Monta's Interactive CV

I love learning, it keeps my brain alive. It genuinely excites me in a way very few things do. I have a deep, almost obsessive curiosity: I need to understand how things work from the inside, not just what they are. It could look like a quick question or a full rabbit hole four hours deep in academic papers chasing a concept until I understand its mechanics. My first personal development book was Limitless by Jim Kwik, I read it at 16 and it is still one of the biggest influences on how I think.

I love experimenting because it deeply completes the process of learning. It is way deeper than simply getting feedback loops. I think about growth in three levels: Knowing, Understanding, and finally Wisdom. To fully understand and learn something, you must be able to teach it, because explaining it to someone else forces clarity on the mechanics and confronts every gap in your thinking. Now the last level is Wisdom, which is deeper and different. I heard this once and it never left me: "Wisdom is applied knowledge." Most people know what is right. Wisdom is whether you can execute it in the unexpected moment, when it is needed, without hesitation, because it became an automatism. Experimenting and teaching help you reach that level of automatism since you cannot teach what you did not fully grasp.

Itkan is an Islamic principle that has shaped how I approach everything. It is the idea that when you do something, you do it at your absolute best, not just good enough. Specializing in an area, go genuinely deep, and do it properly in every aspect. Greatness in ethics and work does not come from being a generalist. The challenge is that early-stage startup life is almost designed against it: juggling different departments, switching context constantly, and spreading effort across disconnected tasks, especially when you are lacking a resourceful team. That fragmentation makes depth difficult. I try to do everything based on this concept of itkan/ihsan, which is one of my biggest drivers. Beyond Islam, I learned with time that the shortcut is always the long way. Investing time to do something with itkan once is always better than doing it halfway and constantly revisiting and patching it up.

What scared me the most is delayed failure, but mistakes are the most efficient form of learning available. There is a difference between knowing something will not work and actually living through it. The lived version rewires how you operate in a way reading about it never could, it is much deeper and closer to wisdom. I highly value failing fast, extracting the lesson directly, and moving forward immediately. The way I see it is that wasting time avoiding failure costs more than failing fast and moving forward.

I am deeply against the 360-degree change mindset. It sounds ambitious but it almost always ends in deterioration and giving up, because the brain simply does not work that way. Real habit formation takes 40 to 90 days minimum, and often longer, before it becomes automatism. The biggest impact in my life came from slow, steady growth: 1% better every day. Staying as consistent as possible, internalizing each lesson properly before moving to the next, while focusing on being slightly better than yesterday. The compounding effect of that over time is enormous.

I believe success and failure both leave patterns. My approach is to decode those patterns into frameworks I can reuse. My biggest strength is connecting dots across different disciplines and turning the patterns I find into frameworks and formulas, making what seems unrelated at first, between analytics, behavioral science, neurology, and business, interconnected. This interconnects with learning too: when you can teach an idea clearly and frame it as a system, your understanding becomes more complete.

My religion and stoicism both taught me the same value: worry about what I can control, control my input, and do not obsess over the output. Truly internalizing this naturally leads me to be fully in the present. I cannot even control the next heartbeat or second, which shifts focus to what I can do right now, with less overthinking about the past or anxiety about the future. The past and future still matter as lessons and planning tools. I track analytics and KPIs closely, but my relationship with them is specific: they exist to improve what I am doing now, not to create anxiety about what already happened or what might not come. The question is never "Why did this happen?" as regret, but "What does this tell me about what to do differently right now?"

It sounds obvious that I would talk about this since I built OnlyFounders, but I take this concept much deeper than its motivational aspect. The dimension that fascinates me is the invisible one. There are things you are conscious of not knowing, and things you do not realize you do not know. When I am around a great environment and team, I absorb ways of thinking I could not have constructed alone. In behavioral science, humans are neurologically wired to mirror their environment. We unconsciously calibrate our standards, our pace, and our definition of good enough to the people around us. I try to be intentional about the environments I am in. Being surrounded by people who have itkan/ihsan and mastery creates a kind of growth that cannot be planned or predicted. You do not set out to learn what they know, yet you absorb it by proximity: a new skill, a different way of thinking about a problem, a standard applied to something you never thought to question. I believe environment is one of the most underrated catalysts for reaching the outer limits of potential.