Open Citadel

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Self-Development App

Your Companion in Becoming 2.0

Write your name

Read your books, save what matters, and turn it into goals you actually keep. Samwell helps you plan, check in, and see how far you have come.

Compass in the app, showing progress on a goal: 85% consistent and 89 of 250 hours logged
Frontispiece · Your Progress
I Why I Built This

The Journey of Becoming 2.0

I started reading because I wanted to build a company. What I didn't realize was that every book, podcast, and biography was quietly rebuilding me.

They weren't just teaching me how to build a business. They were changing the way I thought. Every story, idea, and lesson challenged my assumptions and gave me a new lens to see the world.

That's when I realized the value wasn't in consuming more knowledge. It was in becoming someone different because of it.

The problem was that every insight lived in a different place, and turning those insights into decisions was still my responsibility.

So I built a companion I wished I had: a place where the ideas I discover can be explored, challenged, and turned into actions that shape who I become.

That's why Open Citadel exists.

Thamsanqa Dreem, Author of Open Citadel

II How It Works

A book only changes you when you act on it.

You finish a book full of good ideas. A week later, most of them have slipped away. Nothing happened after the last page.

Compass is where something happens next.

The reader, with two passages from Franklin's autobiography highlighted

01

Read and highlight

Bring in your EPUBs and read without distraction. Highlight the lines that matter and write down what they mean to you.

Samwell proposing a goal, Learn to TIG weld properly, with three things to log

02

Set a goal

Tell Samwell what you want to change, in your own words. He helps you shape it into a goal made of small things you can actually do.

Today's log card: Draw one thing from life, with 1 sketch logged

03

Log your days

A few taps a day. Did you show up, and how did it go? That is all it asks.

A check-in where Samwell quotes recent logs, notes, and a highlight

04

Check in with Samwell

Stuck or drifting? Talk it through. He can see what you have logged and what you wrote, so his advice is about your life, not someone else's.

The planner: a month calendar marking the days that were done, missed, and due

05

See how far you have come

The planner and insights show your consistency over time. It counts consistency, not streaks, so one missed day never wipes out the rest.

A finished goal, Fill a sketchbook like Leonardo, with the note What Samwell took from it

06

Finish what you started

When a goal ends, Samwell writes down what it taught you, so the next one starts smarter.

III Your Self-Development Companion

Turn what you learn into who you become.

Samwell does three things. He talks through your books with you. He turns what you want into a goal you can keep. And he checks in using what you have logged and what you wrote.

He can see your highlights, notes, and logs, so when a week goes badly he can show you what actually happened, in your own words.

You

Be honest with me. Marathon training is going great but the prototype feels stuck. What's going on?

Samwell

Honestly: your side goal is ahead of your main one. The marathon is 93% consistent. The kit is 85% consistent, at 89 of 250 hours. At an even pace you'd be near 114 by now.

The misses aren't random. Look at your last three Mondays:

  1. missed, "Legs dead after 22 km. Couch."
  2. missed, "24 km yesterday. Nothing left."
  3. 1 hour, "An hour. Ordered the torque sensor at least."

Each one came the evening after your longest run of the week: 22, 24, then 26 km. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays you hit your 2 hours on 25 of 28 days. This isn't a discipline problem. The plan asks for your hardest thinking on your most tired evening.

You highlighted this in July:

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

Your logs are the experiment. What got it wrong was the schedule, not you. You said it yourself on Sunday: "a plan written by someone who has never run 26 km."

An example check-in. The person, numbers, and notes are made up.

The same check-in in the app, with Samwell quoting a highlight from Leonardo's notebooks
IV Begin

Start your own journey of becoming 2.0

Open Citadel is live on Android and iOS. Get it now.

The library, the reader, and on-device Samwell are free. Compass works with a Samwell Cloud plan, which you can choose inside the app.