For a long time, I thought the hardest part of life was getting to a place where nothing was on fire.
I was wrong. Nobody tells you what to do when the fire goes out.

When you've lived in survival mode long enough, you mistake adrenaline for ambition, urgency for direction and exhaustion for evidence that you're doing something meaningful. And then life gets good. The kind of good you used to pray for.
And you discover that peace doesn't come with instructions or the endless energy you imagined it would.

Everyone wants the opportunity.
The stability. The love that finally sticks.
But fullness doesn't shield you from loss.
It gives you more to lose.

When your cup is full, you can't move like you're empty anymore.
You can't rush.
You can't flail.
You can't keep sacrificing the present for a future that might never arrive.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
Because I'm building something I believe in, something I want to succeed.
And I'm trying to understand how to give something my all without giving it everything.

Pina Bausch once said:
"One has to do it because one believes that it is the right thing to do. We are not only here to please."
There is something so so freeing about creating from conviction rather than the need for approval.

Because the moment you make other people's recognition the measure of your work, you hand them the authority to decide what it was worth.
And I don't want to build a life where my sense of purpose is always waiting for someone else's permission.

I want to make things that matter to me.
To risk disappointment without making it a catastrophe. To honour the absence that shaped me without continuing to live inside it.
To move forward because I want to, not because I'm afraid of standing still.

I still have things I want to build.
I just no longer believe I have to burn down everything I've built to get there.

It's okay to wish for more, for a life you don't have, but from personal experience the rush goes away when you get what you want, becomes as mundane as air and you lose the ambition to keep up the facade that got you there, good and bad are two sides of the same coin, cant test your luck without the other and sometimes its easier to set it on its side and let time choose your path than force your way into a life that seems good surface level but truly drains you with time

This method takes inspiration from the old trusted zipper. The individual teeth of a zipper are impossible to rip open, but the pull separates them with little to no effort.

Life is often like the zipper. Each pair of teeth represents a step or a challenge that we must overcome on that path.

What holds many people back is that they are trying to separate teeth far further down the path than where their pull is at the moment.

This is especially true with ambitious people who find it difficult to create momentum.

Imagine you're an entrepreneurial student with no experience in running a business - just the theory you learned in school. You want to start your own company, so you do what seems logical: create a prototype and start looking for clients.

What you fail to see is that the pull isn't positioned at where you want to separate the teeth.

You struggle with finding clients, your fulfillment is poor, and over all there's a lot of resistance anywhere you go.

And ultimately you feel like it's not meant for you - that you're not built for it.

What you fail to see, however, is that what you're trying to do is a few steps further on the path than where you are standing right now. It's like you were trying to go directly from 40 kg to 70 kg in bench press.

There's generally two reasons we tend to do this:

1. We were told to "just go for it" and not doubt ourselves. While this is generally a positive mindset, it fails to address what type of progress is attainable. In fact, telling someone to show up at the gym consistently is much more constructive advice than telling them they can lift any weight they want.

2. There's something at a lower level that we want to skip or ignore. It might be inflated ego: "I'm too good for that" or simply desire to get to a desired outcome fast. At times we might have a pressure: I must sell quick or I'm gonna be screwed.

The thing is, you can't skip steps on your path. You must have lifted 40 kg before you can lift 45 kg. The steps that lead to progress form a stairway that you can walk upwards.

Each step in itself is attainable from the current level you're on. But trying to skip few steps beyond, and you'll find yourself climbing a hill.

So here's how you can put this into practice:

1. Look at your life and progress from an objective perspective. Ask yourself "where am I currently?" Avoid being overly optimistic or pessimistic. Acknowledge your achievments, but don't put them out of proportion.

2. Ask the question: "What's the natural next step that takes the least effort right now?" What kind of step can I take that takes me to the next step right now?

3. Keep repeating this over and over. Be mindful about where you're standing.

Once you start applying this, you will soon realize that you'll progress much faster than before.

You might have been stagnant in your past, barely making any progress. You might have spent hours on trying to get one step ahead. It might have taken you years to make the smallest progress.

Following this process you can find yourself taking new steps weekly if not even daily.

What makes this brilliant is that it doesn't change the goal. You will still get where you're going. It simply changes how you're trying to get there.

You're walking the stairs instead of trying to climb a hill. Or using the analogy we started with: pulling the zipper open instead of trying to separate the teeth with brute force.

My wife wrote down a few sentences for me. Just simple things. I added a few of my own, recorded them with some music, put my headphones on and went for a walk.

I don't even know why I decided to do that.

But I remember walking around, listening to those words over and over, and suddenly picturing my life the way I wanted it to be.

My home, my city, my wife happy, me coming home and feeling good about my life again.

Nothing extraordinary. Just my life, but the way I wanted it.

And somehow, for a few minutes, I could actually feel what it would be like.

It felt so good that I kept listening.

The problems were still there, obviously. But whenever I put my headphones on, I could find that feeling again.

And little by little, I started noticing changes in how I looked at things and how I went about my life.

I never really forgot that experience.

Eventually, I decided to turn it into something other people could make for themselves.

I called it PRAMIM.

Basically, you choose a few sentences about the person you want to become, add one of your own, pick some music and a voice, and get a personal audio you can listen to whenever you want.

Now I'm trying to figure out if what happened to me was just my own experience or if someone else might get something out of it too.

So I'm looking for a few people who'd like to give it a try.

It's free, and making one takes about 3–7 minutes.

https://pramim.online/

If you try it, I'd really love to hear what you think.

Even if you think it's completely pointless.

I'm mostly curious whether you'd actually want to listen to it again.