Akanksha's brain

I like how my brain works. Sometimes. So I decided to document it. Welcome to my log of consciousness:)

This is inspired by Michael Dean. Few months back, I read this excerpt from his essay:

A real-time capture log implies that your own life is the best source for inspiration; not feeds, articles, or encyclopedias. Having a public log changes how I see the world. Every moment, experience, and conversation is an opportunity.

Since then, I am hooked with the idea of capturing my consciousness.

With every sentence of Dean's reason of maintaining a logloglog blog. I got more and more convinced and excited about it. There's an attractive nature to fragmented, unedited, unfiltered thoughts.

His process also seems quite simple to do:

It only takes me 10 minutes each morning to read through the past day’s log, pluck out the worthy ideas, and archive the rest. The whole system is basically a text-file per day.

By 9am Sharp. I upload my daily log of the previous day on Akanksha’s brain.

7th April, 2025

12:14 AM - Those who gain fame and fortune without caring about it are the real winners. They have better priorities in life. Fame and fortune comes as an added bonus for them.

12:36 AM - I see the significance of tasteful hoarding now. Having physical volumes of books, movies, music, journals around you makes you revisit them often. And we learn more by revisiting than reaching for something new.

6th April, 2025

11:06 PM - Sometimes, a sunflower needs a little less wind to bloom.

5th April, 2025

8:06 AM - Once our mind is set to do something. We find our way anyhow. This whole world is a proof of that. Every day, every minute someone is finding out a way to solve their problem.

4th April, 2025

12:42 PM - When starting something again, let go of the past baggage of failures & successes. Archive everything — wins, regrets, missed chances, good runs. everything.

You can retrieve the learnings anytime you need them. What you learned is going to be with you but the weight of what happened doesn't need to be.

Start fresh. Start clean.

12:50 PM - Obsession creates talent. In the end, you won't be able to tell who was born with a gift.

3rd April, 2025

11:43 AM - I want to write timeless things. But I am not able to think too far in the future. I can’t even predict what’s going to happen 5-10 years from now. But I would still like to write things that will be relevant 5-10 years from now.

And the biggest metric to test out what’s going to be relevant is:

What I think will be important for me?
Universal feelings that have stood the test of time for centuries.

I have talked more about this: timeless themes.

We all have a central theme in our life, that keeps surfacing again and again. If you just think back, you will find some of the central themes that have stood out time and again for you. Try to window down the theme and emotion to one word.

Something that’s Universal.

Something so constant that as long as humans are present in this world, the word will be there too.

Words like power, love, obsession, creation, innovation, envy, rebellion are here to stay and always did.

These are immortal themes.

11:44 AM - Expression over Impression. Anything we do to impress someone - people or algorithm, dies out too soon.

3:45 PM - Money is just the reward for controlling reality. People who control reality, who dictate the terms of the game get to decide where the money goes.

How does one control reality?

you control perception: People don't pay for the best product, they pay for what they BELIEVE is the best.
you control distribution: Amazon never sold everything. They just control the infrastructure that sells everything.
you control access: In every decade a few companies control the access to information or a niche. Right now it's Open AI, anthropic, deepseek. Before this it was Google & Meta. Even before them it was Microsoft, IBM & some early internet gatekeepers.

If you’re not the one controlling what people believe, what they buy, or how they access things, you’re just another player following the rules, not the one writing them.

4:10 PM - We want to matter in others' lives. It's the whole reason we make friends, raise families, offer mentorship & lead.

When we offer advice, remember someone's birthday, show up when it counts, we instinctively affirm our place in the fabric of someone else's world.

11:50 PM - Wealth attracts wealth and poverty attracts poverty.

Don’t think of it in just literal terms. It applies to most things. Beauty, abundance, confidence, friends, love.

As if whatever you give and show to the world, the world gives back 10x more.

2nd April, 2025

5:27 PM - We instinctively know what the ‘other’ person should do. We don’t carry their emotional baggage or fear. There’s no action bias. So, the advice we dish out to them seems obvious. Like why aren’t they doing this already.

But when it comes to us. There’s a thing that we ‘should’ do and there’s a thing that we ‘want’ to do.

Anyone who yaps anything else, does get heard but not with same conviction as our gut. When we’re in the middle of our own situation, we feel all the emotions tied to each other. We also think far in the future because we are the one who has to live with the consequences.

5:34 PM - I don’t think our gut instinct is always right. Most of the time it is. But not always.

Our instinct reactions are born out of the wisdom that our logical mind hasn’t processed yet. But there are times when emotions overpower instincts and they try to protect us from old wounds rather than guiding us towards what’s best.

Speaking from experience, I would bet on my female intuition/instinct every time.

5:45 PM - I don’t write content. I write ideas worth rereading.

1st April, 2025

11:08 AM - When I think about where I want to live. I think of a room that has stacks of books lined up on the walls. There’s big large windows in it. A nearby lake within a periphery of few kms. The right amount of sunlight is coming in and it makes me happy like a sunflower. This room has kind neighbours around who smile when I pass by. I have friends and community with me to fall back on.

I want to live in a room where I can obsessively put 12 hours of work without interruptions. A room where no one can disturb me. But once in a while someone checks on me to see if I am doing okay or if I need anything.

A room that welcomes me like a warm hug whenever I come back from travel. A room that doesn’t feel empty but rather cozy. Even though I am the only person there or I am the only person coming back from my travels.

I want a room like Austin Kleon’s where all my creations, manuscripts, drawings, brain stormings are at one place.

I want to keep things upside down. Pictures a bit tilted. Things a bit chaotic, so it feels disturbing to the soul.

I know obsession doesn’t require glamour or pretty aesthetics. It requires grit to work from anywhere. Especially a dark basement as such. But it's my obsession to work from a place where sunlight is around me. I feel fresh and rejuvenated to work. Even on the boring days I am so attuned to my routines that I naturally do what I have to do.

1:24 PM - Talking about people from the past in the present tense is the highest form of a “made it” moment for me. Like Steve Jobs is such a genius. Sylvia Plath writes so well. Seneca is mind blowing when it comes to meditation.

We talk about these people and their ideas in present because it applies to us in present. Because of their ideas, these people exist as if they are alive and just out of reach. You can’t meet them, but they are there. That’s a kind of revolutionary existence that only few get to have.

6:17 PM - This idea is one of my all-time favourite reminders: Just get 1% better every day. You will end up 37x stronger.

The calculation is simple:

1³⁶⁵ = 1
1.01³⁶⁵ = 37.78
0.99³⁶⁵ = 0.03