What matters and the cost of attention.

Thinking in abstract terms doesn’t help. Time is far too short to tolerate noise. In the end, what matters is what compounds, what builds leverage, what doesn’t evaporate by the end of the day.

Life has a narrow set of truly critical, invariant variables—time, cognition, physical capacity, social capital, and ethical integrity. Of these, time is ruthlessly non-renewable. Each day starts with about sixteen hours of fresh attention and ends with zero; so the question is simple: where is my focus going?

If I stop and actually look at where my time is going, the absurdity is obvious: hours, even entire weeks, thrown away on empty loops. Instagram Reels, Shorts—low-grade dopamine that evaporates in seconds. If someone asked me point-blank why I devote so much time to useless videos, I couldn’t give an answer I’d accept myself. That bothers me deeply because it exposes how much of my most valuable resource I’ve squandered.

Real projects are different. AI agents, system development, mentorships, interviews, endurance training, strength training—they all share one trait: compound dopamine returns. On them, every win today isn’t lost tomorrow; each increment becomes a new baseline. The work compounds, the effort compounds, the dopamine not only rewards—it builds, and it builds something that matters.

What matters, therefore, is whatever produces compound loops. And compound loops are always deep loops. They need protected blocks of time—long, focused, unfragmented. Social networks, notifications, reels—it’s all noise created by someone else to capture my attention. Whoever controls my attention controls my results—which makes this noise an active agent working against my own goals.

Cutting noise isn’t a matter of willpower; it’s systems engineering. Add friction, uninstall apps, remove the decision at the critical moment—these work because they’re structural hacks against something optimized to beat me. It’s no longer rational to fight them directly. Rationality lies in never entering the arena.

But if clearing noise is essential, it’s still only half of the equation. It’s not enough to avoid what doesn’t compound; I have to actively feed the right levers. I must nurture the positive loops—training produces cognition and focus, which produces better code, which motivates me to train even harder. Deep work produces real projects, which grow my reputation, which opens doors to even bigger problems, problems worthy of my limited life.

There’s a brutal test I like: the 70-year lens. If I’m standing there at seventy looking back, what moments would I pay to experience again? I wouldn’t pay to replay useless videos or scroll through endless memes. But I’d pay dearly to relive the feeling of doing something that matters, of pushing the limit of what I’m capable of. That’s the final metric.

Integrity matters too, because it’s asymmetric. It takes decades to build and can evaporate in a single wrong move. Being ethical isn’t cheap morality—it’s antifragile. Ethics protect the compound returns of trust and reputation. It’s not a choice, it’s a requirement.

Relationships matter because they compound as well. Trusting and being trusted, collaborating with people who respect my ability and track record. But it’s precisely in the almost invisible details—a leisurely trip, an unhurried conversation, a simple moment shared—that these bonds are truly forged. No trivial task or cheap validation is worth more than a solid network of people who pull me to the next level. These relationships are slow, silent investments with absurdly high compound interest; they’re what make the whole journey worthwhile when I look back.

In the end, what matters isn’t complicated. It’s even simple. The difficulty isn’t conceptual, it’s operational. The issue isn’t knowing, it’s remembering at the moment of distraction—or preventing the distraction from being possible. It’s building systems so I don’t have to remember, systems that make the right thing unavoidable.

Right now, in this exact moment, my attention is limited. Some of it goes to training, some to deep work, some to people who are worth it. None can go where there’s no compound return. None can be lost to noise.

Because underneath it all, what matters is only what survives the test of time. What stays. The rest is vapor, entertainment, illusion.

I don’t have time for illusions.