• I’ve been languishing for a long, lonely time. The tragic back-to-back losses of Nora & Isaac’s predecessors broke the mental dam I’d built to repress a lifetime of real-life nightmares, and I’ve been drowning in a torrent of re-traumatization ever since. In my violent descent to rock bottom, I lost almost everything—my happiness, my health,

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  • Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance was radically refreshing—an unabashed celebration of joy, love, care, hope, pride, freedom, and community—and what rendered it transcendent was not merely its virtuosic coding of critique around conflict, identity, diaspora, rebellion, liberation, oppression, and nationality, but its gleeful illegibility to its most ardent and incensed critics, achieved largely because Benito

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  • In our last 1:1, my Co-CEO, Lawrence, dispensed one of the most perspicacious descriptions of leadership I have ever heard. The professor I regard as the progenitor of leadership studies, Dr. James MacGregor Burns, observed in his seminal work Leadership that there are as many definitions of leadership as there are people defining it. Yet

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  • In the next episode of New Material—one of the rawest and realest we’ve ever recorded—you’ll hear me vent to my friend and co-host Herbert Lui about my escalating frustration with re-approaching creation (writing my next book, crafting a new keynote speech, building my startup, etc.) for an audience operating with previous iterations of Hamza Khan

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  • Yesterday, I had a low-grade, heated exchange with two of my co-founders—one that’s still sizzling in my subconscious 24 hours later. At the centre of it was a familiar (and historically complicated) hypothetical: what happens if one employee feels slighted because another employee earns the same, despite putting in “more hours”? I pushed back with

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  • While I fundamentally agree with John Lasseter—and Pixar’s belief that quality is the best business plan—there’s a time-compressed, resource-hungry reality to building an AI product in the age of the singularity. Early in my career, I learned about a concept known as the “Iron Triangle,” which suggests you can usually optimize only two of three

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  • Feel First, React Later

    You’re burning out. You’re feeling hopeless. You’re getting nowhere. Before you start reacting counterproductively while in caught in the gyrations of a loss spiral—and potentially dig yourself into oblivion—take a deep breath and just sit in the shit a little longer. Donald Sull is a Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of

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  • A Toast For The Underdogs

    Do not—I repeat, do not—try this at home: administer, in a child’s formative years, the battery of (1) poverty, (2) adverse childhood experiences, (3) gangsta rap, (4) the immigrant hustle, and (5) the disorientation of growing up in Scarborough. The headspace of an underdog fashioned by those factors is punishing during periods of relative peace;

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  • Now, if we’re really talking about loss—and how it lurks at the core of why humans experience psychological stress—then my accountant, Brian, may know me better than my therapist. In our monthly catch-up call, I vented to Brian that becoming a new father to radiant twins has come with more than its fair share losses—but

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  • After circling the lot for minutes on end, you’re finally about to snag a parking spot—when another vehicle cuts you off and slides into it without hesitation. If that scene enrages you and, within seconds, you begin assembling a mental portrait of the kind of person who would do that, you’re not alone—but you are

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