Management Consultant | Dubaian since 2004 | also at @salmanweblog
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Joined April 2007
- Tweets803
- Following367
- Followers16.7K
- Likes3.3K
Online job application (our online business 22 years ago) is already broken: Candidates bots optimized resumes. Employers bots filtered resumes. System failed.
Salman retweeted
Emirates is the most insane aviation success story of the last 50 years.
It started with two leased aircraft. Today it flies 277, and Dubai has the busiest international airport on earth.
Emirates is a major reason Dubai became Dubai. Here's how its network, fleet and product bets built both.
Salman retweeted
Step Dubai 2027 dates announced👇
Goodbye, San Francisco. Hello, Dubai.
Step Dubai returns Feb 3–4, 2027 at Dubai Internet City.
SF: done. Dubai: next.
stepdxb.com
💯
Dubai hate mostly comes from Europeans with no geographic mobility convincing themselves those who have it are scammers / cheaters. And leftists enraged that some people might opt out of the “unrivalled” European social contract
Surprisingly Dubai is one of the few places where you'd meet more people who love their city than hate it
Personally been there a couple of times and think it's one of the best places pre high wealth, especially for 20-30yo internet entrepreneurs who just want to focus in an extremely efficient / safe environment
Salman retweeted
Really believe that ADHDs, if they play their cards well, might be the biggest winners of this AI gold rush
Cause unlike corporate careers rewarding consistency & compounding, the new world disproportionally rewards curiosity, obsession, rapid switching and intensity
The basic problem with ADHD in the old world was that curiosity was expensive. You’d get obsessed with some random idea, spend 3 days learning everything about it, want to build something, then realise you need 6 months to learn how to code / design / whatever (or pay someone who can) and eventually move onto the next thing
But AI completely changes that equation because the distance between “wait this would be cool” and actually testing it has collapsed from months to sometimes hours. You can get curious about some niche industry in the morning, understand the basics by lunch, vibe code something in the afternoon and potentially have people testing it that evening. So this disproportionately rewards people whose natural state is basically jumping between rabbit holes, connecting unrelated things and occasionally becoming insanely obsessed with one of them
AI is also slowly deleting the boring middle. A lot of ADHD people aren’t necessarily bad at starting things or going insanely deep when something captures their attention, they’re bad at the 200 repetitive steps between “this is exciting” and “this is finished” (boilerplate, formatting, basic debugging, admin, iteration, etc.) And those are increasingly exactly the things you can delegate to AI, which means the economic value of being insanely curious + occasionally obsessive probably goes up, while the cost of being bad at repetitive execution goes down
But there’s a massive catch, because AI is also creating the greatest distraction machine ever invented. Every morning there’s a new model, agent, tool, business model or “once in a generation opportunity” to chase, and the same brain that benefits most from cheap experimentation is also the one most likely to spend 5 years being extremely early to everything and compounding absolutely nothing
So the actual winning combination might actually be ADHD-style exploration + artificially imposed constraints: explore aggressively, follow weird rabbit holes, test way more things than a normal person would, but once something works force yourself into sprints where you’re simply not allowed to play another game
For most of history the economy disproportionately rewarded people who could reliably do the same useful thing for 8 hours a day, 250 days a year. For this weird period of AI, the returns temporarily shift towards people who can obsess over 20 things, connect 2 that nobody else connected, then disappear for 3 days and build the thing
message to all ADHDs:
you just need to hack your brain's dopamine to finish a week's work in 5 hours.
your prefrontal cortex is understimulated. ADHD means your brain has lower baseline dopamine activity so it constantly hunts for stimulation
but every productivity system was built for neurotypical brains that can sit down and grind 8 hours. yours can't. yours needs intensity - urgency - rewards
here's what actually works with ADHD:
- externalise everything: the reward has to be visible and immediate. timers, streaks, session logs. turn invisible effort into something you can see after every sprint
- work around people bc ADHD brains respond to perceived observation. working in silence alone is the worst possible setup. when someone can see your output = spikes and focus sharpens (this is why ADHD kids do homework better in the kitchen than their bedroom)
- do sprints (cc @aporia9n) only. your dopamine system rewards finishing. 25 to 90 minute blocks with a clear end point. dedicate a part of your year to work, another to chill, rest. split your month
- make a leaderboards where you see your friends or colleagues grinding + concrete missions
we will never remove dopamine from social media. so we have to inject it into work instead
the trick is making your brain crave the work session the way it craves opening X or TikTok.
if you want something built for this, try Promethee. it tracks work, gives XP for sessions, and puts you on a leaderboard with other builders. just ask below and i'll give you access code
Salman retweeted
Hello again, world!
Hacker News has been pretty quiet on X. Time to fix that.
Starting today, we'll be sharing interesting things people are building, discovering, and discussing on HN.
And let us know what's caught your eye lately. There's always room for another great link!
Salman retweeted
The most challenging thing to do is stay patient during the "identity gap" on your journey. The uncomfortable between phase. You've outgrown who you were, but you're not yet who you want to become. It's lonely. Confusing. Maddening at times. Those feelings are natural. The old version fighting for survival. Just stay the course. Stay in it. It's supposed to feel uncomfortable. The discomfort is proof of change.
💯
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.
This brings us full circle.
The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”
Salman retweeted
The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom.
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.
This brings us full circle.
The question you should be asking isn’t, “What do I want?” or “What are my goals?” but “What would excite me?”
Salman retweeted
Quick observation on why AI has exploded at work, but has been slow to disrupt consumer apps:
At work, AI follows patterns and gets rid of drudgery (good!)
At home, AI follows patterns but it generates slop (bad!)
This is why AI has taken off at work, but not so much for consumer apps and experiences (social, entertainment, dating, etc)
Much of work is drudgery - filling out forms, following processes, writing updates, reviewing boilerplate code, etc. - and AI does a great job compressing this down the boring steps so that humans can focus on the high-leverage steps. The boring/routine work is not hard, but they often take a lot of steps and you have to stitch together a lot of data. You follow patterns. AI is good at following patterns too.
Consumer attention, on the other hand, is hard to win over because people crave novelty, seek parasocial relationships, and are so cognizant of AI slop. A video of an attractive person talking loses its ability to generate parasocial relationships. In domains like social media, video, etc where authenticity is paramount, a distorted AI sign in the background can ruin the entire thing. Novelty is generated by surfing the cultural wave with something new and unique - AI slop often pattern matches to the past, after all, it’s the past that’s in the data set, and as a result, new/unique is hard
This is a form of “adversarial creativity” - and it exists in business as well. When you think about inherently adversarial activities in business - like sales and marketing, where novel messaging, competitive move+countermove dominate - AI has received the most scrutiny for generating slop. No one wants the same sounding AI generated cold emails. No one wants to use AI slop software. You have to go outside the model in order to really land a message.
Perhaps this is the ultimate human-in-the-loop problem, because to do something fresh and unique requires adversarial creativity. Or maybe with enough advancements around being able to observe and react in real-time, future AI models will be able to say something novel by taking into account the X timeline from the past 24 hours.
Salman retweeted
If you can’t do London/NYC/SF/Paris because of visas, family, money or whatever, just move one level down
Your capital, regional hub, wherever concentrates ambitious people around you
The mistake is thinking city choice is binary: either NYC/London or who cares. There’s a whole ambition-density ladder in between. Can’t get a US/UK visa? Go to your country’s capital. Capital too expensive / impossible? Go to the regional business hub, best university city, fastest-growing industry cluster. The point is just to keep moving closer to where people are actively trying to do sth
And tbh the first jump might matter way more than the last one. Going from a small town where you’re always “the ambitious one” to a city where suddenly 50 people around you are building companies / joining great firms / moving abroad / doing weird interesting shit can completely change your reference class. Madrid -> London might be an upgrade, but hometown -> Madrid can change your entire conception of what a normal life looks like
A very simple rule of thumb: go where the ambitious people from your hometown go. Every country / region has one or two cities that act as sorting machines. Maybe it’s Warsaw, São Paulo, Amsterdam, Dubai, Singapore, Madrid, Boston, whatever. Doesn’t even need to be huge. A 500k-person university / tech / industry hub full of people who actively chose to be there can be much more valuable than a 5m-person city where everyone is just living the life they inherited
And don’t over-optimise which one either. Ambitious people love spending 2 years comparing tax rates / rents / weather / startup ecosystems when the obvious move is simply “leave the environment that’s clearly too small for you”. You can always move again. Hometown -> regional hub -> capital -> global city is a perfectly fine path. High agency isn’t magically teleporting to the optimal endpoint, it’s taking the best available step from where you currently are
A pretty good test is whether your reference class improves. If you’re still consistently the most ambitious / curious / internationally minded person in your immediate environment, you’re probably under-allocated geographically. Ideally you move somewhere and 6 months later think “fuck, I’m actually pretty average here”. That feeling is uncomfortable but insanely useful. Your standards reset without you consciously trying
So yh don’t obsess over making it to some perfect city. Just keep moving up the density gradient until you’re surrounded by enough people playing interesting games that your environment stops being the constraint
You don’t need to live in the best place in the world
You need to stop treating the place you were randomly born in as the default
If you’re in your 20s (and ambitious) do everything to move to those 4 cities
Yes people will mog you for paying extortionate rents for such little comfort but who cares, you’re not everyone, you’re on a mission, you’re here for greatness
London/NYC/Paris/SF are basically the golden 4. They’re not just big cities, they’re global sorting machines. People move there from all over the world because they want sth badly enough to accept all the downsides. The guy born in London can be lazy. But the 26yo Frenchman, Indian, American, Italian, Nigerian, Lebanese etc who voluntarily accepts the tiny flat, shit commute and absurd rent to be there has already self-selected pretty hard
And that selection compounds. I felt it instantly moving from my hometown in France to London. Growing up I was always “the ambitious one” in my friend group. Then you arrive in London and suddenly you feel extremely average. Everyone is trying to do sth. Completely changes your reference point for what a normal person can achieve
The other thing is just how many serious games are happening at once. If you know at 22 that you’re going to be a semiconductor engineer forever, maybe there are better specialised places. But most ambitious 24yos have absolutely no clue what game they’ll eventually want to play. In London/NYC/Paris you can accidentally become friends with people in PE, startups, politics, law, media, fashion, pharma, academia etc. Your finance friend dates someone in fashion, their roommate is building a startup, you meet someone in politics at dinner. Suddenly 5 completely different lives feel plausible
That’s insanely valuable when you’re young precisely because you don’t yet know which people / industries / opportunities will matter to your 34yo self
SF is the weird exception because it’s basically one giant concentrated bet on tech/AI. Much narrower than the other 3, but that game is so asymmetric rn that it deserves its spot. If you want to build at the frontier there’s probably no other place where your reference class changes that aggressively
And yh everyone keeps saying the internet made geography irrelevant. Maybe for information. Definitely not for trust/friendship. Anyone can learn from the same people online now, send the same cold DM, follow the same accounts. Much harder to replicate being the guy someone has had 20 dinners with, worked with, travelled with, introduced to friends and randomly bumped into for 5 years
When you’re 24 and nobody knows who tf you are, geography can do a lot of the work for you. You get invited because your colleague knows someone. You end up at a dinner because your friend needs a +1. Someone you met 3 years ago leaves and starts a company. Another moves to NYC. Another becomes a partner somewhere. Most of the ROI is completely impossible to predict upfront
Basically before you have your own gravity, borrow the city’s
At 45, if you’ve built the company / reputation / money / audience / network, you can go live in Tuscany, Mallorca, South of France or wherever and people will come to you. At 24 no one is coming lol. You should probably be where everything is happening
And tbh if you have the ability to move I wouldn’t spend 3 years waiting for the perfect job / apartment / timing. Get the shitty room, accept being poorer for a while, figure it out once you’re there. Your 20s are probably the cheapest years of your life to tolerate inconvenience anyway
You can optimise sqm, weather and comfort later
At 24 I’d rather maximise how many possible lives are available to me
Salman retweeted
The optimal strategy is to spend your 20s in the most intense / overpriced / high-density city you can tolerate
Then leave once the things you were paying for become portable
At 24 the London/NYC premium buys you friends, network, reference class, career optionality, random dinners, +1s, people building shit etc. You don’t have much gravity yourself yet, so you borrow the city’s
At 35-40 the equation can completely flip. If you’ve built the network / reputation / money / audience / business, opportunities increasingly come to you wherever you are. Meanwhile sqm, schools, weather, calm, being close to family suddenly matter way more
That’s why I’m always slightly skeptical when a 24yo sees the 40yo founder living an amazing life in Mallorca/Tuscany/Bali and thinks “yh I should do that”
You’re copying the location without copying the 15 years that made the location work
The exception is if you already have enough conviction early on that leaving doesn’t really shrink your opportunity set. If at 22 you know “I want to build solo software, distribution is online, I hate institutions, I value freedom way more than status” then yh Bangkok/Bali can make sense immediately
But most 22yos probably shouldn’t pretend they have that much certainty yet
Build the portable assets somewhere dense, then arbitrage them somewhere beautiful
The goal is not to “escape” the city, but to graduate from needing it
If you’re in your 20s (and ambitious) do everything to move to those 4 cities
Yes people will mog you for paying extortionate rents for such little comfort but who cares, you’re not everyone, you’re on a mission, you’re here for greatness
London/NYC/Paris/SF are basically the golden 4. They’re not just big cities, they’re global sorting machines. People move there from all over the world because they want sth badly enough to accept all the downsides. The guy born in London can be lazy. But the 26yo Frenchman, Indian, American, Italian, Nigerian, Lebanese etc who voluntarily accepts the tiny flat, shit commute and absurd rent to be there has already self-selected pretty hard
And that selection compounds. I felt it instantly moving from my hometown in France to London. Growing up I was always “the ambitious one” in my friend group. Then you arrive in London and suddenly you feel extremely average. Everyone is trying to do sth. Completely changes your reference point for what a normal person can achieve
The other thing is just how many serious games are happening at once. If you know at 22 that you’re going to be a semiconductor engineer forever, maybe there are better specialised places. But most ambitious 24yos have absolutely no clue what game they’ll eventually want to play. In London/NYC/Paris you can accidentally become friends with people in PE, startups, politics, law, media, fashion, pharma, academia etc. Your finance friend dates someone in fashion, their roommate is building a startup, you meet someone in politics at dinner. Suddenly 5 completely different lives feel plausible
That’s insanely valuable when you’re young precisely because you don’t yet know which people / industries / opportunities will matter to your 34yo self
SF is the weird exception because it’s basically one giant concentrated bet on tech/AI. Much narrower than the other 3, but that game is so asymmetric rn that it deserves its spot. If you want to build at the frontier there’s probably no other place where your reference class changes that aggressively
And yh everyone keeps saying the internet made geography irrelevant. Maybe for information. Definitely not for trust/friendship. Anyone can learn from the same people online now, send the same cold DM, follow the same accounts. Much harder to replicate being the guy someone has had 20 dinners with, worked with, travelled with, introduced to friends and randomly bumped into for 5 years
When you’re 24 and nobody knows who tf you are, geography can do a lot of the work for you. You get invited because your colleague knows someone. You end up at a dinner because your friend needs a +1. Someone you met 3 years ago leaves and starts a company. Another moves to NYC. Another becomes a partner somewhere. Most of the ROI is completely impossible to predict upfront
Basically before you have your own gravity, borrow the city’s
At 45, if you’ve built the company / reputation / money / audience / network, you can go live in Tuscany, Mallorca, South of France or wherever and people will come to you. At 24 no one is coming lol. You should probably be where everything is happening
And tbh if you have the ability to move I wouldn’t spend 3 years waiting for the perfect job / apartment / timing. Get the shitty room, accept being poorer for a while, figure it out once you’re there. Your 20s are probably the cheapest years of your life to tolerate inconvenience anyway
You can optimise sqm, weather and comfort later
At 24 I’d rather maximise how many possible lives are available to me
Salman retweeted
This might be the most beautiful thing I've read in my life. What a privilege to be alive in 2026.
ordinaryabundance.com
Salman retweeted
It's less so Instagram than travel massification, while the supply of beautiful places stays basically fixed.
Cheap flights + more wealth + more leisure turned international travel from sth you did a few times a year into a normal activity. Plenty of 25yos now travel 6-10x a year and have already been to 30+ countries.
And it's not just the Santorini/Bali/Venice/Machu Picchu etc. anymore. The crowds have moved down to tier-2, tier-3 and supposedly "off the beaten path" places too.
A generation or two ago, casually flying to a Greek island for a week was a pretty big luxury. Now huge numbers of normal people can do it. Flights are cheap, booking takes 5 mins, Google Maps means you basically can't get lost, everyone speaks enough English, you have Uber/eSIMs/cards everywhere. You can organise a perfectly decent 3-day trip to almost anywhere in 30 mins.
And travel has moved massively down the age/income curve too. It’s not only retirees or successful 45yo guys doing 2 big holidays a year anymore. For a lot of 22-30yo in London/Paris/NYC/Berlin, travelling is just another normal leisure activity now (dinner, drinks, festival, weekend in Lisbon, 3 days in Naples, ski trip, Croatia wedding, Greece in August, Marrakech in November).
So yh obviously people also burn through the famous places way faster. Once you've done Paris/Rome/Barcelona/Santorini/Bali, you start moving down the list. Albania, Montenegro, Georgia, the Azores, smaller Greek islands, whatever. So the crowding inevitably diffuses from tier-1 destinations into the places that were supposedly the alternatives.
There’s also almost no information asymmetry left. 25 years ago knowing the amazing beach, tiny village, restaurant or viewpoint was itself scarce knowledge. Now everyone lands with the same Google Maps pins, TikToks, Reddit threads and “48 hours in X” itinerary. We democratised access to the world while the supply of genuinely beautiful places/viewpoints/beaches is basically fixed.
But is it really a bad thing after all? A 25yo spending £300 on Porto instead of £200 drinking in London for the weekend might actually be making the better trade. And millions more people can casually see places that would have been a major luxury for their parents/grandparents.
Yes Instagram/Tiktok explain why everyone takes the same exact picture once they get there. But cheap travel + more leisure + more wealth + zero information friction explain why everyone is there in the first place.
💯
Someone recently asked me: “Why read books when the AI can just summarize them?"
I think it’s a fair question. And my honest answer is: the summary was never the point.
Reading is a sustained encounter with another mind. 300 pages of someone's thinking pressed up against your thinking, for hours, over days.
A summary gives you the conclusions. But conclusions are cheap.
What's expensive & rare & precious is the shape of the thinking that got there.
You cannot compress that, you can only sit with it.
Salman retweeted
Someone recently asked me: “Why read books when the AI can just summarize them?"
I think it’s a fair question. And my honest answer is: the summary was never the point.
Reading is a sustained encounter with another mind. 300 pages of someone's thinking pressed up against your thinking, for hours, over days.
A summary gives you the conclusions. But conclusions are cheap.
What's expensive & rare & precious is the shape of the thinking that got there.
You cannot compress that, you can only sit with it.
Salman retweeted
Also think a lot of the obsession with “balance” comes from copying people’s post-success lifestyle as if it were their pre-success strategy.
People see the 38yo founder who trains every morning, sleeps 8h, spends loads of time with family, travels constantly, angel invests a bit, reads for 2h and somehow only does 4h of “real work” a day.
What they don’t see is the 8 years of 80-hour weeks, the holidays half-spent on a laptop, the dinners constantly cut short, the period where friends basically assumed they’d cancel, the years of one city, one company, one obsession and not much else.
Same with creators, artists, athletes, investors, etc. Once the main bet has paid off, diversification suddenly makes loads of sense. There’s money, reputation, distribution, network, maybe a bunch of equity worth protecting. The marginal return on another 20h of work is lower, while health/family/time suddenly become much more valuable.
So yh of course the portfolio gets more balanced. The mistake is looking at someone’s post-success allocation and assuming that was the strategy that produced the success in the first place.
And successful people often make this worse themselves. They go on podcasts and give advice based on the bottleneck they have now, not necessarily the one they had at 25. The founder with $20m tells you to protect your time. The guy with 3m followers tells you not to obsess over growth. The person who spent a decade working nonstop tells you balance is everything.
Social media makes this even worse cause before, young ambitious people used to read long biographies which explained the struggle, the boring years, the long path before the success. You saw the sequencing. Now you open Instagram/TikTok and basically only see the post-success lifestyle of those founders (morning workout, nice house, family lunch, podcast, angel investing, etc.) Nobody posts: “year 6 of doing the exact same thing in a small office.”
The balanced life is what you can buy with the proceeds of an earlier overallocation (ie dividends). Don't chase the post-liquidity lifestyle pre-liquidity.
I think ambitious people should treat life in “seasons” rather than trying to balance everything every day.
A few years massively overallocated to work. A period getting seriously fit. A year or two nomading. Then family takes priority for a while. Then maybe at 35 you go completely insane again and spend four years building a new company, and so on.
The mistake is thinking every metric needs to stay green all the time. Most great outcomes (building a company, writing sth serious, training for an event) need uninterrupted runs, not daily moderation. Sometimes work should suffer cause you’re travelling, sometimes your social life should suffer cause you’re building, sometimes career progression should slow cause family matters more. That’s fine.
And tbh it probably makes life more fun too. You get actual chapters and completely different versions of yourself instead of spending 40 years maintaining the same perfectly optimised routine. A few intense years in one city, a weird nomad phase, an obsession that takes over your life, then something completely different. Probably much more memorable than one very long well-optimised Tuesday.
It's why I encourage everyone to think of balance in years, not days. A good life can look horribly unbalanced on some random Tuesday and still be very balanced over 10 years.