documenting my 2025 reflections as the days go by… 💭
instead of getting frustrated, i’ve started asking: how can i recreate, reorganize, or rebuild this process or product so it naturally aligns with the expectations and behaviors of the average person? i don’t mean “average” in a bad way here. i just mean most people, the way they think, how much attention they can realistically give, and how easily they get confused by unclear systems even if i think its common sense.
i learned this month that it’s not enough to get angry at people’s inability to follow basic instructions. if something keeps going wrong, then perhaps it’s on me to design better, to put myself in the shoes of the everyday person, even if it annoys me, and figure out how to make things feel obvious, effortless, and aligned with how people actually behave.
one funny example: at my job, i had to keep replacing the paper towel rolls multiple times a day because people kept taking the *entire roll* with them during lunch for their team. it got to a point where the paper towel was always missing, and i had to hunt for which team had it. eventually, i stopped being annoyed and thought, *if everyone keeps doing this, maybe the setup is the problem and maybe it is no longer productive to get annoyed and complain about ppl taking the paper towel.*
so i asked my manager to buy a $5 paper towel roll holder. such a small thing, but it completely fixed the problem. once the roll was on a holder instead of sitting loosely on the counter, people stopped taking it. psychologically, people are trained from a young age even within their own homes not to move a paper towel holder, they just pull a few sheets and leave it. . when the roll is sitting by itself, it looks portable, so people think, “i’ll just take it and bring it back,” but of course they forget… and then hawa gets annoyed 😭. also adding the fact that it would be awkward to carry a weirdly shaped metal paper towel roll holder with you.
it was such a simple fix, but it made everyone’s life in the kitchen easier and taught me that sometimes, you really can’t just keep getting angry at ppls lack of ocmmon sense or ppl being inconsiderate because oftentimes they just don’t know or realize what they are doing and its not always coming from a place of bad intention or a place of selfishness. maybe the design of the process is to blame entirely. so good design is at its core about making it hard and impossible for people to mess up, instead of spending your resources and energy teaching people to behave better
chase perfectionism and chase doing work to the highest bar. and then go beyond that bar FOR YOURSELF, and go beyond your own bar. its just such a satisfying feeling. you don’t even need to tell anyone about this, you don’t need to do it so your team or others will notice you, just do it for the love of doing great work in anything you commit to, paid or unpaid, and no matter how glamorous or prestigious your responsibilities are.
excellence should never be contingent on status, recognition, or reward. if you commit to something, do it with full heart. do it with an above-average work ethic. and over time, people do notice who truly cares, and this will only bring you opportunities and quietly open doors for you.
don’t take shortcuts. don’t be lazy. people love saying “work smarter, not harder,” but most just use that as an excuse for mediocrity. work smarter and 10x harder, and then go one step further by evaluating the excellence and beauty of what you’ve created, and if it’s not excellent then fix it and continue iterating until its perfect. i said it LOL. ppl say perfectionism is toxic and isn’t good but i think you should absolutely chase perfectionism and excellence.
for me, i think a lot of this also comes from god consciousness. knowing that god sees me even if I don’t see him. even if no one else is around, god is. and islam emphasizes putting excellence and care and beauty into everything you do. like i am definitely not above having thoughts like “let me just take the shortcut” or “no one is around should i really pick that up, im lazy” or “no one will notice if the chair is a bit slanted” but in the end having that god consciousness and also just loving excellence keeps me very grounded and even when im tired or lazy, it reminds me do the right thing.
Ahad Rana - need a why for staying in a position. stop waffling back and forth between options trying to find yourself. It’s a very tough world out there. Be pragmatic! Always have forward momentum and do things that align with your end goal Everyone has imposter syndrome new in career cause you don’t know anything yet , just have to be willing to get through it and work through tough problems Always have forward momentum. If you are staying in a position because you are comfortable, you need to be doing more and what is that more?
I think this was Jony Ive, i can’t remember!!!! - the creative process is the most remarkable process. Internal introspective process. Unscheduled unpredicted monday afternoon at 2 there is this interesting thought thats fragile and tentative and starts to gain a little momentum and gets more compelling and there something that happens in this process that when you give body, make a model or prototype, give body to an idea, everything changes. and when you put the first model down, it galvanizes everybody and it includes people. Ideas are delicate so fragile they only exist as energy in our mind, so practice writing them down
Yucheng Low: 3 axes to attack infrastructure problems: Databases, compilers, systems Depends on what is most important to you Data first - thinking about how to query . Compiler - how do I build operations that let people apply functions to the data, here you are thinking a lot about optimization of reordering operations. Systems - let’s make this go as fast as we can. Think in abstractions