Deliberate curiosity

So much to learn, so little time

When I learned that work shuts down during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I started mentally mapping out all the different projects I could finally get to.

Among them:

• Binging YouTube courses

• Recording my own course on LinkedIn posting

• Finishing reading books started in 2025

• Listing half of my art supplies on a secondhand sale site

• Training properly for my half-marathon

…and so on.

Yet when I woke up on the morning of December 23rd with nowhere to be, I felt hollow.

There wasn’t a real reason to out of bed, apart from the daily 8AM gym class I already paid for. I begrudgingly dragged myself into the kitchen, made my filtered coffee, sat at my desk for morning pages, stared at the still-dark winter sky and thought:

Sheesh. I’m exhausted.

I recognised the feeling immediately.

I was, to eloquently word it, burnt out.

2025 had been a blitz of many changes. New work, new pace, new identity. Keeping up with the velocity of it all had thoroughly fizzled me out.

Curiosity killed the cat

A vision-setting session twelve months earlier made me realise that I haven’t been dreaming big enough. Like what do you mean I could travel, I could live life on my own terms, I get to engage in creative work for my day job, and I could have friends that are as into this whole online creator thing as I am? The glitz and glamour of life swept me off of my feet, and I spent the rest of 2025 playing catch up with my own imagination.

Following curiosities have led me this far, mostly in the margins of a full-time job. So when I finally entered my “dream world”, my instinct was simple:

Go full steam ahead.

See something interesting? Do it.
Want to start a podcast? Start it.
Write a creator newsletter? Draft it.
Vibecode an RSS reader? Why not.

Move fast. Move on. Repeat.

I have never spent so much of a year trying to keep my head above water.

Satisfaction didn’t quite bring it back

On social media, I was doing great.

I was showing up at work prepared. Posting regularly on LinkedIn. Publishing weekly on Substack. Recording a podcast every fortnight.

But the gaps, the white space in my life, disappeared. Every spare moment became an opportunity to add one more thing to an already full plate.

One December day, I decided it was a great idea to launch smallcreatorbigworld.com. I vibecoded the site in an afternoon. By the time Bhav woke up (she’s 8 hours behind), it was ready.

She suggested a font change. Before she could finish her sentence, I was already in Cursor deploying it.

If I see a problem that I can fix, I act on it. The 2-minute rule in the productivity cult got me here - if something takes less than 2 minutes, just do it.

Realistically, is fixing the font the most needle-moving thing in the world? It’s easy, yes. But wouldn’t it have been better if I could, e.g. collect a list of website fixes and just batch them the next time I go into Cursor?

When everything is a few keystrokes away, restraint becomes the hardest skill of all.

So how many of those “easy-but-low-impact” actions do I do in a day, and how does it accumulate?

AI: the speed boost I didn’t need

Part of my slip and fall into burnout territory was because I used AI as a speed boost. It’s so easy to type out a few words and get an output in a few minutes that would otherwise have taken me hours to put together, like ideas, drafts, websites, thumbnails…

Prompt → output.
Thought → execution.

I became intensely output-oriented. I could generate 20 YouTube titles without understanding why some have more bite than others. I could draft proposals without internalising the logic behind their structure.

Somewhere along the way, I didn’t take enough time to process things. I stopped digesting, which is the process is the pressure that turns carbon into diamonds.

I used to keep learning logs. Notes, highlights, and thoughts captured in this section of my Substack. Slowing down and distilling ideas made me a better thinker. And I threw all of that out of the window when I introduced AI into my workflow.

I was moving at full speed, but I did so at the expense of friction that would have made me better.

Introducing: deliberate curiosity

In December, a group of friends and I went to a buffet.

Before touching the food, we dropped our bags and surveyed the room. We took mental inventory of the various salads, meats, roasted vegetables, drinks, dessert. We want to eat everything, but our stomachs can only take in so much.

So we skipped carbs, prioritised the Christmas specials, and split the desserts among us.

I still enjoyed the buffet, just without a food coma.

That’s the shift I’m trying to make now. Instead of immediately acting on my “impulse” to get everything done, I will instil some sense of deliberation before taking action.

This is why I’ve tarted experimenting with a single side hustle focus hour after work. If I limit myself to only working in this tiny window, what would be the most needle-moving thing to do?

Everything goes on a list (it can haunt me later). The to-do list will never be completed anyway.

The plan

Pulling myself out of burnout doesn’t require shrinking my curiosity. I just need time to be more discerning with my pursuits:

Take some time to figure out my priorities, set up a constraint for that power hour to determine what needs to get done in that single hour, and park everything else into a list somewhere.

(If I don’t know what to prioritise, then I can take extra time to figure out what actually would make a difference.)

If I choose deliberately, curiosity stops killing the beck cat.

I can still eat the buffet. It just won’t kill me this year.

I love picking a motto every year. (What’s a motto? What’s the motto with you?) My 2025 one was “fuck around and find out”. If you have one for the year, e.g. a motto or a word, I’d love to know what it is and why 👇

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Update log:

• 🎙️ Favourite 2025 resources for small creators: ep with Bhav Sharma out now.

• 🏃🏻‍♀️ Ran 19k (!!!) in preparation for a half-marathon. Super grateful for my friend who very patiently tried to pace me throughout the 2.5h.

• 🎧 Wrapped up 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Then proceeded to listen to his podcast appearances on Prof G and Katie Couric.

• 🎃 Made pumpkin soup from scratch.

• 🗓️ Set up my 2026 review stacks: finance tracker + weekly review templates

• 🎬 Filmed a YouTube video! 2026 YouTube comeback?? 👀

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