Disappointment and expectations are two inseparable concepts.

So, whenever I experience disappointment or see it in others’ frustrations, the first thing to check on the dashboard is, what was expected?!

• How we define expectations?
• How do we deal with disappointment?

Answering these two questions could tell us a lot about our way of thinking, communicating, and view of the world.

I’ll end with few words by Seth Godin who is a seasonal inspiration to me, titled Leaky roofs

In many situations, a leaky roof is worse than no roof at all.

If there’s no roof, we’re not surprised or disappointed if we get hit with some raindrops. But a roof that leaks has raised expectations and then failed to meet them.

Promising us a roof and then breaking that promise might be worse than no roof at all.

Whether you are a content creator or not. This question disguised advice is something that applies to every human being who would enjoy an exercise in mental stretching, sharpening your thinking, observation, and constant curiosity stimulation while creating value to the world.

Since I’ve started regularly sharing from Twitter, to Path, to Snapchat, and Instagram, on and off, I’ve always been hesitant. Why do I prefer writing in my private diaries over the sharing publicly? Yes, it’s safe. Yes, It’s private. But also, it will be easy to hide from stretching your mental muscles and challenge your thinking, especially when the ego is involved in the game.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a public blog under your real-name per se, but the concept of it. The idea of sharing thoughts or observations frequently with other humans. It could be under a nick-name, or to a closed community...

I was listing to my usual morning run podcast, and a single nugget kept nudging me to write that down way after I finished that run and episode.

It was from the wonderful On Being podcast with Krista Tippet, and this episode was a conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz founder and CEO of the Acumen Foundation. You can listen to this episode here.

Back to that nugget, it was a nicely suggested “plug-in” to experiment with these days into my Black Book journal. I’ll leave you with the conversation and for you to judge why this nugget was worth sharing and exploring.

Tippett, Host: you describe in the book how you have modified the Jesuit Examen, which is supposed to be five steps. And I’ve tried this, so I found this useful because I never was able to stick with the five steps.

Novogratz: I try to do it every day. I don’t do it every single day. But when I do do it, my day is...

In the vast sea of the internet, this video popped up to answer a timely reoccurring question that has resurfaced again while I’m redesigning my life and specifically my career going forward.

While it’s a 6-minute short video that I would recommend watching the essence summarized by a commenter ‘short tutorials’ with the following:

being a specialist makes sense only if you’re extremely good at what you do. If you’re not, it’s better to be a “specialized generalist” , which means that you should combine several valuable skills, but not too many. The more rare the combination, the more successful you can be. Tim suggests three easy add-ons to whatever you do: public speaking, writing, and negotiating.

Another tip from Tim: win, even if you lose. Use the skills you learned and the relationships you built during the launch of a relatively “failed” product to be more productive in the...

I have to admit, I have a problem that has a little bit to do with seeking perfection and I’m currently working on that. This problem wears different hats that get it labeled as “over-thinking”, “over-planning”, or “over-researching”. As an attempt to solve this I decided to create a sort of an intervention rule to pull me out of the spiral once I’m aware of it.

As I try to fix this, I was chatting with a dear friend (who’s also an expert in naming things) about this problem consulting here about how and she mentioned effortlessly:

call it Avocado.

An 🥑 is a reminder that “real life” is all about the small joy/details. It will go rotten if you overthink it. unripe if you haste to eat it.

I loved it, with its whole simplicity and how metaphorically it describes the situation. (+ I love avocados). Since then I’ve started to notice more of my over- 🧠ing habits. Allowing my self to...

This is the best writing (or storytelling) advice I’ve ever come across. And it could change the way you’ll ever write anything to anyone from now on.

As I was surfing the rabbit hole of Youtube, I stumbled upon this lecture titled: The Craft of Writing Effectively by Larry McEnerney. It was an hour and twenty minutes long! So I guess I’ll save it for a later watch, along with another 200 videos on the list. But wait, let me just watch the first five minutes, maybe it’s not worth the wait. I discovered early on that it’s more tailored towards academic and post-grad writing. However, he was solving problems I related to, and with his storytelling and dramatic delivery captivated me or made me care to watch until the end of the lecture.

I’ll summarize here my favorite three take-aways:

1. You might naturally use your writing to help yourself think about the world. But if your goal is to...

Mayflies. These little creatures have literally changed my life and brain. It all started when I stumbled upon this video back in 2012 by one of my favorite humans Neil deGrasse Tyson as he answered a question about his opinion about life and longevity. His answer can be summaries in that: a short life is a good thing to inspire focus. however, the part that I like the most in his funny way of storytelling and describing things is the following part.

I think of the mayfly that lives no more than 24 hours, what is life like to them? They’ll never see a sunrise if they’re born in the daytime. The things that we take for granted that they never see. So every minute of their life would be like, oh, it’s a wall! It’s a ceiling! It’s a moon! It’s a grass! Everything is this life experience that’s captured and presumably valued in their little brains. So I’d like to take my 75 years on this...

I’m writing this from my mini-isolation-unplanned-bootcamp-retreat back to the place I used to call home ten years ago, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. 🏡

I’m re-questioning the idea of home, how does this place (physically) earned that naming again. Is it the number of days I spent in? Is it the people I co-habitat with? Is it where I commute to work from? Or where I keep my belongings and books at?

This place feels like home again.

It is a phrase and a feeling I need to examine before it expires. I then need to use these insights to establish or transform my next residence into my future home.

We are all a work in progress. That includes how we think, what we do, our skills, relationships, health, and wealth; the list goes on. Being perfect or calling something so, is a chosen label that donates satisfaction and the acknowledgment of the needless urge to improve or change things.

Hence, this is an exercise in improving my self in the following sequence:

1. Improve my self and perspectives by developing my thinking and thoughts.
2. Improve my thinking by freezing my thoughts and observe them through writing.
3. Improve my writing by practicing it every day here through this space.

Hoping that with better writing, I’ll also improve other aspects, to name a few, my discipline, focus, and storytelling.

— Keep it short, keep it simple. One idea at a time.