A few words
about me

A small introduction, in case you have found yourself here and are wondering who is behind the writing.

I'm Rex Jacob. I live in Kochi, Kerala, with my wife and our two sons. This is the small corner of the internet where I write about the things I am quietly working out for myself: money, books, the roads and places I keep returning to, and the questions that don't quite let me sleep.

I started a software company with three partners in 2006, when I was twenty-three. Almost twenty years later, I am still at it. Most of what I write here comes out of my life experience plus the books I have been reading hungrily since late 2024 — and the small everyday moments that ambush me into thinking more carefully about a thing I thought I already understood.

A note on the name

There is a simple reason I called this site The Shared Horizon. The things I keep coming back to — books, money, and the long roads I ride — all point at the same question: how to live well. A horizon is something you move towards but never quite reach, and it looks a little different to everyone. The word that matters most to me is shared. I did not want to keep the view to myself. So this is just a place to stand beside someone for a while and look the same way.

What I write about

There are three main veins running through this site, and they overlap more than they look like they should.

• Money I have spent a long time thinking about money — earning it, losing some of it, watching people I respect handle it well or badly. I write about money the way a person writes about something they are still trying to understand, not the way someone writes about something they have mastered.
• Books A late-blooming reader. I did not read seriously until I was past forty. The first year of doing it knocked something loose in me. The Book of Books series on this site is my honest, ongoing report on the books that have struck me hardest — Housel, Kiyosaki, Vex King, Greene, Carnegie, Trenton, Clear — and what I am trying to actually live from them. There are also a handful of side-pieces that grew from the same soil.
• The road I have ridden long stretches of South India on a motorcycle — the kind of trip where you and the road are the only two real things in the room. The travel writing on this site is part journal, part field notes from that particular kind of solitude. If you have ever wondered what it feels like to ride alone for ten or twelve hours with nothing in your head but your own thoughts, those essays are for you.

What you will not find here

Not a get-rich scheme. Not a guru pose. Not perfectly polished arguments. I am still working this out as I write it. The website is the working-out, not the finished thinking. Some essays I am proud of. Some I will probably take down in two years. That is the deal.

A note on the writing

I wake up early and use the quiet hours before the day starts. Most of what is on this site was written either in those early mornings or late at night — the two ends of the day when the house is asleep and there is nothing else asking for attention.

I write because the act of writing something down forces a clarity I cannot reach in my head. Half the essays on this site exist because I needed to figure something out and could not find the answer anywhere else. The other half exist because something small happened — a conversation, a paragraph in a book, a long stretch of empty road — and I knew I would lose it forever if I did not write it down.

Where to find me

I do not post on Instagram very often these days, but I read the messages. If you would like to say something quickly or share something visual, that is a good place to do it.

For longer notes — feedback on an essay, a book recommendation, a hello — the contact page is the right place.

A small thank-you

If you are reading this, you have already given me something rare: a few minutes of your attention. The internet is loud, and your time is finite. So thank you. Genuinely. I hope something on this site is worth the trade.

— Rex