I was in your situation, and I created a system that not only destroyed this invisible wall, but it helped me win the National Informatics Olympiad, get promoted in record time in 6 months as a software engineer (while still in university!), and in another 6 months I left and joined Amazon.

The best part: if you use these methods, you will be able to accomplish your goals no matter how motivated you are. When results are coming you will naturally be so happy and energetic that you don’t need any strategies to take action, but in those inevitable down periods without results or when you feel down, these methods will make your mood irrelevant!

Let’s finally destroy this force forever!

Step 1: Make a brain dump.

Did you know the average person has over 6,000 thoughts per day? Your brain is silently sabotaging you by trying to juggle all of them.

If you’ve ever felt mentally exhausted but couldn’t explain why, this is it. Those random thoughts popping up while you’re working? That’s your brain interrupting itself trying to remember everything.

Here’s what’s happening: your brain is made to process and find solutions, not to store information. Using your incredible brain as a to-do list is like using a Ferrari as a storage shed - a complete waste of high-performance machinery on a task any cheap structure could handle. Or like asking a surgeon to memorize your phone contacts - their expertise is wasted on something any phone can do.

Think about it - have you ever been solving a complex problem when suddenly your brain interrupts with “don’t forget to buy milk”? Or could not focus because your mental energy was consumed by remembering appointments and deadlines? That’s your Ferrari engine being used as a storage closet.

The solution is simple but transformative: get EVERYTHING (tasks, meetings, worries) out of your head and onto paper or a digital system you trust. The immediate relief you’ll feel is just the beginning - wait until you experience the surge in creative problem-solving when your brain is finally free to do what it’s truly designed for.

Step 2: Let’s filter!

Here’s a shocking truth: 80% of what you’re trying to accomplish right now may be completely worthless. I know that sounds harsh, but stay with me.

To find out if a goal is useless, ask yourself this question: “Will this goal make any meaningful difference in my life 1, 5, or 10 years from now?”

If the answer is no, it’s 100% stealing time and energy from what actually matters. Be ruthless. Only do the remaining goals; anything else is totally useless and a distraction.

Now, this isn’t about ditching essentials. Of course, eating supports long-term health. Going to school can indeed be a distraction, but only if you have a better plan.

Now for the remaining goals, let’s add another filter to make sure you actually want the results: Do you do this goal to impress or please others? My system would work for these goals also, but this is your life to live and you only get one, so don’t spend all this energy to climb the wrong ladder.

Stick with me, because I’ve got a bonus hack later in this video that specifically handles this pressure of ‘what other people think’.

We just won a lot of life back not only by not spending effort, but also by not worrying, scheduling, and forcing ourselves to do a goal that we weren’t supposed to do anyway.

Now we can focus our precious resources - time, energy, money - on the small number of goals that will actually transform our lives.

Remember: These sacrifices of time and money are needed for accomplishment; that’s why it’s important to only sacrifice for the goals that are worth it.

Step 3: Let’s Break Down

Your brain craves clarity and completion. When a task is undefined, your mind will constantly loop back to it, creating that feeling of overwhelm that keeps you frozen in place.

Here’s how to break the cycle: get specific about what a “done” task looks like. Then break it down into smaller steps.

But why this works? Let’s imagine that invisible force we talked about is literally holding you down. How do you defeat it? It’s impossible unless you complete a specific task! And you cannot know if a task is completed unless you define it or break it down into manageable pieces. Each completed piece is like slapping this force. If you define when a task is done, then you know exactly when you land a slap! Even better, seeing a visual progress bar fill up automatically as you complete a piece makes this concrete – you see the slap land. Otherwise, with vague tasks you’re not sure when the task is done, so we are not sure that force received the slap. It may sound crazy, but if it works, who cares.

This force, whether it exists or not, its damage is real and it’s taking your time forever; you cannot get it back later.

Other people face external barriers - corrupt systems, economic hardship, or even war zones. Your barrier is internal, which means you have complete power to overcome it. Take advantage of this and don’t let your internal force be worse than an external force.

Take your revenge now, create your first task; the task can even be to break down your goal. I recommend using PerspecTask, the app I made specifically for this. Your goals are end-to-end encrypted, so nobody can read your goals. You can find the link in the description.

Step 4: Get them done somehow.

Now that you’ve identified your most important goals, broken them down into specific tasks, and scheduled them - it’s time for the most powerful step: Take yourself out of the equation.

These goals need to get done. Period. It doesn’t matter how: maybe someone randomly slips and falls on your notebook and decides to do your tasks, maybe you pay someone capable if you have the resources, or most likely, you do them yourself - but the point is, they must happen.

This removes your biggest excuse: “I don’t feel like it.” It’s not about you anymore. It’s about the tasks. They need to somehow get done.

This mindset demolishes common excuses:

“I’m not motivated today” - Irrelevant. The task doesn’t care about your motivation. What does motivation even mean? It means you have a reason to do it. If you don’t have a reason worth the time and effort, then stop doing it; it makes no sense. The goal somehow skipped the filter in step 2.

“I’m tired” - Legitimate, but only introduces a temporary delay until you’ve rested. Being tired doesn’t cancel the goal, just postpones it briefly.

“I’m distracted by social media” - This is different. Unlike hunger or fatigue, social media addiction isn’t a biological need. It’s a pure delay with zero upside.

Here’s a crucial insight: If you stop wasting time on addictions, that doesn’t mean you accomplished your goals; you still have to do them. There’s no upside if you don’t have addictions. So there’s no point even talking about them.

If you feel lazy, it’s because the task you want to do is boring compared with all of the notifications and distractions on your phone or computer. Your brain actually tries to help you, it wants you to have the biggest dopamine, so it makes this specific task boring so that you do something else.

For simple tasks, maybe you can afford a few interruptions – your 5-minute job becomes 20. Annoying, but doable. But for those hard, important tasks? The ones that truly move the needle? You have zero chance if your focus is broken. They’ll drag on forever, or worse, you’ll never even start. This is where you become ruthless: Remove. All. Distractions. Your phone, noisy notifications, anything that distracts your mind every 5 minutes.

Start a timer for your task so you can commit to it and do it as fast as you can. Next time you can use this to try to beat your record.

Step 5: Rewire Your Brain’s Reward System

Here’s the brutal truth about motivation: your brain doesn’t care about your long-term goals. It cares about dopamine - the neurochemical that makes you feel good right now.

This is why scrolling social media for 3 hours feels easier than working on your business for 30 minutes. Each notification, like, and new post gives you an instant dopamine hit with zero effort. Your brain is being hijacked.

But instead of fighting this reward system that has existed in the brain forever, why not use it to your advantage? What if you could train your brain to get more pleasure from achievement than distraction?

The secret is understanding that dopamine isn’t just released when you experience pleasure - it’s released in anticipation of reward. This is why the excitement of buying something is often better than actually having it.

Here’s how to rewire your reward system in 3 steps:

First, create immediate rewards for taking action. When you start a task, you can start a timer: now you’re on a mission to do it as fast as possible. It’s like a challenge and game to you to see how fast you can do it. Just like a game where you need to finish the level or the race as fast as possible.

Second, celebrate progress. Acknowledge every tiny win along the way. The act of marking the task as completed and seeing your progress bar increasing, triggers a small dopamine hit. Your brain learns to associate progress with pleasure.

Third - and this is crucial - track your streaks and achievements. The visual evidence of your progress creates powerful dopamine feedback loops. I use the reflection page where everything is calculated automatically. I can see streaks, number of completed tasks every day and my working cycles. This is done automatically, otherwise with pen and paper would be hard to manually track all of this. This makes you motivated to keep the streak and to improve your past performance, just like any athlete. Without this tracking you don’t know what to improve and when you managed to improved it.

Now, a crucial condition for this rewiring to work: You have to reduce the cheap, easy dopamine hits from elsewhere. If your brain is constantly flooded by the instant gratification of social media or sugary snacks, the subtle-but-powerful dopamine from achievement will be insignificant in comparison. A person living 100 years ago would be addicted to this system and accomplish more than you because he didn’t have your distractions. You have a huge advantage over him by having all of this technology available, you can do things 100 or even 1000 times faster. But if you introduce distractions, you’re like the rabbit who runs very fast for a few minutes, then takes a break for a few hours. While he is the tortoise who walks slowly but constantly. In the end he beats you even with all your advanced tools.

Remember: By deliberately triggering achievement-based dopamine, you create an upward spiral where taking action becomes the default, not the exception.

Start with just one small task today. Track it, celebrate it, and watch how your brain begins to crave the feeling of accomplishment more than distraction.

Bonus hack: Don’t care what others think.

I promised you a hack earlier in the video, here it is:

A lot of people stop from taking action because they think friends will not talk with them anymore or they may judge them. Solve this by remembering that they are not the ones facing the consequences: you are.

After realizing this, some people genuinely don’t care what others think anymore.

But, if you still care, I have a solution for that also. Is hard because it is ingrained in human brains since birth, then instead of fighting this, use it to your advantage. Think about role models, or even better if you personally know them, that you want to impress, and impress those. Think about what type of person would be impressed if you achieve the goal you are procrastinating, and try to impress that person by achieving it. In this way, even if you’re from a country where caring about what others think is ingrained in your blood, then use it instead of fighting it. Instead of others using this against you, you use it to your advantage. That’s smart. If you don’t know anyone to impress to your advantage, invent one; otherwise, it becomes a new excuse that you don’t know anyone to impress.

Conclusion

So, what’s your first move? Write your first task in PerspecTask, break it down if necessary, then, commit: Start that timer, eliminate distractions, and see it through. Even if it feels like a grind at first, finish that one task. After you’re finished, I’ll see you in the next video where I show you how not to let life pass by without grabbing its fruits.

Got overwhelmed by the complexity of some goals, so I built a way to visualize them in one glance. pic.twitter.com/jVGgCluC7y

Ever stare at a project plan, a list of goals, or even just a complex task, and feel… lost?

You know the feeling: tasks nested inside sub-tasks, which hide even more sub-tasks. You try to plan, to estimate, but that nagging question echoes:

“How big is this task really?”

That sense of overwhelm makes it easy to lose sight of the whole picture, and to feel like you’re drowning in complexity. Traditional lists and outlines have a hard time cutting through the fog.

From Chaos to Clarity

I needed a different perspective: a way to instantly grasp the structure and depth of my goals. Simple lists fell short.

So I built a tool to visualize and conquer it (an adaptation of “Divide et Impera”).

Think of it less like a list and more like a visual map or a bird’s-eye view of your goals.

At the center sits your main objective.
  └ Branching out from it are the main tasks.
    └ And branching out from those are all the sub-tasks.

Instantly Grasp Scope: Dense clusters immediately show you where the bulk of the work lies. Deep branches highlight complex dependencies.

Cut Through the Fog: No more clicking endlessly to uncover hidden tasks. The entire structure is visible.

Gain Perspective: It’s like zooming out. You can finally see the forest and the trees, understanding how everything fits together.

Color-Coded Clarity: Green for done, blue for in progress, red for cancelled tasks.

This isn’t just about organization, it’s about clarity: it transforms that feeling of overwhelming complexity into a manageable panorama you can navigate. It brings order and allows you to confidently visualize and conquer even the most daunting projects, all in a single glance.

You can create your own panorama for free on PerspecTask.

Problem

Here’s what makes this so frustrating…

You already know what your goals are. Unlike others who are still searching for direction.

You have the time to do them. Others don’t have time, they have 2 jobs, commitments, small kids, or maybe they’re even on vacation, but you have the time.

You even have all the tools and resources to do them. But you still don’t.

Feels like something invisible is blocking you.

And all of this while there’s a big risk: the risk that the goal you are postponing is not even the goal you’re supposed to do.

So because of this we need to accomplish it as fast as possible to find this now not later.

If we have the guilt and pain of procrastination, at least to have it for the right goal, not the wrong one.

The longer you wait to find out, the more time you waste on potentially the wrong path.

So let’s identify what’s REALLY blocking you… because it may not be what you think.

Barriers

The Manifestation Trap

Thinking that the problem will get solved by wishing or manifesting.

This makes you wait for the problem to solve itself or for someone else to solve it.

Spoiler alert: Everyone is busy with their own problems, they won’t solve yours.

Instead of using your energy to wish it, use the energy to do it.

By wishing or manifesting your goal, by definition, someone has to do the work to make it a reality, so if you’re not the one doing the work, someone else has to do it. There is no other way in this universe.

— alexand.ro

So unless you’re a beggar and waiting for the mercy of a hardworking person, do it.

Unless you’re a thief or a looter who steals or forces someone else to do his work for him, do it.

Unless you have the money to hire someone to willingly do it for you, which is the only way everybody wins and it frees you to do other things that need to get done, unless you have the budget to do it, do the task yourself.

Don’t wait for the universe to force someone else to do your work.

Afraid of pursuing the wrong goal

You’re afraid that this is not the right goal and you postpone the bad news.

But you need to find this as soon as possible, and the only way to find out is to do it. Not by asking 100 people if this is the right goal, watching 100 videos, researching 100 statistics. Basic logic is enough to know that this is not a foolish idea, now do it to be sure is not.

In case it’s stupid you will find out for sure before everyone else, while they still fantasise and visualise and meditate about it while taking no action.

And if it was the right thing, you will have the results faster!

This problem becomes even bigger if you think that this goal is the answer to all your problems, you’re even more afraid to find out that it’s not and to look stupid pursuing it.

During difficult times, you console yourself with the promise that this goal will solve everything. If you pursue it and it doesn’t, all hope is gone.

But the reality is that new and BETTER ideas emerge ONLY through action, not hesitation. Even if this isn’t your perfect goal, the very act of pursuing it will reveal what your next goal should be. Because you discover new problems to solve along the way.

You’re not convinced the goal is worth pursuing.

Even if you planned your goals, you may not be sure of their success.

This is actually a good point, while pursuing this goal you cannot pursue others, so you’re not only losing time if it’s not the right goal, but you also postpone working on the right one.

But consider this simple math: if you don’t try, your chance of success is exactly 0%. If you try, it’s greater than 0%.

And here’s a mindset shift that helps:

View it as an experiment, because this takes the pressure off.

If it fails, you have less guilt because experiments are designed to test hypotheses. Everyone knows that experiments can fail, it’s part of the process to succeed by learning from each trial and error.

Perfect Timing Fallacy: You’re waiting for the perfect time.

You think that it would be easier if some other events happen first.

If you know for sure this is the case and there is no problem delaying it, then good, wait by doing something else in the meanwhile. But if it’s not sure and it’s not in your control then it’s just an excuse.

Take it as a challenge: if you can do it now when conditions are far from perfect, imagine what you can do when they are! So treat the “perfect timing” just as a bonus, not a requirement. You’re grateful if it comes, but you don’t need it.

The Feeling Trap: You don’t feel like it.

You remember how it feels to be in the zone, and you’re waiting to feel that inspiration before starting, so that you don’t lose time forcing yourself.

But here’s the secret the achievers know…

The feeling comes AFTER you start, not before.

I’ll give you a trick: There’s no feeling required to open your computer. No inspiration needed to open the software, no motivation in putting your gym shoes.

By doing these small steps, it means you already started working on your goal.

Assume the feeling will come and continue anyway. If it comes, it’s a bonus, otherwise you made great progress so far which is better than waiting and not doing anything.

Most of the time it’s harder to stop than to continue, because like a train already in motion, you already gained some momentum and it’s harder to make it stop.

Remember:

There’s no prize for “feeling it” while achieving your goals. The only thing that matters is whether you complete them or not.

Your child’s stomach doesn’t get fed because you felt or didn’t feel like cooking. Is there something on the plate or not?

Yes, you work faster when feeling it, but if the price is dreadful procrastination, then it’s not worth it at all.

The time you win by doing it 10-50% faster, it’s just a fraction of the time lost by delaying, feeling guilty and rescheduling the task 10 times before actually starting to work on it.

Ambiguity Trap: The goal is too ambiguous.

If the next step is not clear then the next step becomes to create the next step.

Break down the goal until you know exactly what action to take next.

Otherwise, you’ll waste energy on random activities hoping clarity will magically appear or someone will tell you what to do. Which, like we talked before, it won’t happen.

The Completion Fear

After you do all this and you started working on it, maybe you’re afraid to finish it.

Why? Because finishing means judgment time: did it work or not? If not, you invested time for nothing.

Cut through this fear by remembering: if it didn’t work, better to know NOW before investing more precious time.

The Hardness Trap

Your goal might simply be physically or mentally challenging

But remember this truth:

After you achieve your goal, you won’t remember how hard it was — you’ll only have the result and the new skills.

If you never start, you will forever feel the weight of the unfinished goal and the confusion that comes from lacking skills that only develop through action.

The Belief Deficit: You don’t believe you can do it.

If your brain doesn’t believe you can succeed, it tries to protect you from failure or getting embarrassed or whatever is at stake.

So either believe in yourself by manning up, remembering a past success, or reduce the pressure by treating it as an experiment.

The Moving Finish Line

You don’t know when a goal is done, so how can you start a journey without knowing the destination? You wouldn’t know to go left or right.

Define when that specific task is done and do everything to complete it. Otherwise you treat it like a painting which is never finished since you can always do something on it.

Be very specific. “Learn Spanish” is not that helpful because you don’t have a specific target, you’ll never feel finished.

“Learn 10 medical terms in Spanish today” is. You can continue learning more as a bonus after you finished the task, but otherwise you will never feel finished.

The Control Illusion: Thinking this is not in your control.

Then don’t do it. You cannot do anything about it, whatever you do you cannot influence the problem, so don’t burn gas on it. Use that gas on what IS under your control.

You can’t control getting a million YouTube views, but you can control making excellent videos. Just be specific what “excellent” means, otherwise it will forever be an unfinished painting.

Solution

When you notice yourself overthinking a task, you have only THREE options:

1. Start working on it immediately
2. Delegate it to someone else
3. Write it down in a system you trust to tackle it later

Anything else leads to what I call “Task Inflation”: where tasks grow bigger in your mind the longer you avoid them.

You start thinking the task requires special preparation, perfect conditions, rituals, and cosmic alignment.

It doesn’t. It’s not special. Do it and forget it.

Overwhelmed by Ideas

Sometimes you feel overwhelmed by so many ideas and goals competing for attention.

You can calm your mind by writing the goals down in a safe space where you know you will come back to plan or work on them.

You can use PerspecTask, my application for task management, it’s end to end encrypted, meaning that it’s impossible for me to see your goals, unlike other task managers.

Even while working on a goal you may get tons of ideas and most of the anxiety comes from fear of forgetting them.

Open your task manager and write them down to make sure you won’t forget them, you can plan and prioritize them at a later time.

When you have multiple or complex goals, it’s harder to see progress. But seeing progress is critical for motivation. When building a house you can literally see the progress in your face, but with many goals you can’t.

That’s why I implemented all kinds of subtle progress tracking in my application: for tasks, for periods and more.

It takes time and effort to track and calculate progress and it can stop you from actually working on the goal, it can become a reason to procrastinate. And the last thing you need is another reason to procrastinate, even if it’s useful.

That’s why I did this so it can automatically and instantly calculate progress without requiring extra work from you.

Bonus Trick 1

You can procrastinate on your goal by working on another goal that you want to do, which is a smart way to procrastinate.

But you can only go so far with this because at some point you need to do your main task.

Bonus Trick 2

Using the previous idea, let’s actually work on the goal we procrastinate by creating a bigger goal than it, so you can “procrastinate” on the bigger goal by doing the one you actually want to do.

The fact that this works proves the barrier is psychological and you blow it out of proportions in your head.

Conclusion

So what happens when you implement this system?

The pressure and pain of procrastination disappears - not by giving up on your goals, but by breaking them down, prioritising and achieving them.

Imagine waking up each morning with complete clarity on exactly what you need to work on.

Imagine watching your progress bar fill up day by day.

Imagine checking off goals that once seemed impossible, one by one, building unstoppable momentum.

This isn’t just about getting things done, it’s about becoming the person who consistently turns ideas into reality.

The true enemy of procrastination isn’t motivation or discipline—it’s action.

So don’t focus on beating procrastination, focus on taking action, and procrastination will automatically be taken care of, no need to do anything about it.

Sign up now to capture your goals and start achieving them.

Time is still passing. That reality hasn’t changed.

But now you possess the system to ensure your progress happens during this passage of time.

It might not seem glamorous to others, but that feeling of steady progress toward YOUR goals is one of life’s most deeply satisfying experiences.

I have to start by saying: “Thank you, Amazon“. I came to Amazon to learn how can you manage a startup after it grows so big and you have offered me not only a few answers and perspectives on this, but also a home full of smart and incredible people. I had high hopes before joining the company, but I would never imagine that I would learn and change so much.

Why is this decision hard?

Amazon gave me the opportunity to enrich my perspective in multiple areas of my life. I can go as far as to say that, although I liked the person that I was 2 year ago, I don’t recognise that variant anymore. I am an improved version that came after I discerned what concepts would help me from the smart people that I met each day, traveling in multiple countries, speaking with people from multiple types of cultures and social classes. Sometimes I did not want to go to vacation as I was learning so much while being around these people, the opportunity cost of leaving them was not worth it enough to go travel to new places, which is one of my passions.

Do you really need to leave Amazon?

Although it helped me so much and is the company that I relate with the most, I am willing to let go to the top 2 biggest company in the world and all of the benefits that come with it, especially in my field of Software Engineering, in order to pursue my dreams.
Staying at Amazon will help me grow each day, but with the knowledge and updated plan that I have now, I can accelerate my progress if I spend the daily extra 8 hours of mental energy and effort towards my vision instead of Amazon, where only 20-30% of the activities are drastically getting me closer to my vision. In my plan, 100% of my actions are moving the needle in relationship with my vision, and I have the tools to make sure that it will move it in the right direction.
I am learning each and every single new day and I will certainly learn forever in this company, but until when? I need to draw a line and take a leap of faith in what I want to do with the knowledge that I have now.

Why now?

Staying at Amazon means that I will like it more and more here, I will get promoted again and again, change teams in different cities that I would like to live around the world and maybe create a legacy here. But my real hunger and fire is to create my own company that will positively impact the world, and by staying at Amazon I’m just deferring that action and it will make it really hard for me to say “goodbye” to Amazon after all of the great potential progress made inside the company.
On top of all of that, include the possibility of a family, which will mean that a strong decision like this will put multiple people at risk of losing everything, not just myself.
I recently turned 24 years and the greatest moment for me to take this leap of faith is as soon as possible, that moment is now. If I lose absolutely everything that I have, I will be the only one affected, and I am willing to take that risk.

Do you have a backup plan?

I am lucky enough to be in the top domain of our times, and if this doesn’t work out, I can always come back at Amazon or a different big company or help other startups. I will have even more experience than I have in this moment, since I am dedicating my full time towards the world of startups and improving my engineering skills by building products while being on top of the newest technologies in order to see what they bring to the table.

This basically means that even if I succeed with my startup or fail, the outcome will be better than staying, as I will have stronger and more diverse knowledge with a thicker skin developed by the failures that I will feel first hand instead of having a huge corporation in my back where a loss of a few millions of dollars is nothing.

But the backup plan is not even in discussions for me, I am making the decision to leave the company that other people would do anything to enter so that I can give all I have to create an impact in the world.

Do I have what it takes?

I believe everyone that lives in a free country has everything they need to succeed in our times. I gained an incredible perspective during my time at Amazon and by traveling to 3 different continents, which adds indefinitely more value since the last time I tried to make a startup from the age of 18 to 20 years old. Despite this, I am willing to accept that I still don’t know, and probably will never know everything or have the “best” mentality, perspective or decision making process, but because I see this ongoing process as an asymptote, I am committed to challenge and improve it every time I am using it and get as close as I can to the “best” decision making process and mindset, because that will not only help me, but also the people that I will touch in my journey and trough my products.

What are the chances?

I have 0.0000000001% chances to succeed (the number just represents an infinitesimal number, is too small to actually calculate it), but if I stay at Amazon or another big company without ever making this step of creating the startup, the chances to succeed are 0. So even if the chances are almost non-existent, they are still bigger than 0, and I am willing to risk everything I have, including the company that I worked so hard to get in and the lifestyle that I created in Madrid, to take that chance.

What are the next steps?

The first months I will dedicate most of my time to research and take in consideration most of the possible angles from which I can create value in the world. After around 3 months, I should have the ideas and action plan narrowed down and focused on what I want to pursue.

While I am doing this, I can be anywhere that I want. For the first month I will live in Madrid and then travel across Europe to combine the perspective that a travel sabbatical brings with checking out the startup scene in every city and country. It is also important to me to see what lifestyle and perspective every city brings, as this will also help me decide in the future where in this world I may like to live long term, or if I even want to settle somewhere or just move to different cities every few years. So far, Madrid is the city where I would live long term from where I have been traveling so far, but I still have many other cultures to explore.

After I decide on a specific idea, I will go after investments and for a team of crazy people that believe that they can make a difference in the world.

I am also open to help other already-created startups from an engineering and business side, as this will not only help them, but also my experience level in the startup world.

Basically, the next 6-24 months will be a combination of what makes me feel alive the most: creating a startup and travel around the world with a specific purpose in mind.

The first step of leaving behind the incredible world of Amazon and start heading towards my vision, as seen in the picture above, has already been taken.

The tipping point

It may sound like I’m a typical “dreamer” by having this vision, but my vision is what bought me all of these achievements so far. So while people in general are busy labelling and generalising the generations or behaviours of others, I’m busy making the decisions that will take me closer to the vision that I have since I was just a kid, and I hope, that one day, this article will be read and seen as the tipping point of the impact that I will have on the world.

_{Note: everything that I write about Amazon is my own opinion and does not represent any official Amazon communication.}

I never left because of poor conditions, it was quite the opposite: I had the best conditions I can ask for at those certain times, but I always had a vision, I always wanted more and I was willing to lose everything I had. Every time I left a certain place, I was doing it with a purpose, so it actually not even occurred to me to look back except for gathering the lessons. When someone would ask me the question from the title I would get confused: I’m here right now because I worked hard to arrive at this point so that I can have an even bigger impact, why would I even think about the past, no matter how good it was, moreover miss it? You can’t fly to your dreams while also holding the grounded ropes which are leading to your past.

I am a very melancholic person when it comes to remembering the past, maybe that’s why I take tens of photos daily, because I want to remember the amazing moments that I’m currently living, but I’m never in a situation when I wish to go back, everything is constantly changing and I’m happy that I got the opportunity to live those moments, especially that they made me the person who I am today. But just the thought of going back to those moments makes me think of a big regression: I have much more knowledge and experience comparing with just 2 weeks ago, so imagining going back to the activities I was doing more than 1 year ago is frightening.

Maybe by “home” we refer just to the location or people instead of the actions, but I have a different vision of “home”:

Home is in the eyes of each person you meet. It may sound like a really bad line for overly-romantic-teenage kids, but isn’t that true? Aren’t you affecting the lives of the people you come in contact with, even for a few seconds? Every time a person looks at you, the light reflects your image into their eyes, you are visible to them in their brain now, in one form or another, you are now in their head, in their memories. Every person sees you differently based on their own paradigm of the world, some may see you good, some may see you bad, there are thousands or millions or billions of images and interpretations of you in others people’s mind, but only one has the real you. From all of these people, if you influence their lives positively, they’ll cary you in their mind forever, they will have a special place for you there and they will tell other people about you when you are not there. In a way, that’s home, and it’s a special place to be in.
Of course, there are some people on this earth that have a bigger “place/home” for you in their mind, those are the people you want to be around the most and to take care of them as much as you can.

For me, they are the real “home”, and knowing that I have so many homes around this world makes it a bit harder for me to feel alone or to miss a certain physical place. People, comparing to buildings or cities, they are mobile and in our days you can meet wherever you want in this world.

It’s true that you want to be around those people that have the most beautiful home in their head for you, but “missing” them implies helplessness, the inability to either go there, or to create new, bigger homes in the place where you are right now. It’s not easy to get over something if it was not your choice, or if you were forced by the circumstances to leave it behind, but it’s part of the adaptability and progress that will make you a better person.

To answer the question, I am grateful for all of the homes that I have and for the fact that I have the opportunity to make them even bigger and beautiful, in a way that it will positively influence the people carrying them.

An individual is considered valuable to the society, to other people and to itself by the ability he has to apply what he knows in order to craft solutions to different problems or visions. The difficulty of the problem may vary: from rock climbing where your undivided focus and concentration decides every second if you will remain alive or not, to problem solving that may decide the future of your company or life.

In our days we need to solve problems harder than ever before and we have a lot of intelligent people to do that. Or do we? You see, even if you are intelligent, there is a prerequisite every single time you wake up which will decide if your intelligence will be used or wasted that day. That prerequisite is focus.

A wasted day may lead to a wasted life

Every single day you have the opportunity to do what you want. It may be anything from relaxing to building a rocket that will send us to Mars, is your decision, but the question is: will you be able to do what you want during that day? In the year 2018 where the economy and technology are their high, I wish you good luck.

Once you wake up, everything starts competing for your attention: every single channel on your TV, every single application on your phone, that device that you plan to use today needs special attention because is not charged and has full memory, the light bulb is blinking, the heating unit stopped working and you have notifications over notifications on your phone. You didn’t even manage to start what you planned for that day and the morning is already gone. Now you leave your house and the whole city competes for your attention: bars, restaurants, promoters inviting you inside for a coffee, ice cream, opposite sex trying to compete for your attention either directly or indirectly. Every single product or business tries to win a few seconds of your time, that’s how they survive in the end.

With all of these distractions to handle, your head is already full of something completely different that you wanted to.

Doing only one thing became boring

The advertisements are getting better and better on psychologically competing for our attention by creating emotions inside us. Our brain got used with the unlimited hits of instant gratifications from the notifications and with doing multiple things in the same time, because “it’s easy to be in a meeting and also reply to messages, it’s taking only a few seconds”. This false perception made our brain hyperactive and reluctant to do “only 1 thing at a time” like reading, solving problems, pay attention when we hang out with people, taking a shower without listening to music, etc.

If you’re trying to dive deep in a certain domain like coding, playing an instrument, or any other activity that requires your undivided attention, you’ll be full of sweat after 5 minutes of not checking the phone. You will never reach the level of knowledge and skills required to be a valuable person in that domain.

Focus effects in long term

It may not ring any emergency bell in the present moment, and especially that you’re doing “so many things” at once, you will start to think that you’re doing an amazing job.

Let’s zoom out a bit, how much did it matter in the last 2 years that you checked and responded to your notifications every 5 minutes? The answer is actually a lot, but not in a positive way. Almost nothing is that urgent to make your life stagnate for 2 years. If you lift your phone every 5 minutes, how much will you be able to work on your goals? And if you do manage to work on them, what quality do you think those goals have?

To build solutions that will have a big impact now and in the future requires an amount of brainpower and concentration which will make you forget that your body even exists, you will not even be aware of the fact that you’re breathing or of your environment. You can’t achieve that by thinking about random things and by being reactive to the unlimited distractions in the environment.

Every single day you don’t work on your goals, you’re pushing away the day when your vision becomes reality. If a random distraction is more fun than working on your goals, then your goals are not great enough. You should have goals that make you shiver with excitement just by thinking about them.

Managing focus when you have multiple passions

This can be a tragedy disguised as a blessing. You have an incredible passion for life and all of the modalities that you can improve it for you and others, but there’s limited time and infinite possibilities. We can’t do things in parallel.

This is when you start working on one of your passions, but after 1-2 minutes you stop because you remember of your other passion which seems a bit more important or urgent. After you switch, you find reasons to go back to the first one. In the end you create decision paralysis and don’t do nothing. The only thing left is to just go in the corner of the room and start crying because of the anxiety created by the lack of commitment to one of them.

This requires commitment and the willingness to lose the other things that you are not doing at the moment. If you are not willing to do that, it means that the current passion is not the right one to work on.

Lack of purpose

Purpose is the most important word in the dictionary for me. This is the key in life for happiness, passion, fulfilment, joy and all of the positive states that you can have. When you have a purpose and you’re working on it, it doesn’t matter what happens in the outside world or how bad your current situation is. The first step you take towards your purpose, you will feel all of that anxiety and worry disappear from your shoulders.

When you have a clear purpose you have order in your life. You know what you want and don’t want, what you accept and don’t accept. You are in control of your mind and life.

Your purpose and how strong it is, will determine your ability to focus, even after your brain got damaged by the times we live today.

Be willing to lose people

I care about my friends with all of my heart. I may look emotionless to many people, especially to new ones, but when it comes about their lives and struggles I’m all in. Sometimes I think that I was blessed to have these amazing people in my life and its one of the rare times that my emotions come close to my logical thinking. I meet new people every day and I can recognise instantly if we’ll have a special long-term relationship or not. And most of the times we have, but there’s a catch: you have to be willing to let them go. I know is hard, I know you had an amazing connection after just the first 1-2 days or weeks, just imagine the potential of that relationship long term.

Why would you let go of someone that you care about? Isn’t that hard?

It is, but think about this: why would they go in the first place? If they understand where are you coming from and where are you going and they like that, then they will stick around. If they feel that they don’t receive enough attention, which will be inevitable when you are progressing on your purpose, then they will try to change that, they will try to make you change your behaviour, activities and priorities in a way that you will spend more time with them. It’s your decision if you want to do that, but imagine if you change your priorities after each new person that will come in your life, who will you be? You will be a mere shadow shaped by other people’s requirements to keep the relationships and you will never exist, you will never have your own identity.

You need to have enough respect for yourself to have your own identity that people can align with: those who like it will stay and this is exactly who you want, those who don’t or don’t understand, you must be willing to let them go, no matter how great was the beginning or how good their intentions may look.

I have friends/mentors which I cannot speak every day, week or month, but I know them and they know me, we are aware of where we are heading and think about each other, we don’t need to ask “how are you” because we already know the answer, and when we finally meet, we may be a bit sad that it was a long time, but we are much more happy because we know that we accomplished amazing things which we want to share.

You can be the most intelligent person on earth, if you don’t have the focus which will enable you to use that intelligence, then the potential is gone.

Edit 30 December 2019: This article reached first page of hacker news since last night, if you want to receive a summary of what happened next, then please subscribe or follow me on Twitter:

There is a challenge though: when we have something rare and incredible we want to have it somehow: either physically owning it, either touching it, either taking a photo so you can remember the moments, but how do we capture thoughts? There is no way you can take a picture to them, and there are so many other thoughts that if you don’t convert them to something more permanent then you will forget them no matter how important they are. A wonderful way we accomplish this is by something we invented a while ago: writing. It’s an art to decode the thoughts you have and code them back in something we call words. These words have meanings for us humans, they are the most popular and best way to spread our knowledge from generation to generation. But these words are limited, there are only a finite number of them, and our thoughts are complex and have unlimited ways of describing them: they have complex ideas, images, feelings, something that we cannot really translate 100% into words.
This is why I call this process an art, and this is what alexand.ro is about. It’s about capturing the thoughts that have the power to flourish, that makes us have a life we genuinely want, that makes us have a purpose. If I can encourage and can help somebody to take the risks necessary to have their desired life with these writings, then this blog has served its purpose.

“But who is Alexandro?”

My original name is Alex and I was born in one of the most amazing places you can be born in this planet during the best times in millions of years yet. We live in times when we can communicate through language and during our current lifetime we just managed to break the barrier that condemned us to communicate only from a distance of a few meters. It’s something incredible that over 99% of the people who lived on this planet before us didn’t even dare to think about.
The place I’m grateful being born in is called Romania. Historically it has the legacy of the Roman Empire and the Latin language, and when I was born it was a playground of life lessons which you were forced to learn in order to go forward. I was blessed enough to travel in a few countries 20 years later and I can say that it was the best place to be born in for various reasons.

Wrapping up, Alexandro comes from the name Alexandru, with a little tweak at the end that is marked by the country I’m originally from.

“Did you have a blog before this?”

Almost 10 years ago I wrote my first article and did it for 7 years. The tagline of the blog was “See The Impossible”. It was a tagline that marked my endeavours in achieving things that people would tell to me or to themselves that are impossible to accomplish. I didn’t write directly about them, but it was something that was representing me. In the last 3 years I wrote, a lot, but privately. From time to time I would post some of them on my social media pages.
From now on, I am delighted to announce that alexand.ro is the central home for all of my public writings.

On alexand.ro, it’s not about “Seeing The Impossible” anymore, that’s granted now. It’s about taking the action towards achieving it. Be hungry.

22 minutes later I arrived at the Plaza de España metro station and as I went out of it I saw you for the first time. I just stopped in this exactly same spot and looked around. I became speechless and my mouth opened wide while I was admiring your beauty. I could not get enough with what I was seeing. It was one of those moments when I would want to take out a jar and conserve the feelings from those moments forever inside it.

My arrival in Madrid was a shock for almost everybody, so let’s take it from the beginning to see what happened:

• I was in Bucharest after coming from a modest background with nothing but a dream and an excess of enthusiasm for life;
• I was in the 3rd and final year of the University that I adored;
• I had 1 failed startup that taught me a lot and motivated me to start a new one;
• I was working as a Software Engineer for another startup trough a company in which I got promoted after only 6 months of working and enjoying it there (the average first promotion at that company was after ~2 years);
• I was staying for the first time in a rented apartment with a beautiful view over Bucharest after I lived 2 years in college dorms, which were also incredibly beautiful moments;
• I managed to build a network of smart and amazing people that I really respected and cared about. I had amazing experiences with some of them and incredibly promising future together;
• I made huge positive changes in the last year of university that surpassed the first two years which were also amazing;
• Other amazing things that I won’t mention for now.

Everything mentioned above I created. I had almost nothing before it. I was very grateful for everything that I had and I never took it for granted. I had my ups and downs that nobody has any idea about, I had lots of moments when I felt that I would loose everything and couldn’t find my way back to that positive person that I was. And at some point during my university years it happened: I lost almost everything. It was so bad I didn’t even have a place to sleep for the first weeks of the 2nd year of university. But you know what made the difference? The fact that I didn’t give up, the fact that I never listened to the status quo and I had ambitious goals even when I was sleeping on an air bed in the kitchen of my friends. Those are memories I will never forget. That made me create what I listed above. And that’s why I was grateful for every single second I was living.

Practically, before even finishing the last year of university, I already had the career and lifestyle that you usually have after you’re working hard for at least 10 years or it may not even happen for a huge percentage of people in Romania. I was living the “Romanian Dream”.

So the question is: you created all of these things, you’ve put so much dedication in the things you do and you have so many stories to tell of what you did in Bucharest, and you’re living everything behind by drawing a line and starting over in Madrid?

Yes. One of my mantras in life is that you have to give up the good in order to have the great.

“I knew that at some point you are going to leave. It was inevitable. I will miss you.”

The truth is that I never had Madrid in my plans. I wanted for a few years already to work for one of the Big Four: Amazon, Facebook, Google & Microsoft in order to learn how it is to lead a startup after it becomes so huge and I managed to obtain the offer from Amazon, which is the biggest growing company from all of them.

I wanted from the beginning to go to Seattle but I was proposed a high potential team which was situated in Madrid’s office. I didn’t know back then, but in this moment I can say that for me coming to this city for the moment instead of Seattle was the best thing that could happen.

Before coming to Madrid I only visited 2 countries: Romania and a small village from Germany. I had no idea how it is to live in a western country. Nobody was speaking english here, not even people my age, and I had no idea of how to speak Spanish besides “muchas caliente” which I found later on from my peers that I should never say that again. Especially in an official meeting. I even knew more French after I hated all of my french teachers.

I had to rent a place and all of the landlords spoke only Spanish. I had to make lots and lots of documents and the only way to communicate was, again, Spanish. After coming in their country without any interest of learning their language, you would expect that they would behave at least with the same disrespect and disgust that you have in Romania when you buy a bus ticket, try to renew some documents or anything else that is in their job duty anyways. It was exactly the opposite: they were behaving like they were my lost best friends, they had no idea to speak English but they tried with gestures, by asking their coworkers which asked their coworkers how to say something in English, by drawing pictures, anything. I honestly thought that I am in a prank tv show and I was looking for a hidden camera, they were more polite than it’s admitted by law. And this was happening everywhere I went. It was madness. This is one of the things that sets Madrid apart and it still is available after 1 year.

My journey in this period was marked by extremes. After a while since I arrived here I had one of the biggest existential crises that I ever had. It was a dark period and honestly, it was the worst that I had in years. I couldn’t find myself, and this time was for good.

I really arrived at a point where I reached the bottom and I had 2 choices: give up to everything that I created until then, which was the easiest choice, or to admit that I have lots of flaws and I will commit to fix each and every one of them by going trough processes that would challenge and put me to the limits in order to have a high amount of progress. I chose the second one and never looked back.

1 year later I can make the following statements:

• I had a few periods in the past in which I had success after success and it’s hard for another period to surpass those, but I can now say that this 1 year period had the highest growth compressed;
• I managed to visit another 6 countries and cities: London, Dublin, Lisbon, Belgium, Rome and Seattle.
• As much as my ego wouldn’t want me to admit: I am a 99% different person than the one that left Romania 1 year ago. I would have made this change on a period of a few years anyways, but I managed to compress this in just 1 year.
• I already created what I created in Bucharest during 3 years and even more that I could have done there in the last year. That is simply amazing.
• I created bonds with people that I really care about. You would say that if you already have a few friends, why bother making new ones? Oh, but they are all so unique, they all have their own stories and successes and dreams. You could not even imagine what treasure some people have inside them.
• I had important events that I could not take part of because I had others that we’re even more important. It was crazy, a few years ago I would do anything to have the opportunity and now I am turning them down because I have even more important ones in the same time. Despite this fact, I learn to create time for people that I care about. You see, if you try to find a time when you both are “free”, you will never find it. Every single amazing person that I care about and have important discussions and actions with was because we created the time, we allocated that block of time in the calendar and really committed to it. We know that our time is precious and it would take a lot more time to see each other again so we are really serious about this. I received this thing back and it’s special. You know that that person meeting you is taking a chunk from his time from changing the world around him and it’s fully dedicated to you. People in general have this cheap impression that people will just meet with you just because you want so and if you don’t meet with them it means that you have something against them. If I would give my time to meet to just about any person or girl at any given time, then I would not be the person that you would want to meet in the first place. You can’t do everything in the same time so you have to eliminate some things out of your life. “If you want to save somebody you have to save yourself first”. You have to do your own things and then plan to meet with the people you care. I don’t meet with them when I’m “free”. Because 1: I never am free, 2: they are not my last priority and only meet them because I have nothing better to do, wrong, they are my priority and this is why I’m dedicating special time.
• I also have living mentors in different areas of my life, which is crucial. I was underestimating this point for a long time, but mentors can help fast forward your success in ways you cannot even imagine. Some of them were friends that simply inspired me with the incredible attitude that they approach life.

Every single experience that I had during this year deserves it’s own article and I won’t enter in details here.

They say that life it’s not about the amount of breaths you take, it’s about the moments that take your breath away. This year I am grateful that I had accomplished more than I can recall on a simple thought. Madrid saw me grow and for sure enabled me to grow much faster than I would have done in any other place.

I can say that in this past year every single day was a new adventure, nothing was the same and every single day deserves it’s own headline. I got involved in so many things in parallel and although I got overwhelmed in some situations, I managed to get results in the rest and this brought me 365 days that didn’t look like each other and minimum 365 achievements, smaller or bigger. I say minimum 365 because in some days I celebrated multiple “victories”.

It’s a bit ironic that I’m celebrating 1 year of Madrid from Seattle, another amazing city in which I wanted to come for a long time. But after living and having so many memories here, I can proudly call Madrid: my home.

Note: The article was originally published on Facebook Notes and moved to alexand.ro on May 11, 2017.