Freedom Archives

Wk 24-26 – Weekly Note

Notes, thoughts and updates from Week 24 of 2026.

13 June, 2026.
Saturday.
Versova. Morning.

Lemme start this one with an anecdote. On thursday, I had to meet a friend in Powai. So, like most times, I left early (around 8 AM) and en route I passed SEEPZ and then LnT. Seepz is where a lot of blue collar and back office work happens. You know, ops, regular office going people. And I saw people walking about like soulless machines. Crowded around foot stalls, sweating at bus stops, jostling for space. No spark. Nothing. The same loop, every day. And without even questioning the reason why.

Then I passed by LnT. This time, I saw crisp shirts, a few jackets, best formals. Almost all with laptop bags. And another bag for their lunch. And yet in this headless rush to what I think would be consulting firms and tech firms.

This one hurt more. These are the people like me and my closest friends. People who did everything right. They studied. They worked. They earned the seat. They dressed for it. And they looked just as hollow as the first lot.

I could only think of a strong elephant walking to work, carrying its own chains. And the peg. To the exact spot that will bind it. Dignified on the surface. Marching, on its own feet, into the same confinement, day after day. And what sucks more? These people are not wrong. They are not lazy. They love their families. They want a good home. The house, the status, the path everyone expects.

And while I was thinking about this, I reached Starbucks and I had nothing but greatest wave of gratitude engulf me! No, I was not rejoicing in their misery but in my freedom. I love that I no fixed place I have to be. I dont have to dance for anyone. I may not have a golden chain and I may have to scrounge around for my next meal but I love that I can run amok. Reminds me of this cartoon…

And no, i’ve never shared this before but I couldnt stop thinking of this as I rested at the Starbucks seat, with my Americano and a butter chiplet in it.

Ok, lets go.

No, no music this week.

Highlights, reflections, updates, notes and thoughts from the week gone by.

1/ Distribution. From young ones.

Lets start with D. I wont use her full name. Shes 22. Runs growth at one of the hottest startups in India. I spent the call sitting at her feet. And I told her so. “I am a Buddha here, undo what I have learned and relearn.”

She walked me through her playbooks. From doing things at colleges to making playbooks to letting others run it. The shout-out she earned from India’s largest personality. And how she writes hooks (which she takes from evolutionary biology – my notes have details on three signals she looks at and I will not share here). And how she uses Reddit and other things.

Oh, she has a keen eye. She spotted Neem Karoli Baba behind me. And then the call became something else. Pania would call it Satsang. Some day I’d get to spend time with him as well.

2/ The slow rot at the village

For the first time, I admitted to my people that the village that I am proud of and call myself the zamindar of, is slowly rotting. And dying a slow death. Nothing went wrong. Except three things…

Statis
I created easy times and thus non-hard structures
My inability to push people

I am of the firm belief when something grand happens, its the work of a team. And when a disaster strikes, its typically one person to blame. For the village, the person is me.

So, I spoke to my people about how I am feeling. I said, “This village I created ten years ago will disintegrate into nothing. Which is fine. All good things come to an end. And I am okay with that.”

No one disagreed. Which I can imagine.

The good part is that we agreed that we’d love to be around together, free and thriving. And we know that in the post-AI world, we need to pivot. I made some hard rules and lets see who we get to those.

3/ Average. And refusing it.

I recorded a solocast on Sunday that I keep returning to.

I said, out loud, “I am a very average guy. I have accepted that I am average.”

And then, almost in the same breath, “in my case, I am not accepting that I am average.” Both true.

That is the thing that makes me tick.

Is it okay to be average?
Yes, if you accept the average outcome that comes with it. Plenty of people around me made that peace.

I have not.

The way out, for someone who is not born brilliant, is discipline. “The best way to get free is through discipline.” Also, I have said this in the past and I will say it again. Being in the clutches of the calendar is what buys the freedom.

And thru this discipline and hard work, I aim to be that person that’s average and yet wildly successful.

5/ June Focus

15 days in, I can say that one of the experiments seem to be working. I wrote a list of things that I want to explore in June. Here it is…

Distribution
66 MG Road
Caravan Serai (my Book 2)
56 Hours
Revenue from Claude
Fix my living situation
And more.

I am glad to report that I think I’ve stayed on course with these. I have made progress on some and have taken action on others. And I am superglad. The one thing that seems to be missing is Claude revenue. So far it has proven to be a great experiment and I love it.

Just today I built something that tells me when am hunching! And then I built a task manager!

Then last week I built a food log generator. Here…

6/ Brian on Post-AI Life

Saw this podcast. Took many notes. Must watch. A lot of it is similar to what he’s spoken in the past but it was refreshing to see it again.

Some are…

Double down on founder mode. Maybe needed considering the rot of the Village?
In action lies salvation. Lol!
The greatest gift you can offer someone is belief.
Micromanage? Not sure on this.
Dont be a manager / coach / mentor. Hmmm…
“How you do anything is how you do everything”
Make the problem small and dominate one thing than many things (this is worth thinking about)
Do what you love for yourself and everything else is noise

More notes here. Ask for access, in case.

7/ Other things…

Things that I think need to be captured.

Fable came and went. Lol. I have to admit, it was good while it lasted.
Elon is the first trillionaire. Wow. And the other incredible thing is the number of people who got 100M+. Go fund out. Now that’s wealth. And that’s how you build a prosperous village.
Gave gyaan to more people on Claude and oh boy!
We we did CQ. See the new site here.
Gave gyaan to a start up founder about fitness (lol) and a young person about how to get her life back on track (double lol).

📷 Photos from the week gone by

Same. DM me if you want photos.

📈 Trackers…

Not updating this week.

Funny that for all the things that I am making, the very first trackers that I started with, I’ve lost steam with those!

✅ Action on LARGE objectives for the year

In this section, I will capture my progress on large objectives for the year.

In 2026, I plan to do the following three things…

Book2
Human Flag Pole
Save a million dollars

Book2 / Caravan Serai. Made some progress. I think by tomorrow I will be ready to share progress with people!

Human Flag Pole. No action.

Save a million dollars. No action worth reporting.

📌 So, what did I get done last few weeks? And what will I do next week?

This is a one-line report on progress I made on various things that are important to me. I will only talk about things that I got done. Shipped. Not WIP.

So, this year, I want to track the following…

Health. Sleep, food, movement. Nothing. My steps are so low that it’s not funny. I dont know how to walk in this humid weather. Late evenings are better but I dont know how to step out.
C4E / Work. Pick a thing to apply myself to. It’s high time I figure something. I am not getting the confidence to pick a thing. I may get back to events. Let’s see.
Brand SG / Distribution. Nothing shipped apart from talking to a few people.
People. Met many. Should do more of these.
Book2 / Caravan Serai. Made some progress!
Shauk. No action.

🏃‍➡️ Health

Absolutely no action on this. In fact if anything, this would be negative. No steps, sleep at all hours, eating not clean, unable to manage emotions.

Sigh!

⏲️ Reminders from last few days

Same as last few weeks. Parking this section.

I think the tracking system I made (I talked about it above) could solve this for me. Let’s see.

If not that, I dont think I will be able to ever make this!

🗓️ So, one thing that defines the past week?

Freedom.

No, I didn’t suddenly get free. But the realization that I am free was liberating.

The other words for this year have been: People, Motion, Show, Flow, Excitement, Embarrassment, Blur, Whiling, Movement, Blur, Activity, Movement, Regular (again), Regular, Easy, Journey, Downtime, Flow, Show, Same, Motion, People.

—
So that.
Over and out.
Until next week.

Oh, and this too shall pass.

PS: This series of posts is inspired by Thej and his weekly notes. Previous editions from 2026 are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 (missed these three), 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

PPS: Please do point typos.

PPPS: In case you see me being inconsistent in anything – work, writing, reviews etc, PLEASE do point out

Notes from a conversation between Derek Sivers and Andrew Wilkinson

I heard this podcast. And like most times when I come across something interesting or inspiring, I write into people!

So I wrote to Derek.
And here is a part of that email.
Paraphrased for a blog post.

Derek’s honest talk made me reflect on my own life and at 42 (am at that age where I ought to have all the answers :D). Here are some things that I thought about

1/ Explorer vs Leader.

Derek says he’s an explorer. I think I am the same. An explorer at best. While at work, I am supposed to lead a team per se, I have lately realised that I am probably a modern-day hippie who’s supposed to explore. And as Derek mentioned, I need a Queen / King to allocate resources and a leader to go in one direction and do things.

So I am on constant lookup for people that can enable me and support me. I am lucky that I have some folks that have chosen me.

2/ Life optimised for personal growth (and not for status).

I won’t lie – I’ve thought about chasing status but the more I age, the more I realise that I am not very keen on status games. I am also inspired by Naval and his thoughts on status games. On Naval, he also talks about long-term games with long-term people and I recently read one of Derek’s essays about super long-term thinking.

I’ve always explored with the intention of doing the next thing and the underlying intention has always been growth. And personal joy.

I also tend to stay away from folks that are invested into status games.

3/ I am a Xenophile too.

Before I saw Derek’s website, I did not know I was one!

I mean I come from a place like India where we have a million subcultures and yet I pine for foreign lands. I am lucky that I’ve travelled to a few places.

Oh, Derek also talked about the stubborn visionary that built Dubai. This is my phrase of the week, till I find the next one to latch onto.

4/ Optimal level of fame.

You know, the more I think about life and what I want from it, I really want to have access to people, places and things that seem interesting to me. These could be the poorest of neighbourhoods and fanciest of hotels. This could mean an internet billionaire on one side and a lumber worker on the other. This could mean a ticket to ride to Mars or entry into a private forest in some hills.

I would love to have just that level of fame that gets me access to these places. I don’t know what I would do with this access. This also connects beautifully with being an explorer, accepting beliefs that are useful to you (rather than them being universally true) and of course, personal growth!

5/ Questioning your biases and beliefs

Derek talked about some of his. And I am inspired to change some of mine. Starting with the one that I’ve help for a long long time – that I don’t goto people’s homes. And I will change.

Thing is, for some reason, I’ve never been comfortable intruding on people’s personal space. Maybe it’s my reflection of my own space that I like to not share. May be its the manifestation of me never having a good home. I remember this idea became much more stronger during the lockdown when I lived in an absolutely bare shell space. And thus, I always meet people outside (at cafes, restaurants etc). Going forward, I will try to go to their homes and know their stories.

6/ What I really want from life?

Lemme break this into parts.

A – While answers may not be easy about what I want in life, I keep coming back to this one quote from a poet, Kabir.

Sai itna dijiye, jaame kutumb samaay,
main bhookha naa rahoon, sadhu na bhookha jaaye

This translates loosely into, “Oh, Lord, give me enough to take care of my family. Enough that I don’t sleep hungry and yet have enough left to support others that may ask me for it.”

The point is, I want to make enough to take care of myself, my family, my people and the one I feel responsible for. If you want to go down more rabbit holes, you may want to read these three posts.

B – I am gonna think about some hard-nos for me.
One of those is that I want to control my time and I will not rent it out. So far I have been fairly successful at that.

C – Where I live.
Right now I live in a concrete jungle full of pollution etc. I really want to move to a better place – ideally to a place in the lap of nature that is cold. But I need modern conveniences and I may not get to live there.

D – Connect People.
I will invest my time and energy into becoming a people connector. I do this already but I will amp this up. To a point, that this becomes my identity. I am yet to get clarity on this but I will find it for sure.

I also want to invest in communities. Not in terms of giving back, but in terms of the tribe of people that you want to be with. I want a lot of folks around me and I will build those networks.

7/ In the end

From the podcast, this quote Andrew caught my eye / ear- “treasure you seek is in the cave you are afraid and reluctant to enter”

This is what the theme for the rest of 2024 would be. That I need to act on things that I am afraid of doing.

Let’s see how that goes for me.

That’s about it.

As always, please poke holes in my thinking!

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Freedom!

A manifesto of sorts about how I want to live my life.

Do me a favour. Listen to this song while you read this.

From this one, I love these lines…

On bended knee is no way to be free

I would have heard this song a million times if not more. And each time I hear it, the emotions it evokes are the same. That of a life lived on my terms, spent chasing things that I want (and not others), of being free.

The song talks about something very very fundamental to us humans. The want to be free. The need. Not in a mythical manner that gets romanticised where you say you control your time outside of your office hours. But in the real sense of the word. Where you are the master of time, the driver of your destiny and the only one who makes decisions for you on a day-to-day basis.

No, I am not saying that we become hippies and start roaming around free without an agenda or a mission. I dont want us to start running wild and amok and go back to the days of jungles and caves. I am not implying that we quit everything and wait on patrons to provide for us. Let’s park this thought as A. We’d come back to this.

So, Naval says that you are free when you are not a slave to your calendar.

I love that idea.

Of course, we all have calendars and deadlines and meetings and tasks and all that. But having all of it without being a slave. You are free when you control a “large part” of what you want to do, who you want to do it with and how you want to do it. This “large part” is where the spectrum could be. For Naval, it is 100%. For me, it would be 80%. For someone else, it would be 10%. You need to find what your “large part” is and then aim to get to it. That simple. Like I said, mine is 80%

The thing is, the world is governed by two things and two things only – the fundamental laws of physics and the ego of people. One you can’t control and have to submit to. The other you can manage. And in this management is the freedom. This is the lever you push to see if freedom pops on the other side!

Lemme talk about C4E for a bit. This avatar of C4E started post-COVID when an old client and a friend from MDI got me started on a couple of projects. Since then, C4E has largely been an experiment. And a good one at that. That has allowed us to grow into a collective of some 15 people, each almost free. At least from my vantage point. While we dont make enough money to live a lavish life, we do have enough to pay our bills (I think so) and yet have a large control over our time. It’s so good that I often think that the bubble would someday burst. I often wonder when would the penny drop. I know it would someday. I know this too shall pass.

However, the experiment over the last three years has given me the taste of life as a free man. I now know what is independence. And I dont think I would ever want to be chained.

In fact, looking back, I realise freedom has become one of the most important drivers of my life. Even simple acts of rebellion (not wearing shoes or pants) is a struggle for freedom for me.

I hope most people at C4E are like that – free, not wanting to ever go back to the clutches of a timesheet and trap of a fixed salary.

Of course, this freedom has come with a certain price – that of working harder than the ones that are not free. This is the first time I’ve brought the W word in this note.

Remember I had parked an A a few paras ago?
Time to revisit that.

So in the ideal world, most of us would have patrons that allow us to chase our respective bliss. But the world is not ideal. And we dont want to become hippies. So we have to work. And word harder. Hard work is indeed the price of freedom. All of us know about the recent brouhaha around the 70-hours of work per week. I am proud that I clock more than 80 hours a week. I wish I could do more. Laws of physics dont allow me to (old age, you see). No, this is not a norm at C4E. There are people that work “full-time” and yet clock 10 hours a week. And others are probably in between. Of course, these numbers are estimates – we dont have timesheets.

But the point is, we have earned our freedom by paying for it with our hard work. And with one other thing.

Reliability.

At C4E, we’ve taken vows to ensure that we are reliable. And that is the only promise we make to our clients. We dont claim to be the most creative team. We dont win awards (we may at some point in future but that is not our ambition). We dont pull rabbits out of hats. But we deliver. We’ve designed our work to have redundant structures so that we dont miss deadlines. If we say a thing will happen at 5 PM, it happens at 5 PM. There is no if or but or when or doubt about it. We typically over-communicate and in case we are getting delayed, we will tell you.

And despite being reliable and working harder, longer, and more rigorous than others, I want to claim that most of us are largely free. While we continue to be a slave to our calendars, like I said, we choose where we are when we work, what kind of work we do, how we work and who we work with. We are a fully remote team, we work on our schedules, at locations of our choosing (am mostly at some Starbucks) and we respect each other’s freedom. And while we do that, we ensure that everyone is paid fairly (at least to the best of our abilities). On top of this, each person is encouraged to build their dream life (not the life that any one person would want to impose upon them).

Of course, we have clients and deadlines and their business goals and we need to deliver to those clients. And we like to be reliable and available and good. Plus, at our scale, we are unable to say no to a lot of clients but we remain very very choosy. Each time we get an opportunity, we ask ourselves if we’d have to give that client our freedom.

If the answer is yes, we pull back.

If the answer is no, we do whatever we can to ensure that they get what they expect. And more. After all, if not for them, how would we survive? And the world we live in, power equations are biased – some people have work that needs to get done and they have multiple options to get their work done. If they choose us, we are grateful about it and we do everything we can to serve them to the best of our ability. And this is where I mentioned, that I am not sure if 100% freedom is possible. 80% is.

I also think that this service mindset is what has kept us going and has given us freedom. And now that I have tasted it, I really wouldn’t want a life where I am not free. The best part is that we’ve been able to build a village (not a family, not a sports team) where we look after each other, cheer for each other’s success and work to ensure that the village continues to thrive.

Oh, one more thing.
Here’s an invite to the village.
I want others to taste freedom.
Do read this post and write to us if this speaks to you.

Till we speak next,
SG

Further Readings
1/ Naval and Kapil Gupta on Freedom – Link

Thank you to (in no order) Anshika, Krishna, Pradx, Riya, Vivek, Vanita for leaving comments on the first draft.