For years, I read biographies of successful people the way gamblers study slot machines.

Surely one of them had a pattern I could copy without changing my personality.

“The secret was a good notes app.”

Or waking up at 5 a.m.

Or cold plunges.

Or staring out the window with a very disciplined expression.

But great people are deeply unhelpful when you want a neat little formula.

One was a machine of routine.

Another lived like a kitchen fire with deadlines.

One planned everything.

Another just ran into walls until one of them turned out to be a door.

They had different temperaments, different habits, different philosophies.

Some of them were so different that half would have considered the other half idiots.

But the more I read, the more annoying the conclusion became.

What they had in common was not mindset.

Not lifestyle.

What they had in common was the amount of action.

A brutally boring answer.

Almost offensively boring.

They tried a lot.

They made a lot.

They failed a lot.

They redid things a lot.

Even Edison, the king of persistence, gave us that famous line about finding thousands of ways that would not work.

Not exactly the kind of quote you tattoo on your hand (or should I?)

And this is where it gets uncomfortable, because I did not learn this only from books.

I learned it by being a very organized coward.

For years, I had a sophisticated form of inaction.

When I got permission from my wife to move to the U.S., I wanted it to happen through an internal corporate relocation. There were good reasons for that, but this edition is already too long to also become an immigration story.

Still, I was not just procrastinating.

I was procrastinating beautifully:

It looked serious, responsible and likable a progress.

Untill it was not.

Every time a real opportunity appeared, I found a reason it was not for me.

I did not have enough experience.

My English was not strong enough.

My background was too weird.

The competition was too serious (I assumed).

So I kept preparing.

Which felt wise.

It was not.

It was fear, really.

But one day I ran into that old management idea: what gets measured gets managed.

So I thought, fine.

Let’s stop treating this like a dream and start treating it like a numbers game.

I made a rule: apply to at least 5 roles a day.

If I matched at least 70 percent, I applied.

No spiraling.

No dramatic internal monologue.

Just apply.

That became the game.

Every month, I sent about 150 applications.

Notice the word "month"?

Not week.

Months: plural, boring, discouraging.

That part matters, because we all love persistence until it starts looking repetitive and a little pathetic.

After the first month, the process got sharper.

My resume and list of accomplishments were ready to go.

I had templates for hiring managers, with three customized bullet points explaining why their day had just improved because I had applied.

I had reminders to follow up a couple of weeks later, in case they had somehow missed this historic event.

And without realizing it, I had started collecting no’s.

At first, every rejection felt personal.

Then it started to feel statistical.

Then, weirdly, it got funny.

Because once you turn it into a game, a no stops feeling like it says something about you. (Later, I learned that many of those roles already had a preferred candidate - HR is a mysterious process).

It becomes one more rep.

One more attempt.

One more number on the board.

Eventually, someone invited me to an interview.

Of course, I failed.

Progress, but humiliating now.

After enough of those, another truth became hard to ignore: if nothing in my process changed, neither would the result.

So before one interview, I did something that felt unnatural at the time.

I started cold outreach.

I reached out to as many people as I could find who knew something about the role.

And somehow, more than half replied.

Some of them agreed to talk.

So I asked questions: what mattered in the role, how the team thought, what success actually looked like, what kind of person they actually wanted, not just what the job description said.

Then I adjusted my story and came prepared with the right examples.

Not in a fake way.

In a clearer way.

I learned how to describe what I already had in language they could recognize faster.

The first interview with the hiring manager went well.

She moved me to the panel.

And that is where the story took a strange little turn: one of the people I had reached out to for advice was on the panel!

Pure luck.

Or was it?

Yes, it was!

Later, he became a strong advocate for me because, as he told me, I was the only candidate who had reached out to learn more about the role.

That was it.

Not genius.

Not some superior mindset.

Not a magical ritual involving lemon water and inner peace.

Just repeated action.

Then smarter action.

Then luck met someone already in motion (me).

I could do the job. But so could other candidates (native speakers, btw!).

The difference was that before day one, I had already shown them something.

That I could figure things out.

Which is funny, because at the time, I did not think I looked resourceful.

I thought I looked desperate.

And to be fair, I was desperate.

Sometimes the secret is just doing enough attempts for luck to finally have something to work with.

Till next time.

5 Years of Lessons From Running My Own Bookstore - 11 min read.

Opening a physical bookstore in March 2020 is already a pretty good hook. What makes this article work is that Ryan Holiday uses that mildly insane decision to talk about business in a way that is concrete, useful, and anti-BS.

We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It - 6 min read.

If you like essays that quietly wreck your assumptions, this one delivers. Even someone as rich as Jefferson could not count on basics like running water, which makes the bigger point land: part of being an adult is understanding the systems that keep everyday life running.

What Is Attention Residue? The Hidden Focus Killer That’s Sabotaging Your Productivity - 19 min read.

This one makes a good case against multitasking. When you switch tasks, part of your attention stays behind, which is a problem if your day is built on constant “real quick” interruptions.

Kelly started writing these notes for his adult children, and that helps explain the tone. It feels less like a guru addressing the masses and more like someone older, smart, and reasonably sane saying, here are a few things I wish I had learned earlier.

A picture that gives you a shot of fresh oxygen. I just hope those aren’t artificial plants.

Telegraph Training: As a teenager, he learned telegraphy, which gave him a trade built on speed, troubleshooting, and long irregular shifts. That job seems to have trained the exact muscles he later used in the lab: focus under noise, technical improvisation, and tolerance for odd hours.

Notebook Backbone: Edison used notebooks constantly to capture ideas, trials, results, and next steps. That habit made the work cumulative, so each bad experiment could feed the next one instead of dissolving into the fog of memory.

External Memory: Over time he accumulated thousands of notebooks. The scale matters because it shows he did not trust inspiration to wait around until morning..

Menlo System: At Menlo Park, Edison built something closer to an invention factory than a lone tinker's shed. He organized machinists, chemists, draftsmen, and experimenters around shared problems, which turned creativity into a team sport.

Team Multiplier: He did not just collect assistants and call it leadership. He used teams to run more trials, build faster, and widen the search, which meant breakthroughs were less dependent on one man's mood or one lucky afternoon.

Parallel Search: Edison often pushed multiple experiment paths at once instead of betting everything on a single elegant theory. That is a very practical way to work when you suspect reality may not care about your favorite hypothesis.

Bench Bias: He preferred direct physical testing over abstract speculation when possible. Rather than argue forever about what should work, he liked to put the thing on the bench and let the result ruin somebody's certainty.

Perspiration Model: The famous line about genius being 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration survives because it matches his actual method. He seems to have trusted volume, repetition, and grind far more than sudden brilliance.

Output Target: He liked the idea of producing a minor invention every ten days and a big one every six months. Even if the schedule was more aspiration than stopwatch reality, it reveals how strongly he thought of invention as output to manage.

Nap Economy: He is widely described as relying on short naps rather than full, tidy sleep blocks. It is not exactly a health blueprint, but it does show how aggressively he compressed recovery when he thought the work mattered more.

System Over Gadget: With electric light, Edison did not just chase the bulb. He went after the whole system around it, including generation, distribution, and practical use. That is one reason he mattered: he thought in adoption chains, not isolated objects.

Patent Discipline: Holding 1,093 U.S. patents is not just a fun fact. It points to a life built on documentation, repetition, and actually following things through. Less romantic than genius mythology. A lot more repeatable.

Workflow, Not Inspiration: The clearest thing about Edison is that he treated invention like managed workflow. Document, test, revise, repeat, with enough structure that progress did not depend on being visited by the muse.

Short, practical, and fair. The point is simple: if your work depends on thinking clearly, not sleeping is not something to brag about.

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