Sami Belhareth

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Lessons Learned

February 2025

I was searching through Substack a few weeks ago to find blogs in Spanish, to refresh my knowledge of the language after having been out of practice for some time now, and stumbled across Nabeel Qureshi's posts. Nabeel's posts are not in Spanish, but he was at the top of my feed when I opened the app, and the title of his most recent post intrigued me. I then went and read a few more posts from Nabeel, and enjoyed the few that I read. After having read his post on principles, I tried to follow his suggestion from principle #54:

Once in awhile, put away all concepts you read about online and reason "up" from the base of your experience and what you've seen and done. (e.g. What were some of the best decisions you made? The worst? Why? Can you apply those lessons now? etc.)

I managed to distill four lessons from the memories, events, and periods of time which I look back on most fondly and which I regret the most. They are as follows:

  1. When alone, it is good to focus on production. This can be any work output. The act of learning new things that require intellectual rigor and can be applied towards other forms of production or solving problems can also count as a form of production. This leaves you with a sense of satisfaction and progress that mere consumption is unlikely to leave you with.
  2. Consumption is best when limited to when in the company of others. Playing video games for hours on end is much less likely to lead to regret if it is spent on calls with friends, and you're sharing the experience with them. The same holds true for going out to restaurants, visiting new places, etc. Note: you can meet new people in new places, thereby making new friends and sharing an experience with them. Hostels are great for that.
  3. Impatience causes problems. A lot of the issues and insecurities I have encountered in communication stem from impatience. Waiting a bit more and asking more questions solves a lot of these issues.
  4. Self-respect is important. Don't put yourself in situations where the other parties do not value you. If you feel unwelcome, you can make some effort, but walk away if things don't improve quickly. You'll often regret debasing yourself to attempt to achieve some short-term goal.

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