Manifest exponential growth by aligning your thinking with that outcome. Nothing in the market matters except you, your thoughts, and the actions you take to shape your reality.

The goal you should you choose to accept it, is not to read this weeks newsletter , nor memorize this idea or that concept or go all in to have high recall. Basically anyone can do that.

The process towards exponential growth is being able to connect ideas and concepts vs memorizing whats shared with you.

To combine those dots to arrive at a better and new application is innovation at its truest and simplest.

This doesn't happen on its own. We are at a disadvantage the first day we enter the formal schooling system. The traditional education paradigm is focused on what students need to learn. Little emphasis, if any, is on training students how to learn. As a result, students focus on memorizing information (collecting dots), and not on processing information, thinking critically, understanding, and meaningful learning (connecting dots).

See the above presentation as a mind map here.

Outcomes

If it feels like everyone is winning & you aren’t

Just remember “The Law of Hype” from The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.

Digital Transformation seems to be the one thing every ones pinning their hopes to winning and having better outcomes. The hype around it is real. What I tell folks is, to think about this in perspective. Diageo CEO Ivan Menezes said it best "“It is not about doing ‘digital marketing’, it is about marketing effectively in a digital world.”

To have great results we need to focus on the actions vs the hype. Hype doesn't equal success or results.

The use of the word “digital” reminds me of the use of the term “e-business” in the late 90’s. A whole crop of “e-business” consultancies, agencies, and job titles suddenly emerged to help companies figure out how “the rules of business had changed.” IBM popularized the “e-business” term in a 1997 ad campaign.

One New Thing (That I Learnt today)

Boring stuff that Scales (or how to think about it)

What are the top 5 boring business ideas that you think can:

1)Provide scale & sustenance to solopreneurs

2)Can launch in under 1m pkr

3)Provide a fair Roi

4)Don't exist at a commercial scale but should

5) Take under 6 months to build repeat customers

6) Don't have to be tech

I think almost all non independently wealthy people should pursue “boring” business ideas. After achieving a high level of financial independence, then they can use all they learned from that journey on a more risky, business idea w/ higher odds of success. You get up and do what you have to, over and over and over, until one day you wake up and you've grown a wonderful business. I hope that as many of you look at businesses, you see their potential, not their problems.The problems are just the stepping stones for growth!

It doesn't have to be sexy to scale, it doesn't even have to be an existing business idea to scale, it doesn't even have to be a business to scale.? What? My belief in simple has been 10xd after reading about Beau Jessup a British teenager, every thing about her is standard or normal as society defines, normal, except for one thing — she’s making hundreds of thousands of dollars and funding her way through college by naming Chinese babies.

The 19-year-old has made a name for herself as founder and CEO of Special Name, a website designed to provide Chinese parents with culturally appropriate English names for their babies. Sound incredible or incredibly ridiculous? Boring at its core, but it scales. Read about it here.

What you should be reading (exploring/researching)

Countries that offer free or near free eduction. Starting with Nordic countries. We are so hung up on American or British education but we sometimes miss how Fins and Danes are happy in life compared to all others. In the US you feel you need to be protected from government but in Nordic countries the belief is the government protects you. Justice + equality lead to better outcomes, not just education. But free education and an equitable society helps people getting ahead in life beyond money. There is a reason why these countries are the happiest places to live.

According to Aristotle, happiness consists in achieving, through the course of a whole lifetime, all the goods — health, wealth, knowledge, friends, etc. — that lead to the perfection of human nature and to the enrichment of human life. This requires us to make choices, some of which may be very difficult

Monetize your time

The idea behind monetizing your life is pretty simple – take the things you’re already doing and figure out how you can make money doing them. By doing this, you earn extra money without having to use up a lot of your time. In theory, the money you earn from monetizing your life can be used to subsidize your living expenses. It also provides a nice cushion.

To be fair, monetizing your life really does depend on your life circumstances and where you live.Earning an extra $1,000 a month is significant. If you wanted to generate that much from your investments, you’d need to have about 3 carore rupees saved up. It’s really eye-opening just how valuable monetizing your life can be when you think of it in this way.

During my time at University I earned a little over $18,000 doing a bunch of side hustles that led me to believe its achievable and why I consistently write about it and try to share my experiences. The question I often get is how I find the time to do all of these things. For most people, the ability to earn extra money comes down to time – most people work all day, and when combined with other obligations, there are pretty much no hours left in the day to keep working. For me its been a 4 stage process.

1)Deciding to change your outcomes

2)Working to identify how to "hack time" to create moments of monetization in a day

3)Finding things to do. (At University I did mystery shopping, taking online surveys, helping other people do quick websites, buying domain names at 9.99$ and upselling by making landing pages(today I have 100s of domains I rent 20 yrs later), teaching people skills they didn't have, providing walking tours in London, finding things on craigslist-refinishing up cycling and reselling on ebay, the best was freelance writing. Also finding a niche and being an expert to help other people find info in that niche, I realized in university that most people suck at taking notes, I wrote a PDF made a video and sold it for 1.99$)

4)Not letting other people tell you it cant be done.

Made in Pakistan

Being an expert. Yup you heard it right. Look around you. We are experts by the time we hit our teens. You ask, how? In an inequitable world we survive(d) living between power outages, by sharing resources in joint families, learning how to be politically correct, by economizing and stretching single family incomes vs the west where most households are 2 income based. We are experts in frugality and stretching the proverbial dollar. That is a skill made in Pakistan, yet we do not monetize it. Making do with what you have is a life skill that is monetizable. Every one of us has that skill but not many or any monetize it. We have to look at adversity as an enabler and as lifeskill no one can take away from us, if only you think about it as an opportunity you can monetize it.

Why is there no Joint Family Living news letter, why is there no meal planning guide to stretch the dollar, why is there no bargain hunter youtube channel on shopping and meal planning to feed 5 people. Our families, mothers, wives, friends, fathers others have all done it.

The way decide we can move from ranting to renting our skills and experiences and build audiences in the digital world we will be able to monetize our uniquely Pakistani experiences and make money.

One last thing

Once a week I speak to entrepreneurs, locally, regionally, internationally where ever. Why? By speaking to seriously smart and talented people I try and figure out where they are investing their time, what interests them? I am not looking forward, in terms of age when I talk to people, in fact I over index on folks who are in their 20's. Why? Because if they are committed to some thing today, the likely outcomes in the future will be exponential and if the cohort Im speaking to is directionally inclined to some thing the "older" folks aren't betting the house on, then its time to invest in the younger folks and the ideas they are pursuing.