Saud

I can think I’ve made a terrible decision and still be entirely on my own side. I think of this as Team Me. Whatever I think of a particular choice, I remain invested in the person who has to live with it. I can consider what I knew at the time, recognise where my judgement failed and change what I do next. None of that requires me to withdraw my allegiance to myself. There’s a practical consequence to this. If I care about what happens to me, I have a reason to examine my mistakes. Pretending they were all good decisions would leave me dealing with the same consequences indefinitely. Being on my own side gives me a reason to correct myself, including when the correction is unpleasant. That commitment also gives the effort somewhere to go. Maintaining my body and developing my capacities give me more opportunities to have a life I enjoy. A disappointing result doesn’t automatically remove the reason I started. But I think this becomes way, way more complicated when we ask folks to feel a similar allegiance towards an institution. An institution contains other people, with their own interests, and some of them get to make decisions that everyone else has to live with. My willingness to tolerate my own mistakes tells me very little about how much someone else should tolerate on behalf of an organisation I happen to value. Suppose the residents of a building contribute to a maintenance fund. They all depend on the roof, so there’s a reason to pay into something they might not need repaired this year. If the roof leaks after a repair, there may still be a reasonable case for spending more money. But suppose the people managing the fund refuse to show anyone the accounts. They keep hiring the same contractor and describe every complaint as a refusal to contribute. The residents still care about the building, but they now have good reason to doubt whether another payment will help maintain it. An appeal to community at that point asks them to absorb a failure they have no means of correcting. It also benefits the people who get to continue making the decisions. If the residents can inspect the accounts and replace the people responsible, their dissatisfaction has somewhere useful to go. They can act on their concern for the building. Without that possibility, withdrawing their contribution becomes one of the few decisions they still control. This is where an institution has to earn something I give myself without conditions. It has to give people a reason to believe that their continued investment can affect what happens. Even then, getting involved takes effort. The people already dealing with the leak may have the least time or money to spare, and caring about the building doesn’t create an unlimited obligation to repair it. Someone can have good reasons to leave even when their departure makes things harder for everyone who remains. Their willingness to stay tells us only so much about their commitment. Team Me works because remaining invested in myself leaves me free to change a great deal about how I live. I don’t have to preserve a bad decision to prove that I care about the person who made it. For a shared institution, that freedom has to exist in practice. People need some way to challenge what is happening and make a correction stick. Or else, asking them to remain invested means asking them to keep paying for decisions they can't change, with no particular reason to expect the next result to be different.

No book has quite changed my perspective as The Fall. I read it once every 5 years.

I like the Disney × Gustaf Westman collection. It brings these iconic characters into objects people can wear and use in their daily lives. It’s also a great idea for gifters! Maybe someone’s a lifelong Disney fan, but you don't wanna gift them something generic, right? So you can gift them something from this collection instead! And for folks who love Disney but aren’t quite as into it these days, a cup or a chair is a nice way to bring some whimsy back into the house. Or office. Especially for those suffering under "millennial gray". Not a Disney fan, but this is cool. gustafwestman.com/pages/disn…

This is what’s keeping founders from leveling up. Delay that gratification. Have that difficult conversation. See that long horizon experiment through. Keep at it. The more contexts you switch in your work, the less bandwidth you’ll have for when a true signal reaches you. Delegate ruthlessly.

The folks who: - are low agency - easily distracted - have 0 desire to put in an effort Were as replaceable before AI as they will be after AI. I have yet to see a this type of person succeed because of AI, but I have seen the opposite augment themselves. I think AI gives these folk a strong adversary, but the only real change is when (acceleration) and by whom (AI vs Human)

Four Seasons’ New World Icons private jet itinerary is genuinely incredible curation. I love the taste behind it It’s Langkawi not Bali; Hong Kong not Seoul; Anguilla not Turks & Caicos; Jaipur not Mumbai. There’s a very clever subversion here, but the regulars like Los Cabos and Venice are still there for the usual magic. I think this is gonna work really well for a certain affluent audience. fourseasons.com/privatejet/j…

Sustainability, of any kind saudstack.substack.com/p/sus…

We need to have an honest conversation about the guise of productivity. AI agents are a symptom, but we’ve been obsessed as a whole with doing things that look productive without getting anywhere. Hustle culture was yet another manifestation of this.

Jev feels like a ChatGPT moment

As Artificial Intelligence proliferates, a clear consensus is emerging: The true bottlenecks of augmented productivity seem to be taste, timing, cognitive load, and systems thinking. What profession equips one with all four?

Shoutout to Handy. Have been using Parakeet 0.6B Unified for the past few months and it works like a charm. handy.computer/

The kinda people who tell you they’re good at everything tend to be the kinda people who aren’t good at anything. Circle of competence etc etc