We live in the age of AI, with all the information in the world sitting at our fingertips, social media, feeds, every corner of the internet. And honestly, it overwhelms me. A founder’s life is already massive on its own, and when you stack the business in your head, your life in your head, and the noise of social information in your head, the weight is crushing.
But here’s the thing about this exact moment: taste is no longer a 10x advantage. It’s a 1000x advantage. When anyone can build anything instantly, the thing that separates you is your mindset, your pattern recognition, your ability to make something people actually want, or something genuinely beautiful. That’s the muscle you have to train. And you don’t train it by grinding harder.
The Italians have a phrase: dolce far nientethe sweetness of doing nothing. They were obsessed with nature, so they made a whole art out of just sitting, doing nothing, enjoying being alive.
Now, I’m not going to tell you to sit and do nothing. I’m an ADHD founder, that advice is useless to me, and probably to you. But I found a version of it that changed everything: dolce far niente, but for research.
One night a week, I do nothing but wander. No agenda. I sit with my LLM, or just my own curiosity, and I follow it wherever it goes. It doesn’t have to be planned. You’ll have some loose scope, sure, but you free your mind and you refuse to set an optimal goal at the end. And something strange happens, you end up inside a maze that starts correcting itself into a logical road on its own.
Some nights it leads nowhere. That’s fine. The point is that by going somewhere you don’t know, you pick up things along the way you’d never have found on a straight line. Those things crack your mind open to new ideas, new roads. And connecting all those little sub-roads and valleys together, that’s where something truly tasteful and new actually comes from. More than once, a Saturday night like this handed me a concept that flipped my whole business 180 degrees into something completely new.
So do it at least one night a week. I do Saturday nights. Treat it exactly like scrolling Instagram with no purpose, except you’re wandering across topics and sectors instead. Robotics, computing, AI, energy, even literature and philosophy. It doesn’t matter how far apart they look, because everything is connected somehow, and the connections are the whole point. You get inspired from a dozen directions at once, and slowly something forms inside you.
The hard part isn’t the time. It’s resisting your own instinct to make it productive. The moment you give the night a goal, you kill it. You have to let it be useless on the surface, that’s the only way it pays off underneath.
“PMF with a 1000 iterations.”
“The game never ends. That’s the way I live my life. That’s the way I think about everything I do. I don’t think about winning or losing ever, on anything I do. I just keep playing the game.”Micky Malka
“Don’t fight in the North or the South. Fight every battle, everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before.”Petyr Baelish
“If you don’t know what to do, build capacity.”
“To win at everything, you have to start by winning something.”Hayden Adams
“Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.
Sounds simple on the surface, the hard part is making it part of your every day working process.”Brian Armstrong
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.”Albert Einstein