My mental operating system

I’ve never really had a five-year plan. I’ve had experiments.

Some worked. Most didn’t. A few became businesses. Some disappeared after a couple of weeks. Some taught me more than the ones that worked.

But looking back, I realise I wasn’t randomly jumping from one thing to another. There were patterns. I kept asking the same questions:

• Why am I doing this manually?
• What is actually slowing this down?
• Can I build this once and use it a hundred times?
• What happens if I just try it?
• What is this worth in five years?

Over time, these questions became something like a personal operating system. I don’t follow it perfectly. I probably break my own rules more often than I follow them. But these are the ideas I keep coming back to.

1. If I have to do it repeatedly, I should probably build something

I have a weird relationship with repetitive work. I don’t necessarily hate it. I just start wondering why it exists.

If I have to do the same task every day, I start looking for a way to remove myself from it. Maybe it can be automated. Maybe it can be documented. Maybe someone else can do it. Maybe it doesn’t need to exist at all.

This changed the way I look at businesses. A business is not just a collection of people doing tasks. It is a collection of systems. The better the systems, the less the business depends on individual effort.

That doesn’t mean humans become unnecessary. It means they can spend more time on problems that actually need a human.

I think this is also why I sometimes call myself lazy. Not lazy in the usual sense. More like: I am suspicious of unnecessary work. If there is a smarter way to get the same result, I want to find it.

2. Build once. Use many times.

One of my favourite forms of leverage is simple: do the work once and make it useful again.

A piece of code can run thousands of times. An SOP can train ten people. A template can save hundreds of hours. A good decision-making framework can be reused for years.

This changes how I think about effort. There are two kinds of work: work that disappears after you do it, and work that keeps working after you stop. I want more of the second kind.

Work that keeps workingWork that disappears

Value over time. Do the first kind once and it keeps paying. Do the second kind and it’s gone until you do it again.

That is why I like systems, automation, documentation, software and processes. The goal isn’t to work less. The goal is to make today’s work create tomorrow’s leverage.

3. Find the bottleneck

When something isn’t working, my first instinct is not to improve everything. I want to know what is actually holding everything back.

If a project is slow, maybe the developers aren’t the problem. Maybe the requirements are unclear. Maybe approvals are slow. Maybe there are too many handoffs. Maybe nobody knows who owns the decision.

1. Requirements
2. Approvalswhere it waits
3. Development
4. Handoff

Fixing everything at once sounds productive. Usually it isn’t. There is normally one constraint that matters more than the others. Find that. Fix it. Then find the next one.

This is probably the biggest reason I became interested in operations. Operations is basically the art of finding where things get stuck.

4. I would rather try something badly than plan it perfectly

I have started things without knowing exactly what I was doing. Apps, websites, blogs, small businesses, experiments. Some were terrible. That was useful, because reality gives better feedback than imagination.

You can spend three weeks thinking about whether people will use something. Or you can build a basic version and find out.

The first version doesn’t have to be good. It has to exist. Once something exists, you can improve it. An idea in your head has infinite potential. An actual product has actual problems.

I prefer actual problems.

5. Small bets are underrated

I like experiments where the downside is small but the upside could be meaningful. Spend a little. Learn a lot. If it works, continue. If it doesn’t, move on.

This applies to business, skills, investments and even random ideas. Not everything needs to become a company. Not every idea needs a ten-page business plan. Sometimes you just need to test it.

Small experiments turn uncertainty into information. You don’t have to predict everything. You can just learn.

6. Time is more expensive than money

Money can come back. Time doesn’t.

That doesn’t mean spending money carelessly. It means I think about a purchase differently when it can permanently save time. If something costs money but saves me hundreds of hours, it isn’t really just an expense. It might be leverage.

The same applies to people. If someone can do a task better and faster than me, doing it myself just because I technically can is probably not the smartest use of my time.

I want to spend my time where my involvement actually changes the outcome.

7. Stay close to difficult problems

I’ve become less interested in having the perfect job title. Founder, CEO, operator, product person — whatever. Titles are useful for explaining things to other people, but they don’t tell me much about what I’m actually doing.

I’m more interested in the problem. Is it difficult? Does solving it matter? Can I learn something from it? Can I make the system better?

That is a big part of why I keep being drawn towards operations. You get to see how things actually work. Where money gets stuck. Where communication breaks. Where people waste time. Where customers leave. Where processes collapse when the company grows.

Those problems are interesting to me.

8. I learn better when I have skin in the game

I can read about business for hours. But one real client problem can teach me something a hundred pages cannot.

When your own money, reputation, customer or team is involved, theory becomes real. You suddenly care about the details. You understand why a process exists. You discover what breaks. You see what people actually do instead of what a textbook says they should do.

That’s why I like building things. The feedback loop is much faster. Learn. Try. Break something. Fix it. Learn again.

9. Keep optionality

I don’t think everyone needs to know exactly what they want to do at nineteen. I certainly don’t.

I want to become good at things that stay useful even if my plans change: problem solving, writing, technology, business, operations, understanding people, managing money, building relationships.

These skills travel. If one opportunity disappears, they don’t disappear with it.

I think that’s more valuable than trying to predict exactly where I’ll be in ten years. I’d rather build enough capability that I can choose.

10. Think in decades, act in days

There is a strange balance between long-term thinking and short-term execution. I want to think about where something could be in ten years. But I also want to know what I can do today.

Thinking long-term without acting is just daydreaming. Acting without thinking long-term can turn into running in circles.

So I try to keep both. Big direction. Small actions. One day at a time.

11. Curiosity is a competitive advantage

I like knowing random things. Why something works. How an invention happened. Why people behave a certain way. How businesses make money. Why a system is designed the way it is.

Sometimes the information seems completely useless. Until it isn’t. You never really know which piece of knowledge will connect with something else later.

So I try to stay curious. Not because every fact needs to become useful. Sometimes knowing something just makes the world more interesting — and I think that’s useful enough.

12. Let the work speak

I’ve never been particularly interested in being the loudest person in the room. I’d rather build something and let the result start the conversation.

There is a certain freedom in not having to constantly prove what you’re doing. Build quietly. Get better. Make something useful. Repeat.

Eventually, the work becomes the introduction.

The system is still being written

None of these are rules. They are just patterns I’ve noticed in myself, and I’m sure some of them will change.

Maybe that’s the most important part. A mental operating system shouldn’t be permanent software. It should update. Every failure should add something. Every new experience should challenge something. Every interesting person should have the chance to change your perspective.

So for now, this is how I think:

• Question the unnecessary.
• Find the bottleneck.
• Build systems.
• Create leverage.
• Run small experiments.
• Learn from reality.
• Stay curious.
• Keep your options open.
• Think long-term.
• Execute today.

I don’t know exactly where all of this will take me. I’m okay with that.

I don’t need the entire map. I just need a good way of thinking when I reach the next intersection.