A chat about curiosity, imperfection, and knowing when enough is enough

A few days ago, İsmail sent me an email asking if he could send me some questions to answer for his Turkish-language blog. I really liked the questions and thought they would fit well here on my blog too, as they are all related to the topics I discuss here. You can find the original interview here.

Could you introduce yourself?

My name is Alberto, and I really enjoy making apps and writing. I’m naturally curious, so I suppose I have more interests than I’d sometimes like to admit. When I’m away from a screen, though, I mostly take photos, travel, write, read, and go for long walks.

Basically, I live the life of a retired gentleman.

How did you get into the software world?

It all started back in high school. A few friends and I had a football blog where we wrote about something we loved, and we spent a lot of time working on it. The blog was hosted on Blogger, and I was already interested in design at the time. I had also learned to use Photoshop a few years earlier.

So when we decided to give the blog template a new look, I was the one who took on the job. I started with the basics, copying and pasting lines of HTML and CSS without really understanding what I was doing. And that was the beginning of my journey into software.

I really liked your article titled “My life strategy is entirely based on curiosity.” People are now building personal brands and planning everything. Aren’t they doing things “just” out of curiosity anymore? Is curiosity decreasing? (I haven’t quite clarified my question :))

That curiosity you’re asking about is something I’ve thought about a lot. I think it comes from scarcity more than abundance. We live in a time of abundance in almost everything: food, information, relationships, entertainment, activities. And when everything is available all the time, it can become difficult to leave enough space to think, reflect, or simply let something catch our attention.

The fact that we can see what’s happening on the other side of the world with a single click, know exactly what a place will look like before we travel there, or watch 400 YouTube reviews before buying something also takes away some of the excitement. By the time we finally have the thing or arrive at the place, we already know so much about it that there’s less left to discover.

I think curiosity comes from things we haven’t seen before. From picking up a book without reading any reviews and being surprised by it. From choosing a movie at random and discovering that it’s completely different from what we expected. From getting lost in the streets of a random city. From listening to a genre of music we’ve never heard before. From signing up for a class we never imagined we would take.

Curiosity starts with scarcity, with boredom, and with that little spark that comes from being surprised by something or discovering that we like it.

That’s why I think we need to be more careful about what we consume and leave a little more room for the unknown. We should allow ourselves to be a bit more blind to what’s coming next and give ourselves the opportunity to explore it without already knowing what we’re going to find.

In your article titled “What happens when everything is perfect?”, you mention how artificial intelligence affects creativity. Why is imperfection important for humanity?

That same idea, of leaving room for the unknown, connects to why I think imperfection matters. It brings out the most human part of us. We are all deeply fallible, and it is precisely this shared vulnerability that allows us to empathize with one another. We are all made up of successes and failures, and it is often through these shared experiences that we connect with other people.

That is one of the beautiful things about being alive: knowing that you are going to make mistakes, that things will not always go according to plan, and that both nature and the world around us are inherently imperfect. Those imperfections are what give life its unexpected turns and make it interesting. If everything were perfect, the world would, sadly, be rather boring. It is all those rough edges we each carry that make us more interesting to others. They may be similar, but no two people have exactly the same ones.

There is a very clear example of this in the article, where I talk about the movie Her. The film takes place in a futuristic world where AI is incredibly powerful and can practically do everything for you. Yet Theodore, the protagonist, spends his time writing handwritten letters.

Why? If AI can write them better and more perfectly, why would he do it himself?

For the same reason you might treasure your daughter’s imperfect drawing or a handwritten letter from a friend more than something technically flawless. You appreciate the effort behind it. You can feel that someone took the time to think about it, to write it, and to make it with care. It may not be perfect, but it is completely theirs. And that imperfection is precisely what makes it meaningful.

I agree with your article titled “They ruined our experience of discovering new things.” We are in an era where everything looks the same. Do you have any advice on how to find or create truly valuable content?

Following on from that, I think there’s still a glimmer of hope in such a homogeneous world. We have access to all the information in the world, so that’s where I would start.

Read books that were written more than 100 years ago. Escape the bestseller section and look for books written by authors from countries you know little about. The same applies to other forms of content. Search YouTube, follow whatever topics genuinely interest you, and get lost in Wikipedia.

And this applies to the offline world too. Visit lesser-known cities. Explore neighborhoods that aren’t popular where you live. Go to local shops and look for old books, movies, or objects they happen to sell. Visit a street market and look for things from another era.

Take ideas from all these things that aren’t part of the mainstream and give them your own unique perspective. Your voice is unique, and it’s something nobody can take away from you.

The way all those different interests come together is what makes you unique. Add your own life experiences to the mix, and I’m sure something uncommon can emerge from it.

You have an article titled “On making things that matter.” As an independent developer, how do you decide whether a new idea is “worth building” or “meaningful”?

That same personal starting point applies to what I build, too. My approach has always been pretty simple: is it useful to me? If the answer is yes, I build it. If the answer is no, I don’t. That’s basically it.

Of course, if you want to make a living from building software, you eventually have to go beyond that. But I still think this first part is important. When you use something every day, you can improve it through your own experience. You feel the frustrations of using something that doesn’t work well, and you naturally start thinking about how it could be better.

It’s much harder to solve a problem from the outside when you’re not experiencing it yourself. It’s easier to fix a problem from within, although sometimes being on the outside can give you a clearer perspective.

How can we keep our curiosity alive in adulthood and when we get lost in daily routines? How does your learning process work when you become curious about a new subject (e.g., a new programming language or a philosophical movement)?

Coming back to curiosity, I’ve never really learned anything in a formal way. I was a mediocre student at school, and I’ve never been the best at anything. Letting go of the idea that if you learn something, you have to be good at it is incredibly liberating. It allows you to approach learning more like a game.

For example, I’m learning Chinese now because my wife is from Taiwan. But I’m in no rush, and I don’t have a specific goal I want to reach within a year or two. I’m simply trying to set aside some time each day to do something without a clear objective, where the goal is simply to see what happens.

You can spend that time reading about something completely unrelated to your work, watching a movie that looks interesting, going for a long walk and exploring parts of your city you don’t usually visit, sitting in a café and watching people, or simply lying down and doing nothing.

Curiosity tends to emerge when we have nothing to do. Children start asking questions when they get bored, and they start looking for things to entertain themselves when they get bored. That is where curiosity comes from: boredom.

What does success mean to you?

That freedom I just mentioned, to set my own pace, is really at the center of how I think about success. I think of success along three axes: freedom, time, and relationships.

In a capitalist world, pursuing freedom and time usually means you need money. But when you stop putting money first, you often find that you need less of it too.

People who put money first can end up losing both freedom and time in the process of pursuing it. If you know what “enough” means for you, I think it makes sense to build your life around that instead.

I’m nowhere near rich, and I probably have enough savings to live for a year or two. But having the freedom to start new projects, experiment, and see what happens, along with the time to actually do those things, is what a successful life looks like to me.

Having good relationships with the people you love is the other piece of it. In a way, this becomes much easier when you have freedom and time. You can actually spend time with them, and you have the mental energy to be present.

So I suppose that’s my definition of success: enough money to have freedom, enough freedom to have time, and enough time to share with the people I love.

If I asked you to make a list of recommendations, what would they be? (Movies, books, TV series, blogs, YouTube channels, etc.)

5 Movies

City of God
Cinema Paradiso
Grave of the Fireflies
Casino
The Great Beauty

5 Series

Wild Wild Country
Our Planet
Adolescence
Beef
One Day

5 Books

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Usefulness of the Useless by Nuccio Ordine
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

5 YouTube Channels / Blogs

Do you follow the news? If I asked you to give a list of people worth following, who would they be?

I never follow the news, or keep up with what’s happening in the world, unless it’s something so big that you simply can’t escape it.

If you do want to follow the news, I’d recommend finding a newsletter from an independent writer or publisher and supporting them directly. Otherwise, I think it’s very easy to end up with a distorted and overly negative view of the world, because the things that make the news are rarely the things that represent everyday life.

What advice would you give to those who want to enter this field? Everyone is entering through artificial intelligence or other means. What advice would you give to those who want to improve?

The industry is tough these days. But if you want to get into it, you have to find a way to differentiate yourself.

Maybe that means developing skills beyond programming that can make you more valuable, or building connections through social media by sharing the things you’re working on.

Experimenting, trying things, and talking to people are incredibly important skills in any industry. One thing is for sure: a company isn’t going to show up at your door and offer you a job. You have to put yourself out there.

And if you want to get better, copy things at the beginning and learn from them. Copying is a way of understanding how someone else solved a problem, so that eventually you can take what you learned and try to do it better yourself.

How do you spend your day?

My days are deliberately unstructured. I usually go for a walk in the morning and work in the afternoon, but everything else is open.

Some days I go hiking, some days I work from a café, and some days I meet someone. Some days I play games, like Football Manager or Pokémon. Other days, I might have a simple idea for a project and spend the entire day working on it. Sometimes I just feel like writing, so I write and write.

There are a few things I need to do every week to keep the business running and take care of myself as a human being. Beyond that, most of my time is driven by pure curiosity.

How did you start blogging?

I’ve always enjoyed sharing the things I experience. As Tarantino puts it, “I do film for myself and everyone is invited.”

I think that captures the essence of a blog. You write about what you experience, in your own way, and invite other people to get to know you through it.

I think the first blog I started was back in 2011, although honestly, I don’t remember exactly.

What I do know is that blogging is a fantastic way to find like-minded people. That’s probably the main reason I keep writing: to connect with others.

What is your perspective on making money online? How should a content creator make money?

If you can make money from something you genuinely enjoy putting your time and effort into, that’s amazing, right? It’s no different from any other kind of job. Most people would rather make a living doing something they enjoy than spend their days somewhere that makes them hate what they do.

As for how to do it, I honestly don’t know because I’m not a content creator. But I suppose the first step is to stop thinking of yourself as a “content creator.”

I see two possible paths: the easier one, although still difficult, and the harder one, which I find much more appealing.

You can follow the trends, make whatever kind of low-effort videos are getting attention, and put them online hoping that someone looking for a quick dopamine hit will watch them. Or you can create something you genuinely care about and put real effort into it. Of course, the second path takes much more time, and there’s no guarantee that it will work.

But if you eventually succeed, I think you’ll feel a sense of achievement that you could never get from simply chasing whatever happens to be popular at the moment.

The other thing I’ve learned is that things usually take much longer than we expect. It can easily take five or ten years of working on something without getting much back from it. So I would ask myself a simple question: what would I still be willing to work on for the next five or ten years even if I didn’t get much in return for everything I was putting into it?

I think that’s a much better way to decide what’s worth pursuing.

I agree with you about “5 Things That Used to Be Normal and Are Now a Luxury.” Do you think there’s a way to incorporate these things into the norm of life, to make them commonplace through repetition?

Being offline

The only way I’ve found that works for me is to deliberately make time when you don’t use the internet. Time for yourself.

Again, it comes back to the two axes I mentioned in a previous question: freedom and time. If you have the freedom to decide how you spend your time, and you’re not tied to an office job where you need to be constantly available or to a company that fills your calendar with meetings, you can actually do it. You can spend time doing whatever you want without checking a single device.

It’s difficult, but attainable.

Silence

This one is really difficult. In my case, I’m very sensitive to sound, and I’ve never really found a good way to experience true silence.

The only solution I’ve found is to escape to a rural place a few times a year and spend some time there. But even that takes a lot of effort. It can be expensive, and quite often you arrive somewhere expecting peace and quiet only to find people being loud anyway.

I suppose that’s the frustrating thing about silence: sometimes you have to go quite far to find it, and even then, you can’t really guarantee it will be there.

One-ingredient food

Supermarkets are full of shit. This one is actually very easy for me now. I simply buy basic ingredients, and we cook from scratch at home about 95% of the time.

The difficult part is that you have to be extremely conscious about what you’re buying. You need to check ingredients and labels like a maniac every time you go grocery shopping.

It’s sad that it has to be this way, but for me, it’s the only way to avoid buying things I don’t actually want to eat.

Being served by a person

I suppose the only way we’ll see more of this is by supporting these kinds of businesses. Try to buy locally, from grocery stores where you know the people behind the counter. Support online businesses run by small teams that genuinely care about their customers and take customer service seriously.

At the end of the day, we have the freedom to choose where we spend our money. We can use that freedom to help these businesses grow instead of allowing them to be pushed aside by large corporations.

Clothes made of natural fibers

This is a bit like food. You need to do the research and be a maniac when you’re shopping. There are options, but the quality can be surprisingly poor.

So my advice is simple: have less, but buy better quality. And whenever possible, look for natural fibers. Your body will thank you.

You have also visited Türkiye. As a Turk, I am curious about your views on Türkiye. How did you find the city and its people? Was there a moment that particularly impressed you?

I’ll tell you two stories about taxis that I think illustrate this really well.

The first one happened in Spain, where I’m from. My partner at the time and I were taking a taxi to the airport when the driver fell asleep at the wheel on the highway. We almost had a very serious accident. I contacted the taxi company afterwards, expecting them to take the situation seriously, but they did absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. That driver simply continued driving irresponsibly, and I can only hope that nobody was ever hurt because of it.

The second one happened in Istanbul. My mother and I were heading to our apartment from the airport, and I had booked the taxi through BiTaksi. When we arrived, I accidentally left everything in the taxi: my passport, wallet, AirPods, and several other things. It was a complete mess.

I called BiTaksi thinking, “They’re probably not going to do anything about this.” But it was exactly the opposite. They helped me throughout the whole process, in very good English, contacted the driver, and eventually he brought everything back to me. I only had to pay for the return trip to the apartment, which I thought was completely fair.

I’ll always remember that gesture because it allowed me to enjoy the rest of the trip with my mother instead of spending the whole time worrying about what I had lost. And I think that experience completely changed how I saw the country.

Turkey, and other countries like it, sometimes have a reputation for being unsafe. But in this case, I can only say good things about Turkey. I love the way you treat tourists. There’s always a smile, someone offering you tea, someone stopping to talk and ask questions. That curiosity I’ve been talking about throughout this interview.

What impressed me most is how much the countries around the Mediterranean share in terms of values and our general approach to life, despite our obvious cultural differences. We like to live life, enjoy time with friends, have a drink together, and talk for hours. We are brothers and sisters of the same sea.

We also have a very different relationship with work and life compared with more Protestant-influenced cultures such as the Nordic countries, Germany, or Switzerland. For us, life is not something that happens around work. Work is part of life, but life itself is at the center. I think that makes it easier for us to connect with each other.

I’ve been to Turkey twice, and I hope to come back many more times.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I’ll leave you with a phrase I really like: “Los tiempos se igualan”, which roughly translates to “times even out.”

It basically means that both good and bad times will come. Both are part of life. If you’re going through a difficult period, you can take comfort in knowing that better times will eventually come. And if you’re going through a good period, enjoy it, because it will eventually pass too.

Life is very fleeting, and sometimes we give far too much importance to things that ultimately don’t matter that much. So if you’re reading this and there’s something you want to try, do it. Don’t overthink it. Go for it.

In the end, we didn’t come into this world with a predetermined purpose. We give life meaning through the things we choose to do.

There’s a line from Emerson’s Orchard by the Spanish writer Luis Landero that I really like:

To live is to be on a journey toward nowhere, and only the journey gives meaning to existence.

Two men playing chess on a park bench while a third watches