In 2001, new Apple hire John Ternus stayed past midnight at a supplier, magnifying glass in hand, counting grooves on Cinema Display screw heads (on the unseen back). Spec: 25 concentric ones that shimmered like a CD. Reality: 35. He argued hard and won the fix. He wondered if it was normal, then decided it was right—details matter even if no one notices.
one of the ugliest truths about life is that every choice kills another version of your life.
get married, and you’ll eventually miss the freedom you had alone. stay single, and there will be nights when you wonder what it would’ve been like to build a life with someone. have children, and you’ll miss parts of the life you had before them. don’t have children, and you may spend years wondering about the family you never created.
there is no perfect path and there is no decision that leaves you with everything.
the life you didn’t choose will always look better from a distance because you never had to pay its price.
stop searching for a choice you won’t regret , it doesn’t exist. choose your life, accept what it costs, and live with the consequences. buena suerte 👍
I think ambitious people should treat life in “seasons” rather than trying to balance everything every day.
A few years massively overallocated to work. A period getting seriously fit. A year or two nomading. Then family takes priority for a while. Then maybe at 35 you go completely insane again and spend four years building a new company, and so on.
The mistake is thinking every metric needs to stay green all the time. Most great outcomes (building a company, writing sth serious, training for an event) need uninterrupted runs, not daily moderation. Sometimes work should suffer cause you’re travelling, sometimes your social life should suffer cause you’re building, sometimes career progression should slow cause family matters more. That’s fine.
And tbh it probably makes life more fun too. You get actual chapters and completely different versions of yourself instead of spending 40 years maintaining the same perfectly optimised routine. A few intense years in one city, a weird nomad phase, an obsession that takes over your life, then something completely different. Probably much more memorable than one very long well-optimised Tuesday.
It's why I encourage everyone to think of balance in years, not days. A good life can look horribly unbalanced on some random Tuesday and still be very balanced over 10 years.
My girlfriend has thousands of TikTok’s saved- day trips, vacation ideas, restaurants, gifts, etc. I couldn’t keep track of it.
Now she texts the videos to Hermes, it watches them + stores in a vault, I text the agent to pull from her lists and plan. Magic.
⚪️ New App: Slate — a voice journal built on one rule: nothing leaves your phone.
100% Apple, top to bottom. Transcription by SpeechAnalyzer on device. Reflection by the 3 billion parameter Apple Intelligence model on the Neural Engine. Storage in SwiftData. Swift 6, SwiftUI, Liquid Glass. Zero third-party code in the binary.
There's no account. No analytics. No tracking. No third party SDKs. No network calls. The app is private because there is nothing to collect. Turn on airplane mode and everything still works. There's no server.
You speak your mind and slate writes it down. It notices patterns and reads your week back to you in a summary every Sunday.
The local model is an observer. It never replies or advises or comforts. When it has nothing real to say, it says nothing.
The older i get, the more i realize that someone making time for you is one of the clearest signs they care. Everyone is busy. Everyone has responsibilities and their own battles to fight. So when someone consistently chooses to spend their time with you, checks on you, and makes space for you in their life, it means something. time is one thing we can never get back, and people don't give it away lightly.