4 Takeaways from 2023

 Last year, around the same time I wrote a blog about 2022, talking about 3 things:

1. What money means to me

2. Software is a myth

3. The definition of intelligence

In case you haven't read it, you can find it here.

Compared to 2022, 2023 has been quite positively eventful. While my learnings in 2022 were more philosophical, 2023 has been much more action-oriented. Not everything has been a success, but I have learnt a lot about myself, my abilities, and my weaknesses.

Let us talk about the top 4 highlights of this year.

1. Losing 25+ kgs for the second time

The above picture summarizes this paragraph. I think it is time for me to write a book about weight loss and maybe even weight gain. I do not plan to describe my strategy here as I believe this is going to be unique to every individual, but there is one hard learning for sure: Diet makes a HUGE difference. 

weight = weight + k*(calorie_in - calorie_out)

If you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight!

You know sometimes despite all that you have done and can do, you still feel that you are incapable? Imposter Syndrome? I guess I am gaining and losing weight to keep proving to myself that I can do it (jk). 

But I did it again, and I have a long way to go in 2024. What I am particularly proud of is the fact that this helps me take forward my learnings from last year's paragraph on "Software is a Myth". My hardware is getting better now, and I plan to keep improving it throughout 2024 (touch wood).

2. Solving difficult problems first

Everyone has a comfort zone. When we truly learn, we get out of that zone and make progress. I realized that as a student it was easier for me to learn and get out of my comfort zone. Almost every new lecture I heard while studying for JEE was new for me and out of my comfort zone. I had to practice, ask doubts, and be generally curious to learn and upskill. Every day was difficult. Every day was 100% upskilling.

Now, the days are much easier, and that's scary. I was paid extremely well in 2023 to do my job. Whilst it feels great to get paid and also do your job well, when you end up doing your job too well, you know for a fact that you are not learning. You are almost always in your comfort zone.

Although I kept finding ways to learn and upskill, I understand that working is 80% application and maybe only around 20% upskilling. If everyone kept upskilling all the time, then nothing would get done. So, I needed to optimize my 20% upskilling time in such a way, that I can get an equivalent of the 100% that I used to have as a student. 

The BEST way I could do this was - solving difficult problems first. What is something in your team/company that everyone wants to solve, but no one has been able to? Sometimes, these problems might be truly unsolvable. But more often than not, they have 100x learnings compared to everything else you are doing. Some of the 100x candidates for 2023 were:

1. Taking Dash from 0 to 1 - Failed

2. Growing GST vertical by 1.5x - Success (thanks to some amazing colleagues)

3. Losing 25 kgs - Success

4. Taking Judgments from 1 to 100 - In Progress*

5. Taking VakilGPT from 0 to 1 - In Progress*

6. Taking Sapien from 0 to 1 - In Progress

*Although I started these, I am no longer part of the team that builds this

All the candidates from 1 to 5 are not financially 100xers for me as I was being paid to build them. But Sapien is something I will be doing full-time in 2024, investing my time and effort and putting my money where my mouth is. Sapien could be a financial 100xer. 

3. Quitting my job to startup

It was always my plan to build something of my own. In the last 10 years, I have tried to launch multiple small apps/websites while simultaneously working in a job/studying. I have always failed/given up while I was ahead.

Regardless of how great/stupid the idea was, regardless of how excellent/disastrous the execution was, regardless of how brilliant/dumb the founders were, there is one learning that has always been reinforced. 

Either startup full-time or don't startup at all. 

Why should someone invest in your startup/join you as a co-founder or employee if you yourself think it isn't worth quitting your job?

I have been saving up around 80% of my salary for the past few years so that I could bootstrap smallest.ai. October 31, 2023 was the last day of my job.

This time it feels extremely real. Every month I do not get revenue, I go closer to bankruptcy. I might lose everything trying to do this. I might have to start again. There is no safety net. This has to work, else the inevitable happens.

This fuels a different kind of energy. I have started solving difficult problems quickly. Sapien went live in just 31 days from inception. Although there is a long way to go, I think 2024 has something special that will make magic happen. 

4. Staying away from confident mediocres

Mediocrity is everywhere and you learn to navigate through it. But of late, it is becoming much more difficult. There is so much content out there that it makes someone mediocre sound extremely confident. And confident mediocrity is a recipe for disaster.

At the fresher level, this leads to poorly executed projects. Everything has to be manually reviewed, and nothing gets done on time. But they still eventually learn if they want to.

The disaster is exponential when this is at a leadership level. Especially if a founder is so, the entire startup goes for a toss. I have seen this happen multiple times and have done some pattern recognition to avoid these people in the future. Some of their traits are:

1. Will always ask difficult questions, will never answer them

2. Will be extremely insecure about his/her image, and might lie/cheat/deceive to protect it

3. Will never own up to any failure that he/she has led or is a part of, but will claim successes that are not theirs to claim

A very nice example of this would be when your founder outsources his/her strategy to a leader completely, who then outsources it to his associates, who then get the answers from Google. Everyone has mastered how to manage the next level of hierarchy by sounding confident, but no one realizes that it will all go to hell. 

The associates trust the leader's seniority to filter out his /her opinions, the leader trusts the founder's acumen to navigate through his ideas, and the founder trusts the leader's expertise to build the strategy. It's a beautiful vicious cycle.

Although there is some growth you can achieve through this pretentiousness excellence, there is always a threshold that you will reach very soon when smart, capable people will see through your charade.

2023 was not my first year of encountering people of this nature, but I really hope my pattern recognition system helps me avoid them in 2024, while not having too many false positives.

What next?

2023 has been full of positivity. In 2024, I would like to:

1. Gain a lot of muscle

2. Take Sapien to at least 100K$ ARR

3. Try Vipasana

Some people like rigid goals like this, and some people don't. I think nothing matters.

If there is any significant progress in any of the above 3 points, you will hear from me in another blog post. 

Until then! 

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