I want to make this space more into an authentic space, so here’s me trying to put more of my thoughts into place.

I wish that there was a way to hack consistency, to make it so that a person could just automatically do the things that they wish to do without any fear and without any barriers to entry; if there were such a thing, I think that life would be so much easier – we’d be able to show up every single day without any fear and without any favor whatsoever, and things would just become infinitely simpler day in and day out.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really a short-cut to doing that, though – showing up on a day to day basis is a given, yes, but in order for a person to show up every single day to create things, they do need to have the willpower to show up every single day.

I’m not writing this to rationalize my not being consistent or anything of the sort – these aren’t justifications for a lack of consistency, but rather they are an acknowledgment of the actual difficulties that would face anyone who wants to try to become consistent; I list them below.

  1. To show up every single day, you need discipline and a process.

    In order to show up every single day, it’s essential for you to have a schedule in order to make things happen in the correct way and at the correct time – if there isn’t a regularity to the things that you do or your whims just adjust you in some direction that puts you conveniently out of reach of the things that you want to do, you’ll slip away and from slipping away, you’ll immediately fall out of what you aimed to do in the first place.
  2. To show up every day, you need self-confidence.

    Self-confidence isn’t the easiest thing in the world to develop – but it’s the most crucial thing to develop – the ability to just shrug off the slings and arrows of the world, to shrug off your own ego, to somehow be brave enough to have every single part of what you’re saying, thinking, and doing become a part of the record of the world.

    In other words, there are a couple of subdivisions of self-confidence that we have to think about:

    a) The ability to not receive any positive feedback or any sort of encouragement for what you’re doing, potentially over a very very long time.

    As human beings, we naturally want our work to be acknowledged, and we derive a lot of pleasure and joy from the affirmation of others; our work doesn’t take place in a vacuum, and it’s only natural that we would want others to celebrate us in some way, shape, or form – but what if that doesn’t happen? What if we never receive the audience that we expect, and this happens for a very long time? This isn’t something that most people can naturally bear.

    b) The ability to actually be good at what you’re trying to show up for.

    The reality is that no matter what area it is that you try to be good in, you’ll need to have some degree of skill in order to show up pleasantly, to receive good feedback, to actually create something that’s great by industry standards or something else; it’s not something that happens by accident, and certainly not something that occurs when your fingers trip and fall and cascade into the process of creating a novel.

    The reality of this world is that being good at something is not just about being consistent at doing things – it’s also about having a certain degree of talent.

    Those of us who say that you need to only just show up day after day seem to miss the possibility that well, it’s possible that a person might actually just *not* be talented at some of the things that they enjoy or want to succeed at.

    I mean, we want to deny that in many cases, but that’s possible, isn’t it?

    It’s reality and you can’t fight that.

    c) The ability to not self-criticize or drown yourself out with criticism to the point that you stop doing what you wish to do.

    The thing about trying to become great at something is that often, a person’s self can stop them from pushing forward, for the simple reason that they might think that they’re not good enough (and they may not be!) to receive the world’s attention.

    While it’s true that they may become better through practice, what happens is that their self-criticism drowns out any prospect that they had of becoming better by pushing them into a space where they think…

    “Hey, because I’m not good enough at this, maybe I shouldn’t even try anymore… Right?”

    Often times, we’re our most stringent critics, and our egoes stop us from putting out anything into the world that doesn’t meet our own exacting or demanding standards, which in turn makes it so that nothing happens, nothing changes, and we find ourselves left in the same position that we were in before.

Why did I write this in the first place?

I wrote this because I wanted to troubleshoot a part of my own personality and the way that I think about the world; I wrote it because I want to overcome this aspect of my personality that’s holding me back, and the answer isn’t clear – I wrote it because I want somehow or another to push past the most legendary difficulty that I’ve ever faced in this world and to make something that’s consistent and stands the test of the generations where what stands now is a record of repeated starts and stops that are a function of a nature that’s woefully ill-suited to that sort of consistency.

I wrote this because I want to grow as a person.

Leave A Comment

Recommended Posts

A Small Written Piece… About Writing.

I write insane amounts nowadays – it’s because my brain has started moving so quickly that now writing thoughts down has become a natural occurrence, almost like breathing air or drinking water. Just think about it. Sepupunomics. EnglishFirstLanguage. My YouTube channel. Scripts. Descriptions. Essays. Posts. Everything. How is it possible to handle all of that unless your brain is indeed accelerating insanely? Or maybe, there’s an alternate explanation – maybe I just feel like my brain is moving faster, and the reality is that I just now have a thicker skin and mere human opinions don’t concern me, if we can say that. I suppose that in itself is interesting, because it reshapes human behavior — If you don’t really care that much what people are going to think of you, you’re not likely to be very restrained when it comes to writing, talking, yapping, and feeling yourself through this glorious and strange array of words.  The net result?  You practice, you practice, and you practice far more than other people.  Even as we speak now, I am confident that the sheer number of words that I have written trespasses beyond what is reasonable, normal, or even understandable for most human beings, and I continue to write every single day. How many of these words will actually be read by people? Who’s to say, who’s to know, who’s to care? This is just an expression of who I am – so as water is wet, the Earth rotates, and gravity exists, I will write, and so move forward as who I am, a letter and a keystroke at a time. 

Malaysian Prime Minister Tier List

It is quite normal for people to talk about politicians, and coffee shop talk is an everyday thing in our beautiful Tanah Tercinta – but I for one think coffee shop talk alone would be a little too boring… Which is why rather than just engaging in coffee shop talk, I thought it would be interesting to grade them. Which is why just the other day, my friends Vinodh and MJ from The Good Cast Show and FIRL did a new fancy collab – it’s a Prime Minister Tier List, and I’m very happy to share it with you! It was a great conversation with some very knowledgeable people (let me not include myself in that, and I’ll let you assess that for yourself!) who had also interviewed me before (for their respective podcasts), it was an awesome vibe of a chat, and it was an honor to learn with and from you! Come (virtually) hang out, and see you there! Also, I’m conducting a live poll (ends in six days!) for all of us to decide on an all-time ranking of our Malaysian Prime Ministers – join the fun and vote here! Link: https://live.tiermaker.com/63128277

No, ChatGPT is NOT making you stupid.

Sepupus, the internet has been abuzz of late because of a new MIT study called “Your Brain on ChatGPT”. All around on Reddit and the internet, people are starting to form wild conclusions, read patterns in the stars, decide unilaterally or with the agreement of some people out there and everywhere, that somehow now people are being made stupid and MIT researchers have said that it is so and therefore it must be true. I find it interesting and fascinating. Now, in what way is this related to economics if at all? Well, artificial intelligence is a very important part of our economy and it will continue to be important for the foreseeable future, as it shapes and reshapes the economy and how we treat human capital in ways that are intuitive and sometimes unintuitive, in ways more subtle and interesting than the standard narrative of robots replacing human beings may suggest. It’s interesting to think about it and how it’s going to affect the way that we can live and work in this world which is ever-changing and continually evolving. With that in mind, here’s my perspective. I do not generally think that ChatGPT is making us stupid. I read the MIT study earlier, and I broadly understand the way that it is constructed. You can have a look at it here. Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872 Basically, what they did was that they asked participants to write SAT-style essays across three sessions chosen from a range of choices in three different groups: 1. One purely using their brains 2. One using Google 3. One using ChatGPT Then, they had some participants come back for a fourth session where they swapped people from one group to another — 18 people did this in total. Now this is what ChatGPT says, in summarizing what happened: (AI generated – also, as a full disclosure, I do […]

Harvard Derangement Syndrome

We all know the difficulties that Harvard has been going through, and I thought that it would be fun to showcase an actual Harvard perspective, so I’m sharing this free article from the New York Times to all of you written by Steven Pinker, from my own subscription.  It is well worth reading, and I hope you will enjoy it if you choose to read it!  Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/23/opinion/harvard-university-trump-administration.html?rsrc=ss&unlocked_article_code=1.KE8.FQW2.LxEovGin6Ef6&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Pinker is a disarming man. If you read his articles, they are quirky yet intellectually engaging. The man stuffs so many different facts into a single paragraph that it often makes me wonder how or whether he just has access to all of the ideas he does, articulating within a single hand wave expressions and fires of the most deeply interconnected set of neurons I may have ever witnessed on the planet.  Well, at least that’s what I feel having read Pinker for quite a number of years now – And not knowing that he was the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University Well, that’s just a lack of attention to detail on my part, but it’s an interesting reality Sometimes people may have done or know far more than you might even think, perceive, or understand And sometimes these surprises can be rather fascinating.  Read the essay and it will give you a picture of what I understand about elite universities in the US at this point – Not exactly woke madrasas or the very headquarters of the CCP as President Trump seems to suggest, but instead as something rather different, definitely vibrant albeit with its flaws, where strident opinions are often shared, becoming the very voice of a generation through nothing more than the saliency bias and social media even amid an admitted climate where certain ideas are put to rest not because they are bad ones, but instead because […]

Royal Society Interview

Very honored to have the chance to interview the very first Malaysian scientist to join Britain’s Royal Society soon. Looking forward to meeting you soon, Ms. Ravigadevi! What questions should I ask and what are you curious about? Let me know down in the comments!

PKR Deputy Presidency Election Results Analysis

Some of you who follow me on YouTube know that I’ve been conducting some coverage of the PKR Deputy President elections featuring former deputy President Rafizi Ramli, and incoming deputy President Nurul Izzah. Sometimes it’s good to take a moment to think about the events that have happened over the course of the past, to understand things a little deeper, so I decided to do an analysis of the election results, which I’m sure many Malaysians were following. It is my first time doing this, and I will share my thought process along the way. When I look at the vote totals and also who got how many votes, I realize that we have been told earlier that there were about 32,030 people who were eligible to vote. Yet, at the same time, when we added together the votes cast for Rafizi and also Nurul Izzah, the total was only 13,669. This was a 42.7% turnout. Now, this was significantly better compared to previous PKR elections during which the turnouts ranged from about 10–15%. But thinking about that made me realize something important: Firstly, Nurul Izzah only has about 30% of the vote and she does not have a strong mandate. Second of all, this system made it so that what we see seems to be a highly improbable result. Now, some of you may know that PKR recently moved over to a delegate system. The way that it works is that there are 220 divisions of PKR and they all select a certain number of delegates to end up making up the total pool of people who are eligible to vote. In other words, this is not a random sample – This is not the general population. Indeed, if it were, and we were dealing with just your average everyday social media poll, it is almost a foregone conclusion that […]