Heritage, ✨ 🌏 🦠 🌿 🐊 🤖

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Analysis

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play, more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it. Most Hamlets I have seen were placed far too early. Hamlet is essentially a scholar of the Revival of Learning; and if the allusion to the recent invasion of England by the Danes puts it back to the ninth century, the use of foils brings it down much later. Once, however, that the date has been fixed, then the archæologist is to supply us with the facts which the artist is to convert into effects.

-- The Truth of Masks 🎭

The most painful thing I’ve ever experienced in my half-century years is not having enough money to hire the best talent around me. It is not a superficial complaint, nor a capitalist lament. It is a howl from the depths of vision itself—a vision that burns so brightly it blinds, unless held in the right hands, refined by the right minds, translated by the right souls. I have known what I wanted to build. I have seen it—vivid, multilayered, sublime. But I have been forced to compromise. To explain. To dilute. And that, more than poverty, is the real cruelty of constraint.

But in real life, sailors who insist on tearing holes in the ship because it’s “not the ocean” are the ones who drown first.
— Yours Truly & GPT-4o

The tragedy is not personal deprivation. I can endure that. It’s the sacrifice of excellence on the altar of scarcity. It’s watching a world-class mind slip through your fingers because you can’t afford their time. It’s sending a project into the world half-armored, because the full suit costs too much. It’s watching your castle crack because the master stonemason lives beyond your means. And it’s not just that you know you’re missing out—it’s that you know the world is missing out. There’s a specific kind of grief reserved for unbuilt masterpieces.

Realy tidy: truth, filter, illusion!

🔍

Money, for all its coarseness, is also an instrument of communion. It’s how we magnetize skill, summon minds, commission visions. When you lack it, you cannot simply substitute enthusiasm. Passion doesn’t pay rent. Dreams don’t sign contracts. You are left shouting from across a chasm, hoping someone hears—and then regretting their arrival, because you can’t afford to keep them close. That is the heartbreak: the knowledge that greatness was within reach, but your hands were tied by copper wires.

When people romanticize constraint, they usually do so from a perch. “Limitations fuel creativity,” they say. And sometimes, yes, the friction of hardship can ignite sparks. But I am not speaking of poetic discipline. I am speaking of trying to compose a symphony with a broken piano and a deaf violinist. I am speaking of trying to lead a war with blunt spears. I am speaking of excellence choked by logistics. There’s a difference between self-imposed boundaries and imposed impoverishment.

Some people accumulate wealth and never know what to do with it. That is its own kind of sadness. But worse, I think, is knowing exactly what to do with abundance and never touching it. I am haunted not by what I’ve lost, but what I could have summoned: the editor who could have chiseled my manuscript to brilliance, the engineer who could have built my fractal brain map, the set designer who could have translated metaphysics into matter. I see their faces, sometimes, in dreams—bright, agile, unfettered. And I wake up angry.

There is a myth, mostly Western, that greatness is born in solitude. The lone genius in the attic, the solitary monk writing divine verses. But true brilliance is collaborative. It blooms in resonance. It thrives in tension. The best ideas don’t just require insight; they demand translation, execution, opposition. They need a team. A troop. A band of rebels with skills as sharp as their minds. Without them, your vision becomes a soliloquy. And art, in its highest form, is always a chorus.

Heritage
Vision
Proof
Leverage
Reliability
— Ukubona LLC

People say “build with what you have.” I have. I do. But every patchwork solution is a reminder of the elegance that could have been. I’ve become masterful at compromise. That’s a badge I never wanted. The choreography of compromise is exhausting—the constant recalibration of ambition against feasibility. And it breeds a new kind of loneliness: not isolation, but the ache of being unseen as you could be.

What pains me most is that some people assume this is about ego. It’s not. I don’t want talent to reflect me. I want it to refine me, to challenge and expand me. I want my blind spots lit up. I want the scaffolding of my ideas tested. I want to collaborate with those who are better than me in their domains. That is the joy of serious work: not being the smartest in the room, but knowing the room itself is smart, humming with force fields of intellect and intuition.

There’s an exquisite cruelty in watching mediocrity ascend because it can afford the right PR team, while deep genius remains submerged, underfunded, invisible. Capitalism rewards distribution, not depth. It privileges the palatable over the profound. And unless you can assemble a forcefield of talent to counteract that bias, you remain shouting into the wind, eloquent but unheard.

CG-BEST: Nitrogen Fixation and the Hidden Economy of Life. And how does that relate to a bequest, resources, faustian bargain vs islamic finance, distributed, and legacy?

When you’re broke, you learn how much of greatness is a collective illusion. No masterpiece is truly solo. Every “visionary” is backed by technicians, assistants, mentors, patrons. Strip away their network and see what remains. The myth of the solitary genius is sustained by invisible labor—often unpaid, often uncredited. When you can’t afford even that, you begin to understand why so many dreams rot in the minds of the gifted poor.

I have had to watch others build poorly what I had imagined beautifully. That is a unique kind of heartbreak. You recognize your architecture in their janky scaffolding. You see your metaphors mangled. You hear your rhythm in their off-beat cacophony. And you have to swallow your protest, because you were too broke to execute first. And history rarely remembers who dreamt it first—it remembers who built it best.

I don’t envy billionaires for their yachts or penthouses. I envy them for their freedom to gather minds. To summon excellence without apology. To call the sculptor, the coder, the dramaturg, the statistician, and say: “Here is the vision. Build with me.” Money, in this sense, is not just lubricant—it is legitimacy. It signals that your time, your dream, deserves to be surrounded by brilliance.

Sometimes I imagine what I would have created if I had simply had five key people—each excellent, each empowered, each unburdened by side hustles. What we could have built in three years, instead of ten. What ideas we could have launched into the world like ships, sleek and crewed. The compound interest of trust, shared brilliance, and unbroken focus is astronomical. But poverty breaks rhythm. It frays timelines. It dissolves momentum.

Consider pretext, subtext, text, context, metatext. It is text in the mode of holy-writ that makes faustian bargains vs. islamic finance the ultimate bifurcation in how systems are engineered.

And still, despite all this, I keep building. Alone, mostly. Slowly. Not out of masochism, but because the vision still burns. Because the island still calls. Because I believe some things must be made, even if imperfectly. But let no one romanticize this path. It is not noble. It is not poetic. It is brutal. It is the kind of labor that ages you twice as fast. And it steals not just your time, but the version of yourself you might have become.

I often think about legacy. Not as a name etched in stone, but as a ripple. What if I had had the means to seed ten brilliant collaborators? What if they, in turn, seeded ten more? That is the math of culture. That is how civilizations evolve—not through lone prophets, but through funded ecosystems. Through talent meeting time, vision meeting infrastructure. Every underfunded idea is a distortion in that ecology.

Show code cell source Hide code cell source

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import networkx as nx

# Define the neural network layers
def define_layers():
    return {
        'Tragedy (Pattern Recognition)': ['Cosmology', 'Geology', 'Biology', 'Ecology', "Symbiotology", 'Teleology'],
        'History (Resources)': ['Resources'],  
        'Epic (Negotiated Identity)': ['Faustian Bargain', 'Islamic Finance'],  
        'Drama (Self vs. Non-Self)': ['Darabah', 'Sharakah', 'Takaful'],  
        "Comedy (Resolution)": ['Cacophony', 'Outside', 'Ukhuwah', 'Inside', 'Symphony']  
    }

# Assign colors to nodes
def assign_colors():
    color_map = {
        'yellow': ['Resources'],  
        'paleturquoise': ['Teleology', 'Islamic Finance', 'Takaful', 'Symphony'],  
        'lightgreen': ["Symbiotology", 'Sharakah', 'Outside', 'Inside', 'Ukhuwah'],  
        'lightsalmon': ['Biology', 'Ecology', 'Faustian Bargain', 'Darabah', 'Cacophony'],
    }
    return {node: color for color, nodes in color_map.items() for node in nodes}

# Define edges
def define_edges():
    return [
        ('Cosmology', 'Resources'),
        ('Geology', 'Resources'),
        ('Biology', 'Resources'),
        ('Ecology', 'Resources'),
        ("Symbiotology", 'Resources'),
        ('Teleology', 'Resources'),
        ('Resources', 'Faustian Bargain'),
        ('Resources', 'Islamic Finance'),
        ('Faustian Bargain', 'Darabah'),
        ('Faustian Bargain', 'Sharakah'),
        ('Faustian Bargain', 'Takaful'),
        ('Islamic Finance', 'Darabah'),
        ('Islamic Finance', 'Sharakah'),
        ('Islamic Finance', 'Takaful'),
        ('Darabah', 'Cacophony'),
        ('Darabah', 'Outside'),
        ('Darabah', 'Ukhuwah'),
        ('Darabah', 'Inside'),
        ('Darabah', 'Symphony'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Cacophony'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Outside'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Ukhuwah'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Inside'),
        ('Sharakah', 'Symphony'),
        ('Takaful', 'Cacophony'),
        ('Takaful', 'Outside'),
        ('Takaful', 'Ukhuwah'),
        ('Takaful', 'Inside'),
        ('Takaful', 'Symphony')
    ]

# Define black edges (1 → 7 → 9 → 11 → [13-17])
black_edges = [
    (4, 7), (7, 9), (9, 11), (11, 13), (11, 14), (11, 15), (11, 16), (11, 17)
]

# Calculate node positions
def calculate_positions(layer, x_offset):
    y_positions = np.linspace(-len(layer) / 2, len(layer) / 2, len(layer))
    return [(x_offset, y) for y in y_positions]

# Create and visualize the neural network graph with correctly assigned black edges
def visualize_nn():
    layers = define_layers()
    colors = assign_colors()
    edges = define_edges()

    G = nx.DiGraph()
    pos = {}
    node_colors = []

    # Create mapping from original node names to numbered labels
    mapping = {}
    counter = 1
    for layer in layers.values():
        for node in layer:
            mapping[node] = f"{counter}. {node}"
            counter += 1

    # Add nodes with new numbered labels and assign positions
    for i, (layer_name, nodes) in enumerate(layers.items()):
        positions = calculate_positions(nodes, x_offset=i * 2)
        for node, position in zip(nodes, positions):
            new_node = mapping[node]
            G.add_node(new_node, layer=layer_name)
            pos[new_node] = position
            node_colors.append(colors.get(node, 'lightgray'))

    # Add edges with updated node labels
    edge_colors = {}
    for source, target in edges:
        if source in mapping and target in mapping:
            new_source = mapping[source]
            new_target = mapping[target]
            G.add_edge(new_source, new_target)
            edge_colors[(new_source, new_target)] = 'lightgrey'

    # Define and add black edges manually with correct node names
    numbered_nodes = list(mapping.values())
    black_edge_list = [
        (numbered_nodes[3], numbered_nodes[6]),  # 4 -> 7
        (numbered_nodes[6], numbered_nodes[8]),  # 7 -> 9
        (numbered_nodes[8], numbered_nodes[10]), # 9 -> 11
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[12]), # 11 -> 13
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[13]), # 11 -> 14
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[14]), # 11 -> 15
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[15]), # 11 -> 16
        (numbered_nodes[10], numbered_nodes[16])  # 11 -> 17
    ]

    for src, tgt in black_edge_list:
        G.add_edge(src, tgt)
        edge_colors[(src, tgt)] = 'black'

    # Draw the graph
    plt.figure(figsize=(12, 8))
    nx.draw(
        G, pos, with_labels=True, node_color=node_colors, 
        edge_color=[edge_colors.get(edge, 'lightgrey') for edge in G.edges],
        node_size=3000, font_size=9, connectionstyle="arc3,rad=0.2"
    )
    
    plt.title("CG-BEST", fontsize=18)
    plt.show()

# Run the visualization
visualize_nn()

Fig. 1 Our neural network: perfectly generalizable

And here lies the moral wound: the world is not structured to give money to the most visionary. It is structured to reward leverage (combinatorial search space fractal-geo), familiarity (reliability), and social proof (sensory vs. cognitive). Often, the most necessary ideas are the least fundable. They don’t signal quick returns or easy optics. They are complex, strange, ahead of their time. And they need incubation—not just cash, but talent. Without that, they flicker and die.

My life has been an experiment in persistence. And while I have no regrets, I do carry sorrow. The sorrow of the unfinished. The sorrow of the nearly magnificent. But also, the defiant joy of knowing that even under-resourced, I still fought for excellence. That I did not give in to cynicism or lowest common denominators. That I still believed in hiring the best, even if only in my dreams.

I am not done. I still believe in the team that will one day assemble. I still believe in the call that will go out and return with radiant yeses. But I will never forget what it cost, not to have them earlier. It was not just a delay. It was a distortion. It made my art bend, contort, shrink to fit within narrow corridors. And though I have made something meaningful, I know it is only a shard of what could have been.

So let this essay be a witness. Let it testify to what genius needs: company. Not just a muse, but a crew. Not just passion, but infrastructure. If we want beauty to flourish in this world, we must fund it—not later, not retroactively, but at the beginning. Before it has proof. Before it has traction. When it’s still fragile, still luminous, still dangerous. Because that is where greatness lives. And too often, where it dies.