there are a lot of people i admire, yet i think this admiration comes as a dissection of their traits and carefully choosing which side specifically is worthy of it. the idea of having a mentor sounds very appealing, yet i don't think i can ever fully commit to giving such a role to one person when you keep facing their different sides.

every great trait of a person comes with its less desirable pair.

there is a young man i know, full of force that keeps pushing him through doors and people without fear or anxiety. it's as if he's blind to his own limitations. and he's so full of joy, living his life truly to the fullest. in moments where i'd find myself brooding, he stands up and never lets self-pity take over.
yet this gaiety also renders him irresponsible and unreliable at times. you wanna go on an adventure with this person, but be aware that he might leave you midway through the desert.

then there are people like my dad. thoughtful, careful, calculating. mature in most situations. and very prideful. yet this pride sometimes borders on fear, fear which doesn't let you cross the lines he's drawn to protect himself and his castle. you know this person will never let you down, that you can always rely on him and his words, yet exactly this certainty and stability makes it impossible to venture into new and uncertain areas. you can feel his fears weighing down on you too if you're not attentive enough.

and there's a woman i used to work for. strong and sharp. i admired her deeply and was almost devoted to her in my loyalty. and while i was always aware of her other sides, upon leaving i got to see them up close, the calculating, the maneuvering, the quiet moves that got her where she is rn. it put some distance between us emotionally, yet i still respect the qualities i admired back then.

and oftentimes, the exact traits that make you ambitious and admirable in others' eyes can be the ones that make you feel vulnerable and prone to overcomplicating things. i've heard one young man say, "if my insecurities are what help me achieve my goals right now, that i have to keep doing things to prove my worth, then i don't mind them. for the time being, they're useful." and i've seen how healthy and normal some of my acquaintances' upbringing was, and how differently we react to the same things in life. i think there are degrees of healthiness in families. some people were soaked so much in love that they rarely question how their actions are perceived by others. some others weren't that lucky, i guess, and found other ways to move forward.

anyway
i think the key in building close relationships with people is choosing what trade-offs you're willing to accept. it's easy to admire the good qualities, but you have to think ahead about the downsides those exact qualities will bring along the way.

(the screenshot is from the book East of Eden)

@summernotes

i think you have to be in the right mindset to watch miyazaki’s works, to be living in the moment and soaking up all the emotions of wonder about the world around you.

my neighbor totoro is targeted at a fairly young audience, its the first time i’ve watched it.
thought of it more as the ephemeral nature of childhood. and given that it was set shortly after WW2, you can feel how people still move on in life even with the heavy weight of tragedies in the background.

also, as i’ve been reading East of Eden, i found out that it’s soon gonna be made into a TV series. and guess who’s directing and is the main character (Cathy)? Florence Pugh, my favorite of all (she’s in the last screenshot). i usually don’t care much for movies or series, but i feel this one is going to be special.

@summernotes

uzbekistan's stock exchange trading volume hit nearly $2 billion in 2024, which is 7.5x more than the year before while most people in the country still dont know what a stock is.

financial market sequencing puts a question of whether you can build sophisticated capital markets before the population is financially literate enough to use them. it follows as: build the infrastructure, make it so frictionless that people stumble into investing before they even fully understand it, and then use that participation to generate the culture. in uzb, you've seen it in the example of digital payment methods in replacement of cash.

and it's working, at least on paper. in the first half of 2025, nearly $1B in transactions were carried out on the Tashkent Stock Exchange, which is 17 times more than the same period in 2024. simultaneously, Uzum raised $70M from Tencent and VR Capital, hitting a $1.5B valuation.
so public market is opening to retail and private market attracting institutional money. such two different investment worlds forming at the same time rarely ever happens in one country at one, which is quite impressive.

zooming out
this all can be pointed to Thaler's "nudge" theory which states that you can change behavior through environment design rather than education. the pattern here is that every emerging market that developed a real capital market did so through a triggering event that pulled in retail, be that South Korea's 1990s chaebol reforms, India's post-liberalization mutual fund boom, or China's 2007 retail investor surge.

@summernotes

i guess part of being uzbek is about hosting and attending different gatherings.

i used to get pretty exhausted during such events, helping around without having a chance to sit down for a bit. and having dozens of people at home itself is draining.

and doing things that don’t ask much of you mentally can be pretty tiring. i still feel that way sometimes.

but there is also actual warmth underneath all that hustle. seems like good memories also come from those chaotic, loud and slightly overwhelming days.

maybe that’s just what this kind of togetherness looks like.

@summernotes

crazy
Claude being its closest rival is growing at a 640% YoY rate, much faster than ChatGPT's 62% over the same period.

there's a concept called the s-curve adoption race. the leader hits the flat top of its curve while the challenger is still on the steep slope. in platform economics, once you capture the mass market, growth compresses cuz the addressable pool just shrinks. Chatgpt owns the consumer market. Claude has dug in among developers and coders, building from a completely different foothold rather than attacking Chatgpt head-on.

think back to Netscape. it had over 90% browser market share at its peak. microsoft came in through a different angle, bundled ie with windows, and that was it.
and Anthropic just raised $65B at a roughly $1 trillion valuation. both companies are also heading toward ipo.

let's see where this goes.

@summernotes