For as long as I can remember, we’ve been bombarded with advice to stay humble. Don’t be too confident. Don’t act like you know everything. Always doubt yourself and strive to be better. On the surface, that’s absolutely true. I’ve been in plenty of situations where someone’s complacency was so annoying that it completely derailed a good conversation. The first step to learning anything is accepting that you don't know it all, you have to be willing to shut up, sit back, and listen. Dealing with people who are "unable to learn" is, for me, a special kind of hell.

I could write paragraphs about why humility is great, and I’m sure you’d agree. But what about the flip side? Sure, you might see the occasional suggestion to "be proud of yourself" in a yoga session or a self-help book, but in the broader spectrum of life advice, I’d say 90% of quotes and lessons lean heavily toward humility. It’s why "humble" is almost always seen as a positive adjective. In Persian, we even have the family name "Foroutan" (meaning humble), which shows how deeply this is woven into our identity.

My argument is that we’ve swung too far toward the humble side, and we've forgotten the consequences. You might ask: What’s the harm in being humble? Well, when you are too humble, you stop being proud of your achievements. You start dictating a narrative to yourself that you are nothing, you’ve done nothing, and you know nothing; until you slowly start to believe it.

There’s a psychological phenomenon called the illusory truth effect. It’s a cognitive bias where people are more likely to believe a statement simply because they’ve heard it repeatedly, even if they initially knew it was false. By constantly practicing the idea that you are "nothing" to keep the door to learning open, you are causing silent harm to your self-love.

Eventually, you lose every reason to be proud of yourself. And when that happens, you lose the ability to understand why your partner, parents, or friends love you. If you don't catch this and correct it, you’ll start to question the sincerity of that love. The final blow is often accusing your loved ones of loving you for your money, your status, or anything other than who you actually are.

So, in conclusion, I suggest seeing this as a Midrange Horizon, that requires constant calibration. Balancing this specific one is more important than money or anything else because we often have to "manually" adjust it against the norms of society. Sometimes, we need to be less humble just to enable ourselves to accept the love coming our way.

By all means, stay humble. But occasionally, you need to sit back, celebrate what you’ve achieved, recognize the positive impact you’ve had on the world, and actually allow yourself to love who you are.

A lot of life feels like learning how to balance on a moving thing. Money is a simple example: if you save nothing and just burn through everything you earn, you end up with no safety, no cushion, nothing that actually belongs to you. But if you save every single cent and never spend, life becomes this grey boring tunnel where you never actually live. Same with alcohol: drink too little and you're like “Why did I even bother?”; drink too much and you’re hugging the toilet, promising God you’ll never do it again. Learning the “just enough” point is kind of a superpower.

Tonight, I was walking home without my airpods, as usual stuck in this loop of overthinking about the future and all the ways it might implode. And suddenly, in the middle of that mental mess, I went wait, today was actually good. I did some well-needed shopping, coded a new tool that will make life easier for my coworkers and me, helped a few people at the bus stop catch their bus, made a few people laugh, and learned more about Hawking radiation of black holes.

That tiny realization opened up something for me about a different kind of balancing skill. Not as obvious as money or alcohol. It’s way more subtle and fragile, harder to even notice, let alone get good at. It’s about where in time you park your thoughts most of the day. Like, how far into the future or past your brain tends to camp.

I invented a new word for it: Midrange Horizon. It’s a balance because when you think mostly about the short-term future/past, you’re usually kind of okay emotionally. Stuff like: I played some games, I had good food, I got drunk with friends, my salary just came in. That’s where most of the quick hits of happiness live. (Of course, sometimes the present sucks too, that happens. But usually the happiness points show up in this short-range area.)

Then there are the long-range thoughts, and that’s where things usually get dark. Will I pass this semester? Will I keep this job? Will I ever have a healthy relationship again? Why did I buy that car five years ago? Why didn’t I switch my major when I had the chance? The further out you go, the more the questions sound like anxiety or regret.

What makes this tricky is that where your daily thinking focuses ends up shaping your feelings, and then that shapes your actions. If you’re always obsessed with just “right now,” you won’t build anything that needs time and patience. No long-term projects, no skills, nothing that compounds. Then your future suffers. But if you obsess over the far past or far future, you get stuck in worry or regret, and that also kills your ability to move and improve… and surprise, your future suffers again.

So the only way out is to tune this midrange horizon and keep adjusting it. Not too close, not too far. Close enough to stay sane and appreciate life, far enough to plan, commit, and grow. Like an internal slider where you try to minimize anxiety while still maximizing progress and quality of life.

To me, midrange horizon feels like one of the hardest balancing acts in life. It’s like an optimization problem involving your feelings, your plans, your resources, and your performance. Plus, it never stays fixed. You have to keep adjusting it as life changes. It’s similar to walking on a tightrope: you’re constantly correcting, constantly micro-balancing. And you only get one run across that rope.

So I’m trying to drag my focus closer to that midrange. First step is to overthink less about the distant future or some ancient mistakes, and instead pull my attention to a zone that’s nearer but still meaningful. I definitely need to appreciate life more; be grateful for each tiny thing I get to experience. I’m lucky to still be here, alive, and able to notice these things at all.

Here are a few life lessons I’ve found useful, ones that have stuck with me over the years. I often catch myself referring to them or practicing them in day-to-day life. Writing them here isn’t about giving advice (because I know future me will read this and cringe), but simply to record them somewhere so I don’t forget.

Never Bring Your Phone to the Shower

Honestly, most of my ideas or solutions to problems have come to me in the shower; usually when I’m washing my hair. Even the decision to write this post happened there. There’s a reason for that: our brains are constantly bombarded with noise and tasks. We rarely let them rest. When we’re not working, we’re watching a movie, playing a game, or doom-scrolling Instagram. There’s almost no idle time left for our minds to process everything we’ve absorbed.

There’s a fantastic Coursera course called Learning How to Learn that scientifically explains how our brain and learning processes work. It describes two modes of thinking:

• Focused Mode: Intense concentration on a specific problem or concept.
• Diffuse Mode: A relaxed state of thinking that allows for broader connections and creativity.

You can’t be in both modes at once, like seeing only one side of a coin. That’s why learning (and problem-solving) requires time spent in diffuse mode, where your brain connects dots gathered during focused work.

Another favorite of mine is the Veritasium video Why Boredom Is Good for You. Its main message is boredom fuels creativity. When your mind isn’t occupied, it starts to wander. And that’s when new ideas appear.

I’m not saying you should quit social media completely. Just maybe don’t bring your phone into the shower.

You Are What You Do Every Day

We all have goals and dreams, right? The difference between a goal and a task is that the former takes time, effort, and consistency. We often complete our daily tasks but do little or nothing toward our long-term goals. Worse, we sometimes assume they’ll be easy once we finally start, only to find out they’re not, and give up too soon.

A simple fact: you are what you do every day. If you want to build something, learn a skill, make more money, or grow friendships, basically anything bigger than a one-day effort, you have to act on it regularly. Thinking or dreaming about it doesn’t count.

The book Atomic Habits is everywhere, yet few people truly follow what it preaches. The author practically begs us to take small, consistent actions, every day or at least every few days, because that’s how real progress happens. You can’t get somewhere just by imagining it.

Customize Where You Live

We all decorate our homes and rooms to make them feel personal and comfortable. With furniture, tools, decorations, and appliances that fit our needs. But we also live in our digital spaces. If you’re a developer, your terminal and text editor are part of your home too.

So, start customizing those digital environments as well. After more than a decade of coding, I realized (a bit embarrassingly) that I’d done almost nothing to make my terminal better, learn more powerful tools, or optimize my setup. It’s like living in a messy, uncomfortable house.

Improving this comes with a learning curve, especially if you’ve worked in one environment for a long time. I remember losing my GitHub student pack benefits, which included a free JetBrains license, my main IDE. My productivity crashed. So, I learned (and still learning) vscode as a quick fix and neovim as a long-term solution. I rewrote my terminal configs, created useful aliases, and customized the colors and themes. It took effort, but now I genuinely feel more at home, and even get tired later in the day.

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These three lessons are just the ones at the top of my mind. I have more, though I can’t recall them all right now. I’ll write them down in future posts once they come back. They usually do. Still, there’s no guarantee they always will. That’s really the whole point of writing this (and future) posts, to make sure these lessons don’t fade away completely.

The train finally stopped. After hours of sitting, she was free. She had been desperately waiting to arrive, checking the time and location again and again. Yet, when the moment came, she didn’t rush to get up, grab her bag, and leave. If it wasn’t for the young man beside her who wanted to slip out fast, she might have stayed longer. Did she really want to leave, or just like knowing she could?

Stepping out of the station, the first smell of the city hit her: weed. “Yukh. I missed this,” she muttered. Taxi drivers stared into her eyes, shouting offers. Too tired to even say no, she pretended not to hear and dragged her suitcase away. Its wheels rattled loudly on the dotted sidewalks. In airports and stations, a suitcase glides with ease. But out here, every meter was a fight, like a punishment for not taking a taxi.

As she walked past the stores, something caught her eye. Evening was settling in; shops were closing. One clothing store had forgotten to dress the mannequin after selling its shirt. Its bare chest stood awkwardly in the window. She smiled, amused by the silly scene, and quickly snapped a photo. She thought of a funny caption and opened her messenger. But he wasn’t pinned anymore. They weren’t talking. Her smile faded. The suitcase noise no longer bothered her.

She gave a fake smile to the concierge, pulled out her keys, and unlocked the door. “Hello,” she whispered into the empty apartment. The thirsty dieffenbachia in the corner seemed to greet her back in silence. She tossed her keys onto the table, the usual spot. For her, home was a place where you could throw things down without thinking: keys on the table, clothes on the floor, yourself on the couch.

Back in her small, safe room at last. A place where tears never needed a reason, and even if they did, the room had plenty stored. It had seen her try so hard for an exam she still failed. It had seen her heartbreak after countless late-night chats and flirty hours that blurred into dawn. It had been there through happy-ending movies on her laptop, while her own stories never seemed to end that way.

to be continued…

This is my first single-qubit quantum circuit I wrote today:

dev = qml.device("default.qubit", wires=1)
@qml.qnode(dev)
def apply_hxh(state):
    if state:
        qml.PauliX(wires=0)
    qml.Hadamard(wires=0)
    qml.PauliX(wires=0)
    qml.Hadamard(wires=0)
    return qml.state()
print(apply_hxh(0))
print(apply_hxh(1))

It applies a sequence of Hadamard–X–Hadamard gates with optional initial X to a single qubit and returns the resulting quantum state.

I started learning quantum mechanics out of pure enthusiasm. I have absolutely no purpose whatsoever from learning quantum computation. Not everything in life should carry a purpose. To be more precise, not everything in life should start with a purpose. It's not always obvious how a specific path leads to something great.

I believe that's one of the key differences between theory and practice. Mathematicians and engineers. Usually, engineers are building something or improving what they've built. There is always some clear outcome expected after their work. But mathematicians are solving problems or proving theorems that do not have any application at all (for now). They discover new lands we have not yet called home. The fun part is, the technologies engineers use today are the result of the work done by these enthusiastic theorists.

I think this general principle applies to life, too. Our time on Earth is far too short to learn everything or to explore ideas today with the guarantee they'll be useful years down the line. But every now and then, diving into a new science, hobby, or activity completely at random can open doors in ways you’d never imagine. That’s exactly what I’m doing right now.