Anteneh’s Corner

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become achieving your goals. ~ Zig Ziglar

Many competent people lose because they assume the world is an exam Do excellent work. Be objectively good. The system will notice. But most real environments are not exams. They are markets, institutions, networks, status games, and attention systems. In those environments, value does not automatically travel from the person who creates it to the person who captures it. The “genius” optimizes for being right, being skilled, doing the work, and mastering the craft. The “positioner” optimizes for being in the right room, attached to the right narrative, visible to the right people, trusted by the right gatekeepers, and perceived as the obvious choice. This doesn’t mean the “positioner” person is fake. Sometimes positioning is simply the missing layer of strategy. But sometimes it does mean someone with weaker substance wins because they understand how power, attention, and opportunity actually move. The mistake many intelligent people make is moralizing the game. They treat visibility as shallow, politics as dirty, sales as manipulation, narrative as secondary, relationships as unfair, and packaging as vanity. The deeper tension is psychological. Many competent and builder people anchor their identity in competence and fairness. Positioning driven by perception, narrative, and status, feels illegitimate or “unreal.” So they resist it. But that resistance comes at a cost. Positioning is not the opposite of merit. It is how merit becomes visible, trusted, and valuable. It is the transmission layer between capability and outcomes.

HR often get’s bad name in bussiness environments especially in Tech startups. This is what I often tell my team. HR is like government. It’s not there to be liked. It’s there to create reasonable order, manage risk, guard against bad actors, and protect the firm when things go wrong. But like government, it works best when kept lean. HR is necessary friction ( evil ? ) - Too little HR : chaos, legal exposure, toxic behavior, unmanaged risk. - Too much HR : bureaucracy, slow decisions, reduced innovation. - Good HR → optimized friction: enough control to reduce downside, not so much that it kills speed.

Teddy’s “መሬማ” has been on repeat for me these past few days. Partly because of something that happened a couple of weeks ago on Bole Road. I stopped to buy gum from a “ጀብሎ” and noticed the seller was on an Imo video call. Got curious and struck up a conversation. Long story short, he was talking to his cousin in Iraq. I ended up chatting with her too : about life, what she was doing there, even joking if she’d marry me. Both from Wolayita. What stunned me was just that reality that our people go as far as Iraq to change their lives. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. And now, መሬማ hits differently.

When I watch Ethiopian politics descend into hostility and keep testing a new low, I think it’s good to remember a moment from 17th Century and what Ethiopian thinker Zera Yacob said. The Portuguese Jesuit priest Afonso Mendes arrived in Ethiopia in 1625. Within a year, Emperor Susenyos converted to Catholicism and declared it the state religion. What followed was civil war. The attempt to impose one theological interpretation over an another fractured the country. Blood was shed. Stability collapsed. It only ended when Susenyos’ son, Fasilides, reversed the decree and expelled Mendes and the Jesuits, restoring religious equilibrium. Amid that turmoil, Zera Yacob taught something strikingly simple: “I did not say, ‘this interpretation is good’ or ‘that interpretation is bad.’ Rather, I said, ‘all of these interpretations are good if we ourselves are good.’” The crisis was not interpretation. It was intolerance. The problem is rarely difference. It is the loss of restraint, humility, and mutual regard.

Markets do not compensate intelligence or effort in isolation. They compensate exposure to irreversibility - how much risk you’re willing to carry.

A defining demographic signal: China announced yesterday that births in 2025 fell to 7.92 million, 1.62 million fewer than in 2024, with the total fertility rate dropping to 0.93. Even under optimistic assumptions, if China could somehow sustain 7.92 million births per year indefinitely, its population could eventually stabilize at roughly 625 million, less than half of today's 1.405 billion. China's demographic collapse is unfolding faster than even pessimistic forecasts anticipated. At the same time, the United States and Europe continue to face a structural demographic squeeze. Together, these trends will reshape global power, production capacity, fiscal sustainability, and internal state stability. Africa stands apart. It remains the world's primary source of population growth, the youngest region, and increasingly central to the future global labor force. By 2050, one in four people on Earth will be African. The question is whether this translates into economic and geopolitical leverage, or remains unrealized potential. The wild card is AGI. If it arrives, asymmetric AI power could allow some states to offset or reverse demographic constraints entirely—while countries with population growth but weaker technological capacity see their advantage diluted. How do you see this playing out ?

I've dictated over 83,000 words last year using this incredible AI dictation tool called Wispr Flow. That's effectively a full nonfiction book manuscript. The stats show I'm averaging 96 words per minute. (Top 5% of all WisprFlow users.) What's changed for me isn't just speed. It's flow. Being able to capture thoughts on my phone or laptop while walking, reflecting, or pacing. It removes this friction between thinking and creating. For anyone doing knowledge work or writing: tools that reduce cognitive overhead compound quickly. But. Despite it being transformative, two realizations stood out. Not about the technology itself, but about behavior, cognition, and what actually feels satisfying. I wrote about it here reflecting on defaults, friction, and how interfaces shape thinking: https://substack.com/home/post/p-184960053

Values are constraints you voluntarily accept to prevent your own worst capacities from ruling you.

How do you dig into your mind? How do you become aware of your conditioning? How do you reach profound insights and truths that change the trajectory of your life? Through the simple, but often painful act of questioning. Something that so few people do, and you can tell by how they speak or give their thoughts on a specific topic. Questioning is thinking, and very few people do it. - Dan Koe

I discovered Naval in 2018. He shaped how I think about Wealth, leverage, judgment, and building. Some of my favorite's 👇

New essay on intensity, entropy, and the paradox that makes the grind sustainable. Read it on Agentic Mind — my writing about technology, human nature, markets, and the entrepreneurship journey of building a data and intelligence venture. Here: https://anteneh.substack.com/p/the-beautiful-exhaustion

We're consumed by AI doomsday scenarios. Will it take all jobs? Will it become sentient? Will it end civilization? These debates are everywhere. But they're macro discussions about micro realities. Cognitively distant. Easy to debate, hard to act on. Meanwhile, something more immediate has already happened. AI became capable, genuinely not theoretically, at three foundational skills: code, writing, and design. This creates four dynamics worth understanding for any knowledge worker with a computer : - Amplification — Your core strengths get stronger - Democratization — The barrier to competence in non-core skills collapsed -Compression — The distance from idea to output shrank dramatically - Judgment — The nature a skill itself shifted significantly from execution to direction and taste I write more about this week in my newsletter, Agentic Mind. Read and Subscribe to get my future writings the Intersection of Technology, Human Nature, and Markets 👇 https://anteneh.substack.com/p/ai-isnt-taking-your-job-its-taking (https://anteneh.substack.com/p/ai-isnt-taking-your-job-its-taking)

A reminder.

On Blockers, Truth-Seeking, and Culture One of the consistent challenges I’ve observed while running Shega and more broadly in Ethiopia’s professional environment is how blockers (real or perceived) and the lack of truth-seeking culture slow teams down. They create unnecessary issues, delay decisions, and sometimes push teams to build or work in the wrong direction. There is a cultural friction around confronting issues directly. And it feels to me that this is especially pronounced here in Ethiopia. Many people avoid pressing others to fix problems, sharing uncomfortable truths in group settings, or even asking questions — let alone tough ones. ☑️ Someone spots a problem in a project but stays quiet so they don’t look “difficult.” ☑️ A team member knows an approach won’t work but avoids saying so because it might seem like “fighting.” ☑️ A deadline is impossible, yet no one says it until it’s already missed. Issues that could be solved in one honest, 10-minute conversation metastasize over weeks. Teams work around broken things instead of fixing them. We mistake conflict avoidance for collaboration. This doesn’t come necessarily from bad intent, it’s looks it's more a deep social tendency to avoid confrontation. There’s almost an obsession with being seen as “very nice,” “easygoing,” or “someone who doesn’t fight.” But here’s the truth: Any group, whether a professional team, ethnocultural group, political collective or a given society that doesn’t have truth-seeking as a central and Integral part of its culture, cannot build anything great.

I'm not one to often idolize people or jump on role models, but if I had to pick, especially an academic and intellectual one, it would be Thomas Sowell. A rare mix of intelligence, moral clarity, logic, empiricism, and intellectual courage. Thomas Sowell's thinking has profoundly shaped how I reflect on the world over the past five years. As Peter Robinson (one of my favorite interviewers btw) put it well at the end of their conversation, the lessons to be drawn from Sowell's life: "We could all aspire to develop our abilities, to work at our abilities. We can all reject victimization, we can all learn to think for ourselves. We can all defy high-sounding nonsense and insist on logic and evidence, and we can all display gratitude." For anyone who knows him or wants to get started with his work, this interview about his life journey and writing is a great one. A free man indeed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMTWDEYsRVE

Boy, a big client just hustled my team for a week trying to get a discount on the last payment of a project that’s already signed, delivered, and even discounted before signing. How fair is it to re-open a completed agreement? Tough times or just part of the game? 🤷🏽‍♂️ I guess መሰገጥ the way.

Wherever you are in your personal journey and transformation, I’m quite certain that the following conversation between Joe Rogan and Guy Ritchie will be worth listening to — and contemplating https://youtu.be/rd3yeX1-SaM?si=VaCJrw36fHMnszpg

Conquer this day like you do every other day. As long as you are standing , you are not defeated. Until death, all defeat is psychological.