10,000 Monte Carlo simulations

2026-05-16T00:00:00Z

A few years ago I gave up on my personal website because I could not fix some weird bug with git commands; yesterday I shipped full-fledged reporting for a product with backend, frontend and telegram alerts, and I still know only basics. Applied to my career in marketing/growth, this always felt inevitable: large parts of work will be carried away by automation and the job is to be worth more than what's left.

Early 2026, we've built glypticon.com as a tool to answer a question nobody can answer. Simple landing page, 8 fields form, 3 academic frameworks to identify how your job will change exactly in the next few years. And a single number as an output: when your career will be disrupted. Meta Ads on the US audience and 5k people reached with 60 seeing their career countdown number.

Sitting on my sofa, I watched session recordings from PostHog, noticing how Engineering Managers, Sales Directors and Clinical Applications Professionals get large red numbers: "June 2028, this is when your role will be significantly restructured". Some saw the number after 90 seconds of skills mapping python code and LLM APIs rustling in the background, and then dropped immediately. Some read all the complicated narrative, re-read, came back several times to the beginning. Two of them even ran the analysis twice, changing the job title, in hopes to see different headline number, but to no avail.

Laptop was pushing fans on max, my knees were struggling with extensive heat, and my mind was wandering somewhere else. A friend's wife tested it and shared voice note, saying directly that the analysis on her profile as a tech worker made her feel like shit. She would not come back, but there was nothing to come back to: only one number and numbing silence. She remembered a lot of red text emphasizing what was going away. She didn't recall any positives. The product told her the job is disappearing in a couple of years and offered no salvation.

This was not what I actually accounted for. I am more on excitement side. What is missing now is the meaning: I've tried to find it through pure cognition, reading thousands of words on robotics, autonomous weapons, autonomous vehicles. Modern warfare moral implications. LiDAR cost structure deep dives.

I went down into the rabbit hole; 17 deep research chats on finances after, late evening, I was running Monte Carlo simulations on my laptop, exploring how my profile of "growth manager in Berlin" would survive. Even though the world's volatility is high it said I have 100% chance of surviving economic shock; I will be fine. Glypticon gave strangers a red number and no meaning. My simulation gave me a green one, and no meaning either. I just tried to shield myself from daily volatility and the sense that singularity is near.

Waymo accumulated years of iterations in Arizona, and then, all at once, they started launching new cities every few months. No one handed over prediction and promise to the Waymo team. The bottleneck was never the technology itself. It was a human who knew when to stay and commit before clarity on what to do arrived.

I knew what to do and the knowing has stopped helping me.

All my homies studied Hammurabi Code

2026-02-11T00:00:00Z

Our parents, early social circle, everything around us forms our personality.

I found out that Alex Karp is a philosopher, which makes sense! CEO of Palantir, of all companies, thinks in arguments, meanings and assumptions at the deepest possible level. His mind is total, targeting the reasoning itself, which allowed him to build a controversial, but highly influential and successful company, with intelligence agencies as the clients, and lots of fear and hate from usual folks.

Looking at him you can see how profound the impact of studies on one's mindset can be, creating a Personality OS that's a building block of everything person touches. I've studied history, and in my youth I was sitting together with bright minds obsessed over Babylon, ancient Egypt, Vikings, people citing Schopenhauer by memory or people drowning in the dark secrets of the 20th century. All my homies studied Hammurabi Code.

I. Personality OS

Our professor told us that we always will be wired to look at all aspects of life through lenses of historical process.

I am contextualising by default, asking what context produced the outcome. I always do periodisation and pattern recognition — time can be chopped into pieces with transitions in between. I am trained to be a sceptic to the sources. I see everything as a narrative and forces behind it. And my superpower is contingency over inevitability. Nothing is fixed, nothing is settled, anything can change.

Some people tell me that I am a very structured person, which is true, but this is just the way historical education wired me. This is a baseline; at the end, I am not in academia. What people read as being structured is actually just a side effect, same as being cultured. Sophistication and depth is a hollow echo, a binding byproduct of burning the fresh neurons of your young brain with the OS of a highly analytical mindset, achieved through countless hours of meticulously studying how peasants in the Russian Empire arrived at the revolution of 1905.

Good question to ask: what personality do you have? What period of life impacted your lenses? Do these lenses help in what you do, or would it be better to rewire them?

II. Going upstream

I can be extroverted, but naturally more introverted. I am super analytical but can go all in on a gut feeling if needed. What people usually are not able to catch is that I've spent the last 10–15 years rewiring myself in various directions.

I recently had one of those conversations where you realize the other person has a completely different theory of how a self should be built.

My point was: I designed my Personality OS on purpose. I was very shy so I started working in direct cold sales in University. I am speaking at conferences. I don't like it. I stress very much around it. But pushing myself through stressful and uncomfortable situations over and over again, year over year, and now do it effortlessly. For me this was an uphill battle, but I designed it myself because only I decide what's possible for me what not.

Her point was: a self-caring approach, where the stress is an indicator that you can overcome it, but it won't come naturally to you, so you better focus on what you do the best. This is the dominating approach in the mass-culture. In abundance of meanings, oversupply of options, real hard work (always internal) is being neglected. She is not wrong that stress is a signal. But how you interpret this signal is wired by your OS as well! For me this is a marker of uncharted territory, where growth is still possible. Not everything in life comes naturally: without stress, tension, and tearing you apart, so stress can be a good signal.

No, you don't need to go with the flow and live a slow life, I cannot disagree more. If you focus only on what you do the best, you do not boost your weak points and sail with everyone, downstream. Historical thinking is inherently analytical, retrospective and contemplative, but I am building, which is the exact opposite: making decisions fast, not having the full picture. This creates tension. But this tension brought me to the better positions in life.

Many advice will be focused on how you can ride with the flow. Bank on hype. But this is boring. What tension you should bring to your life to stop being a victim of your own weaknesses?

III. Bet a lot, bet often

If you recognise your wiring as a limiting factor, and you start rewriting your OS, there are many ways you can do this.

I suggest to bet often, bet what you can afford to lose, look for asymmetry. I don't want to do one new thing per year. I like the approach called Kelly criterion: you have limited portfolio of time, energy, resources, and you bet it in a sequence, trying to maximise expected long-term value. It is about sizing bets in a correct way, and betting amounts you can survive losing.

The downside of missing targets as a Direct Sales manager is limited: I would still be a history student. And the upside is potentially unlimited: career opportunities, higher sales commissions, landing the dream job in B2B SaaS. This was a wise bet, to bet on Sales jobs. For me, talking to people could give outsized returns, if placed correctly and wisely.

The living tension for me is my tendency to overanalyse and overcomplicate and do not trust any single source. Then, betting allows me a safe space where I can say to myself that I'll try this thing simple, won't trying to become a PhD-level expert in it, and just DO stuff. Few years ago it was almost impossible for me, now I do this effortlessly, switching between Mark who is a highly analytical, and Mark who does first and see what sticks second. Not all bets are winning: I am far away from the trajectory that I was given by my surroundings and my education, but nowhere near where I wanted to be. So I keep betting. Moving countries, building products, building connections with bright minds.

Go upstream, bet wisely, act fast. All my homies studied Hammurabi Code; what wired you to end up here?

IV. Epilogue