Soundtrack: Frederic Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 (preferably the 1975 Martha Agerich recording) I love software. It’s my calling, my passion and my obsession. I’ve been coding since the age of ten, and I’ve hardly stopped since then. Growing up, programming was a fascinating creative outlet—even more so for scrawny boy with two left hands and a dad-shaped hole in their life. I too was suddenly able to “build” stuff. Not treehouses like my friends had, but other things. Virtual things. Cyber-things. Things that, to me, at least, were even more exciting because there were no limits to what I could build. If I could imagine it, I could build it—provided one had enough time and dedication. And since I had plenty of both, it turned out, I ended out being reasonably good at it, too. Later on, it wasn’t so much the coding itself that attracted me, but rather the entire industry surrounding it. The art and craft of creating something bigger than oneself. Diverse people joining forces, teaming up, collaborating, innovating, and gradually changing the world. And, let’s be honest, making good money while we’re at it, too.

Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday. In his book Discipline is Destiny, Ryan Holiday recounts an insightful story about the legendary basketball coach, John Wooden. At the start of his first training session with a new team, Wooden did not begin by teaching zone defense or fast-break strategies. Instead—picture this—he gathered a group of high-paid, world-class athletes in a smelly locker room and showed them how to straighten their socks and put on their shoes. Exactly as you would with a toddler.

Human ingenuity is marvelous: We’ve come a long way from hunting down mammoths using stone-tipped spears to in-vitro meat grown in a lab; from the invention of the wheel to self-driving cars; from learning to harness the power of fire to building nuclear fusion reactors; and from crude Sumerian Cuneiform via the printing press to generative AI. We’ve extinguished most individuals’ most existential challenges, such as finding enough calories each day to survive for a vast share of the population. But contrary to the myth of the lone inventor’s world-altering Eureka! moment, we didn’t accomplish these achievements by individual, instantaneous flashes of insight. Instead, innovation on this scale moves incrementally, with countless tiny improvements adding up to monumental outcomes. Nevertheless, these accomplishments slowly, but steadily made the production of material goods more and more efficient, drove down costs and prices, increased availability, and spread access to them around the globe. Eventually the quality of life for billions of people exceeded the point of mere day-to-day subsistence and settled on a trajectory towards affluence and abundance. Hooray for us!