Dec, 2025
Most things in life are like a bundle of cables in a bag; tangled. To take one cable out, you need to untangle it. Pulling on it without untangling only makes the tangles worse. In life too, the thing you want is tangled with other things and pulling on it blindly makes it worse. Even when a thread seems free, it is often tangled with other things. You can tell which things are tangled by noticing what makes you frustrated. Frustration is a sign that something is behaving unpredictably. And things are unpredictable if you don’t understand how they are tangled with other things. You need to understand the tangles to remove your frustration and only then you can work on the actual problem and untangle it instead of getting stuck on the unpredictability. After you understand the tangles, even failure is not a cause of frustration. There are businesses built on failure, if the failure is predictable. The best startup incubator in the world does not get frustrated when 95 out of 100 startups don’t succeed because they understand that success is tangled with a high failure ratio. Because high failure is expected, they remove their frustration by funding a model where the successful ones can return the losses of all failed ones. A small tangent before I get into the details of untangling; in my writing you will see a lot of absolutes. Saying that understanding something removes all frustration is absolute. What about the frustration from things that are outside of your control? This makes it unsettling to read. But here is the part that makes it unsettling. I don’t think of anything as outside of my control. Not completely. With a long enough lever you can move the moon. The only question is whether you want to spend the energy to build that lever. To me, everything is a matter of logistics. You don’t find me taking into account nuances often because decisions are binary. There is no such thing as a decision and a non-decision together. You can be nuanced in your words, but only absolute in actions. You can talk about having or not having a wall. But you cannot both build a brick wall and not build a brick wall. Believing in this tangled framework means that if you’re not the kind of person who tries to understand the tangles before pulling on them, you make things worse for yourself and loosen the threads that you wanted tightened and tighten the ones that you wanted loosened. For example, there are always people who you are unable to communicate with because they think very differently and value very different things. And if you just tried explaining more in the hope that it will solve the problem, it will only make the communication thread more stuck because every explanation you give will result in bringing up more things that you need to explain. You will get stuck in a recursive loop of explanations about explanations. You need to untangle the communication thread from all the threads that are irrelevant. And maybe you notice that they have different values. At this point, instead of mindlessly trying harder to communicate, you will need to decide whether you can reconcile the different values or if you can communicate with them while using their values instead of yours or just give up on communicating. Communication is the main thread that is tangled with all these other threads that you need to understand to figure out what you can do with the main thread. Without understanding, your attempts at communication will end up in frustration. And people are bad at this skill by default. This is one reason students who do very well in school and university are unable to do well in unstructured parts of their lives. Because in school, all the problems given are already untangled from other aspects because they are made up problems. So students only learn how to work on individual threads and never on how to identify and separate the right thread from the tangles. When they enter the real world they are unable to deal with the tangled messiness of it all and then they look for people who can hand them untangled threads that can make their lives simpler. We wrongly think that potential is lost to circumstances. In reality it is lost to people’s laziness to seriously think about the things that are important to them. When we face a new tangled bundle, prior knowledge of tangles matters less than ability to work with tangles. It is the nature of tangles that even if they are of the same threads, they are never the same. Keep putting the same cables back in a bag and removing them and they will come out tangled differently and pulling on the same thread will have different results based on how that bundle is tangled each time. For example, if a company is trying to focus on growth it can both gain from KPIs and lose from them depending on how their specific bundle is tangled. If the company was trying to grow by figuring out new parts, adding KPIs would kill growth because the parts that are needed for growth have not yet been found and KPIs can only be based on things you already know that you need to focus on. On the other hand, if the company wanted to grow something that was already working by pushing more on the distribution, it would benefit from something like KPIs because you just need to do more of what is already working. When all tangles are unique, how do you develop the ability to untangle them faster? One trick you can use is to try pulling on a lot of different threads in the bundle when you get it. The natural response to getting a tangled situation or a problem is to try to deal with it slowly but you should resist that urge and focus on pulling on a few threads to see how they are tangled with each other. If you keep building theories of how they are tangled while looking at them without actually pulling on them, you are building a jenga tower that is going to fall when the first thread is pulled. When a wrong assumption would mean everything built on top of it also failing, the thing to do is not to put more work in making the first assumption better but to start with a good enough first assumption and then pull on a thread (try one experiment) and then see how the rest of the threads move and then revise your assumption based on that and pull again and keep doing so. This is kind of a Bayesian treatment of the world. Where you keep updating your default assumptions based on your interactions with reality. Startups are a good example of this. No amount of thinking alone can beat execution and experimentation. There is nothing that gives you a higher chance of making something work than trying out different variations quickly and figuring out which parts seem to work. There are a lot of people from corporate that get into startups and start to build with the assumption that long term plans are better than quick iterations and therefore their success rate is often lower than random kids building things because they over-index on their presumed understanding of what they’re building. Normally when trying to untangle something people focus only on the part that they care about. What they need initially instead is a lot of variation and pulling on even the threads that they don't care about and maybe especially the threads they don't care about so they understand how the things you don’t want are tangled with the thing that you do want. Small talk is one example of pulling unrelated threads to see how they are tangled with the thread you care about. With small talk you are trying to pull on random topics to check the basic emotional state of a person. A person’s willingness to discuss deep topics is actually tangled with their current emotional state and if you jumped directly into discussing technical stuff and the person was not emotionally in a state to do so, it would pull on the technical discussion without you realizing. That’s why small talk is about meaningless topics. It’s not the substance of the small talk that is important but the form and tone. You quickly figure out if the person is in the mood to think about something you want to talk about or not before actually starting the discussion. If a person is already stressed over something and you randomly start talking to them about quantum physics, it is not going to be a fun discussion. So you talk about meaningless topics before diving into anything and adjust your dive’s depth based on the result of this small talk. And while you do need to understand most of the threads in a tangle, you should not actually try untangling all of them. One way to notice if you’re untangling unimportant threads is to see if something is making you exhausted. It means you are trying to work on threads that you should not be working on. An example would be that if you were to try to get into reading books, you should pull on a lot of threads but focus on only one. You should check all kinds of books but not try to complete all of them. If reading a book is exhausting, you should move to a different book. Reading most books is actually exhausting because they are the wrong books. This part is obvious to people who read a lot of books but comes as a surprise to those that are trying to start. Avid readers drop more books than non readers. For every one book that I personally read, I drop around 20 books that I started. Every new book should be like a thread in a tangle that you pull a little and see how it affects your reading. If reading a book makes reading difficult for you, it is the wrong book and you should move on to a different book. The right book won’t be exhausting to read. But skill at untangling and successfully untangling a thread does not actually guarantee a frustration free life. It is possible to untangle a thread and still be frustrated. This happens when you pick the wrong thread to untangle. This part is actually more important than your ability to untangle a bundle. Because it is better to be bad at untangling but focus on the right thread than to be good at untangling but bad at identifying the right thread. How do you identify the right thread? In a tangle, there are only a few threads that affect the entire bundle when pulled. Sometimes there is one very long thread that when pulled affects every other thread in the tangle. Sometimes there are two or more threads that are slightly longer than others and affect all the other small threads. There is one small point to note here. It is impossible for a bundle to have all small threads. Because in that case, it would never be bundled and they would all fall apart. So whenever you see a tangle, know that it is only tangled because there are some threads that are very long and affect all other threads. Everything has main threads, in startups, the main thread is PMF. Individuals also have main threads. These are the threads that make them who they are. Of course there are a million things that make a person who they are. But the main threads of a person make their behaviour predictable - or predictably unpredictable. Because the main thread is tangled with every other thread, all other threads will pull on it and it will pull on all of them. Even if we all have the same traits, the main thread is the trait that is usually extreme in a person and that makes it the longest thread. For example, all of our brains like dopamine (the neurochemical for pleasure). But some people’s brains are more addicted to it than others. This person will put in a lot of effort to seek out things in life that provide that dopamine hit. They will usually be extremely extroverted and will have a heavy focus on looking forward to things. We all look forward to things but this person designs their life around looking forward to things that will provide dopamine. It can be a vacation. It can be a weekend plan. And they will indulge in things to the point of self detriment to satisfy this dopamine need. This is one hint of the main thread. Sometimes they are unable to manage it to the point of unintentional self-harm. Another person’s main thread might be that they are a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. This being the thread means they will have the highest density of insights about most things because they always reject the first explanation, but it also means that their social interactions will be strained because having someone disagree with everything is not much fun. Now it is possible for the person to have an even longer thread than the most extreme one you notice. Just because you see one thread as the longest does not mean that is the longest thread. There might be another one tangled worse. But consciously identifying the main threads helps you manage your interaction with that person instead of the interaction managing you. A person who is careless will end up in situations that were the result of them not realizing which part they should have taken seriously. They are either serious about everything or serious about nothing. This will affect everything related to them. One way for finding the main thread of a person is to look for extreme traits or anomalous behaviours. These are reflective of the underlying main thread because some normal behaviour thread is being pulled on by the main thread. Of course there is also the long path available to plainly notice and memorize a person’s behaviour instead of figuring out their main threads. But this takes much longer and still does not make the person predictable in new settings. And just noticing behaviour over the main thread also ends up with problems because the same behavior can be exhibited by very different people with very different main threads for very different reasons. For example, confidence in something to the point of arrogance can both be a sign of high ego or expertise and observing it without knowing the underlying main thread can become problematic for you because you will not know whether to listen to what the person is saying or ignore it. So it is important to untangle the main thread of a person as early as you can. On a sidenote, one trick for differentiating between a person with high ego and an expert is to question them about a lot of things. Someone with a high ego will want to have the correct opinion about everything while the expert will confess to not knowing enough outside of his area of expertise. For example, if a person who has never gone to the gym in their life tries to give you advice about how to do an exercise properly, you should run the other way. Always look for proof of effort or good enough proxies for it. The explanation above makes it seem like this thing of finding the main thread of a person is simple. It is obviously not. But I’m trying to make a point with the oversimplification. And the point is that while it might be impossible to identify the main thread of every individual, it is possible to identify if the thread you care about is the main thread or a thread that is long enough. For instance, if you’re hiring for a role that requires discipline, it is possible to check if discipline is one of the main threads of a person. You can look at their academic scores and it can give you a good enough idea. A person with high discipline can’t help but get high scores even in tests that are meaningless. The threads that I personally care about in people are transparency, obsession and skepticism. I rarely find people who have these as main threads but when I do, we become quick friends. As you read through all of the above, it might give you a sinking feeling that you don’t know what threads are important to you. And for good reason. It’s because neither do I. The mistake we make is that we assume we are supposed to know what we want before we actually start trying to untangle things. But that’s like describing a smell or describing the taste of some food. You only learn what you want when you see it. In fact, you can point to something and say that is what you want but still not be able to describe it. The description comes after the discovery and not before it. The three threads that I mentioned above that I care about in a person I discovered over a period of 10 years. I’ll share the process it followed to give a better idea of what the discovery looks like over time. For the longest time I was the kind of person that did not talk to most people (that includes my family). Primarily because I am one of those people who get obsessed about things and then end up discussing aspects so niche that most people do not find them interesting. For example I had completed my university curriculum by the second year of university and yet I did not talk about this even to the friend I would talk to everything about because I did not think he would be interested in doing so and there would be no value to disclose this other than looking a little crazy to him. I had done the same with physics in college and also never brought it up. But I had not untangled this part of being obsessed about things as the thread that was causing the friction in talking to people about things. I had just left this thread untangled in a bunch that I labeled as “not like talking to people”. But then over time I started finding more people that I did like talking to. The first time I found a person it was random. I tried describing the kind of people I like talking to based on that one person but that person was too many things and it was impossible to separate exactly which part was the one that was important to me. The second person I found a few years later, also passively. But by this time I realized that it was hard to do this by describing it and it was more a function of talking to more people and that’s what I started doing. Finding the third person was quicker and more proactive, finding the 4th person even quicker and finding the 5th person even quicker. I still am probably unable to describe all the traits that make these people the type of people I like talking to but I can tell at least some of them. After finding a few of these I was able to untangle the part about obsessiveness as the main trait in people that I like talking to. And even after this I did not try to learn to untangle obsessive people from the non-obsessive ones and only would find them accidentally until I started figuring out hints that help identify people who are high on obsessiveness. But even then the threads of obsessiveness were tangled with getting to know a person over months before figuring it out. And then I started actively untangling the time part from the identification part and brought it down to a few hours. This entire untangling process seems extremely complicated and overwhelming. But you can make it easier for yourself by surrounding yourself with people who have or had similar tangles as you. While you can’t directly tell if someone has similar tangles as you, one way to identify if you are surrounded by people who are dissimilar in their tangles is if you have to convince people of things that seem obvious to you. If you have to convince people of these things, they are very different in their tangles. One important caveat to note here is that just because you don’t have to convince them does not mean they will agree with you. It just means that when you explain something, they will go “Oh right, yeah I get that” and then after that they still might disagree with you on it. They’ve seen your tangles and likely untangled them for themselves more than you have at that point and you can learn some things from them that might help you and even if they don’t help you, you will not feel like you need to defend your existence in front of them. You can be you. But this does not always mean that the version of you that is being accepted is acceptable. When drug addicts go to rehab, people there can understand them but that does not mean the problem is acceptable. Some tangles are problems and need to be fixed. You decide which tangles are problems yourself. Another person cannot do this for you. And finding people with similar bad patterns can worsen the bad patterns. Of course you also need to differentiate people who can understand you from people who are just understanding of others. I often try to be understanding of different people who sometimes can confuse it with me being able to understand them. Being understanding is to accept someone for who they are. But to understand someone is to know them for who they are. So I often explicitly tell people that I’m going to try to be understanding but I don’t understand them. In addition to finding those that have the same tangles as you, you need to find people who also value the same threads as you. One way to look for people who value the same threads is to look for people who get frustrated at the same things. There are a lot of people who have the same tangles. But not all of them are trying to untangle the same threads. When you value the same things, you can follow others in how they untangle their threads. But if you don’t value the same things, you will be unable to even talk about your tangles. Other people will not have the same problems because they don’t care about the same threads. I once found a person with the exact same background with the exact same types of interests and work and I was extremely enthusiastic about meeting them assuming we’d be able to relate to each other a lot. But when I met him I thought I'd never met a guy more different from me. And it was because we valued different threads, having the same threads did not matter. Another example could be that both a person hiring for a startup and one hiring for a software agency can be frustrated at finding the right kind of people. But the founder is frustrated at people who can't figure things out while the agency person is frustrated at people who can't follow a high enough bar for code standards and because both have different values, they will not be able to find reassurance in each other’s methods of handling their similar tangles. One benefit of learning to figure out which threads are important is that you find out which threads are important to you and that in turn tells you who you are. This brings us to the final subject of untangling; yourself. This is the most difficult thing to untangle because it’s the thing where the threads are not visible to you. How do you untangle something if you can’t even observe the threads. So the first thing you need to do is to make yourself observable. You do this by writing thoughts down. But the thing that people get stuck at while writing their own thoughts is that they only write down emotional thoughts. They think of writing a thought down only when it seems important enough and that usually happens when some thought has some emotional value attached. But that leaves most of your threads hidden. The solution to this problem is to think in writing where you write your thoughts as a way of thinking them instead of just thinking them in your head. If you want to think about something, and you think in writing so you get all of your thoughts down and not just selective ones. And you cannot leave this untangling of yourself to others because there is an inherent problem with that. A mechanic can untangle your car because he can see every single part in it and troubleshoot it in a controlled manner. This is not easy to do with your thinking by someone else because what you're thinking and feeling is not transparent to others. Others can only try to make best guesses and even then they will miss important context around your thinking. It is more likely that someone else looking at your thinking will replace a tyre when the axle was the problem than it is with a car (and it is already very likely with a car). To untangle your own thinking, you need to do the work yourself. Most people get stuck at 14 yr old level of thinking patterns because they never learned to look at their thoughts to improve their patterns. They got better at everything but at being themselves. Because they can’t look at their own thoughts, most people are also extremely emotionally immature because they don’t see their patterns well enough to regulate them. This is why psychiatry is partially a pseudo science while medicine is a proper science. Because while a doctor can see the exact way your intestine is in its place or not, no one can see how your thoughts are exactly. The tangles you have in your thoughts can only be worked on by you. But you can't even see the tangles unless you write them down. Writing down your bare thoughts and then visiting them later allows you to look at your thoughts from a higher level. You can now have thoughts about your thoughts. You cannot be at two levels at the same time. That’s why writing them down is necessary so you can switch to the second level of looking at your thoughts and seeing threads and then trying to untangle them. Being able to look at your own thoughts and notice patterns will help you identify causes for bad ones and nudges for good ones. A lot of people keep getting triggered by the same things without being able to change anything when often there is a possible change they can make in their environment or themselves to remove the triggers that cause problems for them. This also means that most people live sub optimal lives just because they are unable to see and fix repeating problems. And especially when it comes to themselves, people have been unable to see tangles and kept pulling on them blindly and ended up with tangles tightened into knots that form behaviour patterns. This exercise lets you look at your own problems. Let's say you notice you can't focus on something for too long. And you have notes on all the things that you are unable to do because of this but you will also find things where even though you could not focus, those things worked very well. For example, an administrative job involves a lot of distractions and is usually very good if you can focus only for short amounts of time and is extremely bad if you get obsessed about things and dislike losing focus. You can manage your life to fit you instead of trying to fit yourself to things that are antithetical to your main threads. Vacations for example are not a fit for me because my nervous system gets overwhelmed so all of my life’s annual leaves except one have been me retreating to a room and reading and thinking for 2 weeks straight without interacting with anyone. The third level is to look at how you looked at your tangles to see if your untangling approaches have any problems or if they could be made better. I will close this now with a word of caution. There are some tangles better left untouched. You should not try to solve all the tangles that you run into. Some tangles are not worth solving and some tangles are not yours to solve. The worst tangles to try to solve are someone else’s because you are going to get yourself tangled along with theirs for no apparent reason. What you can do is show others some tricks of how you untangle your thing but falling into the trap of thinking you can untangle someone else’s bundle is a lost cause. This applies to personal and professional settings. Because as you untangle some threads of their bundle, they will worsen some other tangles. The problem is that two people cannot work on the same bundle at the same time because one person pulling on a thread will make things worse for the other person. This is one reason adding more engineers to a product reduces the speed of product development instead of increasing it. Make sure people are working on entirely unconnected bundles when you hire engineers otherwise they’re just pulling opposite to each other and making each other’s work complicated. A better approach is to give engineers different things to work on or give them the same thing but at different times and that reduces the complexity to some extent. Thanks to Mujtaba, Laiba, Tamseel, Mumtaz, Maria and Affan for feedback that was incorporated into this essay.
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