed up in me publishing 3x more essays in one month than I did in one year.

One of the most beautiful quote I read in the book:

None of us know what will happen. Don’t spend time worrying about it. Make the most beautiful thing you can. Try to do that every day. That’s it.

— Lauri Anderson

3. Sweet Venom by Rina Kent

I started reading this book for the dark romance. But I had no idea how it would break me. The talk about death in this book spoke to me in ways even Albert Camus couldn’t.

Some lines from the book:

It’s not the first time I have thought about death, and I’m always left with this niggling sadness at the realization that it’s not real.

I find solace in the small patch of orange that’s trying to slip through. Despite the rain, despite the gloominess, there’s that little smidge of brightness that refuses to give in.

4. Is this anything? by Jerry Seinfeld

This book has 413 of Jerry Seinfeld’s quotes. I think this book is always going to be in progress. Some of the jokes are surely funny but not funny enough to make me keep turning pages and swallow the book in one go or in one year.

One of the wholesome jokes:

One big difference between adults and kids is the number of pockets they go through when they’re looking for something.

Adults touch every pocket on their clothes when they’re looking for something.

“I thought... for sure... I had... that with me...”

When you are a little kid,

somebody asks you if you have something,

you just hold both palms straight out.

“No, I don’t have it.”

You don’t have to check. You have nothing.

Anything you have is in your hand.

You ask a kid, “You have a change of a quarter?”

(hold hands out palms up)

He goes, “Nope.”

Ask him to double-check, “Are you sure?”

They just spread their fingers out wider.

5. How to take smart notes by

I started reading this book because some Obsidian bro kept saying, this is the book that changed his note taking process. The Zettelkasten method and all.

I kinda like the book because of the little anecdotes about historians, writers and scientists, how they used to take notes that helped them with their thinking.

Overall, my january was fineee. I broke down thrice. So 28 days out of 31 were epicccc!

How was your Jan 2026?

Poitu Varen
Akanksha

AI will surpass them all. There will be no markers left for you to identify what’s AI and what’s not. Currently, thousands of books are getting published that are partially written by AI. In few years, that number will reach millions.

Now, you as a human, how will you stand out with your thoughts and writing?

In sports, there’s a concept of steroids. People ask people, “hey these muscles are natural or you juicing?”

Some will lie and sheepishly say, “Nah, man it’s all natural. These babies took hard work man!”

Some will say the truth that they are juicing, “Yeah man! You gottta do what you gotta do!”

Then there are ones, who are honest in their words and in their actions. They take a stand against steroids in public. They position themselves as someone who goes to the gym and eats right.

Fans feel connected to him and trust him.

Why? Because he tells them.

He shares his morning routine with them. He shares snaps of eating healthy. He creates an hour long video of exercising in the gym.

You can also take a stand in public that you write like a human to connect with a human. Your writings and stories come from your experiences and thought experimentation.

But for this, you will have to be honest with yourself first.

You will have to let go of the idea of trying to impress someone. To come across as an intellectual. When you are not trying to sound smart for someone else, you can feel free to do whatever the fuck you want.

And the moment you do whatever the fuck you want, you start writing bad pieces, experimental pieces, some good pieces thrown here and there.

It becomes a game that you like to play.

Richard Feynman’s childhood was filled with games he liked to play:

• He opened broken radios, traced the circuit and tried to think how current was flowing. He would then diagnose the problem & fix it. To him this was a game of playing detective.

• He built his own toys: Home alarm systems that scared his parents at night. A radio of his own, so he could listen to songs.

• He did math for fun. He created his own symbols. He would try to arrive at the formula instead of just mugging them up.

You can also make writing play for yourself.

(Mind you, games don’t always make you go happy go lucky. You can get frustrated at times, get beaten but the crux is, you are so deeply involved in the game that you don’t leave without figuring it out and moving to the next level.)

So, what can you do to make writing play & AI proof:

1. Spend time in nature

An hour a day outside, keeps the demons away.

Have atleast one day in the week where you are able to take out a few hours to just sit in the park & read something or draw something. Give a rest to your mind. Do things slowly. Read the passage twice or thrice to absorb it in.

Connect to yourself. How in tune you are with yourself is going to become your biggest advantage.

2. Read old books.

Time deletes all mediocrity. If you want to learn from the best writers of the world, you can do it by reading old books. Because they have survived the test of the time.

Be very very selective when picking books from the last 5 years. Most of them will become irrelevant.

Books are the source that teach you writing without you even knowing about it.

3. Learn how to break the rules.

The biggest advantage AI has over us is it’s amazing at following rules & plot structure. It’s trained on millions of stories, so it has analyzed how to write a good story technically.

But what if you break the rules. You write things that don’t fit into a template. You do things that haven’t been conventionally done and still come up with a good story?

4. Cherish what comes naturally to you while writing.

Trust yourself that you know better than others. If you always doubt yourself than where’s the fun in that?

Just don’t be rigid in your thoughts. Be playful. Don’t hesitate to change your thoughts when you resonate with something new. Humans are made up of contradictions. Why not just embrace it and move on.

Write pieces like, “I used to think this, now I think that.”

Let go of the ego that you are right.

(See contradictory thought: I began by saying: Trust yourself that you know better than others but ended with let go of the ego that you are right. There’s a subtle nuance between these two sentences. If you get it, you get it.)

5. Draw inspiration from your life experiences

You don’t necessarily have to tell your life story for this. You can just pick a emotion or a highlight from your day. Tune into what’s connect to you and then reflect that on paper.

I am slowly connecting with my 2023 version and all the versions before that who used to write about things I firmly believed in. The first time I was asked to write on “capital punishment” I was in 10th grade and I literally just thought on paper.

I had that play effect when writing that essay and it turned out to be one of my best pieces from that time.

6. Pay attention to language

Writing flowery language or writing stories hasn’t been my strong suit. I have tried writing Haiku for a year but dropped it later on. Right now in my essay, “The desire to be everything“ I followed the language of Sylvia Plath. I could feel a sense of poetry in the whole essay.

By paying attention to language, you are able to identify different writing styles. It becomes fun to know who’s writing DNA you are matching.

7. Write about complex & counterintuitive emotions

Why was Albert Camus was able to casually say, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

That is such a strong line for a lot of people. Most people couldn’t fathom the fact how can someone be so nonchalant about their mother dying.

“Someone died. And you don’t feel any empathy. Nothing moves inside you? Why is that?”

But there were others who were comforted by the fact that they are not the only one being nonchalant about death.

We are in so much rush to make money from content creation. That neither we learn the craft, nor do we respect it. We just hang somewhere in the middle, looking at each other.. waiting for something to happen.

Move your butt and practice.

Thinking AI will do this, AI will do that will not help you. If you are so scared or feel useless that everything you want to do is being done by someone else or sooner or later AI will take over.

Then learn AI in depth.

Instead of running away. Go after whatever scares you. Move towards it. Because what the hell. This time won’t come back. This energy you have right now, won’t come back.

So fuck everything & write with abandonment.

Poitu Varen,
Akanksha

But if we don’t take control of our life at this moment. Days will turn into weeks, weeks will turn into years. And looking back, you & I will have a wasted life with “Potential”

In childhood this word “potential” used to give me a certain sense of pride. I had a firm believe that the future was mine to own. Now that word just gives me an ick. Because now it symbolizes, “hasn’t done anything yet.”

I still want to wake up with the conviction that the future is mine to own.

But I have added a caveat to this conviction.

If I seize the day, every day, my friend. The present, future and past. All are mine to own. I am the decisive factor in everything. Life didn’t happen to me. I happened to life.

What does “Seize the day” means?

Seize the day is basically, did I do what I set out to do? Did I overcome the roadblocks in my way? Did I sleep like baby with satisfaction that I really did everything?

Well, unfortunately every day is not that day. Some days it’s hard to sleep, hard to wake up, hard to move things around.

But if these days go checked, they act like a cult and initiate you into a rut. It will begin with tiny shifts in your energy, mood and habits. One skipped workout, one late night, the four I’ll do it tomorrow’s, the one-off day that spirals into a 3:47 a.m. cookie and a halku scroll session. Then, by the time you realize what’s happening, the cult has already done its job.

But if you are able to catch yourself, right before the moment you are about to fall.... things can be different.

This is such a common problem that Lewis Corse made a framework for this:

The RUT Framework

R - Recognize the slip

We all have our patterns. When we start slipping we move towards the same blackhole we came out of in the past. So, ask yourself:

When I start slipping, what are the first things I start and stop doing?

Here are some of my slips or the things I start or stop doing when I am slipping:

1. I stay up late

2. I read too much. More than average. As if I am hiding from the world and taking a refuge in the books.

3. I break my streak of “no junk food” I start craving all sorts of unhealthy stuff.

4. I start making excuses for not going out.

The intent her isn’t resistance. It’s just becoming aware, “oh! it’s happening.”

Awareness of the problem, solves half the problem.

U - Use your anchors

Once, you are aware that you are slipping, do the smallest version of the right thing to stop the slip. But what’s the right thing?

Your awareness of what the right thing is comes from your awareness of what your three ingredients are for a good day.

For me that’s:

1. A 60 min walk with good music. Absolutely resets my brain.

2. Reading. But specific books of Steven Pressfield & Robert Greene. They give me a kick in the butt to keep moving.

3. Reviewing my previous work & notes. It starts with a 5-min flip through but ends up being hours of exploration. I get filled with so many ideas that I feel like an idiot for wasting so much time and get started with work.

This small direction tilt early on prevents a big crash later.

T - Time your stops

Now, you’re getting some momentum back. But think of it like water in a cup that’s given to you in a desert. You are very far from a lake. So when drinking the water, you need to time your stop and protect the water for tomorrow.

Basically, stop before you are empty to keep moving forward.

A cool example of this, Ernest Hemingway. He had this one rule for writing. “Stop when it’s getting good.”

Because if you stop while you have energy, you’ll want to return and do the same thing tomorrow.

So, that’s the framework. But honestly, you don’t really need to know these steps. Just catch yourself early on, before the rut cult initiates you, and you will be fine.

The goal of this isn’t never to slip. It’s just recover faster.

Keeping going after a bad day.
... or a bad week.

Poitu varen,
Akanksha

P.S: What are your thoughts after reading this? I’d love to know.

What if your authentic self is the one who’s petty about your friend’s success? The one who gets bored when someone talks for long? The one who judges everyone and always has something negative to say about them? The who doesn’t want to hear about your passions?

What if the “real you” is someone people wouldn’t like very much?

I think about this sometimes when I hear the advice “everything will get solved, once you show up as you are.” There’s an assumption buried in there that the mask is the problem.

That we’ve all been hiding our true, beautiful, worthy selves behind a wall of social conditioning, and liberation is just on the other side of honesty.

But what if some of the conditioning is... good?

Sometimes learning to be polite when you’re annoyed, to perform interest when you’re bored, or to say “I’m happy for you” when part of you isn’t, is simply you trying not to ruin someone’s day.

Manners exist because our authentic impulses are often rude.

Every time you don’t say the mean thing you’re thinking, or you let someone else finish their sentence, or you pretend to care about someone’s childhood photos, you might not be “being yourself.”

But you are following your bigger truth. You are letting that person be happy. You recognize that it’s their moment. And you try not to stick out like a sore thumb.

By not being yourself, you’re being better than yourself.

And everyone around you is grateful, even if they don’t know it.

I’ve met people who pride themselves on being “authentic” or “telling things as it is” or “not playing games.”

And you know what most of these people are?

Exhausting.

Because “I’m just being honest” is often code for I’ve decided my comfort matters more than yours.

The person who’s patient even when patience doesn’t come naturally. Someone who makes an effort to listen even when listening feels like a chore. The person who chooses kindness over honesty when honesty would just be cruelty in the moment.

I vote for that kind of “Be yourself.”

The one who follows their bigger truth. The who who always strives to do things better. The who experiments. The one who isn’t rigid about who they are.

Because you my friend aren’t a precious gem that you need to discover. You are a river. You just have to feel your rhythm.

Before I go,

I would love to know what does “being yourself” means to you?

Poitu varen,
Akanksha

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

When Sylvia wrote this in 1961, I don’t think she accounted for the infinite options that a 20 something old will get in the 21st century.

The modern version of the fig tree quote might look like this:

“I saw my life growing like a dense forest, with so many seeds of thoughts, trees growing everywhere. From the tip of every branch of every tree, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.

One fig was a remote job, my life becoming a carousel of co-working spaces in different cities and golden hour photos, belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.

One fig was a content creator, a million followers hanging on my voice, my face, my takes. Sponsorships and parasocial love.

One fig was the founder, equity vesting over four years, ping pong tables and existential dread, with the dream of an exit.

One fig was freezing my eggs, buying time. Maybe kids at 40. Maybe never. The choice preserved in liquid nitrogen.

One fig was the portfolio life, a little consulting, a little Substack, a little coaching, monetizing every corner of my mind until I couldn’t remember what I thought before I thought about what would sell.”

Unlike Sylvia, we don’t stand at the threshold of choosing. We want to become everything and we attempt at being everything.

We stretch ourselves across branches, one hand gripping the founder fig, one foot hooked around the creator fig, our teeth clenched around the stem of the lover, the traveler and the artist.

They said choice would taste like freedom, but not that it’s an addictive sweetness. One that rots the stomach, until even our gut-instincts lose their sense of direction.

We have started to suffer. But that suffering is not because of an abundance of options. We suffer because of lack of commitment.

I am exhausted. I am exhausted of orbiting around this word, “potential.” A daily flirtation with who I am not, what I don’t have and what I haven’t done. I just have lists of lists of things to get done. No matter how much I do, something is always a miss.

In 1961, you might have wondered if other women were choosing different figs, career, children, bohemian affair in Paris. But you couldn’t watch them do it in real time.

You couldn’t see the famous poet also being the mother also being the traveler also being the lover, documenting each identity in a grid of squares, making it look seamless. You couldn’t compare your single, half-eaten fig to someone else’s abundant harvest.

Now you can. Now you must.

Every morning, I wake up to evidence that someone has figured out the puzzle I haven’t. She has the startup and the sourdough and the relationship and the biceps and the book deal. He’s location-independent and present for his kids and building generational wealth and learning ceramics.

The math adds up somewhere, in someone else’s life, so why not mine?

The fig tree has become a spectator sport. We watch each other climb. We take notes.

I don’t want to write an essay that ends with a prescription. I don’t know the answer. I’m suspicious of anyone who does, because the hunger to be everything is real, and it’s not delusion, and some of the people who tell you to “just pick one thing” are selling you their one thing.

I wonder sometimes if Sylvia’s problem and our problem are the same problem with different symptoms.

She couldn’t choose because choosing meant loss. We can’t stop choosing because stopping means loss. Both are attempts to escape the same unbearable fact: we are finite.

We have one life. It will end. And no amount of optionality or optimization or pivoting will give us a second one.

I don’t want any more doors. I want to walk through one without looking back. Because that door opens to the home, I can actually live in.

Signing off
Akanksha

Let’s be clear, simplification is not dumbification. You can’t make rockets, spaceships and plan to colonize Mars with dumbification.

So what does simplification actually look like in action?

When Elon wanted to build rockets. It was fucking expensive. So he created something called the idiot index. It calculates how much more costly a finished product is than the cost of its basic materials. If a product has a high idiot index, you’re being an idiot.

The cost can be reduced significantly by coming up with an efficient manufacturing technique.

For every part of the rocket, he went to the bare bones of separating every raw material. He calculated the cost of carbon fiber, metal, fuel, and other materials that went into making a rocket.

The finished product cost at least 50 times more than the raw materials.

So, he started hunting.

A supplier quoted a price of $120,000 for a part. Elon said that the part was no more complicated than a garage door opener and told one of his engineers to make the part. His engineer made it and it only cost $5,000.

When an engineer told Elon the air cooling system for the Falcon 9 would cost $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell to ask her what an air conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said.

So, the SpaceX team bought some commercial air conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket.

Elon saved money by questioning every requirement.

When he asked his team why it would cost $2 million to build a pair of cranes, these are cranes for rockets. He was shown all the safety regulations imposed by the Air Force. Most were obsolete.

So SpaceX then goes to the Air Force and they start questioning them and he says SpaceX was able to convince the military to revise them. The cranes ended up costing $300,000 instead.

Elon constantly presses team to source components from non-aerospace companies because aerospace companies charge 10 times more.

The latches used by NASA cost $1,500 each. A SpaceX engineer was able to modify a latch used in a bathroom stall and create a locking mechanism that only cost $30.

All of this is nothing. Elon has an algorithm - the 5 Commandments that he repeats like a mantra:

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous because people are less likely to question them. Always question, even if the requirement came from Elon himself.

2. Delete any part of the process you can. You may have to add them back later. If you don’t end up adding back at least 10% of them, you didn’t delete enough.

3. Simplify and optimize. This comes after step two. A common mistake is to simplify a part or process that should never exist.

4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be sped up, but only after you’ve followed the first three steps.

5. Automate. This comes last. Never first.

My core takeaways from this podcast:

Stop thinking you have limits. Stop giving into imaginary delays. Start with whatever is in front of you right now and resist the urge to overcomplicate.

See you tomorrow,
Akanksha

PS: I have been experimenting with creating AI videos. Might write about it tomorrow.

A few examples:

These kind of videos are easily doing 300K+ views on Instagram reels. You won’t believe how simple they are to create.

Created these for hugsy.app the fun couples app I am building:

You will see all of these illustrations and more directly in our app.

If you are in relationship, you should definitely sign up to the early access.

A vague tweet. That pulled in comments like:

Something that was just a joke can become my reality now. I have got PCOD & Thyroid, if I am not careful with my diet & exercise, I will be in the 90s for real.

My body won’t be able to handle that. Because at a height of 5’2, 90 kgs is a fuck lot of weight. Not only I will gain weight, I will also gain more health issues. Four months ago, when the doctors made me realize these facts it was like a punch in the gut. The root cause of most of my health problems is my weight.

Now the interesting thing about rectifying this situation is that I can’t just run & do jumping jacks to reduce weight. It will negatively impact my knees & ankles. So I only have 3 ways left.

1. Eating right
   
   I have cut sugar. I am eating quinoa, daliya, oats. Sometimes I slip up but I try not spiral out and get back to eating healthy ASAP

2. Walking + a lil bit of strength exercise
   
   I aim to walk 7-10K steps daily. On the worst days, I have reach the minimum goal of 5K steps. Until I reach the weight of 70kgs, this is all I have to do.

3. Sleep on time
   
   I had no fucking idea, how much of an impact sleep has on my body. I have always been careless with my sleep. The more stress I had, the more I didn’t sleep. (or slept too much). But, sleeping 7-8 hours at the same time every day & eating proper meals 3 times a day is a life hack.

Habits stack over other habits. Whenever I am eating and sleeping on time, other things in my life (like work) accommodate that and also get done in time.

The title of this essay is Road Work, and there’s a reason for that.

I am highly inspired by Gary C Halbert. He is the guy who was sent to jail for mail fraud. He was also a writer. And he wrote letters to his son from the jail. The boron letters. You can read them for free here.

Did I tell you, he was a copywriting legend and might be the one of a very few people who made millions out of writing? Well, he did all that and more.

One of the things, he told his son was about the road work:

Road work is walking, jogging and running. And, in my opinion, you should do about one hour of road work everyday of the week except Sunday. I believe the best time to do your road work is right after you get out of bed.

Wash your face, brush your teeth, use the bathroom, etc., and then, eat a piece of fruit (I think a banana is the best) and then hit the street! That’s it. Just get out that front door and start moving. Walk, run, jog. Keep moving for about 1/2 hour and then turn around and come back. You know, I really do believe this is the very best way in the world to start the day. It cleans you out, it settles you down and it gives you a nice glow that will stay with you throughout the day. It will also make you more clearheaded and improve the quality of your thinking. The benefits are enormous and, believe me, if you start doing this right away (like the day after you get this letter!) it won’t be long at all till you become positively addicted to your early morning workout.

This morning, I had a vivid dream that I am wearing a beautiful blue dress with white shoes. And I AM RUNNING! I am running fast like never before. I am not out of breathe. I am happy. I am laughing out loud. There’s greenery & beauty all around me. It felt so real, like a memory unlock.

If I am able to bring this to reality, it would feel like such a Deja Vu moment.

Before I sign off, I would love to know:

Much love,
Akanksha

Excited to hear from you!

It’s middle of the night, the year is ending. And I have got this obsession of reviving my love of writing and thinking on my own without the assistance of AI. My partner made me realize, how AI dependent I have become. I have stopped thinking from first principles.

Now that I have starting learning new things again. I want to learn them well. Writing Essays is going to be a part of that.

I watched this video, where it said “essay” means “to try”, “to attempt”.

Essays have been the first way for people to express their ideas and thoughts. Einstein used to write essays. Ralph Waldo Emerson is famous for his essays. I sometimes refer to them to get a kick in the butt.

Writing is super duper imp because when an idea is on paper, it separates from you. You can see it. Examine it. Criticize it. You can see if it even makes sense at all or you are spiraling, talking about surface level things.

In essay writing you have to take your vague and scattered thoughts & make sense of it. Give it some rational linear order and that is hard. But that is what intelligence is & essay writing is the ultimate test of that.

It’s 10th Jan, and today was the first day since I started, where I was struggling to write on any dedicated topic. So, I thought let’s just write about what’s blocking me.

A few reasons come to mind:

1. I don’t feel the spark. I have certain topics I wanted to write about but I don’t feel excited about any of them. I look at them and go.. “blah!”
   
   The few topics:

   1. I am dumb when I am happy, intelligent when I am sad.

   2. Why do people clink glasses when doing a cheers. (There’s a murder mystery plot behind it.)

   3. Our couples app is going live soon. (We need early testers...)
      

2. I woke up super late. I have come to realize, my daily habits directly impact my inspiration water tap. If I don’t open it on time, the well goes dry. By writing daily, I fine tuned my mind to be in the deep work zone at night & early mornings.

According to me this is a lazy piece of work.

So to make it worthwhile your time, let me tell you how this tiny habit has impacted me in the last 10 days.

1. I have reduced my AI usage. I am only using it to ask questions I have zero idea about.

2. One habit stacks more habits.
   For eg, once you start smoking, you start eating less, it becomes a habit to skip food. Pretty soon, your life reorganizes itself to accommodate smoking. My life has reorganized itself to accommodate publishing daily. That includes eating right, reading the books that fire up currents in my body and brain, walking to process the ideas.

3. I am religiously documenting my product updates & marketing ideas.

These are v.v.v small results in 10 days. The compounded results can be different.

I have only one rule in writing now:

This small intent change has made a lot of difference. Earlier months would go by and I did not write anything. Or if I wrote anything, I didn’t post it thinking it needs more punch.

Now I am just going with the flow.

Signing off
Akanksha

“When I write, I use my body.

I use all the sensory details of seeing, of smelling, of tasting, of experiencing tenderness & warmth and cold and pain. I notice my heart racing and my body needing of food & water, of walking & running, of feeling the wind and rain, of holding hands.

I try to infuse those vivid sensations that I feel as a mortal being with blood coursing through the body into my sentences as if I am sending out an electric current.“

Yesterday, I heard these words for the very first time on an Instagram reel. And, I started crying. I felt this sudden weight of all my unrealized dreams and potential. The voice just got to me.

These words were spoken by Han Kang, apparently she had won the nobel prize in literature in 2024. She is a poetess. Her career with poetry first. I guess that’s why she has honed her voice to be velvet like, designed for narration. So deep and nourishing.

Or maybe, that’s how she always sounded like. Calm. Composed. Full of sensitivity & emotional depth. Her words made me feel like I am not doing enough, not feeling enough to get more onto the page.

When I see her, I see a woman who has listened to her inner voice for years. She has practiced and fine tuned her craft, like I wanted to.

But I am not there yet. I guess the vision of what I could achieve vs what I am doing now & where I am at… hit me like a load of truck.

After watching the reel, I thought of exploring this person (Han Kang) & my feelings of inferiority a bit more:

I started watching her 34 min nobel prize lecture. She comes on the stage with no fast gestures. She sets her papers. Removes her specs. Smoothens her hair. And then she starts to speak.

As if by taking time in doing these actions, she is making everyone’s mind neurons mirror her calm & peace.

In situations like these, my mind starts to run like a chicken. I get a high pitched tone that rushes to speak the rehearsed lines. All my focus is on getting the script right. I see this when I shoot reels for the Instagram page of @tryhugsy

Anyways, let’s get back to Han and her writing. I will be sharing my notes from her lecture and the little anecdotes or commentary I have about them:

Han wrote a poetry book when she was 8 years old. A book that’s unpublished, hiding in her shoebox. One of the poems she wrote in it:

Where is love?
It is inside my thump thumping breathing chest.

What is love?
It is the thread connecting between our hearts.

Writing books take time & sacrifices:

My novels have taken my anywhere from a year to seven years to finish. For which I have exchanged considerable portions of my personal life.

When a woman talks about sacrificing her personal life. I don’t think that she is losing time with her friends or parents. I want to know if she is married or not? Does she has a kid or not?

Did this soulful woman choose to live alone?

The answer I got: She was married to a literary critic Hang Young Hee, but they have been divorced for many years. And she has a son. She and her husband ran a bookstore in Seoul.

A very strong narrative of how Han writes her novels is QUESTIONS!

I’ll call this The Question Theory: the belief that your life’s work is not the answer you arrive at, but the question you refuse to leave.

Han spent three years on writing The Vegetarian, asking:

• Can a person be completely innocent?

• To what depths can we reject violence?

• What happens to someone who refuses to belong to the human species anymore? (They want to be a plant and survive on water)

Once her questions are answered, and the book is finished. Han becomes a changed person. She has new questions now. On top of her previous questions. Hence, she starts writing another book.

While writing her next book, the questions she had were:

• The world cannot reject violence.

• We cannot turn into plants. Then how do we continue?

Her questions are deeply rooted into how she as a person interacts with the world.

You just have to ask, what’s her POV? And, that’s the book.

• Why this world is so violent & painful and yet, how this world can be this beautiful?

She is fucking dedicated to her craft.

I obtained a book containing more than 900 testimonials and read it cover to cover. 9 hours a day, for about a month.

Whatever happens in the future. I will remember this episode as the moment that shaped it.

Here’s the link to the complete lecture:.

Signing off
Akanksha

But the secretary of war, Henry Stimson objected strongly. He had personally visited Kyoto on his honeymoon and loved its culture. He admired its temples, gardens, philosophy & heritage.

The military kept trying to put Kyoto back on the list. But Henry was adamant about replacing it. Eventually he won, Kyoto was replaced by Nagasaki.

Kyoto was saved because of its story.

That’s why it’s very important to be in control of your story and actively shape it.

If you don’t tell your story in your own words, someone else will tell it for you, through their own lens, with their own biases.

Some 2000 years ago, Aristotle studied what makes up for a great story. How can we write a story that is persuasive and moves people to take action.

Here’s the 5 element framework he gave us:

1. Ethos

Ethos is about authority & character.

Do people trust you? Do they see as someone worth listening too?

It’s about credibility. And it’s built through consistency & commitment to what you are saying.

There’s a concept in storytelling of ‘katha’ & ‘kathakar’. ‘Katha’ is the story & ‘Kathakar’ is the storyteller.

Small kids ask for the same story to be told over again and again. We did the same thing with our grandparents. We knew the story from beginning to end, but we always wanted to hear it again.

What pulled was not the katha (the story) but the kathakar (the storyteller). That’s ethos in action. Who is telling the story and why we want to listen it from them.

2. Logos

Logos is about reason. It involves making a logical appeal using data and facts to build a rational argument.

Stories that move the heart, also have to satisfy the mind.

Logos is the architecture beneath the emotion. It’s the reason why the best stories feel both moving and true.

3. Pathos

Pathos is about emotion.

It’s the genuine connection you build with your audience through honest communication.

In the story of the ugly duckling. A duck lays some eggs. They hatch and all the ducklings look same except one. He looks bigger & awkward.

He feels sad about not fitting in.

But then he sees a flock of swans. He realizes he was neer even a duck in the first place. He was a swan.

The story is simple and relatable. At some point in our lives, we all have been the ugly duckling. Feeling different and wanting to feel like we are a part of something but not able to fit in.

Pathos is the emotional feeling that says, “yes, this is true for me as well.” Or “yes, I am rooting for you to win”

4. Metaphor

Metaphor helps people process complex ideas.

Think about how we talk about time. “Time is money”. Three words and suddenly an abstract, philosophical concept became something we intuitively understand. We “spend” time, “waste it”, “save it”, “invest it”.

Time has become this currency that we value. It’s the reason we think about ways to be productive.

Metaphor takes something your audience has never experienced before and connects it to something that they know & understand intutively

Brevity

This word doesn’t need an explanation.

Short sentences. Punchy sentences. Knowing what to leave out.

Respect your audience’s time and attention. Let your stories breathe. Leave room for the listener to fill the gaps. Let them participate and make the story their own.

It blows away my mind that these principles were written 2000 years ago and they are still relevant today. Whether scriptwriting an hour long youtube video or writing a script for a 60 second reel.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. If we can just practice more and more. There’s nothing that can stop us from becoming grand storytellers.

Signing off
Akanksha

He said, “Don’t talk about your ideas because you have an urge to talk about it.

Write it down and think why it’s bad.

The whole reason you should talk about your ideas is so that your brain can connect dots with others ideas and think more. But if your ideas are bad, what’s the point of connecting it to more bad ideas?”

I was battle ready to banish this idea of his... how can he say something like this.

I was going to say more, but he got a call and this gave me some time to think more. There are two kinds of people. People who work best when they talk. They get their ideas from discussions. These are the fast thinkers. The one who are always on their feet. Excited about ever new idea. They don’t necessarily give a fuck about whether the idea is even good. They just want to keep hitting the wall with ideas until something sticks.

The other segment is of slow thinkers. They criticize their idea before anyone else. They are deliberate with their speech. Whatever they say, they have thought about it multiple times. They will back up their thinking with reasoning and analogies. You can have a full blown discussion with them on every idea they have. Because they have thought on things at a much deeper level.

The more I thought about this I realized,

Thinking is an individual process, sure a few dots can connect here and there. But thinking is best done in solitude. People in conversation aren’t able to be imaginative. They say things that they have already experienced.

The director was still on call. And I was mind blown by the fact that just by taking this moment to think. I was able to think in such a diverse way. “In this moment I am not in a rush to speak out my mind instantly. Is that why he doesn’t allow his writers to speak out their ideas?”

After his call ended, he said, “Let’s play a game.” I got excited, I was way too curious at this point. He said,

“Rename everything on this dinner table. But don’t think too hard about it. For example, this is water, you can call it sun. This is glass, you can call it a dragon or anything that comes to your mind.”

I was up for the challenge. I looked at the items before us. I said fire for water, soda for salt, knife for fork, corn and spinach for some side dishes. The thing about my mind choosing these words to replace the existing ones is that I already associated them in some way. When I was fast in my thinking process, there was no creativity.

Fire is opposite to water. Soda and salt go together. Knife and fork come as a combined set. Even though the knife wasn’t there on the table. In my memory it was together because I have seen it together so often. I was able to think through this when I thought slowly.

To think differently, I had to observe and be patient.

It’s an interesting paradox that we need to slow down to speed up our ability to innovate, to create and connect.

Zomato is known for its marketing. Their marketing isn’t something completely out of the box. They keep it in the box as much as possible. They keep seeing the same box again and again, slow down their thinking and observe the mundane and obvious. They observe things that are so simple that they are ignored by everyone.

And when Zomato brings the same things at the forefront of their copy. It’s surprising and delightful for people because they knew it but just didn’t think of it like that.

Before you go, tell me —

1. What are your thoughts on slow thinking?

2. Do you trust you first idea or second one?

3. Do you have people around you who make you think fast or slow?

Feel free to reply. I’d love to know.

Much love,
Akanksha