Getting Started

This is the reading version of the Getting Started module. The module is fast and interactive. This is the slow, deep version, for when you want to sit with the idea.

Start with the list you can actually write

You are staring at a blank page, asking what to do with your life. It is the wrong first question, because you are not equipped to answer it yet. The flash of light where your calling reveals itself is a story people tell afterwards. Waiting for it is expensive.

Here is the question you can answer today: what do I already know I do not like?

Write the do-not-like list. Every entry on it was paid for with a lived experience. You did the thing; your memory kept the receipt. The list writes itself and does not lie, because it is memory, not speculation.

Now try the love list. You know your pulls, sure. You do not know what living them daily costs. The love list is untested fantasy wearing nice clothes. Even the clever compromise, write both and act on the overlap, quietly trusts the love list as if it were tested. Lead with the tested list, and let your loves earn their way on by surviving contact.

Subtraction beats addition: you find your direction by ruling things out, not guessing them in. Clarity is the prize at the end of the walk, not the ticket to start it.

Losing conviction is a promotion

Here is the move everyone reads backwards. You commit, you do the thing, and you lose conviction on it. Most people file that as failure. It is the opposite: you now know something you only used to suspect. You might even end up more confused, and that is still higher clarity, because the confusion now stands on real data instead of fantasy. Quitting the wrong thing on purpose is not giving up. It is sharpening.

The mechanism is a chain: exposure changes perspective, changed perspective means learning, and having learned you have by definition grown. Every honest attempt pays out, win or lose, because every attempt buys exposure, and exposure is the only thing that moves you. The failures are not waste. They are the tuition.

This flips early decision-making. One instinct says map everything and commit to the highest expected value. Wrong stage: with no exposure your list of options is fiction, so you optimize a map you cannot read. The other instinct says de-risk and test quietly on the side, but undeniable evidence never arrives from the sidelines. The right decision at the start is: what am I curious about, and where do I have the most momentum to gain a lot of exposure fast. Do not look for the perfect move. Look for the fastest learn.

And an idea sitting in the temple between your two ears is as good as a waste idea: never brandished, never pressure-tested. Conviction reality has not signed off on is a daydream with good PR.

Two dials, and the cruel catch

Only two things have anything to do with getting rich: decisions and leverage. A good decision points you the right way; leverage multiplies what it is worth. Everything else routes through these two. Hard work is an input, not a lever. Talent is one ingredient of one kind of leverage. Timing is just a decision you got right.

The cruel catch: to take better decisions you need to see them, and the good ones do not unlock when you have no leverage. The interesting options stay invisible until you have the leverage to be invited into the room where they exist. You cannot pick from a menu you are not rich enough to be handed. Your first job is not finding the perfect decision. It is growing leverage, because leverage reveals the decisions worth taking.

Walk Ikigai, do not teleport to it

You have seen the Ikigai diagram. Four questions: what do you love, what are you good at, what can you be paid for, what does the world need. The pairwise overlaps give you passion, profession, vocation, and mission. The dead center, where all four meet, is supposed to be your reason for being.

The model does not break; the teleport does. People aim straight for the dead center, assuming a clarity only lived exposure could have handed them. The center is real, people do walk into it. Jumping at it means aiming blind, so they freeze.

My twist, Reverse Ikigai, treats Ikigai as a path, not a destination. Walk the circles in order and let each one build leverage. Start at what you love, because chasing interests is how you grow what you are good at: capability leverage. What you are good at becomes your profession, which hands you two more: industry know-how, the gaps outsiders cannot see, and network, every person widening your surface area of luck. Then what the world needs, crossed with what people will pay for, points you at a market in pain: your vocation, your blue ocean. You do not find the center. You walk to it, pressure-tested at every step, and clarity is what the walk produces.

One warning: getting paid is the worst-ROI thing a profession gives you. Two people take the same job. One optimizes for the package; the other takes slightly less and obsesses over learning and meeting people. Five years out, the learner is handed decisions the maximizer never sees, because salary compounds arithmetically while exposure compounds into new option sets. Optimize a profession for know-how and network. The paycheck is the booby prize.

The Three Machines

Where you start depends on your rung of Maslow's hierarchy. If money is scarce, survival comes first. You cannot philosophize about fulfillment on an empty bank account. For most people the honest first step is brutally practical: make enough money that the deeper question becomes affordable at all.

I think of it as three machines. Machine 1 pays the bills, and its trap is that it trades your time for money, which is why it is almost always a service. Machine 2 breaks the link between time and money, because time is the most expensive thing you can trade. Machine 3 is your mission, what you do for others once money stops being the constraint. Getting started is entirely a Machine 1 problem, and Machine 1 has one purpose: fund Machine 2.

The common failure is quiet: most people never leave Machine 1. They just earn, all their lives, chasing the game called more, spending great hours on useless dollars they will never use. Machine 1 funds your escape. If you never build Machine 2, it becomes your life sentence.

The climb runs on what Naval Ravikant calls the three Cs. Content is distribution: build the right audience and you can sell to it at scale. Code is the great equalizer: a repeatable product can be sold to a million people with almost no extra production. Capital multiplies a decision with time, because money compounds without you adding hours. A business is twisting and turning until you find a repeatable process; code lets you sell it a million times without a million times the work.

Build Machine 1 as a service, into a market you can win

Why a service and not a product? A product, like code or a company or investing, is a J-curve: it dips first and demands leverage you do not have yet. A high-value service can hit your goal with a handful of clients, fast. Services do not scale, which is why they are not Machine 2, and exactly why they are the quickest way to make money now.

The question turns concrete: which market gives you the highest odds of getting paid for what you can already do? From my own experience, a good market has five traits. Growing, not post-peak; brilliant newspaper copywriting is wasted leverage in a dying medium. Easy to identify and target. In real pain. Able to pay, ideally where your monthly fee is one to ten percent of their income. And low competition, few people running this exact race with focus.

Here is the test in real life. I decided I would do social media for only surgeons. Not physicians, surgeons, and only established super-specialists who had done a fellowship, later in their careers. Easy to identify. The market for social media was saturated, but social media for surgeons was a race almost nobody ran with focus. A surgeon earning close to a crore does not blink at one to two lakh a month, so I charged about 1.5 to 1.75 lakh. Five clients took me to a crore in revenue, within six months. Saturated market, empty niche.

Then engineer the offer. Value equals dream outcome times perceived likelihood, divided by time, money, and effort. And the equation runs both ways, the part people miss: the business has to be valuable to you too. My dream outcome was a crore, my likelihood was high because it only took five clients, so the value to me was enormous before I ever pitched. If it is not valuable to you, you will quietly abandon it no matter how good it looks on paper. Pitch yourself first.

With surgeons, I picked which denominator to load. Money I let stay high; they could afford it. So I crushed the other two. Effort: just 15 hours every two months, shooting two months of content in one go, so the surgeon barely lifts a finger. Time: a definitive one-year commitment instead of an open-ended someday, a small ask for someone who spent half their life training before earning a rupee. You do not have to win every denominator. Pick the one you can afford to lose.

One more choice: passion or competence? Build on calm, marketable competence, kept passion-adjacent. Chasing passion makes you impulsive and emotional, and the first careless client note on the thing you love converts fuel into resentment. A photographer friend built a studio, realized it was a business, and today never touches the camera himself. I was never passionate about helping surgeons; I grew to love it. Love is something the work earns, not a prerequisite. But do not let cash alone pick the lane either; a business with zero pull is one you quietly stop showing up for. Momentum, not margin, decides whether Machine 1 survives year one.

None of this was a plan

A fair objection: it is easy to narrate a clean framework after the money is in the bank. So here is the honest sequence; none of it was a plan.

As a kid I loved dance, music, arts, and science, and I had to sell event tickets young, so I got good at selling. That landed me a job at Adagio, running a comedy room. The exposure and the people there let me invest my dad's money into a guitar class, pay him bank rate, and earn a 30 percent return, so at 18 I was already tasting passive income. Adagio is also where I met my future co-founder, which led to the NFT business, Stitch Network: 1.2 crore in six months. Love built capability, capability built network, network surfaced the decisions. I did not design the path; I walked it.

The NFT run worked because the problem needed three things at once: a bit of tech from my 11th and 12th science, a bit of art from my arts and BMM background, and a bit of finance from my business side. Almost nobody had all three stacked, and we ended up working with three billion-dollar-market-cap companies. That is what specific knowledge is: not one rare skill, but a rare combination only your particular road could have assembled.

Does survivorship bias apply to my story? Of course. That is why the method leans on parts that do not depend on luck: a do-not-like list costs a page, fast exposure costs some pride, a market score costs an evening. Small, bounded downside; compounding upside. That asymmetry is the argument, not my anecdote.

What to actually do this week

Two assignments, pen on paper. Reading about the gym is not the gym.

One: run your own Reverse Ikigai. Start at what you love and walk outward, writing what each circle has actually given you: what capability, what know-how, what network. Be honest about where your momentum actually sits.

Two: name one candidate market for your Machine 1 service. Score it against all five traits: growing, easy to identify, in real pain, able to pay where your month is one to ten percent of theirs, low competition. If it fails two or more traits, name a second candidate and score that one too.

Then take the fastest exposure on whichever survives. Not a business plan, not a logo: one real conversation with one real person from that market, this week. If you lose conviction afterwards, good, that is a promotion. You do not need to know what you want yet. You need to know where to push, and now you do.

Want the fast, interactive version instead? Run the Getting Started module, or explore the whole codex.