Once you smell Twix, you can never go back to your local chocolate.
Where I grew up, everything came in a local version. Local Pepsi, local chocolate, local biscuits, local chips. Cheap copies of the Western stuff, with the taste sort of hidden, sort of faked. And we didn’t even feel like we were missing anything, the real thing was expensive, foreign, not for us. We just ate our own stuff and that was normal.
Then one day me and a friend split a single Twix. One bar, cut in two. And that was it. After tasting the real thing, I couldn’t go back. The normal chocolate suddenly felt wrong. Fake. Like a lie I’d been eating my whole life without knowing it. If you’re honest with yourself, you can’t go back, the fake just feels unnatural once your tongue knows the difference.
That stuck with me harder than a candy bar should. Because the same thing happens with ideas.
Most of what’s around you is the local version. Commoditized ideas, copied ideas, the watered-down taste everybody already has. And you can live your whole life on it and feel fine, until you taste the original. The real essence. The first-principle version of a thing. After that, the cheap copy doesn’t satisfy you anymore.
So I started chasing the real taste in everything, business, books, the internet, academia. Always digging for the original, the essence, the first version of the idea before everyone watered it down. Because in the age of AI, where anyone can build anything in no time, taste is the whole game. The tool is free now. The taste is rare. You have to develop your intellectual nutrition, feed yourself original flavors, not the local knockoffs everybody’s already chewing.
But here’s the part nobody tells you: there’s no going back.
Once you’ve tasted the real caliber, the Y Combinator level, the SpaceX level, the great original companies and stories, the small stuff stops mattering. And that can mess with you. You might feel overwhelmed, restless, even a little depressed, because suddenly the mediocre options around you taste like lies. That’s normal. You tasted the real thing, and now everything’s changed.
But I’ll take that trade every time. Better to chase the one-in-a-thousand original idea and carry the weight of it than to spend your life making commoditized, zero-taste things nobody truly wants. The original is what people actually crave. The original is what gets close to a monopoly.
So taste the Twix. Just know that once you do, you can never go back to the fake chocolate, and that’s exactly the point.
“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