0:00 99% [music] of people working in companies or in general in life are very confused. And the minute you have clarity, you will beat everybody else. But it's hard to get clarity because so many exciting things in the world. No decisions to be made without experiment. Somebody else making $3,000 outside unless you have made it and you have [music] taken that life risk, that's not something you're committed to. You're trialing it. In big companies, confusion happens on purpose cuz no one wants to own the call. Cuz if I own the call and that decision was wrong, many times you either lose your job or it's like your reputation falls down. What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything in my life becomes easier or unnecessary. The minute you're in your third job, for most people that's their career. Because beyond the third job, experimenting in more fields is not going to change who you are. Always look at is this startup growing exponentially. If you are sitting [music] on an exponential train, you are the stupidest person to leave.
0:47 >> [music] >> All right. We spoke about attribution in the last cutter. This cutter we're going to talk about confusion. If there's a defining hallmark of early 20s, not just for everybody here, but also for me and for everybody else watching, between 20 and 27, 28, some people it takes till 30 also. I think the hallmark is confusion. And I read this beautiful article, okay? And I fully empathize with this. I'll tell you why. The article was about hyper gambling. It's like, "Look, if you're making a certain amount of salary and that's the standard salary, but at the same time house prices are
1:34 completely shooting up. You do the calculation on SIP investment, whatever you're doing, right? All those investments. I'm not a personal finance guy, but I'm sure there's some mathematics around this. You know that in 30 years you'll be able to afford a house and you'll be retired. But you're like, "30 years is a very long time. I don't want to be somewhat rich and somewhat successful at 50. I want to be that at 20." So, you know what people do for the next 5 years of their life? They do what is called hyper gambling. They take these massive long shot risks hoping one of them works. And I'll be honest, there's some kinds of hyper gambling that's good, which is go start your own startup and try a very ambitious like Y Combinator will or a lot of these VCs will now fund very young people who are swinging big, who are trying to build a very big business.
2:20 One out of 100 times it works. For a VC it works. For an investor it works cuz they're funding 100 startups. But for you, hyper gambling might not be the, you know, ideal thing. Some other people hyper gamble by going the buying the latest, you know, some penny stock and hoping it will 100x over. But I empathize with them because it's so hard, right? It's like the world is filled with opportunities and every day you're hearing about somebody who invested in something and it went 100x or somebody else who got this new type of job and suddenly it goes 10x. There's so much FOMO in the world. Right? And at 20 to 25 in our Instagram, YouTube, social media world, it is very hard to not have seen hundreds of opportunities at the same time and therefore be confused.
3:06 And my opinion is that we live in a world whose job is to confuse you. Right? It's It's actually not their job, it's a side effect of what they're doing cuz everyone's vying for your attention and they're all spending on advertising and content to get your attention. And some of this advertising and content is at odds with each other. So, everyone has their own narrative and there are like thousands of this. So, there was this one skit that I'd seen a long time ago where a guy goes into a room and the room is called Instagram and inside the room you have this guy doing budget, there's a guy doing, you know, clapping, there's another guy doing ah selling soap. There's whatever, it's just really funny the video. And I think your job is to avoid being affected by this. As hard as
3:52 as hard as that sounds. So, today I want to talk about something that every 20 to 25-year-old is in the state of. How to avoid it and how to do better for yourself. Cool? Let's go. Like I said, I think the greatest problem facing youngsters today is confusion. Okay, five options are good, this other company is good, that other company is good. Either it's or freelance whatever. There's 100,000 things that you can do. You can invest all your money in some token. This that whatever. There's 100 things you can do. The difference between confusion and diversification because some of you get confused between what is what five options are there I need to get into all versus diversification. Which is if this falls, I need to have another option. You get confused between a little bit. I'm going to run you through what that confusion is
4:38 and how to cure this problem. We'll attribute it correctly. We'll try to find in the many things you're looking at what actually works. Next slide. Peter Thiel frames the world in four quadrants quadrants. Only one of them builds anything. Okay? There is a definite optimist. The view of the future is future can be better. Okay? Do they have a plan? Yes, they have a plan. Result, you get railroads, iPhones, SpaceX whatever. Then there's a indefinite optimist. Which is it will happen but it will be good. A lot of us are like this, all is well. It will happen but it will be good. They don't have a plan.
5:25 It will happen. World will align, manifest. And then I think a lot of them get into something called credential collection. Which is they kind of they're trying to get lucky. Which is it will be good but let me get a degree, let me get, you know, this credential, let me get Facebook on my resume, this that whatever, so that I'm ready for that luck when that luck comes. It's one way of looking at things. It's useful. Then there's a definite pessimist. Which is future is bleak. Do they have a plan? Yes. And they build survival bunkers. They're fully scared. So, they're like and in the in India you'll find this as people who have you know, invested in FDs and all that. They've just like invested all their money. They're they're living like absolute scroungers, okay? And many of
6:12 them die very rich. They'll die at 70 but they have lots of money that they saved up. But they're saving all that money hoping a worst case happens and the worst case actually doesn't happen. The last one is an indefinite pessimist, which is future is bad. It's gone. No plan. Doom scroll. And I'll tell you something, a lot of people tell me that I am a definite pessimist, that I believe the future is bleak. Actually, I do not believe the future is bleak. I believe the future is bleak only for jobs. But I think communities will exist. Humans will find other ways to entertain themselves. Humans like trading among each other. They will trade other stuff. You know, if you look at Counter-Strike, the Counter-Strike economy is so big. There's no real job there, right? But it's like people are trading assets between each other and so multi, you
6:58 know, this thing economy multi-billion dollar economy. Even finance technically does not It's you're speculating on where something will go tomorrow, right? It's not a real job per se. So, I I believe I'm in the definite optimist camp about everything. And that means none of us might need to have jobs 10 years from now, 20 years from now because the AI will get better enough to take care of us. And trust me, this might actually happen. But what matters is are you around other people who can take care of if there is a short period where things are hard, are you around other people who can take care of you? Are there adults in the room where if you know, something happens all of our business gets automated, do you trust me and the people around us to fix it? To build a new line of revenue if needed. Whatever it is, right? So, I put myself in a definite optimist category. I think the future will be better with AI.
7:43 Right? And a lot of people hate doing jobs and you'll only have to do the things that are interesting and fun in the, you know, long run. I That's the world I believe we're entering. And I have a plan. Yes. Next slide. How many of you believe in maximum optionality? Keep all your options open. This is something I know you're all lying about. Cuz I know, you know, it's very hard to describe, but sometimes I'll be sitting and somebody will be trying to have an appraisal conversation with me. I'm like, "This person is just keeping all their doors open." I want to do this. Maybe I want to do that. Maybe I want to do this. Maybe I want to do that. But I think you make the least amount of impact like this. Right? And you know, I don't blame you
8:28 because I bet at 21, 22 I was the same. Right? I I mean, jobs part I sort of I was in the middle of building a startup. But the only difference is I would do one thing at once. And today I'm doing multiple things, but today it's not because of optionality, it's because of diversification. And I'll explain the exact difference to you. There's a reason I made this deck. Next slide. Okay, there's something called Greg McKeown's essentialism. Okay? And he calls indecision, which is not a the ability to not make a decision, the undisciplined pursuit of more. The reason you are not making a decision is because you're greedy. >> [laughter] >> Just kidding, but that's his opinion. And the cure is systematic elimination. If a task isn't a nine out of 10 hell yes,
9:14 it's a no. The minute you set a criteria, okay, I'm not going to do this unless I'm damn sure about it. Unless it's a nine out of 10 hell yes, I won't do it. The minute you set this criteria, a lot of things in your life go away. Oh, you want to do some, you know, degree in something or you want to travel somewhere. Whatever, like any decision you want to make in life, the minute you set this criteria, you'll only do the things you love. Right? Because you have to essentially love something to have a nine out of 10. You'll only do the things you're passionate about. Every tiny option, every option you have, every extra option is actually a tax on your willpower. You don't see it. Having another option it reduces
10:00 Let's say you're doing a primary thing and you have five other options. The more options you have directly proportional to how much your impact here is. So, your impact actually here goes down the minute you have 20 options, 30 options. And you'll see this in everything, right? Like you'll see it in marriages. Or let's say how many of you have girlfriends or boyfriends? Okay. Few hands went up. Um the minute you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, but then outside you have five other options. Do you think your commitment to this first one is going to be the same? No right? Pretty [snorts] obvious. It'll drop. It looks safe, but optionality is the is a type of poison. Next slide. There's something called Gary Keller's
10:45 The One Thing, right? Okay? And I'll tell you how to think about this. It It weaponizes the idea of optionality. It uses optionality as a type of weapon. And it does this, right? It It does optionality by collapsing things. The better question to ask is what is the one thing I can do such that by doing it everything in my life becomes easier or unnecessary? So, I'm saying don't give up on the five things you want to do, but what is the one thing you can do right now that makes all those things possible? This is a better way to look at it. And by the way, EOS is built on this principle. At some point we're like, "Hey, we don't have video editors. We're struggling to hire video editors. What is the one thing we can do right now that will make this easier?"
11:32 And so on and so forth. Everything we have built is just something we needed. It's never been, "Oh, that's an attractive idea. We'll go after that." We've It's never been that. It's like, "We need this right now. What's the one thing we can do right now that makes our life easier?" Next slide. And I want to tell you quickly the difference between confusion and diversification. Confusion is you have five things that are interesting to you, but no impact or no scale or no P&L on any of the five things. None of those things are working. Diversification is one thing is working very well, and by trying to do the second thing, this is not going to fall. This may fall later because of market reasons, this or that. And And you'll see this with freelance, okay? A lot of freelancers do this. They think, "I'm going to freelance and I'll
12:17 make a lot of money, this that, whatever." I'll tell you the It's called the freelancer's trap. And I wrote a book about freelancing in 2017, right? So, and something we didn't write in the book called The Freelancer's Trap, which is ek project lelo gay. Make good money. But I'll tell you one thing, freelance comes with inherent risk. What I mean by that is, in a job, you don't absorb that much risk. You have a stable, standard salary. You don't know how rare that is. But in freelancing, and I'll tell you something about our company that you need to know very well, which is that all our clients don't pay their invoices on time. It's our job to push the client to pay the invoices on time. And every month By the way, the outflow of the company because we have like 500 plus employees, we're spending huge amount of money. So, all those invoices need to come in a specific time, and more importantly,
13:04 just in case those invoices don't come on time, we need to have reserve. We make sure there's enough money sitting in the bank so that if clients are lazy and late and whatnot, we are still able to pay these salaries. You are buffered from that risk because you don't see it. But the minute you freelance, that risk is on you. So, I'll tell you what happens. People say, "Okay, I've picked up this project. Okay, $2,000, whatever, $3,000. Big money." But finishing that one contract, A, the client asked you for more and more changes, and when it's time to pay the invoice, the client now delays. Next month, next month, next month. So, 3 months have passed, you've not actually not made any money. You've not made any real money. And sometimes the clients run away as well. And that's the problem, the smaller you are as a freelancer, the less of a brand you have, the worst clients you get. The
13:51 bigger companies like us get really big clients, and like for example, we work with like some of the biggest clients you can think of, and they pay their invoices on time because the reputation matters. When we work with vendors, because we care about our reputation, we pay We pay our Like if some invoice comes to us, we pay it on time. Or not too late. Cuz we want to be good people, right? We don't want to have that bad reputation. But with small freelancers, small clients, everything is bad reputation world. So, not only is there a risk that they'll pay you late, there's a risk that they don't pay you at all. So, you're absorbing that risk. And the way you And by the way, it still happens to us also. Sometimes there'll be clients who don't pay us. Very rare, but And if you take legal action, it'll take 2 or 3 years for it to, you know, materialize. But luckily, we're diversified. Which means we have three other clients, four other clients who if this person hits we're still okay.
14:37 If this person falls or doesn't pay, we still have enough. So, as a freelancer, you actually need at least three or four projects to make sure you have a consistent revenue stream. Which, because these freelance projects are 3 months, 4 months, requires you to do sales. It requires you to do sales. So, you learn that as a freelancer, you become more like an entrepreneur and more like a salesperson than whatever it is. Let's say you're freelancing in graphic design. Okay? You learn over time as a graphic design freelancer business, your job is to constantly keep getting deal flow. So, you stop doing graphic design, you know, half the time spending time at events or like meeting people or like building relationships, which is a totally different job than you signed up for. It's not free and easy money. It's a lot of effort, and then sometimes
15:22 not being paid at the end of the day. And when you're doing this full-time, you realize "Shit, this is just taking too much energy, and I can't work and get new clients at the same time. And by the time I'm finishing the project, the guy has shut down the project. So, I need to look for another client." So, there'll be periods where you don't get paid because you are you've been so engrossed in finishing the work that you don't have a new client available. So, you realize I have to get another person to actually do the, you know, the actual work. Let me do the sales. And you'll do that, but when you're a small team, that person will be like, "You're paying me a salary. May I go get down freelance?" And the cycle repeats, which is why all freelancers, believe it or not, either they end up building large businesses where they have hundreds of people doing this, or they end up with just one client struggling.
16:08 And sometimes zero clients. Okay? So, what is confusion versus what is diversification? Diversification is Is there a way you can make additional revenue without losing your core job and quitting your job and doing this? Without taking an all-in risk. That is diversification. And I'll tell you some good ways to diversify. Invest your money. If you take your salary from here and invest some portion in, you know, some good blue chip stocks, that is diversification. Why? Are you losing the first thing because of this thing? No, right? And that's the question to ask. By doing the second thing, am I losing the first thing? And there are plenty of opportunities in the world where without losing the first thing, you can do the second thing. I ask the EOS way, right? We don't drop
16:54 the ball on on and some old project that we did just because we're doing a new project. We're like, "Only once this is stable, we take up new things. We have I have bandwidth to do more things." Okay? Next slide. Anyway, there's a book called the Unaccountability Machine. And he He says this thing about large organizations right? Over time, decisions get handed off to process. No one has to own a call, and entropy wins. And randomly, some big company sometimes they randomly take process. Over time, you'll realize why an agency matters. Why do companies outsource to agencies? Why can't they do things in-house? Have you ever thought about this? The best founders I know, young founders who I've been friends with for 4 or 5 years, have now come to the realization. Cuz in a big company, there's just so many things going on
17:40 that you want someone's focus on something, it's better to go external. Cuz that external person cares a lot, right? Because they know if you they don't deliver in 3 months, they're going to shut down their project. Whereas in a company, it's like you expect a salaried employee I'm going to be here forever. Confusion is not accidental, and in many companies it's baked into avoid blame. In big companies, believe it or not, confusion happens on purpose. You might think, "What are What are you saying, Varun? You're saying companies can you know, intentionally confuse people?" Yes. Cuz no one wants to own the call. Cuz if I own the call, and I say, "Yes, I'm making the decision to do this," and that decision was wrong, many times you either lose your job, or it's like your reputation falls down. So, there are big companies, believe it
18:26 or not, where we call them frogs. Some executives in big companies where they just don't make a decision. They're too slow. And they're like, "To make this decision, I need all 15 people in my team to agree." The best companies, one person will be like, "I'm going to spearhead this project. I'm going to do this." The initiative takers. That's why founder-driven companies do better because founders know they can't blame anyone else. Ultimately, if we make a bad decision, it's the founder's fault. Founders understand this. Next slide. Companies run on high clarity, low confusion superstars. So, the minute you have confusion in you, which is mujhe panch ye karna hai, without establishing one thing, I'm thinking about freelance, I'm doing this, company trust you less. Not just here, any company.
19:12 Company's less likely to give you more impactful roles. And I'll tell you one thing, EOS is not the only company does that does it. A lot of companies do it. Like take the example of Divin, right? Divin went all-in on doing a very specific Unreal Cinematics role, and then he just did such a good job at it, he got any whatever he asked for. Because we're like, "We can bet on We can count on you now." Whereas a lot of other people will be like, "First, you give me that, then I'll drop everything else." World doesn't work like that. World works the other way around. Unless you're in a position you have the leverage. If you have the leverage, then you can say, "Hey, listen, bro. Give me all these things, then I will drop everything else. If you have leverage, you have some superstar, you have good brand, etc. Whatever it is. But usually it's you have to prove it
19:58 first. You have to go all in first. And then you'll get what you want. And EOS is no different to this. Actually, EOS every company does this. Okay? And I think these hard calls, right, are best the the rule we have here is ask for forgiveness, not permission. Kar le tu. Make a mistake, it's okay. And later on ask for permission forgiveness. Say sorry, you know, I did this, it didn't work out, sorry. Dude, nobody I'm telling you like nobody cares that much about failure. Something that took me a long time to understand. People care that at some point you were eventually right. And you took the hard calls. You took the risk. And you're not confused about it. And I'm telling you most 99% of people working in companies or in general in life are very confused.
20:44 And the minute you have clarity, you will beat everybody else. But it's hard to get clarity because so many exciting things in the world, no? Which are the one things do you randomly go down the path on? Tough. Next slide. And I think your edge versus everyone else is precisely that you can solve that confusion. You can be like, "Main lunga call." And I think in EOS, like I've mentioned, you have to prove this first. And then receive you'll receive free rein, like some of the people in the company. But in general, like for from a life perspective as well, I think it's important to understand that 99% of people are confused. And the minute you are no longer confused, it'll be random. Out of the five things you want to do, maybe you picked that I'll do the IT networking for the
21:30 company. It'll be very random. But the minute you decide to become all in world expert at it and only care about that, trust me, all opportunities will come your way. It's so strange. And once you do that and become very established as the IT expert, whatever you love 10 other, you know, things you can do. Because now people trust you as that expert. You have enough clientele. You have enough money. You have enough free cash flow. And then you use that to do your next five projects. Next slide. And I think I'm I just want to tell you how much of a problem this is, this confusion thing. And it's very simple to me sitting here because I've been there and I, you know, we have so many employees in the company. And we interview so many thousands of people.
22:16 That is just like these patterns are so common. And I'm just telling you maybe I think this is silly or stupid or whatever, but it's like so common. I thought maybe it's useful to just tell you what is happening. You go to find a path of career guidance. There'll be a 25-year-old paralyzed by infinite career branches. No action taken. Should I do this or this? Like the most common question I get is should I do is B.Com the right degree or B blah blah blah the right degree? And honestly, no one knows. The best B.Com guy will beat the average B.Tech guy. Okay? The best no degree guy at specific things they really care about it will will beat an IITian as well. This is obvious. This is true. You all know this. But I think everyone is paralyzed by should I do this or should I do something else? Should I do video
23:02 editing or should I do finance? Some people had this confusion. Should I do video editing or should I do something else? Should I be a software engineer or should I be something else? And honestly, all the world wants from you is to decide. And anything, whether it be video editing, whether it be dancing. If you're Shiamak, you're dancer Shiamak, you'll make crores. If you're Prabhu Das, whatever his name is I Prabhu Deva, you'll make a ridiculous amount of money. Right? If you're a good dancer. So, whatever it is, you might think oh, dance kar raha hai. Of course, the average dancer will make zero. But whatever it is, if you decide and you're sure and you're going down that path, you'll do very well. And trust me, believe it or not, even if you want to do five things, the better and something I learned myself, even if
23:48 you want to do five things, the best is to do one thing really well. And then you can do the next four things. You diversify. But without that one thing working, you're in confusion land. You'll see 27-year-old stuck between partner, grad school, remote. Should I do remote relationship and get into this school? Or should I, you know, do this job? But they're not doing anything about it. They're just confused. And I'm trying to tell you that clarity is fake. You just have to decide. Nobody knows what the right answer is. You, you know, you you make a call. But ultimately, the minute you make that call, you are above 99% of the population. I I just want to tell you it's very very
24:35 very simple to do this. You just decide. Next slide. Why is everybody so confused? Okay? And I think there are lots of people to blame. But ultimately, you can't blame the world that you're in. I think number one is that I think there are status games masquerading as choice. Right? Lot of people do multiple internships like you all have a CV, a resume. If your CV said Facebook and then Google and then I don't know. Sorry, Meta and Google and then Nvidia. It'd be cool, right, if you got internships in all three? Right? Complete waste. One is enough. And you really have to go there to gain experience.
25:21 Someone wants to do like a cool degree. Mujhe ye degree chahiye so that people see me in a certain way. Whereas we all know that your degrees have not been valuable for anything. Second thing is I think risk illiteracy, right? I think people overweight the downside of making a choice. Agar main ye choice kiya, like liya, which is let's say I decide to continue to work at EOS. >> [snorts] >> versus this freelance opportunity this or that. Risk bahut hai, yaar. Mera jo friend hai woh teen teen teen hazar dollar bana raha hai. Right? Mera jo ye friend hai panch hazar dollar bana raha hai. You've heard these stories. And my opinion of these stories is it's a Can that person prove that they have consistently made that money for 12
26:06 months? I'll be very surprised. Or even if 12 months, two years, I'll be very surprised. Second thing is, I also believe in any growing company, salary brands rapidly increase. Like we don't know, we pay talent maybe two or three times what we used to pay when we started. Maybe even more than that. And that's only going to increase, right? Especially if you're one of the early loyal people in the company. And I think you believe that there's too much down you overweight the downside of that one pick. And if it's freelancing, then it's freelancing. Right? Even in freelancing, if you are going all in on that, maybe the downsides are not as bad. Right? I'm just batting for the other side for a second. Maybe that's the right option for you. But you got to decide. And I think you underweight compounding
26:51 upside. All success is compounding. Not just financial, you know, putting money in stock market and compounding, but also the relationships that you have, the skills that you learn, the team that you're working with. It all compounds. Suddenly, you wake up and you're like, wait, I have like you know, I'm in this position of power and I have 20 new deals. Whereas earlier they, you know, I would get one new deal. Compounding is crazy, dude. And compounding is all about brand. And brand can happen internally as well. Internally, you're known for this. Okay, fine. You get all these opportunities. Next thing is, of course, infinite scroll brain, which is TikTok, I think Instagram, TikTok brain. Which is that the minute you start scrolling, of course, there are a thousand options. And it's like
27:38 sometimes I know this is rubbish because some someone will come speak to me and be like, "I really want to be this." And it's a job role like Like you have no there's no relationship between you and the job role. The person like, "No, I really want to do this." I'm like, "You've never tried it before." No, I really want to do this. It's all like, where is this information coming from? Like have you ever thought about doing a job that you've never heard of? No, right? You'll always see something on Instagram and be like, I want to do that. I want to be a wildlife photographer. Right? It's just random stuff. And I think you're doing it because you want to be different from everybody else. But I'll tell you the secret to being different from everybody else is to just commit to one thing. That's it. And I think last one is blind leading the blind. Please don't take advice from
28:23 Reddit. I've never met a successful people who's currently using 10 years ago all the successful people used to use Reddit. And my Reddit account has like crazy karma from 10 years ago, right? But I don't use it anymore because now it's mostly become people who are complaining. You're getting advice from like people who have lost. Which is not you know, it's you don't want their confusion coming on you. Next slide. Let's do an anti-confusion playbook. I want you all to have clarity. And you know if that clarity is something else, that's also okay. You know best. You know yourself best. I'm not the right person to give you prescriptive advice on ye karna hai ya woh karna hai. I also don't know. You know better. You know yourself better. First thing. Let's put all our decisions in. Are
29:08 these one-way doors or two-way doors? Jeff Bezos has a very good article. He writes these shareholder letters. He wrote something about decisions. And he said there's a difference between something called one-way doors and two-way doors. A two-way door means if I make this decision, is it reversible? Can I come back? If I decide to I don't know. Tell this person shut up. Can I come back from it? Can I apologize and get back? The other things that are two-way door that that are one-way doors. If I make the decision, it's an irreversible decision. Right? Tomorrow, if I do this specific thing, if I let this if I fire this person, let's say, and the relationship become bad, it's a one-way door. I'm never going to be able to turn back
29:54 the clock and do this again. Like aging is a one-way decision, right? If you can reverse it later, decide in minutes. If you feel something is a two-way door, okay, I can undo this quickly, decide within 5 minutes. If it's a one-way door, take weeks, take months. One-way doors are very hard. And that's why one of the things that we've been very careful about and something that we've been thinking about is if someone leaves us, we want to make sure it's a one-way door. It's okay to leave us, that's fair, but it needs to be a well-thought-out decision. Right? If you can just go out, go to another company, come back and you know, freelance for 2 months, come back, I mean, you're you're losing so much context of business here, right? You're losing so much of that context. We're losing good talent. And it starts becoming a habit, like it start becoming
30:40 a behavior for everybody. So, we've been thinking about changing the two-way door to a one-way door. Cuz right now people make that decision sometime in minutes. Right? And then they regret it 2 months or 3 months later. The next one is personal OKRs, but just one. Which is one objective and three key results. If you're making a decision, if you're let's say deciding to go freelance, what is the one objective you have? Number kya hai? to get to. And what are the key three key results? Right? The next thing is time-boxed curiosity sprints. I understand that we live in a world where you can't know everything about an industry. Right? You don't know if the other if the grass is greener on the other side. You don't
31:26 know if that other industry is better, or you don't know if that other field is better. You don't know if freelancing is better. You don't know if You don't know. Nobody knows. But unfortunately, these are one-way doors. You have to stop doing this and go do that your entire time, right? So, I think the best way to do this is to give yourself 60 days to explore a field. Play around with the field, you know, side it. Because see, every field is exciting when you do it for the first 2 weeks. Right? When you've done it for years, you see all the hard parts. Right? Spend 60 days to explore a field, then commit or reject. The next thing is default to build, ship, and feedback loop. If you have working code, if you're a software engineer, or if you have a working video, if you're if you're doing
32:11 freelancing, if you have a working client, if you have a product, it clarifies faster than any whiteboard. Whiteboard pe na we used to get stuck on analysis paralysis. Ki ye karna hai nahi to ye karna hai. No decisions to be made without experiment. Somebody else making $3,000 outside, unless you have made it and you have taken that life risk, you that's not something you're committed to. You're trialing it. Last is marriage and career rule of three. Date three serious partners or ship three serious projects. Then decide. More sampling rarely improves improves clarity and increases opportunity cost. How many of you this is your third job? Okay.
32:56 The minute you're in your third job, for most people, that's their career. Because beyond the third job, experimenting in more fields is not going to change who you are. That it's extra sampling that doesn't it's not needed. After three of something, let's say you've done three, you know, projects here or three videos here, you kind of know what to expect. Right? In the first one you you know, there might still be a big difference in the second one. There might still be a big difference in the third one. But three is a good number, right? After three, more sampling rarely helps. And actually, it increases opportunity cost. Now you're like losing on the effects of compounding if you're constantly switching after three jobs. I think everyone's allowed to rapidly switch till three jobs to find what they want to do. But in those three jobs, maybe if the second one is good, stick.
33:42 It's very rare, I'm telling you, especially in the world today where you know, there's hundreds of people out on the street who are who don't have a job. If you find something that works and you kind of enjoy it, you won't you'll never 100% enjoy anything. You can enjoy it reasonably enough, do it. And the minute you decide, now you're ahead of 99% of the population. Trust me on this. Next slide. When making choices, I'll help you make this choice also. When making choices, look for growth rate versus absolute scale. Sure, you can go work at a very, very large company that's at the peak of their scale, or you can look at some of these early-stage startups. Right? Like for example, I've been watching Emergent grow, right? And we've been helping them, they're a client of ours. I watched them grow like a rocket ship from zero to like $50 million in like a very short period of time.
34:28 It's clearly a rocket. Maybe they might crash and burn. Maybe they might end up becoming a really successful company. But the point is there you have a chance to go wherever it is very quickly. Up or down, you'll know very quickly. Instead of wasting like 10 years of your life at a company that's already hit it's like top, right? There might be a company making thousands of crores selling nut and bolt. In India, there's so many of those companies, steel pipes, this, that, and they're making ridiculous amount of money. But if you work there, growth rate is small. So, always look at is this startup growing exponentially? If you are sitting on an exponential train, you are the stupidest person to leave. Trust me on this. If a company is rapidly scaling, you get opportunities, there's excess money, there's just so much responsibility to go around that you can just put your hand and take it and be like main lunga
35:14 responsibility. You can do that. But if it's slow growth, no, there are there's bureaucracy. Government is a good example, right? It's not going to rapidly grow. So, the people out there have already put their hands. Like in big companies, you'll see they're making thousands of crores, but it's not growing very much. All the bureaucrats, like people like you but 10 years later, who are like nay nay ye mera hai. So, they don't let new talent come in. They're like, "No, no, this is mine." There's a problem. But with startups, no, because there's so much new opportunity, you have the ability to put your hands around some gold. Awesome. I just want to leave this with one thing, right? The minute you make a choice, you're ahead of everybody else. In my own case, like I feel like when I was very young, I was also a youngster. I grew up with the internet. Like some of you guys got the internet after mobile phone era, but I spent my young
35:59 my youth on a computer. I feel like it's very hard to make a choice, but in my 30s, I learned that the minute you make a choice, you're ahead of everybody else. Cuz they will always do sub-impact of what you end up doing. And once you made that choice and you have one thing that works, it's very easy to do five other 10 other things. It's the story of every successful celebrity or superstar or whatever, right? Ranveer Singh now is doing super you, the the whatever the wafer brand and whatnot. The protein bar brand and whatnot. So, once that one thing works, everything else ends up working. You just need to find that one thing. And this is a good framework to do it. That's it for me. Hope you like this. Bye.
