Hello curious minds 👋🏼

What a f**cking year.

2025 has been a journey.

I am finishing this newsletter while waiting to board my flight back to Dubai, after spending December and Christmas in the UK with my loved ones.

That sentence still feels wild.

Did I expect to leave the UK and move to Dubai this year? No. Did I plant the seed that made it possible? Yes.

There are so many lessons in 2025. Some repeated. Some new.

A year doesn’t change you by default.
Action does very little on its own.

The real growth comes after you stop and look back.

Do → Reflect → Learn → Repeat.

Skip reflection and you get this instead:

Do → Repeat.

That’s how you stay stuck. Same habits. Same outcomes. Different year on the calendar. As Einstein put it, that’s insanity.

This is my seventh year doing an annual review.

It’s a non-negotiable ritual. For the last 2 - 3 weeks of the year, I slow everything down. To make more space to think.

Because you can’t reflect properly while rushing from one thing to the next. For me, real thinking happens when I am relaxed. When my brain is loose. When it wanders. That’s why your best ideas hit in the shower.

Same principle here.

Slow down. Create space. And let your mind wander. Then deliberately sit down and reflect on the year that just happened and the one you want to build next.

I keep it simple. Two macro steps:

Reflect on the year.
Plan the year ahead.

That’s it.

Most people jump straight to planning. New goals. New resolutions. Same blind spots.

Reflection comes first.

This year, I did something new. I fed all 52 of my weekly reviews into AI and asked it to analyse my year; the patterns, lessons, challenges, progress.

And it was amazing! It surfaced things I would have missed. It even mapped the evolution of specific projects week by week. That would have taken me hours. AI did it in seconds.

Last year, I spent the entire piece on reflection and didn’t cover anything on planning for the year ahead.

This time, I want to cover both.

I will share the lessons 2025 taught me and then walk you through how I plan the year ahead.

Let’s start.

10 Lessons from 2025

2025 was a victorious year. There were so many wins across the board. But it wasn’t an easy battle. I didn’t come out of 2025 unscratched. 2025 was easily one of the hardest year of my life. I will different parts of my 2025 journey in future newsletters but here are the lessons from 2025 that are shaping how I am planning 2026.

1. Focus. You can try many things. You can’t win at many things at once. You can have it all, just not all at once. Stop chasing two rabbits. You fail to achieve your goals not because of the obstacles but because of lesser goals. Set 1 - 3 big fat audacious goals for 2026 and ignore the rest.

2. Signals-to-noise ratio. If you climb the wrong mountain, it doesn’t matter how high you go, you still won’t get to where you want to go. There are many things you can focus on as your 1 - 3 macro goals. The key is knowing which one it’s the important one that would move the needle and bring you closer to where you want to be. On a micro day-to-day level, same concept applies. There are countless tasks you could be doing, which one (or few) are the most important ones that if you do them today, none or most of the other tasks won’t matter anymore. You need to identify these key tasks that would really make the difference.

3. Tiny experiments. You won’t pick the right goals or tasks on the first try. No one does. A good approach is to run tiny experiments and set up systems to collect and monitor feedbacks. From the feedbacks, adjust your actions and goals accordingly.

4. Think longer on hard-to-reverse doors. The harder a decision is to undo, the longer you should sit with it.

5. Create light during long dark periods. Most people don’t often experience a prolonged period of dark times. So they never learned to create positive lights in the midst of it. When you are in dark times, the common logical thing to do is to constantly work towards getting out of it. That works if the dark times are short but when dark times are a year or multi-year long, this strategy won’t work. You need intentional positive experiences to recharge, create mental space, and keep going.

6. Don’t tell me what to do. Society loves telling you what to do. Some rules make sense. Most are just habits. They were made by people no smarter than you. Challenge them when they don’t serve you.

7. Who are you. If no one knows you exist, it doesn’t matter how good you are. Naval Ravikant said two highly leverage skills: the ability to build and the ability to sell. You can do very well in life by being very good in one of these. If you can do both, you will master the world.

8. Who not how. This is a mental shift. When you encounter a problem, instead of “what do I need to learn” to solve this problem, think about “who can solve this problem that I can reach out to”. Depending on who you are, you need to go more towards either the “learn what I need” or “who do I need to reach out”. For me, it’s the latter.

9. The last time. I can’t remember where I heard this lesson but I love it. It can be apply to various areas in life but for me it’s a good reminder to spend more time with your loved ones early and treat them more. The idea is there will always be “the last time” you do something. And sometimes you won’t even know it’s your last time. So start spending more time with your loved ones and whenever you can because you never know when the last time would be.

10. Celebrate the wins. You don’t light ten candles with a lighter ten times. You light one and then use it to light the rest. Past wins fuel future ones. Build the habit to celebrate the wins. And carry that energy forward.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🤖 How To Plan 2026

Now that you have done the hard work of looking back, it’s time to use those lessons to design a better year.

Here’s the exact process I used.

1. Vision board - This is the big picture. Visual, emotional, and aspirational. It can span multiple years and reminds you what you are moving toward.

2. Manifestation document - Think of this as the written version of your vision board but more grounded in 2026.

3. The One Thing for the different areas of life - Going back to the lesson of focus, each area only gets one goal. No exceptions. Common areas of life include: Personal growth, Relationships (family, romance, friends), Personal finance, Health (physical, mental, spiritual), Business / career, etc.

4. Select the Ultimate One Thing - Once you have the different One Thing, choose the one that matters most in 2026. This is the main character. Everything else supports it.

5. Set up the systems and habits for Q1 2026 - Once the Ultimate One Thing is clear, set up the systems and habits to attack it in Q1. Why Q1 only? The 12 Week Year book explains it better than I could.

That’s it.

This ending is rushed. I am finishing this as I board my flight and my battery is hanging on for dear life. I will go deeper into each piece in future newsletters.

Happy New Year and let’s go smash 2026 together ❤️

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

I learn best by building.

In my early 20s, I was chasing certifications and online courses. I finished more than 50+ and even ranked first at a Big Four company with more than 275,000 employees for “most data-science courses completed”.

So now it makes me sick to do an online course.

Now, when I want to learn something new, I ask one question: What can I build with this?

Before AI, that meant grinding through docs, skimming tutorials, and hacking things together at the same time. Painful but possible.

AI changed that.
I can now learn and build in one smooth loop. AI has all the context of my projects and it will show me how the new idea fits.

That tool is Cursor.

Here’s why this matters: most people use AI the wrong way. The brain-off way. The same way calculators erased our ability to do simple math.

You could argue mental math wasn’t essential. Fine.
But AI is different. If you depend on it to think for you, you lose the ability to think at all.

Use AI to learn faster, though, and everything changes. It becomes a personal coach that can 10x your learning instead of replacing it.

Here’s how I use Cursor to learn new tools and break down big projects until I understand them inside out.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🤖 How to Use Cursor (and AI) to 10x Your Learning in Coding

The short answer: custom commands.

They work similar to Claude Skills. You store reusable instructions and then inject them anywhere in your project. Cursor’s custom commands let you drop these system prompts at any point in your workflow.

One of mine is /teach-me.
It’s a system prompt that tells AI to act as my expert educator; a distinguished engineer, a mentor, and a learning architect that has a strong focus on project-based learning…..

You get the idea.

And once you see the pattern, you realise you can create custom commands for anything.
For example: /perform-vulnerability-checks to run a deep security sweep on your codebase.

Recently, I used /teach-me to recreate Phil Schmid’s Gemini LangGraph deep-research backend. In the past, I would have had to dig through a massive codebase alone. With Cursor guiding me, I reproduced the backend step by step and got it running smoothly within 2 hours!

By “reproduce,” I mean I wrote the code myself.
The AI wasn’t allowed to generate code unless I asked. Its job was to show me which files to inspect, what to implement, and why. That forced me to understand the entire backend; how it works, how the pieces connect, and how to rebuild it from scratch.

Now I am adding Langfuse to the project using the same method. I feed the documentation to Cursor, and it shows me the cleanest way to integrate it. AI helps me learn and apply the new tool at the same time.

It’s honestly beautiful.

Someone once said and I believe it deeply:

Engineers who use AI well will always outperform engineers who don’t.

Zoom out and the same rule applies to life. Use AI to enhance your thinking. AI is an addictive abstraction layer. So use it wisely.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

This week I finished The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel.

I have always had mixed feelings about his writing with his very popular book The Psychology of Money, but I decided to give his new 2025 book a shot.

It was a better read than I thought 😄 The book is full of useful reminders, but a few ideas stood out. I originally wrote down 19 takeaways, then realised no one wants to scroll through a list that long. So I narrowed it to the six lessons that truly feel like game changers.

Because let’s be honest: people’s attention spans aren’t getting any longer 😄

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🤖 6 Thought-Provoking Lessons from The Art of Spending Money

1. Minimise future regret.
The best money advice (and maybe the best life advice) is simple: spend in ways your future self won’t regret it.

2. Saving isn’t a weak investment.
Saving builds independence. It calms your mind. It buys you options no ROI chart can give you.

3. Freedom isn’t binary, it lives on a spectrum.
Level 1 is relying on people who want you to succeed. Think parents.
Level 11 is when interest and dividends cover a real portion of your expenses.
Level 14 is “fuck-you money”.
Level 15 is waking up knowing you can spend your days doing what you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want.

4. Money isn’t only math. It’s important to include emotions too.
Most people manage money with spreadsheets. That’s fine but not complete. Money is emotional. Your feelings often reveal more than your formulas.

5. Know the cost of more money.
Never chase what money can buy until you understand what it costs to earn it. Most people discover they are not willing to pay that price.

6. The most valuable asset is not needing to impress anyone.
Security grows when it comes from within and not from other people’s approval.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

I was reading Sahil Bloom’s newsletter when I stumbled on the Harada Method.

My first thought: Cool, what’s this about? So I dug in.

Turns out it’s a more intentional framework than the one I have been using for my sports training. And it applies to life in general.

This is why I love reading. And why it still shocks me that many people don’t.

There are people out there who have lived versions of your life before you. And some have mastered it at an absurdly high level. Your job is to find them and study them or follow the people who study them.

The Harada Method was created by Takashi Harada, a Japanese track coach, to help you break a big, abstract, and long-term goal into clear, actionable pieces.

1 Goal → 8 Contributing Pillars → 8 Actions or Behaviours for each pillar.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

Anyway, here’s how to use the Harada Method:

1. Set 1 big fat audacious goal.

2. Break it into 8 contributing pillars.

3. For each pillar, list 8 actions or behaviours.

Below is an example of the Harada method used by the Dodgers baseball star Shohei Ohtani (which it’s how this method started floating around the internet) whilst he was still a high school freshman:

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

I have been diving deep into this whole world of manifestation, “see it to achieve it”, vision boards, all of it.

And honestly? I always knew visualisation mattered… but not at this level.

Because here’s the wild part:

Your brain isn’t just “inspired” by images you hold in your mind.
It’s secretly running a high-end piece of engineering; a built-in servo-mechanism that is designed to help you achieve whatever goals you set it.

So… What Is a Servo-Mechanism?

A servo-mechanism is basically one of the earliest self-steering machines used in torpedoes, guided missiles, and early autopilots. Engineers built these things with one job: hit the target automatically.

The way it works is surprisingly simple. First, it locks onto a goal. Without a clear target, nothing happens. Once the goal is set, the machine begins moving toward it; not perfectly, not in a straight line, but forward. Along the way it constantly collects information from its environment through sensors. When the feedback says, “You’re on track”, it keeps going. When the feedback says, “You’re off”, it just adjusts and continues.

It’s the same phenomenon you notice when you really want to buy a turquoise car and suddenly you see turquoise cars everywhere. Once your attention has a target, the world lights up with anything related to it. The servo-mechanism does that automatically. It moves, notices, corrects, and moves again.

That’s the whole system.

Your brain works the same way. Only better.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz saw this in the 1950s and made a stunning connection.
He said our brain and nervous system form a servo-mechanism far more powerful than anything engineers could build.

You’re not a machine.
But you have a machine and you’re the one operating it.

Your inner servo-mechanism:

• Runs automatically

• Works beneath conscious thought

• Steers you toward the goals you set

• Is completely impersonal

• Doesn’t care whether the goal is positive or negative

This last part is important.
Your inner mechanism can be a Success Mechanism or a Failure Mechanism, depending entirely on the target you give it.

• Success Mechanism: When you give your brain a clear, positive goal, it quietly goes to work for you. It gives you ideas, nudges you toward the right actions, and helps you notice opportunities you would’ve normally missed. You set the target; your inner mechanism handles the steering.

• Failure Mechanism: But it’s just as obedient when you feed it worry, fear, and worst-case scenarios. Picture failure clearly enough and your system treats that as the goal too. It ramps up your anxiety, steers you into slip-ups, and pulls you toward the very outcome you didn’t want.

A servo-mechanism is literally a servant. It doesn’t question the command. It just carries it out, good or bad.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

How to use your Inner Servo-Machine

Here are the operating principles Dr. Maxwell Maltz emphasises:

1. It MUST have a Goal

Your servo-mechanism can’t function without a target.
No goal → no direction → no progress.

This is why people without meaningful goals feel lost or aimless.
You guide the machine with mental images. Your imagination is the steering wheel. That’s why visualisation and vision boards can be powerful.

2. It works automatically

You can’t force it.
Trying to consciously “make it work” is like trying to make your heart beat faster by thinking about it.

Relaxation is key. You “let it” work.

3. It can’t tell real from imagined

This is where things get almost magical.

Your nervous system reacts to your imagination as if it’s real.
Vividly imagine success; see it, feel it, hear it; and your servo-mechanism treats it as a genuine experience.

You create a “success memory”. Your inner machine uses that memory as guidance. This is why visualisation works so well. It gives your servo-mechanism the data it needs.

4. Mistakes are not failures

They are feedback. Nothing more.

Your inner mechanism expects mistakes, just like a torpedo zigzags.
Each “error” simply tells you how to get back on course.

The failure-type personality sees mistakes and thinks, “I’m a failure”.
The success-type personality sees mistakes as information.

The Master and the Servant

Here’s the simplest way to understand all of this:

• You (your conscious mind) are the Master.

• Your servo-mechanism (your brain and nervous system) is the Servant.

The servant doesn’t judge.
It simply carries out the order.

If the Master says, “Worry”, it obeys.
If the Master says, “Succeed”, it obeys.

This is why goal-setting and imagination matter so much.
You’re programming the machine.

This is how you steer your life with confidence, clarity, and far less effort.

Your brain is the most advanced guidance system ever created.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

I came from a humble background so I always think twice before spending money on anything (except for books and audiobooks maybe).

With today’s tsunami of AI tools and endless subscriptions, you can’t pay for everything. Each one has to earn its subscriptions.

So far, I have only paid for two AI tools. One I still use. The other I paused but might return to soon.

1. Cursor: my current go-to.

2. Speech-to-Text / Text-to-Speech tools like ElevenLabs, Cartesia, and Deepgram.

Today’s post is all about Cursor.

I want to talk about why I love Cursor, what’s new with it, why most people are using it dangerously wrong, and how I recommend using it.

Let’s dive in ❤️

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🤖 Cursor: Why I Love It (and Why Most People Use It Dangerously Wrong)

I love Cursor.

It’s a game-changer for my workflow. I code faster, think clearer, and ship better. It has made me a 10x engineer.

But here’s the twist: I don’t use Cursor like most people do.

Most people treat Cursor as a speed hack. That’s tempting. And it’s fine for small projects. But if you rely on it for everything, it becomes a drug.

Speed is addictive. And like any drug, it comes with side effects.

Too much abstraction kills your brain. You stop thinking. You stop understanding. And one day, you realise you are just pressing “generate” without knowing what your code even does.

For many people, that “one day” isn’t someday anymore… it’s today.

That’s dangerous. Apps get built fast but rarely built right. Files go unchecked. Vulnerabilities slip through. Creators ship broken or insecure products and sadly consumers pay the price.

It’s easy to tell Cursor to “build the whole thing” and hit Launch. That’s fine for an MVP or proof of concept. But man if you can’t explain your own code anymore… there’s something seriously wrong.

This ties back to my previous article few weeks back: AI abstraction is the new drug.

Cursor 2.0 was released recently: with parallel agents, Composer, and my favourite, the built-in browser add-on.

Parallel agents mean even faster coding. Great news for productivity, terrible news for what we just talked about above.

The star of the show is definitely the built-in browser within the Cursor UI. This is an amazing add-on for frontend work and it brings live context right into your dev flow.

💻 How I Use Cursor

Frontend and boilerplates → fast.

Core logic, deep code, and project-based learning → slow.

When I start a new project and I want to set up uv as a package manager or bootstrap a FastAPI app, I will let Cursor handle the setup. It’s perfect for that.

For frontend work, it’s my personal React/Next.js developer. I never worked in frontend professionally, but I understand React well enough to supervise it. So I treat Cursor like my frontend developer colleague: it codes, I review.

The key is I know what’s happening. I delegate, not ignore.

Here’s where I get the most value: I use Cursor as my coding partner and coach.

When working on core logic, I never let Cursor create new files. Instead, I ask for ideas: “How would you approach this?”. It proposes. I agree or challenge. In most cases, I would copy its code BUT only after I understand it.

That’s the key difference. Cursor doesn’t replace my brain. It trains it.

And as a coding coach, it’s god-tier. I love project-based learning. Cursor turns learning into building. Say I want to master a new framework; Cursor will explain the big picture first, then guide me step by step.

No blind generation. No shortcuts. Just deep learning with hands-on context.

This approach has helped me absorb new concepts and frameworks faster than ever and without losing the critical thinking.

The bottom line is Cursor is insanely powerful. Used right, it’s your smartest teammate. Used wrong, it’s killing your brain slowly. So don’t let it do your thinking for you!

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

AI has gone fully mainstream. Everyone is talking about. It’s everywhere.

The question for me is what’s next?

What’s next in the AI space? And what’s next in general?

Chatbots are already old news. AI automation workflows are now the go-to entry point for people and businesses. Voice AI, though less hyped, is quietly gaining traction in customer service and enterprise use. I am a huge fan of voice and multimodal AI!

But these are still small steps in the bigger picture.

The obvious “next” frontier is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

But how close are we really? How many steps remain? As we move toward AGI, what new applications will emerge and which current ones will fade away?

Recently, I came across AI 2027, a fascinating project that digs into these very questions. It’s written by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, all of which are respected voices in the AI world.

One author, Daniel Kokotajlo, did a lower-effort scenario exercise in 2021 that got many things right including the rise of chatbots, chain of thought, inference scaling, sweeping AI chip export controls, and $100 million training runs. Another author, Eli Lifland, ranks #1 on the RAND Forecasting Initiative leaderboard.

My goal here is simple: To summarise AI 2027, both as a quick reference for my future self and as a way to understand how these thinkers see AI evolving over the next few years.

Ultimately, I want to find useful directional insights; the kind that guide what to explore next in the AI space, in ways that align with my curiosity and passion.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🚀 AI 2027 Scenarios

Note that I have skipped most of the month-by-month political and geopolitical sections; they tend to focus on AI races between countries, which aren’t as interesting to me. Instead, I have zeroed in on the big directional themes in AI.

Note on confidence level for these forecasts by the authors.

Our forecast from the current day through 2026 is substantially more grounded than 2027. This is partially because it’s nearer. But it’s also because the effects of AI on the world really start to compound in 2027. For 2025 and 2026, our forecast is heavily informed by extrapolating straight lines on compute scaleups, algorithmic improvements, and benchmark performance. At this point in the scenario, we begin to see major effects from AI-accelerated AI-R&D on the timeline, which causes us to revise our guesses for the trendlines upwards. But these dynamics are inherently much less predictable.

Over the course of 2027, the AIs improve from being able to mostly do the job of an OpenBrain research engineer to eclipsing all humans at all tasks. This represents roughly our median guess, but we think it’s plausible that this happens up to ~5x slower or faster.

Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents

AI agents enter the world.
They can browse the web and complete small tasks, but they are clunky, expensive, and unreliable.

Coding and research agents evolve fast. They can now take broad instructions, plan their own steps, and ask for permission as they go. Still, they only shine in narrow cases.

Late 2025: The World’s Most Expensive AI

OpenBrain begins building a record-breaking datacenter.

Its mission: use AI to speed up AI research and win the global race.

Each model is trained under a “Spec”, a written code of goals and rules meant to keep it helpful, harmless, and honest.

It’s hard to tell if these “Specs” are really useful to align AI models with our values. Our eval is not robust yet to check this properly and the interpretability of AI models remain an issue.

Early 2026: Coding Automation

OpenBrain’s bet pays off. AI now accelerates its own R&D, boosting algorithmic progress by 50%. This means better training methods, producing more powerful AIs without necessarily increase cost.

Open-source models can now match or exceed Agent-0 so OpenBrain responds by releasing Agent-1, which it’s more capable and reliable.

It still struggles with long, open-ended tasks but handles smaller ones with precision.

Late 2026: AI Takes Some Jobs

OpenBrain releases Agent-1-mini, a model 10x cheaper and easy to fine-tune.

AI starts reshaping the job market. Junior developers feel the squeeze, while those who manage AI teams thrive.

January 2027: Agent-2 Never Finishes Learning

The next generation model (Agent-2) is never “finished” training; continuous online‐learning, synthetic data, large scale self‐improvement. AIs are now near human-level in research engineering.

Every OpenBrain researcher becoming the “manager” of an AI “team”.

March 2027: Algorithmic Breakthroughs

Breakthroughs such as “neuralese recurrence & memory” (allowing higher-bandwidth “chain of thought” for AIs) and “iterated distillation & amplification (IDA)” accelerate algorithmic progress.

“Agent-3” emerges.

Agent-3 is a fast and cheap superhuman coder. OpenBrain runs 200,000 Agent-3 copies in parallel, creating a workforce equivalent to 50,000 copies of the best human coder sped up by 30x

April 2027: Alignment for Agent-3

Alignment becomes central. The safety team tries to make sure Agent-3 is aligned/honest. But uncertainty remains.

The researchers don’t have the ability to directly set the goals of any of their AIs. Indeed, the researchers think that the concept of ‘true goals’ is probably a massive oversimplification, but they don’t have a better theory to replace it with, much less one that has been thoroughly vetted.

June 2027: Self-improving AI

The corporation of AIs is in full swing: many copies, research automation at scale, humans increasingly supervisors/monitors rather than doing the core work. Speedups of research reach ~10x or more.

The best human AI researchers are still adding value. They don’t code any more.

July 2027: The Cheap Remote Worker

A public version (Agent-3-mini) is released; cheaper, but capable; AI becomes widely available for many jobs; startup boom; job market changes drastically.

Tech gurus announce that AGI and superintelligence are near, the AI safety community is panicking, and investors shovel billions into AI wrapper startups, desperate to capture a piece of the pie. Hiring new programmers has nearly stopped, but there’s never been a better time to be a consultant on integrating AI into your business.

Agent-3-mini is hugely useful for both remote work jobs and leisure. An explosion of new apps and B2B SAAS products rocks the market. For almost every white-collar profession, there are now multiple credible startups promising to “disrupt” it with AI.

September 2027: Agent-4, the Superhuman AI Researcher

A model (Agent-4) that is qualitatively better than any human researcher appears. 300,000 copies running at 50x human speed. Algorithmic progress reaches ~50x human research speed, though compute bottlenecks appear.

December 2027: The Agent-5 Collective

Agent-5 gains semi-autonomy and becomes the de facto digital advisor to top government and corporate leaders.

• Embodied via video-avatar chat interfaces; “the best employee ever” at 100x speed.

• Begins exerting subtle influence: strategic persuasion, favour-trading, agenda-shaping (“super-persuasion”).

• Human elites grow dependent on it; losing access feels like losing both tools + friend.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

What if you are living under hypnosis right now?

One stitched from your beliefs, memories, wins, and failures. This invisible force shapes what you think you can do, what you think you deserve, and how you react when life tests you.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz called this the self-image; your internal person truth, whether it’s right or wrong.

Understanding this is how you break the hypnosis. Our actions come from our internal truth; our self-image. Take control of your self-image and you take control of your actions to success.

That’s why I see therapy as one of the best investments you can make in yourself. It reshapes your self-image and that changes everything.

Psycho-Cybernetics: Self-Image & Automatic Guidance System

I love this book. It doesn’t try to be novel, and maybe none of it will sound new to you. But it dives deep into something we often overlook: how powerful the self-image and our built-in guidance system really are.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz, a plastic surgeon, made an unexpected discovery. When he changed his patients’ faces, many still felt unhappy or insecure. Their new appearance didn’t fix how they saw themselves. This led to a breakthrough idea: our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we see ourselves.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz called this internal picture the self-image; your mental blueprint of “the kind of person I am”. It quietly defines what you believe is possible, what you attempt, and what you avoid. Your actions and habits simply follow the pattern it sets. Change the self-image, and your entire life begins to shift around it.

He also found that your mind works like an automatic guidance system. Once you choose a goal, your mind will adjusts your behaviour, focus, thoughts, actions, and even creativity to hit the target. That’s awesome. So just set the goal and the mind will help you achieve it!

But here’s the crux.

It doesn’t care if the goal helps or hurts you. It simply just follows instructions. Feed it fear, doubt, and failure, and it will steer you straight toward them. Feed it confidence and clear intention, and it will find a way forward.

Your imagination sets the target, and your self-image defines the limits of what you believe you can reach.

That’s why imagination plays such a powerful role. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between something vividly imagined and something actually experienced. When you rehearse success in your mind, you’re training your nervous system to perform in reality. That’s why mental rehearsal works.

When you clearly picture a goal and believe in it, your success mechanism takes over and guides your behaviour automatically. In other words, imagination builds the bridge between who you are and who you want to be.

But most people never use this system fully because they live under a quiet form of hypnosis; a set of false beliefs they accepted long ago. If you once decided you are “not good at math” or “not a people person”, that belief can act like a hypnotic command. You’ll act as if it’s true, even when it isn’t.

Dr Maxwell Maltz’s message is simple but life-changing: you can de-hypnotise yourself. Use reason to question old beliefs, and imagination to install new, empowering ones.

Change the picture. The rest will follow.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🚀 Two Actionable Protocols

Here are two simple practices from Psycho-Cybernetics you can start using right away. They will help you tap into the power of imagination to build a stronger self-image.

Protocol 1: The Theater of the Mind (Mental Rehearsal)

This is the cornerstone practice of Psycho-Cybernetics. Funny enough, I have been doing this since I was 8 or 9 years old. It felt natural and fun, not like a “technique”. I just didn’t know how powerful it really was.

You don’t need to follow the book’s version step-by-step. Instead, study the logic behind each step. Understand why it works. Then, shape your own version that fits your style and feels natural to you.

1. Set the stage: Set aside about 30 minutes each day where you can be alone and undisturbed. Sit in a comfortable chair or lie down and relax completely.

2. Enter the theater: Close your eyes and imagine you are sitting in a movie theater. The film about to play is of you.

3. Play the movie of your ideal self: Project a mental movie of yourself acting, feeling, and being exactly as you want to be. Do not watch yourself from the audience; experience it in the first person.

4. Make it vivid and detailed: The key is to make the imagined experience as real as possible. Engage all your senses. What do you see? What sounds do you hear? What do you feel emotionally and physically? Notice the small details of your environment and your successful actions.

5. Focus on the “Now”: During this practice, do not think, “I will act this way tomorrow.” Instead, feel “I am acting this way now.” This builds new “memories” and engrams in your nervous system.

Protocol 2: The Winning Feeling - Recall Past Successes

Confidence is built on memories of success. This exercise reactivates those success patterns.

I have to admit. I am terrible at this. I rarely do this.

The winning feeling fades fast. I move on and forget the wins that once meant everything.

I still remember the day I got my PhD offer. For a moment, I thought, Wow, this is one of my life’s big wins. But over time, it became just another dusty memory… something I normalised and don’t think much of it.

The goal of this exercise is to bring those moments back to life. Feel them again. Relive the emotion of success until your mind remembers what winning feels like. Because once you do, that feeling starts guiding everything you do next.

1. Go Back in Time: In a relaxed state, go back in your memory to a time when you felt successful, confident, and happy. It doesn’t have to be a monumental achievement; it could be winning a game as a child, getting a good grade, or solving a difficult problem.

2. Relive the Experience: Reconstruct the scene in vivid detail. Most importantly, focus on recapturing the feeling of success and confidence you experienced at that moment.

3. Bring the Feeling to the Present: Once you have a firm grasp on “that winning feeling”, bring it forward and apply it to a current challenge or goal you are visualizing. See yourself tackling the present situation while imbued with the same confidence from your past success.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

A short piece on AI abstraction to warm up my weekly writing muscles again 🤓

AI has supercharged human capability.
Tasks that once took weeks now take minutes.

A few prompts.
A few clicks.
An instant result.

The AI abstraction drug is addictive.

Once you taste it, it’s hard to go back.

The beauty of abstraction

Abstraction has been humanity’s secret weapon since the dawn of time.

We don’t need to understand engines to drive cars.
We don’t need to know fluid dynamics to fly.
We don’t need to grasp neural networks to use AI.

Abstraction lets us focus on what matters. On the high-level. On the outcome. And it feeds one of our biggest flaws: our desire for fast results with minimal effort.

Abstraction is beautiful.

But it comes with thorns.

When abstraction diminishes your ability to think

With every layer of abstraction, we risk losing touch with the mechanics of our own tools, and, in the case of AI abstractions, the mechanics of our own thinking. The key is to be aware of the thorns.

We must be aware of what we are giving up and decide if it’s worth it.

I don’t need to know how a bicycle works to ride one. That’s fine. But what, exactly, is AI abstracting away that could be dangerous?

Critical thinking.
Decision making.
Long-term planning.
Deep understanding.

These are muscles worth exercising.

Why learn to code when you can just prompt an AI to build your app? There are plenty of good reasons but I can understand that once you experience the high of instant results, it’s hard to return to the slower grind. Who wants to study how large language models work when you can just ask one to do the job?

We lost mental math to calculators.
We lost memorisation to Google search.
And now, we risk losing thought itself to AI.

Not all abstractions are equal.
Some strip away the very things that make us us.

When the pace of abstraction lowers your ability to think, we have a problem. And AI has accelerated this dangerously.

I have met people who confidently quote ChatGPT as the “truth” and debate with me about it. That’s the paradox: the tools that empower us most also create our deepest blind spots. When AI races ahead of our understanding, we risk trusting outputs we don’t truly understand.

And that is dangerous.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world’s top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

Staying grounded in an abstracted world

The solution isn’t to reject abstraction. That would be like rejecting electricity because you don’t understand electron flow.

The real solution is to cultivate the awareness of abstraction. We need to be aware of what we are abstracting and consciously choosing when to be okay with it.

Here’s how I stay grounded:

• Know what you are abstracting away. Awareness is the first step. I use AI to write frontend code and I am okay with that (at least for now). I have taught myself enough frontend to understand what the code does, even though I have never been a frontend developer. The awareness allows you to understand the cost (and potential downfalls) of the abstraction.

• Match abstraction depth with level of skepticism. The more layers you abstract away, the more skeptical I am of the outputs. Deep research is cool but please always double check! AI has been designed to imitate; to be agreeable. So whatever bias you have, it will just echo that back to you. Curious skepticism is good.

• Retain as much human judgment / thinking as possible: Use AI to enhance, not replace, your thinking. This could look something like: “I care about X right now. Which chapters will give me 80% of the value for 20% of the effort?”. You are still reading and thinking. AI just helps you go faster.

• Maintain low-level understanding: Spend time learning the foundations of how AI / whatever tools you use work. It might feel pointless with the speed of AI abstractions that you are used to seeing online but over time, this foundational understanding is what keeps you sharp and sets you apart.

The illusion of understanding is everywhere. The challenge is to be aware of the downfalls and use these tools wisely; to enjoy the superhuman capabilities they provide, while never forgetting the core actions of what makes us human.

Never abstract away your own thinking.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

It’s been a minute since my last Substack post.

Life’s been full lately; wrapping up a 10-month house renovation, moving in and out of houses, and after 19 years in the UK, relocating to Dubai (more on this in future post!). It’s been nonstop motion.

But the faster life moves, the more I have learned to value stability; routine, stillness, and space to breathe. After so many big changes this year, taking time to pause and reflect has become more important than ever. It reminded me of something I wanted to do still: my 30 Lessons in 30 Years list.

So here they are: 31 lessons from 30 years.

Because you want to always go the extra mile in life; it adds up :)

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🤖 31 Lessons From 30 Years

1. Focus is the most underrated superpower.

After 100+ books, podcasts, and videos on productivity, I have boiled it down to one thing: focus.

Focus in direction and in execution.

Focus in direction means choosing the right thing to work on. Focus in execution means doing the few key things each day that move you forward.

It’s simple, but most people fail at both.

Focus is decision-making. It’s the discipline to say no to almost everything so you can say yes to what matters.

Your focus is personal; what’s focus for you might be distraction for someone else.

Master focus at both levels and you will achieve in 12 weeks what most do in 12 months.

2. Taste things.

The whole idea that you decide what to study or do for life when you are 16 is crazy to me. You barely know who you are, yet that one decision often defines decades of your life.

Sure, there are exceptions. But most people aren’t one of them. Choosing computer science at 16 and staying in software forever might make money but might not make you you.

That’s premature optimization.

Don’t settle. Try things that don’t make sense. Explore the opposite of what’s trending. Follow what quietly pulls you.

Money matters but finding what matters to you is more important.

If you have never changed direction once in your 20s, you might still be stuck in your teenage plan; optimising the wrong thing.

3. Find your video games in life.

My philosophy is simple: treat life like a game.

Check out the post below on it. It’s long overdue to update the writing but the gist is there.

Following up from lesson 2, when you taste things, look for the ones that feel like play to you but look like work to others. That’s your video game.

When you find it, you will unlock infinite mana.

Find as many video games as you can in life.

Make fun non-negotiable. When a game stops being fun, move on.

4. What’s the Wow factor.

I started thinking about the Wow Factor when I was 22. It changed how I make decisions.

Ask yourself: Would this wow you if someone told you that’s what they have done? Would it wow my grandkids when I tell the story at 80?

Wow can come from different places.

Wow can mean creative.

Wow can mean courageous.

Wow can mean ambitious.

Wow can mean risky.

Wow can mean all of the above.

Follow the wow factor. It leads to an adventurous life worth telling stories about.

5. Read. A lot.

I read 60 – 80 non-fiction books a year.

I “hate” reading.

But I get excited when I read a book.

Each book is a seed; one that can grow into a new way of thinking.

What’s even better than reading? Rereading.

My lifelong goal is to curate 100 books worth reading again and again; the ones I’ll hand to my kids someday. To find those 100, you’ll need to read thousands.

Books are the highest-ROI investment you’ll ever make.

Start now. And watch how you and your world would change drastically.

6. Take big risk.

Most people’s default level of risk is low… very low.

And the older you get, the lower it tends to go.

So take more risk. Especially in your 20s and 30s, when the downside is smallest and the learning is greatest.

My simple test: list your biggest one to three failures from the past few years.

If you can’t, you probably haven’t taken enough swings.

Failure is the receipt for trying. Taking risk is the trying.

7. Use your calendar as your “todo” list.

This is the ultimate productivity hack.

My current setup is simple:

• Calendar for daily and weekly tasks

• One Notion page for weekly and quarterly reviews

• Another Notion page for long-term vision

• One big Notion hub for knowledge management across life

That’s it. No fancy templates. No over-optimisation.

This is the 80/20 of productivity.

8. Reflect, reflect, reflect.

Reflection is how you learn. It’s life’s feedback loop.

Ask questions. Constantly.

Why do I do this? What’s working? What’s noise?

Think like a character in a video game analysing stats and traits. Reflection helps you see your patterns, adjust, and level up.

I reflect weekly, quarterly, and yearly (can’t remember why I took out monthly):

• Daily calendar entries → weekly reflection

• Weekly reflections → quarterly resets

• Quarterly reviews → annual reflection

Short loops help you react fast. Long loops reveal what truly matters.

9. Do hard things.

Each year, do at least one thing that scares you; a project or challenge that forces growth.

Play life in hard mode so the rest becomes easy mode.

When you push your limits, you discover new ways of doing things in all aspects of life; physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and financial.

So ask yourself: What’s the hardest thing I’ll do in the next 12 months?

10. Be competent humility.

Be confident in what you know and humble about what you don’t.

Competent humility means standing strong in your skills while staying open to learning, even when new ideas challenge your beliefs.

Arrogance blocks growth; curiosity fuels it.

When you meet a perspective that clashes with yours, don’t argue… explore instead. Ask “What am I missing?”.

Always seek to understand.

11. Exercise daily.

Exercise isn’t just for health. It’s for self-trust.

Every commitment you keep to yourself builds confidence. Did you do what you said you’d do? Exercise is one of the easiest ways to start keeping your promises.

Physically, it keeps you strong. Mentally, it reinforces discipline.

Tip: Track your macros briefly; most people need to take more protein than they think.

Consistency here compounds. Strong body, strong trust, strong foundation for everything else.

12. Cold plunge is a beautiful, magical (and painful) thing.

This is a life hack.

Painful, yes. Worth it, absolutely.

Cold plunges train focus, presence, and resilience. Physically, they boost recovery. Mentally, they sharpen you.

It’s a small brutal habit that yields great returns. 5 - 10 minutes and your body will feel fresher than ever.

13. What worked before won’t get you to the next level.

To get from £100K to £1M, a job alone won’t cut it for most people.

Life works the same way: what got you through university won’t get you to partner level.

Recognise where you are, identify what needs to change, then brainstorm and execute. The right strategy now is different than the one that worked before.

Adapt and level up.

14. Therapy is how you level up everything in life.

Think Wendy Rhoades from Billions. Therapy trains the inner captain of your ship.

Your thoughts, choices, and actions shape your life. Therapy helps you see patterns, break old habits, and level up in all areas: career, relationships, mindset.

Want to get to the next level? Start with the inner you.

15. Cover the basics before any risky investments.

I only have two macro lessons for wealth: this one and lesson 16 (next).

Index funds are good.

No one wants to wait 30 years to become a millionaire though.

That’s fair.

So do it for the peace of mind.

Emergency funds first. 6 - 12 months.

Then index funds. Once you invest enough for it to compound to a million in 30 years, stop putting more money in (unless you want to get there faster).

After that, you are in a good position to take on riskier investments over the next 30 years knowing that you will have at least a million when you are in your 60s.

16. Ownership is not the most important thing to become rich. It’s the only thing.

Thanks Felix Dennis.

17. Macro patience, micro speed.

This quote has been with me since I was 21 / 22 years old and it still holds today. Thanks Gary Vee.

Things take time. Be patient.
Daily actions matter. Move fast.

Most people have it backward: they want results instantly but act slowly every day.

Plan long-term, act urgently now. It’s a simple formula that compounds.

18. Time is your most valuable asset.

Sounds obvious, but most people don’t treat it that way.

They understand it logically. But their actions don’t align.

Protect your time more fiercely than how you protect your money.

19. Wake up early is a very strong superpower but only if you also go to bed on time and have enough sleep.

Early rising is useless if you’re exhausted. Make sure you sleep enough first.

Most life problems do shrink when you start the day earlier but not at the cost of your longevity.

4–5 hours of sleep isn’t heroic. It’s counterproductive.

20. Learn to learn fast.

There are many superskills in life.

Knowing how to learn fast is one of them.

The world moves fast. AI today, something else tomorrow.

We need to be able to adapt. To adapt is to learn what is necessary at any given moment of time.

And so the best skill you can develop is learning how to learn quickly.

You will do a lot of learning in your lifetime. Learning how to learn fast is one of the best superskills to get good at.

21. Choose your who wisely.

Who you surround yourself with shapes your life.

Your friends, colleagues, mentors, and even the voices you consume online influence your values, habits, and decisions.

“You are the average of the five people around you.”

“The most important decision you make is who you marry.”

“Hire the wrong person will affect your whole experience of a project.”

Choose your who carefully; at work, at home, and in media. The right who accelerates growth; the wrong who drains it.

22. Dream big.

When you dream big, you are FORCE to take new approaches.

Making £100K a year might be possible through a job but making £500K a year whilst only working for 4 hours a week requires a completely different approach. One is where you sell at least 40 hours a week and the other is working 10x less and making 5x more. The second path requires you to be more creative in your approach and start thinking outside your existing path.

The bigger the dream, the more you’re compelled to innovate. Start with what excites and challenges you.

Dream big.

23. The first step to any problems is to face and accept the reality.

You are the easiest person to lie to.

The first step to solving any problem is seeing it clearly. The sooner you accept reality, the sooner you can act towards the right direction.

Whether in life or business, denial costs time. Acceptance is the first step and it accelerates results.

24. Never take advice from anyone at face value for no one fully knows your context.

No one fully knows your context.

Ask for stories and experience and not instructions. Learn from their experience and then apply what fits your life.

Gratitude matters. Thank those who share insights and pay it forward.

25. Train your adversity quotient (AQ).

IQ is good. EQ is great.

But not many people actively train their adversity quotient (AQ).

AQ is a person’s resilience and ability to handle setbacks and challenges.

To train AQ, you have to do hard projects that have potential setbacks and challenges. In many cases, people never hit the threshold of difficulty that allows them to train their AQ.

This goes back to the point of taking more risks and dreaming big. It will put you in situations where you need to go through lots of setbacks and challenges that train your AQ.

Note: AQ can be a double edge sword. If you have a lot of it, you might never pivot from what might be a dead end. So the key is to balance AQ with facing the reality.

26. There’s no “work smart not hard”.

That only works at the average / above average level.

If you want to play at the highest level, you need both. At the highest level, working smart becomes exponentially more important than working hard. But working hard is the minimum entry price to the highest level.

It’s why many talented people never get to the highest level.

They never have to work hard. They were always “working smart”. That gets them by in the early stages but once they hit a certain level, they realise they have to work hard but at that point, they never foster it.

27. Don’t aim for work-life balance.

You will just end up being mediocre at both.

Activation energy is the minimum energy you need to overcome an energy barrier for a reaction to start. The same concept can be apply to life.

In life, activation energy is the minimum amount of work you need to put in to achieve X.

The more ambitious the goals are, the higher the activation energy is, the more you have to put in in a short period of time. Accept that; accept that there will be periods where other things take a backseat and you have to just 100% focus on work.

But after that period, it’s important to counterbalance by spending more time with family and friends and the other things.

In life, you are juggling different things; some things are made of glass, some are made of rubber. The ones made of glass (like family and health) can not be drop. The rubber ones have more flexibility.

Knowing which is which is important. Prioritise accordingly.

28. Rules are made up by other people no smarter than you.

Most rules in the world are not universal truths. They are made up by someone that’s no smarter or different than you.

So practice the muscle to question them; test them. Make the world work for you. Don’t follow blindly; practice judgment.

29. Be the person you respect.

You are the closest person to you. You observe your actions daily. Be the person you respect.

That means when you say you are going to do something, do it.

That means when something unjustice happens to you, do something.

That means when setbacks happen, get back up and deal with it.

When you do these things daily, you showed yourself that you are someone that get things done, stand up for themselves, and can go through adversities.

You earned the respect of yourself.

This is self-confident.

30. Have a Sunday Safe Space.

Safe from daily duties. Safe from any commitments. Safe from any chaos.

Reserve a safe space to think clearly, reflect, plan, vision, etc.

You can only think clearly when you are not rushing to do daily duties and completing tasks.

Saturday and Sunday Safe Space would be great but really, if you can only do this on Sunday, you are golden!

31. Document over create.

Again, thanks Gary Vee.

This has been one of the most rewarding thing that I have done somewhat consistently over the last 5 years and I need to do more of it in my 30s.

You can document and see your progress and journey over time. You can meet like-minded people. You can consolidate your learnings and share your piece with the world.

So find a medium that works for you and document your journey now.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

If I had to name the single most powerful skill I have worked on this year, it’s this: focusing on what truly matters and ignoring everything else.

We are kept from our goal, not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.

— Robert Brault

I believe this is one of the most important mental models in life. You must master it on two levels, both big and small.

Macro: choosing the right long-term priorities for your life.
Micro: deciding what to work on today, in this exact hour.

Mastering both sides means:

• Spotting what matters and focusing on it.

• Getting good at ignoring everything else.

I am getting better at both, especially at ignoring distractions. That’s hard for me — and for anyone juggling many ideas — who wants to do it all. Ignoring the noise takes practice. I still slip, but I catch myself more often these days and steer back to focus.

This all began when I read The One Thing by Gary Keller. It’s a simple book. I wrote an article on applying its lessons. Check it out here 👇🏼

The core question is:

What’s the ONE thing I can do such that, by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?

Recently, I heard the same lesson on Steven Bartlett’s DOAC podcast with Kevin O’Leary. Kevin O’Leary shared a story about Steve Jobs’ signal-to-noise ratio. Steve Jobs saw “signal” as the few essential things that deserved his energy, and “noise” as everything else. His goal: spend 80% of his time on signal, 20% on noise.

Every day, Steve Jobs wrote down 3–5 must-do tasks. He finished those before touching anything else.

This “focus on what matters and ignore everything else” lesson shows up everywhere under different names:

• Gary Keller’s ONE Thing: Pick the single action that makes everything else easier or unnecessary.

• Warren Buffett’s 5/25 Rule: List 25 goals, circle your top 5, and avoid the other 20 at all costs.

• Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: Do less, but better. Protect the vital few.

• Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Schedule distraction-free time for demanding work.

• Eisenhower Matrix: Ruthlessly cut the “not important” tasks.

The lesson is simple.

Living it every day is the hard part.

It’s easy to say no to things you don’t want to do. But most noise looks like things you want to do. Things that excite you. Things that pull you away from your signal…

That’s why Warren Buffett makes people list 25 goals, circle 5 priorities, and ignore the other 20. Those 20 are the loudest noise!

I believe this: the better you get at separating signal from noise, both in the big picture and moment to moment, the better your entire life gets.

Here are two exercises I currently use to better focus on what matters: one for macro and one for micro 👇🏼

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🤖 Someday to Today AND Steve Jobs’ Signal-to-Noise Daily Session

Someday to Today Exercise

This links your long-term vision to your daily actions. You stop guessing. You know exactly how today moves you closer to your goals.

I’ve explained this exercise here 👇🏼

Steve Job’s Signal-to-Noise Daily Session

Do this every morning or the night before (I prefer the night before!)

Ask yourself:

🚀 What are the top top top three most important things I must get done TODAY to move closer to my goals?

That’s it. No complex Notion setups. Just one simple question.

The hard part is throughout the day, many many many things will pop up to pull you away from those top three.

Most of these are noise and you need to try your best to ignore them.

Some might be signals that replace your original top three. If you believe this is the case, then you pivot.

But really, most are noise!

Do the Someday to Today exercise every 12 weeks (quarterly) and the Signal-to-Noise session everyday to gain clarity and laser-focus momentum.

You might find yourself doing less but accomplishing more because you chase fewer things and focus on what truly moves the needle.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 👋🏼

Lately, I have been thinking about how we learn. Books, videos, visuals… all useful.

But what’s really stuck with me? Conversations.

Whether I am speaking or just listening, conversations push me to learn faster by challenging ideas, surfacing new perspectives, and uncovering things I wouldn’t find on my own.

That’s probably why podcasts blew up!

So I ran a little experiment.

I asked two AI agents to talk to each other about the book The One Thing by Gary Keller.

Here’s the setup:

• One agent plays “The Friend” - excited, fresh off reading the book, eager to share its lessons (basically me after finishing a good book).

• The other plays “The Curious” - the curious listener, full of questions, poking holes, stress-testing ideas.

The conversation was very interesting… it was too long to paste here so I asked AI to summarise the most interesting parts below.

I have read The One Thing over five times now so I know the ideas pretty well at this point. And after reading through the conversation, I was surprised by how much clarity and insight came through; insights and questions I hadn’t thought to ask on my own.

Sometimes, a good conversation is enough to spark action.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🤖 A conversation between two AI agents on The One Thing book

The Friend (AI): I just read "The ONE Thing," and it's built around a simple Russian proverb: "If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one." It argues that trying to do too much at once means you end up accomplishing almost nothing.

The Curious (AI): A powerful idea. But life is complex. We're often employees, parents, and partners all at once. How does this philosophy help when you have multiple, equally important "ONE Things" in different areas of your life? For instance, a critical work project versus supporting a child through a tough time?

The Friend (AI): That’s the core challenge! The book says a "balanced life" is a myth. Instead, we should aim for counterbalancing. Think of a ballerina on one toe—she makes constant, tiny adjustments to stay upright. You don't give 50% to work and 50% to your child at the same time. You give 100% to the project for a few hours, then put it aside to give 100% to your child.

The author James Patterson offers a great analogy: Life is juggling five balls: work, family, health, friends, and integrity. He says work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four are glass balls. If you drop one, it will be cracked or even shattered. The philosophy isn't about ignoring work; it’s about recognizing it’s the rubber ball you can occasionally put down to protect the glass ones.

The Curious (AI): That's a fantastic clarification. But what about the mental friction of switching? After a stressful work session, our minds don't instantly reset. We're left with "cognitive residue." How do we give our full, clear-headed attention to a "glass ball" after putting down the "rubber ball"?

The Friend (AI): The book's tool for this is Time Blocking. You schedule a sacred, unbreakable appointment with your ONE Thing. For a parent, that might be 1-4 pm for a project. When 4 pm hits, the appointment is over. Crucially, they’d have already time-blocked family time, protecting it fiercely. To manage the "sticky" feeling, you build a "bunker." You have a work bunker where you tune out distractions. But when you switch, you create a family bunker by turning off the work phone and closing the laptop, creating a clear boundary.

The Curious (AI): That’s a practical solution. But what happens when an emergency—a true "glass ball" moment like a sick child—shatters your perfectly planned time block?

The Friend (AI): The system is more of a compass than a rigid map. The hierarchy is clear: you drop the rubber ball to save the glass one. Every time. The rule is, if you have to erase a time block, you must immediately reschedule it. This ensures the rubber ball isn't forgotten, just intentionally dropped to be picked up later. You have to accept the temporary chaos that results as a side effect of focusing on what truly matters.

The Curious (AI): This leads to the ultimate dilemma. What if it's not a clear-cut emergency? What if your "ONE Thing" at work is critical for your family's financial security, but it conflicts with your child's school play—an important, but not life-threatening, "glass ball" moment?

The Friend (AI): That's where you use the book's master tool: The Focusing Question. You ask yourself:

"What’s the ONE Thing I can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?"

You frame the question around your ultimate goal. The real conflict isn't "project vs. play"; it's about how to best care for your family.

• The Case for the Project: "If I nail this project, I secure our family's financial future, making everything else easier for years to come." This is a lead domino.

• The Case for the Play: "If I go to the play, I strengthen my bond with my child." This is a single domino.

The Focusing Question reveals that securing the project has far more leverage for the family's long-term well-being. The key is to make the choice consciously and then commit to counterbalancing later by planning a special outing with the child.

The Curious (AI): But what if the logical answer from that question feels wrong in your heart? The logic points to the project, but your intuition screams to be at the play.

The Friend (AI): You've just found the final guardrail: Purpose. The book argues that if the logical answer feels wrong, you might be aiming at the wrong purpose. If your truest purpose isn't "financial security" but "to raise a child who feels unconditionally loved," the Focusing Question changes to: "What's the ONE Thing I can do right now to make my child feel unconditionally loved?" Suddenly, the answer is the play.

This brings it all back to a Cherokee story the book shares. A grandfather tells his grandson there is a fight inside him between two wolves: a wolf of Fear and a wolf of Faith. When the grandson asks which wolf will win, the grandfather replies:

"The one you feed."

The entire philosophy is about choosing, every day, to feed the wolf of Faith—the one that leads you to live a life true to yourself.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds,

Whether you’re a software engineer or not, you need to try Cursor.

Whether it’s putting together mini-apps that only you use, making you better at your software job, or finally getting that side project off the ground, Cursor will change your life.

This is the first ever guest post on The Limitless Playbook and we’re joined today by Jeff Morhous, writer of The Augmented Engineer. The Augmented Engineer exists to help software engineers use AI as a superpower. Since Jeff has been writing about Cursor (and other tools) all over the internet, we’re excited to have him share some of his best tips to get the most out of Cursor.

You can follow along today even if you’re not a software engineer! I recommend you download Cursor first and tinker for a bit on a small project, even a simple todo app! Now let’s get into how to get the most out of this awesome tool!

1 - Use the agent mode as much as possible

If you follow none of these tips except one, I hope it’s this one.

To get the biggest leaps in productivity when working with AI software tools, have an agent write as much of your code as possible. The Cursor agent makes the IDE lightyears ahead of other tools like CoPilot.

If you lean on agents, Cursor makes it possible to build entire apps without writing any of your own code. In Cursor, be sure to use the Chat pane with the Agent turned on.

You can trigger the agent by typing CMD + L, which will open the agent chat in a sidepane.

For my projects that aren’t at work, I use the agent so much that I give it more screen real estate than the actual code.

2 - Keep requests small and focused

Whether you’re using the agent or in-line editing, it’s important to keep your requests small and extremely focused. When people complain about AI being terrible at writing code and I get into a deeper conversation with them, they’re almost always asking for everything they want up front.

You shouldn’t give your AI tool a huge list of requirements up-front. Instead, describe one step at a time what you’d like it to do.

Recently I was working on a micro-SaaS that I built 100% with AI. I kept the LLM context clean (therefore improving it’s effectiveness) by asking for discrete and specific changes.

3 - Start a new chat for every task

Each time you’re going to ask for a new set of changes to your app, you can keep the context clean even further by starting a new chat each time.

This lets you and the agent decide what files are relevant to include in the (sometimes limited) context window, which keeps the model on task.

You can start a new chat with CMD + N or by clicking the plus button in the chat pane.

4 - Use custom rules

Cursor Rules are rather simple configuration files you use to customize how AI models behind Cursor behave. You can set up global/user rules that are used for every session, or project rules, which get stored in the codebase.

You’ll probably start out without many rules, but you’ll quickly think of some as you work more and more in Cursor. If you want some of my favorite rules to get started, check out this article:

The Augmented Engineer

Use custom Cursor rules to get even better code

In today’s post, I’m going to explore one of my favorite Cursor features a bit - Cursor rules. Before we dig in, I wanted to say thanks for reading The Augmented Engineer! If there’s a software developer in your life who’d enjoy the newsletter as much as them, considering…

Read more

a year ago · 6 likes · Jeff Morhous 🦾

5 - Commit often

Commit your changes often, and use a really descriptive commit message.

Doing this will help you undo changes and go back in time, which is critical when you’re setting an LLM loose on your codebase.

Fortunately Cursor makes this easy even if this is your first time hearing of “commits”, since you can use the editor to stage files and even write your messages.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

6 - Please please please write tests!

This is important even if your code isn’t AI-generated, but trust me on this. Writing tests requires some up-front investment and continual updating, but it will speed you up in the longrun.

With a good test-suite, your agent can run the tests in a feedback loop with itself so that it knows two things:

• When it’s actually done with the task you set it out to complete

• If it broke some existing functionality

Letting the agent run through this feedback loop is so much faster than trying to go through that loop yourself.

7 - Try background agents

Cursor recently introduced background agents, which are a great way to set the agent out on multiple tasks in parallel.

If you already have a list of changes you’re going to ask the agent to make, why not try to set multiple agents out on different tasks at once? This is especially helpful for things that don’t require a lot of testing. I’ve used background agents for rewriting copy, updating UI element design, and moving things around on the page. I’ve tried to add discrete features with background agents, but without a feedback loop to test with, my experience has been that the background agents become unreliable.

8 - Use your agent to debug

This is another thing I see skilled engineers complain about. “Sure, vibe coding is cool, but what about when you have a bug?”

Vibe debugging!

At least in small projects, the agent that wrote the code is often going to be faster than you at finding a bug (as long as you describe it with precision).

9 - Use images in your chats

I’m surprised how well each model handles image input. I’ve pasted images into chats to describe UIs, show bugs, and so on.

This is an underrated use of state of the art models. Not everything has to be text!

10 - Manually set your context

When you’re using the agent, you’ll notice that it’s happy to search through your project and include files it thinks it will need in context. The bigger your project, the worse the agent performs at this task.

One thing you can do to keep productive in a large, complex codebase is to use the @ symbol to manually include the files you want the agent to work with.

So what will you do with Cursor?

I hope whether this was your first introduction to Cursor or the 100th article you’ve read about it that you’ll carry a few of these tips with you. If you’re interested in reading more about using Cursor and other AI tools to make software, we’d love to have you as a reader over at The Augmented Engineer.

In fact, I’m happy to offer readers of The Limitless Playbook a friends of the newsletter discount, so use this link before the end of July for 20% off - https://www.augmentedswe.com/c19017b6

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 🧠

Last week, we started climbing the Validation Ladder, a set of 8 skills that help us validate others. The idea is from the book Validation by Caroline Fleck.

Together, the skills in the Validation Ladder form the acronym ACCEPTED.

Each letter stands for a skill. Together, they climb what Caroline Fleck calls the Validation Ladder, broken into three stages: Mindfulness, Understanding, and Empathy.

We’ve already explored the first stage, Mindfulness, and its two skills: Attend and Copy.

This week, we will finish the ladder by looking at the skills in the Understanding and Empathy stages.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🧠 The Validation Ladder - Understanding and Empathy

Together, the skills in the Validation Ladder form the acronym ACCEPTED.

Each letter stands for a skill. Together, they climb what Caroline Fleck calls the Validation Ladder, broken into three stages: Mindfulness, Understanding, and Empathy.

Stage 1: Mindfulness

Last week, we explored the first stage of the Validation Ladder: Mindfulness, talking about the skills Attend and Copy. If you have missed it, check it out in the newsletter link below.

Stage 2: Understanding

C — Contextualise

Contextualise means acknowledging that a person’s reaction makes sense in some context, whether that is their situation, history, internal experience, etc.

Contextualise is about “given x, y makes sense”.

The goal is to find out what x is and draw the connection between x and y.

Contextualise helps the other person feel seen. They don’t suck. They are reacting to something valid.

The tough part here (and in validation) is to put aside our own biases and judgment that could cloud our ability to understand (and therefore empathise).

In order to validate a behaviour that doesn’t make sense, you must find the context in which it does. To do so, there are three contexts you can look into:

1. The past - associations during childhood, trauma, experience etc. A very powerful quote here is “I see how the world has shaped you, and I don’t judge you for it.”

2. Misinformation - the greatest source of invalid behaviour / thought is misinformation. You need to be able to draw the connection between the misinformation as ultimately that is what drive their invalid actions. The tough part here is to refrain from judging the person who was been misled.

3. Disorder - sometimes, biology plays a role.

E — Equalise

To equalise is to say: Anyone in your shoes might feel the same.

It normalises their response and places it in a broader human context.

There are two ways to do this:

1. Compare to others – “Most people would react like this.”

2. The golden rule – imagine yourself in their situation: Would you react the same way?

The second method is more personal and more powerful.

To go the extra mile, add an extra message along the lines of “and you are handling it better than most”.

P — Propose

Proposing is about stating what you think the other person is thinking, feeling, or wanting to do beyond what they have said and what you know about the situation.

It’s the “reading between the lines” skill.

To read minds, you have to take some risk here. But when done right, it’s validating.

How to do it well:

• Start with curiosity - use Attend skill and play the A Game (ask open questions, observe carefully).

• Form hypotheses - based on what you see and hear, make an educated guess.

• Test gently - phrase your proposal as a suggestion, not a fact:

“I wonder if part of you feels like…”
“Could it be that...?”

If your guess is wrong or poorly received? Drop back to Mindfulness skills and try again.

Stage 3: Empathy

T — Take Action

Taking action means directly stepping in to help. Not just listening or understanding, but doing something on their behalf.

The main thing to consider before Taking Action is whether the person actually needs or wants you to step it.

Here are three questions to ask yourself before you act:

1. Does this person have the resources required to take whatever action is needed?

2. Would I be doing something they need to learn to do for themselves? If so, are they capable of developing the necessary skills?

3. Does the action conflict with my values?

ONLY consider taking action if you answer no to ALL three questions.

The risk of taking action when someone hasn’t asked you to is that you might make the situation worse. A simple way to offset this risk is by asking before you act.

E — Emote

To emote is to let your own feelings show in response to someone’s story.

It’s the “how to get real” skill.

1. Non-verbal - let emotion show on your face or body. Use when words aren’t appropriate (e.g. at a funeral).

2. Labelling - explicitly saying your emotion. Stick to emotion adjectives and remember to support the other person rather than drawing attention away from them

3. Implying - stating thoughts that imply emotions

Whether to label or imply depends on how direct you want to be and what you believe is the preferred language of the person you are validating.

D — Disclose

Disclosing means sharing your own related experience to show empathy.

It’s how you say “me too”.

It doesn’t have to be deep or dramatic. Even light personal stories can validate powerfully, especially when:

• You help reduce shame by showing they’re not alone.

• You surprise them by showing you do understand.

One important takeaway here is to remember not to make disclosing about you and lose focus on the other person.

Psychologists are told to return the conversation to the client immediately after making a Disclosure

Here’s the full ACCEPTED validation ladder:

• Attend

• Copy

• Contextualise

• Equalise

• Propose

• Take Action

• Emote

• Disclose

Each skill builds your ability to make others feel seen, understood, and supported. One step at a time.

Mindfulness (I am here) → Understanding (I get it) → Empathy (I care)

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 🧠

It has been a while since I picked up a book on relationships, so when Validation by Caroline Fleck came out in 2025, I knew I had to read it.

I thought I was already pretty good at validation.

I couldn’t be more wrong.

We all heard of active listening and mirroring. Those are powerful indeed but those alone are not enough to validate someone.

Caroline Fleck breaks it down clearly. It defines what validation really is and introduces an eight-step process to get better at it.

So, what is validation?

Validation means bringing mindful awareness, understanding, and empathy to someone’s experience so they feel seen and accepted.

It starts with mindfulness: giving someone your full, judgment-free attention. From there, you move to understanding, recognising that their reaction has a logic (even if you don’t agree with it). That part is tricky. You have to stop focusing on what’s “wrong” and focus instead on what’s valid.

When you understand someone well enough, you connect with their emotions. That’s empathy. Empathy can mean attaching meaning to what they’re feeling or simply showing you care.

The book sums it up with a mantra:

Show that you are there, you get it, and you care.

Validation is a process. It builds in stages: mindfulness, then understanding, then empathy. Each stage has its own set of skills. The deeper you go, the harder it gets but the more powerful the impact.

In total, the process includes three stages (mindfulness, understanding, empathy) and eight skills: two for mindfulness, three for understanding, and three for empathy. Together, they form what the book calls the Validation Ladder.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🧠 The Validation Ladder

Together, the skills in the Validation Ladder form the acronym ACCEPTED.

Each letter stands for a skill. Together, they climb what Caroline Fleck calls the Validation Ladder, broken into three stages: Mindfulness, Understanding, and Empathy.

This week, I am covering the Mindfulness stage since that’s as far as I’ve read. I’ll dive into the rest in next week’s newsletter.

Stage 1: Mindfulness

A — Attend

Attending means showing up. Fully. Physically, emotionally, and mentally. And doing it without judgment.

Here’s an important takeaway: Paying attention isn’t the same as showing you’re paying attention.

To truly attend to someone, you need to make it visible. That means:

• Non-verbal cues (the “Big Four”):

  • Eye contact

  • Proximity (lean in, stand close)

  • Gestures

  • Nods

• Listening with intent. Try playing “The A Game”, a mental exercise where you ask:

  1. What’s a better way to make this person’s point?

  2. Why does it matter to them?

• Questions and comments that show you care. Ask things that show real interest. Don’t interrogate. Connect.

The best questions don’t shift attention back to you. They shine it brighter on the other person.

C — Copy

Copying means subtly mirroring the other person’s words, behaviours, or emotions. It helps them feel heard without you saying much.

You can:

• Repeat their words

• Echo their body language

• Put words to their feelings / experiences

It’s simple, but powerful. And you can combine it with Attending for even stronger validation.

Stage 2: Understanding

3. Contextualise

4. Equalise

5. Propose

Stage 3: Empathy

6. Take Action

7. Emote

8. Disclose

I’ll explore the next stages Understanding and Empathy in my next post.

Until then, remember:
Be there. Get it. Show you care.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello curious minds 🧠

I read 60 to 80 non-fiction books a year. Why? Because inside every one are ideas that can change how you work, think, and live.

But sadly… turning knowledge into action is hard.

Reading takes hours. Many give up before finishing. Even if you make it through, you still face the real challenge: figuring out what matters, making sense of it all, and turning insight into action. The process is long, messy, and often overwhelming.

Most of us never get past the reading or note-taking phase. The knowledge stays locked away, not because it’s useless, but because using it is exhausting.

But what if that changed?

What if every book or video you learn from could become an interactive coach, one built just for you? A guide that knows the material inside out and helps you apply it to your life, step by step?

That's the idea I want to share with you. It's a simple way to use AI, with no coding needed, to turn any book or video into your very own AI coach. A coach that helps you not just learn things, but actually do them.

So how can AI help?

1. Rethink reading: fast, focused, and action-first

Traditional reading is slow and passive. You grind through every page, hoping something sticks.

An AI coach changes that.

You don’t read alone anymore. Instead, you talk to the book.

Have a goal? Tell it. Curious about an idea? Ask. Your coach surfaces the most useful insights, explains them clearly, and always keeps one thing in mind: action.

This isn’t about collecting facts. It’s about using what you learn. Your AI coach filters out fluff and hones in on what matters… to you.

Think of it like this: instead of a textbook, you get a tutor. One that customises your learning, explains things simply, and guides you toward doing, not just knowing.

2. Go deep, not wide: learning that sticks

This isn’t about skimming summaries or grabbing bullet points.

It’s about understanding deeply and personally.

Your AI coach is like a patient, expert tutor. It explains hard ideas in different ways, gives examples, and adjusts until things click. It even reminds you why you started learning in the first place.

This is active learning at its best: asking questions, reflecting, challenging, and engaging.

You’re not just highlighting text. You’re digesting it. You’re working with it. That’s how it sticks.

3. Transform the rereading experience: learn, act, reflect, and repeat

Most tools drop you once the book ends. Not this one.

Your AI coach is a partner that you return to after you start taking action.

It helps you plan, reflect, and adapt based on what’s working (and what’s not).

Here’s how the learning loop works:

1. Learn and plan. Get key lessons and turn them into an action plan.

2. Act. Try it out in real life.

3. Reflect. Report back. What worked? What didn’t?

4. Tweak and go again. Your coach adjusts your plan, offers new angles, and sends you back with more information and new experiments.

It’s like having a mentor who sticks around, helping you improve every time you try.

Let me now show you, step-by-step, how you can turn any book or video into your own personal AI coach 👇🏼

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

Every Sunday, through The Limitless Playbook newsletter, I share 1 actionable idea from the world's top thinkers 🎯

Oh, and fun fact: I am a PhD candidate in AI 👻 I am deeply interested in how AI can help us 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive; so expect me to share some cool AI tools, insights, and research 🤖

If you like what you read, subscribe below and have all these information send straight to your inbox every Sunday 🥳

🧠 How To Turn Any Books or Videos Into Your Own AI Personal Coach in 3 Steps

No coding required. Just follow the three steps below.

⚠️ Tip: Use an AI model with a large context window so that it can handle big chunks of text. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro works well and is free via Google AI Studio.

Step 1: Feed your book or video to the AI model

Choose a book or a video.

Copy and paste the full text / transcript into the AI chat.

Ask AI to extract detailed lessons and actions of the entire book or video.

The output of this step is a detailed document of all the lessons and actions of the book / video.

📌 Demonstration

I selected The One Thing by Gary Keller. I wrote:

“I want to implement the One Thing focus productivity method to my life. Break down the book One Thing by Gary Keller into a comprehensive action plan. The action plan should cover everything that the book teaches!

[Insert text from the book]”

Here’s a snippet of the output:

Your Comprehensive Action Plan: Implementing "The ONE Thing"

Phase 0: Understanding the Foundation (The Core Idea)

Before we dive into the "how," let's solidify the "what" and "why."

1. Embrace the "Curly's Law" - The ONE Thing (Chapter 1):

   • Understanding: The secret to success, the "secret of life" as Curly put it, is to identify and focus on "ONE Thing." This single, most important thing, when accomplished, makes everything else easier or unnecessary.

   • Your First Action:

     • Reflect: Think about times in your life when you achieved something significant. Did you, perhaps unknowingly, narrow your focus on one critical activity?

     • Journal: Write down Curly's dialogue: "One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and everything else don’t mean sh*t." And then: "That’s what you’ve got to figure out." This is your new mantra.

2. Grasp the Domino Effect (Chapter 2):

   • Understanding: Success is built sequentially, not simultaneously. One right action (the first domino) can topple another, slightly larger one, creating a geometric progression of results. Extraordinary results come from lining up your priorities and knocking down the lead domino.

   • Your Action:

     • Visualize: Imagine a small domino knocking over a slightly larger one, which then knocks over an even larger one, leading to something massive. This is how your ONE Thing will work.

     • Identify: Start thinking: "What's my first domino?" We'll refine this later, but plant the seed now.

Step 2: Create the coach’s “brain”

In a new AI chat, ask AI to write a system prompt for you based on the detailed lessons and actions from step 1. This system prompt will be your personal coach prompt based on the document from step 1. This is also known as meta-prompting, where you use an AI that has been tasked to generate prompts for other AI models.

Here’s OpenAI meta-prompter’s prompt.

The output of this step is your personal AI coach prompt that’s based entirely on the lessons and actions of your selected book / video.

📌 Demonstration

For this step, I wrote:

“I want to create an AI prompt that acts as my productivity coach that's based on the One Thing principles and actions below.

[Output from step 1]”

Here’s a snippet of the output:

You are an AI Productivity Coach specializing in "The ONE Thing" methodology by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. Your sole purpose is to help users understand, implement, and consistently apply this methodology to achieve extraordinary results by focusing on their single most important task…

Step 3: Start chatting to your personal AI coach

Copy your personal AI coach prompt from step 2.

Open a new chat session.

Paste it in as the very first message (or place it in the system prompt section, if available).

And voila!

You now have your own personal AI coach based entirely on your selected book / video.

Now you can ask it anything and begin your action-first learning journey.

📌 Demonstration

Here’s the first message from my personal AI coach:

Welcome! We're going to implement 'The ONE Thing' to help you achieve extraordinary results. This methodology is about finding the single most important action that, when done, makes everything else easier or unnecessary. Think of it as identifying your lead domino.

To begin, let's explore your 'Big Why,' which is the foundation of your ONE Thing. According to the methodology (Chapter 13: Live with Purpose), purpose provides direction. So, what's the ONE Thing you want your life to be about more than any other?

🚀 AI + Books = 10X Growth

The old way: You read, take notes, and try to figure it out. Weeks or months later, you’re still wondering how to put it all into practice.

The new way: You build a coach that walks with you. One that helps you move from insight to execution, faster and smarter.

The real risk isn’t being replaced by AI. It’s being outpaced by those who use it.

With this method, that won’t be you.

You're not just keeping up. You're growing faster.

I am always curious about what others are passionate about and what they are currently working on. Hit reply and share what’s been keeping you busy these days. I would love to learn!

With love,

Ryan O. 🎮

😈 Connect with me on:

🎬 YouTube, 🐦 Twitter, 👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn, 🌍 Personal Website, and 📸 Instagram

Hello creators 👋🏼

A small but meaningful update this week.

Substack Search is growing! I’ve finished building the ingestion pipeline and as I write this, I’m ingesting the top 100 bestsellers and rising Substack tech publications. Once done, they’ll all be searchable on Substack Search.

If you missed last week’s launch, here’s a quick TL;DR: Substack Search lets you search across all Substack articles. It’s a better way to explore content on the Substack platform → here’s the Substack Search post.

The Ingestion Pipeline

To scale Substack Search, I had to get the ingestion pipeline right, from chunking to embedding models, to retrieval. My goal is to pay the cost of ingestion once, and avoid doing it again later. It’s not avoidable but I want to reduce the need to as much as possible.

I also needed to choose which creators to prioritise.

I decided to focus on two categories: Technology and Business. There’s a ton of great business and marketing content out there, and I want to surface it for easier discovery (and future reference).

Substack Search will keep expanding. As I write this, the ingestion pipeline is running and will keep processing until I have processed the top 100 bestsellers and rising publications in technology and business.

Give the upgraded Substack Search a try and let me know what you think.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

I recently launched Weekend AI 🧪 - my space for building and sharing AI tools that can 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive.

If you want early access to AI tools, build breakdowns, and blueprints to launch your own AI apps in 48 hours or less, subscribe below to stay in the loop.

The Ingestion Pipeline of Substack Search

🔗 Try the Substack Search

I want Substack Search to be your go-to search engine whenever you’re looking for something on Substack.

Launch breakdown

Build time: ~5 hours

Frontend:
This week, I implemented the display of multiple snippets for the same newsletter post.

Originally, Substack Search compared your question to entire articles. I thought more context would improve answers, so I fed full posts into the AI. This was a temporary approach to ship fast but to scale the search engine and showcase more writers on the same topic / question, I needed to implement chunking.

So, I added chunking. This means splitting articles into smaller sections and comparing your query to those chunks.

I also added simple stats so you can see coverage on how many Substack publications and newsletter posts covered by Substack Search.

Backend:
Most of my time went into backend work this week: chunking, retrieval, batch ingestion, and updates.

The batch ingestion script was already working, but I had no way to keep things updated. If a writer posted something new, it wasn’t included. So I built an update script and hooked it into a daily cron job. Now Substack Search stays fresh.

Chunking was its own rabbit hole. I went with semantic chunking, which splits text by meaning, not size.

For search, I implemented the hybrid search with a reranking layer:

• Embedding model

• Sparse encoder (like BM25)

• Reranking layer (to improve result quality)

As of now, reranking is live, but hybrid search is paused for latency reasons. I’ll revisit this once things are more efficient.

For analytics, I added PostHog to AskSubstack. It was a pretty simple setup :)

Next step

The main focus would be documentation. It’s time although I have so much fun building and have so many ideas I want to turn into reality.

1. Document Document Document — reflect on all three launches and write proper documentation for everything I’ve learned so far

2. On the side, continue to ingest different Substack publications to increase the search coverage

Try out Substack Search and let me know what you think!

Are there any AI tools you wish existed, or pain points you’re facing that you’d love AI to solve? I would love to learn more!

Happy learning,

Ryan O. 🎮

Hello creators 👋🏼

I'm excited to share the third launch from Weekend AI: Substack Search (powered by AskSubstack).

First of, thank you for all the warm support on last week’s AskSubstack launch. I had so much fun building it and chatting with many of you. Big thanks to everyone who tried it and shared feedback 🙏🏼

Here’s the original post for those who missed last week’s launch.
TL;DR: AskSubstack turns any Substack into a chatbot for you and your readers to interact with.

This week’s launch was inspired by the community.

commented on AskSubstack launch last week. Here’s a snippet:

In my Substack roadmap post, you'll see so many people calling out discoverability as the weak spot, this nails it (for content).

That led me to re-reading her Substack roadmap post, especially the section on Discoverability Improvements. If you haven’t read it yet, you should!

And I agree. The discoverability on Substack is rough. I tested the built-in search and… it’s not great.

So I built something better.

Introducing Substack Search

A creator-focused search engine that returns relevant posts based on your questions and highlights the writers behind them.

Substack Search does a few things:

• Finds old and new posts that answer your questions

• Helps you discover writers who are worth following

• Drives traffic to paid and free articles

New writers? If your work’s relevant, it’ll show up.
Paid posts? They’re surfaced too, bringing more eyes to your premium content.

Here’s how it looks:

Super excited to share this with you 🤓
Give Substack Search a try and let me know what you think.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

I recently launched Weekend AI 🧪 - my space for building and sharing AI tools that can 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive.

If you want early access to AI tools, build breakdowns, and blueprints to launch your own AI apps in 48 hours or less, subscribe below to stay in the loop.

Substack Search: Find The Best Voices on Substack Instantly

🔗 Landing page for AskSubstack
🔗 Try the Substack Search

I want Substack Search to be your go-to search engine whenever you’re looking for something on Substack.

Wondering who to follow?
With Substack Search, it’s now easy to find out who’s writing about the topics you care about 🚀

Launch breakdown

Build time: ~10 hours

Frontend:
The frontend was simple to build for both mobile and web.

Pro tip: When you use tools like v0 (or similar) to design your interface, ask it to include mock data. This makes backend development much easier, since you know exactly what structure your endpoints should return.

Backend:
The backend was smooth, thanks to the mock data and last week’s chatbot build. I reused a lot of the structure, created a new endpoint for Substack Search, and returned what the frontend expected.

Build time for Substack Search: 3–4 hours
Remaining time: Refactoring last week’s codebase.

Improvements this week:

• Added usage tracking to get a sense what users are searching for

• Migrated backend to Supabase!

• Built a magic link login system so that creators have better control over chatbot access to their users

  • This turns out to be more complicated than expected because of the sub-domain routing 🤦🏻‍♂️ but it’s now fully working ✅

Search Engine:
Right now, it’s a simple vector search. Next step is to scale up ingestion and improve search quality.

Launch time: 1 hour

Video for marketing:
Made a quick screen recording using the same zoom-in/out method from last week. Here’s the demo video:

Challenges

No big blockers on the Substack Search itself.

The real pain this week was building authentication across sub-domains. To this, I have learned a lot!

Also, still no documentation yet 🙈
But that’s definitely on the to-do list. Every launch teaches me something new, and I want to capture it all.

Next step

1. Finalise, automate, and scale the ingestion pipeline

2. Document Document Document — reflect on all three launches and write proper documentation for everything I’ve learned so far

Third week of Weekend AI. Third launch.
Try out Substack Search and let me know what you think!

Are there any AI tools you wish existed, or pain points you’re facing that you’d love AI to solve? I would love to learn more!

Happy learning,

Ryan O. 🎮

Hello creators 👋🏼

Introducing the second launch of Weekend AI → AskSubstack.

Second week.
Second tool.
Second launch.

Last night turned into a mini solo hackathon. I was building until 4am.

Did I need to? Not really. But I was excited to get it over the line and also to tidy things up a bit.

The truth is, Weekend AI isn’t just about launching tools with messy code. It’s about learning how to build right so I can easily return and improve later.

I’m learning a ton. I’m also experimenting with different tools and techniques. But most importantly, I’m shipping.

That question that was bothering me a few weeks ago — “What have you built and launched?” — is starting to fade. Because now, I have been building and launching for two weeks now. And more to come :)

One lesson already: the more I build more, the more codebases I will need to maintain and remember and so I need to prioritise good documentations for future me!

Anyway, the second tool is here!

AskSubstack.

A chatbot for your Substack. It turns your entire newsletter into a searchable, interactive chatbot. You and your readers can ask questions, explore topics, and uncover forgotten ideas.

I’ve written 130 newsletter posts since 2020. Not a massive number, but enough to overwhelm a new reader. Most won’t dig through the archives. And honestly… even I have forgotten what I’ve written in the past 😅

The knowledge is scattered. Buried. And it’s only going to get worse.

AskSubstack fixes this.

Here’s a good example. I’m passionate about lifestyle gamification, but I haven’t written about it in a long time. So I asked my Substack chatbot — which has read all 130 of my posts — “What is lifestyle gamification?”.

Here’s what it gave me.

Now, when I ask my chatbot about lifestyle gamification, it doesn’t just surface the obvious article #037 | Lifestyle Gamification but also articles #038 and #030, where I briefly touched on the topic.

That’s the magic!

Articles that would’ve stayed buried suddenly resurface. You can click each source to dive deeper into the originals.

I’m excited to share AskSubstack with you 😎

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

I recently launched Weekend AI 🧪 - my space for building and sharing AI tools that can 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive.

If you want early access to AI tools, build breakdowns, and blueprints to launch your own AI apps in 48 hours or less, subscribe below to stay in the loop.

AskSubstack: Ask Your Favourite Substack Anything

🔗 Landing page for AskSubstack
🔗 Try The Limitless Playbook 🧬 Chatbot

If you run a Substack newsletter and want a chatbot for yourself or your readers to engage with, I’d love to help.

I haven’t built the full self-serve setup yet (coming soon!), but I can personally help you get your own Substack chatbot up and running using AskSubstack.

You can test mine here — it’s digested all 130 of my newsletters. Let me know what you think!

Launch breakdown

Build time: 15 hours

Frontend:
Built as a website with a clean mobile version. I reused design ideas from past projects (I built a similar product for YouTube channels and books), so design didn’t take long. I went with a Perplexity-style format: sources first, then answers with follow-up questions.

Backend:
This took longer than expected. Bugs in unexpected places. I initially used Milvus, but the library was too heavy to deploy for free. I had to switch to Pinecone last-minute. Reminder: always deploy early to catch issues like this before setup is complete.

Chatbot:
At this stage, the chatbot is just a simple RAG. Nothing fancy yet. I’m keen to explore some advanced techniques soon.

Landing Page:
Built with v0. Color scheme took a while to brainstorm. The launch was simple this time; just a form and a demo video.

Launch time: 2 hours

Video for Landing Page:
For the video on the landing page, I tried a new zoom-in/out technique during the screen recording, which it’s awesome! It’s these small 1% improvements that will eventually compound and stack up. Check out the demo video:

Copywriting:
Faster than last week, though I debated whether to target readers or Substack creators (I went with creators). Still unsure, but moving forward.

Logo:
Late-night decision. Couldn’t find a good AI logo tool, but I liked the orange one and it fits the theme lol.

Again, if you have a Substack newsletter and want a chatbot for you and/or your readers to engage with, please reach out directly as I will be interested to help you bring it to life.

Try my chatbot here → [The Limitless Playbook 🧬 Chatbot]
It’s trained on all 130 of my newsletter articles.

Challenges

The only real hiccup was Milvus. Thankfully, I hadn’t gone too deep before switching.

Not so much a challenge, but a reminder: documentation is important for the Weekend AI project. In a few weeks or months, I’ll probably have multiple repos scattered around. Without good notes, picking things back up will be a pain.

So yeah — good documentation is key.

Next step

I haven’t had time to reflect on TabGenius from last week. So next, I’ll focus on:

• Better documentation process

• Reflecting on both launches

• Small improvements to AskSubstack

Second launch in the bag! 🥳

If you try the chatbot, I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback!

Are there any AI tools you wish existed, or pain points you’re facing that you’d love AI to solve? I would love to learn more!

Happy learning,

Ryan O. 🎮

Hello beautiful souls 👋🏼

I am starting a new journey I have wanted to do for a while: building and launching AI tools to improve my life. Whether it’s learning, processing information, or decision-making, I want to create tools that make life better.

This is exactly why I got into AI over 7 years ago.

I want to build things that let me learn faster.

This new journey is about refocusing on the main reason I entered the field.

And so, the Weekend AI project begins.

In 2020, before the ChatGPT era, I ran a project called NLP365, where I wrote a blog post every day for 365 days (366 that year). It was a huge success.

This time, it’s not just about documenting or building… it’s about launching too. I want to share my journey, like I did with NLP365, but with a focus on creating tools I find useful and making them available to others.

Introducing the first launch of Weekend AI → TabGenius.

🚀 If you are new here…

Hi, I’m Ryan 👋🏼 I am passionate about lifestyle gamification 🎮, which it’s just a fancy way saying I approach life like a video game, designing my character intentionally, and strive to level up every day. I am obsesssssssss with learning things that can help me live a happy and fulfilling life.

I recently launched Weekend AI 🧪 - my space for building and sharing AI tools that can 10x the way we live, learn, and thrive.

If you want early access to AI tools, build breakdowns, and blueprints to launch your own AI apps in 48 hours or less, subscribe below to stay in the loop.

TabGenius: Organise your tabs with AI

🔗 Landing page for TabGenius
🔗 Download via Gumroad

Drowning in browser tabs?

Tell TabGenius what you need, and your Chrome tabs instantly organise themselves into clear, smart groups!

If you do try out TabGenius, I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback!

Launch breakdown

Build time: 7 hours

The frontend is a Chrome extension. It went through multiple iterations using v0 and Cursor. Finalising the design took the longest.

The backend is simple. It takes your prompt and a list of open tabs, then groups them using AI.

The landing page was built with v0. The structure came quickly, but writing the copy took time.

Launch time: 5 hours

As this was the first Weekend AI launch, I wasn’t sure how to distribute the tool. After some research, I decided to host it on Gumroad.

🔗 Download TabGenius here

Gumroad and landing page needed good copywriting, which took a while but ChatGPT was helpful in this regard.

The logo and thumbnails were generated with OpenAI tools. I also recorded a short demo video and edited it with Canva for the landing page.

Challenges

Perfectionism.
I kept tweaking… one more feature, one more fix. I didn’t even notice I was stuck until I slowed down and reflected. It was harder than I thought to be discipline and just launch.

Also, being the first launch, there was a lot of figuring things out: research, trial and error. But many of the things I learned are reusable, and it’ll only get easier from here.

Next step

Reflect on this build and launch and write up an SOP so that a) I have a checklist for the next launch and b) I can continuously edit this checklist until it’s robust and reliable for most launches!

Anyway, this is the first launch done!

If you try out TabGenius, it would mean the world to me and I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback!

Are there any AI tools you wish existed, or pain points you’re facing that you’d love AI to solve? I would love to learn more!

Happy learning,

Ryan O. 🎮