Nick Saraev Nick Saraev
Free Roadmap to $25K
· 34 min read

The next few months of my life.

The next few months of my life.

It's that time again. Today I’m going to write a long, meandering journal entry that covers, in-depth, what I am going to do with the next few months of my life.

It’ll include thoughts on the trajectory of my career, ROI calculations, a breakdown of how I’m currently spending my time, actionables for my agency/coaching business, and more.

I’ll attempt to map all of these out as fully as possible, and at the end of this document, write a list of actionables that I can use to continue propelling my life towards greater and greater achievement.

I hope you find these thoughts insightful! They are my own. I wrote these in a private journal, and have not altered them at all, except for copying them over to Ghost and then adding links where relevant for context.

Taking stock.

First, where am I? Since the last time, I have grown leaps and bounds.

Basically: I have achieved all of the goals I had the last time I wrote one of these.

It continuously boggles my mind to see the degree to which I can think, act, and then achieve what I want, so long as I'm consistent about it. I understood this at some level my whole life, but only recently have I really internalized it.

Retrospective

As usual, I owe all of these achievements directly to my previous period of deep contemplation.

During that time—September 2024—I was living in an AirBNB in the Calgary Beltline. I was going for long walks down the Elbow river, trying whatever eclectic mix of new foods I could find in the downtown core, and building a wonderful relationship with my girlfriend (who I now live with).

My career back then was composed primarily of two income streams: my agency, LeftClick, and my Skool community, Make Money With Make. I had a second agency, 1SecondCopy, that was still producing on the order of ~$30,000/m, but I had passed the management of this agency off entirely to a team member, and I rarely checked in more than once a week.

I was growing used to making money. And I had a roadmap in front of me that I had already begun executing on that I hoped would make me more. This included a laundry list of new products, some cool strategies about content creation, and a handful of then-novel strategies I was keen to employ.

It was a very exciting time in my life.

Where do I want to go?

Last journal entry, I mentioned that I was not satisfied with my income or my net worth. At the time, I was at ~$100,000/m and still had something to prove.

Today, I can confidently say that is no longer the case. In short: I am satisfied with my income. I no longer want to optimize for money; it is not my greatest desire, and I have enough of it that I think I can turn my attention to other things.

To me, money is just a means to an end. It is something that buys you first your needs, and then your wants. And it turns out that very few of my wants are things I need large amounts of money to buy.

To be clear, here is what I want:

Money helps these things, of course. For instance, it's difficult to be earnest or present in a relationship when you can't pay your bills. It's hard to be healthy without good food. And it's not reasonable to follow your curiosity wherever it goes if you don't have the funds to pay for your or your family's sustenance needs.

But all of that applies only to a point. Eventually you have enough. And if you continue optimizing for money after this, you will:

In all likelihood, regardless of whether I change what I am optimizing for, I will probably continue making absurd amounts of money. It is difficult not to in a position like mine.

I just don't want to focus the totality of my being towards that end anymore. Because I have earned enough to buy the majority of safety, security, and flexibility that I think matters for me and the people close to me. Everything from here on out yields diminishing returns, and may even contribute negatively towards my relationships, health, curiosity, and impact.

Goals

I've spoken briefly on what I want. They seen pretty high-level and illustrious. Can I quantify those goals further?

Impact on the world

Let's start with impact.

I have probably already had a sizeable impact on the world. You can call it hubris, or perhaps delusion, but I think my logic is sound:

I am happy with this, to be clear. But I feel that I possess the ability to have a much greater impact than 1/33,333rd of the economy. It may be more delusion—either way I believe I can multiply that number by (at least) a few hundred.

I don't know how, or with what vehicle. I just know I am capable of doing it. It could be directly related to my channel; a scaled-up version of what I am doing now. Or something orthogonal to it that still has to do with AI but is not "building AI systems for businesses".

In any case, I currently lack the time to commit myself fully to this endeavour, because I am still optimizing for personal wealth. To have an outsized impact, I should optimize for global GDP instead. To do that, I will require a fair amount of time, and I must determine what vehicle will take me there. More on that later.

Health

I read a quote once long ago from Socrates that resonated with me:

What a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.

Health in body and mind is difficult to quantify, but I know for sure that, at minimum, I want to embody that Socratic ideal, insofar that I would very much like to see the beauty and strength of which my body is capable. I figure it's about time! If I don't do it now, when will I?

Last year I went through brachial neuritis, an extremely rare condition that effectively paralyzed my right shoulder. I'm only just now regaining the ability to move my arm past ~90° for the first time in ~11 months. It has been a debilitating and extremely inconvenient process.

My weight has also dropped precipitously, ~15-20 lbs, and I am averaging less than ~2,000 steps/day (down from an all-time-high of ~12,000). For the most part, I have not kept up with exercise.

While I am not about to die, I am certainly unhealthy. I'd prefer not to be. So my goal over the next period is to push my health to its logical conclusion and see what life at the "high" end of the spectrum feels like.

Think Bryan Johnson, except instead of optimizing specifically for longevity, I would like to optimize for performance (longevity would obviously be a major side effect, though). My hope is to get the privilege to experience life at peak levels of physical and cognitive fitness. I think this would not only be enjoyable, but help me achieve the next level of impact, as discussed above.

Unfortunately, this requires time and some reprioritization.

Curiosity

I am a naturally curious person. When I was younger, I used to exercise that curiosity to the utmost, which led to what I would consider to be a very intellectually fulfilling life.

In recent years, that penchant to follow my curiosity has died. "What is interesting" is often not "what is profitable", and at every step I've forced myself to pick profit over knowledge.

Hopefully, you understand why. I was raised in an environment where money was scarce, and where the shadows of my family's early financial challenges crept into every corner of our lives. So when I was given the ability to earn a bunch of money for (relatively) little time in exchange, I jumped on it, neglecting everything else. Like an addict, I wireheaded and discarded most of the rest of my interests and hobbies in pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Suffice to say, I don't want to do that anymore. There are so many interesting things in the world, and they all deserve to be learned. I would like to get back to exploring curiosities, engaging in hobbies, and—above all else—asking questions genuinely motivated by the pursuit of knowledge, not profit.

I used to play guitar! I used to design wonderful 3D worlds. I also used to build neural networks for fun (this is how I got into AI in the first place). I haven't done any of this stuff in years and my quality of life has suffered for it.

Above all: I want to read again. I used to get absorbed in books for many hours at a time. I am simply unable to justify the time these days, and that needs to change.

Relationships

How does one define strong, rewarding relationships? After thinking about it for a time, I believe this is simple: a strong relationship is where you love and are loved in return.

I have this now with my girlfriend and it is incredible. She adds a vast amount of texture to my life; a flavor that is, frankly, irreproducible. Because of her, colors are brighter, music is louder, and life is definitively better.

I want more of this. They don't have to be romantic—strong platonic ones apply too (I have a dearth of these at the moment). To make a long story short: I want people I can share everything with, who understand me and I them, who I love and love me in return.

I'm not sure how to quantify that. Perhaps I leave it at I would like to become closer to more people, family included.

However I do this, relationships require time, so I'll need to find some more.

Bottlenecks

Now that I have tabulated what it is that I want, what is currently impacting my ability to drive these outcomes?

Like in the previous journal entry, I will go through everything and tabulate the bottlenecks below.

I should note that, back when my broad goal was just "money", this was much easier. I was able to determine my bottleneck was monetization within ~30min, and immediately transitioned to strategizing how to fix it.

Goals like "being impactful" and "having strong relationships", on the other hand, are much more subjective, so I don't expect the same will happen here. Still, I believe I can go much farther in quantifying bottlenecks and acting on them than you might think. Let's try.

Time

Probably the best place to start is my time. This was the core tie-in between all of my above goals—I did not feel like I had enough time to achieve them. Makes sense. Career is a behemoth right now.

So to fix, let's take a look at what I am currently spending my time on that does not fall into the goals I care about. From there, I should have a reasonable understanding of where I might cut back to be able to better prioritize.

This will (probably) be mostly career related tasks, but I'll be unbiased and include anything that doesn't directly contribute to the above goals.

Also, I'll try and average things out from a daily perspective, since that has always been best for me. I will use sources like my historical time logs, as I've been tracking data on daily actionable times for the better part of the last two months.

Example of my daily tracker.

Where I'm spending my time

Next, I'll write a line-by-line breakdown based on the above time logs, Rize logs, and activity estimates. After, I will tabulate the total, and start figuring out a rough distribution of where I'm spending time and how I can cut back to reallocate time towards things that are more important to me.

There is more, to be sure. That said, this seems sufficient for now. Any further digging will probably only reveal a few minutes here or there.

Using the above numbers, I currently spend 60+20+20+20+20+10+60+50+60+45+5+15+15+15+10+15+25+15+60+45 = 585 mins per day, or ~10 hours, on the above tasks.

For simplicity's sake, and to make it easier to interpret for myself, let's create a visual breakdown of the distribution with ChatGPT. I'll do a pie chart, where the full pie is equivalent to 10 hours.

This is a bit granular, but I can bin these into related tasks to pull broader categories. Using the above, you can break down my day as follows:

How do I feel about that, now that it's out in the open? Off the top of my head:

Sanity check—if I were to do this, would I lose 40% of my revenue?

It is decided, then. I can significantly reduce my time involvement by batching tasks, portioning out a percentage of posts (rather than all), and delegating work.

I expect I will trade ~20% of my income for ~40% of my time back. I will track this religiously over the next few months and see how my predictions pan out.

In reality, I may actually make more money, given that the added time will naturally lead to more opportunities for in-depth strategy like this, and time for in-depth strategy has always directly correlated with earnings.

Beliefs

Are my beliefs a bottleneck? Last time they weren't. How about now?

Well.. do I believe that the kind of life that I want—rewarding relationships, great health, impactful work, and open-ended curiosity—is, at some level, impossible?

No. I have now seen many people achieve their version of this. So I know that it is not only possible, but, assuming I think about it enough, I feel it is probably inevitable.

I mean, pretty much every time I have had a limiting belief I later destroyed it. At one point in my life, this would certainly have qualified as one, but I am now confident I can achieve the sort of life I want with enough time and effort.

Moving on.

Monetization

Last journal entry, monetization was definitively my bottleneck.

I lacked product differentiation, and so was leaving a ton of money on the table. Also had a big waitlist that I wasn't taking advantage of; basically, an overhang where I had generated much more interest than I was able to capitalize on due to my standout YouTube performance. Naturally, fixing that was priority #1.

Well, that has since been solved. Maker School became the #1 community by revenue on Skool, possibly the #1 community on Earth, and this led to me winning the Skool Games and gaining a fair bit of notoriety (see picture with Alex Hormozi and Sam Ovens at the top of this post).

I also did this at a subscriber count that was a fraction of other channels who I am competing with. Right now, my monetization is still somewhere in the neighborhood of ~$2.5/mo/subscriber. And while there people with much higher numbers, given that money is no longer the prime directive, I'm happy with this. I would actually be fine dialling it back a bit, depending on the degree to which it buys me some time to focus on impactful things like I described at the beginning of this entry.

Miscellaneous thoughts

Okay, I think it's clear: time is my bottleneck. Monetization and beliefs, once big hurdles I had in the past, have been taken care of. I can't think of any other major bottlenecks right now, and I spent a healthy thirty minutes racking my brain, so let's move on.

That means, if I want to build the sort of life that I want—one where I am healthy, curious, passionate, and surrounded by people who love me (and I them)—I need to acquire more time ASAP.

Logically, I should be willing to do this at the expense of money. A fair amount of it. I don't need to be making $400,000/m anymore; I would probably be satisfied with a fraction of that (maybe $200,000, or even $100,000), assuming that the proportional increase in my time was significantly greater.

Sanity check: if my income dropped from $400,000 -> $200,000 and I gained back an additional ~8 unburdened hours in my day, would I be fine with this? Thinking out loud, I feel like this is pretty precipitous an income drop.

That seems stupid, though. It would not materially impact my life in the slightest. The friction here is, at some level, probably a result of my desire for social validation. I like being the best, and I am worried that this will negatively impact the perception that I am the best. But I can be the best in other things, and the majority of people out there can not meaningfully distinguish between high incomes anyway, so many of them would still perceive me to be so. I would still have most of the social proof I need to do cool things.

In any case, I do not have to answer that question right now. Instead, I can begin to scale back my time investment to achieve that ~40% reduction I mentioned above. Once I have those four hours of my day back, I can evaluate the impact on my income; if it is significantly more than -40%, I can decide what to do then.

Perhaps I'll go back to spending more manual time; maybe I'll decide to spend even less.

Actionables

Now that I have taken stock, worked out my goals, determined my bottlenecks, and fleshed out where the hours in my day are going, it is time to write down actionable next steps.

This is the most important part of any roadmap—it is the thing that connects "thinking" with "doing". Both are necessary to achieve what you want.

I will first write a "masterlist" at a high level, brainstorming as many as I can. Then, I will go into detail for each, breaking the list items down into sub-steps to reduce friction, since the higher the initial difficulty, the lower the likelihood I will do the task. After, I'll mash the two together for your reading convenience. If the task recoups my daily time, I'll include a (+X) in the title for ease of tracking.

Remove Month 6 1:1s immediately and replace with something that doesn't scale with my time (+10)

As part of Maker School, I offer a 1:1 with me if you make it to your sixth month.

I spent 1:15hrs last week on them. The week prior, 1hr. On average, it comes out to something like 1hr/week, or ~10 minutes/day.

A quick way to reclaim that time is to find something else to give away that doesn't scale with time. It's not that big of a deal, but I might as well. One months' worth of 1:1s is ~4 hours, and I wouldn't mind having that back.

What can I provide?

I could also continue doing them, but leverage them for some other purpose. Like content on the main channel.

Sanity check: is that feasible? No, I don't think so. Most of the conversations are unstructured—fifteen minutes of recording could make maybe three minutes of content. Certainly not enough to justify the time spend.

Okay, so I'll provide some resource. I don't need to know exactly what that is. But actionables here are:

Remove Loom video roasts, since they're directly contingent on my time. Instead, do Loom videos ad-hoc, so it's not an expectation but akin to a variable reward (+30)

I record ~20-30 mins of Loom videos every day for Maker School. They're hyper-leveraged and a big draw. Majority of these are "Upwork roasts", where people post their Upwork profiles and then I record a video discussing how their profile could look better.

It's good fun; definitely lets me build some quick wins with people, generate the some 1:1 "facetime" (which, at the scale I'm operating, is nuts), and reorient people who are making obvious tactical errors early. I'd consider it one of the standout advantages of Maker School.

That said, I feel like the vast majority of roasts at this point are not providing any new value; they are rehashed versions of older ones. Realistically, I could probably organize the information better, and force people to watch a certain number of old roasts before proceeding instead.

I would lose the perception of 1:1 facetime, but I believe this would actually make the instances in which I do record a Loom video more powerful, since my time would appear higher value. Whereas right now I routinely do 10-15/day, if I cut that down to 1-2/day, people will pay much closer attention to those 1-2.

This will save me a significant amount of time. It will also reduce the perceived value of the program, to be clear. But I believe, proportionally, the time I save will >>> this.

Steps:

Switch LeftClick sales calls to 'discovery videos', where I personally record a short Loom going over the person's needs (+30)

Right now, I have maybe one LeftClick discovery call every couple of days. They take ~30 minutes of my time, and often include some small unit of work before/after the call to prepare (let's say 45).

Recently, with the growth of LeftClick and working more closely with Noah, it has become unclear how and when I should join a call.

Logically, having me on calls improves close %, since most of these leads are generated directly through my longform content and so want to see and talk to me.

But at the same time, going on every call is not very time-leveraged, and the more time I spend on operations, the less time I am spending generating leads (which, right now, is my main strength).

Additionally, if we set the expectation that I am to be present on the first call, it can lead to expectations further down the line that I am to be present on subsequent engagements too. So it's a catch-22.

I have dealt with this for a long time in many contexts, not just LeftClick. Prior to this, when I was handing off referrals, I would send them directly to a partner. The most common question on that call was some variant of "where's Nick?"—naturally, the switch-up led to poor close rates and lower AOV.

Anyway, I believe I can solve this once and for all with a nifty hack. I am a big fan of standardization, and I read about a very cool approach three years ago when I was looking into Digital Nomad consulting services that I thought was brilliant.

To make a long story short, a clever man, whose name I unfortunately forget, had been offering tax consulting services for entrepreneurs looking to minimize their end-of-year owings. He was very good at his work, and so naturally became quite in-demand, with services costing thousands of dollars per hour.

Eventually, there was not enough time in the day for him. But he was making good money, and wanted to continue.

To get around this, he did not pivot services, or change the business model. He continued providing the same personalized consultation. With one exception.

His clever hack: he turned his 1:1 consulting calls into WhatsApp voice messages, where you'd leave a message with your situation, and he would record a 5, 10, or 15 minute voice message describing how he would approach solving it.

He was able to charge several hundred dollars for what amounted to a few minutes of his time. Less than a direct call, but because it was async, he was able to become available to a much wider stretch of timezones than before, and his business grew by leaps and bounds.

If you, as a customer, outlined your problem in enough detail, and anticipated the follow-up questions you may have:

It was one of the cleverest forms of productization I had seen, and directly inspired more than a few of the decisions I've made with Maker School and MMWM.

Anyway: I believe I can take this approach to sales calls. Instead of doing discovery calls directly, I could record 2-5 minute Loom videos that go over their needs and requirements, and then hypothesize a few solutions.

I would do this with a standardized pitch, along with some ideation, and do it for every lead that comes through the pipeline. Then, Noah or our future salesperson would take the call, and we'd get the following benefits:

I would tack these videos on to the end of my community management every day. I could feasibly do several, and because it's async I'd be able to "take calls" with anyone. So regardless of how big my top-of-funnel gets I would be able to manage this, and it would be the 80/20: first touch is me -> maximizes LeftClick's $/hr -> edifies person who's taking the call -> maximizes probability of a conversion -> I swing by onboarding -> minimize buyers remorse -> operational team crushes.

Actual time cost on my end per day is maybe 5 (down from 30).

Steps:

Cut back Daily Updates to 25min time investment total (+25)

The average Daily Update recording and packaging time is starting to get out of control. Looking at the last three weeks, we're somewhere around 47 minutes of recorded footage, with 5-10 minutes of packaging time.

As much as I love Daily Updates, I will cut this down significantly. Today's video was a good test-run: 23 mins total instead of mid-50s.

Question—can I change the structure to make this more valuable? Q&A is most valuable, of course, but some people like watching my "build in public", and that's what is suffering for the most part. Also, people don't really care about brand stats as much (it's more for me), so how about:

That seems okay for now.

Packaging is not worth optimizing. I use templates and am probably about as streamlined as I could be here. No other changes needed.

Steps:

Delegate email and inbox management completely (+40)

I get way too many messages. It's leading to feelings of overwhelm, which is leading to actual overwhelm. It also, quite frankly, takes forever to get through. I have also let a lot fall through the cracks over the last few months—genuine refund requests, problems with billing, etc—that is hurting my credibility.

I'm not going to deal with that anymore. To that end, I'll hire a competent native-English speaker to be my EA and manage everything for me.

In particular, I want them to:

I also want to see what all the rage is about a competent EA in general. A lot of people have told me that it's imperative I get one over the last few months, and I should try it out before dismissing it.

We'll see how this pans out. But I think this will save me ~5hrs/wk.

Steps:

Delete/archive personal Instagram profile.

Instagram is taking me too long again. I also use it for frivolous things—silly brainrot memes and the like. The gateway into this is always my business channel, algorithms end up "capturing" my attention and it ends up taking ~10-15mins/day.

No reason to be doing this. So am deactivating my personal Instagram and then removing it from my phone.

Steps:

Delete YT Studio on my phone—I never really use it anyway (+15)

Speaking of which, I'll delete YouTube Studio on my phone too. There is no reason to have this, really. I only ever do productive work with YouTube from my desktop; anything that is not from my desktop is usually unproductive (checking stats, etc).

This is an easy win. Steps:

There are so many distractions as you scale. It is unbelievable. If I took even a tenth of those "amazing opportunities" at face value, I'd have gotten absolutely nowhere.

One of these opportunities is travel. I get invited to travel all the time now. Various conferences, events, retreats, offsites, summits, masterminds, etc. Whatever you want to call them—the vast majority represent an ineffective usage of my time.

So I'm going to cut all that out completely starting today. No more work-related travel unless it's something that I feel will save me time, not cost me time.

Steps:

Purchase weight scale and begin weighing myself every morning.

I always improve whatever I track. As part of my health goals, I want to improve my weight—therefore I should track it.

To fill you in: my weight has dropped ~15-20lbs over the last few years as a result of work taking precedence over everything. I forget to eat pretty often, unintentionally opting to fast instead, and the ups-and-downs make it difficult to consistently do things like build muscle and remain healthy.

I am currently ~171.4lbs at 6'2. I would like to be ~187lbs, and so part of my health goals will include eating more. To that end, I will grab a weight scale and build a habit to weigh myself every morning.

Steps:

Download Macrofactor and track diet for 14 days to determine TDEE.

In the same vein, I often over or under eat. So to be more precise, I need to know what my Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is.

There are formulas that estimate this for you, but I'd like to know, without a shadow of a doubt, what mine currently looks like. From my readings, the best way to do this is to track your food for a period of ~14 days while weighing yourself every morning. Slight fluctuations due to water and sodium intake will average out, leading to a clear picture of how much you're eating -> how much of that is being stored.

Jeff Nippard, who I respect deeply, has an app built just for that purpose. It's called Macrofactor, so I'm going to download it and start tracking my food intake.

To that end, I will also buy a few utensils to make that tracking easier, like food scales, volumetric measures, etc.

Steps:

Identify optimal supplement stack & build into habits, a la James Clear.

I have a liver deficiency called Gilbert's Syndrome, which is often associated with fatigue, the inability to process certain foods and nutrients, and jaundiced skin (if you've ever watched one of my videos and wondered why my skin looks particularly yellow some days, this is the reason).

It impacts my lifestyle to some degree. So I would like to optimize my supplement stack to mitigate the negative impact, as well as "level up" the rest of my health to boot. These include some low-hanging fruit like daily vitamin D supplementation, certain vitamin deficiencies that I have, so on and so forth.

Steps:

Create 80/20 health tracking system—lifts, cardio stats, cognitive stats, etc.

Right now, I use Google Sheets to track all of my outputs. I do this in a Sheet called Life Tracker, where every day, as I complete my actionables, I log what i did and the amount of time it took to do it.

For instance, I know that I responded to 60 Maker School posts today. I also know that it took me 59 minutes to do so, and that my "posts per minute" was 1.02. My Daily Updates video took 35 minutes to create, I recorded 8 Loom video roasts, I responded to 19 threads in MMWM, etc.

This level of tracking can be a bit laborious the first few times you do it, but now I look forward to turning my timer on and going through the motions. In many ways, a timer forces me to "sprint" through each task, and it also keeps me accountable (since I don't like breaking the chain).

Anyway, I can apply the same logic directly to my health tracking. I measure my sleep every day—there are also websites out there that track things like my average reaction time, cognitive health, etc.

If I combine all of these, I should be able to get a clear picture of my health at any given moment and then optimize from there. It would be fun to do this, too—I am a big fan of self-experiments like that, and think that given the differences between bodies, they are necessary to determine the truly optimal lifestyle.

I could then perform mini RCTs on myself to determine whether new diet additions or lifestyle changes are beneficial to my health. Would be awesome. I could also publicize those for others.

Steps:

Build systems to spend time with people I care about.

I would like to build some sort of system to more regularly see the people I care about.

My family is a great example. I love spending time with them, and they're close enough (geographically) that I can. But if we don't schedule it in ahead of time, it rarely happens. Something comes up—usually career related—and I put it off.

This is clearly a priority issue. I am prioritizing my work over the people I care for. Very silly, given that one of the main regrets of people on their deathbeds is that they wish they spent more time with the people they loved.

So I will prioritize it. I will set aside scheduled blocks ahead of time, and then construct the rest of my schedule around that. My only 'sacred time', for productivity purposes, is my morning. So as long as I keep those to myself I'm OK.

Steps:

Read four books.

I used to read ~2 books per week. It was a big part of my life. Fiction, nonfiction, history—the genre was less important than the time I would spend lost between pages.

I don't think I've read a book cover to cover in months. And if I have read a book in the last year, it was probably something strictly business or management related. Basically, "for-profit reading".

I would like to get back to unstructured, "curiosity-driven" reading instead, so I'll make this a goal.

Steps:

Ideate higher-impact avenues.

I don't imagine I'll be able to decide on what I want my higher impact avenue to be right now.

But that's okay! I'm just getting the ball rolling. With the additional time I'm freeing up, and a bit of space between me and the day-to-day, I'll soon have plenty of room to determine the optimal path forward.

The cool thing about this: I am now exceedingly confident that I can have, and do, whatever I want. It just takes time and effort. There is no bar too high, or path too treacherous. In the long run, I am capable of it all.

I have not always believed this.

In my youth I deluded myself into thinking I'd be a world-renowned billionaire by 30 (uninformed optimism). Then, reality hit, I accrued a few business failures, and I quickly found myself doubting whether I'd be able to pay my rent, let alone food and other expenses! (informed pessimism)

But I applied myself consistently over the course of around a decade, and eventually climbed out the other side (crisis of meaning).

Now, looking back, it is clear to me that my problems are just ones of applied effort and enough time. Given that I have plenty of time—I am not even thirty, after all—I just need to find the thing I want to apply my effort to, and then do it.

I will figure this out in a directed way, and leave it for the end of this list so that, when I attack it, I am not hurried or busied by the various goings-on of my day.

Steps:

Closing thoughts

Not much to do now but... act!

I'll leave us with my closing thoughts from last September's journal entry.

I would, of course, like to positively impact the world to a much greater degree than just producing content. But any grandiose plan at this point would be little more than fantasy. 

Jensen Huang at NVIDIA talks often about how “planning is just dressed-up guessing”. I firmly believe this. So I’ll keep my guesses as constrained as possible—to the next few months at maximum—and focus my energy on tackling the small, realistic actionables that I’ve listed above.

I’ll start by adding each step to my to-do-list and proceeding logically based on priority. Until next time.

I love reading the thoughts of a younger me, because it confirms that my faith in the above concepts was correct. I have since achieved most of the goals I wanted back then, and am in a much better position to determine how best to positively impact the world.

No longer is any of this just "fantasy", but something I will turn into "reality". And the next time I write, I will undoubtedly have made even more headway making that so.

Time to get to work.

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