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CFO in three years.
Four questions a day — two technical, two not. Weighted to retail, the Gulf, and the controller-to-CFO jump. The non-technical ones decide the offer more often than the technical ones do.
Model the impact of a 10% AED appreciation on a UAE retailer sourcing from China.Chalhoub · Majid Al Futtaim
A supplier offers 5% discount for payment in 10 days instead of 60. Take it?Walmart · Lulu · P&G
How do you stay current technically while managing?Big Four partners · Group CFOs
Where do you think retail is heading in the next five years?Gulf retail boards · Search firms
Two tongues, sharper.
Spanish from zero, and English that survives a board room. Two words each, one delivery drill. Say them out loud — reading them does nothing.
Seven months old.
Two things to actually do today, and the reason each one matters. Most of it
is presence rather than technique — but the technique is not nothing.
Born 25 December 2025 ·
day 223
Jainism and Buddhism.
Operating instructions, not theology. Each one carries the source idea and the thing to do with it today.
Compound the skill.
FP&A, the CFO ladder, a case study, a book, and one hack — rotating daily. Seven tabs, one discipline.
80/20 of Month-End
20% of accounts drive 80% of variance. Focus commentary there. The rest is noise.
Recruiters worth the email
Michael Page, Robert Half, Hays and Charterhouse run most of the AED 25–45K finance mandates. Cooper Fitch and Nathan HR sit closer to the local groups.
FC Step 1: Own the Close
Financial Controllers close the books — every month, clean, on time, no surprises. Speed + accuracy is the baseline. If close takes 10 days, get it to 5. Automate reconciliations. Build a close checklist and hit it every time.
Tata Nano: The lesson in positioning
Tata launched Nano as 'the cheapest car' at ₹1 lakh. It failed. Indians didn't want to buy 'the cheapest car' — it felt like admitting poverty.
Passion and Perseverance: The Formula That Beats Talent
Duckworth's research across West Point cadets, Scripps spelling bee champions, and sales teams found that the most important predictor of success was not talent, IQ, or physical fitness. It was grit — the combination of passion for a long-term goal and the perseverance to pursue it despite obstacles and setbacks. Grit predicts success better than talent in almost every domain. The most talented people often lack grit because things have come too easily — they've never had to develop the capacity to push through failure. The grittier person with modest talent consistently outperforms the talented person who quits.
- Grit = passion + perseverance for long-term goals. It predicts achievement better than talent.
- Talent × effort = skill. Skill × effort = achievement. Effort counts twice.
- Our preference for 'naturals' hides how much of performance is accumulated work.
- Grit is measurable, and it predicts West Point completion, sales retention, and spelling-bee results.
- Interest comes before passion. Passion is developed by deliberate cultivation, not found.
- Deliberate practice: a stretch goal, full concentration, immediate feedback, repetition on weakness.
- Purpose — the belief that the work matters to others — is what sustains effort past year three.
- Hope here is not optimism. It is the belief that your own effort changes the outcome.
- Goal hierarchy: one top-level goal, mid-level goals as means, low-level as tasks. Drop anything that doesn't serve the top.
- Gritty people quit constantly — at the low level. Never at the top.
- Grit grows with age and can be trained deliberately.
- Hard Thing Rule: everyone does something hard, you may quit only at a natural end point, and you pick the hard thing yourself.
- Gritty cultures build gritty individuals. Environment does much of the work.
- Consistency over years beats intensity over weeks, and it is less glamorous.
- Passion is cultivated, so 'find your passion' is bad advice.
- Deliberate practice is uncomfortable by design. Comfortable practice is repetition.
- Purpose is what keeps effort going when interest dips.
- West Point's Beast Barracks: the Grit Scale predicted who stayed better than the Whole Candidate Score.
- Spelling-bee finalists were separated by hours of solitary deliberate practice, not by verbal IQ.
- Julia Child was 37 and had no cooking credentials when she started. Mastery came from sustained years, not aptitude.
- Top-level goal: financial independence with the family in one place. Everything else is a means and can be dropped.
- Hard Thing Rule for the household — one hard voluntary thing each, quit only at a season's end.
- Deliberate practice on modelling: pick the weakest area, get feedback, repeat. Not more of what already works.
- Mid-2026 is 10 months. Grit is what makes month 7 look the same as month 1.
EPF Power
EPF gives 8.25% guaranteed, tax-free. Max out VPF if your employer allows.
Execution beats intention
2-minute rule: if it takes under 2 min, do it now. Don't queue it.
Sharpen the operator.
One quote, one lesson from the world, one rule for being a better person and a better dad.
Pain plus reflection equals progress.— Ray Dalio
Joy is a Practise
Joy doesn't arrive when the conditions are right. It's practiced in the conditions you have. Find one thing today that is genuinely good. Savour it for 30 seconds. This is not toxic positivity — it's neurological training. Brains that practise noticing goodness get better at finding it, even in hard seasons.
The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.
— Warren Buffett
Simple living. High thinking.
Own less. Behave well. Sit still. Think in models. One phrase of Arabic, one honest rep. Six tracks, rotating daily on different cycles — the combination never repeats.
Maintenance Is The Tell
If you own more than you can maintain, you do not own it — you are storing it on its way to landfill. Count what you actually maintain.
Praise Publicly, Correct Privately
Reverse it and you buy resentment that outlasts the correction by years. This costs nothing and is violated constantly.
Walk Without Input
No podcast, no music, no call. Boredom is the raw material of original thought, and it has been almost entirely eliminated from modern life.
Pareto Principle
80% of results come from 20% of inputs — and the distribution is often sharper than that. The work is identifying the 20%, which requires measuring rather than assuming.
Write The One-Line Summary
Every analysis compresses to one sentence with a number in it. 'Margin fell 340bps because freight doubled.' If you cannot write that line, the analysis is not finished.
Stress Is Physiological, Not Just Mental
Chronic cortisol elevation drives visceral fat, impairs sleep, and suppresses immune function. The body does not distinguish financial stress from physical threat.
Look back, or none of it compounds.
Week 32 of 2026. 3 days until the weekend review. Answers save in this browser, keyed to the week.
What did you say yes to that you should have declined?
Every yes was a no to something. Name what it displaced.
Yesterday's chess.
AKK_010 on Lichess. Pattern over volume — review the turning point, not the result.
Profile →LICHESS_TOKEN to GitHub secrets for per-game analysis, openings, key moves and AI coaching.
Create token →Endgame: King Activity
In the endgame, the king becomes a fighting piece. Centralise your king immediately. A king on e4 controls d3, d4, d5, e3, e5, f3, f4, f5 — 8 squares. A king on a1 controls only 3. Rule: when queens are off the board, march your king to the centre. Opposition matters: two kings facing each other, one move apart — the side NOT to move has the opposition.
Practise: Lichess Study · Chess.com Puzzles
Rating 1956 · 🔴 stretch
Exposed King · Endgame · Long
What’s playing.
40 tracks across three crates — mine, bhakti, and the all-time canon. The top five rotate every morning. Tap a title and it plays.
- 01 Phir Le Aya Dil Arijit Singh
- 02 Tera Ban Jaunga Akhil Sachdeva, Tulsi Kumar
- 03 Agar Tum Saath Ho Alka Yagnik, Arijit Singh
- 04 Channa Mereya Arijit Singh
- 05 Ae Dil Hai Mushkil Arijit Singh
- 06 Tujhe Kitna Chahne Lage Arijit Singh
- 07 Kabira Arijit Singh, Tochi Raina
- 08 Tum Hi Ho Arijit Singh
- 09 Iktara Kavita Seth, Amitabh Bhattacharya
- 10 Ilahi Arijit Singh
- 01 Om Jai Jagdish Hare Anuradha Paudwal
- 02 Gayatri Mantra Anuradha Paudwal
- 03 Krishna Govind Govind Gopal Jubin Nautiyal
- 04 Mere Gharib Nawaz Rahat Fateh Ali Khan
- 05 Shree Ram Chandra Kripalu Jagjit Singh
- 06 Deva Shree Ganesha Ajay Gogavale
- 07 Achyutam Keshavam Vikram Hazra
- 08 Hanuman Chalisa Hariharan
- 09 Shiv Tandav Stotram Shankar Mahadevan
- 10 Vaishnav Jan To Lata Mangeshkar
- 01 Afreen Afreen — Coke Studio Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Momina Mustehsan
- 02 Tajdar-e-Haram — Coke Studio Atif Aslam
- 03 Ranjish Hi Sahi — Live Mehdi Hassan
- 04 Bohemian Rhapsody — Live Aid 1985 Queen
- 05 Sandese Aate Hain Sonu Nigam, Roop Kumar Rathod
- 06 Mitwa — Unplugged Shafqat Amanat Ali
- 07 Bohemian Rhapsody Queen
- 08 Hotel California Eagles
- 09 Billie Jean Michael Jackson
- 10 Comfortably Numb Pink Floyd
- 11 Stairway to Heaven Led Zeppelin
- 12 Imagine John Lennon
- 13 Smells Like Teen Spirit Nirvana
- 14 Wonderwall Oasis
- 15 Lag Ja Gale Lata Mangeshkar
- 16 Kal Ho Naa Ho Sonu Nigam
- 17 Tere Bina Zindagi Se Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar
- 18 Ae Mere Watan Ke Logo Lata Mangeshkar
- 19 Chaiyya Chaiyya Sukhwinder Singh, Sapna Awasthi
- 20 Kun Faya Kun A.R. Rahman, Javed Ali, Mohit Chauhan
Six minutes. Sharper.
A new set every day, same set for the whole day. Numbers under time pressure, estimation, recall, and the two calculations a trading desk actually runs. Scores stay in this browser.
You just read a losing month in public.
Most people showing you signals do not show you the stops. If that is the kind of record you want in your inbox, this is where you say so.
One email a day at 6 AM IST. Not investment advice — a public log of what I actually did.