100 Things I Believe to Be True

A personal list. Revisited yearly. The list that stays the same is the list that is no longer true.

1. Truth takes precedence over tribal loyalty, even when the cost is belonging.
2. Feelings do not shape reality. A bad argument stays a bad argument regardless of how many people agree with it.
3. Strong opinions, weakly held. The work is in battle-testing what you believe, not defending it.
4. Extreme positions are almost always wrong. If something is framed as binary, it is usually false — the truth lives on a spectrum.
5. The map is not the territory. No matter how good the mental model, it is still a model.
6. Most people give up refining their map by middle age. The work of staying curious until the end is the only work that compounds.
7. Admitting you do not know is infinitely preferable to making up a story. Curiosity is always cheaper than confidence you cannot back.
8. Humility is the root of growth, learning, and kindness. It is the belief that your mind is not yet so great that it cannot be opened further.
9. The news is not reality. Bad things happen suddenly and dominate; good things happen gradually and go uncounted. The world is better than the headlines suggest.
10. Audience capture is real. Every creator is slowly reshaped by the tastes of their own followers. Watch for it in the people whose work you once respected.
11. Logic is the most trustworthy tool for approaching reality. Physics rests on mathematics; the universe is rule-based even where the rules are not yet visible.
12. Reality is probabilistic and, at the deepest level, only resolves when observed. Objective reality is the composite of every subjective reality overlapping at once.
13. Consciousness is emergent — music played by the orchestra of the brain, not a soloist sitting above it.
14. The self is a useful fiction. The goal is not to strengthen it but to loosen its grip so consciousness can connect to the world instead of sitting in the middle of it.
15. Knowledge is a sixth sense. It reaches experiences the body has never had, and it is boundless.
16. Everything matters and nothing does. That is the fundamental dichotomy, and it is the most liberating truth there is.
17. Meaning is made, not found. There is no Why. You can only ever know how — and that is enough.
18. Meaning comes from contribution and growth, not acquisition. People do not mind hardship; they mind not feeling necessary.
19. Something has to sit above you in the value hierarchy — a code, a cause, a person, something worth sacrificing for. Self-as-highest-value is a dead end.
20. Coming to terms with death is what lets you live fully. Books cannot teach this. It has to be felt.
21. Stoicism holds you together through most things, but it will not grieve for you. Some pain has no framework.
22. Understanding an emotion is not the same as processing it. Knowing is not healing.
23. The Stoic dichotomy of control is the single most useful mental tool there is — serenity for what cannot change, courage for what can, wisdom to know the difference.
24. Amor fati. Not just bearing what is necessary, but loving it.
25. Nothing by itself is good or bad; thinking makes it so.
26. We have two lives. The second one starts the day we realise we only have one.
27. The obstacle is the way. Every time.
28. Ego is the enemy of the work. Stay humble, stay open, take wins without arrogance and losses without bitterness.
29. Stillness is the key. Slow down enough to actually see what is in front of you.
30. Waste no time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
31. Freedom is the thing worth optimising for. Money is the instrument; freedom is the outcome.
32. Security traded for freedom is a bad deal, compounded. The university-to-Big-4-to-corporate path trains people to mistake employment for safety.
33. Work should feel like a calling. When it does, you recognise it. When it doesn't, no salary is going to fix it.
34. Staying too long in the wrong role is a self-imposed sentence.
35. Specific knowledge at the intersection of two credible worlds is the real unlock. The most defensible businesses sit on bridges nobody else can build.
36. Do not attach self-worth to external validation. If your core worth rises and falls with the value of your portfolio, your self-esteem belongs to the stock market.
37. The most expensive gap in any life is between knowing what to do and doing it.
38. Building can be a form of hiding. Planning is safer than shipping. Both feel productive.
39. Breadth feels like curiosity but often functions as commitment avoidance. A dozen side projects is not a portfolio — it is a hedge against any single one mattering enough to fail at.
40. The fear before publishing, pitching, or committing is almost always larger than the reality on the other side. The catastrophe lives in anticipation, rarely in fact.
41. Work, Finish, Publish. In that order. Everything else is preparation pretending to be progress.
42. Inputs are effort, outputs are work, outcomes are real-world results. Motion is not momentum.
43. Plans are for examining assumptions, not for following. A plan before product-market-fit surfaces what you are assuming; it does not predict the future.
44. One percent better every day is a life-changing arithmetic. Compounded small improvements beat infrequent heroics, always.
45. The cold water does not get warmer if you jump late.
46. Action is the cause of motivation, not the effect.
47. Intentions are not a product. Until a hope manifests as a tangible action, it is not worth announcing.
48. Ask how you will feel about this in ten minutes, ten months, and ten years. Almost nothing survives all three horizons, and that tells you how much of it you should have cared about.
49. Imagine failure in advance. The premortem is the cheapest form of risk mitigation, and almost no one does it.
50. Risk tolerance is about asymmetry, not recklessness. Move fast on reversible decisions; move slow on irreversible ones.
51. Regret minimisation. The pain of a bad outcome is survivable. The pain of never having tried is permanent.
52. Emotional stability matters more than extraversion for building anything that lasts.
53. Self-efficacy beats raw intelligence. The belief you can figure it out is more predictive than any credential saying you should.
54. Resilience is a practice, not a trait. Optimism and self-efficacy are trainable.
55. Competition destroys value. The goal is to be so differentiated there are no direct competitors.
56. Code and media are permissionless. Combined with specific knowledge, they are the only real leverage available.
57. Specific knowledge is built before it is needed, over years. It cannot be acquired on demand.
58. Expertise is not knowing more — it is the ability to sort the useful from the useless. Everyone is drowning in information; almost no one knows what matters.
59. Holding too long, betting too concentrated, and letting greed override the exit plan is a single mistake wearing three costumes. Do not wear it again.
60. Losing money you thought would change your life teaches you that no amount of money was ever going to change your life.
61. Crypto's technology is real; most crypto tokens are structurally broken. The token market is not cyclically depressed — most of it is in terminal decline.
62. Stablecoins are the infrastructure play. Utility has migrated there; value capture has followed.
63. Africa — South Africa especially — is blue ocean for stablecoin and blockchain infrastructure. Remittances alone are a generational business.
64. Equities are in a late-stage blow-off. A structural reset is coming, not a mild recession.
65. The real crisis facing the West is political, not financial. Low trust plus deep polarisation prevents any rational fiscal response, and the debt math only gets worse from there.
66. Building in public attracts opportunities. Job applications solicit them. These are not the same thing.
67. B2B infrastructure beats consumer apps for defensible value. Build the rails, not the storefront.
68. Health is the floor everything else rests on. When the body breaks, the rest collapses in sequence.
69. Fitness is not an activity — it is an identity. The day that framing slips is the day the body starts to go.
70. Sleep is non-negotiable. Seven hours is the floor, no matter what is being built.
71. Long effort, honest feedback, silent company — the body teaches best under those three conditions.
72. Controlled stressors — cold, heat, fasting, hard efforts — raise the threshold for the uncontrolled ones.
73. Cycle intense effort with deep rest. Chronic high intensity is a slow failure, not a strength.
74. Junk food is cheap dopamine. Phone scrolling is cheap dopamine. Cheap dopamine is what the mind reaches for when it is avoiding the real work.
75. The first hour of the day belongs to you. Give it to a phone and you do not get it back.
76. Meditation and journaling are infrastructure. Skipping them is a false economy.
77. Writing is how you reach parts of your mind thinking cannot. Flow state is a real place.
78. Psychedelics — mushrooms, ayahuasca — are legitimate tools for psychological growth when treated with respect, not as entertainment.
79. The experience of oneness is real. It predates every theory of consciousness and it survives them all.
80. Happiness is love. Warm relationships predict health, wealth, and longevity better than almost anything else measurable.
81. Quality over quantity in friendships. Surface-level relationships cost more than they seem to.
82. Show me your friends and I will show you your future. To change, change the room.
83. Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. Say what you want — early, clearly, and only once.
84. A relationship that lasts is one you can suffer with, not just one that is fun when things are easy.
85. The fifty-fifty framing is wrong. Sometimes one partner brings thirty, sometimes seventy. What matters is that the sum holds over time.
86. And yet the whole can exceed the sum of its parts. Two people can unlock a hundred and twenty between them.
87. The version of a person that emerges when someone is relying on them is better than the version that exists alone. Commitment creates the character; it is not a reward for already having it.
88. Listening is the most under-utilised superpower. The way to get people to listen to you is to listen to them first.
89. When someone does not do what you asked, ninety percent of the time it is because you did not communicate it properly.
90. Nothing compounds faster than kindness. Keeping score is for games, not friendships.
91. Everyone leaves eventually. Learning to be alone is not a consolation prize — it is the baseline.
92. Don't be kak, be lekker. Choose positivity and generosity in every situation. That is the whole of character compressed into five words.
93. Experiences beat things. Memories, and the people you make them with, are the only portable wealth.
94. Be genuinely interested in people. Every person has a story worth hearing. No one has ever regretted asking.
95. Consistency and integrity are the whole of character. Do what you said you would do, especially when no one is watching.
96. The goal of parenting is independent, healthy, happy, courageous people — not obedient ones.
97. Children need to learn how to think — logic, fallacies, reason — long before they learn what to think. Schools do not teach this.
98. The Overview Effect is the shortest path out of neurotic self-importance. Zoom out far enough and most of your problems dissolve.
99. Pay attention to what you are paying attention to. Attention is the most finite and precious resource there is — guard it, and block without hesitation what steals it.
100. You could die tomorrow. Better get on with it.