Anthropic’s Economic Index dropped quietly that month - the kind of research paper that ends up in industry decks six weeks later once someone figures out what it actually says. I’ve been sitting with it for a couple of weeks. I think it’s the most important number I’ve read this year.

revenue as a working engineer. Numbers are real and posted publicly every
week

Here’s the number: 0.92.

That’s the correlation between prompt quality and productivity outcome, holding tool use constant. In plainer English: once two developers are using the same model, the single variable that explains whether they ship in a day or a week is how they write the prompt.

Not their typing speed. Not their framework. Not their prior experience. The prompt.

I’ll come back to that. First the part that made me actually close my laptop and stare at the wall.

Augmentation Mode

52% of Claude.ai users are now in “augmentation” mode.

Last year the headline use case was task delegation - write this function, draft this email, summarize this document. You told the model what to do, it did the thing, you checked and shipped.

This year, more than half of Claude.ai sessions are conversational. Back-and-forth. Thinking-with. The user is not handing off a task; they’re using the model as a second brain that talks back.

That sounds small. It isn’t. It’s a different product being used by different people for a different reason.

The sign this has really shifted is quieter: the top 10 use cases dropped from 24% of all traffic to 19%. That doesn’t sound like much. It means the tail of “what people use this for” has exploded. The long tail is now bigger than the head. People are using Claude for things nobody thought to optimize for.

Coding is still about 35% of conversations - that’s held steady - but inside coding the texture has changed. Less “write me this function.” More “I’m stuck on this architecture, let me walk you through what I’m seeing and you tell me where I’m wrong.”

The 12x number and why it’s the honest one.

Anthropic reports that college-level tasks now complete roughly 12x faster
than a year ago. High-school-level tasks, 9x.

I want to be careful about this. A lot of AI productivity claims dissolve on contact with a working engineer’s actual week. But 12x on a cohort of measurable cognitive tasks, controlled for model version - that’s not a vibe. That’s compression.

• A week becomes an afternoon.

• An afternoon becomes an hour.

The METR study last year said developers with AI were 19% slower than developers without. That was the contrarian stat of 2025. Same cohort, recut this year: 18% faster. Same developers, same tools. What changed is how they were using them.

That’s the 0.92 number showing up in the field. The people who got good at prompting compounded. The people who didn’t stayed where they were - or got worse, because they stopped trusting their own instincts and started trusting someone else’s autocomplete.

The trap.

Here’s where I have to be honest about where I’ve been. I spent most of 2024 treating AI like autocomplete. Good and fast autocomplete. But autocomplete - which is to say, I gave it small local tasks and verified the output the way you’d review a capable junior’s PR. Only in 2025 it had changed.

The problem with that workflow isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it doesn’t scale to the conversations 52% of users are now having. Autocomplete is a one-shot transaction. Augmentation is a dialogue. Those are different skills.

Writing a good prompt, I’ve come to believe, is closer to writing a good memo than to writing a good search query. It has:

• A problem statement, in the words I’d use to a smart colleague who just walked into the room.

• The context they’d need to make a judgment call, not follow a narrow instruction.

• What I’ve already tried and ruled out.

• What I specifically want back, and in what form.

When I write prompts like that, the 0.92 number shows up in my own week. When I don’t - I get exactly what I asked for, at high quality, and it turns out I was asking the wrong thing.

That last line is the whole game in 2026.

What this means for the developer who ships.

If you are a developer reading this in April 2026, you are in one of three
places.

Place one: you still treat the model as autocomplete.

Your ceiling is about a 2x productivity gain. That’s fine. That’s also where most of the industry was in early 2025, which means it’s where the value got priced already.

Place two: you treat the model as a pair.

You think out loud to it. You argue with it. You hand it 3x more context than feels necessary and you read its responses like you’d read a smart colleague’s memo. Your ceiling is the 12x cohort.

Place three: you’re using the model to ship businesses, not just code.

Product decisions, pricing, copy, support scripts, positioning. You’re not a better coder. You’re a one-person company.

Place three is the Indie Hacker Renaissance I wrote about Friday. Place two is what the DORA report found in mature teams. Place one is most of tech, and it’s the seat that gets squeezed between the other two as the year goes on.

Moving between these places is not a skill ceiling. It’s a habit change. It’s how you start a conversation with the model on Monday morning.

Where I am.

I’m writing this week-one of a Substack relaunch, with $6 of online product revenue for the year. I’m not in place three yet, even though I have systems setup for myself. I’m climbing from place two to place three in public, with audit numbers posted every week.

Part of what I’ve been building - quietly, mostly on weekends - is the prompt library I wish I’d had in 2025. Not a list of “10 ChatGPT prompts for developers.” The actual prompts I use to take a product idea from “I’d build that” to “someone paid for it.”

• Pricing conversations with the model.

• Positioning dialogues.

• Launch day orchestration.

That’s the Ship & Sell Kit.

It launches Next week. Founding price $29 for the first 50 seats. The waitlist is this Substack - if you’re reading this, you’re on it.

I’m pricing it deliberately low because the point this quarter is not revenue. The point is feedback from the first cohort while I still remember what it was like in place one.

One thing to watch this week.

Stripe Sessions 2026 is in San Francisco April 29–30. The expected reveal is Managed Payments going generally available. If you’re past $5K MRR and still on the old Connect flow, that announcement is going to change your architecture diagram.

I’ll cover it on Wednesday.

Until then:

1. write your prompts like memos.

2. Argue with the model.

The 0.92 isn’t a ceiling. It’s an invitation.

The Engineer of Wealth is a weekly transparency report on building online
revenue as a working engineer. Numbers are real and posted publicly every
week.

That silence is the entire bill for everything you shipped on Friday.

For the last eighteen months, the loudest message in our industry has been:

• it doesn’t matter.

• Vibe code it.

• Prompt your way through.

Ship it Friday, fix it never, the model will handle the rest.

Andrej Karpathy coined the phrase “vibe coding” almost as a half-joke, and the half that wasn’t a joke became a movement. Ninety-two percent of developers in 2026 have adopted some flavor of AI-assisted, prompt-driven development. We are all vibe coders now.

It looks ridiculous when we compare it to overall adoption between sectors. Developers are lapping everyone.

Except the bills are coming due.

A Medium analysis published this April put the numbers in front of us.

• Forty-one percent of code generated by AI assistants gets churned - rewritten or thrown away - within two weeks of being merged.

• Duplication is up four-fold compared to pre-2024 codebases

• 1.5 million record API key breach traced back to vibe-coded applications - and that’s the most expensive lesson of the year so far.

The pattern the model produced was not wrong. It was generic. And the developer who shipped it did not know enough about API key handling to recognize what was missing.

That last sentence is the entire essay. Let me show you why.

Vibe coding optimized for the demo, not the system

Vibe coding is, in the cleanest definition I can give you, the practice of treating the model as the engineer and yourself as the product manager.

1. You describe what you want, the model writes it, you skim it, you ship it.

2. If something breaks, you describe the break, the model patches it, you re-skim, you re-ship.

For a certain class of problem, this works astonishingly well. Throwaway scripts. Internal tools that three people will use.

Weekend prototypes that are really just thinking-out-loud in code form. I have built dozens of these in the last year. So have you.

The trap is what happens when one of those weekend prototypes gets traction.

Vibe coding does not optimize for the things that distinguish a prototype from a system. It does not optimize for what happens when the second user logs in at the same moment as the first. It does not optimize for what happens when the third-party API rate-limits you on a Tuesday afternoon. It does not optimize for the migration you will need to run six months from now on a table that suddenly has fifty
thousand rows in it.

It optimizes for the demo. And demos do not survive Monday morning
production traffic.

The 4x duplication number is the smoking gun

Read past the headline figure - 41% churn - and look at the duplication number. Four times the duplication of pre-2024 codebases. That is not a quality metric. That is a forensic fingerprint.

Duplication at that scale only happens when nobody in the loop knows what already exists in the codebase.

1. The model does not know because the model has a context window, not a memory.

2. The developer does not know because the developer has been outsourcing the act of knowing for the last eighteen months.

I have been writing code for fourteen years. I am currently a Staff Ruby Engineer for a Singapore-based client, and the single most valuable thing I do in that role is not write code. It is to remember.

• I remember which service owns which queue.

• I remember why the retry logic on the payments path was rewritten in 2024.

• I remember the conversation we had about the index that nobody wanted to add and the production incident eight months later that proved we should have added it.

That memory is not nostalgia. That memory is leverage. It is the reason a senior engineer can walk into a meeting and save the team a week of work in fifteen minutes.

And it is exactly the thing vibe coding cannot do for you, no matter how sophisticated the model is, because the relevant context is not in any document the model has ever
seen.

For two years, that kind of memory looked like overhead.

In 2026, it is the moat.

Share Engineer of Wealth

Why the senior engineer era is back

The discourse this spring has shifted hard. The JetBrains developer survey published this month tells the story from a different angle:

Claude Code’s adoption has climbed from 3% to 18% in nine months, with an NPS of 54 - the highest in the market. And the developers driving that adoption are not juniors looking for a shortcut. They are the senior engineers who already know what good code looks like and have figured out how to use the model to write more of it without sacrificing the thing that made them senior in the first place.

The pattern that keeps showing up in every honest postmortem I read is the same one.

The engineers getting the most out of AI in 2026 are the engineers who could have written the code themselves and chose not to, because they knew what to ask for, what to verify, and what to throw away.

The engineers getting hurt are the ones who let the model fill in the parts of their judgment they had not built yet.

That is not a story about AI being bad.

That is a story about leverage being the wrong word for what vibe coding actually was. It was not leverage. It was a loan. And the interest just came due.

If you are 30+ and quietly worried, read this part twice

If you are reading this and you are a senior engineer who has spent the last year quietly worried that your fourteen years of pattern-matching, your scar tissue, your habit of asking “but what happens at 3 a.m. when this fails” - that all of it was about to be commoditized by a model with a better context window - I want to tell you something specific.

You are early.

You are not late to AI. You are early to the version of the industry where the people who can actually verify what the model produces become the most valuable engineers in the room. The 41% churn number is going to get worse before it gets better. The duplication number is going to get worse before it gets better.

And every one of those numbers is a job posting waiting to be written for someone who can read code and tell whether it is real.

The thing you have been told for two years - that your experience is depreciating in real time - was never true. It was a sales pitch from people who needed you to feel that way so the tools could be priced as a replacement instead of a complement.

Your experience just became the scarce resource.

The question is what you are going to do with it.

The honest part

Here is the honest thing I will tell you, because the only currency I am building this newsletter on is honesty: I have been writing code for fourteen years and my current online business has made $5 to date. That $5 is not a metaphor. It is a number on a Lemon Squeezy dashboard I look at mornings.

The reason I am telling you that is because the gap between “fourteen years of senior engineering” and “$1 of online revenue” is not a code gap.

It never was.

It is exactly the gap the vibe coding crowd was selling a fake bridge across. The actual bridge - the one I am walking across right now in public - is the thing nobody wants to talk about because it is unsexy and slow and involves

• writing landing pages

• email sequences

• posting on platforms where the engagement is humbling.

That is why I built automateideasai.com - an AI-powered tool that validates your product idea against market fit, competitors, and audience before you write a single line of code. Free to explore, pay to go deeper.

Because the actual bridge between “fourteen years of senior engineering” and “$1 of online revenue” is not building faster. It is knowing what to build. That is the step most of us skip, and it is the one that turns vibe-coded weekends into actual businesses.

If you have been waiting for the right moment to stop vibe coding and start building something of your own that survives Monday morning, the moment is now. The senior engineer era is back. Your scar tissue just got expensive again.

The only question left is whether you are going to validate the idea
before you build it: https://automateideasai.com

👉 This post is a bit long, you may want to see it directly in the browser! 🙏

97% of day traders lose money long-term.

Every single one of them believed they were skilled. They watched a few YouTube tutorials, nailed two trades in a row, and concluded they’d cracked the market. Then they blew up their accounts faster than you can say “leveraged long.”

A few things worth knowing about this statistic: the 97% figure comes from studies of retail traders, The losses aren’t evenly distributed either - many of the 97% lose far more than the 3% gain, because the winners are often institutions, algorithms, or early holders with structural advantages.

This isn’t just about trading though. It’s about how most people misread success in EVERY SINGLE DOMAIN - business, career, investing, health. Someone gets a lucky break and builds an entire identity around a streak that was statistically inevitable for someone. Just not repeatable for them.

So let’s break it down.

When you think about beating the market, do you wonder who will you compete with?

1. Professional Wall Street investors

2. Insiders

3. Institutions

4. Early Holders

5. Project’s Developers

6. Algorithms and advanced bot alerts.

This looks so unfair, it’s hard even to articulate. Still, people think they can be smarter after watching a few videos on youtube. And the funny thing is, it works out for someone, sometimes, and every here and there for someone else - just because of how probability works.

Here’s the core truth most people refuse to accept:

Variance hides skill in the short run and reveals it in the long run.

Short-term results are noisy. Long-term results are brutally honest. And the difference between the two is where fortunes are made - and lost.

I touched on this idea briefly in Life Is a Badly Designed Game (Section 3: Skill > Luck Over Time). Today, we’re going deep.

The Luck-Skill Spectrum

Not everything in life sits neatly on one side. Most activities are a blend of skill and luck - the question is how much of each.

Michael Mauboussin, in The Success Equation, built a framework for exactly this. He mapped activities on a continuum from pure luck (slot machines) to pure skill (chess). Most of life sits somewhere in the messy middle.

Disclaimer: Even Chess requires luck. Your opponent may have just a bad day.

Sports data makes this tangible:

• NBA outcomes are 85-90% explained by skill. The best teams almost always win.

• NFL outcomes are roughly 62% skill. Any given Sunday, a mediocre team can beat a great one. But over a full season? Talent rises.

• Poker, over 1,500+ hands, shows skilled players earning roughly 10x what unskilled players earn. Over 10 hands? Anything goes.

Kahneman nailed it: ”A good process will usually have a good outcome, but only over longer periods of time.”

There’s also a paradox here that most people miss. As the average skill level in a field rises, luck explains more of the difference between winners in the short term. When everyone is good, the margins shrink and randomness fills the gap.

But if you zoom out?

The compounding effect of even tiny skill edges becomes overwhelming.

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The Math - Why Time Is the Great Separator

It’s a shame that most people do not understand statistics, but because of that we’ve great advantage.

The Law of Large Numbers states that as the number of trials increases, average outcomes converge to the expected value. Variance shrinks toward zero.

In plain English: flip a coin 10 times - you might get 8 heads. Below each dot represents 10 coin flips run.

Flip it 10,000 times - you’ll land very close to 50/50. The same principle applies to skill expression in any domain. Below, you can see each dot representing 10k flips, and how final result deviates from 50%.

One quarter of great investment returns could easily be luck.

A hot streak in business - maybe the market was just favorable.

But 10 consecutive years of outperformance? The probability of that happening by chance alone approaches zero.

This is the mathematical backbone of the entire argument. Time doesn’t just reveal skill - it demands it. Every additional trial strips away another layer of noise and leaves you standing naked with your actual ability.

The coin doesn’t care about your confidence. Neither does the market.

Who else earns on markets?

At the start of this article I’ve shown you who you’ll compete with when you choose the market trading path:

1. Professional Wall Street investors

2. Insiders

3. Institutions

4. Early Holders

5. Project’s Developers

6. Algorithms and advanced bot alerts.

But the funny thing is, even from those groups, a lot of people still lose their money over time.

So WHO actually earns?

The research shows, that those, who do... nothing.

Literally. The best-performing accounts tend to belong to people who forgot they had them. There’s a famous story about a Fidelity internal study that found their top-performing accounts belonged to dead people or people who forgot they had an account. The story itself is almost certainly an urban legend - no one has ever found the original source. But the principle behind it? Backed by mountains of data.

DALBAR has been tracking investor behavior since 1994. Their 2025 report found that in 2024, the average equity investor earned 16.54% while the S&P 500 returned 25.02% - an 8.5 percentage point gap. Over 20 years, a passive $100K in the S&P 500 grew to $717,503. The average investor’s behavior reduced that to $345,614. Investors correctly timed the market direction only 25% of the time - worse than a coin flip.

Here’s an even more telling finding. Studies consistently show that women outperform men as investors - by 0.4% to 1.8% annually depending on the study. Fidelity analyzed 5.2 million accounts over a decade and confirmed it. Warwick Business School found the same with Barclays data.

The reason? Women trade about half as often.

Not better stock picks, no insider knowledge. Just... less activity. Less overconfidence.

In the curve above, it almost perfectly reflects the profit eaten by the trading cost. The consequence is, that nearly 1 full percentage point less eaten by friction annually. And the compound curve shows what that quietly adds up to over 30 years - over $100,000, generated entirely by restraint.

As Jack Bogle — the man who created index investing - put it:

“Don’t do something, just stand there!”

The mechanism is brutally simple: overconfidence → more trading → more costs and bad timing → worse returns. It works the same way whether you’re a retail trader, a hedge fund manager, or a crypto degen. The more you touch it, the more you break it.

And before the crypto crowd says “but HODL works” - yes, for Bitcoin. For the average altcoin? A study running 480 million simulations found the median HODL return was -28.4% after fees. The spectacular wins you see on Twitter are survivorship bias. For every guy who forgot about his Bitcoin and woke up a millionaire, thousands of others forgot about their altcoins and woke up with nothing.

The people who actually build wealth in markets aren’t the ones making clever moves. They’re the ones who stopped making moves altogether.

The Graveyard of Lucky Gamblers

Let’s look at where luck-dependent strategies end up.

Crypto traders: 95-98% lose money long-term. They all believe they’re skilled and smart, yet they lose life savings without understanding the math of probability. Every now and then one person gets lucky, earns tons of money, and the masses confuse that with mastery.

They completely ignore the fact that someone will always win by pure chance. That’s how probability works. If a million people flip coins, someone will get 20 heads in a row. Then they’ll start a Discord and sell a course about it.

Day traders broadly: Only 1-3% consistently beat the market. Active traders underperform passive investors by 6.5% annually. That’s not a rounding error - that’s the cost of confusing activity with skill.

Mutual fund managers - the supposed professionals: Only about 15% maintain their outperformance over 14 years. The rest regress to the mean, which is a polite way of saying they got lucky and then they didn’t.

Now here’s a comparison that hits close to home. I follow these two figures in the Polish investing/trading space: Cezary Głuch and Rafał Zaorski.

Trader21 aims for steady wealth growth. Disciplined. Methodical. Boring, if you’re the kind of person who needs adrenaline with their morning coffee.

Zaorski? He generates incredible profits. And incredible losses. He went broke multiple times. He gambled other people’s money, used extreme leverage, and was wrong more often than he was right.

As I noted when studying their approaches: ”I prefer calm, slow pace of steady increase of wealth, and I do not need to be the absolute best in the market to be satisfied.”

One strategy survives contact with time. The other survives contact with Twitter.

The Skill Builders Who Won

If time destroys lucky gamblers, it canonizes skilled practitioners. Let’s look at the evidence.

Warren Buffett beat the market in 28 out of 31 rolling periods - placing him in the 99.99th percentile. The probability of achieving this by luck alone is effectively zero. What looks like “magic” is 70+ years of compounding a genuine skill edge. He still lives in the same house he bought decades ago - because wealth built on skill doesn’t need to perform.

Annie Duke, professional poker player turned decision scientist, put it best: ”There are exactly two things that determine outcomes: luck and decision quality. Luck you can’t control. Decision quality you can.” She tells a story about Phil Ivey - one of the greatest poker players alive - who would obsess over suboptimal plays even after winning sessions. Because he understood that the outcome wasn’t the signal. The process was.

Alex Hormozi: ”Volume negates luck.” He points to Kobe Bryant, who did three practices a day while everyone else did one or two. In the beginning, Kobe was worse than his teammates. Then equal. Then better. Then untouchable. Because when you 3x your reps, you don’t just keep pace - you compound ahead. The gap becomes uncatchable.

Jim Collins, in Good to Great, found that the companies that went from good to great ”did not have a perfect track record. But on the whole, they made many more good decisions than bad ones.” Not perfection. Consistency. The Stockdale Paradox at work: retain faith that you will prevail, while confronting the brutal facts of your current reality.

Do you notice the pattern?

None of these people eliminated luck from their lives. They made it irrelevant through volume, consistency, and deliberate improvement.

The Real Skill - Staying in the Game

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that ties everything together:

Skill beats luck. But only if you don’t quit.

January 9th - that’s the day researchers found that 80% of people abandon their New Year goals. Nine days.

That’s how long most people’s “commitment” to change lasts.

On the X platform, only 0.05% of accounts have more than 1,000 followers. Not because growing an audience is impossible, but because it’s uncomfortable, unclear, and unglamorous in the early months.

The feedback loop is brutal: you post into the void, the void doesn’t clap, and your brain says “see, I told you this was pointless.”

This is where the concept of deliberate practice matters.

Anders Ericsson’s research showed it’s not 10,000 hours of anything. It’s focused, feedback-driven improvement. Engineers understand this intuitively - it’s debugging your approach, not just writing more code. It’s reviewing why your last article flopped, not just publishing another one.

Angela Duckworth formalized something useful here:

Performance = Talent x Effort²

Effort shows up twice. First, effort builds skill. Then, skill multiplied by effort produces results. This is why consistent, mediocre-talented people routinely outperform brilliant people who dabble.

And then there’s the compound interest law, as Brian Tracy put it simply: ”If you invest money and allow them to grow using compound investment mechanism, you will get rich at some point. That’s all.”

That’s it. No secrets. No hacks. Just time + skill + not quitting.

As Phil Konieczny would say - don’t try to time the peaks and valleys. Average your way across multiple cycles, and it becomes very hard not to build wealth. People just think too short-term to see it.

The Honest Nuance

I’d be lying if I told you skill always wins. There are domains where luck still dominates, and pretending otherwise is its own form of delusion.

Low-sample domains - startups, entertainment, viral content - have enormous variance. You can do everything right and still fail because the sample size is too small for skill to express itself. One product launch. One movie. One tweet. These are closer to coin flips than chess matches.

Do that, quantity negates the luck, as Ycombinator stated: 2/368 investments, following the power law of profit distribution.

Black swan events exist. Nassim Taleb’s concept of antifragility is relevant here: some systems don’t just survive disorder - they benefit from it. Building optionality, keeping reserves, positioning yourself to gain from unexpected events - that IS a skill. Perhaps the most underrated one.

And there are real trade-offs you can’t escape. Time vs. money. Freedom vs. certainty. Growth vs. comfort. As I wrote in the newsletter framework: ”Adults accept trade-offs. Children look for hacks.”

You can’t optimize for everything simultaneously. The skill is knowing which trade-offs to accept - and accepting them without resentment.

Understand, which game you’re playing on.

The Question to Sit With

To win: work on the skills and use luck when it happens. Never depend on it.

The disciplined person’s move this week is boringly simple: pick one skill. Practice it deliberately. Measure your progress. Then repeat - not for a week, not for a month, but for years. Compounding is the core engine that powers everything, and long-term players always win.

Your skill set is the only asset that can’t be inflated away, can’t be seized, and appreciates with use rather than depreciating. As Paul Jarvis wrote in Company of One: ”You have to be good at your skill set before you can expect to achieve autonomy from using it.”

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with:

Are you building skill - or just hoping your lucky streak holds?

But there’s a catch. To build anything, you need materials — and chopping a tree takes forever with your bare hands.

And you need to hurry up, because every 20 minutes the night comes and the world fills with monsters that will kill you in one hit.

That means whatever you want to collect, you’ll face the same set of problems:

1. Weak tools.

2. Lack of useful materials.

3. Options are very limited.

4. Everything takes forever.

5. Your progress is constantly interrupted — or reset — by the threat of dying.

This is what the early game looks like. You know there are endless possibilities, but to get there you have to push through real struggle: repetitive tasks, grinding for resources, slowly building survivability to the point where progress can actually stick.

It’s boring, and it’s intentional.

Most people will quit.

Most people will quit.
For any ongoing effort, most people quit. People aren’t used to working on the same thing for a long time. You can see it everywhere.

1. Most people quit the gym before January ends.

2. Most people can’t keep up a diet.

3. Most people won’t consistently save money.

4. Most people won’t publish daily for years.

It doesn’t matter what you pick — the data is always the same. Most people quit.

So if you want to build a product for recurring buys, what do you do?

As a system designer, you want to make them quit early.

Focus on long-term players

It may sound harsh, but it’s nothing personal. Game designers want to entertain players — but the real key to funding future games is keeping the game alive long enough to make money.

If most players quit early, spreading resources across everyone is a waste.

Filtering out players who won’t stick around is smart resource allocation, not cruelty.

And this is why every system tests patience first. You start with a grind.

• Posting daily for a year.

• Mining diamonds by hand in Minecraft.

At the start, most information and possibilities are hidden from you. You know nothing, you have no idea how to optimize, your tools are weak and cheap. You’re stuck doing repetitive tasks.

In real life, you start with low income, low savings, low returns, and invisible progress.

Nobody wants to collaborate with you yet, because there’s a good chance you’ll quit. Collaborators and investors run the same test - patience first.

Exactly like in games.

Early game is about surviving
Games simplify feedback. Even when progress is slow, you can measure it. Life doesn’t give you that luxury — most of us lack the metrics to look back at, and that’s how slow feedback gets mistaken for the wrong direction.

Veterans know the early phase is not about winning — it’s about surviving long enough to scale.

Here’s part of a conversation with another Substack creator, when I offered a small collaboration. It shows exactly what I mean.

If someone wants to work with you, they’ll first check whether you’re going to stick around. Do you have content? Do you publish consistently? Are you making progress?

In the end, the most valuable asset anyone has is time. And successful people do not want to waste it.

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How to not get bored early

So here is the real question. How to not get bored?

The short answer: stop expecting not to be bored.

Early game is designed to be boring and that’s the point! That’s the filter. Once you accept this as a feature - not a signal that something is wrong - you’ve already won half the battle.

But there are also practical moves that make the grind survivable.

Build your own XP bar.

Games track progress for you in their own interest! Not yours. Life doesn’t track it at all. That’s why slow progress feels like no progress at all.

The fix is simple: create your own metrics.

• Track the number of articles published.

• Track subscribers, even when it’s 12.

• Track the streak.

When you track nothing in life, you also mine blind.

I track my Substack growth every month. At 25 subscribers, it looks ridiculous. But 25 > 12, and that’s movement. In a game, that number would show on a progress bar. You’d feel it. In real life, you have to build that bar yourself.

And you may set up some little milestones to reach, that are achievable relative to where you are right now!

Play the meta, not the session.

Session-by-session thinking will destroy you. One bad night of dying to creepers looks catastrophic. But zoom out to the map you built over three months, and the single death doesn’t matter.

Same in life. One bad week with no readers, no sales, no traction. Or one week of being sick, resulting in no publication. That feels like failure.

But ask a different question: are you more capable than three months ago? Do you have more content? More proof of work? Then you’re leveling up. The session was bad. The character is stronger.

Optimize the grind.

You’re an engineer. Use it. Or if not, use other engineers’ minds.

If something is boring, the answer isn’t to quit - it’s to find the most efficient path through it. In Minecraft, you don’t hand-mine coal forever.

Instead, you craft better tools, you build a furnace, you auto-craft coal from wood - and automate the whole process. You design a mining system.

The same logic applies in reality.

• What can you template?

• What can you batch?

• What removes friction from the boring work?

You’ll be surprised how much of the early grind can be systematized - and how much less painful it becomes once you’re solving the system instead of suffering through the task.

Find other players at the same level.

Solo grinding is the hardest mode.

The Substack creator from that screenshot tested my consistency before investing time in collaboration. That’s actually the right instinct - but it also reveals something important. Other people at the same stage of the game are rare, and valuable.

You don’t look for players far ahead of you. They’re the most visible, but at the same time, they’ll make YOU feel invisible.

You don’t look for players behind you. They’ll pull your focus backward. People grinding through the same early phase - people who understand why 25 subscribers feels simultaneously tiny and meaningful - those are the ones worth finding.

They’ll hold you accountable. They’ll celebrate your first $27 sale as if it were $27,000. Because they know exactly what it took to get it.

Remember what you’re building.

Not the business. The character.

In every RPG, the hero’s journey is boring before it’s epic. But the players who make it aren’t the ones who are never bored. They’re the ones who understand what the boring is building toward.

Early game is character creation. It’s the part of your story that makes the later chapters meaningful. If you skip it or quit it, the rest of the story has no weight.

The game is designed this way on purpose. Not to punish you. Not because the designers are cruel.

Because the destination only means something to those who walked the whole path.

Keep mining.

There are 2 types of successful people. PERIODICALLY & CONTINUOUSLY successful one.

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Periodically Successful Person

The first type of successful person is is PERIODICALLY successful one. There are periods, where they have extreme or significant success, and others, when they bancrupt, loose everything they’ve built and they start over.

It’s extremely visible in the investing world. Around 95% of traders loose all the money long-term. You may hear about very successful trades, but they’re usually made BY DIFFERENT PEOPLE over time.

Here is the example what it means:

1. Today I get rich

2. Tomorrow I get bancrupted, but you’ll get rich.

3. The day after, you’ll get poor again, and someone else will have the trade of life.

However, we only hear about spectacular successes. The second part of the story is usually hidden.

But where is the hidden trouble? The first type of person, need to start over, again and again, to reach the same level of success they’ve already did in the past.

I’m not interested by that. And if you neither, keep reading!

Continuously successful person

In this article and in General, I’ll mostly talk about the second type. A person who is more and more successful over time, instead of starting over and over again.

Extraordinarily successful people rarely start from scratch. During the span of their lives, they perform smart actions that compound over time. For example, investing allows you to use the money you’ve already earned to multiply future results.

Over time, to achieve the SAME results, you need to put LESS effort. If you wish to continue pushing hard, the effects will keep multiplying.

But for that, you can’t lose that money you’ve already earned. You need health you’ve already got. You need people you’ve already helped to. And this is what I’d love to stick with you.

0 times infinity is still 0

How you’re being tricked by games

Nothing meaningful is linear. Look at games. XP, skills, gear, territory, influence - all compound. If you want to reach the next level in-game, XP feels slower the more you progress, because the progress bar stays the same while the required points explode.

Progress didn’t slow - your scale did.

If you already block 98% of incoming damage, an extra 1% doesn’t reduce damage by 1%. It cuts what’s left in half.

That’s compounding.

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Progress scale change awareness

I know, the example with defense % in games can be seen a bit odd, but Life works the same way!

Here is the chart showing Bitcoin’s price over time (Black Line).

Let’s say, I’ve:

1. Bought 1 Bitcoin in 2015, for $300.

2. Sold it in 2018 for $10k.

I’ve have got 33x of return!!!

Then compare that with this situation.

Let’s assume, I’ve:

1. Bought 1 Bitcoin in 2022, for $20k.

2. Sold it in 2025 for $120k.

In that scenario, I’d earn “barely” 6x of profit.

In the first example, I’d earn $9,7k, in the second: $100k

It’s not visible from the chart, because THE SCALE IS CHANGING.

If I’d change the chart to linear to keep the scale, we’d see how much of a shift had been done recently.

The progress does not slowed down - it accelerates. To the point, people need to adjust scale, so the early progress is still visible.

Make a lever from compounding.

Earning first $100k takes forever, but second is way easier.

If you are aware of the scale not being linear, you’ll quickly notice that the jump from $1M to $10M is only 10x while getting your first million if you have a dollar - ONE MILLION TIMES.

However, this 10x is far greater progress, if you’ll keep the scale LINEAR.

The compounding effect gets crazy when it comes to your health, reputation and network too! Help enough people for long enough and the effect becomes exponential.

Here is a useful rule to Remember:

Small advantages held long enough dominate big advantages held briefly.

Unfortunately, people quit both right before compounding starts to matter.

Don’t be like them.

Next week...

Next week I’ll cover why early progress is boring by design, so make sure you subscribe for future deep dives!

If that idea resonates with you, please let me know in the comments and share this article with your friends!

Let’s Engineer the Wealth together!

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The sense of life is to grow yourself through constant sacrifices, while doing it playfully.
-- Jordan B Peterson

Life consists of real problems to solve, and those who can solve them better usually thrive.

But how to struggle with real problems through play? Well, we build stories and that’s an amazing concept, but I can think of another example, which is gaming.

In this letter, I’ll talk about the concept of gamifying wealth generation, but you can apply this to any important problem you face, and try there.

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About a little idle game

Let me tell you a story.

There is a mobile game, named “The Tower” - straightforward idle game, where the goal is to perform recurring runs defending your tower from incoming enemies. After each run you’ll inevitably loose at some point, you use the earned coins to upgrade the tower a bit and try again against harder waves.

Classic loop. Nothing fancy.

So why bring it up?

Because in this game, there are 8 (eight!) different currencies to manage:

1. Cash

2. Coins

3. Stones

4. Cells

5. Module Shards

6. Reroll Shards

7. Keys

8. Time

Each currency is earned differently. Each unlocks different upgrades. And each affects overall progress in non-obvious ways.

Still, though, what’s the point?

That complexity doesn’t repel players.

It attracts them. Why?

Because the game provides:

• Clear feedback loops

• Visible progress

• Community strategies

• Step-by-step optimization paths

People have essentially solved the game.

Kids. Teenagers. Non-technical adults.
Some of them run spreadsheets more complex than small businesses!

When it was shown to me that’s when it hit me:

Why can people master insanely complex games - yet struggle so badly with real life?

And here is why.

Why people struggle in life, while perfecting their games?

The same people that can optimize every single asset to built the best empires or collect most powerful equipments in-games, struggle with getting rich in real life.

Have you ever wondered, why?

We play games of all sorts, solving different problems, from puzzle-like, through calculations and cryptography, through economical optimizations and strategical thinking, to memory and pure action-like quick reflexes.

All that require effort, and usually we don’t care - we have fun by doing so. In games, effort feels light. Even enjoyable.

That’s sth I find extremely interesting and inspiring, so I’ve decided to use this concept and adapt it to a real-world problem, of wealth generation.

This is provoked me to ask a few questions, mainly: What’s the difference, between people playing economy-based game, vs real-life asset accumulation?.

The unconfrotable answer

Life is a badly designed game.

And humans prefer to play games that are designed well.

10 things that games & life have in common.

Good games reward us for the same behaviours, that life does:
Patience, gratitude, emotional control, learning from mistakes. Look around.

Study the behaviour of successful people and you’ll see some patterns.

They understand what actually matters to make progress fast.

Here are a few game principles that games and life share - and most people ignore:

1. Compounding Is the Core Engine

2. Early Progress is Boring by design

3. Skill > Luck over time

4. Assymetry is the real game

5. Resources allocation beats the raw effort

6. Meta knowledge separates elites from the rest.

7. Progress is non-reversible until it is.

8. Identity drives outcomes

9. Long-Term players win

10. Most people quit early

Let’s deep dive into them! 👇

. Compounding Is the Core Engine

Nothing meaningful is linear. Look at games. XP, skills, gear, territory, influence all compound.

If you already block 98% of incoming damage, an extra 1% doesn’t reduce damage by 1%. It cuts what’s left in half. That’s compounding.

In life, if you’ve 50% income for expenses, doubling expenses means 1.5x more money available for investments. That’s the same math applied.

XP feels slower at higher levels because the progress bar stays the same while the required points explode. Progress didn’t slow - your scale did.

Life works the same way!

Earning first $100k takes forever, but second? It’s way easier. The jump from $1M to $10M is only 10x. While getting your first million if you have a dollar? One million times.

The compounding effect gets crazy when it comes to your health, reputation and network too. Help enough people for long enough and the effect becomes exponential.

Here is a useful rule to Remmber:

Small advantages held long enough dominate big advantages held briefly.

Unfortunately, people quit both right before compounding starts to matter.

2. Early Progress Is Boring by Design

Every system tests patience first. You start with a grind.

Posting daily for a year.
Mining diamonds by hand in Minecraft.

Most of the information and possibilities are hidden from you.
You know nothing, you don’t have an idea how to optimise, your tools are weak & cheap. You’re forced to do repetitive quests.

In Real life, you start with low income, low savings, low returns, and invisible progress.

Games simplify feedback. Even when progress is slow, you can measure it. Life doesn’t give you that luxury. Slow feedback gets mistaken for wrong direction.

Veterans, however know, that the early phase is not about winning - it’s about surviving long enough to scale.

3. Skill > Luck Over Time

Luck matters short-term. Skill dominates long-term.

You can win once by luck. You can’t win consistently without skill. That’s why professionals don’t rely on luck - especially when stakes are high.

They build skills so that when opportunity shows up, it becomes leverage.

Markets follow the same rule. Builders, disciplined investors, and operators destroy gamblers over time.

If you want to be successful, remember:

Variance hides skill in the short run and reveals it in the long run.

Most people confuse a lucky streak for mastery - then blow up. This is extremely visible among the crypto market degenerates. 95-98% of traders here looses in long term! How crazy is that?

They all believe they’re so skilled and smart, and yet, they loose life savings without understanding the math of probability. Every here and there one person gets lucky, and earns tons of money, and masses confuse that with a mastery.

Completely ignoring the fact, that every time someone else succeeds.

To win, work on the skills and just use luck when it happens, never depend on it.

4. Asymmetry Is the Real Game

Maybe you have heard a term: unfair advantage. What they mean, is assymetry.

Most of us have something that gives us a unique starting point for any effort we take. Most of good games will also use this trait. You start with different, and the goal is to use this for you advantage.

Both life, and games, reward smart positioning, not equal effort. In games you can exploit mechanics, stack multipliers together, build synergies between different elements or classes.

In real economy, you can optimize taxes, use the loans, build scalable products, create multiple tiers of your business to apply upselling to existing clients...

When you think about health:

• you can take supplements,

• go to the gym,

• complement it all with a proper diet,

• add profilactic physiotheraphy on top,

• and have healthy relationships...

and all those results will start to compound without you even knowing how and when.

If you understand this, you’ll quickly realize, that grinding harder is inferior to finding better multipliers!

This is why grinding is overvalued. Some grind is necessary, but pros are looking for assymetries, amateurs keep grinding.

5. Resource Allocation Beats Raw Effort

You always have limited resources. Always.

In games, you may need to balance time, stamina, mana, gold, inventory slots or whatever else game will support.

Life hides it though!
Thinks like time, energy and money are more or less obvious.

The reset most of people NEVER NOTICE!

For example, everybody is fighting for our attention. We leave in the world of constant distractions, and our attention is crucial if we want to achieve our life goals. We also should fight for it and we have the best capabilities to do so.

Another, often unnoticed currency is trust. You build your credibility by consistently showing up where others give up. This is why people tell you: “post everyday, it’ll change your life”. It’s not about posting, but building trust, which takes time.

But energy & attention is a resource, you need to manage very carefully, therefore

Saying no is as important as acting.

Bad players spend resources reactively. Good players invest them deliberately.

Where to allocate resource though?

6. Meta-Knowledge Separates Elites

Chances are you’ve heard about Minecraft, even if you haven’t played yourself.

There are multiple classes of players.

1. Newbies - try it out, play occasionally

2. Amateurs - play for fun, optimize & automate to some extent, but not pressure.

3. Professionals - use extra tools, play for living, speed up through early game to have real fun without resources limitations.

4. Gods - world champions in speedruning, technical geniuses, and so on. They constantly break the game, and developers look for such people to find bugs to patch.

The Level 4 people are reading the source code of Minecraft and build communities of hackers, spending days and nights looking for ways to cheat the system.

The difference between them and normal professionals is unbeatable. They know exactly how the game works under the hood. They track patch notes and code changes. They attend events and hard-test everything that comes out, looking for exploits to use in own favor.

This is the real advantage. Knowing how the system works, not just playing inside it.

That gap is unbridgeable through effort alone.

How to use it in wealth building?

If 98% of crypto traders lose, I don’t “try harder.” I study why. I analyze behavior, psychology, cycles, inflows, incentives. I build systems that exploit impatience and emotion. I am aware of cycles and aware of how long-term game favours the players.

The Key point here, is that Rules aren’t neutral. They favor certain behaviors.

Elites study why the rules exist, and they deploy behaviours that increase the probability to win.

7. Progress Is Non-Reversible Until It Is

When you rush for progress, you level up - until you die or get wiped.

In games, you’ll manage risk, by looking for players with similar skill set, to maximize profits while minimizing the chance to fail. Games will punish you with permadeath, resets, gear loss or XP progress drop when you make mistake.

Catching up will cost you time.

In real wealth building, mechanism is very similar. Knowing that money makes money, you want to avoid bankruptcy, reputation damage, debts.

Knowing that you need energy spread across time, you want to avoid health collapse, and avoid extreme risks of accidents or contusions.

That leads us to a very important lesson:

Defense matters more than offense.

Even in Chess, where it’s way easier to attack than to defend, ability to know where to take a draw is crucial to progress to higher ranks.

Staying in the game beats bold moves that risk elimination.

However, not everyone can defend in the exactly same way.

8. Identity Drives Outcomes

One more shared trait of life and games is knowing that who you become determines what you can access.

In games, usually this is solved by guilds memberships, professions, races, reputation. Over time you develop a build in the certain direction, that determines your strategy.

In order to access everything, you are forced to work on collaborations.

Life is no different.

In wealth building you invest your time into skill stack, networking with people you choose, and resources you accumulate. It is very similar to what you have in games, just you can’t start a new character from scratch as easily. Commitment compounds.

Most people will fall into the trap of looking at one very successful character, and immediately try to copy that. It doesn’t work.

You don’t get rich by doing rich-people actions once.
You get rich by becoming someone for whom those actions are normal.

And that’s only possible through a long-term commitment.

9. Long-Term Players Win

Long term players always win. The question is by how much.

Both - games and life - punish short-term thinking brutally. To show you the difference, here is a chart of unrealized profits for long-term hodlers of Bitcoin.

Green means that a lot of wallets holding Bitcoin for a long time is in almost constant belief or euforia (blue). There are very short periods, where Bitcoin’s price drop low enough that most of long-term hodlers is on loss.

Now if we’ll compare that to short-term hodlers, you won’t believe. They’re almost never on profit. They live in constant fear, anxiety and depression, with very, very short periods of minimal profits just to get back to emotional hell again.

All that makes us to the very simple and important truth.

Speedrunning works only if you already mastered the game.
Shortcuts work only if you can survive it.

Remember. Time in the game > timing the game.

Knowing this will almost ensure your success, because most people will not stay.

10. Most People Quit Early

This is the biggest shared mechanic. In every single ongoing effort, most people will drop off.

On the X platform, only 0,05% of accounts have more than 1k followers. Not because its impossible, but because it’s uncomfortable, unclear, and unglamorous early on.

Games mask this with dopamine spikes every once a while, life doesn’t.

It’s even more cruel, hiding from you everyone and everything who is unsuccessful. Social media will only show you posts with dozens of comments and hundreds of likes.

Restaurants shows you only people who are able to go there and eat outside.

Everything that is out of the bubble is hidden for you, leaving you with the impression you’re not doing ok.

And there is no cure for that.

Life is just a badly designed game.

But once you understand the mechanics, you can build a game inside it — and win.

Stay in the game.

The game is simple. People make it complicated and confuse rules together, making it hard for them.

You don’t need to.

Stay in the game. Learn the rules. Stack advantages.
That’s how you win - quietly, predictably, and without drama.

So far, I’ve shared how I see wealth differently[^1] and how I navigate trade-offs in life[^2]. Now I want to share what I think of as the “operating system” behind it all.

At the center is wealth. For me, this is the crossing point of everything else that matters.

Everything else - family, freedom, fulfillment, financial growth - is a part of it. Over the years, I’ve learned that building systems around different areas that support each other, gives the exponential growth - while neglecting one pillar ruins the progress in everyhting.

It’s inspired by ikigai, the idea of finding purpose in what you do. For me, wealth is not just about activity - it’s about living that purpose while keeping balance across everything else that matters: relationships, time, energy, and financial security.

Right now, I think of wealth as having a balance across a few core areas in my life:

• Living the life I actually want

• Spending time with the people I love

• Doing work that feels meaningful and valuable

• Having enough resources to support all of that

With that clarity, my choices feel simpler. I’ve realized it’s not about chasing everything at once - it’s about setting boundaries and letting systems carry the load.

It was never easier than today, with the era of AI assistants, endless automations and infinite access to global knowledge.

If you are keen to see more about this concept, check the deep dive article I’ve published a few weeks ago[^3], and I’ll explore the practical examples of building those systems in the articles to follow.

Where I’m heading next?

Currently I’m putting more energy into building scalable value while keeping the balance I’ve built so far. Long-term, steady progress, no shortcuts, no burnout.

Follow along! No burnout. No shortcuts.

-- Seb

Last time I shared how most people think in terms of this OR that when building a meaningful life. The truth? You don’t always have to choose. Wealth, health, freedom, and family can coexist - but only if you set the right boundaries and make disciplined trade-offs.

Family-first example:

I am on my way of figuring out how to give people the value equivalent to $1M. However, I do it within certain boundaries.

For example, I prioritized what can’t be rushed. Marriage, parenting, and relationships were non-negotiable. While peers focused solely on climbing the career ladder, I invested time in family, trusting that financial success would follow. The result? My career and income accelerated precisely because I put family first - not in spite of it.

Prioritizing what can’t be rushed:

Without a focus, we get overhelmed and paralized. This is why, when it comes to priorities, I tried to create a system that prioritizes what gets indefinitely harder over time.

• Energy in your 50s is easier to preserve than in your 80s → start early.

• Financial compounding works at any age → focus first on the irreversible.

There are people that became milionaires (or bilionaires) within a few years. But no one raises their kids quickly. None. Null. Zero. There’s no shortcut.

So I aim for the green area. Ambitious, but not extreme.

TODO: I’ve published the full deep-dive on the blog — feel free to read it here: [Insert link].

However, keep in mind, that The point isn’t idealism - it’s discipline. Real-world results come from sequencing priorities, not chasing everything at once.

Next time: “How health, energy, and systems make this sustainable.”

Stay tuned!

-- Seb

This is my first email, so I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Seb, and I help software engineers and ambitious professionals build real, sustainable wealth - without sacrificing health, freedom, or time with family, and without burning out along the way.

I’m doing it mainly by sharing own learnings and journey, rather than coaching directly.

I want to ask you: what comes to mind when you hear wealth?

Most people think: money - and that’s just normal. Here’s a snapshot of how people perceive wealth:

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Please reply to this email and let me know what wealth means to you. 🙏

What I’ve noticed, countless books, courses, and posts reinforce this narrow view. But for me, it has always felt incomplete. Money without health, freedom, or wellbeing isn’t real wealth - it’s a trap, often costing energy, relationships, and time for numbers on a screen.

When I was a kid, I read one of Robert Kiyosaki’s books - most likely Poor Dad, Rich Dad. One sentence stuck with me for life:

> “Poor people think like: this OR that. Rich people think like: this AND that.”

I embraced it early: if I don’t have to choose, why would I? Since then, my mission became simple - build wealth without losing health, ideally improving it, while sharing the journey with people I love.

Check out my full essay on this topic—I’d love to know if you find it interesting!

Next time: I’ll share how I navigate trade-offs when life forces hard choices. Stay tuned!

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My approach to wealth generation

What comes to mind when you hear the word “wealth”? I bet it’s money. About 90% of people associate wealth with financial terms.

Research consistently shows that financial association dominates how people perceive wealth.

Countless books, courses, and posts reinforce this narrow view. Yet this equation has always struck me as incomplete.

Money without health.

Having money is undeniably better than not having it - better doctors, better specialists, better care. And in a pragmatic sense, professionals paid directly by you often have a stronger incentive to keep you in good shape.

So simple and pragmatic.

Money also matters when you can’t be healthy. Being able to afford an environment adapted to your needs can define your quality of life, regardless of limitations.

Still, the real win is having both money and health.

When I was a kid, I’ve read one of Ropert Kiyosaki’s books, most likely Poor Dad, Rich Dad and there was one sentence that stayed in my head for the rest of my life:

Poor people think like: “this OR that”, rich people think like: “this AND that”.

I embraced this early: if I don’t have to choose, why would I?
My mission became simple - pursue wealth without losing health, and ideally, improve it along the way.

Since then I’ve tried to find a solution to how to pawn my way to the wealth by at least not-loosing health on the way, and if possible, get healthier in the process.

Money without freedom

There are many ways to earn well. The one I respect most: create value, or create value at scale. It gives you income and freedom.

But there is other way too - you may trade your freedom in exchange of more money, and this is what most people do.

A loan is the perfect metaphor. You get the cash upfront, but the price is years of commitment.

Taking big loans, climbing corporate ladders that own your calendar, or signing your life to a high-paying but soul-crushing role - all are classic examples of the second path. You may end up wealthy on paper, yet exhausted, with children who grew up and you barely able to recall when and how.

Preserving - and ideally expanding - your freedom while building wealth is harder, but infinitely more valuable long-term.

Money without wellbeing

We’re constantly fed the idea that we have to join the global race to get rich.

Young people drop everything to chase their first million:

• No time for relations

• No time for the rest

• No time for travels

• No time for living how we want

They often reach the goal only to realize what they sacrificed can’t be bought back.

I want to be rich. But I want to be rich while building memories with people I love, traveling, and living fully—both as a young man and as a grandfather energetic enough to chase my grandkids.

It’s harder than just making money. I know. And I choose it anyway.

Money With Everything Else: My Definition of Wealth

Japan has a concept called ikigai - a philosophy about finding a purpose worth devoting your life to.

In this approach, your ikigai is described by intersection of:

• You are or can be good at

• You love to do

• Others need it - so you can feel important

• People can pay you for doing - so you can cover your living.

This is way closer to what I aim for, when think about wealth, but not quite there yet.

Ikigai is beautiful, but it’s still activity-centric. True wealth, to me, is broader: it’s living your ikigai while maintaining the sustained balance of everything that matters.

You can have ikigai without wealth. You can be passionate, useful, and fulfilled - and still struggle financially.

So I think of wealth as balance across the core parts of my life:

1. Living the life I actually want

2. Having time for the people I love

3. Doing work that feels like ikigai - fulfilling and valuable

4. Possessing enough resources to sustain all of the above

It’s a harder definition. But it’s clear - and clarity removes friction and prevents unintentional sacrifices.

Setting up boundaries & definitions.

This perspective puts me in a small minority. Most people want to be rich, but I’d argue, a few can define exactly what that means.

I know what exactly I aim for.

I have setup multiple areas of my life that I want to keep in balance and constantly work on, focusing on whichever one slips.

Example 1: Family first, money to follow

There are people that became milionaires (or bilionaires) within a few years. The odds of doing it though, are smaller the more we want to restrict the time.

However, there are no people who raised their kids quickly. None. Null. Zero. There is no shortcut.

Most people delay decision about family until they can afford it - risking to never have it.

I refuse to choose between being rich and having a family - so I aim for both. But I prioritize what can’t be postponed: relationships, marriage, parenting.

So I prioritized family early—got married and had kids while my peers were grinding for promotions. I trusted (correctly) that the financial piece could compound later; plenty of people have built wealth in their 30s, 40s, and beyond after starting families.

Ironically, becoming a husband and father made me better at everything else.

Parenting books and team-management books teach the same principles. Applying them made me a better engineer, a better leader, and a more grounded person.

My career took off. Finances followed - slower than if I’d focused on nothing else, but steadily and sustainably.

My career and income accelerated because I put family first, not in spite of it.

If you look for an advice, prioritize what can’t be rushed.

Example 2: Health in the Middle

Balancing all these areas is demanding. Early on, my health started slipping, so I dove deeper into how to maintain it—not repair it later.

My wife turned out to have a superpower here - deep expertise in nutrition, supplements, non-toxic living, and recovery protocols (amplified by maternal instinct).

She became an expert in areas I’d never willingly study.

With her beside me, not-loosing health became much easier than I’d ever anticipate if I’d choose to race for finances first.

Together we built systems that make staying healthy almost effortless. Health became a shared asset rather than another item on my to-do list, and I’ve realized, that chasing wealth together is easier and much more fun.

Priorities

Priorities become simple when your rules are clear. The world is unpredictable, and no plan is guaranteed - but you can stack the odds in your favor.

I want all aspects of wealth but when everything matters, you still have to sequence. My simple rule: prioritize what cannot be done (or done well) later.

Example:

• Energy in your 80s is smaller than in your 50s → have kids early so you can enjoy grandkids.

• Financial compounding works at any age → trust the process and focus on the irreversible first.

I trusted myself to figure out the financial side later. Plenty of people already did it and left roadmaps behind.

Summary

I now have strong foundations in health, family, freedom, and fulfillment. The financial pillar is the one that has lagged slightly - intentionally.

It’s time to pour more energy into Sustainable Business and scalable value creation while protecting everything I’ve built so far.

Join me as I build wealth the balanced way. No shortcuts. No burnout. Just progress. I’ll be sharing the journey as it unfolds.

Welcome aboard.