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Codex Audentia

Codex: An ancient manuscript text in book form.
Audentia: Latin for “audacity”.

This is my codex — a working notebook with my notes, experiments, and rambles in their full glory. It is raw, unpolished and unfiltered.

This is not a blog.

I’m building a 1,000 year company, and writing about the process.

Apr 25

The Monk Life

By Reflections No Comments

It took me a long time to learn that being a HIGH-PERFORMANCE PERSON demands the “monk life.”

Any great endeavour, personal growth, or massive success is rooted in sacrifice.

A balanced life is an average life. Achieving high performance means you can only obsess over 1-2 priorities (maybe 3) in your life — the ones that bring you the most meaning and joy — and everything else usually has to be renounced.

When looking for the City of Gold in the rainforest, you must be willing to take a machete in your hands and hack away at the vines in your way. To find Treasure Island, you must leave the shore and set sail. You can’t have both. You have to pick and choose.

High-performance living is not for everyone, because for most people, the sacrifices aren’t worth it. And that’s okay too – no judgment.

I lived the “casual” way for a long time myself and kept wondering why I wasn’t getting the results I wanted. I had made lists of all the things I WOULD do. But I was afraid to decide what I WON’T do.

What we DELETE from our routines is as important as what we ADD.

The Monk Life is the ticket to success and greatness because once you choose it, you’re no longer held back by things that do not serve you.

Accepting the Monk Life starts to change your self-image. The mere act of sacrifice automatically lifts you up from the “pretenders” and places you among the “contenders.” The proof of your own conviction begins to erode your self-doubt.

Living the Monk Life means you’ve accepted the arena as your home. You belong to it, and are a gladiator by default. Winning is no longer a wish or a dream; it’s your job.

Mar 17

Obsession

By Reflections No Comments

In any project, business or organization, the psychology of the leader is the biggest factor towards success or failure.

I’ve realized I have an obsessive personality. By nature, I tend to get obsessed with things.

I can forget about food. Sleep. Standing. Moving. All so that I can keep doing whatever I’m doing.

But I’m also very easily distracted. My brain is an overly energetic dog.

The only way to keep me productive is to put my brain on the track with a big, clear rabbit to chase. I can chase that rabbit all the way to the finish line.

I also realize that if I had allowed myself to be obsessed with what my inner wisdom told me… not second-guessing everything I came up with… not focusing on other people’s advice and ideas first… I could have stayed consistent with my routines for an entire year.

If I’d tuned out the noise and focused on one thing for 365 days straight, I’d be in a totally different place right now.

So I’ve learned that I will use this fact to my advantage.

Focus on a single project at a time and go all-out on making it succeed, before moving on to the next one.

Patience over tactics. Take it 6 months at a time. Don’t switch things up all the time — just stick it out for 180 days before changing directions (or even horses, for that matter).

All the things I started and left unfinished because of short-term thinking:

  1. DenseLayers.
  2. Promoting the article constantly.
  3. Publishing the book.
  4. Guesting on other podcasts.
  5. The Eccentric CEO Podcast.
  6. Writing Twitter threads weekly.
  7. Networking and making friends on Twitter.
  8. Writing more essays on cool new technologies.
  9. Working out.
  10. Learning French.
  11. Learning Chinese.
  12. Learning to Draw.

You need to do things that scale, but give them time to compound! OR if you’re just going to “flip” things for a quick buck, just do that.

As Noah Kagan says, Law of 100. For doing anything, do at least 100 of them before switching gears or directions.

  • The book: 100 press releases, 100 guest podcasts, etc.
  • The podcast: 100 episodes EACH (ECCEO, AAI), 200+ youtube clips

Feb 06

Lethargy, Procrastination, Ambition

By Reflections No Comments

I’ve been reading a lot again. I sometimes wonder, when was the last time I had the urge to jump out of bed in the morning? It certainly has felt like years.

I believe the last time it happened was while writing or promoting an essay over several days, or any other project that was incredibly meaningful and important to me, was a lot of fun, was challenging to figure out, had a deadline, and usually involved accountability to other people.

I have an obsessive personality — I can, and dare I say need to get obsessed with something to feel great. Take that obsessive focus away from me, and I slowly lose my mind. I become distracted, lethargic, start sleeping 12 hours a day, stop working out or taking care of myself, and just feel like sh!t.

Who not How

On another note, I recently started reading a book called Who not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy (more the latter than the former). It made some interesting claims:

  • All ambitious people procrastinate. You are not alone, and you are not defective.
  • Procrastination is a form of inner wisdom. It tells you that at the moment, you’re not capable of achieving the goal by yourself. You need to find people who can help you get there.
  • Who before how. Before you ask yourself, “how do I do this?” you should ask yourself “WHO can help me do this?”
  • Only work on things you’re uniquely positioned to do. Find “whos” to help with everything else, and it will propel you faster towards all your goals than you could ever do alone.

This is a powerful, fundamental concept that can be transformative, similar to The 4 Disciplines of Execution.

Being Driven

I read another book recently called Driven, about people who tend to be incredible hyper achievers but are also prone to addictions and damaging behaviours if not focused.

Everything that book described felt like the story of my life. I hated school for the most part and lived in my own world, even though I got decent grades. I would just stay zoned out, and everyone noticed. I get distracted very easily, and leave things unfinished all the time.

But I can also get super absorbed into things — be it a book, or a subject, or a problem. I remember when I was reading the 4th Harry Potter novel, I finished it in less than 2 days, by just reading the heck out of it every hour.

Singular Focus and Ambition

It’s starting to dawn on me that being focused on a day to day basis, comes down to having a compelling vision in your mind and an identity that keeps telling you, “why am I not there yet?”

Day before yesterday, I was watching Underdog Billionaire on Youtube. Seeing Glenn Stearns and Grant Cardone (albeit with camera crews around them) just actively charge towards what they wanted, and do everything they could to gather strong team members one after another, take HUGE risks, and flip bigger and bigger products one after another. They also always made the vision bigger than themselves, and told their honest story, which helped recruit the right, motivated people to the cause. They also didn’t constantly have “plan Bs.” It was constantly, “if this fails, then the whole thing blows up.”

They almost completely ignored their current circumstances and focused on clawing towards the future.

“When climbing a mountain, don’t look down.” Keep looking at the peak.

What is my “peak”? If I don’t look at the peak and the next step every single day, multiple times per day, then I’ll be tempted to look down.

Steps to productivity:

  • Putting all eggs into a SINGLE BASKET at a time and bet everything on it
  • ELIMINATE TIME SUCKS (swear on your mother you won’t watch TV/anime/movies/Youtube etc until you reach a milestone).
  • Delegate every single task that’s not essential. Even DELEGATE THE OUTSOURCING, so you don’t have to waste hours on freelancer websites.
  • Do whatever you can to surround yourself with the RIGHT PEOPLE
  • Giving those people OWNERSHIP of their respective jobs and getting out of their way

Dec 14

Book Cover Design Brief

By Rambles No Comments

Staying true to the idea of documenting my journey in raw, unfiltered fashion.

It’s time to seriously start looking for a book cover designer for my labour of love over the last 12+ months. If I delay this any longer, my book may never get done.

 

Quick overview of the book

The book is titled “TECH FLUENT CEO.”

The working subtitle for the book is: The Eccentric Entrepreneur’s Guide to Leading and Innovating in the Age of AI

(Subtitle could also be: The Ambitious Non-Techie’s Guide to Leading and Innovating in the Age of AI)

It’s target audience is ambitious entrepreneurs, who want to build a modern, digital tech company or startup, but are non-technical — i.e they don’t have a background in software engineering or programming.

But they still need to hire engineers and work with them.

The book is about making them “tech fluent,” by teaching the concepts they need without having to learn to code, so that they can confidently communicate with engineers and strategize technically. So it’s like a non-fiction, educational business-technology textbook!

I want this book to enable countless entrepreneurs from diverse disciplines — arts, sciences, medicine, law, etc — to see their background as an asset, not a limitation, in their journey to build successful tech companies.

 

Who is the target reader?

Here’s the persona:

  1. X is a highly motivated, hard-working CEO / business leader. X has a get-shit-done, whatever it takes attitude.
  2. X wants to be very successful in life and in business.
  3. X is not a techie or engineer. X comes from a non-traditional background — could be anything from law to medicine, liberal arts, marketing, etc.

Design guidelines

First and foremost, I want a cover that pops — it is bold, eye-catching, and makes the person stop to look for a second.

Second, I want a cover that’s clear and authoritative in terms of fonts/typography. They need to see it as if the author wrote THE book on the subject.

Third, I don’t want a cover with too many elements crowding it up. It should be a work of art, yet unpretentious and simple. “Trying too hard” hurts credibility!

Here are some designs I’ve found that impressed me recently. In the first column, the two books are from Stripe Press, and the other two covers are by Eiko Ojala.

The cover “The Revolt of the Public” (shown below) is the closest to my original vision, especially in terms of title typography. It’s a great cover design, but I’d like the author’s name to be a little bit more prominent in mine. Another fantastic cover is the Lamborghini Moleskin design by Ponzi (also shown below).

A few things I don’t want:

  1. A design biased towards a certain gender of CEOs.
  2. Something cute.

 

 

https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/2493fa105505099.5f7afff3351ea.jpg
(Left) I really like the contrast and visual storytelling, and effective use of space. The slightly “cartoonish” art is also charming in its own way, giving the book a fun and approachable feel. (Right) I adore the color schemes and unique paper-oriented style. It captures attention and can be a formidable credibility-booster.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is 81gtwOnZhzL.jpg

https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/d25d08105505099.5f7afff338004.jpg
(Left) It’s a catchy cover, well-done in every sense of the word. Uses serious elements while still overall being fun and approachable. Great choice of color. (Right) the cover is eye-catching as a work of art, but just a little too plain.

Finally, everything by Emiliano Ponzi is beautiful. The Lamborghini cover is my favorite of all, for its understated but inspiring, aspirational nature.

(Right and Left) These aren’t book covers, but I REALLY REALLY love the visual storytelling. It’s genius. His colors are a little understated though, while I like them a bit poppy.

Lastly, here are 2 gorgeous covers by Owen Gent. I like the way he chose color schemes and the art style, although it’s very fiction-based.

Sceptre - Hodder & Stoughton - Sjón - Moonstone
Sceptre - Hodder & Stoughton - Sjón - The Blue Fox

Here’s one final cover inspiration, which lacks any sort of imagery whatsoever but is extremely clever. Another detail I love about this is the blend of fonts, a mix of formal and informal typography that makes the book seem approachable without being casual:

4 Inspiring Takeaways from Dorie Clark's 'The Long Game ...

 

What a designer could lead with:

I’ve chosen a few hypothetical directions for the cover, which might help! These are just suggestions.

  1. Use the paper-oriented style seen above for the cover?
  2. Focus on visual storytelling, with smart usage of space — to help with that, I can share with you the first two chapters which introduce my whole book.
  3. Use bold typography
  4. Colors should pop, but not overwhelm.

The last pointer for the designer is, please feel free to ignore everything I said and make a brave cover if you personally think it’s perfect. I won’t be mad I promise~

Dec 07

Productivity Systems Review

By Reflections No Comments

As I’ve discussed before in this codex here and here, a routine is the most fundamental infrastructure of any profession. Without a solid customized routine, you’re just an amateur.

I’m on the right track.

Big question in productivity and routines is, what do I optimize for? Depending on the priority, the routine changes. Here are some options:

  • Reduced anxiety
  • Clarity on goals and what I need to be doing
  • Creative energy, generating fresh ideas
  • Deep focused energy

Another question is, am I choosing priorities from the wrong emotional place? My routine can’t be reinforcing impatience and beliefs like “I’m not productive enough,” “I’m not doing enough,” “I’m neck-deep in work and trapped,” etc.

A routine that you don’t stick to, is one that was never meant to be — you don’t have the right systems in place. Willpower comes in spurts, but routines/habits are like a flowing river. Rely on routines, and willpower becomes even more effective.

Lately I’ve been feeling like I need to increase my SPEED and VOLUME of work. Not because I feel guilty, but because I’ve been feeling like I’m genuinely wasting precious time on things that are not meaningful to me.

As Brett reminded me recently, he would kill to be back at my age again. I am so lucky to have all this time. It can be a liability or a gift, depending on how I use it.

I think it’s safe to say that I need to be want to focus on output. I want to be more calm. I want to feel very present and in the moment.

The first material result I want from that is in having 4 days per week where I have nothing on my podcast and marketing to-do lists, and I can focus exclusively on other things. That would be awesome.

Let’s pick Sat, Sun, Mon, Tues as the no-podcast-marketing-writing days. Everything related to marketing and growing my private consulting practice, including the WIG commitments, should be done and scheduled within Wed, Thurs and Fri.

Therefore, for the RED days (Sat-Tues)

  1. All my SANPRAM calendly links to be disabled (no meetings about podcasts or anything else)
  2. Specific time slot for checking Slack notifications, just to help teammates. Not more than 15 minutes for management (they can talk to me on purple days)
  3. Work on extra income-generating projects.

On my 3 Purple days (Wed-Thurs-Fri), do the following:

  1. Write 2 blog posts about the podcast episodes
  2. Write 1 newsletter on alternate weeks
  3. Conduct interviews
  4. Hold meetings
  5. Get podcast episodes edited
  6. Take sales meetings (if any haha)
  7. Do one livestream if possible?
  8. Fill out 5 social media posts (videos and accompanying twitter threads) scheduled for the rest of the week

How do I get focused work done?

  1. By not checking notifications or my phone every 5 minutes
  2. By not looking up social media and other stuff constantly
  3. By having Focusmate sessions booked in advance
  4. By having clear goals that get reinforced throughout the day

Realization: I’m still being too analytical. I’m not even sure what should go INTO the routine, and here I am trying to optimize stuff that is still barely in shape.

When I look at my LinkedIn and Twitter feeds, I sometimes see a false reflection of myself. I’m trying to create a bloated identity to please invisible people. When I look at my Facebook profile and old Medium articles though, I see a more honest and genuine reflection carefree and goofy side of who I am.

The reason is not that I’m doing something inauthentic, but just that instead of sharing my excitement for learning and teaching with people, I’m building a “personal brand.” I think I can stop trying to build a “brand” and just be fun and goofy, and someone with the heart of a teacher.

Dec 02

It could take 50 years

By Reflections No Comments

If a daily or weekly habit takes 5 years to show an amazing result, is that worth the effort?

It could be building muscle sustainably, stretching to become more flexible, learning an amazing new skill, etc.

I’ll be 34 in the next 5 years. If at 34 I’m healthier and stronger than I’ve ever been, more flexible and agile, more mentally clear and happy, and having enough money to retire, that is worth the wait.

Then think about 20 years.

If it takes me 20 years to build a net worth of almost a hundred million dollars, that’s an INCREDIBLE lifetime achievement. It’s more than I’ll ever need or want. I’ll be only 50 years old. A 50-year-old with tens of millions to their name, can have another 50 years to enjoy it and see it compound.

Life expectancy for someone like me is probably around 100. In the next 70 years, humanity will see faster changes than ever seen before on the planet.

Things are already getting to a point where powerful civilizations rise and fall in a matter of decades, not centuries — just think of the Saudis discovering oil at the turn of the last century, and now learning that they have to wean off of it.

This means, over the next 20-30 years, we will have more “land-grap” opportunities to become insanely successful than any of our ancestors did. We will have SO MANY chances to “strike big.” Just like Ray Kroc who founded McDonalds after a series of barely successful ventures, it just takes a little grit to get going and keep digging for gold. Fortunes will grow and vanish over spans of just a few years.

I almost feel like anyone who doesn’t become wealthy at any point over this period during such a time is either ignorant to the point of foolishness, or cursed by destiny.

When the world is changing faster than people’s knowledge of it can keep up, you’ll be left with huge swathes of folks with outdated world-views, who will miss opportunities right under their nose. And that’s already happening.

We are incredibly lucky to be living in a time like this.

I will use SANPRAM Transnational as a vehicle to ride as many of these waves as possible. The goal for my personal life is to experience the most that the universe has to offer, marvelling and celebrating the creations of both human and nature, leaving few fruits untasted. And doing things that genuinely get me happy and excited.

Dec 02

A Teaching Superpower

By Reflections No Comments

My unlikely, unplanned journey to becoming a world-class teacher.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ae/4e/7d/ae4e7d56f9e4a1d973a03fe0e80eff54.jpg

(This is not a blog. It’s a codex – raw, unpolished and brutally frank)

Let’s get 3 things out of the way first.

  1. I never planned to be a teacher, never thought it would be one of my careers, and wasn’t good at it as a child. It was not god’s gift nor a hobby.
  2. It’s surprising to me that I’m now regarded as a world-class teacher. Now only have I personally taught people on 4 continents, many more have read my essays and tutorials, etc.
  3. I have however found more success as a teacher than in all my previous roles – sales, marketing, systems engineering, software development, machine learning R&D, and whatnot.

So how did it happen? Was it an accident?

Not entirely.

My real “gift” is not teaching. It’s in cinema and storytelling. I knew I wanted to make movies and TV shows since I was a small kid.

I obsess over the best way to tell stories visually – how to draw people into it, how to create empathy, how to hold people’s attention so tightly that they can’t look away.

On the other hand, I’ve also never been a sophisticated thinker. I like to understand things from the big picture and then go deep. I’m not that smart either – math was my most hated subject in school because I couldn’t relate it to anything in my life. But I did enjoy Physics though.

As a filmmaker, you’re always switching from the macro (how and where is the story flowing?) to the micro (how should I compose these 10 seconds in a way that evokes X, Y and Z emotions?).

Students are an audience. As a teacher, your job is to sell a story.

Whenever I have to write or make a presentation, I get fired up. It’s like a drug-induced state of pristine focus. I can’t snap myself out of it. And that’s why I know that writing is my “safe place,” where I can always find solace when everything else is chaotic. (The same applies to language learning.)

Oct 12

Revisited: An Entrepreneur’s Routine

By Reflections No Comments

The last time I discussed this topic was in August 2020: https://aman-agarwal.com/2020/08/25/getting-into-a-routine-as-a-solo-entrepreneur/

What Happened

It seems like stress, productivity, procrastination and discipline are all intensely interconnected.

Over the last 13 months, I’ve been through many stages of crippling stress and procrastination, when I also felt very unproductive. At the same time, I’ve also made some terrific changes in my life that I can’t take for granted:

  • Had a 132 day unbroken streak of Chinese reading on LingQ
  • NoFap streak unbroken (and still ongoing) for 148 days straight. I never thought I could have achieved this, without the help of certain friends who motivated me to stay hanging.
  • Started working out, with 5 consecutive weeks of completing 3 progressive workouts each week without falling off the wagon completely.

However, this does not completely negate the damage caused by other things:

  • Days when I’d just watch Youtube or anime the whole time.
  • Sleep schedules being very erratic, getting pushed further back down to 7-8am on certain days.
  • Losing my Wim Hof breathing and meditation practice.
  • Losing my Chinese and French daily study and practice.
  • Losing my late night stretching/flexibility practice.
  • Not keeping my accounting and financial reporting up to date every month.

Where I am right now

As I’ve said in my previous post, a routine is the most fundamental infrastructure required for any profession.

As of today, I have the following challenges that I believe my routine needs to help me with:

(First a token of gratitude to myself: I do not hate myself for my lack of perfection, because I know it’s a journey, and I’m becoming a better person every year. Until last year, NoFap was a distant dream for me. Now, it’s slowly, cautiously becoming a part of my identity.)

  1. When I wake up, I feel like I need to check if I’ve missed something because of sleeping so late. I need to check that I don’t have any urgent meetings, or anything I need to prepare for.
    • Instead, I want to feel a sense of calm energy. I want to feel motivated to do whatever I need to accomplish that day. I want to feel like I have all the time in the world but can’t wait to get started, instead of feeling like I don’t look forward to it.
    • Key: wake up early, and don’t have meetings early in the day.
  2. I don’t look forward to Mondays. I feel a sense of pain and hurt that I have to show up to work again. This means there’s something I’m not enjoying about my work, especially teaching. I don’t feel confident in my teaching abilities? How come I’m not feeling grateful that I have a teaching session, like I once did before when Wilson was my main student?
    • Instead, I want to feel like WOW, tomorrow I get to work with my team again and we’re going to crush it! I don’t want to WAIT for Monday to come up so I can work on really cool stuff again.
    • Key: be prepared way in advance for the week.
  3. I feel “lost” throughout the day and get decision fatigue very quickly. Having my dad constantly ask me for stuff is also a problem, but not the main problem.
    • Instead, I want to feel a certain CLARITY most of the day. I want to know what I need to be doing. The only interruptions should come from a sudden idea that grips me and I want to note it down/discuss it with someone.
    • I don’t want to feel like “oh where did all that time go?”
    • Key: have only 2-3 things to do in a given day, and book focusmate sessions beforehand.
  4. I get a lot of urges throughout the day to look up Google or Youtube or LinkedIn for something.
    • Naturally, I don’t want to do that. Having set up Pause and Limit for all these websites, and then removing them from the toolbar should work great!
    • Done!
  5. I haven’t been producing enough content and threads on social media. I haven’t been posting enough podcasts consistently. I haven’t been posting in slack groups consistently. I haven’t been going OUT to market and self-promote.
    • Naturally I need to build into my routine the time to do that.
    • I also want time for polishing my craft: teaching the stuff that actually matters.
    • Taking quotes from my book and putting them out on social media.
    • Writing pages and descriptions for my podcast episodes.
    • Cutting out snippets for podcast episodes.

So what are the major chunks of my week?

  1. Motivation: listening to motivational quotes, and viewing my immediate goals on my vision board. 2x per day.
  2. Working out and nutrition: first thing to start the day on MWF.
  3. Writing — latest podcast episode description, and/or new book chapter, or email
  4. Reviewing and editing
  5. Creating new content for social media? Only use canva/notepad.
  6. Meetings and podcast recordings — ideally only 3 days a week.
  7. Language learning in a Focusmate session.
  8. Shutdown alarm at 3am.

DAILIES

  1. Rejoice and celebrate the new day as soon as I wake up: celebrate my life’s wins and efforts.
  2. Motivational audio in the morning
  3. Check email and messages really quick
  4. Workout and nutrition
  5. Sit down, review vision board and REASONS for 2 minutes
  6. Start off with focusmate sessions dedicated to the day’s WRITING tasks.
  7. Move on to focusmate sessions for language learning tasks.
  8. Review vision board and goals again.
  9. Move on to focusmates for social media calendar OR the editing tasks OR admin tasks.
  10. You’re done for the day. Do some journaling. Set up next day’s tasks.
  11. Go to sleep.

What I need for this:

  • ONE assigned writing task per day. Maximum of two.
  • TWO focusmate sessions dedicated to language learning (25 mins or 50 mins each)
  • LESS THAN= 3 assigned social media or admin tasks per day. Combined should not take over 50 minutes of focused effort.
  • AT MOST ONE assigned editing tasks per day.
  • ALL RECORDINGS scheduled only on Thurs and Friday, all MEETINGS only on Wed, Thurs, Friday.
  • ONE focusmate session for reviewing end of day and journaling.
  • TURN OFF laptop after all the day’s tasks are done.

I challenged myself to get a black belt in Judo in 12 months, training at the Kodokan in Tokyo.

I challenged myself to achieve fluency in Japanese in 12 months. The result blew me away.

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