I am turning 24 this year though it all hits a bit different. excitement for the day has bit vanished like it isn’t what it used to in childhood. adulthood has finally started to settle in.

last few months have been a tad different. now I have more clarity on a lot of things and the internal ethos.

In 2013, I had an opportunity to attend an entrepreneurship workshop at IIT Delhi for 3 days where among many activities one was to write a letter to yourself in the future. I wrote the letter and forgot when it landed at my doorstep it was a big surprise.

as almost 11 years have passed from that small event I thought why shouldn’t we do it again, write a letter to yourself ? this time though on my newsletter (publically)

1. you make your own structure

school, college provide a structure for academic life but once you hit adulthood you build your own structure. designing your own life is your own responsibility no one will do it for you. take the events of life like a colour brush and paint the canvas of your existence.

2. run yourself like a startup

Early 20s is like the 0-1 stage of your adult life. organised tutorial phase is now over. find out the KPI’s that matter to you and keep shipping yourself, acquiring new hobbies and skills. Keep reinventing find out what is going right and if growth is in the right direction pivot. but keep building and shipping yourself.

3. ideas are just ideas until you build it

ideas are easy, it’s the execution that is hard. everyday the brain is like 20 new ideas for apps, devices, tools, videos or art. but they exist in the mental domain and putting them out is necessary as breathing air. it’s the classic 0-1 situation. It will all happen just give it time and effort necessary.

4. learn to say no

a lot of things seems important in the moment, but focus on task at hand: progress happens on working on long term things for a long while not short term fascinations. say “no” to a lot of unnecessary things, get the focus game going. try skating to where you think the puck is going to be and focus on nothing else.

5. execute execute execute

action creates information. and the only way to know result is through execution. if it ain’t executed it doesn’t exist. don’t keep things in mental domain for long. gather information and take a call.

6. break rules (nonsense ones)

a lot of rules you find are there to close you up in ways that might restrict you. obey the law of the land you live in. question the made up rules and the purpose they serve and the second order effects of rules that you follow or ask others to. choose the rules that are necessary and the ones that aren’t. fight nonsense bureaucracy simply. it slows things down.

7. seek mentors

imagine life like a game, there are players who are at the top of it and have collected a lot of XP or there are those who have amassed the in game token or gems. some have shields of side-quests to show. learn from the experiences of them and learn from what they can teach. you can’t walk in their shoes but they can give you enough learning that your structure is there.

8. take risks

take calculated bets on yourself like a de-gen options price trader. i mean why not? in a world that is betting on others win or loss bet on yourself. sure there is risk. there was risk in everything involved you have done till now. but the ability to measure risk shouldn’t stop you from taking the risk.

9. build a filter for noise

there is a lot of noise in media, tweets and other feeds. a lot of people have a lot of opinions on everything. not everything has to be accepted as fact, most of them are just pure noise. reject whatever is not valuable. we are in an information abundance age. our brains haven’t evolved to be in such an information overload always. it causes fatigue overtime. relax and think rationally before accepting something as a fact.

10. time is the most precious currency

value your and other’s time both in professional and personal life. its the only most unrepishable asset we have, money can be made again tomorrow, time spent can’t. also don’t fret on time other’s wasted of you or you accidentally wasted of others, previously what’s done is done.

11. balance

life only will work if you have balance, anything in extreme is harmful and anything in less isn’t effective. even a bike falls when it ain’t balanced, a car tilts in the wrong direction if the wheels ain’t balance. functionality of existence is based on balance. otherwise the damage of not having balance are very hard to recover from.

12. value system is the base you build on

value system is important to operate in life. we are supposed to operate with the value system we carry. its the core of everything one do. keep your value system intact. it is designed well, its the foundation.

13. before your talk : do

before you go talking about something do your homework, make an informed decision and do the necessary work beforehand not after hand. doing is hard, it where all the alpha is, words don’t mean anything if there is no action. DO.

14. don’t hold on to grudges

holding grudges on anyone will only lead to harm to yourself. true people did you dirty but it’s a choice wether you want to carry it forward. move on nothing good comes out of holding a grudge.

15. get gleeful like a child

as adulthood creeps in child like wonder starts getting looked down upon but most curiosity and spark or what people call element is stored in the child part of yourself. its what keeps one going. look up in the sky and wonder.

16. work on things that excite you

life is one time play, work on things you feel excites you. in a few thousand years time very low chances anyone will even remember you. ozymandias came and went and his statue was broken and surrounded by dust nothing stands the test of time. do your work give in your best but realise you have to fill it with things you find important so that on you are contended with your life’s work.

17. set deadlines and value them

all your life in school college workplace they set deadlines so you can deliver on the value, it keeps the world moving and teams and organisations achieving. so set deadlines in your own life and hit those goals. value deadlines they are places in time so that you can reach there. it is what keeps us delivering things that are necessary personally and professionally.

18. learn to sell and build

it’s naval’s quote, more details on : https://nav.al/build-sell .
you can do both, do both. it’s that simple.

19. think independently

think from first principles, devoid of opinions. thinking independently provides clarity. do experiments to validate those notions. if those notions fail: correct them and if those notions are found to be true publish your findings. but keeping this cycle active is neccesary

20. allure to perfectionism is demise to “getting things done”

don’t half ass it too. after a point you lock in all the goals of the project and just pour yourself in whatever you are doing. perfectionism would put things in drafts and in progress for long. progress is evolution and you surely start at level 0 many of times in different domain. things you create in code, art or media or any other format don’t match your taste yet cause you have seen how the greats have done it but realise that in a lot of arenas you are still a beginner and a lot has still to be learnt.

21. learn to use leverage

leverage comes in with a few forms:
capital, automation (tech), people and distribution.
there are no other forms known. learn how each leverage is built and nurture it and grow.

22. travel and see the world

go see the world, go out and travel there is no better substitute to understanding in how the world really is like without travelling and meeting people from different walks of like. you have learnt more about geography, people, culture, langugae from travel. Also don’t travel like a tourist, go really see the place, learn from them. bring back good stories and experiences.

23. कर्म करो, फल की चिंता मत करो

trust this quote Bhagvan Gita , be optimistic put in your work and make things, there is no substitute of putting in the effort. keep the hope and trust that the mechanics of the universe will eventually fall into place.

24. the world is a malleable place

the world was made by people no smarter than you and you can change it; you can influence it. build whatever you wish to if you put your mind to it and believe it to your core. (it’s a Steve Jobs quote)

lastly, be based

to the best,

shreshth

This place is making a resurgence. by this place I mean the newsletter. it's got a new flashy domain too: shreshth.xyz

If you go look at the last post1, it happened to be a while ago in the middle of 2022, we are now in early 2024. A lot has happened since then. I have grown a lot. saw both the beauty the world has to offer and the lessons it has to also teach.

some of you had the luxury of following slices of this journey on my Instagram stories. though it's coming to an end. atleast in its current form.

instagram stories

In college years I became actively present on Instagram because of its widespread adoption by peers. It looked lucrative socially to be there and I made it a goal to post atleast one story post a day, it garnered views so it made sense to keep posting things there plus it helped me remain relevant in that college community.

since 2023, I don’t think it's valuable anymore to be present on IG.
the platform has changed and it isn’t what it used to be and what role I wanted it to play.
Though I kept on posting due to sunk cost fallacy of being on platform since 2015. I will deep dive on my take on ig in some other post and why it will have a similar arc to facebook.

Also one fine day, I opened my screen time page which shocked me to my core. I quietly decided to leave Instagram, deleted the app and observe the effects it had on me. the results after 14 days were:
1. I was feeling back in my element.
2. Got more clarity on things and was able to focus better.
3. Absense of doom scrolling bought less mental stimulation and less mental fatigue

though I lost the major channel of putting my word out.

why this place, why now ?

Internet should be used as a leverage machine not as a consumption space, a place you come to talk to people, build software stuff, learn new things and see what the world is upto; not consume automated targeted ads every 2 minutes.

so I made a quick list of all places I want to build my online presence longterm.
the idea was that these should be spaces that support users in ways that they aren’t the product themselves.

so top canidates from the list that I want to focus on.
1. Substack
2. Twitter / X
3. Youtube

firstly,
all the above platforms give the option to monetise content once crossing a particular threshold. you aren’t consuming ads if you are a premium user.
Also the value proposition of being a creator on these platfroms is very high at the moment and in terms of increasing surface area of luck.

secondly,
I personally found a lack of a single place I could point to where my things are put up. So the plan is to put ideas here clearly for posterity and future reference.2

thirdly,
long form content is an easy way to attract those whose consumption palette in reading is still retained while detracting those who can’t focus long enough to read till now even.

conclusion

The goal is to be consistent in this place. most likely share things I am working on, my takes and opinions on things, things i scour on find interesting and tales to tell. I expect the frequency of it to be minmum once a week.

I believe that every format needs to be mastered. be it written word (tweets or long form newsletter), images (both graphics or sensor generated) or videos (reels and yt). This is an infinite game and should be played like one too.
getting word out on all these formats is necessary and every format has its own network effects which you can eventually play with.

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This is a subscriber’s only post. A couple of weeks ago I posted a very eccentric intro to this newsletter which wasn’t received well by the current audience. I had written multiple n…

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Far out in the charted but not so fashionable middle of the plains formed by a collision some 55 million years ago of two grand landmasses on a blue-green planet orbiting a not so significant sun in the western spiral arm of the galaxy exists a member of ape descent lifeform.

Even though these ape descendant lifeforms were nearly 7 Billion in count and spread unevenly in habitable and comfortable zones across the blue gree dot and did a lot of wonderful and exciting things. This isn’t holistically about them.

This is about just one member of the species trying to make the sense of its existence, consuming information in its perceived environment and trying to make the best it could do for its fellow beings; while enjoying the passage of time which is no more than a blip in the vastness of existence.

The member for the sake of ease was given a word as its name called “Shreshth” by its parents belonging to the family name of “Arora” and “Chhabra” which meant “the best” in an ancient language called Sanskrit which assimilated their hopes and aspirations into a single word. So that whenever the being was called it remembers its purpose and calling but was he really “the best” only time would have told the answer to this question.

Some genius generation of this species on the other end of the planet built an Information System with their insane tool-building skills where they tricked abundant sand available on the planet’s crust into thinking. This attempt didn’t go largely unnoticed and a plethora of tools got built over it.

While this member tries to build tools for its fellow species on the Information System and also tries to tread waters of chaos in an entropic sea; trying to make meaning out of everything going on. This is a log of things it thought could be shared, some raw ideas, some fully baked action plans some are just plain old observations while trying to be original.

While the impending heat death of the universe wasn’t very far away and everything that occurred didn’t matter anyway. He was still hopeful and optimistic while the small light of consciousness flickered on the dot.

Grateful for its existence while knowing it was very small compared to its species lifetime.

This is just a small attempt to tell its story while increasing entropy minutely.