You always know. But I was still negotiating with my fear.

That is the part nobody warns you about. You think the trap is the money, the lease, the visa, the contract.

The trap is that the closer you get to the door, the more comfortable the cage feels. Every comfort is making the case to stay.

It took me longer than it should have. By the time I actually quit, sold what I had, and got on a plane, the voice had been arguing with me for years.

Get a job. Keep it for at least two years. Don’t be the guy who quits. Don’t look weird on a resume.

I assumed I would be fighting that voice every morning for the rest of my life.

Then something strange happened. Once I was actually out, the voice stopped talking. Not quieter. Gone. Every weird leap I made after that, the voice never came back to argue. I had spent my entire life believing I had to win the argument every single morning. It turned out I only had to win it once.

I thought maybe it was just me. Then in 2017, on the Nomad Cruise from Las Palmas to Panama, I met my friend Dustin. He had spent two years preparing to leave a corporate web design job in Florida. Saved money, set deadlines, read every nomad blog he could find. He picked October 2016 as his date.

October came and went, and he was still at his job.

He didn’t actually leave until February 2017, four months late, after a new city and a new job had quietly made the cage feel cozy. Different country, different decade, and the script in his head was the same as the one in mine.

Keep the job. Two years minimum. Don’t look weird on a resume.

When he told me the story, he mentioned almost in passing that once he was out, the voice had gone silent. The same way mine had.

Same voice. Same prediction. Same trick.

My best guess at why this happens is that the voice is running one prediction.

Leave the cage and you die.

It has been running that prediction every morning since you were a kid, and it has never been tested. Then one day you actually leave, and a month goes by, six months, a year, and you’re still alive. The prediction was wrong. The voice doesn’t get convinced by a better argument. It gets retired by reality.

It doesn’t work for everyone. Some people jump and the voice gets louder, not quieter. Usually that’s because they jumped from one cage into another with the same self intact. New job, new city, same permission-seeking. The voice retires when the prediction it was built on stops being true. You can’t fake the data.

The voice that warns you about quitting your job is the same voice that warns you about publishing the post, launching the product, sending the cold email, telling someone the truth, raising the price, moving countries, going independent, building in public.

It’s one voice. One wall. You think it’s a hundred different fears, each with its own counterargument. It’s not. It’s the same fear in different costumes.

That is why people who finally jump tend to keep jumping. It’s not that they got brave. It’s that the wall is gone for them. They paid the toll once. The rest of their life they walk through where the wall used to be.

It also explains the people who never jump. They keep negotiating.

They move the deadline, build a smarter spreadsheet, read another book.

They tell themselves they need a little more runway, a little more skill, a little more clarity.

They are not preparing. They are paying the voice to leave them alone, and the voice never takes the deal.

Twelve years later, I’m still building on top of that one decision. Leaving London. Years on the road. Killing projects. Settling in Spain. Going all-in on AI and building my own things.

None of it has felt like a fresh decision. The first one is still doing the work.

If you have been arguing with yours for years, you don’t need a better argument. You need to stop arguing. The voice has been waiting for that the whole time.

What is it still talking you out of?

This is Vicious Notes. My study of clarity, power, and compounding for long-game players who want to build and endure.

I wish I could credit everyone that influenced my thinking and I try my best to attribute the source but just want to declare it here and onwards that any accidental brilliance you read here comes from the great minds and people in the arena. As Sir Isaac Newton would say, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.

— Tomas, long-term partner at Craftled

I just turned 34, and as every year, I’m now reflecting on the highlights, challenges, favorite purchases, and impactful books of 2025.

This year was a year of extremes. Incredible joy and devastating loss. New beginnings and final goodbyes. I became an uncle and lost my father.

Here’s my annual review of 2025.

The Year in Review

Started the year in Chiang Mai, visited Bangkok, enjoyed some massages and unlimited pad Thai. I can eat it all day.

January 11, we drove to Valencia to pick up our baby puppy Pixel, an Italian greyhound that brought a lot of joy to our home.

January 27-31, Marrakesh for saas.grouping. Lots of fun, workshops, activities, amazing food, and getting to know people I work with every day better. Coming from the padel court, I tried tennis and got absolutely demolished by Rewardful CEO Emmet. Lots of fun, and for the first time I tried a golf driving range and want to play golf sometime soon.

Did my first hiring interviews at Rewardful. Fotini excelled and became our partnerships and social media manager at Rewardful.

April 28-May 2, stayed in Mallorca, coworking, chatting, and doing some local sightseeing with Justas.

May 13-20, a Mediterranean cruise celebrating my mom’s 50th and Isabella’s mom’s 60th birthdays: Barcelona - Tunis - Palermo - Naples - Livorno - Marseille - Barcelona.

Chatted quite regularly with my closest friends.

July: road trip for Isabella’s birthday with her friends and Pixel. Granada, Cadiz, Sevilla, Cordoba. Isabella got her Spanish citizenship!

Bought a scooter, so much fun. It unlocks a new dimension and you see the world differently: more exciting, so much faster to move in the city, easy parking, and also lots of fun.

Early September, Lithuania - caught up with friends Kamile, Martynas, Justas, Egle, and Rokas, celebrated my mom’s birthday, visited my dad for the last time.

September 12-14, did the first edition of a micro conference/retreat, grilled steaks, played poker with cigars, made homemade pizza, walked, chilled in the pool, and talked business, vibe coding, and making a living as online builders and makers. Ash, Edgaras, Janis.

End of September, moved to San Juan Beach, a much nicer area and a bigger apartment in a calm private neighborhood two minutes from the beach. Way more expensive, but I instantly felt a quality-of-life improvement.

End of November, visited Paris, sightseeing, eating good food, and entering the Louvre. Paris, even on cold and rainy days, still has its charm and is one of my favorite cities to visit. Unfortunately, my dad died when I was in Paris, so the stay wasn’t as delightful.

In December, I flew to Lithuania for my dad’s funeral. It was the most life-shattering moment and huge wake-up call to live. I wrote about the in-the-moment feelings and observations of losing a parent in detail here: In memoriam.

Drove to Calella for Christmas to stay with Isabella’s cousins and aunts.

I’m very fortunate to be in excellent health, have a loving and supportive wife who’s also my business partner, have curious and successful friends, live on a beach with lots of activities and a nearly perfect daily lifestyle. The death of my father, while devastating, reminds me to live today, to remember that tomorrow is not promised, and all we’ve got is this moment.

Read full review here.

This is Vicious Notes. My study of clarity, power, and compounding for long-game players who want to build and endure.

I wish I could credit everyone that influenced my thinking and I try my best to attribute the source but just want to declare it here and onwards that any accidental brilliance you read here comes from the great minds and people in the arena. As Sir Isaac Newton would say, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.

Most people chase hacks. We play decades.

— Tomas, long-term partner at Craftled

Telsiai, Lithuania

Dec 2, 2025

Place of my birth and my dad’s death. Quite symbolic that he brought me here to this moment to this place to this world and now he’s next to me literally in ashes and I am helping him pass to the next world.

Yesterday was the hardest day where I finally saw the dead body of my father and made my peace and allowed my body to weep and release the emotions I wanted my father to feel.

I loved and will always love him.

Not the Hollywood “feel good” movie type of way, not the perfect father-and-son connection type of way, not the ideal or imagined ideal standard way but the most natural to me and most human way where both of us are imperfect but both of us are one, he is me and I am him, and it will be this way forever until my last breath.

I am writing this at 5:47 in the morning, Lithuanian winters are brutal and it’s not just the cold, it’s the darkness.

Right now it’s still very dark and cold outside but I am feeling the light. I awoke early thinking of him and later have to see my mom who sleeps next door, I want to write what I feel, what is going through my mind, to help myself calm down, to remember this moment, to help someone going through the same pain, and most absolutely importantly to remind myself and you that this is what it feels to be alive.

This vibration or more correct word oscillation is what it feels to be alive, it’s what gives everything meaning.

We get so used to our routines, our day-to-day life that we surrender to the illusion that it will always be there, it will always repeat, and nothing will change.

We become apathetic and stagnant and delusional expecting things to last forever but death has this powerful function to release all of the dormant energy and emotions and vibrate and move your body that it becomes uncontrollable in the face of death and may look and feel like a natural force from another world even, as if someone possessed you. All of this is life that is waiting to be lived.

People who have been dormant for too long feel it the most, the shock is so powerful it can even break you and your world. You can’t just deny living, deny the pleasure of life and everything it has to offer just to regret it the moment death comes to equalize things.

You must live today. You must make death your friend.

It’s like a daily alarm clock. You don’t fear it, maybe some of you do, these screaming little gadgets can be spooky at 5 am but it’s a reminder to live.

Ironically, that same gadget that reminds you to get up in the morning, doesn’t die or change its form, but it doesn’t work for the dead. So don’t worry about the death or dying, worry about living the day and the more vibrations and oscillations you feel the more alive you will be.

So what is life in the end?

It’s taking more of calculated risks to keep these vibrations alive.

• It’s thinking of someone you like and rethinking 1,000 times the first word you will say to make contact.

• It’s these butterflies in your stomach going to the amusement park.

• It’s the heat in your face when you volunteer to speak your mind in public.

• It’s the vulnerability you expose saying you are afraid or you don’t know.

• It’s expressing exactly how you feel.

• It’s the “stupid” or “inappropriate” for your gender, age or culture, thing to do or to say.

• It’s the act of stepping forward only seeing one step ahead and shaking and hoping there will another one after, even if it doesn’t make sense.

• It’s creating something and putting it out there, allowing all world to see it.

My father was taking more of these calculated risks in the last 5 years, and I am so happy he did.

He found new companionship, he built new home, he expressed himself more, even if it was a dry and stoic approach.

He drove across the Europe to see my brother in Portugal and to see me in Spain, he drove to Romanian mountains and fed the wild bears that he shouldn’t have, he tried new foods, he dipped his toes in the Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. He tried gelato, he tried Aperol Spritz, he tried jamón serrano and churros, he walked the castles, he saw palm trees, the flamingos and the cute baby flamingos, he was accompanied by his new life partner and his first born son, he asked, he wondered and he was curious and he was vibrating life and he was alive.

You can’t mistake these vibrations for something else than life. Many people die and keep walking dead and even someone’s death can’t reactivate these vibrations in their body.

So don’t be afraid of these powerful emotions and body shaking and heart racing as this is literally life. It’s what it means to be alive and it’s what my father will never feel again no matter how many alarm clocks, churros, flamingos or oceans I bring to his feet.

Whenever you face death, as a daily meditation of mortality, or saying last goodbye to your loved one at the funeral, use that energy and that momentum and that aliveness to live again.

Say what you’re feeling and thinking, create and contribute, participate and help. Follow and lead. Give your dream a shot. Risk a little more to get more of the thrill of life.

Now I’m not saying sell your house and buy chocolate, or jump of the roof expecting to fly, but you know exactly what you should do now, as you were thinking and rethinking it for a long time. It runs in your mind like a movie, you have lived it in your mind but you didn’t allow your body and your wholeness to live it because you fear it won’t be like it’s in your mind, the master script writer, your ego, wrote it and you won’t allow the spontaneity and randomness of life to ruin it, so you stash it all inside of you and start strangling these vibrations and ironing them into a plain straight sheet of paper with the cold fear of imperfection.

There’s the irony, that imperfection is the goal, the purpose, the essence, the being and the life.

I believe that life is for the living. It’s not for the dead we gather at funerals.

Yes, we’re here to honor my father, to remember him, but also here because of what he meant and means to us, the living. We are here because he did what the most alive person can’t ever do right now, he reminded us that tomorrow’s not promised and the death won’t make any exceptions when it is your time to go.

We are here because we received and accepted the alarm clock of life and we awoke from sleepwalking expecting to live forever.

We are here because we feel the life vibrations more strongly than ever and we are here to accept the pain of loss, we’re here to weep, we are here to remember the good and the bad, we are here to scream uncontrollably, to release what was strangled inside for so long, we are here to accept each other with our most human imperfections, we are here to accept my father in his other, dead shape and form that doesn’t vibrate life anymore but still keeps reminding us all that this is it and all of us are traveling to the same place.

Yesterday was the day I saw his cold body peacefully resting forever. While I knew about his sudden and tragic death 3 days ago and had a lot of time to cry and remember and rethink and come to peace with it, there is something your mind can’t do with days what physical presence can do in an instant.

If you don’t see it, don’t touch it and cry your guts out, your mind is trying to make sense of all of it, logically, but then when you see it, when you feel the eternal cold in his hands, it registers in your wholeness in an instant that it is over. Unmistakably clear.

Your mind can’t play deception games anymore and your human nature joins the show and offers you two choices. Surrender or fight.

You have been surrendering most of your life, just letting it flow and letting it become monotonous and passive. But now, in this moment of suffering and extreme explosion, perhaps the biggest eruption of emotions and energy and shivers in your life, human nature is whispering to FIGHT IT! Don’t accept it. Deny death.

Now? Now you pick your enemy?

After all these years of dormant surrender you pick a fight with death? You and I already know how it will end.

But then there’s another choice other than fight. You surrender. You accept.

• Accept that you won’t share a meal together.

• You won’t feel the unconditional love, protection and safety your father provides even living thousands of kilometres away.

• You accept he will never see your newborn niece, or your dog, or your kids, or your wins or your losses.

• You accept that he will create a permanent void that never be filled again but you also accept that all he lived was the way it was supposed to be.

There is no another go, no retry button. No tomorrow.

Human nature in me screams to fight it, don’t accept such a shitty deal, it is a loss. Human nature looks for its allies in bitterness for life, in blame of oneself for being not enough, of doing not enough or picking the horror cinema and running series of “what ifs” and “what could have beens” of looking for hidden meaning and deception of life, but there’s none. No one to blame, no one’s fault, no matter how tragic and heartbreaking it may sound.

When you were introduced to the game of life when you were born, you accepted the terms of service and now act as if you haven’t, or as if they won’t ever be enforced.

So in these moments when death brings life to all us, when it activates all of these dormant alarm clocks, bells and sirens all at once, it’s impossible no to feel alive, it’s impossible not to tremble.

It’s my dad who gave life to me. I am him and he is me. In that moment, I squeezed his cold hand, I chose not to fight. I chose the imperfect son I am. I chose the imperfect father he was. I chose the imperfect funeral and imperfect circumstances and I choose imperfect life.

These moments brought a lot of pain, full body sorrow and heavy heartache. But it was life that I felt, not death.

I couldn’t stop replaying the last time I saw my dad. We spoke, we laughed, we ate, we shared each other’s presence and while my father was never much of a talker or expresser of emotions, I always felt his love. The love that your dad loves you and if it means going on a 3 hour trip without saying much, it was how we loved each other and I wouldn’t change it for anything or any “perfect” Hollywood depiction of a father and son relationship. He was who he was and that is why he is my father.

Now sitting there, having 1 hour to make sense of everything, very willingly staring at his face with a typical dead man make up, my mind was trying to play games with me.

I guess that’s the coping mechanism we humans have, that we will find any reason to hope. I turned to my mom on the right and whispered to her, do you also feel like your daddy is going to come back? That he is alive in your mind and memory? I said that for some reason it feels like this mannequin here is a lookalike of my father, I left him at his home, he made me breakfast, hugged me and told me to close the gates and drop the key in the post box and he left and now I am waiting for him to return. She responded that she feels the same way of her dad, my grandpa, who passed away couple of years earlier.

So this coping mechanism and voluntary self deception might be the way to live the contradiction. My dad is alive but my dad is also dead. He is alive in me, I am him, I see the world through his eyes and I breathe the air through his lungs, he continues to live within me through the new things I will do, new things I will see, touch, taste, feel and create.

He lives in my memory, in all these adventures we had. He lives in all that, often uncomfortable, silence. He lives in all the daily, insignificant in the moment, episodes like seeing him patiently sitting on the couch waiting for me to prepare to go out, or him showing me around his garage, or cooking me one unexceptional lunch. All these memories instantly become priceless.

These little movies full of life are mine to keep until my last heartbeat.

Now writing all of this I can’t stop thinking of him, I am crying, but the tears are of joy. I stop as I get overwhelmed with emotions and need to clear up my tears as I can’t see through as I type this on my phone, but in these moments I extend my arms, clench my hands and wiggle my fingers to feel alive.

I whisper to myself with already dry mouth “this is what it feels to be alive, I am alive!”

I clean up, smile and feel joy to be here. I feel joy for having a father, I feel joy for the time we shared, I feel joy he lived and I was part of his life and now I can take these memories with me.

But wait, here comes the twist of the story.

We have the coping mechanism of remembering the precious moments with recalculated pricing. Where it felt like there was a low price of eating just another lunch with your dad, now writing this, I know with all of my body, that it was the last lunch, and it was priceless. The moment and memory of it is recalculated as priceless and it will remain priceless, and in that moment, you realize the grand impotence you face when your loved one dies. You’re naked, helpless, you can’t do anything and suddenly you start going down. You dig for more of these memories and you let them feed that impotence, that extremely clear preview of what eternity means.

Dec 5

Alicante, Spain

Returned home. Feeling lighter and calmer. Funerals are powerful. It’s designed to help you close the chapter. To make your piece, and as my friend said, everyone who shows up to express their condolences, take a piece of the burden and heartache with them, instantly alleviating you.

It’s incredible how just looking at some of your photos bring back all the distant memories. I don’t regret of not taking more photos or videos of you, but now having just some moments captured in photos and video feel priceless, hearing your voice, seeing you throughout the life.

I understand now. All these movies about the war make so much sense where people risk their lives just to save a photo of their loved ones, as I would not trade the last photo of you for anything.

I can’t stop thinking about the words the funeral cantors recited when saying the last goodbye to you.

There will be new springs, but you won’t be there, there will be new moons, but you won’t be there, a lot of water will flow through the rivers, but you won’t be there, you will be forever gone.

These are some of the most painful and comforting words I could hear in that moment and they still echo in my heart, my mind and my presence experiencing the world through the eyes you gave me.

I remember now bringing your ashes in that urn to the hotel room and looking at it the way I look at any other inanimate object, like a chair or bed, and thinking, or more accurately wondering, how come someone who had consciousness, had the ability to contain universe inside turned into something static and lifeless like a wooden box with a bio capsule inside with ashes? What is life then really?

If the tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to experience it, did the tree really fall?

I wonder if it is the same with the human life, if you didn’t ever make contact with anyone and there is no one to experience your life but you, did you really live?

I realize how episodical and infrequent our real life encounters where as of lately, I would see you for 1-2 days per year but my mind would make a continuous story of your life, filling out the rest of the year as if we saw each other every day. It makes me wonder, how other people saw you, what side they got to know you, what side of me did you get to know, what is life really if not these limited moments?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I know that no matter what questions you ask or want to ask, can only do it while you’re alive. Death is a reminder to live.

Life goes on, but I can’t stop thinking about you, dad.

Long-game players learn to build levers.

They understand that freedom doesn’t come from working less. It comes from building systems that keep working when they stop.

You can grind twelve hours a day and still crawl. Effort is finite. Energy fades. Life happens.

I’ll let Rocky explain it to you in one of the most famous lines from Rocky Balboa (2006):

“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place, and I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward — how much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!”

No matter how motivated you are right now or how much energy you put into something, if you’re like 99.99% of people, you won’t sustain it forever.

The variable that multiplies everything is leverage.

Output = Effort × Leverage

Effort is capped by time.

Leverage scales effort beyond you.

Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

That’s the essence of modern freedom. You don’t escape work. You design mechanisms that compound while you rest.

A London Tuesday

London 2013. I’m 21.

I discovered coffee and it tasted like ambition and panic. I was working as a UI/UX designer at an agency, pushing pixels for clients I’d never meet.

One Tuesday, I watched my boss present my work to a client as agency output. My mockups, his slides and bill it at ten times my rate. He didn’t design a thing. He didn’t even rename the file.

That day I understood leverage for the first time.

He wasn’t smarter or faster. He simply owned the system. He had distribution, positioning, and trust. All the invisible multipliers. My effort was his leverage.

I swore I’ll learn how to get more leverage.

Years later, I learned the same lesson in reverse, thanks to my friend Viktor from Iceland, the calmest person in the world.

I was buried in side projects, deadlines, and open tabs. Viktor just looked at me and stoically said, “You don’t need to do anything.”

Thanks to my 10-day Vipassana experience I was able to see clearly what he was saying.

Leverage wasn’t only about scale. It was also about subtraction. Doing less, but at a higher altitude.

That mindset shift changed everything.

Write a blog post on your own site and you’ll get 20 views. Publish the same story on a major outlet and it reaches millions.

When The Observer republished my article 12 Powerful Habits I Have Stolen from Ultra-Successful People, it became one of their top stories of the year.

Exactly the same words, just on a bigger lever.

Leverage turns the same effort into asymmetric outcomes.

The four forms of modern leverage

• Code & media. Infinite distribution. Write once, reach forever.

• Capital. Money hiring money. Invest in compounding assets, not status toys.

• People. Brains that extend your own but only if your systems make clarity scalable.

• Reputation & network. Trust that shortens every future deal.

You don’t need all four. One quiet lever that compounds beats ten noisy ones that don’t.

Leverage buys back attention, and attention is the raw material of every long-game.

The long-game player asks a single question daily:

“Does this decision increase my future leverage?”

If the answer is no, it’s noise.

Effort fades. Leverage endures.

Notes

Naval Ravikant on Leverage. “Code and media are permissionless leverage. You can multiply yourself a thousandfold with no one’s approval.” Read: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

Archimedes on Force. “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” Every era has new levers. Electricity, TV, internet, AI. The principle never changed.

Andy Grove on Multipliers. “A manager’s output is the output of their organization.” People leverage works only when clarity of direction exists. Read: High Output Management.

James Clear on Systems. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Read: Atomic Habits.

This is Vicious Notes. My study of clarity, power, and compounding for long-game players who want to build and endure.

I wish I could credit everyone that influenced my thinking and I try my best to attribute the source but just want to declare it here and onwards that any accidental brilliance you read here comes from the great minds and people in the arena. As Sir Isaac Newton would say, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.

Freedom scales with leverage.

Audit your work. Turn one effort into many outcomes.

— Tomas, long-term partner at Craftled

They chase growth without direction. They follow advice that doesn’t fit their situation. They stay busy instead of effective. Their calendars are full, but their compass is lost.

Clarity is the antidote.

It’s not about knowing everything. It’s about knowing what matters, and what doesn’t.
It’s the discipline to cut noise, name reality, and act on what’s true.

Leonardo da Vinci said,

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

He wasn’t talking about aesthetics. He was describing how clear thought separates genius from chaos.

The legendary management consultant Peter Drucker echoed it centuries later:

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

That’s the essence of clarity. Not doing more, but seeing sharply enough to do less of what doesn’t matter.

When you start subtracting, you begin to notice where your leverage hides:

• What’s truly driving results.

• Where your effort is being wasted.

• Which projects serve your compounding advantage and which just feed your ego.

Clarity doesn’t come from thinking harder.

It comes from removing what blurs your view.

I first learned that lesson in a 10-day Vipassana retreat in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Ten days of silence. No talking, no writing, no music, no exercising, no input.

At first, the noise was unbearable. Thoughts crashed like waves. But one morning, around day eight, I heard wind caressing the tress and, for the first time, it wasn’t noise. It was just wind. The mind didn’t get quieter. I simply saw it clearly.

Meditation taught me that clarity isn’t the absence of thought. It’s the ability to watch thoughts without reacting. The same principle governs everything you build. You can’t make powerful moves if you can’t see your own noise.

Years later, I wrote you already know what to do, a reminder that you don’t need more tactics. You need to act on what’s already clear.

You call it research or planning week, but often it’s fear wearing a productivity mask. You rehearse the idea for months instead of shipping it once.

Clarity doesn’t just sharpen thought. It forces movement. When you finally see the truth, excuses evaporate. Action becomes obvious.

That’s when clarity becomes power. When every decision compounds because it aligns with your true direction.

Warren Buffett calls it the power of focus. Marie Curie called it discipline of mind.

Both played the long game. They knew sustained clarity builds endurance, and endurance builds results.

If you can see reality clearly, what’s working, what’s noise, what’s true, you’ll develop an edge that can’t be copied.

Because clarity compounds faster than time.

Notes

Peter Drucker on Effectiveness. “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” Most people obsess over efficiency. The long-game players obsess over direction. Read: The Effective Executive.

Leonardo da Vinci on Simplicity. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” “Beauty and utility are not separate; what is not useful is not beautiful.“ Design, art, business. The same principle. Clarity is elegance made visible. Read: Da Vinci’s Notebooks.

Andy Grove on Signals. “The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).” Read: High Output Management.

Marcus Aurelius on Reality. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.” Stoic clarity: cut lies, especially the ones you tell yourself. Read: Meditations.

This is Vicious Notes. My study of clarity, power, and compounding for long-game players who want to build and endure.

I wish I could credit everyone that influenced my thinking and I try my best to attribute the source but just want to declare it here and onwards that any accidental brilliance you read here comes from the great minds and people in the arena. As Sir Isaac Newton would say, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.

Clarity cuts deeper than effort.

Audit your week. Cut one thing that isn’t compounding.

— Tomas, long-term partner at Craftled

They chase likes, hacks, and quick wins. They burn through energy trying to stay relevant by imitating, and when the noise fades, they’re left with nothing to show for it.

But short-term games don’t compound. They distract. They exhaust. And worst of all, they keep you from building anything that lasts.

I know because I’ve played those games. I’ve jumped from project to project, stacking half-finished ideas, chasing novelty instead of endurance. It felt productive, but it was the illusion of progress.

The turning point was realizing that nothing matters more than staying in the game. Becoming a cockroach, building something hard to kill.

Charlie Munger, one of the clearest thinkers, said:

“The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the waiting.”

Translation: endurance beats brilliance.

You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room. You just have to survive long enough for compounding to do its work.

But survival isn’t passive. You need strategy.

Machiavelli would remind us that Fortune (luck, timing, external forces) is like a flooding river. You can’t control it, but you can get ready to channel it.

That’s what he called virtù. The courage, adaptability, and clarity to shape fortune instead of being crushed by it. It reminds me of another quote about inspiration which would very well work for luck:

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso

The same principle applies to business, health, wealth, and even relationships. You can’t predict when fortune will flood, when a market shifts, a competitor collapses, your video goes viral or an opportunity opens.

But if you’ve been quietly compounding, writing, coding, designing, strengthening, learning, you’re positioned to capture it.

Every day people go viral online but most just enjoy the minutes of fame and vanish without being able to capture that attention and direct it to something they can leverage.

The opposite of this is fragility.

• The founder who builds only for speed burns out, I know, I burnt out multiple times and it’s no fun.

• The investor who over-leverages blows up, I know, I lost all my savings in the last crypto hype cycle.

• The creative who chases every trend loses themselves.

The short game punishes the impatient. The long game rewards the enduring.

• Look at James Dyson. 5,127 failed prototypes before he created the first vacuum that worked. Most people give up after 10, maybe 50. But Dyson wasn’t playing for weeks, he was playing for decades.

• Or take Steve Jobs. Brutal, flawed, but relentless. He wasn’t just building gadgets. He was reshaping taste, brand, culture. Things that compound invisibly over time. Jobs didn’t chase hacks. He played the long game of perception, design, and storytelling until Apple became the world’s most valuable company.

• Even Elon Musk, with all his chaos, understands the long game. Rockets don’t happen on quarterly timelines. Neither do electric car ecosystems. His edge is the willingness to endure extreme ridicule, failure, and iteration where short-game players would’ve surrendered.

The principle is the same everywhere: compounding requires survival.

Survival requires clarity. Clarity comes from refusing illusions.

• Hacks won’t save you.

• Hype won’t sustain you.

• Noise won’t compound.

What compounds is focus, discipline, and endurance. What compounds is saying no to 99 things so you can say yes to one game worth playing for decades.

For me, that means a portfolio of calm businesses instead of hype startups. Clear writing instead of endless feeds. Fitness routines I can repeat for life instead of crash programs. Systems that keep me in the game when willpower fails.

The formula is simple but vicious:

• Stay in the game.

• Play long-term games with long-term people.

• Compound relentlessly and don’t interrupt it.

The rest is noise.

Because in the end, there’s only one game worth playing.

The long one.

Notes from Reading & Listening

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die so I’ll never go there.” – Charles T. Munger

“All that matters is to survive. The rest is just words.” – Charles de Gaulle

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” – Thomas Sowell

“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” – John Lennon

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right.” – Henry Ford

“Play long-term games with long-term people. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest.” – Naval Ravikant

This is Vicious Notes. My study of clarity, power, and compounding for long-game players who want to build and endure.

I wish I could credit everyone that influenced my thinking and I try my best to attribute the source but just want to declare it here and onwards that any accidental brilliance you read here comes from the great minds and people in the arena. As Sir Isaac Newton would say, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.

Most people chase hacks. We play decades.

— Tomas, long-term partner at Craftled

After decades of trying to reinvent the wheel, I’ll just surrender and use Substack for my newsletter and public notes.

It’s my fourth rebrand as well.

Started out as Wednesday Inspiration → Life Designed → Growthlog → Vicious Notes.

I’ll be sharing my notes on seeking clarity and power for long-game players.

The main goal here is to have unfiltered space to express myself and connect with curious like minded people.

If you like me want to start a newsletter and keep overthinking, just use Substack. Zero cost. Built-in recommendation and discovery network that will increase the chances of your work being read by strangers instead of trying to do it the hard way on your own website.

Once you reach the level of recongizeability, you can easily transfer anywhere you want.

If Michael Jordan started a YouTube channel or Substack newsletter he could get millions of subscribers in the first week, not because of the content but because he can transfer his reputation to any platform he wants.

So, the goal here is to become recongizable, not for my face, but for my work and values.

May the consistency fortune favor me.