There is a moment that keeps repeating itself. Someone asks me a question about their project — something technical, something I know well — and before I can stop it, the expression crosses my face. The faint, involuntary surprise that says: how do you not know this? I hate that expression. I have hated it my whole life. And I keep making it.
When I was younger, this made me notorious. The word that followed me through school was arrogant. I never understood why. I was the one walking around convinced that everyone around me was more capable, more together, more in control. I was the one who spent years wanting to be invisible — not because of confidence, but because of the opposite. I didn't want anyone to see how wrong I was getting everything, how different I was, how much I was falling behind.
What the world read as arrogance was actually a brain that genuinely believed it was the last one to figure things out.
It took years of studying ADHD — my own and others' — to understand what was actually happening. And when I finally saw it, it was one of those moments that rearranges something inside you.
The Forgetting
The ADHD brain has an unusual relationship with the cost of learning. When we learn something — really learn it, after all the struggle and the failed attempts and the late nights — the moment it clicks, something strange happens. The difficulty disappears from memory. Not fades. Disappears. What was once a mountain becomes, in our recollection, flat ground.
So when someone asks us about something we now know, we're not measuring their question against the journey we took to get to that answer. We've already forgotten the journey. We're measuring their question against where we stand now — and from where we stand, it looks obvious. Simple. Something any child would know.
This is not superiority. This is the opposite. Because somewhere underneath, the quiet assumption is always: everyone already knew this. I was just the slow one who took this long to figure it out.
You Don't Know What You Don't Know
There is a sentence I have said more times than I have said good morning: You don't know what you don't know. Anyone who has ever worked with me or sat through something I was explaining has heard it. I say it constantly because it has been the most transformative idea in my own life.
A year ago, I watched a short video of someone explaining how to build a complete SaaS product in a day using tools I had never heard of. In that moment, I knew something important: I knew that I didn't know. I could feel the edges of my ignorance for the first time. And that — knowing the shape of what you don't know — is the beginning of being able to move.
Before that video, I didn't know about Supabase or Vercel or what any of it meant. But more importantly: I didn't know that I didn't know. The ignorance was invisible to me. It had no shape I could reach toward.
Knowing what you don't know is not humiliation. It is the map. It tells you where the market is.
A few days after that video, I started learning. I paid in time, effort, and money. I got no visible result that year. Three weeks ago, by the grace of God, Zalfol crossed 1,700 users — with a direct payment system active from anywhere in the world.
Show Me the Market
When Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf arrived in Medina — one of the wealthiest merchants of his time, having left everything he owned behind in Mecca — the first thing he asked the Ansar was: Show me the market. Not: give me money, give me goods, give me a share of your home. Show me where the exchange happens. I'll do the rest.
That's the only thing templates in Zalfol are trying to do. Not give you answers — answers belong to you, they always have. Not do the work — the work was always yours. Just show you where the market is. Give the ignorance a shape. Make visible what you didn't know you didn't know.
So that when someone asks you about it later, and you feel that involuntary flicker of surprise — you'll remember. You'll remember that you were once standing exactly where they are. That the mountain existed. That you climbed it. And that the fact it no longer looks like a mountain from where you stand is not arrogance.
It's just memory, doing what ADHD brains do best: protecting us from the weight of our own past by erasing it entirely. والله أعلم.