I founded Naamche, a product development agency, and we built a product called Mimir. But six months later, it died.

Here’s what we did wrong:

There's this initial rush of excitement when you start building a product. Everything feels possible. You imagine users, revenue, and a bit of changing the world. But product development isn't a sprint. It's a marathon with unavoidable valleys.

The real test comes when you hit the grind. That's when having a services business becomes dangerous.

Client emergencies create an illusion of urgency that product work can't match. The unhappy client needs attention now; the product can always wait until tomorrow.

But tomorrow never comes.

What happens instead is a slow death by neglect.

No one decides to kill the product; it just starves for attention until it's forgotten. The team stops mentioning it in meetings. The repository sits untouched. The excitement that once fueled late-night coding sessions becomes a vague memory.

There's a fundamental conflict here: services businesses operate on other people's schedules, while products require you to set and protect your own schedule.

"Inspiration is perishable. Act while the spark is fresh. Learning and building flow best when you're curious, free, and having fun." - Naval

Naval was right about inspiration being perishable.

When you feel that spark, there's a limited window to transform it into something sustainable. The tricky part is that service work brings the financial stability that should enable product development but also creates interruptions that kill it.

The only way to do it is probably to create a firewall. To build a dedicated team that's untouchable by client emergencies.

Ultimately, it's not just about allocating resources but also protecting the fragile momentum that turns ideas into products. If not, neglect will always lead to failure when building a startup.

I started driving to the café where I usually work. As I often do, I turned on a podcast about business history. Stories of how founders' life experiences shaped the companies they built.

Halfway there, something strange happened. I realized I spend nearly all my waking hours either working or consuming information. There's no time for silence. Where did this thought come from? I'm not sure. But I reached over and turned the podcast off.

The world around me wasn't quiet, of course. Cars honked, people walked by, motorcycles weaved through traffic. But suddenly, my car was quiet. No external voices feeding me with new thoughts or ideas.

This silence felt uncomfortable, almost brutal. I had an immediate urge to turn something back on, to feed my brain with fresh insights. Why? Perhaps because my own thoughts weren't engaging enough, or maybe they were too confronting to face directly.

But this time I resisted. I decided to complete my drive to the café without any audio companion. I didn't need new ideas; I needed to give my mind space to process the ones already there.

It’s revealing to just observe what I do on a typical day. When eating alone, I put on videos to "take the boredom away." (How did eating become boring?) Before sleeping, I watch YouTube videos that promise some new insight about life. Walking, driving. Always with podcasts playing. I realized I hadn't experienced genuine mental silence in ages. It was just an endless stream of ideas flowing into my brain, one after another.

This moment became a turning point. I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with podcasts. I still eagerly anticipate the next episode of Acquired. But I'm learning to distinguish between deliberate consumption and filling every moment with noise. When I'm not genuinely curious about specific content but just using it to occupy time, I'm now choosing silence instead.

This means driving just to drive. Eating just to eat. Walking just to walk and observe my surroundings. Being present rather than constantly narrating or consuming narratives. Enjoying silence, rather than feeding your brain all the time.

Hear me out.

The AI noise was disturbing. As the world spoke about AGI galore, I went on an existential crisis: "What's next for me? What value can I provide when AI becomes as smart as me?"

There were some answers. Anu's "Taste is Eating Silicon Valley" article helped. But I still didn't get what that meant for me. That just shifted the question: what exactly is taste?

After some reflection, I realized something simple: if you strip away the complexity, taste is fundamentally about caring deeply about doing good work. It's complete devotion to your craft, whatever that craft might be. True taste exists without expectations about the output.

Tibetan Buddhists take this concept to the next level. They spend days meticulously creating sand mandalas—intricate geometric designs made from millions of colored sand grains. Each mandala requires extraordinary precision. Monks spend weeks working on it - using metal funnels to place individual grains with mathematical accuracy.

Yet they don't preserve or exhibit their creation when they complete it. Instead, in a ceremony, they methodically destroy it, sweeping the sand into a nearby river. It sounds theatrical. But they do it to detach themselves from the result. They believe that true mastery comes with that freedom.

There's another philosophy around this in Eastern culture: the idea of 'you' is flawed. The core teaching is that what you consider to be "you" isn't you at all. It's your mind. But you're not your mind. You're not your body.

So what are you?

You are the present. Whatever you're doing at that very moment.

When the monk creates sand mandalas, he becomes the process itself. Similarly, if you love design, you are the act of designing. This isn't metaphorical - it's about complete immersion. You devote everything to that process. Without the attachment of the result.

This realization helped me understand that what people call "taste" is essentially discovering what you truly are. But to find what you are, you must first identify what you are not.

We have spent our lives identifying with our thoughts, often to the point of delusion. The truth is that the mind is an essential part of us. It should be working for us. Instead, we've become servants of our own minds.

We struggle to turn off our thinking, like a broken faucet filling a tub that we can't shut off. Our thoughts wander constantly, consuming our attention and energy.

So, as machines improve at replicating human thinking, we cannot continue doing what we've already been doing. It's time to start maintaining a distance from thought itself. Keep it at arm's length.

It's time to quiet the mind. To understand that we're not our thoughts.

In a world where AI makes thinking cheap, it's time to explore meditativeness. To discover who we truly are. To know when to stop thinking altogether.