one of the biggest things that hit me this week was an incredible deep pain that I wasn’t doing enough.

welcome to a continual pattern in my life hahaha

and so what i decided to do was start seeing what i could build that i hadn’t yet learnt, and that was the fastest way for me to get confirmation that damn, i actually have learnt a ton…

welcome back, this is week 28 of the unicorn founder, and ah, there’s some really cool things in the works at the moment, excited to tell you about them.

today’s menu:
→ applying skills
→ san francisco
→ big idea

APPLYING SKILLS

i think that a continual study of ourselves, the inputs we are putting in, and the outputs we are getting out is seen in any person who achieved anything meaningful in their lives.

and i think there is a deep desire in those sorts of people to never settle. there is a restlessness.

and for many that is uncomfortable, but for these people it’s what allows them to just never stop making progress.

and any discomfort they experience in that restlessness is quelled by the unbelievable satisfaction they receive from their progress.

it’s a matter of valuing one thing over another:
progress > comfort.

i put myself in the category of those kind of people.

i learnt over this last week that there needs to be a push and pull between consumption and creation.

and each person will have a slightly different preference to how those two concepts relate with one another.

but for me, i need to consume a little and then create a lot.

it’s the way i find peace in knowing that every second i am spending in consumption is yielding a harvest by being put into immediate action that validates with experience that which i just consumed.

so i ended up following along two tutorials for building a chrome extension and the greatest benefit i got from those was:

→ damn, everything these guys just did, i can do on my own, for my own ideas.

so the next task really is to actually go and do that on my own. without a tutorial. because that is still a form of consumption.

but wow.

it truly is incredible what new reality you can start to enter into after just dedicating a little bit of time into building a tool in your life.

because once you start the application of that newly constructed tool, you begin to see a whole new reality forming around you, and you can interact with it in so many more ways now that you have the correct tools.

so the takeaway: test the skills you are learning in order to truly know the depth to which you have learnt that skill.

SAN FRANCISCO

i have applied to the most insanely cool thing i have seen since y-combinator.

basically it’s a place for the most ambitious builders to live and work. with a ton of mentorship, public demos, and community integration included.

it one million percent appeals to being the precise place where i will feel at home.

and getting over to san francisco has been a germinating idea since i first learnt about y-combinator back in early 2023.

so, i have obviously applied and on tuesday night (south african time) i have my interviewwww, which is exciting.

who knows when confirmation of acceptance occurs, but i will document it here of courseee

they run 6-month cohorts and so the upcoming one will be from jan → june

yeah i know, sounds absolutely amazing.

one of the big things that i have been required to do in my application is let them know what sort of super ambitious project i want to work on building… and well, i have some pretty cool things i want to tell you guys about… upcoming nowwwww

BIG IDEA

apple and microsoft allowed people access to technology
google allowed people access to information
facebook (meta) allowed people access to people

and what i want to do is allow people access to truth.

but the truth is relative ethan…

well, sort of, but before we go down that rabbit hole, let me explain a bit more context.

the question i asked myself:
what do you feel comfortable giving years of your life towards?
→ my answer: the pursuit of truth.

my issue: i do not trust a single thing i read on the internet, nor anywhere really.

we have all been bruised by misinformation and are hopefully all aware of how easy it is for misinformation to mislead and cause us harm.

and that’s because anyone can upload anything for pretty much zero dollars.

and that’s good. it’s super good. because it allows freedom of speech. which is fundamentally important.
however, when we draw conclusions based on misinformation we start to cause damage, whether intentionally or not.

and so, what i find myself doing is manually, for days if not weeks, trawling through site after site to confirm the truthfulness of specific information, most notably when it is going to demand a pretty important change in my life:
→ change of diet
→ change of routine
→ change of habits
→ change of beliefs
→ change of who i support
etc…

and so what i want to be able to do is search for something as i normally do and receive an overview of what truths exist around a specific matter.

what i am not trying to do: create a narrative where only the truth i want to exist can exist.

what i am trying to do: create a way for people to immediately see polls of what truths exist, how reliable they are, and on what basis they were founded.

the big idea: you can draw whatever conclusion you want, i just want to make sure that the foundational evidence used is fact and not fiction.

imagine simply searching for as to whether 5 cups of coffee a day will cause you cancer, and immediately a dashboard showed up giving you superhero powers to see what conclusions have been made all across the whole internet on this topic.
→ from research papers, to reddit posts, to community notes on X (formerly twitter), to wall street journal articles, etc.

→ with every single algorithm decision open for you to analyse at your discretion for how those truths were found, ranked, and positioned in the hierarchy of reliability.

does it sound like an absolute behemoth of a task? 100%

and that’s why i am going to start tackling it with building teeny tiny tools that will in principle represent mvps and fragments making up a greater whole.

these tools will range from say:
→ a website that shows an overview of the main truths behind the “why” of two different leaders at war with each other, including citations of each side’s story and perspectives of why they think they are right.
→ a chrome extension that analyzes your watch history on youtube and let’s you know what percentage of information in an unwatched video is information you have already watched.
→ a chrome extension that will research a fact on your behalf and provide a real-time summary of how accurate it is, whilst showing how it got to it’s final decision.

is this something that i feel incredibly passionate about? oh yes.

so, it’s gonna be an interesting next few weeks coming up.

it’s time to continue learning how to code and to continue creating with the knowledge i am gaining.

🕺 thanks for coming everybody

check out LinkedIn, X, IG, TikTok for daily updates/thoughts/ideas… and even YouTube for some longer form content I am putting out

connect with me there, or reply here.

Peace and Wholeness : )
ethan