Logbook

Went to the eye doctor today because my eyes were not recovering. Turns out I have severe dry eyes due to too much screen, so got some medicines and some precautions to take. Looks like I should work from outside the home, maybe cafes or coworking spaces, since you look outside of your screens, which relaxes your eyes.

Watched the video regarding the boring businesses. How boring businesses like software for pharma companies, even software for plumbers, are multi-million dollar valuation companies today. Extremely boring but painful, it's printing a lot of money today, so picking up a boring but painful niche is probably a good idea for a business.

And so I watched Dan Martell's video today and his life story, "Prison to a Multi-Millionaire," is proof that your excuses are not valid. Real OG guy.

So looks like my eyes are still not recovered, so I continued Sam Bhagwat's Principles of Building AI Agents book and later I watched Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang's interview. He talked about how AI is going to bring more human progress in a decade than the last century combined. He talked about loop engineering and designing feedback loops with which agents can work and interact with each other. He also said that the design always comes down to simpler stuff like markdown, skills, crons, nothing too fancy. He also mentioned that LinkedIn is for finding customers; technical writings on LinkedIn can be ignored. He also mentioned that as a founder you should have conviction about your idea and understanding of the future, otherwise you'll get drowned in the noise of others' opinions.

I also discussed with Claude voice AI regarding a few ideas that I had. It was an insightful conversation. Claude AI has certainly improved its voice capabilities, and during the conversation I realised that I was able to contribute to conversations effectively because of my experience of talking with people. I go to events and talk to founders of various companies. I know what the current trend of companies is. I was able to counter Claude's opinion and make it give me more accurate and relevant information. I realised that even if I don't have anything to talk about myself, I should still put my shame aside and talk to people at the events, so I'm going to do that.

Today was particularly hard for me emotionally. I went to a cybersecurity event today, which was nice. I learned many great things about AI attacking your applications and AI defending your applications. When I talked to other people I was low on confidence because I haven't built and shipped much and I don't have any product which I can sell. I don't even have the idea or the pain point I'm going to build a product for.

This harsh reality kind of hit me that after spending more than six months I don't have anything, but I did learn a lot of things in the past few months. Coming from an employee background, learning about entrepreneurship and business, a lot of misconceptions were cleared and it's a work in progress. I feel it's very slow. Also people recommended that I start a service business first so that it pays you and you learn along the way so that you don't have the feeling where you are not getting paid. I don't want to do any service-based business. I want to have a product that solves the real pain point and helps people.

Now I'm very very confused: should I really go towards a service-based business to learn about other businesses and their pain points and get a product idea from there, or continue working on my current strategy, which is going online or talking to people and finding out the real pain points in the industry and also looking out for problems in the AI space to solve?

I was a little down today but this is expected. I knew it wouldn't be easy when I started. I had told myself that this will not be easy. It will be painful so I'm feeling that pain now, but it's also fine and I'm growing. I think it's a good thing that you should have the goals, which we don't know how to reach. That makes us scared, anxious, and clueless.

Also I wish there was a guide to entrepreneurship, like a person who knows nothing about entrepreneurship, how that person can get started. Like a guide or roadmap which you can just follow through and just mark it down, like "learned this, did this, now this is the next step," kind of like that. It's wishful thinking but I wish something like that existed and if I am able to pull this off I'd probably like to do something like this: a book or guide which starts from scratch.

In the last few weeks I tried to work particularly super hard and I also tried to avoid instant gratification stuff and any kind of dopamine hit entertainment. I worked super hard and I feel like I did not rest enough. My mind was always filled and avoiding the instant gratification that we have the habit of took an immense amount of willpower. I got burnt out.

I took last week to rest and recover. My lesson here is that you can work super hard but then you also need to rest hard. You have to give your mind daily rest. You cannot engage your mind all your waking hours. Either that or my body will adapt to working super hard and willpower will increase so that I can push myself and avoid instant gratification stuff.

But I am still going to treat rest as a priority and I believe rest means anything that relaxes your mind, like:
- just sitting doing nothing or meditating
- just taking a walk around a block or garden
- any other things like that
- talking with your friends and family or cooking etc.

So I am going to try this out and update how it goes.

And so when I got burnt out, I also took this opportunity to do a dopamine detox. It means that I took the time to just sit and let myself be bored. I meditated maybe once or twice a day. I also tried to notice the feelings of boredom in me and let them stay there. I resisted the urge to pick up my phone or unlock it or watch something on it. I just let the boredom come to me and I just watched it.

This thing, I think, has worked out nicely. I observed that I was more present in the activities that I'm doing. My chattering of mind was also reduced. I was focused on the present moment without many future or past thoughts bugging me. I found peaceful moments peaceful, not disturbing or restless. I also started getting pleasure in the simple things like taking a walk, eating the regular food and finding it tasty and joyful, etc. My restlessness also reduced. Overall it was a great experience and I would recommend that you try it.