The reality is, I don’t think I’ve ever truly switched off. And when I do, I start thinking about different projects, responsibilities, and more often than not, I make other people’s problems and priorities my own. Part of that allows me to feel useful to others, which is where I derive a lot of my self-worth. That is an unhealthy need that I was only recently able to recognize.

The way I work is simple: I set a target, align with others, and pursue it with relentless urgency. It’s like having blinders on.

I’ve gone through a mixed bag of emotions reflecting on whether that’s a positive or a negative trait. Today, I’m in a place where I accept that my way of working just is. I’m not broken—it’s simply who I am right now. And I intend to lean into it. Anyone who’s worked with me knows that when I obsess, it consumes every free moment. It’s what I think about before I sleep, and what I return to the moment I wake up. Until, eventually, it’s not.

2026 is the year I intentionally build an environment where I can be the most productive version of myself. Part of that means acknowledging something uncomfortable: I don’t know how to rest.

I believe deeply that, just like building muscle, rest is essential for growth. It’s something I preach to any founder I work with, and I insist on it with my teams. But the truth is, I don’t apply it to myself. I struggle to step out of that urgency gear.

When I want to achieve something, I tap into a manufacture psychological state of urgency, sometimes even anger, that sharpens my focus. And once I start seeing results, that momentum creates a short-lived sense of satisfaction, which reinforces the cycle. It becomes a self-fulfilling loop. But it’s artificial. And it comes at a cost only I can see.

The irony is that my inability to rest is holding me back. It’s a bug, not a feature. Productivity without rest is a broken flywheel. It spins fast, but it burns out. While hustle culture continues to be widely celebrated, I know deeply that the ability to rest is a skill worth mastering.

This is a reflection I’m writing for myself, but I suspect it might resonate with others as well, especially given everything happening around the world. Whether it’s work-related pressure or something far heavier, like conflict and uncertainty, our minds and emotions don’t distinguish. Fatigue arrives all the same.

Rest, in all its forms, is the only real solution.

For me, I’m at my happiest when I feel productive. My office spaces are, strangely, my happy places. Even writing that feels odd, but it’s my truth.

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Looking back, that mindset helped me achieve what I set out to do.

It served me until now. But now, I serve it.

I’m not writing this to advocate for taking a vacation. I’m writing this to acknowledge something I’ve been avoiding: the importance of rest. My reflection is simple: if I had built rest into the flywheel, I might have reached a similar outcome (God willing), with the same level of effort, but far less suffering. Thinking of myself as a project might be the only way I can approach this.

And if that’s the case, I’ll need to pursue it with the same urgency.

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I’m going to shamelessly plug Graham Weaver to make my point (he’s Managing Partner Alpine, Lecturer at Standford, and one of the figures that influenced my move from operator to investor). Annual planning documents are the check and adjust moments to make sure the compass is leading the boat towards the right direction.

I look back at my own career and there’s an easy narrative I can tell to make it make sense in hindsight. The truth can’t be any further from that. Every decision was filled with anxiety and uncertainty. At times designing for downside protection, other times swinging for the fences and playing for the upside, and most recently for optionality.

The purpose of this post is an attempt to share a glimpse into how I’ve made decisions about my own career that might help others. I have strong opinions here, but have no doubt they are loosely held and will evolve with time.

Back to the question(s) that I’ve gotten in many forms, “I feel stuck, what should I do next?”, “I’m not sure if I’m building the right startup, how should I decide?”, “What do you recommend I study at university?”, they are all difficult to answer. If we attempt to strip them down to their lowest common denominator, they are actually asking the same thing, how should I decide my next step relative to where I am today?

My Guiding Principles:

1. Deselection before selection

Selecting what to do is a privilege that we earn by knowing ourselves deeply. In behavioral science, the way our mind naturally works is we actually deselect when we make a decision for the first time. We walk by a supermarket shelf, we don’t think of a brand first (the first time), we deselect from the available options. If we’re buying Himalayan salt, we don’t think of a brand first, but we’re most likely to pick up a brand that we believe best aligns with what we’re looking for or we are familiar with. After deciding we reflect and post rationalize our “selection” but in reality it was us deselecting. The second time around, there could be muscle memory, and familiarity of picking up the same brand or product, but in reality how we got there the first time is by deselecting.

To summarize, before selecting, we should earn the right to select. We do this by trying enough things to develop an informed opinion.

2. Fall in love with the most impactful problem

We are problem solvers. We don’t create products for the sake of creating products. We create products that make people’s lives easier and give them more of what they value in a way that is better, faster, and costs less for them. Picking the right problem to solve is more important than the solution you build. Solving the most impactful problem (you decide the measure) is a arguably the biggest responsibility you have towards yourself. And once you figure it out, do it so well and for long enough to get noticed.

Jobs are just the same, instead of selling a product, we are renting our time with the promise that the value we create is higher than the cost of our time. However, solving problems on a ship that finds a treasure leads to a far different result than solving problems on a ship that’s on course to sink. If you’ll pick a job or rent your time, do so on the boat that is most likely to find the treasure.

3. Make yourself useful for long enough to get noticed

Compounding is one of the wonders of the world that we don’t talk about enough. Doing something for a few years and doing it well is good. You get a pat on your back. Doing something for a few decades and doing it well, you become an expert at it.

Naval talks about this concept of playing long term games with long term people. I can’t stress this enough. If you’ll become an expert at something, then select a category where similar people will be in the category for a long period of time, you end up with compounded expertise AND compounded trusting relationships, that increases your impact by an order of magnitude, and you can see it in play comparing relationships between stock day traders and then between long time horizon investors and capital allocators.

Tools to keep close:

The biggest mistake I’ve ever made was taking advice from the wrong people. Now I don’t believe in advice, I ask people I respect for their experiences and I take what I believe is relevant to me. That reflection makes their experience personal to my simulation. Below are three tools for reflection that I live by.

1. Ikigai

I’ve mentioned Ikigai before in Lessons From My Favorite Startup. It’s a powerful tool that works if you really invest the time in self reflection. It takes time but the investment pays back almost immediately.

2. Johari Window (about the self), and the Rumsfeld Matrix (about the world)

As awkward as it feels, true self and outer reflection requires us to ask those who know us best to share their experiences dealing and working with us.

The most ignorant people think they know everything. I’ve been there before, and now I know that the more I know the less I actually know. Knowing where we sit at all times is a super power with making big decisions in an informed way. This next framework is popular in Epistemology and military risk analysis, Donald Rumsfeld popularized this and he was mocked by the media for it. Once understood, it’s a powerful tool.

In Summary

Careers rarely follow a clean, linear narrative. Most meaningful decisions are made amid uncertainty, balancing downside protection, upside potential, and optionality over time. Clarity comes less from choosing the “right” option and more from committing to meaningful problems, and staying useful long enough for compounding to take effect. If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: invest in understanding yourself, choose the ship before worrying about your role on it, and give time the chance to work in your favor.

Happy new year!

My friend (start up founder), was approached to raise money for his startup, the interest came from an individual investor and he felt the responsibility of sharing venture risk with them. He asked rhetorically, do you know the difference between Price and Value (الفرق بين السعر و القيمة)?

His explanation was very simple, he went on to explain to the investor, his assessment of the value of his company was the cash in the bank and whatever contracts he had in his pipeline. The price on the other hand, was the minimum valuation he would accept to bring investors into his company. He explained that in his company, the price was much higher than the value today, as long as the investor acknowledged that, he was comfortable taking his investment.

There’s a clear disconnect between the two concepts of value and price that I thought he captured so simply. So what number should an investor target or use, and what’s the figure a founder or business owner should optimize for?

The value of anything is subjective because value is assessed by humans, and different people have different needs, hence they will value things differently. There are a bunch of academic methods investors use to attempt to eliminate that subjectivity, I’ll name a few for reference including the VC Method, Future Cash Flow Method and the Market Method among many others.

What makes a successful investment? Investments come in the form of time, money or resource. At it’s core, investing is the idea of giving something up today with the plan to get more later. Almost like delayed gratification (very similar to the Marshmallow Test). Going back to the example above, a good investment is when the future expected value is higher than the price today (+ the cost of capital) that investors should invest.

The market is a beautiful phenomena that allows price discovery to take place between what a person is willing to sell for and what investors are willing to investing at. The more predictable the end outcome, the easier it is for price discovery to happen. Venture Capital or investment in startups is on the far end of predictability because of the time component of the outcome being 8-10 years away, if you’re lucky.

My reflection from the conversation is that we are all investors. With our time, with our emotions, with our effort and with our capital (money). Yet, it’s easy to treat decisions with long term outcomes with the same weight that we give to decision with near term outcomes. An example, we are happy to invest months planning a trip, but probably invest less time on writing a life philosophy or career plan.

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Back to my friend, what was he really saying? Here’s what I think he was saying. I think he was telling the investor he would feel comfortable taking his investment if he recognizes that there is risk in this being a good investment because of the price today being higher than the value today, and the future value has significant risk associated with it. The probability of success is low, but the potential future outcome is large. I get it, he wants to make sure his investors know that they are getting into from the start.

I’m clearly obsessing over drawing parallels between investing and life, because life is precious and time is finite. Am I investing my time today in the right places? Will the the price I’m paying today lead to a larger future value?

I wonder if I’ll invest the time to answer that one day.

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I enjoy turning complex, pattern-based insights into simple, objective formulas. My approach is shaped by what I’ve seen work for myself and other operators I hold in high regard. The only disclaimer you’ll read here is that this is the reality of what I believe to be true today, and while I have strong views, they are loosely held.

In my experience, life rewards action more than intelligence. Each action opens the door to more opportunities, and those who consistently move from ideas to execution are the ones who succeed. This holds true whether the goal is feeling happy, setting a world record or financial results.

Moving between founder / operator and investor in over the past 10 years has been incredibly insightful. It’s like having the opportunity to look behind the veil into how decisions are made and more importantly what patterns emerge to deliver results.

Action is good. At the core of it, I’ve seen that action comes from a place of wanting to play offense or from taking a defensive position. You can pick this up from listening to people’s words. For example: Defensive thinking: “We’re entering this market to blitz scale, we have proven the model and need to protect ourselves in case our competitors attempt to capture the opportunity first,” Thinking on Offense: “We see an opportunity to win over customers in this market, the customer is underserved and we can build a strong presence before anyone else does.”

But is all action equal? Words are important, and having a positive mindset makes a world of a difference. Even though the result can be the same, the choice is ours whether to approach it from a place of weakness or a place of strength. When our backs are against the wall naturally, the fear of failure becomes the driver, but inspiring others (and ourselves) always works better coming from a place of strength.

Quick wins are powerful. I use this framework in almost all my projects to kick off momentum. Positive feedback loops transform that vision and positive inner voice into tangible belief. Any building journey or problem solving requires a large number of people to consistently show up for a long enough time, with focus, and early wins accelerates both.

Quick wins turn vision into velocity. Focusing on them is a strategy, not just a tactic. If you are leading a venture-backed startup, velocity is everything. Quick wins are your best friend. They build momentum and belief. To sustain progress, you need habits.

Success doesn’t respond to hope, it responds to habits, consistent actions repeated over time. This is the success formula I have been developing over the past few years and fully believe in. I believe it carries over across both business and life.

The most powerful force in a startup is not a visionary roadmap. It’s momentum and focus. What if your #1 priority for this month wasn’t a grand strategy, but securing two small wins? Forget tracking performance against the 5-year plan. What’s your 5-day win? Momentum is contagious. That’s how you start the fire. Focus on what’s important, and take action.

I was lucky enough to land a first job (outside of a family business), that I thoroughly enjoyed and ended up spending about 6 years with the company working in 4 different countries. At around the 18 month mark, while I was working, learning and growing, I started getting an itch of feeling like I wanted to do more. It felt like I wasn’t doing enough in life, little did I know that feeling would continue to follow me until today.

As a result of that itch, I ended up exploring more than 20 ideas to build businesses around. Some alone, some with my brothers, some with friends, but nothing stuck. It wasn’t until a friend had an idea of importing modified golf carts and selling them that I decided to pull the trigger. The market was underserved, the product was significantly better (both looks and performance), and the end price to consumers was cheaper. It was around the same time where a major golf cart distributor decided to exit the market, so there was a clear gap. It felt like a no brainer, and the idea was that this could scale to neighboring countries. The product offering wasn’t meant to grow the market, but rather capture market share by offering a better and cheaper product.

“Wet Wheels” was born when the Golf Carts arrived from the US, they looked great, and they were fast. My business partner and I were excited. We created our Wet Wheels social media accounts, hung leaflets at supermarkets, and got sales specific cellphone numbers. We sold more than a third of our inventory within the first 4 weeks. It was around that time that we got the first angry customer call, complaining about us selling them a broken golf cart. Being a natural people pleaser I remember leaving work early to visit the customer to find out what they were doing wrong, even taking instruction leaflets that we laminated with me to avoid future calls. But they were right, the car wasn’t moving.

After a lot of trouble shooting with the source we purchased the modified cars from, we figured out the golf cart needed a solenoid replaced. I didn’t even know what a solenoid was, but I ordered one before I had the time to understand the mechanics of it. The part was on the way, of course free of change to the customer.

A few days later another customer called, same issue. And before both parts arrived we got a third call. My heart sank, did we sell people lemons? Again, I left work early and rushed to the customer but this time it was different, they used a wrong electrical voltage socket and it burned the inside of the charger. I thought easy, I’ll tell them we’ll change it for free to win them over even if it was their mistake. I’ll just go get another charger. Turns out it was a 3-week wait to get one. Hating the experience of letting customers down, my response was to order as many solenoids as cars, and half the amount of extra chargers. All of a sudden this went from a “cool high margin venture” to a “is this worth it?” venture.

The story ends well, we end up selling all the cars, they were great deals for whoever got one, they stood out so we kept getting calls. But I didn’t feel good, I kept dreading the phone call of an unhappy customer for any wear and tear part, and the unknown of what parts could be missing and whatever other unknown unknowns exist. We never ordered a second shipment. Was the opportunity there? Yes 100%, we proved there was clear demand for it, almost Product Market Fit. But this was not a business my partner and I wanted to build. Why do I consider it to be a “failed startup”? Well the north start for me was always for this to be a regional business, not make money from a few shipments of golf carts. The learnings here were more valuable than the return though. Wet Wheels taught me a few things about myself:

1. It’s difficult for me to sell something I don’t understand deeply.

2. Depending on others to maintain a quality of a product is a risk. Know it going in, that’s not a risk that I like as an operator.

3. Anything that’s not a consumable, should have a strong post sales customer support set up. This might seem like a no brainer, but as an eager fresh graduate coming from FMCG world into business, this was a great lesson.

4. It’s important for me, on a personal level, to feel that people are better off post interacting with a product / service I offer. Above and beyond experiences are a non-negotiable.

Founder Market fit is something I speak about regularly today as a quasi investor-operator. It’s a fancy way of finding out whether we have a strong enough “why” towards the customer problem we are solving. Solving that problem turns into the business, and the road towards building any generational business is filled with challenges. If the purpose is strong enough, those challenges becomes easier to lean into. There are so many words and concepts that have captured this: Raison D’être - A Great Cause - Ikigai.

I’ll leave you with a simple Ikigai framework that I think can double as finding a problem that fits within your “why”. If you’ve never done one, I think it’s never too late to explore what you can learn about yourself, I re-do mine every year.

PS - if you were a Wet Wheels customer, thank you, I still have a few solenoids in my garage to give out for free. If you weren’t, you missed out.

For anyone interested in psychology or answering the question of why are we the way we are, there is a popular school of thought of Etiology that suggests we are shaped primarily by our past experiences (what’s happened to us). I struggle with that concept because it eliminates the role of the individual agency.

That’s where the counter-thought of Teleology comes in. Etiology and teleology offer two powerful yet contrasting perspectives to understand human behavior.

• Etiology traces actions back to their roots in past experiences (the seed)

• Teleology looks forward to the aims and purposes that drive us (the tree)

They form two different schools of thought that change the way a person perceives the world. Grasping these concepts does more than explain our circumstances. It reveals how we justify our choices, and reminds us that change is always possible. No matter how entrenched our history, we retain the power to choose our actions and redefine our path forward.

Here’s a simple example to contextualize it of a founder building their business, one is solving backwards, the other is building forward:

• Etiology-based thinking:

  "Employee turnover spiked last quarter due to unclear roles, so we're restructuring based on what didn’t work."

• Teleology-based thinking:

  "I envision a culture where people feel ownership and growth — so I’m designing teams and systems to make that future possible."

  

While Etiology dominates modern psychology, Teleology never picked up the same momentum. Since being exposed to Teleology I’ve been wondering why it isn’t more popular. Etiology was popularized by Freud whereas Adler, another Austrian thinker, was not as successful popularizing Teleology. The only conclusion I can come up with is that it is easier for us as humans to relinquish the responsibility of our actions rather than fully embrace it.

While this is a clear promotional piece preaching for Teleology, this post is simply me wondering, what would the world be like if we took 100% responsibility for all of our actions? Understanding how we see the world helps us understand how we can change it. Whether your mental frameworks are rooted in Etiology or Teleology, our purpose can move us beyond both.

One of the things I score highly above anything else when investing with founders or hiring for a team is agency. And I think by default anyone that subscribes to Teleology has high agency and is thus more likely to take initiative.

Answering the initial question, are we prisoners of the past or architects of tomorrow; I’ll leave you with one of my favorite poems Invictus by William Henley which I think gives a very Teleological response.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

I’d like to premise this by saying I’ve made a bunch of hiring mistakes, and I have no doubt that I’ll make some more. But I’ve also found amazing talent and have been able to groom colleagues into leaders I’m lucky to call friends today.

The journey of starting a business starts with building a product or service, and doing most of the work yourself before convincing others to join you in serving your customers. This process is a beautiful but difficult exercise. Naturally, anything that involves random humans coming together is complex.

Then there comes a time in every business (the fortunate ones at least) when the customer demands exceed the capacity of the team doing the work, and that’s when growth slows or quality starts to diminish. For operators with high agency, the immediate response is to work harder. Spend more time at the office, sleep fewer hours, push longer and try to increase productivity. A special few would take a step back and assess what levers they can push / pull to gain leverage (Naval speaks about leverage at length, and it’s a thought worth exploring if you haven’t already).

We gain leverage by improving one (or all) of three variables in a simple equation: What you do [+] Who you do it with [+] How you do it → improving any of the three levers is more impactful than attempting to change how “hard” you work.

1. What you do should be answered by the customer, observing, listening to, designing for and then iterating with the earned insights.

2. Who you do it with is 100% in your control.

3. How you do it, is your modus operandi and will always change over time.

Our role as operators is to identify what needs to be solved (first), and how to solve it. But we don’t always need our team members to do both. A good team member would know how to get a job done. A great team leader would know what problems to prioritize. A star would know how to do both.

Let’s pause there and address the elephant in the room. Hiring, regardless of experience, is daunting, intimidating, filled with posturing, and ends with making big decisions from a few brief meetings. It takes a candidate approximately 27 applications to land one job interview (source). On average, managers conduct 3 interviews for mid-level roles and 5 interviews for leadership roles (source). And even if we find the perfect candidate, about 30% of new hires resign in the first three months of employment (source). The process is highly inefficient, and I can’t wait for the day that someone cracks the code.

My primary reflection on hiring is that it’s a simple trade between three variables where you can only optimize for two at a given time. Today, before I start any hiring process, I answer three simple questions to identify the type of candidate I’m looking for:

1. How much time do I have to fill the role?

2. What’s my budget, and what expertise do I need to onboard?

3. How important is trust for this role? *

* I’ll share more about my journey with trust, and the trust equation in hiring. TL;DR it’s simply how well we can assess the reliability of the person’s ability to perform the job.

We end up with four types of candidates. Unicorns don’t exist (and if you come across one, you should partner with them, not hire them) so we’re left off with three personas. Different situations require different personas. There’s the general rule of build with generalists and scale with specialists, but I think that’s a simple view of approaching a complex task like scaling a company. Anecdotally, my experience sways towards Reliable Rookies or Elite Finds, that probably highlights my preference to over index on trust and trust building in general (which we’ll get to in the coming posts).

Here are a few actionable scenarios from the diagram above:

❓ In a high performance culture where you can only afford to have A players on the team, hiring only A players will slow you down because of the time it takes to find them.

Would you risk reducing your growth rate to hire A players or trade off the caliber of the team in favor of hiring fast to maintain a growth rate?

In the coming posts, we’ll dig deeper into the four steps I use to find “who you do it with” from formula (What you do [+] Who you do it with [+] How you do it):

1. Pre-hiring and pre-interview

2. The interview process & culture fits

3. Reference interviews and negotiating the offer

4. Onboarding and setting up for success

Thanks for reading this far. If you’re an operator that’s had a success in hiring, feel free to share any useful hacks you’ve used or picked up below! I look forward to reading them.

I’ve explored many different coping mechanisms but found journaling to be the most effective way for me to structure my thoughts. My thoughts then became my feelings, and my feelings influenced my emotions. While this isn’t a perfect recipe, it’s worked well for me.

Today most of my writing is a function of the rabbit holes I go through to understand different systems and philosophical topics. Mostly I write about dots from different arenas that I think should connect.

Who am I?

I am a serial imposter. That’s probably the best way to describe myself.

I grew up on an island called Bahrain, spent 14 years in one school, over achieved in school, then decided to go to the University of Miami. The experience of leaving an environment where you were one degree separated from the people around you, to being a dot in an ocean of people from all over the world had a big impact on me, and the way that I think.

I graduated early thinking I would rush back to work in a multi-generational family business. Three months in, I realized I wasn’t cut out for it and I needed to scratch the itch on my shoulder of finding my own identity as an individual. I picked up an internship at Kimberly-Clark started working with a 100+ year old Global FMCG while I studied my Case In Point, waiting to interview for your usual suspects in consulting, I spent 6 years with Kimberly-Clark across 3 brands, four categories, 7 countries and 2 continents. This ended up being one of the best decisions I made, I started in consumer research, moving to understanding the principles of how to go from customer insight, to product development to go to market strategies. Looking back, I believe Kimberly-Clark has had the biggest influence on the way that I think and how to build a sustainable business.

I’m an operator, turned investor, turned operator, turned investor. Today, I wear multiple hats, you can find most of them here. The one theme of my professional journey so far has been to continuously make new decisions as I learn new information. I studied entrepreneurship but went into strategic marketing, which that went into general management, before exploring investments from multiple roles, to graduating to board governance roles, then jumping back into the operator seat of a start up that we expanded to six countries to now spending most of my time on investments and post investment value creation. This might read like the journey makes sense, but with each shift or pivot it felt like I needed to learn an entirely new industry. The only constant has been that as I get comfortable I end up convincing myself that discomfort is the best route forward.

What to expect

Expect to see posts about actionable ideas, frameworks, and lessons learned from the frontlines of building and investing in high-impact businesses. Here’s a list of what I would expect to write about:

• Frameworks for designing organizations that thrive in uncertainty.

• Deep dives into early-stage investing and what separates the best from the rest.

• Stories from the frontlines of scaling businesses in emerging and mature markets.

• Insights from consumer behavior and how to leverage them.

My objectives

Now that you know a bit about who I am, I’d like to share why I have decided to post what I write. The first is that I would like to meet like-minded people. I enjoy meeting new people, but it’s difficult to identify the signal from the noise sometimes. I hope that by publishing these blog posts I’ll be able to meet intellectually curious people to have meaningful conversations and debates.

The second and probably more important one is understanding the leverage that media (written or visual) has in making thoughts and concepts accessible. My journey as an entrepreneur, operator and investor has been a constant need to learn things quickly. I’m hoping that some of these posts can help any reader connect the dots faster through simple language and constructs.

Finally, I believe this will be fun, and one of my 2025 goals is to discover my definition of “fun” away from what I do professionally.