At the end of last year, I shared more than a decade of very real, very spectacular ****-ups with my Stripe colleagues in an internal conference, a few weeks after touching on the same theme at Fuckup Nights Bucharest. What surprised me wasn't the stories themselves, but how clearly I could see the shift underneath them once I started putting them on paper.

At 23, I genuinely believed I could control life through effort. I took my first manager role, had 11 people and 16 projects, worked 12–14h days, and occasionally slept on office floors. I thought that was what commitment looked like. What I actually got was burnout and a pretty harsh lesson: control and effort, on their own, don't scale.

At 33, my plan looks nothing like that. It's closer to spaghetti thrown at a wall — messy, vivid, occasionally beautiful, and completely unclear in terms of where it's heading. 🍝
And somehow, I'm more okay with that than ever.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped treating life like a waterfall project — plan, build, deploy, success — and started treating it like what it really is: an unpredictable bowl of mud, full of variables you don't see until you step in them.

What emerged for me wasn't a life philosophy, but a few working principles.
I default to curiosity over certainty (because certainty usually means missing data), choose play over perfection, and try to apply systems thinking to myself with brutal honesty about what's actually working.

I also started tracking what I call investment buckets — career, relationships, health, hobbies, presence, and others. The uncomfortable truth is that you can only meaningfully invest in about three at a time. So instead of chasing balance, I work in seasons.

🍂 Right now, I'm exiting a deep career season — over a year into Stripe — and I'm very aware that my friendship and relationship buckets are running on old batteries.

People sometimes ask where the energy comes from. It's not energy. It's alignment. I try to shape each season around a few pillars of joy (big shoutout to David, who inspired me to refine it), enough that when I wake up, I'm at least curious about the day ahead. Not every day. Not even most days. But enough.

And when things start feeling off — unmotivated, restless, that quiet resistance to getting out of bed — I don't panic. I start an incident report on myself. 🚨
More often than not, one of the buckets is underfunded and entropy is just doing entropy things.

I'm thinking of turning this into a Sunday habit: messy, honest notes from building a career and life in public, without pretending I've figured it out.

P.S. Fun story: I wanted to be a priest at 9, a doctor at 17, a president at 23–25. Now I'm just hoping to become a really good person. Keep iterating.

Big thank you to Oana for giving me the nudge to push more out there.