Hi Reader,

How's it going for you?

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of chatting with Pavel Klavík, the founder of OrgPad, my absolute favourite mindmapping tool. I've been using it for everything from project planning to learning new topics.

I used this tool to create this mindmap for my video on learning Python:

Pavel has an interesting backstory – he used to work at Google, improving their search engine. Then he quit his well-paying job to develop this mindmapping tool together with his wife.

OrgPad is his brainchild, something he believes will help a lot of people learn and organize their stuff better. This has been his motivation and passion in the past 6 years.

What really struck me was how much you can accomplish when you’re genuinely invested in something.

Pavel said to me, “Pretty much everything I’ve ever learned was done by using it for real stuff. Before creating OrgPad, I knew nothing about web applications, had never built a server, and did not know much about how browsers work. As I encountered real problems, I learned how to tackle them.”

It's a reminder that you don't need to "know it all" before you start. If you’re curious and willing to learn as you go, you can figure things out.

This has been true for me when developing several personal projects, no matter how hard and scary I thought they were.

So, how do you know what’s worth learning or working on?

There are endless things you could dive into and work on, but how do you decide which ones deserve your time and effort?

Once you choose something, you sacrifice other possibilities. Your time and energy are limited. Economists has a term for this: opportunity costs.

I struggle with this daily, from choosing projects and deciding how to spend my evenings to making career moves and figuring out the direction for my YouTube channel.

Then a moment of clarity came to me over a dinner with a friend/ old colleague the other day. Having gone through some tough health issues and life changes recently, he's started reading Bhagavad Gita, a 2,000-year-old Hindu scripture​, with the help of Perplexity AI to understand some parts of it. 😂

He said – something along the lines of this (or at least, this is how I interpreted it):

"Everything you do has a good side and a bad side. Nothing is purely good or bad by itself. For example, I could make a video on waste management in India. Maybe it helps someone learn about it and sparks change, or maybe no one watches it and my effort goes to waste.

There’s no way to predict how something will impact the world. The only thing you know for sure is how you feel about what you’re doing...

If it feels right, you’re more likely to put your best effort into it – and when you do that, you become good at it and are more likely to make a positive impact."

Of course, this doesn't apply for obviously harmful/ illegal things. You don't want create a deepfake tool for scamming celebrities because it feels good 😅.

But I believe for many hard decisions – career moves, long-term projects, passion pursuits - sometimes the best compass is how it makes you feel.

Have a great rest of the week 💪.

Thu

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