Before I started making content, I used to wonder what it would feel like to have a thousand followers. It looked like a dream — a number that would definitely bring me a lot of happiness. Then I remember hitting it. And it felt like nothing.

So I told myself maybe the real milestone was 10,000. That’s when it would feel like something. I remember reaching, even passing, 10,000 on a completely ordinary day. My life felt exactly the same as it had the day before. So I moved the line again: surely 100,000 was the one. When I hit 100,000, there was a spark — a rush of excitement — but in just a few days, it had faded, and I was back to another ordinary day.

Then I moved the goal post to 200,000. Then 300,000. Then 400,000. Each time, the same thing: little to no joy, and everything still felt the same. The truth is that reaching those numbers changed almost nothing about how I actually felt. If anything, all they proved was that I was capable of doing what I set out to do. But the happiness I’d thought it would bring never came.

That experience taught me something that a lot of people spend their whole lives trapped inside: the “I’ll be happy when” mindset.

It’s the belief that happiness is waiting for you on the other side of some future event. I’ll be happy when I pass the exam. I’ll be happy when I get married. I’ll be happy when I’m rich. I’ll be happy when I finally travel there. I’ll be happy when I launch this business. It doesn’t seem dangerous at first — some people might even think it’s motivating.

But here’s what we miss: the moment you attach your happiness to a future condition, you deprive yourself of happiness right now. You’re postponing your joy to a future you can’t even guarantee will arrive.

And it’s a trap in two separate ways. The first is the disappointment. You might actually get the thing — and discover it doesn’t live up to what you had in mind. The expectations were often unrealistic to begin with, so when reality falls short, you end up resenting the very thing you chased, as if it failed you. It didn’t. You simply expected it to bring more joy than any single thing ever could. My follower counts were exactly that: each one arrived, and each one was not as exciting as I’d imagined.

The second is less obvious but also dangerous. You have no real evidence that the outcome will make you happy — because you’ve never lived it. If you’ve never been married, never had the money, and never taken the trip, then “I’ll be happy when I do” is pure guesswork. You’re trading your present joy for an outcome you’ve never actually experienced.

I’m not saying these things can’t bring you joy. They can. But why postpone your happiness until they arrive?

The mindset I’ve adopted instead is simple: rather than “I’ll be happy when”, I try to say “I’m grateful for”. I’m grateful for the roof over my head. I’m grateful for the people who love me. I’m grateful for the food I have and the health I still have. It’s far better to stand on the real ground beneath your feet than to lean your whole happiness on an imagined future you’ve never touched.

And if right now you’re thinking you have nothing to be grateful for, walk with me for a moment. Imagine you woke up tomorrow with none of it. No home to return to. No one who cares enough to help. The same worn clothes, no food, and nowhere to go. Sit in that picture for a second.

Now come back to your actual life. If you were struggling to find anything to be grateful for, notice that your life isn’t that. Because that is someone’s life. What you might be quietly complaining about is the exact thing another person is praying to have.

And even in our faith, we were never told to spend this life miserable, punishing ourselves, just waiting to be happy in the next. That was never the instruction. We’re told to make the most of our time here and to be grateful — and that gratitude itself invites increase, as we’re reminded in Surah Ibrahim. Build the best future you can. Strive for more. But not at the cost of the joy you’re living right now.

Because here’s the real shift, and it’s the whole point: happiness was never meant to be a destination you finally arrive at. I’ve stopped thinking of it as happiness at all and started thinking of it as contentment — not an outcome you chase and capture, but something you do, consistently, today. You can work toward the goal and still refuse to make it the gatekeeper of your joy. Because if we’re honest, that goal might not come — or it might come looking nothing like you imagined. And a life spent in misery waiting for an outcome that only ends up disappointing you is a wasted life if you ask me.

So here’s my question for you to sit with: what are you chasing right now that you’ve traded for your current happiness — and what has that waiting already cost you?

Thanks for reading.

Nurain.

When I was a little kid in nursery, I never wanted to be like my mates. When everyone was making noise, I’d be the quiet one. When the class was rowdy, kids running everywhere, I’d just sit on my chair in a corner and watch. Whenever the teacher came looking for whoever was causing trouble, I was rarely, if ever, part of it. And it wasn’t some grand strategy. It just felt like the smart move, even then. I could see they were going to get into trouble, and my rule was simple: don’t copy them.

That instinct never left me. By the time I got to university, it had only sharpened. I’d watch classmates pour their days into video games and then struggle in class. I’d see them smoke, chase every cheap dopamine hit, and act like the years ahead were guaranteed. And I could tell that most of them had no idea what they were doing with their lives. So in my head I’d quietly run the math: if I wanted to waste these years and ruin my life, that right there is the blueprint. So now I know exactly what not to do.

I lived like that for years without a label for it. It was only recently, some time last year — I was watching a YouTube video — that I realized this thing I’d done my whole life wasn’t just a personal life hack. It was an actual framework, used by some of the sharpest thinkers alive. What I thought was a strange habit turned out to have a name.

It’s called inverse thinking, and it was popularized by the late investor Charlie Munger. It’s the practice of focusing on what you want to avoid rather than on what you want to achieve, in order to get the results you want. You map out everything that leads to failure, and then you simply remove those things from your path. Munger put it bluntly: all he wanted to know was where he was going to die, so he’d never go there.

I know it might sound strange. Because whenever you go online or sit through a motivational seminar, everyone tells you to study the 1%—to obsess over exactly what the top performers do. And that’s not bad advice. It’s actually quite useful. But there’s something nobody emphasizes nearly enough: you should also know exactly what the 99% are doing so that you never do it.

Say you want to build a personal brand. Don’t start by asking how to build one. Start by asking how to guarantee it never happens. That’s easy: don’t post. Or post once and then disappear for weeks. Never study anyone who’s already done it well. Never experiment. Stay completely inconsistent. Learn from no one and quit the moment it gets boring.

Now look at the list — because that list is actually the plan that’ll help you succeed, just flipped. Post relentlessly. Find people worth learning from. Stay consistent. Experiment constantly. The list of how to fail wrote your list of how to win, and it was far clearer than any “10 tips to grow your page” video could ever be.

The same move works everywhere:

Want to ruin a relationship? Never call. Never text. Only reach out when you’re in the mood. Make everything about you and ignore what the other person needs. Then, do the opposite.

Want to stay unfit? Keep eating trash, never move, stay lazy, and never train. Then, do the opposite.

Want to guarantee your business fails? Keep procrastinating. Talk endlessly without ever executing. Refuse to learn. Never find a mentor. Then, do the opposite.

Every time, the path to failure is easier to see than the path to success. So you map the failure — and then you walk the other way.

There’s one place this shows up that means more to me than any of the others. Think about the deen. If you asked, “How do I guarantee I end up in the worst place in the next life?” —most of us already know the answer, without a single thing needing to be spelled out. We know what ruins a person. So often, the things to avoid are made clear to us, even when the road to what we’re chasing feels uncertain. Sometimes knowing what not to do is the clearest guidance we’re given. So we simply do the opposite.

That’s really the heart of inverse thinking. We spend so much energy chasing the perfect plan for success when a huge part of the answer is just refusing to do the obvious things that keep the 99% stuck. You don’t always need to know the secret the 1% are hiding. Half the time, you just need to stop sabotaging yourself by doing what the 99% are doing.

So here’s my question for you to sit with: take the one goal you want most right now. If you set out to destroy any chance of achieving it—if failure were the goal—what exactly would you do? Be honest. Because chances are, you’re already doing some of it. Start by stopping that.

Thanks for reading.

Nurain

What if there was a way to increase your chances of being lucky?

I know that for most of us, the moment we hear the word “luck”, we assume it’s something that happens to a select few. But what if I told you that you can actually increase the odds of luck finding you?

I first came across this idea from Naval Ravikant, who popularised it. But after digging a little deeper, I found that it originally came from a man named Dr James Austin in his 1978 book Chase, Chance, and Creativity. The core idea is this: luck isn’t as random as we think. It’s something you can intentionally create for yourself.

Whenever we see successful people achieving extraordinary results, our first thought is usually, “They got lucky.” And to be fair, luck did play a part. But what we miss is that they did specific things to invite that luck in. They tilted the odds. And there are four types of luck you can capitalise on to do exactly the same.

1. Blind luck

This is the one we all recognise. It’s finding money on the floor. Being born into a wealthy family. Walking into a restaurant and discovering the last burger left is the exact one you wanted. It’s pure chance — and you can’t control it. It simply happens to you. The other day I luckily walked into a store a few minutes before they closed. Nothing really special because it happens to so many.

This is the only type of luck that’s completely out of your hands. Which is exactly why it deserves the least of your attention.

2. Luck from motion

This is the luck that finds you because you’re in motion — because you’re doing things.

If you hustle, you’re more likely to make money. If you work out, you’re more likely to get fit. If you keep reaching out to potential partners, you’re more likely to find the right one. The principle is simple: the more you try, the more chances you create for luck to find you. Motion generates opportunities that stillness never will.

This one I’ve lived through directly. I’ve put out over a thousand pieces of content on Instagram alone, and the brand I’ve built came from sheer volume — I simply did more than most people were willing to. There’s a line from Alex Hormozi that captures this perfectly: “Volume negates luck.” The more you put out, the less you’re at the mercy of chance, because you’ve given luck so many chances to find you that eventually it has no choice but to find you.

3. Luck from awareness

This is the luck that comes from noticing what others don’t.

It’s reaching a point where you can spot patterns and trends before most people even realise they’re there. Think of the people who jumped on Facebook ads in their early days or built on TikTok / Instagram / YouTube the moment they took off. From the outside, we call them lucky, we say, “they got in early.” But they weren’t just lucky. They had developed the awareness to recognise the pattern before the crowd did. That’s a skill, not a coincidence.

I see this in my own work constantly. After creating content for over six years, I’ve developed an eye for where social media is heading – the hooks that are starting to work, the content styles about to take off, the tools everyone is starting to use. I tend to notice these shifts long before most people do. It isn’t a sixth sense. It’s just pattern recognition earned from years of paying attention. What looks like being “early” from the outside is usually just awareness built over time.

4. Luck from character

This is the most powerful type of all — and the one worth building your whole life around.

Luck from character is when you become the kind of person that opportunities are drawn to. Think of the creator who keeps landing brand deals, keeps getting invited to speak, and keeps being handed doors most people never even see. We look at them and say they’re lucky. But the truth is they became someone who attracts those opportunities. They turned themselves into a luck magnet.

Or the successful athlete who keeps getting invites, unexpected opportunities, and so on. This is the one I experience the most in my own life now. Over the years I’ve built a personal brand around helping people make smarter, better decisions — and because of that reputation and the 600,000-plus people I’ve built an audience with, opportunities come to me: invitations to speak, brand deals, and opportunities that I never went looking for. A few years ago I’d have had to chase every one of those. Now they find me. Not because I got lucky — but because I became someone luck knew where to find.

And here’s the shift that matters: at this level, you’re no longer the one chasing opportunities. You’re the one being chased – because of the reputation you’ve built.

So luck isn’t reserved for a chosen few after all. There are real, deliberate things you can do to make it find you.

And here’s the best part: only one of the four – blind luck – is genuinely out of your control. The other three are entirely yours to build. Most people never realise this. They treat all luck as blind, sit back, and wait — which is exactly why they stay unlucky.

So here’s my question for you to sit with: which type of luck are you actually chasing right now? Are you stuck hoping for blind luck, waiting for an opportunity to fall into your lap? Or are you actively building the other three — putting yourself in motion, sharpening your awareness, and becoming the kind of person opportunity comes looking for?

Thanks for reading.

Nurain.

Pablo Picasso is considered one of the greatest painters who ever lived. But what fascinates me most about his story is this: over his lifetime, he’s said to have created somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 pieces of art.

At his death, his estate still held more than 45,000 unsold works — paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and more. Now, here’s what most people get wrong about him. When we think of Picasso, we picture a man producing masterpieces his whole life. I used to think that too. But it isn’t accurate. The truth is he created masterpieces because he was willing to create thousands of ordinary ones.

He painted almost every day for decades. He experimented constantly. He tried new styles relentlessly. And that is how he produced the handful of pieces the world remembers. His success didn’t come from perfection. It came from volume.

There’s a story that captures the same truth, told in Atomic Habits. A photography professor split his class into two groups.

The first group was graded on quantity — on how many photos they took. The more they shot, the higher their score. The second group was graded on quality — they only needed to produce one photo, but it had to be as close to perfect as possible.

When it came time to present, the best photographs didn’t come from the quality group. They came from the quantity group. Why? Because in taking hundreds of shots, they were constantly experimenting and learning a little from every frame. The quality group, meanwhile, spent the whole term overthinking the perfect shot and ended up presenting an average piece of work.

Two different people but the same lesson: the ones who made the best work were the ones willing to make the most work.

And I’ve lived this myself.

Across all my social media platforms, I’ve built an audience of over 600,000 followers — and it didn’t come from one perfect post. It came from putting out hundreds of ordinary ones long before a few finally caught traction and grew my page.

People only remember the hits. They rarely see or remember the hundreds of experiments and average posts that slowly got you there.

You can’t ever reach that one breakthrough piece if you’re stuck overthinking it, trying to perfect it before it goes out. Because perfection is subjective. What you judge to be brilliant, others might ignore. And what you’re embarrassed to post might be the very thing that takes off. You simply can’t know until you release it. The fastest way to learn is to start.

This is sometimes called the portfolio mindset. Instead of chasing one flawless creation, you build a large body of work – and let volume do what perfectionism never can: help you learn.

So for you, the lesson becomes:

• Publish 300 videos, not 3 “perfect” ones.

• Write 100 newsletters, not 10 “perfect” ones.

• Record 50 podcast episodes, not 5 “flawless” ones.

Your audience may only ever remember a handful. But those handfuls only exist because of every ordinary one that came before them.

So let me ask you: what are you holding back right now because it isn’t perfect yet? The post you keep rewriting, the project you won’t release, the thing sitting in your drafts. Perfectionism feels like a high standard. But while you wait to be ready, the work that would’ve made you better never gets made. So start before you’re ready. That’s the whole secret.

Thanks for reading.

You’ve probably come across the 10,000-hour rule, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers – the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at almost anything. The first time I heard it, it sounded inspiring. I could become an expert at anything, as long as I put in the hours.

Then I did the math, and the inspiration immediately left me.

If you spread 10,000 hours across your calendar, it’s brutal. At 1 hour a day, that’s 10,000 days — around 27 years. At 2 hours a day, 5,000 days. Even at 5 hours a day, you’re looking at 2,000 days – around 5 and a half years. I went from motivated to completely discouraged, and I became convinced I’d never truly master any skill I cared about, because who has that kind of time?

Then one day I was scrolling online and came across the 20-hour rule, popularised by Josh Kaufman in his TED talk “The First 20 Hours”. His point was different: you don’t need 10,000 hours to become an expert to enjoy a skill or use it well. You need about 20 focused hours to become decently good at almost anything. And 20 hours isn’t 27 years — it’s a few days. Two hours a day for ten days. Three hours a day for a week or four hours daily for five days. That’s it.

That reframed everything for me. And it’s the exact method I now use whenever I want to pick up a skill fast. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Deconstruct the skill.
Break the skill into its smaller parts and get specific. This is where most people fail before they start — they say, “I want to learn video editing” or “I want to get good at cooking”, and the vagueness paralyses them.

When I learnt video editing, I didn’t set out to “learn video editing”. I broke it into pieces: how to import and cut clips, how to fix bad audio, how to colour-correct, and how to add text and transitions. Suddenly it wasn’t one intimidating mountain — it was several small hills I could climb.

Cooking works the same way. “Learn to cook” is too broad. But “learn to boil pasta” or “learn to fry an egg” is something you can actually work towards. Now you know exactly what to practise: your knife work, your timing, and a handful of basic recipes. Specificity takes you from a fog into a checklist.

Step 2: Learn just enough to self-correct.
Gather three to five resources — books, YouTube tutorials, or a course — and learn just enough to start and catch your own mistakes. Not so much until you feel ready. Just enough to begin.

Most people get this wrong. They binge tutorials for weeks and call it “learning”, when really they’re hiding from the discomfort of being bad at something. It’s like a quote by Mark Manson where he says, “learning is a smart person’s way to procrastinate.” So action is vital regardless of your level of readiness.

With video editing, I watched a couple of tutorials on cutting and audio, then immediately opened the software and starting experimenting and making mistakes. But those experiments and mistakes taught me more than ten more hours of watching ever could. Same with cooking — you don’t need to read the whole cookbook; you need to burn the first pan and learn from it.

Execute fast. The mistakes are the lesson.

Step 3: Remove the barriers to practice.
Make it effortless to start and hard to get distracted. Kill the friction on the good behaviour and add friction to the bad.

When I was learning video editing, that meant I’d need to keep my phone in another room, turn the TV off, and have the editing software already open on my laptop so there was no “getting set up” excuse. For cooking, it’s having your ingredients and tools already on the counter so the gap between “I should practise” and actually doing it is as small as possible. You’re far more likely to sit down and work when the work is right there and the distractions aren’t.

Step 4: Pre-commit to the 20 hours.
Decide in advance that you’re doing the full 20 — before you hit the wall where you feel awkward and incompetent and want to quit. Because you will hit it, usually somewhere in hours 3 to 8, and that’s exactly where most people abandon the skill.

Break it into something you can sustain: 2 hours a day for 10 days, 3 hours for 7 days, or 4 hours for 5. Whatever fits your life — but commit to the number first, so that when the discouragement hits, the decision is already made. That’s the whole game.

You really don’t need 10,000 hours to become great at a skill. You need 20 focused ones. The reason so few people ever stand out isn’t talent or time — it’s that almost nobody actually sits down and dedicates the 20 hours to do the deliberate work.

Which is exactly why doing it makes you the exception.

Thanks for reading.

Nurain.

I experienced my very first anxiety attack over the same thing that brings me joy and meaning today: social media.

At the time, I was running multiple pages at once: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, a blog, YouTube & Snapchat.

My goal was to grow all of them simultaneously. Then, one day I was talking to my brother, and he pointed out that I was wasting myself trying to do everything at once. I had convinced myself that people expected me to post every single day, to create something new constantly. He said, “Nurain, nobody really cares. You’re the one who created all these expectations for yourself.”

I brushed it off. But the next morning, I experienced my first anxiety attack — and I couldn’t even understand what was happening to me. His advice had been to stop posting on all those pages. He didn’t tell me to focus on one; that part was for me to figure out.

I found it painfully hard to take his advice, because I had poured months into growing those pages. Throwing all of that away felt insane. I’ve spent months building this — I can’t just let it go. That was the thought running in my head.

But when I finally cut them off, the relief was almost immediate. Once I made those hard choices, all that time, focus, and energy came flooding back to me — and I used it to grow far faster than I ever could have while holding on. And that was when I recognised what I’d been suffering from — something I’d only ever read about: the sunk cost fallacy.

Here’s what it means. We find it hard to let go of things because of how much we’ve already invested in them — time, money, energy, effort. We have a tendency to focus more on what we have poured into something instead of where we are going with it. But what we often fail to realise is that the investment is already gone.

You can’t get it back whether you stay or leave. The fallacy is making your decision based on what you’ve already spent instead of on whether the thing is actually useful to you. I kept staring at the months I’d sunk into those pages, completely ignoring what they were costing me right now. I was like a car stuck in mud — flooring the accelerator, going nowhere.

You’ve probably faced this yourself, or you might be facing it right now. Maybe you’ve poured your savings into a business that isn’t going anywhere; the market is shrinking, and letting go feels impossible because all you can see is what you’ve put in. Or maybe you’re in a relationship that drains you and brings you no joy, and yet you keep pouring into it because “I’ve already been with this person five years.” You focus on the years behind you instead of the direction you’re heading.

The hardest truth about the sunk cost fallacy is this: you have to look at where you’re going, not at how much you’ve poured in.

Imagine you’re climbing a mountain, and halfway up you realise it’s the wrong one. Most people won’t climb back down. They’d rather finish the wrong climb than admit they need to start over. So they push to the summit of a mountain they never wanted and carry on with their lives from there. The right move — as painful as it is — is to go back down and climb the right one. It’s not an easy decision. But if you actually want to get the results you desire, it’s the one you have to make.

But here’s where it gets interesting. The sunk cost fallacy isn’t always a bad thing — because this same force can work for you instead of against you.

When you pour money into something — an online course, expensive gear for your content, a coach, a trainer — you’re far more likely to take it seriously because you paid. The spending gives you skin in the game.

Think about how seriously you take things you paid for with your hard-earned money compared to things you got for free. Chances are, if you paid, you’ll use what you paid for. There’s a saying in business that, “If you pay, you pay attention.” And I’ve seen this play out in my life as well.

Whenever I pay for things, I take them far more seriously than if I got them free. For example, I subscribed to MyFitnessPal a while ago, which is a fitness app that makes me take my training seriously. I’ve also paid for several tools tied to my income that push me to actually make a sale each month so the money isn’t wasted. That’s not the fallacy trapping me — that’s me using the exact force as a commitment device to help me make progress.

So the fallacy itself isn’t the enemy. Holding on to something that’s clearly going nowhere because of what you’ve already spent — that’s the trap. But if you use it to your advantage, that is, putting something on the line so you’ll follow through – that’s one of the smartest moves you can make.

So every once in a while, you have to step back and ask whether you’re climbing the right mountain — or whether it’s time to start again.

And if you’re not sure whether to hold on or let go, here’s the question I keep coming back to: If nothing about this ever changed — if it stayed exactly as it is right now — would you still hold on?

—

Sitting with that question is the easy part. Acting on it — building the discipline to climb back down the wrong mountain and start the right climb — is where most people stall.

That’s what I built Self-Mastery for: a course for those who want the clarity and discipline to stop drifting and design a life on purpose. If you’re ready to do more than reflect, start here → ENROL NOW

Back in 2019, I had the chance to study multimedia design in Malaysia. When I arrived, everything was new — the country, the people, and the lifestyle — all of it different from what I grew up around in Nigeria.

Then one day, on an ordinary afternoon when I was bored out of my mind at home, I decided to go and buy a book. My mom had been encouraging me to read for years, so I thought, “Why not?” I was bored anyway. So I went to a bookshop and picked up a novel. It was okay — but honestly, I’d rather watch a movie than read a story I could just as easily watch. A few days later I went back again, and this time I picked up something different: a personal development book called Love for Imperfect Things by Haemin Sunim.

I didn’t know it yet, but that small, almost accidental purchase would reshape how I saw my entire life. The book opened my mind in ways I didn’t expect. It was the first time I realised I was actually quite dumb — that I didn’t know half the things I thought I knew. One quote in particular shifted something in me: “The less you know, the more you think you know. But the more you know, the more you realise how little you actually know.” That single idea sent me out reading more and more and more, which transformed my life.

But what truly transformed my life wasn’t just the book. It was the change in environment. Let me explain. I only stumbled into that book because I was somewhere it was easy to stumble into. Bookshops were everywhere in Malaysia. Walking into one out of sheer boredom was the most ordinary thing in the world. But back home, believe it or not, that wasn’t true — and still isn’t. Getting your hands on books like these was hard, and that lack of access limits you more than you realise.

Which brings me to where I grew up. It’s a town called Minna, in Nigeria. For most of my life, I stayed home. I didn’t go out much, didn’t have many friends, and barely knew my neighbours. That’s just how I grew up — partly because Minna didn’t have many places to go. No malls, no fancy spots to spend an afternoon, no bookshops to visit – nothing. So when the opportunity to go to Malaysia came, of course I took it.

The more I read, the more I understood that you don’t have to stay trapped — and you don’t have to follow the path everyone assumes is the only one. Which is the typical go to school, get a 9-to-5, get married, retire and then die.

Books showed me you can design a life completely different from that. One that brings you joy, fulfilment, something you actually look forward to waking up to.

Malaysia taught me other things too. I noticed how calm the people were compared to back home, where so many of us are hot-tempered. Malaysians rarely argue in public or fight — they’re gentle and composed. And that matched something in me. I’m a calm person by nature, and seeing them live that way showed me you don’t need to shout or be irrational to make your point. That was a quiet revelation.

It also forced me out of my comfort zone in ways I couldn’t avoid. If you don’t speak up, if you don’t go out to buy your own food, if you don’t figure things out — good luck. You could starve, honestly. I used to be too shy to talk in public, with no idea how to approach a stranger. Malaysia stripped that away. It made me learn the very skills I’d never have learnt inside my bubble.

Honestly, my parents did their best with what they had — but there are just certain lessons you simply cannot learn in the same place you grew up. If you could, you’d have learnt them already.

Every time I go back to Minna, I see people who still think the way I used to. They don’t think outside the box. They believe what they can see is all there is. Now, don’t misread me. I’m not saying that if you move abroad or travel, you’ll automatically come back smarter and wiser.

A lot of people leave their hometown and return exactly the same. This was never just about changing locations. It’s about surrounding yourself with better growth opportunities – people, books, podcasts, etc. When you do that, your mind opens. Shifts happen. None of that occurs if you stay in your bubble.

There’s a question I keep coming back to: Imagine your life five years from now if you did absolutely nothing. If you stayed exactly where you are, would you be happy?

It’s the kind of question that forces you to look honestly at where your life is heading and whether that’s where you actually want to go. So if an opportunity comes – to work somewhere new, to be around better people, or to study abroad – take it. Go in with an open mind. But don’t just take it and ignore what it offers. Use it fully. That’s how you grow.

Thanks for reading.

Several years ago, I made the decision to stop listening to music completely. It remains one of the best decisions I’ve ever made — but it didn’t start as a decision. It started as a question I couldn’t keep avoiding.

For most of my life, I treated music as harmless. Background noise. Something to play in the car, at the gym, or while I was in transit. I never not thought or assumed sound playing in my ears could really shape anything that mattered.

Then I noticed a pattern I’d been repeating without ever questioning it. Every single Ramadan, I quit cold. Thirty days, no music at all. And every single year, the moment the month ended, I went straight back to it like nothing had happened.

One day I actually sat with that thought instead of moving past it. If this was something I treated as wrong enough to fast from for thirty days a year, why was it suddenly fine for the other eleven months? And if it truly wasn’t a problem, why did some part of me feel the need to abstain at all?

I realised I wasn’t fooling Allah by taking that break every Ramadan. I was fooling myself.

That realisation changed how I saw the whole habit. Because most of what gets called entertainment isn’t neutral. The music industry packages some of the most destructive messages into the most addictive melodies — on loop, every day, until they stop sounding wrong and start sounding normal. The line between what’s right and what you’ve simply gotten used to starts moving without you noticing.

Taking drugs, alcohol and other intoxicants starts to seem cool. Promiscuity seems normal. Bragging and showing off start to feel like a must. Violence doesn’t seem so bad anymore.

For me, it reshaped how I saw women. It introduced me to language and ideas I would never have come across otherwise — not because I sought them out, but because I let them in through something I played every day without thinking twice.

There’s a line I think about often: you are what you consume. We’re careful about food. We track macros, count calories, and talk about discipline at the gym. But we rarely apply that same scrutiny to what we let into our ears from morning to night. What you take in repeatedly doesn’t stay external forever. Eventually, it becomes you.

A man doesn’t detox his body for thirty days and then go straight back to poison the moment the fast ends and call that balance. If something is harmful enough to abstain from completely, it doesn’t become harmless again just because the calendar changed. That contradiction is the part most of us never sit with long enough to actually notice.

So if you’ve ever felt that same quiet tension — fasting from something every year out of obligation, then returning to it the second the obligation lifts — that feeling isn’t random. It’s the part of you that already knows the answer, waiting for you to stop arguing with it.

Here’s what actually helped me break free, not just for thirty days, but for good:

1. Shift your identity first. Decide who you want to be before you try to change the habit. I had to tell myself, “This isn’t who I am anymore.” The behaviour followed the identity, not the other way around. Who I needed to become to hit my goals required a different level of focus and discipline that music will not have allowed me to get to.

2. Replace it, don’t just delete it. I filled the space with podcasts, lectures, and the Qur’an. An empty habit pulls you back to it eventually. A replaced one doesn’t.

3. Remember the cost. Every time the desire to listen to music comes back, I remind myself specifically what it was doing to me. Reflecting on those reminders makes it very hard to return to it.

It hasn’t been instant, and it isn’t always easy. There are still days a catchy tune crosses my path, and some part of me wants to chase it. But I know the price now, and that’s usually enough to keep walking.

I’m not asking you to quit forever today. Start with seven days. Replace it with something that builds you instead of just entertains you, and pay attention to what you notice about yourself. You can even try to just sit with your thoughts in silence without listening to anything.

Be very selective with what you allow into your ears, as it can shape your future more than you may think.

Thank you for reading.

– Nurain.

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