I'm the main character of my world.

But am I the main character in someone else's world too?

There's a word for this: Sonder. It's that feeling that sneaks up on you when you're watching strangers on a bus or the subway.

That person probably has something weighing on them today. They're someone's child, someone's friend, someone's partner — carrying their own memories and wounds. To them, I'm just background noise. Like one of those Japanese city pop playlist videos on YouTube, where the world blurs and sways behind the music.

In that moment, the lens you've been looking through — the one where you're the center of everything — shifts just slightly. You feel it: everyone around you is the main character of their own life. That feeling, the one that's almost impossible to name, is Sonder.

So here we are — each of us the protagonist of our own story, and at the same time, background extras in everyone else's. But even though it's my eyes doing the seeing, I often find it easier and more familiar to look outward. To search for myself in the people and the world in front of me.

That's probably why I keep scrolling through short-form videos for hours, even though I know it's a trap. Why FOMO pulls at me no matter how hard I try to ignore it. Why I say I don't need help, but quietly ache for someone's love and attention. Even at work, I get hooked on being useful to others — and somewhere along the way, I forget about becoming genuinely capable.

Buffett and Munger often talked about the idea of a Circle of Competence when discussing their investment philosophy. An investor doesn't need to know everything — and shouldn't try to.

The size of that circle is not very important; knowing its boundaries, however, is vital.

I want to get clearer about the edges of what I understand — the shape of my own inner world, the contours of things I can't see directly. And while I want that clarity, I don't want to get too comfortable there either. There's a concept called the Zone of Excellence — the place where you're good at something, recognized for it, even rewarded for it. But I don't want to settle there. I want to slowly, deliberately stretch the boundaries of what I understand. When I run into something outside my circle, I don't want to dismiss it as wrong or false. I want to look at it carefully. If I can quietly widen my own understanding — little by little, on my own terms — that feels like something worth celebrating. Because when you get down to it, most of the problems in the world come from people not really knowing or understanding each other, or what's beyond their own experience.

I'm just out here trying things, doing whatever feels interesting — and yet some people look at me like I'm doing something remarkable, just because it looks different from what they're used to. Let's stop performing for the outside world. What's visible matters less than we think. Let's live as the protagonist actually moving through our own story. Let's become someone useful and capable — for ourselves. And if we happen to become a beautiful backdrop in someone else's life along the way? Well, with a little luck, that might just follow naturally.

The May sky looks like deep ocean water today.

The Zone of Excellence comes from Gay Hendricks' book The Big Leap — a self-development framework that maps out four zones where people tend to operate in work and life: Zone of Incompetence, Zone of Competence, Zone of Excellence, and Zone of Genius. The Zone of Excellence is where you're highly skilled, others recognize it, and the results show — but it doesn't make you feel deeply alive. The goal is to move toward the Zone of Genius: the place where your energy flows, and you create real value in a way that's distinctly yours.