Summer

For the first time in several years, I find myself in a position that feels strangely unfamiliar. It is not that I have lost ambition, stopped building, or suddenly become less interested in startups. If anything, the opposite is true. I still think about technology constantly, I still pay attention to AI every day, and I still want to build something meaningful. The difference is that for the first time in a long time, I do not know exactly what that thing is yet.

That uncertainty has changed the shape of my days more than I expected.

Over the past few months, several chapters of my life ended at roughly the same time. School ended. Summer school began. The cut that dominated a large part of my daily routine came to an end. I went to San Francisco, built Talon during Google I/O, came back home, and suddenly realized that the next project had not appeared yet. There was no Ryva waiting for me. No startup idea occupying every spare thought in my head. No clear problem that felt important enough to deserve years of my life.

For a while, I thought that was a problem.

I found myself spending more time on social media than I normally would, reading discussions, watching people launch products, following AI announcements, paying attention to what founders were building, and generally consuming far more information than I usually like to. From the outside, it probably looked like distraction. Internally, though, it felt like something else entirely. I was not really looking for entertainment. I was looking for a signal.

I think obsession is one of the most misunderstood forces in the world.

People talk endlessly about discipline, consistency, habits, and work ethic, but the most productive periods of my life have rarely felt disciplined. They felt inevitable. When I was deeply invested in a project, I did not need systems to convince myself to work on it. I woke up thinking about it, spent the day working on it, and went to sleep wondering how to make it better. The work itself generated energy. Progress created more progress. Momentum created more momentum.

The challenge is that obsession cannot be manufactured on demand. You can force yourself to work, sit at a desk, and finish tasks, but you cannot force genuine fascination. The kind of curiosity that consumes your attention and pulls you back to a problem over and over again tends to emerge on its own, often long before you realize how important it will become.

The things that end up consuming years of your life usually begin much smaller than that. They start as observations. A problem that seems slightly strange. A workflow that feels broken. A question that keeps returning to your mind for reasons you cannot fully explain. Most obsessions begin as tiny signals that become impossible to ignore over time.

I think that is the phase I am in right now.

For most of my life, I have thought of observation as something passive. Building felt active. Shipping products felt active. Writing code felt active. Observation seemed like the thing that happened before the real work started.

I am no longer convinced that distinction is accurate.

The more I look at people who build meaningful things, the more I think observation is the real beginning of the process. Every company exists because somebody noticed something other people overlooked. Every product starts because someone became obsessed with a problem that most people learned to tolerate. Every major project begins with attention long before it begins with execution.

The internet makes this difficult because it constantly pressures people toward action. Launch something. Build something. Post something. Announce something. The expectation is that progress should always be visible.

Observation is almost invisible. From the outside, it looks like wandering, somebody spending time reading, thinking, noticing, and collecting fragments that do not appear connected yet.

Lately, that space has been filled by a mix of things rather than any single obsession. I’ve spent more time lifting, cooking, paying attention to nutrition, and generally thinking about how to build better systems around my health and daily life. None of these have become all-consuming, but together they provide a kind of steady progress that I enjoy. There is something satisfying about working on problems where feedback is immediate and improvement is visible. You can become stronger, refine a routine, improve a recipe, sleep better, and watch small gains accumulate over time.

At the same time, some part of my brain continues searching, not desperately or impatiently, but continuously. Even while focusing on these smaller pursuits, I find myself paying attention to how people use AI, how students interact with technology, and the countless inefficiencies and strange behaviors that most people overlook. The search for the next obsession never really stops; it just becomes quieter for a while.

I notice things more now than I did when I was fully consumed by a startup. I pay attention to how people use AI. I pay attention to how students interact with technology. I pay attention to inefficient systems, strange behaviors, recurring frustrations, and patterns that seem insignificant at first glance. Most of these observations will probably lead nowhere. A few of them might become something larger.

The strange thing about this period is that I no longer see it as a gap between projects. I think it is part of the same cycle.

Every obsession begins with observation. Every period of intense building is eventually followed by a period of paying attention. Obsession creates momentum, but observation creates direction. Without momentum, nothing gets built. Without direction, you end up building things that never mattered in the first place.

That is why I increasingly think this summer is not really about startups, fitness, school, or even AI. It is about learning to trust the phase before clarity arrives. The phase where the signals are still weak, the connections are still forming, and the next obsession has not fully revealed itself yet.

I can’t say what I’ll be building six months from now, but every project that has mattered to me began the same way: not with a product, a company, or a clear goal, but with an observation that refused to leave my head.

Maybe that is what this summer really is: a period of paying attention before the next direction becomes obvious.