Enes Paker - Work & Notes

Founder at Crea, Inc. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Notes on what I'm thinking about, learning, and exploring.

I don’t see these as final answers. They are ideas in motion, shaped by books, conversations, work, and life. Writing helps me structure my thinking. Sharing creates room for better questions, different perspectives, and conversations I might not have found otherwise.

Recent

13 Jul 2026

Every person seems to have one or more core drivers: deep motivational forces that shape what they pursue, avoid, admire, fear, and repeatedly choose. They may come from temperament, family, environment, trauma, or years of reinforcement. Over time, they become part of identity.
You can act against a core driver, but it usually creates friction. Self-awareness does not remove the drive. It just helps you ask better questions: should I work with it, redirect it, or pay the cost of changing it?
And not every cost is worth paying. We cannot fight on every front. Mental, emotional, and physical energy are limited. So the question may not only be “Can I change this?” but also “Is this worth changing?” Is this pattern causing real harm to me or to others, damaging trust, relationships, health, or long-term goals? Or is it simply making life slightly imperfect?
For example, if someone has a strong drive to contribute ideas in meetings, they may speak often, push the conversation forward, or come across as intense. But what is actually happening? Are they making others feel unheard, shutting down collaboration, or creating tension? Or are they simply energetic, engaged, and fast-moving? Should the goal be to suppress that driver, or to express it with more awareness?
The point may not be to become a different person in every possible way. Maybe the point is to understand which parts of ourselves need discipline, which parts need redirection, and which parts can be accepted without turning every imperfection into a battle.

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23 Jun 2026

Comparison is natural.
It is one of the ways we understand the world. When we describe something unfamiliar, we usually compare it to something known. A peach is like a softer, juicier apple with a different kind of sweetness. Comparison gives the mind a bridge.
The same thing happens internally. We compare to orient ourselves, inspect where we are, and understand what something means.
But comparison has two very different forms.
Some comparisons only give context. Where you were born, your family, your height, your starting point, parts of your natural makeup. They may explain something, but if there is no useful action available, staying there can become rumination.
Other comparisons can become teachers.
Looking at someone successful in your field can be useful if the question is not "why am I not them?" but "what can I learn from how they think, operate, communicate, build, or make decisions?"
The trap is envying someone's outcome without seeing the full picture of their life. We usually compare our entire reality to the visible part of someone else's.
Comparison is useful when it creates learning. It becomes costly when it only creates self-punishment.

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12 Jun 2026

Reading a good book and having a good therapy session have something in common.
In both, you rarely hear something completely new. More often, you hear a clearer version of thoughts that were already scattered somewhere in your mind.
The value is in the structure.
A book gives you a lens. Therapy gives you guided attention. Both create time to look at something directly instead of letting it stay vague in the background.
You may not normally think about an idea like financial freedom being a spectrum, not a binary state, unless something gives you the space and language to explore it.
Sometimes insight is not discovery. It is recognition, organized well.

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4 Jun 2026

As AI tools and agents get better, the important skill may shift from knowing how to talk to AI to knowing how to direct the work.
Right now, a lot of attention is on prompt engineering, context files, instructions, and workflows. These skills are useful, but they may become less central as AI systems get better at asking questions, extracting missing information, and guiding parts of the process on their own.
What may remain more durable is understanding what the business actually needs.
That work is harder than it sounds. It means working closely with clients, customers, stakeholders, and teams to understand the real problem behind the request. It means asking better questions, listening carefully, connecting the dots, and helping people clarify what they are actually trying to achieve.
A lot of the value is not only in collecting requirements. It is in helping people make better decisions. Stakeholders often start with goals, constraints, risks, and assumptions that are not fully clear. The work is to surface those things, explain options simply, give honest feedback, and help them understand the tradeoffs so they can decide with more confidence.
Prioritization becomes part of that same responsibility. Every business has limited time, budget, and attention. Not everything can or should be built at once. The value is often in helping decide what matters most, what can wait, what creates the most impact, and where the team should focus first.
Working with AI may eventually feel less like writing commands and more like managing a highly capable team.
If that happens, the durable skill may not be knowing the perfect prompt. It may be setting direction, clearing ambiguity, removing blockers, making judgment calls, and creating the conditions for good work to happen.

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