Intro thread -- I'm an animal

[madtwatter]

Basic bio:

• 21, male, undergrad student
• Born in Mumbai, left at 13 months old. We moved to Hong Kong (for ~ 1 year), Singapore (for 3 years), Malaysia (3-4 years), Japan (< 1 year), Hong Kong again (9 years), and then I came to Canada for uni
• Currently doing an internship in computer vision in Montreal

Longer background:

I've felt since I was literally 4 years old that it was my destiny to be rich and famous (I get less insufferable as the post goes on, I promise). I'd ask my parents for a toy at the mall, they'd preach prudence, and I'd respond by saying that I wouldn't have to worry about that, because when I grew up I'd own the entire mall.

Despite this, I never pursued any business ideas as a youth. I was a dilettante with zero fighting spirit. My mum tells an anecdote about me as a 5-year-old where I wouldn't enter a ball pit because there were babies, much younger than myself, playing inside, and I couldn't assert myself. I've worked on this and will continue to do so.

I was a great student. I was on the Ivy League track, and my parents and I derived lots of satisfaction from my reputation. I was also a paid, award-winning journalist from the age of 15 onwards (this kind of extracurricular excellence was almost par for the course at my school, which was a nice private school in tony Hong Kong).

This changed at 16 -- school got harder, my complete lack of study habits caught up to me, and I got depressed. My grades at the end of HS were sub-50th percentile for my school. I went off to Canada to study. I'd come home during each holiday and cry (literally) to my parents, lamenting my lack of direction. My grades got worse. I'm sure I would've killed myself if this had continued. I even made an account on a forum that provided information on various methods for offing yourself.

Near the end of my second year (March 2020) I got Scott Adams' book, How to Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. This book changed my life -- no exaggeration. I was a different person before and after that book. I can't praise it enough -- it's written with hypnosis techniques (he's a trained hypnotist), and it's lethally effective. I listened to it over and over, and resolved, that summer, to take control of my life. Adams describes a system of serial entrepreneurship and skill building that maximizes your probability of business success. I decided this would be my path. (Around this time, I also listened to Unscripted, but How to Fail... resonated more at the time).

I decided to aim at a career in software, because:

• I could self-teach
• It would give me a high-leverage skill that's bound to be useful in business
• I could meet cofounders this way
• Software devs can earn a lot, and I could use this to fund ideas

In the 2 years since, I've built projects and done internships. I'm currently doing an internship in computer vision.

I was also diagnosed with ADHD recently, which alleviated a mountain of shame that I experienced over my dramatic decline in school. Lots of people say that ADHD confers creativity, and can be transmuted into an entrepreneurial advantage. I don't feel creative, but F*ck that -- I'm committed to getting rich young, ADHD or not.

As mentioned, Adams suggests serial entrepreneurship + constant learning as a "system" that improves your probability of Fastlane success, if pursued over a long enough period of time (similar to MJ's emphasis on process vs events).

Here's what I've tried:

Attempt 1: Twitter bot

After reading Adams' book, I became obsessed with his writing, and read his other book on persuasion, as well as literally hundreds of his blog posts, going back to the mid-2000s. I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of his thinking, and I thought that I would build a Twitter bot that would write threads that summarized his content. I wrote these tweets manually at first, and attached them as replies to his tweets.

Pretty soon, he blocked my bot. I realised my mistake: I'd been so eager to share my knowledge of his writing that I had resorted to writing tweets on irrelevant stuff that was barely related to the tweet I had replied to. Learning: it's not enough to make noise in public. The key is to be useful in public.

Attempt 2: Therapy app

This is a long story, but it's worth it.

In December of 2020, my parents sent me a link to this interview:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJsGArhWZCY


It's with Dr. Phil Stutz, an eccentric 75-year-old psychiatrist who treats A-list actors, CEOs, and billionaires. He invented "Tools." A Tool is a CBT visualization that you can do in a few seconds to solve a problem (e.g. insecurity, fear, laziness). I tried his Tools. They worked. I became obsessed, and devoured all of his interviews, as well as the 2 books he co-wrote with colleague Barry Michels (also a shrink to the stars).

Fast forward to the summer of 2021. I'm sat in my dorm room, having just withdrawn from a course, and with nothing else to do (no internship). I saw on Instagram that Jonah Hill (one of Stutz's patients) was making a Netflix documentary on Stutz. I thought I would make an app that would help people use the Tools. I'd kill two birds with one stone:

1. It would give me a project to put on my resume.
2. I thought that hundreds of thousands of people might watch the documentary, since Jonah Hill is a big name, and because I knew the subject (Stutz) was fascinating. Some % of these people might Google the Tools, go on the App Store to see if there was an app, etc. I could conceivably get thousands of users, and this would be a way to learn how to serve value to a user base.

I wrote the app's content (borrowing heavily from Stutz and Michels), designed it, built it, and released it in August 2021. I got ~50 downloads. I forgot about it, despite a market echo (an email from a user who described an aspect of the app as "perfect").

Around the same time, I got an unpaid internship at a tiny startup. The startup failed in October 2021. Through a series of coincidences, I'd managed to find Phil Stutz's number, and I thought this was the time to call him. I cold-called him to pitch the app. The motherfcker picked up, and I pitched him. He was encouraging, and told me to email him, so I did.

I waited a couple weeks. Crickets.

But he'd been so receptive during the call, so I called him again. He picked up, and we ended up on Zoom. Bad news -- he couldn't work with me, for legal reasons (plus, he's very busy, as all high-calibre people are). But after he delivered the news, we kept talking. We ended up speaking for almost an hour, and he asked about me, encouraged me, complimented me, and gave me advice. I couldn't believe it -- he had become a hero of mine, and here he was, on my screen, talking to me.

At the end of the call, he asked how old I was.

"21," I said.

"Yeah, I'm -- I'm impressed with how you're handling yourself," he said.

My brain spun in my head. "H-how so?" I squeaked.

"Most people who achieve things are a pain in the a$$. You're kind of a pain in the a$$ too," he replied.

Phwoar. Talk about a Wizard of Oz moment. Lol.

The project may have failed, but it gave me a killer story to tell during job interviews.

Learnings from therapy app failure:

• Reciprocity/usefulness: I think he only indulged me to the extent he did because I'd done my homework on him, had actually built the app, and even had a user testimonial to tell him about. He could see that I wasn't asking for a handout -- I'd come with an offer of value, no matter how idealistic.
• Boldness: the part that surprises most people about this story is the fact that I cold-called him. Yeah, I was nervous on the call, but I actually enjoyed cold-calling him. It gave me an incredible rush. This is probably a strength I can leverage.
• Optimism: I could've easily assumed he wouldn't care, or wouldn't pick up. Reasonable assumption. But I called him anyway, and it led to magic.
• Do things that make for a great story: self-explanatory.

In general, I think I should be evaluating future ideas with the CENTS framework in mind. I didn't do that for either of these ideas.

Sorry this was so long.

I'm thrilled to be here. Leave a reply if you enjoyed my public wankfest lol.

 

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