Scattered thoughts and changes on turning 30

Mon Aug 03 2026

What has changed

I'm more zen and more chill

Perspective

And I don't think this is something that can be speedrun or something that can change just reading advice. I've always been a bit of an anxious person

Less obsessed about "productivity "

I kind of automatically stopped playing computer games

I'm kinder to myself now

What I've learned

Not blundering and not giving up is 90% of success

In my field of highly competitive startups, i see a lot of people just give up or implode, ...

The corollary is not to blunder. As I write in Advice for finalists, the body affects the mind, and:

when your judgement is affected, the first thing to go is the ability to judge that your judgement is affected. Learn to listen to your body, because it really, really affects the mind.

and yeah, I'd echo that

Sometimes people look way more impressive than they actually are

People project success

People's external state have little bearing with their internal conviction and I find it is difficult to ascertain who "got that dawg in them". The people who are sounding extremely outwardly confident may not be the ones with the intestinal fortitude to push through and succeed down the line.

I remember

We really underestimate the power of consistent compounding

Fitness, relationships, language learning, skill acquisition, all of these benefit

put in the work every day

Women will naturally like you

this one is a big change

You should not always "maximise optionality"

The advice to young people is often "maximise optionality"; I actually think this is retarded advice, sorry; or rather, it's not bad advice per se, but it's misused to gaslight young people to take up soul-sucking jobs at McKinsey or Bain and co.

In 2022 I came off a post-Covid bender, and fresh off raising money for my startup, started living the life of a "digital nomad". In the space of five months I was in Darmstadt, Geneva, Glasgow, Reykjavik, Brussels, Croatia, London, then Oxford.

There are certain things you can only do if you commit and compound. I'll give an example. If you look at all the startup literature out there, the YC stuff, they all primarily focus on the early stage finding PMF part. And the kind of implicit assumption is, by elision, that once you find PMF, the rest is like easy. And to be clear, finding PMF is the hardest and most critical part, without a product people will pay for, you have nothing. But I've realised now, with the benefits of already having found PMF, that there are yet more challenges to overcome. The challenges are different and more interesting and I enjoy my job now more (five years in) than when I started. If you do a startup for two years and exit and restart, you never get the chance to face and tackle these types of "scaling" or "post-PMF" problems. So that is an example of something that only happens when you commit and compound for a long time.

Think about what success looks like and whether or not you want it

Here's something that's happened quite a few times: a bright young founder asks me whether they should start a startup that does XYZ, where XYZ is the hot new thing (at time of writing, AI, prediction markets). And I tell them:

Things always take longer than they should; so before you start something, try to visualise what success looks like, and make sure you want it! If you succeed, you'll be stuck doing that thing for a long time, so make sure that that's something you actually want to be doing. The worst thing is to wake up and be trapped doing something you hate, even (especially) if it's going well.

You might be stuck in a good business doing bad and that will come at the price of your soul.

What has not changed

Wanting to build things that matter

Sometime in 2019 I started saying that I wanted to do "difficult, interesting, and impactful work". Reason being, if it's not interesting, I can't bring myself to do it. If it's not impactful, what's the point of doing it. And if it's not difficult, let someone else do it.

With age, I have changed my view: not that I don't think "difficult, impactful and interesting" is correct, but rather, I think the most important thing, bar none, is focus on "impactful".

Why is that? Because I realise that everything in this world is more difficult that it seems. The skill ceiling is very high. And if it's difficult and impactful, then it will naturally become very interesting to you. You will go into a flow state

What makes work impactful for me, is to work on something I know is positive-sum, building on solid foundations, unharried, sustainable growth over the months and years. See the above: think about what success looks like and whether or not you want it.