The burnt toast Theory!
The minor setbacks and frustrations you're facing right now? They might just be the hidden catalysts propelling you toward your biggest breakthroughs tomorrow. Embrace the detours, they're often the fastest route to success.
It's an interesting concept check out this video and tell me what you think.
my 2025 wrap.
i turned 20 today. generational run type year. still feels unreal. here's a 2024 + 2025 recap:
> landed @meta before i turned 18. worked on @instagram's auth infra.
> named a @DEShawGroup Latitude Fellow. 1 of 47 nationwide
> landed @apple at 19. did ML in Cellular Engineering (WTE) cupertino
> published ML research under my professor at @HowardU
> taught myself swift overnight to build an iOS app for @hack_harvard and won the track
> @NASA RockSat-C program. built a robotic arm for suturing in space. we had to test it under some of the most insane vibration conditions (genuinely one of the hardest things i’ve ever done)
> contributed to a couple opensource repos
> research w @NIH AIM-AHEAD
> 2nd place at @nvidia agents for impact. built a layer on top of @meta ray-ban glasses for real-time voice first aid + cpr coaching. @baxate_carter loved it
> touched 12+ states. red-eyes between sf, labs, hackathons, conferences, people, everything!!!
> shipped products @tryspawnlabs@deepubuntu, and others doing upwards ~$20k in quarterly revenue
> secured $50k+ in scholarships from @amazon, @tmcf_hbcu, @UNCF, @Boeing, @Chevron among others for academic excellence.
> finally met a bunch of online friends irl @tedddyoweh@clintonimaro, @TomiTokko3
> spent a lot of time this year building and learning around physical intelligence, perception & manipulation, robotics, humanoids, embodied ai, egocentric data, and vlms
2026 goals. saying it out loud:
> @ycombinator Spring 2026
> publish this paper on embodied ai & egocentric data for robots (thanks @eddybuild)
> gym consistency
> win some. lose some. keep going
> tweet more lol
i shipped a lot this year.. probably a little too much cause i noticed i need to spend more time with friends and family. got the best advice from @tundespeaks - gtfolh.
if you told me this in 2022 i wouldn’t believe you. ngmi isn’t an option.
back to work @letstrace
merry christmas, everyone🎄
Elon Musk: “Anyone who wants to make more than they take has my respect”
Elon is asked for his advice for entrepreneurs, to which he responds:
“I’m a big fan of anyone who wants to build. Anyone who wants to make more than they take has my respect. That’s the main thing you should aim for: to make more than you take and be a net contributor to society.”
He compares it to the pursuit of happiness:
“If you want to create something valuable financially, you don’t pursue that. It’s best to pursue providing useful products and services. If you do that, money will come as a natural consequence of that rather than pursuing money directly. You can’t pursue happiness directly. You pursue things that lead to happiness — fulfilling work, study, friends, loved ones.”
Elon continues:
“It sounds very obvious, but generally if somebody is trying to make a company work, they should expect to grind super hard and accept that there’s a meaningful chance of failure. Then just focus on having the output be worth more than the input. Are you a value creator? That’s what really matters: making more than you take.”
Video source: @nikhilkamathcio (2025)
Exciting Milestone💪
A SaaS HR Landing Page I designed is now live🚀, thanks to an awesome collaboration with my developer friend @dev_benedict.
Check it out and let me know your thoughts🤗.
Live link👇
https://t.co/8KK0F7foP8
#Saas
My name is Zainab
I transforms business ideas into effective digital solutions that address user needs while driving revenue growth for the business.
I'm available for gigs and collaboration.
Send me a dm,let's give your business the sparkle 🪄.
Rick Rubin on the power of creating something truly for yourself
Elon Musk has said that Rick Rubin’s philosophy of creating something truly for yourself is how Tesla creates products.
Rick elaborates on this philosophy in the clip below:
“My only goal is to make something that I like, and I know that I can keep working on it until I like it. So in some ways there’s no pressure.”
Rick doesn’t consider the audience at all:
“The audience comes last… I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”
He argues that this is why there are so many bad movies today:
“So many big movies are just not good. It’s because they’re are not being made by a person who cares about it. They’re being made by people who are trying to make something they think someone else will like. And that’s not how art works.”
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues a similar point:
"If you think about the greatest products, they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them.”
Uber started out as a private timeshare limousine service for Garrett Camp and his friends. Microsoft started when Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a Basic interpreter for the Altair so they didn’t have to write machine language to program it. Drew Houston built Dropbox to make his files live online after forgetting his USB stick. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google for Stanford—and particularly for themselves—with the first server in Larry’s dorm room.
Video source: @LewisHowes (2023)