The 2 p.m. Sun
Midday Stillness and the Ideas We Miss While Rushing. A Letter from Kuala Lumpur Personal reflection on how the scorching midday hours, those moments we dismiss as dead time, might hold more wisdom than our obsession with constant productivity. On Mediterranean heat, ancestral traditions, and learning to stop.
The other day I found myself sitting in my office in Kuala Lumpur, looking out the window while the relentless Malaysian midday sun shone over the skyscrapers. It reminded me of those suffocating days in Algiers, when the same Mediterranean sun was reflected on the white walls of the Casbah
There is something peculiar at that time of day. It's as if time stopped and everyone went into a kind of collective trance. Merchants close their stores, the streets empty, and only the buzzing of the air conditioning remains as the soundtrack of our modern lives
For years I have pursued success as someone who pursues a shadow in this schedule – always moving, always looking for the next great idea, the next revolutionary project. But lately I have realized that it is in these moments of apparent stillness when the best ideas bloom
The other day, while watching a woman struggling with several shopping bags under the scorching sun, I had an epiphany about a new delivery service that could solve this everyday problem. Sometimes the most innovative solutions are born from observing the mundane with new eyes
The siesta, that tradition that I criticized so much in my early years as an entrepreneur, now I see it as an act of ancestral wisdom. In that limbo between morning productivity and the second air of the afternoon, there is a space for contemplation that our startup culture rarely values
I have realized that my best business decisions did not arise in frantic meetings or brainstorming sessions, but in these moments of forced calm, when the sun is at its zenith and the world seems to slow down
Maybe it's time for us to rethink our relationship with these "dead" moments. Instead of fighting them, we could take advantage of them as spaces for silent innovation. After all, the true art of entrepreneurship is not to move faster, but to know when to stop and observe
Sometimes I wonder if we are not so busy chasing the next great success that we forget to look up and contemplate the sun at 2 in the afternoon
I write in the shadow of the past, while the future fades.
Whispers live here
Words linger longer when they come from the heart.