Most remote work advice assumes reliable wifi, stable power, and the option to hop on a call when things break. Remove those assumptions and you find out which of your systems actually work and which ones only work because you’re constantly compensating.
Intermittent electricity. Connectivity that disappears for hours. No local talent pool. No “quick call” to fix anything. Every system either survives without real-time input or it fails.
This sounds like a limitation. It’s not. It’s a filter.
Metropolitan life gives you infinite options, which means infinite decisions, which means infinite ways to avoid the real bottleneck. Constraints strip that away. When you can’t brute-force problems with more access, more tools, more availability, you stop building systems that need you online and start building systems that actually work. The questions change: not “how do I stay connected” but “what breaks when I can’t be.” Not “how do I manage this person” but “can this person manage themselves when I’m unreachable.”
The desert didn’t limit anything. It exposed which parts of my operations were real and which were just noise I was managing in real-time. The same infrastructure problems that feel like obstacles are actually stress tests. If your business survives unreliable power and unpredictable connectivity, it survives almost anything.
Anyone running remote operations can apply the same filter without moving to the desert: ask yourself what happens when you can’t intervene in real-time. If the answer is “it breaks,” you don’t have a system. You have a dependency wearing a system’s clothes.
Core insights:
Why I Moved to the Desert to Save My Brain
72 hours in Nuweiba dismantled everything I thought I knew about how my brain worked.
Remote Operations Without Losing Control
Distance doesn’t break operations. It exposes what proximity let you hide.
Why I Hate Dentistry (and Why I’m Still a dentist)
The paradox of hating both having and not having patients.
Managing in Egypt.. What the Business Books Don’t Tell You
Defensive thinking, blame culture, and why mindset is the actual bottleneck.
Related: Running a Business with ADHD • Systems Over Willpower.. Why All Systems Will Fail ADHD Brains • The Accountability Filter
