1. This might sound truly self-presumptuous, especially coming from someone who has not proven himself the way I think I need to, to say these things: But I see so many people around me with incredible talent working on incredibly difficult tasks, but I see their work leading to a black hole in an AI-first future. My intuition on this has been built from extensive observation and careful self-scoring since the day GPT-3 launched.

I consider this intuition of what-deserves-your-effort-and-time and will survive or thrive in an AI age, both in the short-term, medium, and long my biggest edge.

Public self-flattery has a way of sometimes truly biting your loud mouth in the ass. Let’s hope this is not of those cases.

2. Since I started working on things that made me money and honed my skills from the age of 17, I’ve never set yearly goals. I was always in a rush to solve the next week or month of problems, some because of the cards life played me, some self-created because they allowed me to hold a sense of urgency and importance.

The second half of last year and this was the first I intentionally stopped creating “urgent problems” and for the first time, actually, life matched that symphony and gave me greater peace.

So this year, it kind of made sense to have something: a structure, and some new years’ goals. But what I realized was, a lot of my life I couldn’t or didn’t want to fit into strict time boxes.

Two of my priorities in life are pursuing spontaneity (because many of my biggest wins and best ideas come from this) + deeper friendships, and caring for + prioritizing those connections.

These values are non-negotiable, and often at a perpendicular to strict time boxes and mapping my schedule out months in advance.

So I did something else instead: I mapped out loose goals and habits: gym 20x in a month, learn 3 songs on the piano every 3 months, stuff like that. It was my discretion to be carefully consistent, load it all up top, or rush and get it done last minute. And deciding to stay out at a party until 4am means I always know the tradeoffs. I like it this way, and 3 and a half months into 2026, I know it’s what works for me.

3. One thing I’ve learnt from Huberman’s Lab that has helped me immensely over the last 2 months was… sitting in sunlight, looking directly or only tangentially apart into the sun. It’s been a life changer in solving fatigue and just the general feeling of feeling-drained, and I didn’t realize how painfully oblivious so many of us are to how necessary this is for us, our brains, and health.

Every day I’ve done that, my day has been better than baseline, and everyday I’ve woken up to do it earlier in the morning, even better so. But the way my internal conflict of priorities has been colliding has made that waking up early a rarity rather than the norm.

The other habits I started logging at the start of the year, I don’t anymore because I consider them learnt. They’re ingrained into me and my mind has learned the benefits of being regular with them and I no longer have to force myself to remember or practice them.

So I’m adding a new one. Waking up at 7:30am, 3x a week for now. Full 8 hours of sleep is now de-prioritized relative to waking up early, but I think 3 times is generous enough that it won’t need to come to that. Generous enough to fit Murtaza Qilbash this weekend and various other plans the next.

My productivity right now very much varies on a scale of 100x-0 depending on days, but I think just a guarantee of 3x productive days a week means I can achieve more than most dream of in their lifetime.

Of course, I know that isn’t my competition or bar though, it will be higher — but this is the first step. I remember the same thing Ben Affleck told Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting: “I’ll fucking kill you.”