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
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The Turkey Illusion
ShareI find the turkey illusion interesting: a turkey is fed by the butcher every day. Day 1, food arrives. Day 2, food arrives. Day 999, food still arrives. Based on the data, the turkey may believe the butcher is a friend and the future is safe. Then day 1000 comes, and it is Thanksgiving. The turkey had a lot of data, but not enough context.
I do not read this as a reason to ignore data. The data was not wrong. Maybe it was just incomplete. The turkey saw the pattern, but not the context around it. That is the part I find useful to keep in mind when looking at data, forecasts, and repeated signals.
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The Risk of Forced Fit
ShareIn Greek myth, Procrustes had a bed, and when travelers did not fit it, he forced them to fit exactly. If they were too short, he stretched them; if they were too tall, he cut off their limbs until they matched the length of the bed. The bed never adjusted to the person, the person was forced to adjust to the bed. That is why a Procrustean bed became a metaphor for forcing reality to match a fixed idea.
I think about this because it shows up in how we reason. We build models, beliefs, systems, and explanations to make sense of the world, and that structure is necessary. But the risk is that once we become too attached to a frame, we stop asking whether it still fits reality. In software engineering, this can happen when a team chooses an architecture too early and then forces every problem into it. The product may need something lightweight, but the team has already committed to microservices. The quiet shift happens when the question becomes less “What does this system need?” and more “How do we make this fit what we already decided?” That is when the model starts becoming the bed.
The same pattern can show up in strategy, hiring, product decisions, and even personal beliefs. A framework can help us think, but it can also protect us from seeing what is actually in front of us. Maybe the discipline is not to avoid models, but to keep them humble. Use them to understand reality, not to reshape reality until it becomes convenient.
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Financial freedom
ShareFinancial freedom may be better understood as a spectrum than a finish line.
Not simply “free” or “not free,” but a gradual increase in control over time, work, relationships, and decisions. Each layer of savings, lower debt, and fewer dependencies creates a little more room to choose.
That framing makes independence feel more practical. You do not need to be retired or ultra-wealthy to become meaningfully freer. Having enough cash to cover normal problems is one layer. Being able to absorb a larger surprise without panic is another. Having the savings and skills to leave a toxic job, bad client, or unhealthy role may be one of the more important ones.
The version I keep thinking about is what Morgan Housel calls “I respectfully disagree” money:
“The concept of f-you money, having so much money that you can tell people to f-off without fear of repercussion, is great. But so is kindness and civility. So I aspire to ‘no thank you, I’m not interested in that, I respectfully disagree and I’m free to ignore you’ money. One is rationalizing being a jerk, the other is intellectual independence.”
Maybe the highest form of financial freedom is not status. It is having more control over your time, more room to choose well, and fewer people or obligations owning your decisions.
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The Cost of Fragility
ShareNot seeing the exact shock coming is often understandable. A tsunami, economic event, market shift, or system failure can arrive in ways that are hard to predict. Maybe the more useful question is not whether we should have seen the event coming, but whether we had built something that could only succeed under ideal conditions.
There is a real tension here. Building with too much protection can slow things down, but building only for calm conditions can create hidden risk. Maybe the balance sits somewhere between accepting that we cannot predict every disruption and still asking where our systems depend too much on things going right.
A company losing one large client is a simple example. In one version, the loss threatens the business. In another, the business absorbs it and continues. In a better version, the loss becomes useful information. The team better understands which customers it serves best, improves onboarding, diversifies revenue, and builds a stronger operating model from the pressure.
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