finding things that are normal for me

when this April I got into a three-month downward spiral of anxiety and fear about what I want to do in life, I found an article whose point was “do what was normal for you as a kid that wasn’t normal to others” (can’t find it anymore - but here a similar one).

but I couldn’t find anything worth mentioning, everything seemed ordinary. And that’s the problem: normal things go unnoticed. One of my goals this year was to pay a lot of attention to the smallest bits (elaborated in granularity matters for self-understanding and thoughts on a career break), and I found a world of normal things that aren’t necessarily normal to others.

i am sharing some here, hoping they’ll help you find what normal means to you.

living life

• my hierarchy of needs has one endgame: being happy. Everything else is secondary, a tool. I don’t sacrifice happiness for the sake of doing bigger things, I’ll do bigger things if it brings me more happiness.

• my second endgame is self-expression, being true to myself, doing whatever I want to the extent I can, asserting how I am and not expecting it will be a match with a big part of the world.

• i love staying with the people I love and I love so many people. I’ll build a villa with ten separate apartments, each for one of the people I love the most, and have a huge pool/garden/barbecue/movie/working/gym area for us to share our life.

• i love writing, in my notion I have materials for at least three books. It is my thing. Sometimes I go back to emails I wrote particularly well and reread them out of pleasure. I know, weird. In elementary school one of my fav activities was dictation, I was great at writing essays in middle and high school, and had a blog at 17. Took me months to properly embrace this back from my past.

• i love having conversations about very complex topics as long as other people can sustain them. Being smart is not sufficient as you usually require enough context of certain dynamics which are completely unrelated. But when I find those people, able to take into consideration thirty different variables in each of their sentences, I melt out of respect.

• been traveling on average since graduation four months a year, with six months a year in the last two years. I can easily plug and play in whatever location I am. I like alternating big travels (one month in China), weekly hybrids (one week in Romania, semi-off, semi-work), weekly-visiting-friends (one week in Milan, working at friends), with big working travels (one month in Greece, working). I don’t like weekends away, too stressful.

• as long as I can, I’ll never have a work setup that forces to me dress in a certain way.

• i like waking up and staying twenty mins in bed, enjoying the slow return to the day, cuddling myself under the cozy and warm weight of the blankets. The perfect morning continues with a mindful skincare routine, a slowly-made cappuccino at home, and some readings. No sound needed, which is also the reason I routinely anger my gf by lowering her music volume.

• i like listening to people and making them as emotionally safe as possible. I think I am very good at it too, I tend to believe that people open up to me way more than they would do to others.

• i like horizontal, 360° people. My best friends all have an insane spectrum of things they are interested in or that could be talked about.

• i like personal administration, organizing my next 12 months’ travel, having a clean to-do list, a clean apartment, an inbox zero, and no unread messages on LinkedIn and WhatsApp.

• i like my persona to be as recognizable as possible online. The more I do it, the more similar people to me reach out and I guess we can just play together and it’s just awesome.

• among my friends, I am the one with Fede to pitch traveling and group us. It’s a hustle I am ok with taking the responsibility for.

• i think a lot about conversations and friendships.

• my perfect day starts at 6 with the sunrise and ends with dinner at 6:30 and sleeping at 9. Every time I travel to America I can easily make it happen. Impossible to maintain it in my normal life.

• i want to live in a place with easy access to nature, a good startup network, and a great variety of people. I dislike London (too chaotic), I like Paris (whose beauty compensates for the chaos), and I like Berlin. But none of them has easy access to nature. I am thinking of Barcelona and Lisbon as the next stops, but there is something off which I don’t yet understand.

• i spent 15k€ in coaching this year and it’s been the best decision of my life. I did talk therapy for 1 year and although it was useful in understanding rationally, it was useless for proper healing.

• seeing people who are love-driven or hate-driven, those who put a shield around them, and those who do not.

• always been in love with superheroes movies and science. Had once a 5-hours conversation with an artist discussing how that could have impacted at large my sense of optimism and empowerment (watching stuff where everything is possible → come to believe that everything is possible as long as the law of physics allows it).

• i get the whole clothing-as-self-expression but I am very bad at it and it’s not important enough for me to invest. But I’d love in the future to hire some sort of style advisor and go shopping together once and for all.

• i like asking deep or weird questions out of the blue, especially in a group of people where everybody is too busy maintaining a stick up in their ass to maintain a sense of seriousness or professionalism.

work

• i love atypical stories: a newsletter or podcast turned into a vc, a jazz club owner turned into a writer, a business student turned dj turned entrepreneur, a big tech manager who has a yoga studio, an investor turned coach, a creator turned whatever.

• i love content creators and their art. I love scientists too. I have a weird relationship with tech entrepreneurs. Many of them of repressed, blind to life, people. But those who do it out of joy are powerful energy movers.

• i love guiding and coaching people. I fantasize about building a great company just for the sake of paying people more and creating an environment that maximizes happiness and fulfillment (obviously connected).

• i don’t like the idea of working 60 hours a week, but I kinda find myself close to that the moment I work on something I care about. So maybe it’s true that “find something you love and you will never work again”. But that combination that leads you to that love is hard to find, surely it isn’t for me staring at a computer 60 hours a week.

• there is only one culture for me that works: a written culture. Unless truly necessary, a call-less week is a great week. Unless truly necessary, async forever.

• i learned coding this summer and enjoyed it for three months. I don’t mind doing it, especially as a tool for something else, which is I guess a sign that I don’t properly love it. The things I love, I love them for the sake of doing them.

• i enjoy fundraising cause I love crafting narratives and stories.

• i love founder-led marketing, ie. the work of Tyler Dunk from Beehiiv or the guys from Meow.

• i enjoy M&As, surely biased cause Habyt did 6 of them during my tenure.

• it’s natural for me to think in terms of vertical integration. Whatever business I think of, I start to fantasize about buying up, down, left, and right.

• i love writing, but I enjoy copywriting to a very limited extent.

• i love turning complex information into easily understandable pieces. Ideally, this would happen on a numbers-driven activity (M&A) as I don’t find it as fun to do it on a processes-driven activity (COO). I lose myself in Excel, writing business plans (as in, 5-year P&L projections) is a lot of fun.

• i love biotech when looking at it from above, but I don’t find myself in a flow while studying pure biology dynamics. Other fields that I love are fintech (Revolut), creative x ai (Midjourney), robotics x architecture (Monumental Labs), creators-driven economy (Erik Toneberg's thoughts), and healthcare (Superpower).

• i am also so fascinated by the intersection of media and venture capital as allocators of resources. Not Boring, The Generalist, 20 VC stories are huge inspirations for building what I think I’ll build one day: a VC for creators. If you’re interested in talking about it, pls reach out.

• i currently need 24K€ net to live well, in my wildest spend-like-crazy scenario as an individual sharing home with my girlfriend, I’d hardly need 100K€ net to indulge in everything that I strongly to weakly “want”.

• i like WeWork, but their chairs suck. I love working in coffee shops.

interests

• geography: scrolling Reddit’s thread about maps, comparing real sizes of countries, reading how geography impacts economies.

• geopolitics: understanding the nuances behind each complex topic (western vs non-western), discovering how certain countries came to be, and what powers are at play. Some things are pure entertainment (why does nobody talk about Indonesia?), others can be too painful and after I feel have enough context I stop digging (Palestine).

• construction: watching videos on the biggest engineering challenges behind mega projects.

• music: playing the guitar, understanding the meaning behind songs. Surprisingly, many of Oasis’s lyrics are completely meaningless. Unsurprisingly, most of Pink Floyd’s lyrics are more profound than one would expect. For instance, Echoes is poetry that narrates about human evolution.

• education as equal access to what is useful and enjoyable to learn is not great atm, that’s why I am building Brightdale. Ok, that’s not true: I am building it because education was not great for me and I am so pissed that I lost so much in missed opportunities that I don’t want this to happen to other students.

• aviation: it’s just insane to me that we have these ships flying around. I kinda like watching airplane crash documentaries, but I stopped due to my fear of flying.

• urbanism: when walking around I naturally analyze if that piece of the city is a nice piece of city-human integration, or if the buildings around were built to satisfy the human eyes. Architecture is one of the few public arts and people are forced to experience it. Yet, I don’t think society put enough thought into creating timeless beauty for the improvement of the human experience.

• I am half Indonesian so something attracts me to Asia, but all-things Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and so on just fire up the right points in my brain. If my dad was not old I’d go and live somewhere there, but will surely spend more months in the area in the upcoming years.

• as a kid I’d be obsessed with astrophysics and the universe, which almost led me to drop out of economics and start astronomy. I didn’t follow through due to lifestyle conflict of interest. I still watch and read astrophysics, but it’s not as strong as before.

activities

• i read for pleasure 45 hours a month and want to get to 60/75 hours. Whenever I discover a new blog, I can easily read it all in one day or so. I love discovering hidden gems written by non-famous people. She is great for instance! Kindle is 40% of my readings, blogs 50%, physical books 10%.

• coffee: I am perfectly fine spending 100€ a month on coffee. In Beijing, I’d spend 3€ on lunch and 6€ on coffee. I love coffee shops, their vibes, discovering the ones with the most beautiful designs and reading the owners’ stories, watching the art behind making a well-crafted flat white, sitting in and reading or working. I was thinking it would be cool to launch a series where I would travel around the best coffee shops in the world and write an essay in each shop every week for three months. If you know someone who would be up for this (ie. La Marzocco, some coffee brands, maybe Oatly or similar), it would be awesome to tell all these stories. Btw, the best coffee shops are not in Italy and the average coffee in Italy is very mediocre, but don’t tell that to my fellow Italians.

• food: I love understanding the dynamics of each ingredient, and can easily draw a dish in my mind and match the final result taste with what I had in mind with extreme accuracy. My brother has a restaurant, my dad used to work in hospitality, and I have been working in many restaurants: it’s satisfying to cook something great while keeping the kitchen clean. I spend too much time on YouTube watching dishes I know I’ll never prepare. I spend too much time re-reading the story of the restaurant if printed on the menu. I don’t care if it’s half made up! I like all pizzas and I like the food I get served on flights.

• i like hiking with friends, to the extent that it lasts no more than two hours. I prefer walking in nature on plain ground.

• i did more than 130 scuba dive sessions, but at this point, I like more the idea of it than actually doing it. It’s still magical tho, but I am fine with doing it once a year. Snorkeling has better ROE (returns on effort).

• i accept that when I start a TV series, I have to finish it in as little as 48 hours.

• i have so much fun doing psychedelics (weed in milk as I don’t smoke, shrooms) and have some of the funniest memories with friends while on trips. People overcomplicate the topic. Taking ayahuasca was not fun at all, but it changed my life. People who take ayahuasca often report the same feeling, medical professionals who never did it also overcomplicate the topic.

• i love techno on shrooms but haven’t found a better place than Berlin for that (not that I have properly looked).

no category

• taking advantage of referral codes. I used to do the smallest ones (10€ from neobanks), but if the benefit is > 25€ I’ll do it.

• my relationship with American Express, have earned > 3.000€ since I had it.

• i define myself as a techno-humanist. I am emotionally optimistic about technology and I rationally see it as a net-positive force for human development. I don’t like pursuing technology for technology’s sake, it should be a tool to maximize equal access to opportunity and happiness.

• longevity: I love to stay on this planet as much as possible. I am a big proponent of humans living with a healthy body and brain as much as they want. Nope, I would personally not get bored. There are at least 20 different careers I’d like to expand upon and it would take me half a millennium to get over them. And this doesn’t take into consideration all the things that I like to do that I’ll discover in the process!

• i enjoy people who speak in mystical or energy terms. I didn’t get them some years ago and would define them as too abstract. Now I have understood that achieving that level of abstraction is very powerful, as it simplifies many things in life.