Sometimes an idea comes to me before I know why. Over time, I’ve learned to trust that feeling—to explore what piqued my curiosity and dig into what made the matter meaningful.

Lately, I’ve been leaving things behind, intentionally. Objects that hold meaning, ones that might one day draw me back. I don’t collect valuables, but I do grow attached to specific items—things I’ve spent time with, like a pen, a desk, or a lamp.

Leaving a place is rarely ideal. But I remind myself that life is short, and I’m grateful to have had the privilege of movement in this life. Moving to Canada, for instance, was a difficult choice; a trade-off between the comfort of family and friends and the potential for a brighter future.

Over the years, I’ve developed a habit: when leaving a place, I often leave behind an object—not deliberately at first, but it became intentional as time went on. These objects, I imagined, might greet me on my return and spark excitement to resume what was left behind.

One such object was a wooden meeting table in our Toronto office, which we closed just before COVID. My father and I had built that table together. He was insistent on adding a power outlet to the tabletop, wiring it perfectly so everyone could charge their devices with ease. For years, it was the centerpiece of many productive meetings.

When my father fell ill, I had to leave Toronto and fly back to Iran. It was a bittersweet goodbye, and I decided to let the office go along with most of its furniture. However, I asked the team taking over our space to keep the table for me, hoping I might reclaim it someday.

Years passed. My father passed away—a loss that lingered in every corner of my life. He had always thought my move from Toronto was a mistake, but I carried his memory with me in everything I did. After COVID, when the same building and unit became available, I returned to Toronto, hoping to reunite with that table.

The team who had taken it no longer occupied the office. They had moved on but shared photos on Instagram of celebrations around my table. I was genuinely happy to still see our table was still in one piece, featured in such joyful moments, even as they didn’t respond to my messages.

For weeks, I waited and tried to reach them, but there was no reply. I stood in the same room where the table once lived, hoping to reclaim that connection to my father. Eventually, I let go. I built a new table—not as beautiful, not as meaningful, but mine nonetheless.

That experience taught me something: leaving something behind is a way of staying connected, but it’s not always about holding on. Sometimes, it’s about making room for new beginnings.

Last year, I left a whiteboard behind, fully aware of what I was doing. That small act led to something bigger—a new office and a new business built on one of my oldest ideas.

Being creative is something I’ve been lucky to have without fully understanding why. But I often find myself lacking intuition or motivation, going through my lows, and struggling to climb back up.

This happens especially when I’m under pressure, traumatized by a loss, or trying to process a situation that suddenly feels out of control.

Like most people, I’m no expert in these matters. My experiences come from observing myself and reflecting on the changes I go through as I live each day. What intrigues me to write about this is perhaps my own struggles and how I manage to rise above them—how I climb back up on difficult days, as part of this journey.

Over the past few years, I’ve made changes to my environment, including the people I surround myself with. I’ve realized that a change of scenery—whether through traveling or living somewhere new—can bring fresh energy. But that spark is often short-lived.

What has left the biggest impact are the meaningful experiences I’ve shared with people, whether while traveling or right at home.

My life revolves around people. I feel most inspired when I’m helping others, solving their problems, or creating moments that bring us closer together. To me, happiness is about connection—being together and creating wonderful memories.

At the same time, I make sure to spend plenty of time alone. Reflection is what helps me recharge and figure out what’s worth giving to the people I care about. There’s a balance between nurturing myself at home and staying grounded enough to offer my best to others.

My toughest days have patterns, and I’ve learned to recognize them. For example, when I’m excited to sleep, it’s usually because I’m not excited to be awake. That’s often my first sign of depression creeping back in.

When this happens, I know what to do: I get up, move around, clean my home, and get ready for the day. A tidy home and being dressed make a surprising difference.

Then I sit down with my instrument. I start playing and let myself stay in that moment as long as I can—until my mind is filled with happiness, ideas, and inspiration. I lose myself in the flow, and suddenly, I’m back in the zone, ready to start an amazing day.

I think we all have an “instrument” in our lives. Maybe it’s not musical, but it’s something that helps us quiet the logical side of our brains and escape the spiral of overthinking.

For me, it’s movement and flow—playing music, listening to inspiring people, or even diving into a great podcast. These simple acts are what break the cycle of slow, difficult days for me.

Life is tough and depressing at times—it’s brutal. But we all learn that this is just life. We only have some control, and the harder we try to control everything, the tougher it feels. But when we let go, we discover new meanings, and those meanings continue in shaping our understanding and who we are.

When I started thinking about building a business back in my college days, I needed something that paid more than minimum wage and could support the expenses I had. It wasn’t easy, especially as an international student in Canada.

I had been coding since my early days in secondary school, as soon as I got my hands on my first PC—the Pentium model, which was already capable of running Windows, starting with Windows 3.0 before it got fancier with Windows 95. I immediately liked the DOS and command-line environment and started hacking into it. I broke the PC and reformatted it every few days, then started fixing our neighbors’ and family members’ computers, all the way up to my father’s company. I loved solving puzzles and intuitively learning.

I started coding with QBasic, then moved on to Visual Basic. When I went to learn the C programming language, my teacher thought I was too early, since my school math hadn’t reached far enough to support the logic I was about to learn!

Something I realize now is that learning at an early age isn’t difficult at all. It’s probably something we naturally start to do as our brains are curious and love learning. At later ages, this is still the case, but now we are more complex—we have many interests, worries, and distractions.

As I began this post, I thought my inspiration stemmed from doing what I could to solve the first challenge I encountered. I started a radio station in college, which led to everyone knowing I was into digital stuff and could make websites! This was very unintentional, but it led to my entire career as a freelancer and, later, to developing our agency, Noble Pixels.

Since then, acting on the next idea has brought more opportunities than I could usually handle over the years. I’ve been fortunate to receive mentorships that helped me grow my network, build teams, and lead at times.

My next idea is often inspired while serving others—when I see their problems and realize how my time and energy could improve their lives. I’ve learned that identifying those challenges is the first key step. Having the resources, processes, and capabilities to solve them comes next in achieving those goals—and perhaps moving to the next inspiring idea!

I’ve often thought being an early adopter is an advantage some are luckier or smarter to have, but I hardly find myself being an early adopter of anything. I fit in the average, and I think that’s OK!

Speaking in 2024, when information has reached new depths through AI, almost anything can be learned with a few voice commands. But AI has probably been around for a decade, and I wasn’t fascinated by it—nor scared. In fact, I was just busy learning coding and enjoying making things automated, a little more efficient! Looking back, I think if I had been an early adopter, I would have invested in AI much earlier. But nonetheless, I believe my knowledge and expertise are finding their medium in this new era.

I recall in 2010 when APIs were just becoming available to integrate with Excel, Google Analytics, and Google AdWords. That’s when I started automating reports. With tools like ChatGPT and Copilot now allowing file uploads and already understanding general SEO knowledge, I couldn’t wait to upload my first Webmaster Tools file and ask questions! What are my top-performing keywords? What are the low-hanging fruits? What is a good strategy to focus on? Suddenly, I was saving hours every day!

These days, I’m so excited to teach people how to use AI. I think it’s crucial to integrate now as an average consumer to upgrade our craft and translate our jobs into this new era.

More recently, I’ve been asking candidates about their use of AI and their perspectives during interviews. I still encounter resistance, especially from the creative side, where many feel their jobs are threatened. This is a similar reality we’ve faced during past evolutions, and we only have the power to influence and help correct its course! Think Abacuses to Calculators to Excel. Typewriters vs. Computers and Now AI!

As a mainstream consumer of technology, somewhat in the tech field I find venues of change that we are part of and we are quickly refining the way we process our information, from spell-checking our grammers to find the next place to travel or making our investments.

However, with the generalization of AI and the influx of convoluted ideas that aren’t ours, I’ve decided to stick with my voice and not use AI for writing my content, as I find that distracting for my future self. I prefer to be able to look back and know what I was thinking, even for the smallest of matters.

The greater realization is that we all know we’re in an era of change. Similar to cryptocurrencies that transformed many people’s futures, we are witnessing fast-paced progress in changing our habits and social exchanges through the force of AI. We may question every message we read as others use AI—and consider how we would respond if we choose to be ourselves, while also not falling behind the norms, not losing our jobs, or avoiding the need to do something uninspiring as a result of the rapid AI transformation.

In past being an early adopter in such speed wasn’t essential or perhaps even practical given our focuses. Even in skilled jobs as an Engineer, an Artist, or an Accountant, most of us are dedicated to our daily jobs and have spent years studying and practicing our professions. I think the easiest way to integrate AI into our lives is by using it to learn and accomplish what inspires us more efficiently. Perhaps, if you’re in research, you’ve had the chance to test AI much sooner—similar to how search engines became a necessity for accessing information. But for many other industries, AI can be the key to staying ahead or excelling in their businesses during this wave of change.

As an entrepreneur, I’m learning about business and finances the hard way—through costly mistakes. Early on, my amazing mentor, Mark Wicken, advised me to have a reliable accountant and a reliable lawyer to support my growth. Others successful peers ahead concerning me often, “You need to learn the finances. Without it, you’ll never gain control of your business.”

While these tips sounded right, they require a consciousness that comes from experience. In my case trying as a software developer, my passion was building and I yet had to learn things the hard way, often leading to hardships. These challenges, though painful, are valuable lessons that I hope to share in a way that could be meaningful to others and help their growth.

Over the years, I developed a 7-daily CEO chore list to help me stay on track. However, until last year, I made the mistake of prioritizing project management over finance and marketing, leaving those areas for end-of-month and quarterly reviews.

In 2024, I reorganized my list and shifted my focus:

1. Finance
2. Sales
3. Marketing
4. Operations
5. Team
6. Clients
7. Projects

This was a major shift. Instead of starting my day with projects, clients, and team-related tasks, I began prioritizing the harder parts first: finance, then marketing and sales. Although it sounds simple, this was a big adjustment. I had to trust that my teams were handling delegated tasks, while I focused on maintaining a healthy business by prioritizing finances.

This practice has been an interesting experiment. Each day, I write out my daily document with these seven items and time-box my day. However, I’ve felt overwhelmed and realized the need for an even more focused format and I’m starting to shift to a slightly different, weekly model of same 7-CEO Choirs.

I’m considering switching to a weekly system. For example, I could combine tasks like Sales and Finance on one day, Marketing and Operations on another, and dedicate separate days to Teams, Clients, and Projects. This would create a manageable 5- to 6-day cycle each week.

Developing Digital Experience Management solutions has been an integral part of my work over the past two decades. Started with Content Management (CMS) development, to more sophisticated developments for enterprises like hisense-usa.com, where I led the architecture and platform engineering of a complex process and developing a Digital Experience Management or DXM.

What is a DXM?

We come across the need for a Digital Experience Management through breaking the components of a CMS and sometimes the extensions of it such as a Client Relationship Management (CRM), eCommerce systems and other operations, sales and marketing I/O backend and user-interfaces that handle the data transactions of a user with the web connected interfaces, often a website or mobile app.

Over the years, we design and develop our DXM solutions based off the public user needs, what we serve to users and what they send back via our forms and trackers to understand user’s responses and behaviour.

There are hundreds of key tools and thousands of integrations available to connect to common CMSs like WordPress to establish the requirements for a website. However the moving components and various skills and interests in development result in redundant work that we often try to solve for.

In my view of the modern web, a DXM serves to define the primary administrative functions for managing an organization’s various digital experience channels. Its purpose is to synchronize content publication across these channels while optimizing result reporting processes. This ensures that content creation efforts are directly aligned with measurable outcomes.

A DXM is more sophisticated than a CMS on the backend but simplifies administration. It extends a CMS by incorporating Platform Engineering principles to address traditional CMS limitations, where code and databases are managed separately to generate the final output. In a DXM solution, micro-systems are defined to handle specific tasks related to codebase files, media files, and databases, while the DXM integrates these components to deliver a single rendered output optimized for the fastest loading response times.

DXM could integrate all digital outlets including website(s), app(s), eCommerce, and social media channels for syndicated content publishing and reporting needs.

Where AI Comes in?

The rise of AI is significant for various areas in a DXM model we are working to build. We are doing this by defining direct correlations between content production and the outcomes.

Finding out what has worked from the Analytics is an easy task for AI in 2024 by accessing Google or Bing Webmaster tools, we can easily find out what’s performing. Now AI is capable of suggestions for creating new content to advance the previous organic efforts (SEO). Same could work in analyzing the user behaviours and for paid advertisement (bidding keywords, ads) and similarly for the social media management.

Defining AI Agents that are responding to outcomes and are trained to manage and moderate the content to some degree or fully automated. Although this is already happening with some degree of integrations in 2024, purpose of a DXM system is to streamline the full production to outcome and the iterative optimization process a breeze!

I have been working on DatabyPeople.com for couple years now with our developers and designers and going through few iterations to shape this product; still a concept but getting closer to a beta launch.

The idea started from trying to demonstrate inflation on everyday consumer products, to realize the impact over time in a sensible way.

We built a tool that takes user’s numerical data, we thought it has to be location based, so we require users to have their device location on when entering their data.

We wanted the platform to grow by users’ data, much like Wikipedia, but in a numerical way, to become a public data repository. Everyday we have interesting use-cases and ideas that could help something, especially with the merge of AI.

I was reviewing one recent use case today which led me to the idea for IO by AI! Thought what if, we setup AI agents that will be checking the incoming data from Data by People, do the analysis and investigate further for the cause and effects.

For this case, what if we given people enter data on databypeople.com, on a regular basis for all their purchases, then also they enter their health symptoms – all anonymously! Comes with a specific increase of illness, the AI would be able to inspect the anomalies and make suggestions based on this data. i.e. increase purchase of products with sugar in a specific region resulted in increase of a specific cancer.

Data by People has many interesting use cases. Still requiring access to a mobile phone and internet with an interest to contribute. But we envision a day when everyone is willing to input the they are interested and help with the visibility of issues around the world.

I always thought I’d do something cool with this domain! Here I am blogging!

It was with a realization that we all are portals to similar ideas that are transmitting faster with the power of internet and now AI to accelerate the learnings, I’m often thinking about our role in leading the change and where the attention must be.

The amazing world brings opportunities to every interest, shown with effort and ambitious to earn it, we strive in creating our lives within the shortest timeframes we get, but more importantly enhance this experience for the future ones.

And I think from philosophers to philanthropists and everyone who is grateful for life, we have one theory to unite around that’s preserving life in all shapes and forms given and not only act against their extinctions, but to enable the thriving environments.

Here are some beginning thoughts for this blog, I hope to find my voice after 20 years of developing, marketing and learning the science of communication, I am eager to write what I think for myself and for those who might benefit from this collective.

And who knows, maybe Theory Junction is still a big name for my personal blog, but let’s worry about this later. We just launched our beloved TeamUP.Space to the public! TUS is my first child (digital product outside clients’ projects!) and I’m grateful for every brilliant mind that has contributed to make this project possible which brings me a great responsibility to focus and make this project possible.

Stay tuned for news and updates!