This is an article that provides one of many possible outlooks on life.

I don’t know about you, but I think about my life a lot. I kinda spent my entire childhood doing it. Starting off with the so called ‘what’s-the-meaning-of-life’ kind of question and chasing down this rabbit hole has been my specialty. I just constantly thought. My teacher took a photo of me during a field trip and sent it to my mom along with a text message saying “I’m really curious what is going on in this child’s mind” – I just sat by the seaside looking into the ocean while everyone else was playing in the sand. I debated between philosophy and physics for my college major so I guess I did show some signs of a thinker.

I like to think of it as a skill. I can’t really find any use cases with it, though. Sometimes I wonder how different my life would have been have I developed a different set of skills like coding or engineering instead of this not-even-properly-philosophical skill. I did get into ChemE because google said it makes a lot of money so I’m not completely blind to engineering. I also teach myself stuff so I know things but I’m probably not one of those Olympiad kids.

I hated my life after I got into college. I hated people there and I hated the things that they all aspired to – jobs and stability. It just seemed idiotic. I was also hung up on the fact that I didn’t get into Caltech, so I started resenting physics.

I started exploring a bit. Journalism, because I thought it would be cool to have people read my stuff but it was just a bunch of soul sucking slavery and attention business. I went to this event for journalists and after hearing a speech and having a few conversations with people, I concluded that the whole industry is kind of retarded except for the good players. And then there was legal practice stuff, it was interesting, but not interesting enough.

I later started building things and got really obsessed with VCs and AIs. Then at one point I asked myself – why?

The answer was simple, I wanted money. I wanted billions of dollars and I was blinded by this whole AI gold rush and influenced by sf builders around me.

And then I got to thinking – okay, what is my ultimate goal here? If I can make billions of dollars doing something else, would I still care about this whole AI thing? probably not.

So I just had to define my point B with more clarity and it was certainly not getting into YC or a16z. It was money. Software game started to feel a little… off. I needed a renovated focus, a shift. And it should be more about money. (Evaluating the potentiality of something bringing in revenue is a highly valuable skill imo)

So I had to do some research, I looked up richest people in the world and realized:

1. They are mostly entrepreneurs
2. There are certain industries that produce more billionaires than others

– then my thought stopped there and jumped to somewhere else – about resource.

We are given roughly 80 years of time. you probably already spent 20 on doing useless shit unless you’re raised really well or are just really smart. and once you hit 60 you will probably want to stop doing things. Which means you have around 40 years to actually do things. It’s pretty short. And if you have a goal of becoming a billionaire by 30 or 40 like me, you have 10-20 years of window to do some money raising. You see how short this can be?

The fastest track indeed seems to be fund raising. Or making a good exit.

Also, scalability matters. It’s a good idea to start from the market instead of the problem or the solution itself. Especially with those emerging markets.

I also want to talk about maximizing happiness. If you read my article on Epstein, you should have seen how I define the happiness in life. I think of it like a scoring game with a limited time. There are a lot of different ways to define it but this is what I like. Let’s say for whatever the time you have left on this earth, You want to do things that make you happy, you probably don’t know what they are yet since you don’t have them. I just make the easiest assumption – money. Good housing, nice watch and a nice car. Enough money to afford the lifestyle I want and still support my family – it sounds like what I would want. Of coarse, the problem, here is that we don’t know if this level of focus on money itself would actually facilitate or hinder the process of acquiring the money or happiness but I figure this is the best we can do for now.

Okay, so, we have established that every single second matter. The goal is to do something that has the billion-dollar-scalability. Here comes the final question: Do we know if what we are doing has that kind of scalability? What if we stop doing it because we wrongly conclude that it’s not scalable yet the truth is the opposite or vice versa? I don’t think there’s really much we can do about it. You just have to equip yourself with a good set of skills to handle uncertainty.