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I was reflecting on my academic education and it is funny that I used think the solution to every problem was simply to just try harder.

Can’t solve the math equation? Stay up later. Code not working? Bang your head against it for another hour. Essay not coming together? Just push through the mental fog.

Looking at a problem set, telling myself that if I just persevered a little more, I could make this work. But at 2am, we all know that the brain has already shut off. It’s not persevering, it’s just spiraling into a pit while reframing it as determination.

We were trained to think that if something isn’t working, we’re not trying hard enough. If it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t count. “No pain, no gain”. As if the universe keeps a ledger of our misery and pays us back in achievement points.

We’re encouraged to do hard things, and that’s good. Hard things are often worth doing. But we confuse hardness with suffering. The hardness of a problem is subjective. Multiplication is trivial to you but unfathomable to a six-year-old. True difficulty should come from the inherent challenge of the problem itself, not from using an inefficient approach to solve it. There’s a difference between productive difficulty and pointless suffering.

This mindset becomes particularly dangerous when combined with timeline pressure. It creates a dangerous cycle. When our initial approach fails, the “failure is not an option” mentality kicks in and we would rather double down on failing approaches than exploring alternatives. Each hour invested becomes a sunk cost, justifying another hour.

To break this cycle, I often ask myself if there’s a simpler way, and usually there is. Rubber duck debugging (explaining the problem to a rubber duck) forces me to articulate assumptions I didn’t realize I was making. Often the solution becomes obvious mid-explanation.

The world doesn’t need more exhausted people grinding through ineffective methods. It needs more people to recognize when grinding isn’t working and to find approaches that are effective and sustainable.

The goal isn’t to eliminate all struggles. It’s to struggle intelligently by trying differently, not harder.

I like asking people what they’ve changed their mind about recently. It’s a question that cuts through small talk.

For me, I’ve started believing in God.

I used to be confidently atheist and my favorite way to think about it is using Ricky Gervais’s example about how Christians don’t believe in 2,999 other gods while atheists don’t believe in just one more. Or his vampire analogy on addressing “what if god exist”: just as we don’t hang garlic outside our doors just because Dracula might be real.

The scientific worldview seemed complete. Atoms can’t actually touch each other due to electromagnetic repulsion, so how could spirits pass through walls? Everything had explanations rooted in physics and chemistry.

What puzzled me was how many brilliant scientists believed in God. These weren’t people who ignored evidence. They understood falsifiability. Yet somehow they found room for faith alongside rigorous thinking.

That got me thinking about half-lives of facts. Facts decay over time. The Earth was flat until it wasn’t. Continents were fixed until plate tectonics. The universe was static until Hubble showed it expanding. Each generation looks back at previous certainties, never wondering what current beliefs might seem equally wrong later.

So I started with a thought experiment and assumed God exists. What would that look like?

Here’s what struck me as odd. Across religions, gods take on the form of human or animal. If God created humans and animals, then by definition God can’t be them. But if God is omnipotent, then form becomes a choice rather than a constraint. God could appear as anything.

Why not a dinosaur god? Something that ruled Earth for 165 million years before making room for mammals, then humans, then whatever comes next. The image appeals to me 🦕.

Maybe the question isn’t about God’s existence, but about the limitations of certainty. Science excels at describing how things work, but “how” and “why” are different questions.

It’s obvious that this is not a proof. But it has changed my mind about being certain that materialistic explanations exhaust reality.

It’s interesting when we practice holding strong beliefs loosely. So … what have you changed your mind about recently?

The other day I was watching the sunset, one of those especially vivid ones, and I realized something: this is the same sunset a billionaire might be watching right now.

That seems obvious, but it surprised me. Because in most comparisons, billionaires live in a different world. People use them as a kind of measuring stick, even though it’s not a very healthy one. Still, that’s how most people think: what would life be like if I had everything?

We’re told, again and again, that some limits don’t go away no matter how rich you are. You’ll still age. You’ll still die. You don’t get to pick where you’re born. These are the fixed boundaries.

But there are more shared experiences than people usually realize. And a lot of them don’t scale with wealth.

Natural phenomena like sunsets and sunrises. The sound of waves crashing. Looking up at the stars. These experiences don’t care how much money you have. They’re available to almost everyone.

The same goes for certain feelings. The calm after helping someone. The mental clarity after a long walk. The kind of laughter you only get from being around kids or close friends.

And just as there are joys that money can’t amplify, there are discomforts billionaires can’t avoid. A wet sock feels just as bad whether you’re rich or poor.