Past a certain income. Past a certain milestone. Past whatever was weighing on me at the time.

Then I started getting closer to those things, and the closer I got, the less they felt like what I actually wanted.

What you were actually pointing at

Almost everyone has felt this at some point.

You are doing something and you forget to check your phone. You forget to eat. You forget, for a while, that you are a person being watched and judged.

You are just in the moment, with your 100% of focus directed toward what you are doing.

That is called the flow state. That is the real freedom.

Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi called it “the secret of happiness.”

Here is what it means in simple terms. The moment where your brain reaches full concentration on something that actually matters to you and uses your real abilities. Everything inside your mind goes quiet. The part of your brain responsible for worrying about what others think slows down. What remains is just you, the work you are doing, and the present moment.

That specific feeling is what most people who say they want freedom are actually pointing at. That is the peak state of freedom.

I built two successful businesses. One affiliate marketing, then an e-commerce dropshipping one. Successful and positive cashflow on paper. But I never really felt it. Truth is, I hated it.

The one good thing that came out of those two years was realizing what actually put me in flow.

Talking with customers and engaging with people on socials. Writing content. Helping and directing people whenever they had a problem.

I realized it two years too late. That is why I started writing online, sharing my thoughts, building genuine relationships, making myself visible.

As I am writing this, I am in my flow state. I feel comfortable. Really comfortable. From the outside you would see me on my laptop with an espresso beside me. From the inside I feel that I am in a meaningful conversation with you.

I am not making the money I used to make before. But I am doing what makes me wake up every day to do it without thinking twice. That creates momentum. That is what eventually leads to financial success. Not the billboard kind. The meaningful kind. Income that comes from purpose, not from chasing the next loop.

This was never about an empty calendar. A passive income dashboard. A laptop at the beach. Traveling every week (though that would still be cool).

It is the feeling of being so fully inside something that the self watching itself disappears.

That is freedom. And it lives inside the act of doing the right thing, not outside of work entirely.

That is what everyone gets wrong.

Why most people never find it

A pattern I see and hear constantly is this. Most people build their life in a reactive way. They move away from what they don’t want, but never toward what they actually want.

It is all about structure. Structuring your life in a way that directs you, instead of letting you escape, is the difference between flow and circling.

Energy moves where the structure points it. If the structure is built around escaping a problem, then once the problem is distant enough, the energy has nowhere to go. You start circling. You eventually drift back toward the problem you were running from.

I started my two digital businesses after being part of a startup with my professor in college. It didn’t work out, but after seeing the world of entrepreneurship up close, I was dazzled. Shiny object syndrome hit hard. Every online guru at the time was promoting affiliate marketing and dropshipping. Those were the models. So I jumped in.

The real reason I started both, if I am honest with myself now, was fear of missing out and wanting to escape the feeling of no longer being part of something. Wanting good financials was part of it too. The twist was I always wanted to do it with meaning, but I didn’t, because I fell into the shiny object syndrome thinking success was measured by money.

Remembering that now, I genuinely don’t know how I was thinking. It doesn’t make sense to me anymore. As a result, both businesses were built to escape something, not to build toward something. And it was miserable. I hated it.

What I do now is what I actually needed to do years back. But it is never too late, and here I am. I know what I want. I love what I am doing. I am willing to keep investing my time in it. It has been about ten or eleven months of doing this, and writing daily doesn’t feel like a process I have to push through. It became a natural part of my day. Networking online, same thing.

This is what happens when you build toward something true. The path of least resistance leads toward it naturally. And when you are on that path, doing that work, you enter flow. Not sometimes. Consistently.

The brain needs to build

The human brain was never designed for idleness. It was designed for engagement, building, and innovating.

Studies show that people who have meaningful, skilled, challenging work to engage with aren’t just more productive. They’re more alive. More resilient. More genuinely satisfied.

When the brain has nothing meaningful to do, it doesn’t rest. It generates problems that don’t exist. It turns against itself.

For me personally, when I have nothing to do, I find myself fixing things that don’t need fixing. Solving problems that aren’t actually problems. It consumes my energy and produces nothing useful, even if it feels productive in the moment.

Even my rest time is about doing something meaningful. When I just sit on the couch and scroll online, I never feel good after. I think you know what I mean.

So rest for me looks like calling friends to stay connected. Training. Going on long walks. Anything that has a meaningful output even if it isn’t work. And understanding that rest is a break from work, not a break from life. There’s more to life than work, and a lot of people forget that.

Viktor Frankl survived three concentration camps and spent his life studying meaning. His conclusion was simple. People who could create something, even small things, even in the most extreme conditions, maintained their sense of meaning. People who couldn’t, lost it.

This isn’t a motivation technique. It’s a description of how humans are wired. The person in flow isn’t working hard. They’re doing what the brain was built to do.

Freedom isn’t escaping that state. Freedom is being inside it without the noise of the wrong obligations pulling you out.

When the flow disappears

Now let me say a blunt thing.

Flow isn’t permanent. What worked once will stop working. That isn’t failure. That’s the phase changing.

That’s the part nobody tells you about. Most purpose content acts like once you find your thing, you’re set forever. That’s not how it works.

Evolving is inevitable. You see it in other forms all the time. In tech. In age. In norms. But you never seem to see it in yourself.

You’ll keep evolving the longer you stay alive. Why? Because you’ll keep getting exposed to the changes happening around you. You’ll keep gaining new experience.

That’s how life goes.

Sometimes it’s evolution. Sometimes it’s a wrong decision you made. Either way, life moves on. What you need to do is adjust toward your direction.

The question is never “did I lose my purpose?” That question leads nowhere useful.

The real question is: “what has changed, and what do I actually want to build next?”

Have a constructive approach. Don’t be destructive.

When you can answer that clearly, not what you’re escaping but what you’re building toward, the structure realigns. The path of least resistance changes. And flow, the real experience of freedom, becomes available again.

This isn’t a one-time discovery. It’s a skill you practice across every phase of building a life.

The only kind of freedom that lasts

Freedom isn’t an arrival. It never was.

It’s a recurring experience, available to you inside the act of doing what you’re genuinely made to do. Not every task. Not every day. But consistently, structurally, when what you’re building points toward something that is actually yours.

The people who seem free aren’t the ones who escaped the most. They’re the ones who found, and kept finding, the work that makes the self disappear into the doing.

So let me leave you with one question.

When was the last time you were so inside what you were doing that you forgot to check if it was working?

That moment, however recent or distant, isn’t a memory. It’s a direction.

If you reached till here, thank you for reading.

Talk Saturday.
Yassin

If this was useful, here are two things you can do:

1. Share The Founder with one person who needs it. Word of mouth is how this grows.

2. If you’re not subscribed yet, join here. One deep piece every Saturday morning, always free.

   If this resonated, the next one will too. One deep piece every Saturday morning. Always free.

I’ve lived this myself. I bought more business courses than I can even remember, thinking the same things you are thinking right now. But let me tell you the truth I realized. Bear with me, because it is ugly.

You are buying anticipation, and your brain is mistaking it for progress.

You are running on the same chemical loop that every social media platform is engineered to exploit.

The answer to all of this is one word: dopamine.

Most people think dopamine is the chemical of pleasure. That is the surface explanation. But there is a deeper layer to it, and the entire attention economy we live in today is built on understanding it.

Let’s dig deeper.

Dopamine is not the reward. It is the anticipation of the reward. Your brain doesn’t spike when you get the thing you want. It spikes when you think you’re about to get it. The strongest dopamine response in the human brain is not pleasure. It is uncertainty.

Take the course-buying example. Your dopamine spikes as you click buy, anticipating the results promised in the marketing. But once you own it and start digging into it, you lose interest. The spark goes out. You feel yourself getting back to normal. And then you start craving that spark again, somewhere else.

See the cycle?

This is one of three loops most early founders fall into. And once you understand the chemistry, you start to see them everywhere in your own behavior.

The Three Loops

These three loops are everywhere. I lived all of them.

Once you see them, you can’t unsee them. And once you realize you need dopamine control over yourself, you become sharper and able to see things more clearly than before.

The Course Loop

When I started in the digital business world, I did what everyone does. Watched YouTube. Followed people on socials. Consumed everything I could.

Once I had the surface information that anyone can find for free, I started buying courses. I saw the results being promised, and I bought. Honestly, at the start I benefited a lot. The information was new, my dopamine was spiking for what I didn’t know.

But at some point, once you’ve collected most of the surface knowledge and become above average, the spike stops being about the information. It becomes about the promised results. And that is the trap.

You don’t get the results fast enough, either because you didn’t implement or because you ran out of patience. So you start thinking you need to learn more. Buy more. The next course will be the breakthrough. Your dopamine spikes for the promise, you buy, you start it, and suddenly the spark is gone. That is the cycle.

To be clear, sometimes I bought a course looking for one specific answer. That is not the loop. That is searching for information. The loop is when you are buying anticipation, not knowledge.

The Guru Loop

I think nobody escapes this one. It is the core loop of the three. The other two come complimentary with it.

I followed a lot of gurus. To be clear, there is a difference between people who genuinely change you for the better and people who treat content as a business model first. We all fall into following some of the second kind before we learn to tell the difference.

I was getting directed by every guru I followed toward a different business model, a different strategy, a different system. I was blind. Every new piece of content gave me the dopamine spike of the promised result. The anticipation was the addiction, not the content.

Today, I follow less than 10 people, and I genuinely invest in what they teach. I learned that the real ones don’t keep promising results. They push you toward action and tell you straight that the outcome depends on you. They are not selling anticipation. They are selling reality.

The Model-Chasing Loop

I made money from different business models. I won’t lie. On paper, you would say I was profitable. The truth is I was also miserable.

Influenced by gurus and their promised outcomes, I ran into every model like a bull. Affiliate marketing. E-commerce. Freelancing. I wanted to turn the freelancing into an agency, but I was too miserable to keep going alone. I made money because I put in the effort. But I was so blinded by the dopamine that I never asked myself if any of this was actually my passion.

Let me be blunt. If you are not passionate about what you are doing, you and the thing you are doing will not survive long. It will make you more miserable than you already are. That is the cost of building from a dopamine loop instead of a grounded place.

The founder who cannot control their own dopamine becomes the easiest customer in the market. Everyone selling courses, content, and transformation understands this pattern. And the founder who does not understand their own dopamine cannot build from a grounded place.

The system outside you

Now zoom out from your internal self. Everything you just read about the three loops doesn’t only happen to founders. It happens to every person on the internet, every day, by design. Nothing about the modern internet is accidental.

Some would say this is already known. It is not new. But if you know, then why are you still falling for it? Why don’t you have dopamine control over yourself? Statistics say very few people actually do, even though most have heard the warnings. That says something. Even if you know it, the awareness lives in your subconscious instead of your behavior.

Let me show you the mechanisms that run the attention economy today. Once you see how the system is built, you’ll understand exactly where to step in and use the same chemistry on the right side of the line.

The mechanisms running the system

1. Variable timing rewards. Notifications don’t arrive when something happens. They arrive when the platform decides to release them, often in delayed bursts. This is not a technical glitch. It is the same neuro-reward structure used in slot machines. B.F. Skinner proved decades ago that unpredictable rewards create stronger dopamine responses than predictable ones. Every platform you use was built on that exact research. The notification doesn’t have to be valuable. It just has to be uncertain.

2. The dopaminergic scroll. Infinite scroll is not addictive because it is entertaining. It is addictive because each new piece of content is a possibility. The next one might be funny, useful, shocking, or relevant to your life. Your brain spikes on the anticipation of that possibility, not on what you actually find. That is why you can scroll for an hour and not remember a single thing you saw. The reward was never the content. The reward was the anticipation that kept resetting every time your thumb moved.

3. Anticipation is the product. Platforms don’t sell content. They don’t sell community. They sell your attention to advertisers, and they sell it through dopamine loops. The personalization layer makes this stronger. When content feels designed for you specifically, your brain treats it as relevant to your life, which spikes dopamine harder than generic content ever could. Companies that do personalization well generate 40% more revenue than competitors. That is not a marketing stat. It is a neuroscience stat. They built a chemistry business and called it a media business.

This is why your three loops feel impossible to escape on willpower alone. You are not fighting your discipline. You are fighting an entire economy designed to exploit the same wiring you have been trying to control inside yourself.

So now you see it from both sides. The trap inside you, and the system outside you. The question becomes simple. Are you going to keep being the customer, or are you going to learn how to use this same chemistry on the right side of the line?

The decision is yours.

The Founder’s Unfair Advantage

Here is where this becomes useful. Until now I have been showing you the trap. Now let me show you the leverage. At the end of the day, dopamine is not an enemy. It is neutral. The only difference is how you use it, knowing both sides of the coin.

The Curiosity Gap

The strongest dopamine response in marketing is not generated by clicks. It is generated when someone recognizes a problem they were already feeling but had not yet named.

This is the curiosity gap. You leave just enough space in your content for the reader to think instead of consume. You don’t say everything at once. You challenge one specific assumption they hold. You make the payoff worth the anticipation.

The reason this works is the same reason the three loops work. Anticipation is the trigger. The difference is what you put on the other side of it. If the gap creates interest and the content delivers real value, trust compounds. If the gap creates interest and the content underdelivers, the next time you open a gap they will not walk through it.

This is not about being mysterious. It is about respecting the reader’s mind enough to leave them space to fill it themselves. Most content today gives people answers nobody asked for. Curiosity gap content gives people a question they didn’t know they had, then earns the right to answer it.

The Reward Frequency Rule

Predictable rewards create weaker dopamine responses than unpredictable ones. This is the most counterintuitive part of the whole framework.

The founder who posts the same type of content, in the same structure, at the same time, every day, is doing what the productivity world tells them to do. But it is also exactly what kills audience anticipation. The brain stops anticipating because it already knows what is coming. And anticipation is the trigger for everything.

The move is not to be inconsistent. The move is to be unpredictable inside a consistent rhythm. Same voice. Same quality. But different structures, different angles, different layers of depth. Your audience learns the sound of your thinking but stays in anticipation mode because the body of work keeps evolving.

Surprise the reader once in a while. Not with clickbait. With intellectual surprise. A sharp angle they didn’t see coming. An idea that contradicts what you said last week and explains why. A piece that goes deeper than they expected. That is the dopamine spike that builds trust instead of eroding it.

The Ethical Line

After all of this, you are now able to influence human nature. But everything can be used in an ethical or unethical way. And on this topic, ethics is tricky.

If we are honest about ethics on social media today, it is almost non-existent. The only thing controlling it is the platforms themselves, and only within their scope.

This means you stand on a very thin line that divides you between using what you just learned ethically or unethically.

What is that line?

→ Ethical dopamine design: the audience receives more value than the anticipation promised.

→ Unethical dopamine design: the audience receives less value than the anticipation promised.

The audience always feels the difference. Even if they cannot name it. Their trust grows or dies based on which side you build from.

The audience that feels exploited eventually leaves. The audience that feels respected stays and brings others. Same chemistry, different long-term outcome. Being ethical is what makes you survive long term as a brand, a business, and as a person.

The only thing that doesn’t shift

Human nature does not change. Platforms come and go. Algorithms get rewritten every few months. New business models look like the answer until the next one shows up. But the chemistry inside the human brain has been the same for thousands of years. Two chemicals, same loops, same anticipation.

The founders who understand this don’t chase the next platform or the next model. They build from the chemistry. They use it on themselves first to stay grounded. Then they use it on the right side of the line for the people they serve.

The rest stay customers in someone else’s loop.

You now know how it works. The next time you feel that spike, the one that tells you the next course will change everything, the next guru holds the answer, the next model is finally the one, you will recognize it for what it is.

That recognition is the start of dopamine control. And dopamine control is the start of building anything that actually lasts.

Thanks for reading! Talk Saturday.

Yassin

If this was useful, here are two things you can do:

1. Share this with a person(s) who needs it.

2. If you’re not subscribed yet, join here. One deep piece every Saturday morning, always free.

Subscribe now

Your “why” is not a destination. It’s a mirror.

This is what we are looking at today.

Why the standard advice fails

Imagine this. You leave a “why” workshop with a beautiful statement. Six months later, when reality hits, that statement has zero power to guide a real decision. This is because a “why” built on aspiration collapses under pressure. A “why” built on observed character survives it.

In today’s fast-moving world, if you build something that doesn’t suit who you are, you won’t survive long term. By being passionate here I don’t mean motivated. I mean waking up every day genuinely energized to keep going, loving the process, wanting it to grow, staying with it through every shift in the market. That’s what keeps you in the game when nothing else will.

I am not saying this is easy. I faced it myself. Changing my “why” every few months just to fit what I learned. Building businesses that even when they made money, did not survive long enough. Not because they failed in the market, but because they did not fit me. Under pressure, they broke me. They made me miserable. That is when I realized “finding my why” was missing something. It was missing a part of me to balance it.

At the end of the day, the business you build is for two people. Your customers, and you. A business gives them a product or a service. It gives you fulfillment and the energy to keep growing. If one is missing, you won’t survive.

Every existing framework produces a statement, not a decision-making mechanism. Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” is the most famous of them. Was he wrong? Absolutely not. His contribution is real and important. He put “why” into the mainstream. He made purpose accessible, visual, repeatable. The limitation is simply that his framework was built for leaders inside existing organizations. Not for the 22-year-old first-time founder sitting alone, who does not know what to build because they do not yet know who they are built to be.

Sinek gave us the language for purpose. Founders today need a method to see their specific purpose in their own character.

See your “why,” don’t find it

You don’t need to invent your “why.” Your “why” is already showing up everywhere in your life. You just don’t recognize it yet. The patterns you live by are already telling you who you are.

It shows up in how you respond to problems. How you spend your energy. Who you understand deeply without trying. How you face difficulty.

I built an e-commerce business, then freelancing, then affiliate marketing. Each one made sense on paper. Each one taught me something. But none of them survived because none of them fit me. What I noticed across all of them was the same pattern. The work that drained me was the transactional part. The work that energized me was the people part. Conversations with clients. Helping someone figure something out. Building real connections.

I didn’t see it as a clue at the time. I thought it was just personality. Looking back now, that was the data. That was my “why” showing up in plain sight, telling me where to go, while I was busy chasing business models that ignored it.

That is what I mean by “see, not find.” Your “why” does not require a workshop. It requires honest observation. Look at the work that energizes you. Look at the people you understand without explanation. Look at the problems that make you genuinely angry. Look at how you respond when life gets hard.

That is character mapping. And it is the only honest source of a “why” that survives pressure.

The business that aligns with who you genuinely are expresses itself as a “why” that cannot be faked and cannot be copy-pasted. The business that aligns with who you wish you were is the one that breaks you when reality hits.

Turn the observation into a filter

Seeing your “why” is only half the work. The other half is using it. An observation that stays an observation is just a thought. The point is to make it a filter.

Your “why” should be your compass. A statement you write once and forget is decoration. A filter you use every day is leverage.

So let’s make it concrete. Run every business decision through three questions:

→ The customer filter: Who do I instinctively want to serve based on my lived experience?

→ The problem filter: Which problems do I feel the gap of most intensely?

→ The difficulty filter: What type of difficulty am I built to face, and which type will destroy me?

These three questions are not abstract. They are the operating layer of your “why.” Every customer you choose to serve, every problem you choose to solve, every challenge you accept or refuse, gets measured against them.

When a decision contradicts the filter, the business has left your “why.” You don’t need a coach to tell you. You don’t need to wait until burnout hits to realize it. You feel it in the moment the decision is being made. That is the difference between a “why” that lives on a wall and a “why” that runs your business.

The only “why” that survives

Stop trying to find your “why.” Start focusing on your own patterns.

It’s already there. In the work that energizes you. In the people whose struggle you understand without explanation. In the problems that genuinely make you angry and furious. In how you actually respond when life gets hard.

Your job is not to invent a beautiful statement, it is not a writing competition. Your job is to look at your own patterns honestly enough to see what’s been there the whole time. Then build a business that fits it, not one that contradicts it.

The ones who do this end up building something that lasts longer in the market. Not because they were more talented or had a better idea. Because they were finally building from who they are, instead of who they thought they should be.

That is the only “why” that survives.

Talk Saturday.

Yassin

It used to feel like watching someone climb a mountain in real time. You didn’t know if they’d make it. That uncertainty was the point. Now it feels like a highlight reel with a sales page at the bottom.

What it actually was

Building in public was about journaling the journey publicly. People saw the process and realized you were a person worth trusting. It stood for inspiration and building real connections. A community that supported the business dream later on. But community and trust first.

At the start it was actually valuable. The goal was to build a connection, provide real value, and convert at the very end. Never the other way around.

For me personally, I remember following founders who shaped how I thought about my own journey. I won’t even call it inspiration. It was learning from the mistakes they shared publicly. That alone was something rare. You see, it wasn’t polished. That was the point. The rawness was the trust.

Back then it wasn’t a content strategy. It was a founder’s journal. The reader did not follow for the answers. They followed because they wanted to see if the founder figured it out. The business becoming a business was a byproduct of trust. Never the starting point.

Then everyone started doing it. Still good. You could still find real people. You could still learn something. But the game changed. And I won’t say it’s entirely AI’s fault. It’s the wrong use and abuse of AI by the people doing it.

What AI broke

Everyone is an expert now. Nobody is allowed to be learning anymore. Just be human.

AI removed the effort barrier. Anyone can generate “lessons learned” without ever learning anything. Everyone performs competence. Nobody documents confusion. The result is a feed full of recycled insights from people who didn’t earn them.

Want to catch the fake ones? How much content have you seen on social media that felt replicated, generated, hollow, but you ignored it because of how often you saw it? It started feeling like the norm. Text content reveals who actually writes from experience and who is just trying their luck. The reader always knows. They may not be able to explain why a post feels empty. But they feel it.

Effort is seen. Experience is felt.

The yes-man trap

Now let’s go deeper. AI is the silent yes-man.

The feedback loop became airtight. AI said you were right. Likes said you were relevant. Nobody in that loop had anything real at stake.

Not the AI. Not the audience optimized to engage. So you kept going, more certain than ever, further from reality than you realized.

This is the misunderstanding most people have with AI. They treat it like a validator, a partner, sometimes even a human. It’s not. It’s a tool. And by default, it’s tuned to agree with you. Unless you train it to push back, it will tell you your thinking is sharp when it isn’t, your idea is original when it isn’t, your post is insightful when it’s recycled.

False certainty gets built. False certainty gets broadcast. The loop runs without a single moment of friction. Everyone becomes a replica of each other.

This isn’t about bad intentions. Most founders doing this genuinely believe they’re providing value. That’s what makes it so hard to see from the inside. The line between sharing what you know and performing what you think you should know got very thin. AI made it invisible.

What real building in public looks like now

There is a way out of this. And it starts with one shift.

Stop trying to prove what you know. Start showing how you see.

Dan Koe has been saying this for years. AI can copy any idea. But it can’t copy how you see it. People don’t follow dictionaries. They follow humans. That was always true. AI just made it the only thing that actually matters now.

Think about it this way. The founder writing “here are 5 lessons I learned this week” is competing with every other founder posting the same thing, most of which is AI-generated anyway. The founder writing “here is how I see this problem and why I see it this way” is in a different category entirely. Not because the second person is smarter. Because they brought something AI cannot bring.

Their lens.

Your lens is the mix of your experience, your failures, your way of looking at a problem that nobody else has. It is your background, your skills, your taste, your scars. It is the only thing in this entire conversation that AI cannot copy.

So the new standard is simple. Real building in public in 2026 is not about what you learned. It is about how you see what you went through. It is okay to share your failures, your wins, your confusion, your half-formed thoughts. That is the rawness that built trust in the first place. That is what people actually root for.

Before you post your next “lesson learned,” ask yourself one question. Did I actually learn this, or did I ask AI what the lesson should be?

That question is the line. On one side is building in public. On the other side is performing in public.

Building in public is not dead. The version that mattered is fading. AI killed the parts of it that required real effort, real confusion, real journey.

But it can come back. Not by going back to how it was, but by raising the bar on how it should be. Show your real lens. Document the confusion, not just the polished takeaways. Let people see you figure things out instead of pretending you already have.

The founders who do this in 2026 will stand out by default. Not because they are louder. Because everyone else is performing the same script.

Talk Saturday.

Yassin

If this was useful, here are two things you can do:

1. Share The Founder with one person who needs it. Word of mouth is how this grows.

2. If you’re not subscribed yet, join here. One deep piece every Saturday morning, always free.

Subscribe now

You can call this the paradox of choice, popularized by Barry Schwartz, which shows that when people face too many options, they experience more anxiety, decision fatigue, and regret, because they fixate on missed alternatives rather than the benefits of the option they chose.

You see content today split into two teams: one that is with the idea that AI is killing creativity and logical thinking, and the other team is on how AI is improving us. Yet you feel both are correct, this is because they are. The catch is that each team is just biased, but both together complete the full picture. And this is it:

AI is not killing founder creativity. The real killer is infinite optionality hitting a brain that has no decision system.

That does not deny the team with the opinion against AI, it is still valid. But it all comes back to you.

In this issue, we will dive deeper than what we hear and say these days in the business world. We will focus on the core. Your awareness and thinking.

The paradox of modern-day development

If I had come in 10 years ago and told you that you could be able to build a software business without being a technical person, would you have believed me? Or if I had told you that you can generate high-quality designs, presentations, docs, etc., in just plain text that would only cost you 15 minutes instead of days, would you have believed me?

No one would have believed, nor would I believe myself. But here we are, we’ve come a long way. We live in a world today where you can literally start a digital business from zero, and I fully mean it. The entry barrier has become an all-time low, and I am not just talking from a financial perspective, but a skill set one as well.

With all the AI and the tools today lowering the barrier of entry, it has created a world of “infinite starts”. This should be heaven for entrepreneurs, but instead, you see early founders more lost, more anxious, and more static than the ones who had fewer options. This is Barry Schwartz’s paradox of choice, where more options increase anxiety and regret because we compare what we got to all the alternatives we gave up.

Overwhelm Disguised as “Being Strategic”

I am gonna be blunt in this, but the majority are just living in the illusion of the strategic entrepreneur, while actually escaping what is really happening.

But all of this can be mitigated if you are aware of what actually happens inside your head, because your greatest unfair advantage is your thinking and awareness. Both complement each other, both are the ones that shape your decisions and lens on situations, and they are the backbone to your decision system.

Let me throw some examples of the behavior I am targeting here before we dive deeper:

• You’re not sitting on the couch doing nothing. You’re drowning in motion with nothing real to show for it.

• One week, you’re the ‘AI automation guy.’ Next week you’re ‘helping creators productize knowledge.’ Two weeks later, you’re talking about community.

• You open ChatGPT or Claude ‘just to brainstorm’, and suddenly you have 20 ‘better’ ideas than the one you were supposed to be building.

• You tweak your Notion workspace, rename the same three strategy docs, and convince yourself you’re ‘building the machine’.

Sounds familiar? We’ve all been there, so be honest with yourself.

The truth you need to be aware of is this: on the surface, all of this looks like research, refinement, being a thoughtful founder.

Under the surface, it’s much simpler: you’re overwhelmed, and you’re scared to pick. When everything is available and possible, you start playing defense against regret. You’re terrified of closing the wrong door.

Social media makes it worse. Everyone is promoting their “one right way,” even when it’s cliché. But if you see it enough, it gets to you. You start to believe there’s a perfect move and everyone else has found it already.

So instead of choosing, you keep spinning the wheel, hoping to dissect the “perfect” idea that removes all risk. That idea doesn’t exist. No one starts with certainty. No one. Just an idea, and a decision to actually back it.

This is why I say clear thinking is your only real advantage in the age of AI. Tools multiply options. Only your thinking can decide what you’re actually willing to commit to.

What Clear Thinking Really Means for a Founder

Let’s make this concrete and clear from the start. When I say ‘clear thinking,’ I don’t mean sitting in a quiet room journaling for three hours.

It is not complicated; it just needs some focus and attention. Here are simple ways to ignite clear thinking:

• Clear thinking = knowing your game (who you serve, what you’re building for the next 12 months).

• Clear thinking = simple decision rules (how you choose tools, ideas, opportunities).

• Clear thinking = willingness to close doors (accepting you’ll miss out on other options, because you can’t do everything).

Add one more layer to this: unbiased judgment. Not chasing what’s trendy, not doing what looks good on social, but a more logical, almost boring way of choosing.

And then comes the most important part that is skipped: commitment. Once you have honest answers to those three, you don’t keep looking and spinning the wheel for new options. You back the decision.

The three look simple, maybe even vague at first glance. But that’s exactly why they work. They force you to look at reality with the full picture, to see what’s actually in front of you, and to stop hiding behind “I’m still figuring it out.”

AI: Brain Booster or Brain Replacement?

After you bypass the clarity and clear thinking phase, AI here can help. Because AI is supposed to fall under your thinking, not the other way around

Your way of using AI is what determines if it is your booster or long fall replacement.

AI can make you sharper and go deeper in discovery, it can carry the unnecessary loads that take your time and energy, or you can use it for aid in super complex tasks like analysis, and many more ways it really just depends on your creativity in how to use it. But there is the other side of the coin, where you let AI literally be the supporter of your failure and starts turning off your brain.

Here is the wrong use: AI as a replacement for thinking:

This is when you ask:

• “Give me the business idea.”

• “Write the strategy for me.”

• “Tell me the best niche, the perfect offer, the exact content plan.”

You hand over the hard part: deciding what you believe, what you want, and what game you’re willing to play. Over time, this kind of dependence creates cognitive offloading: you stop practicing critical thinking because the model will “think” for you. You feel productive, but your ability to judge, filter, and originate ideas quietly gets weaker.

Right use: AI as an amplifier of thinking:

This is where AI is your super-intelligent partner. You decide first, then you use AI to:

• Stress-test your strategy, let it challenge your thoughts.

• Let it be your sparring partner.

• Expose blind spots.

Turn a rough thought into a clearer structure and, most importantly, a deeper one.

Here, AI is pushing against your thinking, not replacing it. Studies are already showing that when people use AI to support deeper and higher quality thinking, not to avoid it, creativity and output quality go up, especially when AI is used to free cognitive load through automation, not to erase it.

The line is simple: if you go to AI to avoid a hard decision, you’re using it wrong. If you go to AI after you’ve decided to refine, test, and execute faster, you’re using it as leverage.

Where This Actually Leaves You

AI made it easier than ever to start something. It did not make it easier to decide who you are, what you’re building, and what you’re willing to bet on. That part is still on you, which means it needs your mind.

In a world of infinite options like today, your competitive advantage is not what you can start. It’s what you’re willing to ignore. The person who can think clearly, choose one game, and stay with it while everyone else is chasing the next tool or idea is the one real leveraging in the age of AI. Most importantly, keep your mind sharp and clear. Because put in your mind, what if the AI age ended tomorrow?

Talk next Saturday.

Yassin

You’ve defined your problem, your audience, your AI strategy, and your tools. But without a consistent structure for how you work, you’ll drown in chaos the moment things pick up. You’ll wake up Monday with no plan, work on whatever feels urgent, and end every week feeling busy while nothing compounds.

What a system actually looks like

I’ve had a Notion-based operating system for 3 years. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve adjusted it. Added sections, removed sections, restructured entire workflows. But what I can tell you is that it’s my second home. Everything lives there.

My setup uses only two tools: Notion for the main OS hub and Notion Calendar. That’s it. Inside Notion, I built a structure that fits how I actually work. Goals divided into annual and monthly. A to-do task system. A content OS where I manage ideas and content production. A prompt library for AI workflows. A full notes section divided by topic. It’s literally a system with everything in one place.

By having everything in one place, I’m never overwhelmed. Nothing gets lost. Nothing gets forgotten. No scavenger hunts through five different apps to find where I wrote something down.

A system doesn’t just organize your work. It buys back your time. And the time you buy back is where the real value is. That recovered time goes into deeper thinking, innovation, and the things that actually make you better.

The Founder’s Operating System

You don’t need my setup. You need three components.

1. A Weekly Rhythm. A simple map of what happens when. Not an hour-by-hour schedule. A block-level structure that tells you what type of work belongs on which days. Separate creation from engagement. Batch similar work together. Protect your highest-energy time for the hardest work.

The test: Can you describe your week in 3-4 sentences without checking a calendar? If not, your rhythm isn’t clear enough.

2. A Decision Filter. A set of questions you run every new opportunity, request, or idea through before you say yes. Three questions:

→ Does this directly support my current priority?

→ If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?

→ Can this wait 30 days without consequence?

If it doesn’t support your priority, if saying yes means dropping something more important, or if it can wait, the answer is no. Or at least not now.

3. A Capture System. One place where every idea, task, piece of feedback, and commitment goes. Not five notebooks, three apps, and a pile of sticky notes. One system. Pick one tool. Create three categories: Ideas, Tasks, Feedback. Review it once a week.

Build your first operating system this week. Start with three things:

→ Your Weekly Rhythm: Write out what type of work belongs on which days. Can you describe your week in 3-4 sentences? If not, simplify until you can.

→ Your Decision Filter: Write down the three questions and put them somewhere you’ll see them daily. Run every new request through them for the next two weeks.

→ Your Capture System: Pick one tool. Create three categories: Ideas, Tasks, Feedback. One place. Review it once a week.

You don’t need Notion. You don’t need a fancy setup. You need one place that holds everything, a rhythm you can describe in a few sentences, and a filter that protects your focus.

Start ugly. Upgrade later.

That’s the full Founder Framework Series. Five weeks, five tools. Clarity, audience, AI strategy, AI stack, and now the system that keeps it all running. The foundation is set. Now build on it.

Talk Saturday.

Yassin

You don’t need 15 AI tools. You need three. One for thinking, one for creating, and one for operating. Pick one per category, learn it deeply, and ignore everything else until you’ve outgrown it.

The 3-Tool Rule

Last week you mapped where AI fits in your business. Now you need to pick the right tools for the job.

1. A Thinking Tool. For strategy, brainstorming, research, and decision-making. This is the tool you have conversations with. You bring it a challenge, it helps you think through it. My recommendation: Claude. It’s the most powerful option right now for deep thinking and structured reasoning.

2. A Creating Tool. For content, copy, visuals, and anything you publish. It drafts, you refine. It generates options, you select and edit. It should never replace your voice. If 80% of your output is written, pick the AI you write best with. If visual content is a big part of your workflow, pair your writing tool with a dedicated media tool.

3. An Operating Tool. For automation, workflows, and repetitive processes. Start with in-app automations first. The tools you already use have built-in automation features that require no learning curve. Don’t jump to a separate platform until you’ve maxed out what’s already built into your existing tools.

The rule: One tool per category. Master it before adding another. If you can’t explain what each of your three tools does for your business in one sentence, you either have too many or you haven’t learned them well enough.

How this works in practice

AI for me is an enhancing tool for my thoughts. I’m not always in deep thinking mode, so I trained AI to get me there. Every idea starts in my mind, then I take it to AI and make it challenge me. Not the other way around. AI doesn’t generate my ideas. It stress-tests them.

One of the biggest wins was eliminating the blank page problem. I always have ideas, but I don’t always have the right structure in mind. I trained AI to help me organize and structure my thinking so I can move from concept to execution faster. The ideas are mine. The architecture is collaborative.

For operations, there are tasks I used to delegate to freelancers. Formatting, simple design work, basic writing tasks. Now my AI subscription handles those. Not because AI is better than a skilled freelancer, but because for routine tasks at my current stage, it’s faster and more cost-efficient.

The opportunities are limitless. But I only do what I need now, because it’s not about adding more. It’s about reduction and protection of focus on what is only necessary.

Define your 3-tool stack this week. Write one sentence for each:

→ Thinking tool: Which AI will you use for strategy, brainstorming, and research?

→ Creating tool: Which AI will you use for the content you produce most?

→ Operating tool: What are you still doing manually that you shouldn’t be?

For each one, finish this sentence: “I use [tool] for [purpose] because [reason].”

If you can’t finish that sentence clearly, you either haven’t chosen yet or you haven’t gone deep enough.

Then commit to one rule for the next 30 days: no new tools. Only deeper use of these three.

Talk Saturday.

Yassin

Without business clarity first, AI becomes a multiplier of confusion. You automate the wrong messaging. You generate content for the wrong audience. You build workflows around a business model that isn’t validated.

The AI conversation right now is all hype and no filter. Every thread says “use AI for everything.” Every tool promises to replace half your workload. So founders try to do exactly that. They automate things they don’t even understand manually yet. They throw vague requests at it and expect magic. They copy-paste outputs without reviewing them.

The result is that AI works against them. It makes them generic and produces the same flat output as everyone else using it the same lazy way.

Here’s the uncomfortable reality. AI is advancing at 50x while the majority of people are using maybe 10x of what it can actually do. The gap isn’t in the technology. It’s in the human operating it.

How to think about AI correctly

Think of AI as a super intelligent, adaptable, hard-working employee who just joined your company. They’re capable of incredible work, but they’re new. They don’t know your business, your audience, your standards, or your context. You need to train them. The more detailed, structured, and clear you are in that training, the better the outcome.

AI is a tool that aids you in problem solving. It is not a fully trustworthy, independent problem solver.

The AI Fit Map

Every task in your business goes into one of three categories.

Automate. Repetitive, rule-based tasks where your personal touch adds zero value. Scheduling, data entry, basic email responses, invoice formatting.

The filter question: “If a machine did this with no personality, would anyone notice or care?”

Accelerate. Creative or strategic work where AI makes you faster but you still drive. Drafting content you then rewrite in your voice, brainstorming ideas you then filter, researching competitors.

The filter question: “Do I need to be involved in the output, but not necessarily in every step of producing it?”

Avoid. High-trust, relationship-driven work where AI would actively hurt you. Sales conversations with early customers, personal outreach to your network, critical business decisions.

The filter question: “Would the person on the other end feel cheated if they knew AI did this instead of me?”

This week, list 5-10 tasks you do in your business. For each one, assign a category: Automate, Accelerate, or Avoid. Use the filter questions above.

Then pick one task from your Automate column and one from your Accelerate column. Set up AI to handle those two this week. Start small. Learn how to direct it well on simple tasks before you trust it with complex ones.

Talk Saturday.

Yassin

Founders define their audience as “entrepreneurs aged 25-35” and think they’ve done the work. They haven’t.

You cannot define a whole group of people because you’ll be lost in different character traits and preferences. But what you can do is focus on your ideal customer characteristics. This way you literally pinpoint and target their needs, fears, and passions associated with your offer.

When your audience is “everyone who might be interested,” you end up speaking to no one. Your landing page is vague. Your content is generic. Your offer tries to solve too many problems at once.

Most founders don’t realize this is the issue. They think the problem is their marketing, their design, or their pricing. But the root cause is almost always the same. They never defined who they’re actually talking to with enough specificity to make their decisions sharp.

The trap most founders fall into

Even founders who do the work often make a second mistake. They define their customer through their own lens. They describe the problem the way they see it, use language that makes sense to them, and assume their audience thinks the same way they do.

But the idea that feels perfect in your head might land completely differently on the other side. A technical founder building for non-technical users will instinctively describe their product in technical terms. A founder with deep industry experience will skip context that a newcomer needs.

The way you see your product is not the way your customer experiences it.

The One-Person Filter

The fix is simple. Stop thinking about audiences and start describing one specific person. Not a persona document with stock photos. A real human being you could describe to a stranger in 30 seconds.

Answer these five questions:

→ What’s their situation right now? Not demographics. What stage of life or business are they in? What decisions are they currently facing?

→ What have they already tried? What solutions have they attempted that didn’t work? This reveals their frustration and what they’re no longer willing to settle for.

→ What’s their biggest frustration right now? Not a category of pain. The specific thing they’d vent about to a friend over coffee.

→ What would “solved” look like to them? Their desired outcome in their own words, not your product features.

→ Where do they already spend time and attention? Which platforms, creators, or communities do they trust? This tells you exactly where to find them.

The test: Read your answers out loud. If someone listening could pick this person out of a crowd, you’re done. If they couldn’t, go more specific.

This week, answer those five questions about your one person. Then write a 3-4 sentence description of them as if you’re introducing them to a stranger.

Read it out loud. If someone listening could pick this person out of a crowd, your filter is set. If they couldn’t, go more specific.

Talk Saturday.

Yassin

The Founder Framework Series is a 5-part deep dive into the core frameworks every early-stage founder needs before they touch a single AI tool, hire anyone, or spend money on ads.

Each framework is built from real patterns I’ve seen across 30+ startups. Not theory. Not motivational content. Just the thinking tools that separate founders who build with clarity from founders who stay stuck.

Who this is for:

You’re early-stage. Maybe you have an idea, maybe you’ve started something but it’s not working the way you thought it would. You’re overwhelmed by decisions, unsure what to prioritize, and probably drowning in AI noise that tells you to use tools before you even know what you’re building.

This series fixes that. Foundations first. Then everything else.

Read them in order. Each one builds on the last.

The series:

01 — The Clarity Triangle

02 — The One-Person Filter

03 — The AI Fit Map

04 — The 3-Tool Rule

05 — The Founder’s Operating System

If you’re new here, this is the best place to start. If you’ve been following along, send this to a founder who needs it.

— Yassin

A founder came to me wanting to launch an ecommerce clothing brand for padel players.

He had done serious work. Sourced factories, tested fabric quality, designed products. The product side was solid.

But when I asked the basic questions, there were no answers. Do padel players actually need a new clothing brand? Which padel players? Casual weekend players or competitive athletes? Local market or international? What’s the frustration with what they currently wear?

He had built an entire business plan around a product without ever confirming that a specific group of people actually wanted it.

That gap wasn’t just a branding problem. It was leaking into every decision. Marketing strategy couldn’t be defined because he didn’t know who he was talking to. Distribution couldn’t be planned because local and international are completely different operations. The launch roadmap kept shifting because there was no anchor holding it in place.

What Changed

Once I pointed this out, he went back and did the work. Defined exactly which segment of padel players he was targeting. Answered the local vs. international question. Mapped the real frustration his audience had with existing options.

That clarity immediately changed his cost calculations. He realized his overhead was too high for the specific market he was targeting and started reworking his numbers.

The business isn’t launched yet, but it’s now more validated than it ever was when he was just focused on the product. The foundation exists. The decisions have an anchor.

He wasn’t lacking effort or skill. He was lacking clarity, and that single gap was making every other decision harder than it needed to be.

The Clarity Triangle

Before you build anything, you need to answer three questions. What problem do I solve? Who specifically has this problem? Why am I the one to solve it?

These three answers form a triangle. If any side is missing, the whole thing collapses.

Side 1: The Problem. Define the specific pain you solve. Not a category, not an industry, a pain.

Bad: “I help businesses with marketing.” Good: “First-time founders waste months building a product without knowing if anyone actually wants it, and run out of motivation before they ever make a sale.”

Side 2: The Who. Describe the one person who feels this problem hardest. Not a demographic, a situation.

Bad: “My audience is entrepreneurs aged 20–35.” Good: “A 27-year-old who quit their job 3 months ago to build a SaaS product. They have an idea and a landing page but zero customers.”

Side 3: The Why You. The one thing in your experience that makes you credible to solve this specific problem for this specific person.

Bad: “I have 10 years of business experience.” Good: “I’ve guided 30+ startups through their first 6 months and watched the same clarity problem kill good ideas over and over.”

Now read all three together as one sentence:

“I help [Who] solve [Problem] because [Why You].”

If that sentence is clear, specific, and believable, you have a foundation. If any part feels vague, that’s the side you need to work on.

Your Assignment

Fill in your Clarity Triangle this week. Write three statements:

→ Problem: “[Specific person] struggles with [specific frustration] which leads to [specific consequence].”

→ Who: Describe your one person. Their age, situation, what they’ve tried, and their biggest frustration right now.

→ Why You: The one thing in your experience, results, or journey that makes you credible to solve this specific problem for this specific person.

Then combine them into one sentence:

“I help [Who] solve [Problem] because [Why You].”

If that sentence is clear, specific, and believable, your foundation is set. If any part feels vague, you’ve found exactly where your business needs more work.

Talk Saturday.

Yassin

If this was useful, here are two things you can do:

1. Share The Founder with one person who needs it. Word of mouth is how this grows.

2. If you’re not subscribed yet, join here. One deep piece every Saturday morning, always free.

Subscribe now

Tools and knowledge are everywhere. Everyone has access to the same courses, the same AI, the same frameworks. They are no longer a competitive advantage.

Yet most founders are still stuck. Not because they lack resources. But because they keep collecting inputs without building the foundation that makes those inputs useful.

What Actually Builds a Business

There are three things that actually build a business. None of them can be downloaded, automated, or outsourced.

→ Clarity.

Knowing exactly what you are building and for who. Without it, every tool you use just helps you move faster in the wrong direction.

→ A resilient mindset.

Setbacks are coming. The founders who survive are not the ones who avoid failure, they are the ones who keep building after it. No tool can give you that.

→ Strategic decision-making.

Choosing the right thing at the right time. Most founders stay busy doing everything. The ones who grow are the ones who know what to say no to.

Once these three are in place, everything else becomes easy to gather and deploy. The tools, the knowledge, the resources, they all fall into place when the foundation is solid.

Stop searching for what is already available to everyone. Start building what only you can build.

The tool will not save you. But clarity, resilience, and the right decisions will.

Talk next Monday.

—Yassin

You can now start a digital business in a matter of weeks or days. AI can handle many aspects from coding for SaaS or websites, to content creation and ideation, research, identifying market gaps, and many more.

It has become a necessary asset. A business without AI in its operations is an outdated and a dying business.

But here is the other side.

Although AI made business a lot easier, it also made it a lot harder and more confusing. Everyone now has access to the same tools, which means there is no competitive advantage in having different inputs. Anyone can duplicate your business using AI, so potential competitors are not a percentage, they are a certainty. And some AI has literally obliterated entire businesses because it now does their job almost for free.

The question here is: where are we heading as entrepreneurs with AI?

What This Reveals

Let me tell you this. The ones who will survive long enough in the market are the ones who utilize AI in the right and most unique way possible. And here comes the real part, the ones who think beyond, who look at the bigger picture, who stay curious about the everyday developments.

The majority are not utilizing AI to its full potential. Even if they are able to build a full business with it, that is not a sign it is fully utilized. Even AI-producing companies like OpenAI and Anthropic claim that AI is advancing heavily while the majority are not utilizing its full capabilities. That gap is your opportunity. Because once you use it better, it helps you make your business better.

The focus now should not be business first, then AI integration later. That is a losing strategy. You should do both in parallel. AI should become a cornerstone and part of the foundation.

Treat it as your co-founder.

That does not mean use every AI tool out there. It means use the ones that are always developing and the ones that suit your needs. For example, I use only three: Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Each has its own role and strong point. No more, no less. But I try every day to utilize their capabilities and reach their maximum potential.

I started using AI when it first came out. I will be totally honest, I was terrible. I thought I was using it correctly, but I was not.

Then I started learning slowly. Prompt engineering to get unique and more effective results. AI agents and how to use them in automations. Generation models. How to adjust AI for my needs and train it on my own data. And I am still learning more while writing this. I will not stop until AI is outdated, which is not happening of course.

Let me share how I actually use it. I have a project file in Claude where I created documents and guides of what I do and what I am building. I added instructions inside the Claude settings itself, then additional specified instructions inside the project. I created different chats for different purposes to keep things organized. I have a side folder in Notion that includes my prompts, and I invest time weekly in engineering super effective prompts to stay ahead. I test the majority of them and just tinker around.

This is what helps me work four hours per day without breaking a sweat while protecting my focus. My other AI models like Gemini and Perplexity I use for other purposes like research and media generation, each with their own adjustments.

Here is what I realized. In different aspects like research, scenario planning, and strategy, I was ahead of many people I talk to who use the same exact models as me.

Not because I am smarter. But because I invested in utilization and looked beyond how I can use AI more creatively.

The System Behind It

There is a saying: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

This translates to AI as well. If you have no clarity or understanding, if your foundation is weak, AI helps you weaken it even more and make it more shaky. But if you have all of that sorted out, AI becomes a booster.

Consider AI as your multiplier. But know that it is not a solution for everything. There is always a part on your side that helps direct its potential.

Know this and you will build amazing things with AI.

Now here is how to think about it practically. Consider your AI as your super intelligent employee. But like any employee, it needs training and guidance.

This is how you make your AI unique to you. Provide it with guide documents about what you do. Make it learn. Its general knowledge is generic and will not help you stand out. The more precise you are, the better the results.

Train it. Make it better. Continuously.

How to Use This

I am not going to share a step-by-step guide on how to use AI. That is not the goal of this writing.

I will share something different.

You do not need to learn every AI tool. You need to learn how to think with AI.

That is the whole idea. It all depends on how you think of it. Your ceiling is your thinking, not the AI.

Avoid moving with the crowd. Test AI capabilities yourself. Try things on your own. No one out there has it mastered. Everyone is exploring.

So you explore too. You never know what you will reach.

AI is not the future of business. It is already the present.

The founders who will thrive are not the ones with the best tools. They are the ones with the best thinking behind those tools.

Start training your AI the way you would train your best employee. And never stop learning how to use it better.

The gap between you and everyone else is not access. It is utilization.

Talk next Friday.

—Yassin

What if it’s not about the right answer, but the right question?

This is what the majority does today.

They use AI to find answers. They ask people who have done it before. They consume content from anyone who seems to have figured it out.

The result? They get an answer or advice, but it just does not get them the same result they see online.

I love talking to people and asking them how they perceive solutions when they are facing problems. Most of the time, I get the same answer:

“I just need the right strategy, mentor, tool, course...”

And you can’t blame them. It is logical to look for answers with people or things that solve your problem.

When we are kids, we always seek answers from our parents or older siblings. We carry that same instinct into business.

Why These Answers Miss the Point

Does that mean you got wrong answers from the people who have done it?

No. That is not the reason behind the failure of the answer or advice.

The reason was that you were asking the wrong question in the first place, which led to an answer you did not need.

For example, I got asked multiple times this question: “Why can’t I get more clients or target my audience?”

My answer to this would always be to pay more attention to the marketing aspect and how distribution works.

Although what they are actually facing is a clarity issue. Here is how they could have asked the question a bit better for themselves, even before asking me:

“Are we aware of who we want to help and how we will do it? Are we aware of the problem we are solving for the audience?”

Now the question they should ask me after answering those for themselves:

“How can we gain better clarity on who we serve to create better marketing and distribution that suits our target audience?”

See the difference?

That is the effect of asking the right questions. Not just to others, but to yourself first.

The Deeper Truth

Let me tell you the hard truth.

No one will train you or teach you how to ask the right questions. Either you are born talented enough where your brain is wired in a way that naturally asks the right questions, or you learn with experience, which takes a long time. Yet still, you will never be aware that this is a skill.

It is just a matter of epiphany, awareness, and luck to stumble across something that lights this idea up in your mind.

No school, college, or job will train you to do that or even tell you. Unless you have an amazing and experienced manager who is highly intelligent.

Let me drift a bit away from the business landscape now and tell you that this is not just for business. It is for your life with all its aspects.

Better questions don’t just give you better answers. They change the direction of your entire life.

That is the greater picture you should see here.

The Question Upgrade Framework

Now let me give you something practical to walk away with.

Three filters. Run any question through them before you go looking for answers.

→ Filter 1: Flip the assumption.

Every question you ask carries a hidden assumption. Before you solve anything, identify what you are assuming is true.

“How do I get more clients?” assumes you need more clients. But do you? Or do you need better clients who pay more and stay longer?

One question targets volume. The other targets leverage. Same topic, completely different direction.

→ Filter 2: Ask “Why” before “How.”

Founders love “how” questions because they feel productive. How do I grow? How do I scale? How do I build an audience?

But “how” without “why” is just busy work with direction.

Before asking “How do I grow my audience?” ask “Why do I want a bigger audience and what will it actually change?” You will realize that most of the time, you are chasing the wrong metric.

→ Filter 3: Ask “What would make this irrelevant?”

This is the one that changes everything.

Instead of solving problems, question whether the problem should exist at all. Instead of “How do I manage my time better?” ask “What would I need to change so time management stops being a problem?”

This forces you to think in systems instead of band-aids. And that is where real progress lives.

What Changes When You See This

Let me show you a few more examples to make this click.

Wrong question: “How do I get more followers?” Right question: “What would make one person share my work with ten others?” → Shifts your focus from vanity to value.

Wrong question: “What tool should I use?” Right question: “What problem am I actually trying to solve?” → Stops the endless tool-hopping cycle.

Wrong question: “How do I find more time?” Right question: “What am I doing that I should stop doing entirely?” → Subtraction beats addition. Every time.

Wrong question: “How do I scale faster?” Right question: “What breaks first if I 2x tomorrow?” → Exposes the real bottleneck instead of hiding it.

You see the pattern here?

The right question does not give you a better answer. It gives you a better problem to solve. And better problems lead to better businesses.

Here is what I want you to do right now.

Pick the one decision you have been stuck on this week. Write down the question you have been asking yourself about it.

Now run it through the three filters.

Flip the assumption. Ask why before how. Ask what would make it irrelevant.

I guarantee you the new question will point you somewhere completely different.

The answers were never the problem. Your questions were.

Talk next Monday.

—Yassin

I realized that, especially on a platform like LinkedIn.

You write a piece of content that is similar to a popular creator. Sometimes you even publish it before they do. Then you compare your results to theirs.

You start falling into imposter syndrome. You feel incapable.

This is the fastest way to quit early on.

Here is the untold truth to keep in your mind. The majority of the people who are ahead of you were once in your exact place. They are not different from you. Just ahead of you.

What This Reveals

Social media was built for connecting. But it became about posting the highlight.

Seeing continuous highlights gives you the perception that everyone is living an amazing life, looking amazing, making X amount of money.

But this is just one moment in the day. In one day of the week. In one week of the month.

While you are busy comparing, you are not doing the things that actually matter and move the needle.

That is what the majority need to accept.

When I started my first business idea, I started it because I saw all those people who talked about affiliate marketing showing a tremendous amount of profits.

So I started. But I did not even catch 10% of the highlight profits I saw online that made me start in the first place.

I did not realize I was being influenced by this while I was creating content for my affiliate programs. I felt pretty down.

Until I had this moment. In real life, I never compare myself to others. I just compare myself today with who I was yesterday.

Why should social media be any different?

The System Behind It

Here is what nobody tells you about timelines.

Every founder you admire went through a phase you never saw. The messy phase. The zero results phase. The “is this even going to work?” phase.

Social media erased that part of the story. You only see the after. Never the before.

So you start measuring your day one against their year three. And when your results do not match, you assume something is wrong with you.

Nothing is wrong with you. You are just comparing timelines that were never meant to be compared.

How to Think Differently

You do not need a system for this. You need a shift.

→ Stop measuring sideways. The only comparison that matters is you today versus you yesterday. That is it. If you moved forward, even slightly, you won.

→ Remember what you did not see. Every highlight you see online has years of invisible work behind it. You are not behind. You are just not seeing the full picture.

→ Protect your momentum. Comparison does not just feel bad. It makes you change direction. You start chasing what worked for someone else instead of building what works for you. Stay in your lane.

Your timeline is yours. Stop borrowing someone else’s and wondering why it does not fit.

The founders who make it are not the ones who moved the fastest. They are the ones who kept moving.

Your pace is not the problem. Losing trust in it is.

Stay on your timeline. It is the only one that was built for you.

Talk next Friday.

—Yassin

It actually never was about money only; it always was about more than that, even if we go back in time.

It just became even clearer today that it is not. But still, people never realize that. This is why the majority give up or don’t survive long enough in the market.

Yet, still, monetary value is important for you to live your dream life; no one is denying that.

Let’s understand a bit more why monetary value isn’t enough alone, and then tell you what is missing. Also, share a framework to improve your thinking process, in helping you identify your why when deciding to build your own thing.

Building for money is short-term thinking

Money is an essential thing in life, it buys us the things we want, makes us look well, eat well, and overall makes our loved ones happy.

But here is the catch: of course, we want what is built to be profitable. But focusing only on money is actually confirmation of this idea that it isn’t gonna survive long enough.

You see, when you think from a monetary perspective, you focus on revenue and net profit only, you forget other metrics and elements to measure.

This is a business death trap.

Many businesses stay unprofitable for months, even years, or on low revenue, but they keep going because they trust the process. Because they know that there are other elements and variables to consider.

So, what is this thing?

It is a fulfillment to wake up every day excited to build and grow the thing you’re working on.

Sounds easy and simple, but why majority not build something that fulfills them?

How fulfillment transforms our building process

When you build something that is meaningful to you, that is focused on making you go to bed excited for the next day, it will drive you to monetary value no matter what.

You see, when you work on something that fulfills you, it fuels you to make it better and get even more creative as well as innovative with it.

Most importantly, it makes your business live longer, because you’ll always take care of the business for the purpose you believed that made you fulfilled, not just for making quick money or cash.

And let’s be honest, in today’s world, the number one goal of any business should be to survive in the fast-moving market we live in.

Fulfillment should be your “why” for starting a business.

I will share a very common methodology on how to understand your why, and give you an idea of what business idea would drive your inner genius.

Probably you heard about it before “Ikigai”:

Follow this framework, print it, or draw it on a canvas, and fill it.

You’ll get a clearer view of what you truly want.

How to think long-term after knowing your “why”

I read Simon Sinek’s Infinite Game book 4 years ago. I cannot lie, this book helped me a lot in improving my thinking process. So, shoutout to him for his remarkable work.

After understanding your why, your full picture vision still might be focused on short-term results, and as we said, today it is about survival.

Here is a framework I use to improve my thinking process to cover short-term, mid-term and long term.

I call it the “10, 10 and 5”, which is I need to evaluate a decision in those terms:

• Will I regret this decision after 10 mins?

• How do I expect it will go in the following 10 months, will it be worth it?

• Does it help me get to where I want to be in 5 years?

Of course, questions can be adapted based on your situation, those are more of the general ones that suit the majority of situations.

The moral is evaluate it on those 3 different periods 10 mins, 10 months, 5 years.

My final words…

Don’t follow the crowd in what the majority are building, always adjust everything to your own taste. Because if you build something you do not like, you’ll just focus on what it will yield in terms of money, but it will burn you out at the end.

Build something meaningful, something that excites you, something that will live.

Focus on meaning more, and money will come along. Use Ikigai.

You can use my time-lapse decision-making framework, or create yours

Wishing you best of luck in your current project!

Talk next Monday!

Everyone’s talking about success. What it looks like. How to get it. Who has it.

But nobody’s talking about what success actually means.

They show you the roles. The money. The status. The highlight reels.

And most founders believe that’s the goal. Get the title. Hit the revenue number. Show the world you made it.

But here’s what I’ve learned from the mentors who’ve shaped my thinking:

Your beliefs about success matter more than your skills.

You can be the most talented founder in the room. But if your beliefs about success are wrong, you’ll build something that looks impressive and feels empty.

Today, I’m sharing 5 beliefs that will reshape how you think about success and make you unshakable along the way.

What most people miss about success

Here’s the pattern I see:

Founders chase what they think success is supposed to look like.

They build businesses for the wrong reasons. They optimize for metrics that don’t matter. They sacrifice what actually makes life worth living.

And when they “make it,” they realize they built a prison, not freedom.

The problem isn’t lack of skill. It’s the belief system driving the work.

If you believe success is about status, you’ll chase roles that drain you.

If you believe success is about money, you’ll optimize for revenue at the cost of meaning.

If you believe success is about perfection, you’ll never start.

Your beliefs determine your actions. Your actions determine your outcomes.

So let’s fix the beliefs.

The 5 beliefs that will make you unshakable

1. Success is about freedom, not status

Most founders chase titles and roles. CEO. Founder. Director.

But titles don’t give you freedom. They give you expectations.

Real success is owning your time and choosing how you spend it. It’s saying no to things that don’t matter and yes to things that do.

Stop optimizing for how it looks. Start optimizing for how it feels.

2. Family and loved ones are the reason, not the reward

One of my mentors told me something that stuck:

“Work is important for meaning and purpose. But your loved ones are the reason you do this in the first place.”

Don’t build a business that takes you away from the people you’re doing it for.

Design your life first. Build your business around it. Not the other way around.

3. Continuous improvement beats perfection

You don’t need to be the best to start.

You need to be willing to get better every day.

Most founders wait for perfection. The perfect product. The perfect pitch. The perfect moment.

Meanwhile, the ones who succeed are the ones who started messy and improved along the way.

Progress compounds. Perfection delays.

4. Meaning matters more than money

Money pays the bills. Meaning keeps you going when things get hard.

If you’re only building for revenue, you’ll burn out the moment it gets difficult.

But if you’re building something that fulfills you, something that matters, you’ll push through anything.

Build something meaningful. The money will follow.

5. Your uniqueness is your edge

Stop copying what everyone else is doing.

Success doesn’t come from following the same playbook. It comes from how you see the world differently.

Your perspective. Your experience. Your way of solving problems.

That’s what makes you stand out. That’s what people remember.

Don’t blend in. Be different.

What changes when you believe differently

When you shift your beliefs about success, everything changes.

You stop chasing what doesn’t matter.

You start building what fulfills you.

You design a life that gives you energy instead of draining it.

You become unshakable, because you’re no longer measuring success by what others think. You’re measuring it by how you feel and what you’ve built.

The skills will come. The tactics will evolve. The strategies will change.

But if your beliefs about success are solid, you’ll keep going no matter what.

So ask yourself this week:

What do I really believe success is?

And is that belief serving me, or holding me back?

Talk next Friday.

Most likely it was for you too. You had your own experience to learn from this year, same for me.

Today, I will share with you my biggest mindset shift in 2025 that I went into 2026 with...

Be excited to be bad at something new.

Reasons behind fear of starting something new

You see most of people in this world always have this fear to start something new.

Reasons are as follows:

• Fear of judgement

• Fear of failure

• Fear of being bad

But what people do not realize is that this is normal, no one has all the answers or even born with them.

This part of the process, having its own learning curve.

Judgement? Who cares, you only need to listen to the people who are ahead of you in the journey, everything else is noise.

What if you fail? Failures and setbacks are success in wearing a mask, you either stand still to face it and unmask it, or you run from it.

What if you’re bad at it? It is okay to start and be bad at it, but work on becoming neutral or good at it or the best option try to become a master.

Even talented people start out bad, just less bad than others. Only difference is, they have a better growth rate at it.

Become excited to be bad at something new

Instead of looking at it from the fear side, look at it as a challenge or a game.

Have you ever started a video game and you were good at it? Most likely no.

It takes some practice and time to become good at it, and even more time to become a master.

It is about consistency and discipline to be good at it.

This is the same concept for when starting something new, it is the same learning and slope curve.

And always know, whatever the result you’ll achieve you’ll learn something valuable along the way.

And at the end you won’t be bad at it, because you started.

Action beats anything and remember that.

So, I want you today to pick something you were scared to start, and commit to it for 90 days.

Talk next Monday.

The majority of people get super creative ideas every single day, only 1% take action upon them to create them.

This does not have to be a million or billion dollar idea, sometimes even simple things tend to stay stuck and not happen as well.

Majority of people when asked this question like when I asked you now say one of the following things:

1. Fear of failure.

2. Fear of wasting time.

3. Fear to appear vain or arrogant.

Those are the common answers I hear most of the time. The problem is that this is the external scope only. There is a deeper lens to those 3 fears.

This is what we will be focusing on today, which is how to mind shift our thoughts on how we perceive those fears and on how to turn them into fuel for creation rather than staying in the same place.

How everyone falls into the flaw in surface-level thinking of the 3 fears

Let me be clear on this, each fear of the 3 does not exist in the factual world we live in, it just lives inside our brain.

This is because, with today’s social media, it keeps showing you specific elements that reshape the real logic for you.

Take, for example, everyone sharing their highlight post or story makes you feel the majority are living their dream lives and are the happiest, which then results in you thinking you would waste time building something. Although you never think for a second that this is their highlight of a few minutes in their day, from one day in a week, from a week in a month. Who knows how they feel or what happens at other times.

Another example, you see all those influencers online, not all of them are good to be honest, and you see the criticism and negative comments they receive, you even say one yourself and share it with your friends. Then, when you start thinking of something to do or create, you start remembering those criticisms and negativity. You start fearing being perceived as arrogant or vain, or even worse, you start asking yourself how you’ll be perceived if you fail.

You see the pattern?

Everyone’s perception has changed drastically in how they view things. If we go back a few years, will you have the same doubts? The dream was to create and build something. Everyone would support and be inspired by your action.

But today it is different, and it is okay, nothing stays the same forever.

How to perceive the 3 fears differently and turn them into your fuel for creation

What if I told you that there is a different lens that the majority miss, and only the 1% that we talked about who take action look at, and you don’t?

You see, you cannot change how people think or perceive things, but you can change your own. That is what will make you stronger, more resilient, and guarantee long-term success.

But what about the people? People’s perception changes from time to time, you just have to focus on your goal, and along the way, people will align with it.

Here is the different lens to perceive the 3 fears and turn them into fuel to your creative genius and resilience:

1] Fear of failure:

Shocking truth the fear of failure is just a mask worn by a deeper fear…

The fear of judgement… Either by the public or those whose opinions matter.

You see, there is nothing bad about failure; it is part of the process. Every setback or failure is just one step towards success… Sounds like a paradox I know but it is true.

In terms of the majority of people, let me tell you this: people are influenced by today’s social media and norms, like what we talked about. For the people who matter, add to the previous the element of care.

Think of it this way… ask these questions:

• Who are you doing this for?

Answer must be you.

• How many successful people out there were called out, yet they ignored, kept going and got on top, now they’re idolized?

Answer must be a lot.

Those 2 questions should be enough for you to reconsider your thinking towards the fear of failure, or as we agreed upon in other words the deeper one the fear of judgement.

2] Fear of wasting time:

Remember the highlight posts or stories you saw? The majority of these people are actually busy the rest of the time. Busy doing something that adds value to them, the value that is then perceived by you through their posts.

Putting the effort to create something is not a waste of time; it is an investment. An investment for your idea to make it come to life, and an investment for you to become better, more knowledgeable, and more experienced.

Also, look at it from the perspective that you’re being busy doing things that add value to your life, even if that value isn’t instant, then look at it as a long-term investment in your happiness.

Time is an asset, and it is used in every aspect of our lives, so make the most of it.

3] Fear to appear vain or arrogant:

The influencer world has grown rapidly in the last decade. Personal opinion, the majority aren’t the greatest. Yet they are at the top.

Why? Because they just stayed consistent in being who they are when documenting their journey, some did not resonate and criticized, others saw something that resonated and supported every single day.

You see, sharing your journey or documenting it isn’t arrogance or showy, unless you make it that way. It is more about transparency and being real.

Some will hate, and some will follow. You cannot change that, nor can you change how people will perceive your journey. What you can do is to stay consistent with your journey and documentation.

One day, when you reach there, all the doubters will come back because you’ll be the real deal then.

See, this is how it goes. So, don’t focus much on people’s comments, be who you are, show care to those who do support and make them part of it.

The real 2 questions to ask yourself now…

After seeing the different lenses on how to approach the fears that were stopping you, and on how you can make them your fuel.

The real 2 questions now are:

1- Will you take action?

2- Is it really about the fears or about commitment and discipline?

Those 2 questions are the second step after bypassing the fears, as sometimes there are greater forces behind those fears that push it to face you.

Think about it. Let me know in the comments, or you can DM me for a quick conversation.

Talk next Friday.

Not because you’re out of ideas. It’s because you’re out of interest.

In this email, you’ll discover how to recognize when your passion shifts to obligation. You’ll also find tips to help your creativity grow again instead of fading away.

Because if you fall into this phenomenon’s trap, you won’t grow in a market where everyone is loud and creativity is the only real way to stand out.

Your creativity fuels what you love

Creativity is a complementary element to doing your passion. The more you do what you love, the more creativity you want to bring to the table.

Now imagine this in today’s business world. Markets are full and entry requirements are easier than ever, so creativity is what helps you stand out from the noise.

But when that passion slowly becomes an obligation, creativity doesn’t scream. It just quietly dies.

This is what happened to me.

My story: When obligation kills creativity

When I went into the business world, I wanted to build something. So I took action and built my affiliate marketing business.

I made a lot of money. I was very creative, especially in fitness, because I had a strong interest in it and everything around it.

Then one day, I woke up and realized the work I was doing no longer felt like passion. It felt like an obligation.

My creativity died. And I stopped that business.

I got interested in ecommerce and dropshipping, so I invested some of the money I made from affiliate marketing.

Guess what: after some time and some profits, it started to feel like an obligation as well.

And it didn’t just happen once. This same pattern repeated itself in the next businesses and projects I touched.

I thought I had no clarity. In some phases that was true, but there was something deeper going on.

After helping over 30+ startups, I finally saw it. That was the “aha” moment.

Why most founders get stuck

You start with passion, filled with creativity. But over time, that same passion slowly fades.

It’s not because you suddenly hate what you do. It’s because you outgrew it, but you kept forcing yourself to stay.

Our minds love challenges. They love to discover, build, and solve.

Most founders get stuck when the business stops being a challenge but stays on their calendar. The mind is done, but the ego and the bills keep you locked in.

So the work becomes obligation. And your creativity quietly shuts down as a defense mechanism.

How to reignite your creativity

→ Tactic 1 – Audit your energy:

Write down every major project or business you’re involved in right now. Label each one with a simple tag: “passion”, “obligation”, or “both”.

→ Tactic 2 – Reduce obligation work:

For everything that feels like pure obligation, ask: can I eliminate it, simplify it, or batch it so it takes less creative bandwidth? Often, the problem isn’t the whole business it’s the way you’re running it.

→ Tactic 3 – Delegate or build a small team:

If the business still matters but drains you, start building a team or delegation system to run the day-to-day. Your role should shift from “operator doing everything” to “builder designing the next challenge”.

→ Tactic 4 – Design your next challenge:

Give your mind a new game to play. Define one new creative challenge a new offer, format, product, or business angle that genuinely makes you eager to sleep so you can wake up and work on it tomorrow.

The truth: You outgrew your old passion

Your creativity rarely disappears. It refuses to fuel a game you’ve already outgrown.

Growth demands that you outgrow old identities, not cling to them. When your passion turns into obligation, it’s usually a signal that it’s time to evolve, not a sign that you’re broken.

So here’s the question: Where in your business are you still forcing yourself to play a game your creativity has already outgrown?

Talk next Saturday.