# fafo

- Written: 2026-08-07
- Canonical page: https://rafay.sh/chunks/fafo

i recently met a guy for the first time irl, on a trip. somewhere in the conversation he asked me, "what's your biggest/craziest fafo?"

i didn't have an answer, and that made me ponder during the whole trip.

i talk about fafo a lot. but sitting there, i couldn't point to one crazy story. so i started wondering if i even fafo at all, or if i just like the word.

then it hit me. the trip itself was the fafo. i found out about it ~2 days before it happened. i had a submission due the same day of the trip. i had to lie to a strict professor to submit early, and i had to convince six other people that leaving early and risking that professor's wrath was worth it. all of that, decided and executed in about 12 hours. if any one of those pieces had gone wrong, i wouldn't have even been on that trip to get asked the question in the first place.

so i did have an answer. i just didn't recognize it, maybe because it worked out. i remembered the trip clearly, i just never thought of it as a gamble. maybe that's the trick with fafo, once it pays off, your brain quietly reclassifies it as a good decision instead of what it actually was.

but that wasn’t enough, i think there are two kinds of fafo. the acute and the compound. when you hear the word fafo, you think of the crazy shit, which makes sense. acute ones are usually rare (maybe i have skill issue), these are the ones that have short term results, the kind that hit you fast enough to stick in memory right away.

however, most of the fafo we do is compound, not acute. these are long term, done step by step, making them add up into something with a serious impact. if you were to think about them in the moment, they won't feel important, because they're not crazy, neither big at the time. i went to the gym consistently for 3 years, never skipped, not even during exams, just lowered the days when things got hectic. no single day felt like a big decision, showing up was just something i did. but three years of just showing up gave me strength, a bunch of people i met along the way, a hobby i can actually talk about, and enough understanding of exercises to know what works for which body. none of that came from one day. it came from compounding.

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