Menoua Dergaloost

Audentes fortuna iuvat. Building a better world. 20yo.

[Alex Slater @aslater]

We fixed flight booking.

https://t.co/Mx59uo4srQ

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

@EvanYadegari LET’S GO

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

We’ll start seeing teamless billion dollar companies within two years. Just one person and a dozen Mac minis.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

Justifications are killing your dreams.

If you feel the need to justify something you’re doing or intend to do, then it implies it’s fundamentally unjust which is why you feel the need to reframe it and make it sound more reasonable.

If I logically determine that quitting junk food is in my best interest and I set that as a goal, then every single time in the future when I go to eat junk food REGARDLESS of the situation or circumstances that make cheating on my diet feel unavoidable, that is a regression because it moves me AWAY from my goal.

It doesn’t matter that “it’s in close proximity to where I work,” or “I’ll eat healthy in the future to make up for this meal,” or “it’s cheaper and quicker than if I ate at home.” All of those are justifications and attempts at excusing self-sabotaging behavior. The outcome is binary: Did this move me TOWARDS the goal I set for myself or AWAY from it?

It could be the most sound explanation in the world for why you relapsed on your goal or took an action contrary to what you’re trying to achieve, but it doesn’t change the fact that it REGRESSED you from the objective that you’ve previously deemed more important than the reward you’ll get from the relapse.

Hence, if you mess up, OWN IT. Admit that you messed up and that this action pushed you back. Admit you’re accountable, EVEN IF you think you couldn’t have done anything different.

And if you feel the goal is too difficult or unrealistic for you to stick to given a strong influence of circumstances that are working against you, change it! If you’re going to set a goal for yourself, either COMMIT to it in full, or don’t pretend like it’s a goal of yours AT ALL.

Pay attention to how often you justify your actions.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

When you’re struggling to see it through and losing hope for your goals and the future:

1) Lay or sit down (with zero stimulation)

2) Stare at the ceiling for a few min and in your mind, clearly define/recall:
- Your long-term goal
- Why you pursue it everyday and for who

3) Recall the one primary action that’ll move you towards that goal

4) Get up and take that action

When we get too deep in the details, we tend to lose our North Stars and wander in different directions, taking longer than we should to return to the main path of real progress.

It’s helpful to stay grounded in the present so that nothing your brain conjures up slips past your better judgement while it’s routed towards completing the mission as efficiently as possible.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

This X account is intended to be a documentation of my thoughts and life throughout my 20s and beyond.

I’ve toyed with the idea of logging my journey for a while, but felt I didn’t have enough value to give. Kept pushing it out since I’m not yet a billionaire, or a professional athlete, or a wise old man, or a great entertainer, of whom there are countless of all over social media with much more to offer than I currently can.

But I reasoned that if I knew in my teens what I know now at 20, I would be significantly further ahead in my journey.

And I also reasoned that there’ll be tons of new lessons I learn as I keep progressing through each stage of fitness, entrepreneurship, relationships, spirituality, and self-development, many of which I could share to people who might be trailing a step or two behind me.

And instead of waiting to become a valuable person to start posting, I should start posting in the midst of my pursuit of value so in the end it’s easy to trace back how I get to where I end up, whatever the outcome is.

I’ll also enjoy reminiscing on these times in my older age. I know I’m in my golden years.

So if my posts inspire or help improve the life of at least one person in any way at all, I’ve done what I came here for. If not, at least it’ll serve as a time capsule for myself and my future generations to look back on.

Whether you choose to join me on this or not, I hope this post finds you well and I’m rooting for you from afar. Godspeed.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

At this point, you can build almost anything with AI.

If it’s not doing exactly what you envision when writing the prompt, the bottleneck is in either your explanation, word choices, context, or specificity (depending on how creative you want the AI to be).

Most successful prompts I see and write average around several hundred to over a thousand words, because the more angles you give the AI to perceive your instructions through, the likelier it is to execute in the direction you’re looking for. Then you can microadjust along the way to refine the result.

Treat prompting as speaking to an expert generalist. Connect the dots for it, pull mental models from different disciplines and domains and give it many frames to view the world through, and it’ll decide the most precise aim, trajectory, approach, and options that it can to complete your request based on your words.

Think to yourself: “If I send this prompt and the AI pulls from a massive pool of predetermined information from the internet, how many remaining options does it see from that pool based on what I just told it?”

How many of those billions of options could it possibly execute on?

The goal of the prompt is to have the AI be carefully creative within a set of guidelines, principles, and parameters, OR to be so specific within the model’s context window to minimize the total number of options it has to complete the request out of that massive supply of approaches it’s got.

So ultimately, what you should focus on is improving your ability to communicate concepts and ideas, broadening your vocabulary, and scaling your knowledge horizontally with priority on first principles topics.

These will arm you with a big chunk of what you need to have the AI yield whatever you want. The future belongs to generalists.

Now go crush it out there. 👊

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

@EvanYadegari Only the beginning man. Rooting for you.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

If you don’t live up to in private what you preach in public, you’re a false prophet.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

Speed creates vibrations in space-time.

The faster you go, the more local chaos is formed.

But eventually, at a certain velocity, you’ll defy gravity and fly.

You’ll never hit a ceiling on how fast you can operate— the only limiter is your complacency with the resulting chaos.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

While you’re still able, you must exhaust every ounce of potential inside yourself.

Don’t look back in regret of opportunities missed, days passed.

Don’t look back wondering what could’ve been had you given a little more.

Give it all you’ve got. 100%.

All of it.

ALL of it.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

We get one chance on this floating rock in the middle of nowhere.

One shot. You’re only you once.

You’re blessed with the gift of conscious presence on this tiny little planet, so treat it like the present it is.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

If you’re not doing anything exceptional in life right now, get your sleep on lock.

Once you do, you’ll be an exception to the average person by default, and sometimes that’s all the momentum you need to start on big stuff.

The bar for excellence is underground at this point.

[Menoua Dergaloost @mender8]

The sheer life momentum you get from sleeping and waking early, consistently, and on-time is unmatched.

Just knowing that most people struggle to sleep on-time and wake up without an alarm when all it takes is 3 nights to adapt to a new sleep schedule should invigorate you.