Ian Mwaura™

it is an unwritten rule of life that after every prolonged period of hardship and uncertainty, there is going to be a period when you are going to achieve quantum leaps across multiple areas of your life. the only requirement is that you do not give up on yourself

Robert Reich forgot the 6th and most common way: 6) Build something millions of people actually want

I started @DellTech 37 years ago with $1000. Revenues in 1984 were $6 million. Last year's revenues were $94.2 billion. Impossible is nothing.

An underrated cheat code in life: being incredibly reliable. Show up on time. Do what you say you will. Own your mistakes. It goes so much further than you think.

Everyone should go to Japan at least once (preferably early in life) just to understand what a highly functioning society can look like

Elon Musk just told Joe Rogan every app on your phone will be dead in 5 years. Not struggling. Not declining. Dead. Musk: “You’ll get everything through AI.” Rogan asked the timeline. Musk: “5 or 6 years, something like that.” Rogan: “So 5 or 6 years, apps are like Blockbuster video.” Musk: “Pretty much.” That’s not some AI newsletter prediction. That’s the guy who owns the platform you’re reading this on telling you the entire app economy has an expiration date. Think about how your phone actually works right now. Apps trained your brain to think in boxes. One box for email. One for music. One for video. One for food. One for banking. Your entire digital life is opening and closing 30 different boxes. All day. Every day. AI doesn’t think in boxes. It thinks in intent. Musk: “Whatever you can think of or really whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it’ll show you.” Not what you search for. Not what you tap on. What you haven’t even thought of yet. The app needed you to know what you wanted and go get it yourself. AI arrives before the thought fully forms. That’s not an upgrade to the interface. That’s the end of the interface. Musk went further. He said most of the content people consume in 5 to 6 years will be AI-generated. Music. Video. All of it. Rogan admitted AI-generated music is already his favorite. Not a prediction. Present tense. The ground already moved. Most people are still arguing about which streaming app has the better library. Every major tech company of the last 15 years was built on one assumption. That you would come to them. Download their app. Learn their layout. Give them your attention. Give them your data. AI inverts that entire model. You stop going to anything. Everything comes to you. Anticipated, filtered, delivered before you finish the sentence. The App Store doesn’t shrink. The concept of an app store stops making sense entirely. You don’t browse a shelf of tools when the tool already knows what you need. The phone isn’t dying. But the 30 icons on your home screen are the Blockbuster shelves of 2031. And right now, you’re still renting.

High cortisol steals 5 years from your life. It tanks testosterone, stores dangerous visceral belly fat, and literally shrinks your brain. Here are 10 cheat codes to lower cortisol according to science:🧵 1. Stop working out after 7PM

“I don’t read all the things written about me. I wasn’t aware that the world thought that I was so weird and bizarre. But when you grow up as I did in front of 100 million people since the age of 5, you’re automatically different.” — Michael Jackson. 🕊️ 🥹

TIME IS NOT TREATED THE SAME EVERYWHERE: 1. Germany: Being late is disrespectful. Meetings start to the second. Punctuality here is not a habit. It is a moral standard. 2. Brazil: An invitation for seven means nine. Relationships matter more than schedules. Rigidity kills the atmosphere. 3. Japan: Trains run to the minute. A sixty second delay comes with a formal public apology. Time is a system. The system is everything. 4. India: Events begin when people arrive. The gathering defines the time. Presence matters more than precision. 5. Polynesian cultures: Time was tied to stars, seasons, and the ocean. Circular, not linear. The clock came later and from somewhere else. 6. United States: Time is money. Literally. Every hour is billable. Every minute is scheduled. Rest has to earn its place. 7. Spain: Lunch at three. Dinner at ten. The day bends around the person. Not the other way around. 8. Ethiopia: A different calendar entirely. Thirteen months. New Year in September. A different year than the rest of the world. Time here is a cultural choice, not a global agreement. 9. France: August belongs to rest. Emails go unanswered. Shops close. Nobody apologizes for this. Leisure is a right, not a reward. 10. Kenya: The clock starts at sunrise. Six in the morning is hour zero. Noon is hour six. Time is built around light, not an arbitrary number on a wall. 11. China: One time zone for the entire country. A landmass that should span five. In the far west the sun rises at ten in the morning. Unity was chosen over accuracy. 12.Australia: Aboriginal communities have always read time through seasons, animal movements, and the stars above. For over sixty thousand years the land itself served as the calendar. No clock was ever needed. Nature told them everything. 13. Mexico: Mañana means not right now. Urgency is often self-imposed. The present moment has its own demands and they are considered legitimate. 14. Greece: A guest arrives at any hour. You welcome them fully. The clock adjusts to the person. The person never adjusts to the clock. 15. Scandinavia: Months of darkness then months of endless light. The body follows seasons, not schedules. This is ancient. Science is only now catching up. 16. Nigeria: Start times are a suggestion. What matters is that everyone arrives, connects, and the evening becomes what it was meant to be. The experience always outranks the schedule. 17. Indonesia: Jam karet. Rubber time. Time stretches around mood, traffic, and social obligation. Rigidity is considered uncomfortable, not professional. 18. Russia: Eleven time zones. Vast winters. Long silences. Time here is treated with patience that outsiders often mistake for slowness. 19. Egypt: One of the first civilizations to invent a calendar. Yet modern Egyptian social time is deeply flexible. Hospitality always comes before the clock. 20. Congo: Community shapes the day more than any schedule. Time belongs to the people in the room, not the hands on the clock. 21. Philippines: Filipino time is a known and accepted reality. Six in the evening means seven or eight. Arriving before the host is ready is the real social mistake. 22. Vietnam: Built on endurance and long horizons. Planning here thinks in years and generations. Short deadlines feel foreign to a culture that measured time in struggles spanning decades. 23. Tanzania: Pole pole. Slowly slowly. A phrase that governs daily life. Rushing is not a virtue here. Moving with intention is. 24. Argentina: Dinner at ten. Parties at midnight. The night is its own world. Compressing it into earlier hours would make it something lesser. 25. Turkey: A meeting can become a meal can become a long evening. Nobody considers this a deviation. It is simply what time is for. 26. Iran: Its own solar calendar. New Year on the spring equinox. Time tied to nature, poetry, and a civilization so old that modern urgency feels like a passing trend.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

Anthropic CEO: "AI will write 100% of code within a year" developers spend 4 years in university learning to code Claude learned it from every book ever written if the hardest skill is already handled - the gap is no longer about what you know it's about how well you've configured the tool that knows everything most people haven't done that yet the article below is where you start

Marc Andreessen on Elon Musk: "Every week he identifies the biggest problem and fixes it. That's 52 problems solved per year." "He has an operating method that is very unusual by modern standards. I'm not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does. And I think probably the single biggest question in all of business right now is... why don't more CEOs operate the way that he does?" Andreessen explains: "If you go back in history, you find characters more like him. The industrialists of the late 1800s, early 1900s... Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Watson who built IBM." On what makes Musk different: "The top-line thing is this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does. To be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it. To be in the trenches, talking directly to the people who do the work. Deeply understanding the issues. Being the lead problem solver in the organization." The method: "Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies. He identifies the biggest problem the company is having that week... and he fixes it. Then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row. And then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year." On everyone else: "Most other large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting for the board meeting for the presentation... with the compliance review and the legal review. It's this level of incredible intellectual capability coupled with incredible force of personality, moral authority, execution capability, focus on fundamentals... that is just really amazing to watch." On why top talent wants to work with him: "The side effect is he attracts many of the best people in the world to work with him. Because if you work with Elon... the expectations are through the roof in terms of your level of performance. He is going to know who you are. He is going to know what you've done. He is going to know what you've done this week. He is going to know if you're underperforming. And he may fire you in the meeting if you're not carrying your weight." But for those who match his commitment: "If you are as committed to the company as he is and working hard... many people who have worked for him say they had the best experience of their lives." On delegation... and the bottleneck: "Most CEOs have a problem knowing when to delegate. The Elon method is a little bit different. He actually delegates almost everything. He's not involved in most of the things his companies are doing. He's involved in the thing that is the biggest problem right now... until that thing is fixed. Then he doesn't have to be involved anymore. Then he can go focus on the next thing that's the biggest problem." Andreessen uses a manufacturing analogy: "In any manufacturing chain, there's always a bottleneck. Something keeping the line from running the way it's supposed to. Sometimes the bottleneck is at the beginning... we can't get enough raw material. Sometimes it's at the end... we don't have enough warehouses. Or it might be somewhere in the middle. Whatever the bottleneck is... is holding everything up. Job number one is to remove that bottleneck and get everything flowing again." Musk universalized this: "He looks at every company like it's some sort of conceptual assembly line... sometimes a literal assembly line making cars and rockets. Any given week, there's guaranteed to be one main bottleneck. One thing holding people back." The resolution: "I'm going to micromanage the solution of that. I don't need to manage everything else... because everything else, by definition, is running better than that. So I can go focus on that." On going directly to the source: "When he identifies the bottleneck, he goes and talks to the line engineers who understand the technical nature of the bottleneck. If it's people on a manufacturing line, he's talking to people directly on the line. If it's a software development group, he's talking to the people actually writing the code." What he doesn't do: "He's not asking the VP of engineering to ask the director of engineering to ask the manager to ask the individual contributor to write a report... to be reviewed in three weeks. He doesn't do that. He goes and personally finds the engineer who actually has the knowledge about the thing. Then he sits in the room with that engineer and fixes the problem with them." Andreessen explains why this inspires loyalty: "The technical people who work with him are like... wow, if I'm up against a problem I don't know how to solve, freaking Elon Musk is gonna show up in his Gulfstream and sit with me overnight in front of the keyboard or in front of the manufacturing line and help me figure this out." He asks: "If you're a normal CEO running a normal company... how can you possibly compete with that?" On why other CEOs don't do this: "It's the way management is taught. Most classically in something like Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School. It's management as it was developed in the 1950s, 60s, 70s... the so-called scientific school of management." He describes it: "Management as a generic skill you can apply to any industry. You could manage a soup company or a car company... they're kind of all the same. There's a common set of management practices. It's process. How to manage the balance sheet. How to set the review schedule for meetings. How to do compliance. How to hire and motivate executives. How to resolve interpersonal conflicts. All these general business skills." The problem: "Those general business skills are very useful in lots of contexts. But that training gives you none of what you need to go do what Elon does." Andreessen concludes: "Elon pushes as far as he can... not doing all the stuff you're classically trained to do... so that he can spend all of his time doing the things only he can do. And it turns out that has this incredible catalytic, multiplicative effect. His companies are just incredibly amazing."

He’s dead on.

A surprising amount of adulthood is finally realizing that structure is not the opposite of freedom. It’s the thing that keeps freedom from turning into aimlessness.

I said what I said Na watukome🫴🏾

This cost them about $1 trillion. The truth is, you cannot build systems like this exclusively on the logic of profit. You cannot expect to break even in 20 or 30 years. Projects of this scale are built because the government decides they must exist to serve the people. And this is a problem with systems that are strictly, or overwhelmingly, capitalist. If you leave every problem in your society to the spontaneity of the market, some challenges are so large and so unprofitable that you will never have sufficient incentive to solve them.

VEVO was the only reason YouTube didn't get sued out of existence in 2009. Universal and Sony were ready to pull every music video off the platform. The labels argued YouTube was generating billions on their content while paying back almost nothing. Eric Schmidt's solution: let the labels build a parallel platform where they controlled the ad sales, the curation, and the branding. They called it Video Evolution. VEVO. The deal was simple. Every "official" music video would route through a VEVO-branded channel. The labels owned the inventory. They sold premium ad slots that regular YouTube videos couldn't access, charging advertisers top dollar to run alongside Beyoncé instead of a random gaming clip. The leverage was real. In 2010 when MTV.com tried to renegotiate licensing, UMG pulled every Universal video off the site. MTV's online platform collapsed. The labels had figured out something the platforms hadn't priced in. The platforms needed the labels far more than the labels needed any one platform. JustinBieberVEVO had 33.6 million subscribers. His personal YouTube channel had 4.2 million. TaylorSwiftVEVO had 27.3 million. Her personal channel had 2 million. The VEVO suffix marked the most valuable real estate on the platform. Then YouTube counter-punched with Content ID. Every fan upload using a licensed song could now be monetized directly for the labels. By 2016, YouTube had paid labels over $2 billion through Content ID alone. The labels stopped needing a parallel platform to get paid. YouTube was already paying. In 2018, YouTube started "consolidating" VEVO channels into Official Artist Channels. Artists could not opt out. The 33.6 million Bieber subscribers got auto-merged into a single channel without VEVO branding. Vevo.com shut down the same year, despite generating 25 billion monthly views. The VEVO logo still sits in the corner of every official music video. That's the only thing left of the last time a record label cartel had real leverage over a tech platform.

Sabastian Sawe didn't break the 2-hour marathon barrier just because of the Adidas "supershoe." He's a damn good athlete. These East Africans all are. I had to tell the whole world on CNN. Everyone be guided. Thanks for your attention to this matter!

Naval really nailed it with this one: Money < life < attention

Getting paid to think is peak everything. If you’re getting paid well to think, don’t take it for granted. That’s 1% of civilization type stuff. Your ancestors are proud and jealous that you’ve gotten this far.