[CTQ Smartcast] Lessons From A Solopreneur On Thinking In Terms Of Small Bets, With Ayush Chaturvedi

Ayush Chaturvedi is a solopreneur. He quit his corporate job after 11 years and is working on numerous copywriting and management consulting projects as a freelancer. 

In this Smartcast, hosted by CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar, we talk about the skills and mental models Ayush developed to go solo. We also addressed how companies and leaders must adapt to the future of work and get the best out of an empowered employee.

 
 

Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.

 
 
 

Follow CTQ Smartcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favourite podcast platform.

(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)

SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT

  • Triggers behind leaving a stable corporate job

  • Skills needed to go solo and how to develop them

  • Moment of Truth: Ayush’s last day in office

  • How and why planning your days/weeks/months are important

  • What stops the employees from taking on this solopreneur journey?

  • How can leaders manage to coach employees with varied approaches?

  • Tips on how to manage multiple projects

  • The future of work for companies and solopreneurs

  • The power of the Internet

  • Why must one think in terms of small bets?

  • Signals to watch out for when thinking about future relevance

AND

  • Future relevance of physical board games, no-code and paid newsletters.

LINKS TO BOOKS, PEOPLE, NEWSLETTERS AND ARTICLES MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST

BOOKS

PEOPLE

PLATFORMS, NEWSLETTERS AND ARTICLES

If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like How Outside-In Thinking Helps Create Value For The Future, With K.S. Prashant

TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

00:00:00

Harish: Ayush Chaturvedi is a solopreneur who provides services like copywriting, management consulting, business analytics. He's also a consulting Product Manager at Talk Howdy. He quit his corporate job after 11 years and is now doing a variety of projects and gigs. He's the kind of empowered employee that companies - large and small are dealing with today. Freelancer economy is often spoken about as a trend as part of the future of work, people like Ayush are already living that life. The future is not some time away in the distance. It's already here, just unevenly distributed. So we picked Ayush his brains about how he arrived at the decision of becoming a solopreneur, the skills he taught himself and the mental models he developed. We tried to address two segments of the audience for this conversation. People who identify with Ayush and contemplate how to go about becoming a solopreneur. And founders and leaders of companies that employ people like Ayush how to deal with these undercurrents, how to get the best out of the empowered employee. Things are changing at a rapid pace. And individuals, as well as leaders, have to figure out a way to stay relevant and embrace the change instead of trying to resist it. So go on and listen to this fascinating chat with Ayush Chaturvedi, where he talks about his life as a freelancer and solopreneur. 

00:01:44

Harish: Welcome Ayush, welcome to the CTQ Smartcast.

00:01:47

Ayush: Hey. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here and to be speaking to you.

00:01:52

Harish: Yeah, so let's dive in straight to the million-dollar question types. You took a sabbatical after being a corporate employee for 11 years, what was the trigger for this?

00:02:00  

Ayush: Right. So I would say at some point, I realised, so it's not exactly a sabbatical, I don't know what it is right now. It's more of me taking things as they come. So two or three years ago, I realised I was seven-eight years into my corporate journey. And I realised that probably there is a race I'm running and I don't see an end goal to this. There is no finish to this race that I'm running. And I probably will have to run this race for the rest of my life. So that was a very disturbing thought, and we can look at our previous generations of parents and so on, especially government employees, and they enter services at 20-21. And then they retire at 58. That's like a 30 to 35 or 40-year career, doing the same work, all their life, and probably they didn't have as many options back then. I just realised we live in the 21st century, it's got to be better than that. So seven-eight years ago. So this disconcerting feeling is in the back of my head that I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. And so that's where this trigger came in, that I should probably try something else somewhere else. So yeah, that's how it started.

00:03:29  

Harish: Right. Yeah. So it's nice that you spoke about how it started. But what impressed me was both the way you thought about this, so as you said, this probably got triggered seven to eight years ago, but you took your time to sort of plan this. And you also articulated it in a very nice blog post, right. So how did that come about? And talk to me through that entire seven to eight years long thing? Probably struggling with some confusion, how to go about this. What was that like?

00:04:07  

Ayush: Yes, yes. So it was seven to eight years into my corporate career, that is just three years ago. Okay. Around 2017-2018. Yeah, so I had to think of many things back then that if I have to do this, then how do I do this? Right? If I have to go on my own and not be a corporate employee. So first, let's just back up a bit and just look at what I did not enjoy about my corporate life. And that was, first of all, that I was playing a very small role in a very big company. Right. So I was with Samsung Electronics, as an Android senior staff engineer. I was an Android developer. And when I joined back in 2012, Android was going up, you know, and over the past few years and looking at the tech industry, I realised that it's not that popular. Everyone's moving to the MERN Stack, to JS web development, JS frameworks, and people are now getting to NoCode and I'm like, I'm writing code, and it's going to become obsolete very quickly and then I'm going to be, you know, stuck in this legacy technology, that's just there because they need to support legacy technology, you know. So that is one feeling that what I'm doing is not cutting edge. The second feeling was that I'm playing a very small role in a very large company, I would rather play a big role in a small company, or be a company of my own right, do my own thing. And it's scary, that the good part of the job was that I was getting status, I could go out and say that I work for this multinational company that employs 1000s of people across the world. And I was getting a predictable paycheck every month, which was hefty, which is growing every year. And which I enjoyed. Of course, you know, who doesn’t like the money? But, yeah, so that's the good part. And I said if I were, how do I go about this. So I, of course, need a monetizable skill, which I got to build on my own. Where people can pay money not for doing this, what I'm doing already at my job, probably for some people that can work. But it was just that I didn't think that the technology that I was working on was good enough to be monetizable outside because software engineers in India, like you, throw a stone and you'll find 10 of them. So I needed to move on from them. Product Management was one area where I wanted to get in because just one level up in the value chain, where you're closer to the actual product, you get a bigger say in it, and then writing. I've always loved reading a lot. And then this writing is just and when you read a lot, you start to want to write more. So writing was just a way to express my thoughts. So I thought, okay, these are two skills that I can probably learn and figure out a way about how to make money. And then there was the whole personal finance aspect of it. How much would I need to be able to do this? And there's this great community called www.indiehackers.com, where I became more active over the past one and a half years. And there the whole concept, everyone's software engineer is trying to build their own SaaS apps, you know, like SaaS is the future, probably subscription-based software. And everyone is for freedom. So the way the mentality of an indie hacker, indie means independent, independent software engineer works is that they look at how much money do I have saved up? How much am I making? How much am I spending every month right now? And so how long will it take, it's basically a runway. So the analogy is that, while you're on the runway, you're building the plane as you're taking off, and your runways have to be just enough, that by the time you build a plane and you take off, you don’t go over the runaway. And so that was a mental model that I was working with, that I needed a runway of at least 24 months, like two years, to build my own thing. To build a sustainable internet business. Bootstrapped, you know, I don't want to go around asking for funding again. Because again, when you go funding, you lose a ton of freedom to build what you want to build. So those are kind of two or three mental models that I'll go with, I want to do writing, I have to get into product management. And I have this idea of a runway. So for the next three years, I need to save up and invest. I need to hack personal finance in a way that I know what's a mutual fund, an index fund? What's a liquid fund? What's a debt fund? What are stocks? What is Bitcoin? How much money should I put where, what's PF so I was like, big into investing for one year into personal finance and investing? And I learned it as a skill for myself. Because I didn't want to, probably I can. I'm at a level where I can become a financial planner, you know, Certified Financial Planner, I don't want to give those exams and do this for people. But I said that I learn this skill for myself. So yeah, personal finance is one big aspect of it, that you don't want to take a crazy decision out of passion, out of anger or frustration, or out of exuberance. You know, you can make stupid decisions when we're high on exuberance or high on adrenaline. So broadly two or three things that are going on in my mind. And that's what I did for the next three years. For the last three years, probably from 2017-2018 to August 2021. Yeah...

00:09:49  

Harish: Right, right. Yeah. So like I was mentioning before we started recording. I see two kinds of consumers of this particular conversation. One is people who are probably identifying with you, who are thinking like okay, this is what I have also been thinking, so, how do I actually go about operationalizing all these plans that I have on paper, right. So, those are one set of people and the other set of people are the leaders of companies, it could be a large corporate, it could be a startup entrepreneur, a founder or an investor who has bought portfolio companies, where people like you are employed. And the fact is that there are these undercurrents. Right, people are feeling this. So, one way to think of this is that, yeah people are thinking like this, when they come up to me, when these things surface, I will do something about it. The other way to look at it is, can I do something in the way I'm building my company so that people actually feel aligned to what I'm doing, or I get the best out of people, like what you're talking about, right? It doesn't have to be that somebody is working forever in my company, just the way you are now working as a consultant Product Manager with someone. I may want to remodel the way I think about building a company. So these two kinds of people. So we'll try to address you know, both aspects of this.

00:11:25  

Ayush: Absolutely.

00:11:26  

Harish: First one, one interesting thing that I heard you talk about is where you talked about how you looked at building the whole personal finance as a skill. Right, so what other skills did you think were needed for you? Before you sort of took this decision? How did you prepare? You know, what is the groundwork that you did?

00:11:48 

Ayush: Yeah, so personal finance was one aspect of it, and that included me getting rid of most of the debt that I had taken up. And that meant the only debt right now I have is my home loan, which meant moving into my own home, that we had bought a few years back. So that's where COVID helped. And that our own home is actually a bit farther away from our offices. So we had to live closer to our office for all our life so far. But suddenly, we realise it now we working from home might as well, save on rent. So yeah, so getting rid of that, as a personal finance aspect of it, getting rid of rent, minimising my debt, doing a lot of savings, doing a lot of investing, and stuff like that. The other skill is putting yourself out there and being able to talk about what you're doing, because on the internet, realising that, actually anywhere, any kind of business needs a sales and marketing process. So I thought that if I want to be a single person business, then I will need to learn to talk to people about what I'm doing and how I can add value to them. You know, there's this whole, when a traditional employee, when he applies for a job, he lists down his credentials, that I'm an engineer, I got 98% in 12th, I got 99 in CAT, I got an MBA. And then I worked at so and so bank for so many years, I did this, I did that. And I was of the opinion that credentialism won't work going forward, especially in an open world where anyone can be a competition. So instead of credentials, I need to move to credibility. So it's basically proof of work that I have done. So back in 2019, I started a newsletter called The Wisdom Project, which is actually quite close to Choose To Thinq, because the goal of the newsletter is actually that people don't think critically, you know, critical thinking was the core of it. And I was, I loved reading and consuming awesome content. And I was like, Okay, I'm going to share these five pieces of content every day, and people’s minds are going to be blown. And I'm going to do this every week and see, some opportunities might come up, you know, and nothing worked. So you realise that when you start something of your own, it's very hard to make it work. But it's been going on 110 weeks now. Every Sunday, I send it out. I've got some followers, some subscribers to it, but I realise how difficult it is to build something on your own. And then how difficult it is to market something and then put something out there. You know, Naval Ravikant, if you know, has a fantastic thread called How To Get Rich Without Getting Lucky. And he says like learn to build and learn to sell. Right? Those two skills basically are everything that you need to do. I learned to build through, through writing a newsletter for two years continuously straight. And then I learned to sell through the process of writing, actually. So I wrote a lot for myself, just to clear my head, and for the newsletter, and then started personal blogging on my personal side as well. And then I started another newsletter like six months ago, which is going way better than this one. And so I thought that I can take this skill of writing, and use it to sell my skills. So product management is a very vague skill, in a sense, like, you're not sure what a deliverable of a product manager is. So that a lot of it is critical thinking, as a product, a lot of it is clear thinking, to be able to break down user stories, to be able to break down the users’ problems, the use cases, to be able to break down to engineering what the user wants, and to design and go-to marketing and to play that role. So I thought that probably product managers would be good at writing. And I can probably use my writing skills to be a product manager. So yes, writing was very important. Learning to build is important, learning to sell weather. So I read books on copywriting. So there's a fantastic book called Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy who is an amazing adman. And so that was a very old school book, but it got me into the very fundamentals of copywriting. How can writing influence people, you know, and it's not influenced in a bad way. Again, Influence is another great book by Robert Cialdini. And it's not about negatively influencing people, it's about getting them to take any action that you want them to take. And eventually getting that double thank-you moment in economics, where you help them and they help you. Right? So yeah, I'm big into behavioural economics as well. So psychology, understanding psychology is very important. But that was before I made this decision. Behavioural economics and psychology, I was big into it, I knew that this can come in handy someday. And it eventually came into my writing. When I learned copywriting so yeah, learning to build, learning to sell specifically copywriting and doing something of your own continuously for a stretch of time. Eventually, everyone will get the skills that they need.

00:17:34  

Harish: Right, right. Yeah. So when you woke up on August 16, 2021, what was the feeling like?

00:17:43  

Ayush: Amazing. So August 16 was the last day that I went to the office to give my laptop and then I came back and I wrote this blog post. And this Twitter thread and people loved it. I get so many DMs every day when people read that post and read that thread. But yeah, the feeling was of anxiety, there were a lot of things. It had been like that for the last six to eight weeks before that. When I was doing it, I knew what I was doing and it was on that day it suddenly became real. Okay, now this is real, you know? Oh, shit, what did I do? I’m this crazy person who just quit his stable job and doesn't know where he's going. But people showered love so much. And they said that you know, we whoever I spoke to, like, I want to do this, like you have the courage to do this. So I got some validation that made me feel good. And I was like, yeah, now I have an empty calendar. I can do whatever I want to do. And this is like the real test of my critical thinking, now what do I do? You know, I read a lot of people like when they quit, they just go into a bit of a slumber sometimes, they just relax for a long time, like six months, they were like, okay, about 24 months, I might as well take, you know, chill for 6 months, and then I'll do something. And then there are people who get too anxious, and who overwork themselves and then you know, eventually burn out within two or three months out of the fear that they're not going to be able to sustain this for long. I wanted to be in the middle somewhere. And I told myself that I don't want to burn myself out. Because that's the point of quitting. I want to focus on my health. I want to focus on my own time. You know, I want to work at my own pace, but I don't want to be too chilled out, but I should be careful of myself. So yeah, so that was what was going on that day in my head. I’d planned most of the stuff I knew like what meetings I had, a couple of things on my calendar. So yeah, so it was a long time coming. So I knew what was going to happen. On that day itself, it was very nerve-racking.

00:20:06  

Harish: Right. So how does your day look like today? How do you plan it? Do you plan in terms of weeks/months? Or is it like taking it as it comes?

00:20:15  

Ayush: Yeah, so I like to plan weeks. But particularly, I'm very specific about my morning routine. So I'm big into habits again, you know, Power of Habit, Atomic Habits are fantastic books. And I've written two e-books on Atomic Habits, like how people can learn from it and how people can apply them. So my morning routine is like my journaling, my meditation, my yoga, my walks, like a three-hour long morning routine, which I don't even skip, probably one or two days a week, I skip it. But otherwise, I don't. I feel energised by following my morning routine. So that's very important. I wake up without an alarm. Yeah, that was one thing that changed on 16th August, I have had no alarm since then, you know, I wake up naturally. And that doesn't mean that I sleep till 10, I naturally wake up at seven now. Sometimes it's 6:50. It's sometimes 7:10. But when I was working, it had to be like 6:30 or 6:45 or seven, there had to be certain that I had to get up. So yeah, that changed. So I wake up naturally, then I do my morning routine. I'm in no rush because I don't do any meetings in the first half usually, especially since my clients are in the US. So most of our meetings are late at night. So 10-11, stuff like that. So mostly by 10 am I am done with my routine, my breakfast, everything. And then I have like three hours of writing that I do for various projects, either for my own projects, basically, it's writing for Twitter, writing for my blog, newsletters, or writing for freelance. That's till lunch. After lunch, I take a nice 30-minute nap or something. That is again, a privilege that I enjoy now that I can take a nap for 30 minutes after lunch. And, then I get to my chunk of work after three or four in the afternoon, like four or five hours of product management work for my clients. That's like seven, eight in the evening. And then I'm big into board games. So I play board games with my family after 7-8 till dinner. And like every average Indian family, we watch KBC and the IPL and sleep.

00:22:43  

Harish: That’s a nice routine you have. Ticks of all the boxes. Yeah. Like a three-hour block in the morning to IPL. Like we keep saying it's like, you know, it's like the curiosity diet. You need everything in the thaali, right? You need your proteins and carbohydrates. You also need your dessert.

00:23:05 

Ayush: Yes, absolutely, exactly. So that's what I got. So it's important that I spend time for myself, then it's important that I spend time with my family. And then in between that is time for my work. So again, that was another thing with a corporate job that was taking up 40, 45, 50 hours a week. And I was not getting time for myself. I was not getting time for my family. So those two chunks, like three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening, are very important. And between that is a seven-eight hour window that I have for work.

00:23:38  

Harish: Right, right. Yeah. So based on what people have told you in the last couple of months, right that like you said, Oh, we always wanted to do this. And that's my sense as well, that this is a big undercurrent that you're talking about doing this in 2021. I quit my corporate job in 2010. I still remember March 31st 2010 was my last day. It was the end of the financial year. I still remember that. And again, it was very similar back then as well, where a lot of people said, oh, you know, you're doing what I always wanted to do, great and all of that. So what do you think, in your opinion, is what is stopping people from doing this? One is the whole fear aspect, right? So sometimes it's just easier said than done, kind of a thing. But there are also a lot of other things that people get out of a corporate job environment that they yearn for. One simple thing that I can think of is solopreneurs. At least to me, I've heard people talk about the feeling of loss of kinship, that I'm in this all alone, right? I would much rather be part of a larger team. Again, we've seen people like James Clear talk about it. Make it a community thing, and suddenly it becomes a lot more enjoyable. So similarly, that's one thing. So what are other reasons other than this, the regular fee, monetary, that is taken care of for most people, what are the other things that are stopping people from doing this?

00:25:20  

Ayush: I'll say one thing is that they don't know they have the skills to monetize. You know, they feel that they work, if they go out on their own, a lot of things that their company does to bring in business, they will not be able to do. So stuff like sales and marketing, or if you're a designer, then don't know how to code. So there's an engineer on your team. If you're a marketer, don't know how to build a product, product manager and developers in your team. So basically, being a solopreneur is being able to have all these skill bits, being T shaped, where you have deep knowledge of one or two things, and you have a peripheral knowledge or basic understanding of all these other skills that go into making a company. Right, so I think, if people spend some time, invest some time they can learn all of them, but it's not for everybody. So yes, that is one thing that stops them. Another thing about kinship, there are great relationships that develop when people work together. And I've had that for the last 11 years, and I've had many friendships from my workplace. One thing that's changed during COVID, is that we all realise that, okay, we are all at home, and we crave connection, crave human connection. And how do we get that? So that's what we all found online when we found communities online. So I found, for me, personally, I found very good communities online, to be able to share my pains and my struggles and my successes and my wins. So I spoke about Indie Hackers earlier. So that's a great community. It's an open community. I spoke to it. And so I'm very active on Twitter these days. And that's because I'm able to be in that small watering hole of Twitter, which is created, indie hacker, Twitter, and everything, where everyone is building their own businesses as a solopreneur or want to be one. You know, they want to build their own thing, they're just building something on the side with a full-time job. And eventually, they will quit. So I found that Twitter is great that way. Whatever you want on Twitter, you start tweeting about it, and you start meeting people. And then the algorithms do it for you, the negative side of it is that it becomes a filter bubble. You know, where there's confirmation bias, but the positive is that you will hack the algorithm to surround yourself with those people. So today, Twitter is like my water cooler for my work. I just go there and I see okay, this guy is doing this. And it's a repetitive conversation that we have almost with the same set of people. Right. Okay. You're working on this launching this? Okay, nice. Okay, let me help you. Okay, and launching this, please come and help me. So that kinship thing is I think solved for me, that belonging thing is pretty much solved for me with online communities that I'm part of, what else stops? I think that that's pretty much about it. And if they had the skills, and at the end, monetary cushion to do it, everyone will do it. I mean, nobody wants to be told to be at a certain place at a certain time. There's this fantastic book called The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. And I mean, that quote always stands out: what does money give you? So money gives you the freedom to work with the people, who you want to work with, at a time of your choosing, and on the things of your choosing. And that's the only thing that we want money for ultimately. So if there's like a 9:30 meeting every day for a year, during a pandemic, you know you're not going to enjoy it. You know, if your boss wants you to be in that meeting every day, it's, I mean, for all the bosses listening, give us flexibility. Don't be so hard on that.

00:29:25  

Harish: Right. So actually, let's move tracks to think about the corporate side of it. As I said, I think this is a fact that you know, people that the undercurrents are there in the people who are working in these companies, whether it's a startup or a larger company, all the other conditions today are true that people have money, they are more sort of empowered that thinking about themselves. So existential issues are all sorted out. Right, which is why now you're thinking of the actualization right? Is this giving me happiness? And that's where then you start wondering, Am I being asked to report at 9:30 for a meeting? Is it really important, right? I mean, I may be happy to do that, if I see the point of it. And I see that I'm actually adding value to something. And I believe in the purpose of the company and all of that. So how should companies be thinking about this while dealing with people like you? And I'm sort of labelling you here? Because I want you to put yourself in that situation. How can companies get the best out of me? How would you answer that question?

00:30:40  

Ayush: So a couple of things here. People need actualization, people need meaning in their work. Right? So you need, so I just go on a time tangent here. I don't know. They're stupid. There's a great debate between Karl Marx and Adam Smith that I read. They probably lived in other times, written debate or something, where Adam Smith says that go for specialisation. If you are making a shirt, you know, make a team of 10 people, you make buttons, he makes collars, you make cuffs, and then Marx says like, what is the point of making buttons for a guy? I mean, what is the meaning of making these buttons, you know, I get up every morning making buttons for this shirt factory, I'm making collars for this shirt factory, I'm making cuffs for the shirt factory, and then it's assembling the shirt and selling it off. For economics. It's great. For capitalism, it's great. For Adam Smith's specialisation of labour, right. But for the guy who's actually, you know, making the buttons and the cuffs and the collar all day, there is no point I mean. And now we are knowledge workers, it's more true even now than then it was probably 200 years ago, that we need meaning in our life, we don't want to build buttons, we want to build entire shirts, even if they don't sell as much, even if they're not as good, know what is good, what is bad, we don't know, I'm probably proud of this t-shirt more than anybody because I designed it myself. So it says I am the CEO of my life. And, you know, a Nike shirt will not have as much value as a 300 rupee shirt has for me. So people need meaning, you know, so, the first thing I think every corporate boss should do is to try and give as much ownership to their employees as possible, not micromanage. You know, don't like to come about and second guess everything that you're doing, even if they're doing it wrong, even if they fail, let them fail, let them learn. Failing is probably the best way to learn. And don't be an ass to them once they fail and just be calm and be like, okay, cool, you failed this, I'll fix this because I'm your boss, I can do this better than you, I fix this, for now, take it as a lesson move on. And the next time you do this, you know, do this better. And I trust you that you will do this. So basically give them a lot more ownership to do what they're doing. Give them, don't treat them like school kids or factory workers. Like they don't know what they're doing, or they have to report a certain time for us, or that doing eight hours of work is necessary. You know, Henry Ford had come up with an eight hour a day job and it made sense because the factory and a conveyor belt and everyone has to do their job. And then you can produce a car, you know, at the end of the conveyor belt, but that's not how knowledge works. You know, that's not how designers, marketers, right? As product managers, we are thinking, a lot of my work is actually the 40-minute walk that I take every morning, or whenever I'm playing Monopoly with my son. And stuff like that many ideas strikes from there. So, again, trust your employee that whatever hours they're putting in, they do their best work. And they will probably be, it'll be better for you in the long term. That's a way to groom people to grow in a company. So trust them, give them ownership and then not be a ringmaster to them, you know, be more of a coach to them. That, okay, you're playing the sport, you're the striker here and I’m the coach and telling you what to do. And then ultimately what happens in the field. It's up to you. And you have to perform there. And you got to take the game forward. So yeah, that's what I think they should do.

00:34:32  

Harish: Right, right. Yeah. So a lot of this again, what strikes me is that people sort of default to what has been happening for generations. It's just being lazy that I don't want to be deliberate about figuring out what is best for individual A, which may not be the case with individual B. And you know, they're just trying to come up with this one size fits all so that they can just say that yeah, this is the model. And now, you know, let everyone try to fit into that model. Right? So a corollary to that is that there are people like you, I would say, who are sort of enlightened and empowered. Right? I would say a lot of people these days, a lot of young people are there or are getting there very soon. But there are also a lot of people, especially in India, given you know, how things are in the education system? And who will probably get there in some time? They're not there yet. Right. So, then I think that's probably the challenge that these leaders and people who are designing these companies are also facing, right, how do I manage this for both? So then what is your advice for people?

00:35:56  

Ayush: So that's their skill? You know, that's what they're supposed to do? The company is the product for them? The process is the product. So I’ll just back up a minute and just say that all this comes from the Industrial Revolution, before the Industrial Revolution, we didn't think like that, we didn't work like that. There was nobody, there was nobody telling Leonardo da Vinci that you need to paint this, you know, he would go there, he’d get a commission, and then he would paint and at his own time, his own way. And that's how we produce his best work. Okay, coming back to the leaders, they are coaches of people, they are designers of systems that can produce the best results for the company. And for that, they're going to have not everyone's at the same scale. The same coach coached Sachin Tendulkar, as well as Vinod Kambli. Both of them had their own skills, and both of them eventually did put it in. So you have to take a call of what is optimum for my company, and for my team, and what person fits what role and coach them accordingly. So probably, if I'm an introvert, then I would probably not be a good leader, you know, probably not appropriate for certain kinds of roles. If I'm an extrovert, then I probably not be appropriate for certain kinds of roles, this is a personality to everyone. And, as a coach, you need to understand that personality, this person is more suited to this. And they're more interested in this. So I might as well use them for this kind of role and use someone else for that, and if I don't have someone else, I should hire somebody. Don't force-fit a person into a role, rather create a role per person. And if you get good hard-working, intelligent people in your team, you can do anything in the world. You know you don't need people, like designers or marketers. No, you need Ayush who will write for you if you need it, who will be a product manager if you need it, who can even do some basic design in Canva. And then you figure out okay, his design skills are shit? You know, he can't do design, I know that, but you can do writing better. I give him writing. I hire somebody who's a good designer, and probably get them to do design and not do anything, you know, and that's how I can build my team and actually scale it. What does the manager do? I'm sad to say, but in most of corporate India, mid-level management is just taking orders and passing orders and that's sad. I mean, that job has got no meaning. And I was moving into that job. I knew that if I worked at my company for another three, four or five years, I would be doing that job. I was doing it partly and not fully but I have been doing that job. So I mean, I didn’t want to do that. I think mid-level managers have this existential crisis as well. What will they do outside of this company? This is what they should be doing. They should be honing their team-building skills, they should be honing their coaching skills, you know, their sense of which worker is good for what, and how can I groom them to do their best work? That’s probably it.

00:39:12  

Harish: Right. I think this idea has come up quite a few times in our Smartcast. Dr Anand Deshpande, Chairman and Founder of Persistent systems, has a talk about this where he speaks about this specific thing that you talked about the mid-managers who are just trying to forward things. And yeah, that's the flap that organisations have done over a period of time and they'll probably be the first to be let go of when you have empowered employees, why do you want people like this? Right? There's also this concept of holacracy. Right? Where people, it's a way of managing companies where people sort of are formed into circles. There is no single authority, there are people who are accountable. But I might be the owner of one circle. But I might be just a contributor in another circle. And I think this whole, this is not exactly the kind of gig economy that people talk about. But this is working on simultaneous projects at the same time, right? I think this is gaining currency more and more, this is what freelancers are doing, you're probably doing that right now. So how do you manage that? How do you manage that from just the perspective of time management or mind space? What are the challenges? And how are you doing it?

00:40:47 

Ayush: So first, the benefit is that I get to work on so many different projects all the time. And it's very interesting, it keeps me intellectually charged all the time, you know, intellectually curious. When I wake up, I'm like, I'm excited that today, I'm going to work on this. And no two days look alike. For me, every day, I have different things that I'm working on. To manage it, basically, it's a lot of time blocking, it's a lot of planning again. And it's a lot of focus on deep work. So Cal Newport has a book called Deep Work, where you should spend chunks of your time going deep into certain kinds of work. So I take out, I have my time management hack, my productivity hack is I have 10 blocks a week, of four hours each. Okay, two blocks every day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And that's what I do Monday to Friday, and whatever project or task that comes in, I just fit in, like, okay, which is the next empty block that needs to be filled in, and I fill that project into that block. And of course, I make sure that it doesn't collide with something else, or if the deadline is coming up, then I need to probably give 2-3 blocks or something. And that I manage. And the good thing about this is, and again, this is true for the knowledge economy, whether you're as a holacracy within a company, or whether you're working as a freelancer, a consultant that you need to realize that knowledge work takes time, it's not fixed, that if I spend four hours, then I'll write a great 2000 word article. Probably sometimes I've written for clients where initially when I started out as a freelance writer, I charged them on a per word basis because that’s the shitty way of doing it across the world of charging freelance writers. And it's taken me eight hours, nine hours to write and it just didn't make sense economically for me to spend it. But I want to put out quality content, you know, I don’t want to put out a lot of fluff. So I moved on from that and moved on from value-based pricing now for myself, but I think everyone needs to realize that knowledge work is not factory work. Again, going back to the industrial revolution, what you do can take more time and all my clients realize that. My consulting and freelance clients know that, and within a company, bosses need to realize that. What if this person is supposed to design something, or this person was supposed to code something, coding is another, you know, creative knowledge work. It's not like a factory job that if you give somebody to build a feature for 3 days and do it in one or two days, and we have these calculations in man-hours and man-days, that this project needs to be done and, and it's again, it comes down to what you're saying that because it's the way they've been following and that's why people don't know any other way. That's what people do. You know that they're just breaking down projects into specific man-hours and man-days and then assigning people and so like Warren Buffett has this fantastic quote that you can't impregnate nine women and bring a baby in one month. So you need to spend nine months to bring a baby in this world, and that's true for any kind of good knowledge work as well. It takes the time that takes and all of us need to be okay with it. You know, it's okay if it takes a bit longer. Especially if you're a product company, it's okay if your own product man, come on, you can push the deadline to the next day. All deadlines are made up by us. I think no deadlines in this world matter or shouldn't matter. Right?

00:44:24

Harish: Yeah. So interestingly, the quote you mentioned, I think it's also part of this project management book called The Mythical Man-Month, which was like, the first book on project management that software project managers used to refer to. And still, in practice, we've not been following that right. Do you think, you know, going back to what you're talking about in terms of working simultaneously on multiple projects, you also spoke about how you could be writing, designing and doing these things? Yeah, do you think this is the future of work for companies as well, not just for solopreneurs?

00:45:09

Ayush: For companies, I think large companies need to break themselves down into small teams, they need to build task forces of people who are capable, who within a team of let's say, five or six or seven people, they have all the required skills to build something within the team. And the bosses or the managers need to come up with projects, and then give this one project to one team and let them do it their way. You know, they do their estimates, they do the planning, they do the execution, and then they own the results, eventually. So where again, as a team, if I have a strong bond, within my seven, eight people group, then I'll pitch in with wherever the team is lacking. You know, if okay, if this guy needs some help with coding, I can help and if someone needs designing, I can help it up. And we will all have to be T shaped anyways. And whether we like it or not, we have to be T shaped people to do well, in the knowledge economy. We can't just be a single line that I only do coding, I don't do anything else. So if you don't understand the user we're coding for, I think why are you coding. So I think that’s where companies will go where they will have specialists, everyone will have a specialization. But everyone will have a few general skills as well. And that's the best way they can function. I guess the old factory work model will not work.

00:46:55

Harish: Going back to your blog post, right, one interesting thing that caught my attention there was, in terms of being prepared for taking a decision like this, you said you should have earned an internet dollar. So why the internet? Is the internet the only way that they should be thinking about this passive income slash other income?

00:47:18

Ayush: Yeah. So the internet is changing many things. It is changing the fundamental mental models that we have lived with for a long time. Selling atoms is harder than selling bits. What I mean by that is when you do physical business, you've got a cost of goods sold. You know, every time I sell a biscuit packet, it's four rupees, and then there's probably a cost of manufacturing it one rupee, two rupees, then delivery and distribution. And then the profit comes out to be one, one and a half rupees. Every time I sell an info product, which is just living digitally on the internet somewhere in some file storage, there is no cost of goods sold. I've already created it. So I created ebooks, I created toolkits and these kinds of newsletters. So those kinds of info products will not exist without the internet. First of all, probably the closest thing would be books. But in the old pre Internet era, books again have a manufacturing cost and distribution and retail cost, which again, the internet kills all of those costs. You know, if I write an ebook, you can download it instantly right now and start reading. Now the connection between the writer and the reader is direct. There is no publisher, there are no middlemen. All those middle costs have gone away. So if you tell this to a biscuit manufacturer, that the moment you've manufactured your first biscuit, every subsequent biscuit will not cost you any manufacturing cost. You know, his mind will be blown. Like no, that's not possible, you know. So that's how people have done business in the physical world. They don't realize how different business in the internet world is. And as a solopreneur, as somebody who lives in this world, I think everyone should leverage the internet. Of course, you can go ahead and build your biscuit factory, and compete with other players and probably do very well for yourself, and I'm not against that, then again, you will need to probably leverage the Internet to market your product, even if it's a physical product, you need to run ads on it. And we see all these D2C companies these days who are running Instagram and Facebook ads and pouring money just to get customers, right, they're leveraging the internet. Probably a hoarding or a flyer somewhere doesn't cost or shouldn't cost as much as an Instagram ad today because that's where the user's attention is, everyone's on the internet. And so yes, everyone should leverage the Internet, the power that it has, which is the power of infinite reproducibility. So again, going back to Naval Ravikant,  in his fantastic thread, he talks about code and media, you know, two things. And specifically, I think he talks about those two things because they are infinitely reproducible. If I had a piece of code, and I just sell it for a subscription. I’ve written it, that's a SaaS company, right? I have written code, written software. And actually, I just have to maintain it. And people keep paying me monthly money, just to keep that product going. I've written it once. And I've sold it infinite times. Same thing with the media. You are producing this podcast right now. And this will go on YouTube and his own LinkedIn is going to all these channels and producing this once. And this will be viewed probably years later, and probably my grandchildren will watch this someday, you know. And, the cost of reproducibility of this is very low and is negligible in the long term. So that's the power of the internet that we should all leverage, especially being a solopreneur when you don't have a marketing team. I wrote that blog two months ago, but when you discovered it, it was as fresh to you as it was the day it was written. Right. And that's the beauty of it. David Perell is a fantastic writer. I follow him on Twitter, an online writer and he has a quote that says “Words on a Page Have Infinite Patience”. You know, they will, they will do your work for you for years to come. And I think that's what that blog did for me. And you know, and you found out about me and you wanted to do this podcast with me. And again, so many other collaboration opportunities have come up through that blog post and through that Twitter thread. So I think that's the power of the internet if I'd written it as a book, that it would not have been able to get distribution. It would not have reached even people in Bangalore, Pune, I'm in Noida right now, the blog post has reached the internet across the world. So, yeah, that's why the internet is important, that when you go solo, you need to leverage the infinite reproducibility of the internet.

00:52:26

Harish: Right. Yeah. So coming back to that blog post. Another thing that you spoke about was thinking in terms of small bets, right. Now, when you look at it, investors have always been doing that, right. That is how they've always thought about their portfolio companies. Why do you recommend everyone should think like that? Why is it such a good thing for everyone? 

00:52:51

Ayush: Yeah. So again, this comes from VC investing, this comes from Index Investing. I read a lot about personal finance, and I figured that nobody knows shit about it. Everyone's just taking bets. And they are just hoping that will pay off. And probably as a retail investor, the best thing for me to do is invest in index funds, just buy the whole index of 30 companies or 50 companies Nifty 50. And just keep putting money into it for a long period of time and I'll be able to build some wealth. And that's true for life. You know, Taleb has this book called Fooled By Randomness and his Incerto series, The Black Swan, Anti Fragility, and he says nobody knows shit about life. What can happen and I can't be certain, and that's the thing with people who work full-time jobs, working for corporations, who don't know when you'll be fired, you know, or till when your company will go on. And you're putting all your eggs in one basket and you're hoping that this will or you have this belief, a very strong, irrational belief that your life will be taken care of by this company. No, it doesn't work like that. Unless you're in the government. Probably government jobs will stay forever. Otherwise, a private company can go so that was like, again, that is another realisation that I had all my eggs In this one basket with this one company, it should diversify. So my investing and my personal finances are one way of diversification. So instead of diversification of investment, people think of diversification of income. So my income right now comes from two or three sources. One is the consulting gig to two or three freelance writing gigs that I have, like in the process of me just talking to a few people, I want to start ghostwriting and a freelance writing agency, where I do this for CEOs. CEOs have a lot of domain knowledge or any domain expert, basically, but they don't have the time or the skills to put that knowledge down into a fine book or a blog post. So I want to set up a team where I ghostwrite posts right for them because I have built this skill over the last few years. So that is another income stream that I'm looking at. You know, yeah, the basic point is that you build a portfolio of multiple bets, you figure out what is working, and you double down on that, instead of relying on only one thing and hoping that it'll work out in the long term. So yeah, that's how I think about it.

00:55:27

Harish: And what you're talking about is very much in sync with what we say about future relevance, right? I mean, how should people be thinking about their future relevance? So one thing is, whether you are working in a company, or you are a founder, or you're a solopreneur, whatever, right? What are the signals that you should be watching out for? So that you make decisions from a position of strength, and not because you've been, like, forced into it? What are the signals that you should be looking out for?

00:56:00

Ayush: Yeah, so as an employee, I will say, whenever you join a company or a new team, there is a phase of the rapid growth of learning. First six months, one year, one and a half years, you learn a lot, you will have new work, you're excited. When I was there, I worked with two companies before this, Infosys and Samsung, and both places, I was like, for the initial one or two years, I was very excited, and learned a lot and I was very confident. But the whole corporate model, how it works is that once they figure out that this guy is good at this, your work becomes repeatable, they want you to do the same thing. You know, it comes back to if you're good at making buttons, you know, keep making buttons, don't think of making a shirt, we've got people making cuffs and we've got people making collars, and we will assemble them, and we'll produce great shirts. So if in your job, when you see repeatability, that's an issue to be worried about, that your learning growth has plateaued. You're not learning as much new stuff as you used to, and probably enjoy that period, because work will be very easy for you, now that you know how it is done. And enjoy that period for a while, one year, two years, three years, then you will start getting bored. You know, there is something in the back of your mind that will tell you what is the point. So that's when either you talk to your managers, switch your teams, get something else to work on, get something new to work on, or go on your own, go solo. If you don't see the possibility of that. But yeah, that is primary for an employee that is the primary reason, the primary signal that things are getting problematic when what they do becomes repetitive. And one more thing to that is that if a job is repetitive, it will be codified and some algorithm will do it for you, you know, and you will become irrelevant in the future. So yeah, that's a very important tip for that.

00:58:10

Harish: Right. Yeah, I think those two are great yardsticks to use in terms of thinking about where you stand and how relevant you will remain. So you mentioned quite a few books and people but if you were to if I were to put you on the spot and ask you for recommendations or books people to follow, who would they be? In terms of thinking about future relevance?

00:58:34

Ayush: Yeah, it's very hard for me to pick a few books or people because I think everyone should read what they think makes more sense for them. So books have this thing with you know, this cult following almost like we should be reading more. We should be reading this book, this book, this book, all those fantastic books from yesteryears. And I was in that space for a long time. I read Sapiens and Homo Deus and read many books that I've never read. Everyone said that you should read and probably you should. But I'm now at a stage where I'm thinking that I should only read stuff that helps me solve my problems, right? So right now I’m reading this book called Show Your Work. So personally a fantastic book and I need to do this, because of the work that I'm doing, I need to speak about it, you know, I need to show my work I need to build in public, as I say on Twitter. So this book is relevant to me right now at my stage in my life and may not be relevant to somebody else. Having said that, there are some foundational books that everyone should read. And just last week, in my newsletter, I sent out like five books that I think make sense right now in the context of this conversation. I think everyone should read psychology and for psychology, Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, mental models, cognitive biases, just this mind-blowing concept. 30 years of research packed into a book. You know, it can be a bit dense sometimes. You're going to just skip through...

01:00:25

Harish: Including the font size, actually. 

01:00:26

Ayush: Oh, yes. I read everything on my Kindle. Yeah, so it's okay. Kindle makes sense. Actually, I got a physical copy of this one, because it's a beautiful coffee table book. So yeah, a physical book of this one. But apart from that, I read most books on Kindle, because it's great to highlight and then you get a PDF of the highlights you never have to go back to. So yeah, so Thinking Fast and Slow is a fantastic book everyone should read. I would say Sapiens, again, you may not be big on history. But it comes back to like, many things in the world are explainable through evolutionary psychology. You know, how we have evolved as humans and as animals. We are animals from the hunter-gatherer days to now, everyone should read. Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Taleb. It's in The Black Swan that made a big splash in the media and Skin In The Game, a couple of years back, also going big. But I think the theory really starts with Fooled by Randomness, and every book is just an addendum to it. So it just explains to you that the world is uncertain, and you don't know, you don't own your future. You just got to be prepared. Some people call it luck. Some people call it God. Taleb calls it Randomness. And I love the phrasing. The world is random. So yeah, I think everyone should read that. On a practical level, everyone should have Atomic Habits, to deploy those habits in their life, and then everyone should read Psychology of Money, two modern books written by bloggers, so they understand that we all have short attention spans. And that's why I think they are so good and so easy to read and so good to absorb. Psychology of Money is, again, a bit of psychology, a lot of finance and financial management, and how we think about money is important. Atomic Habits is just how to best become the best version of yourself by building habits.

01:02:35

Harish: I think that covers quite a wide range. So thanks for that. So we usually end our smartcast with a short piece where we ask for your hot take on certain things. Right. So I want you to comment on this, it is not exactly a rapid-fire, but you can give your hot take. So what do you think is the future relevance of NoCode?

01:03:04

Ayush: Very high. It's going to become very high, it's going to be the first step in the software value chain. Last week, I wrote a piece about it. So yeah, I think NoCode will democratize software development. People like product managers, marketers, designers will end up building a lot of school software projects, using NoCode. Yeah, so very relevant.

01:03:31

Harish: What is the future relevance of paid newsletters?

01:03:38

Ayush: Hard, but should work. At least that's what I'm trying to do. Eventually, in the next one year or so I'm coming up with a paid one. So that is again, I just take two minutes. There's this concept of The Long Tail by Chris Anderson right? And in the old days, there used to be like one hit that one music label or one rock star would get all the attention and everyone else, all the indie music, people would not get anything. But with the advent of Spotify, with the advent of Substack, with the advent of all these creator platforms, I think we'll see a lot of growth in the long term, the tail will be longer and even the fringes will end up making a sustainable living for themselves. So paid newsletters will work. If you carve out a niche for yourself and be a very solid, very specific problem for a very specific set of users, then those users will keep paying for it. Okay, in that sense paid newsletters to make sense. But will a paid newsletter become a New York Times? No, will a paid newsletter ever become the Economic Times or The Times of India or India Today magazine? No. Will a paid newsletter be good enough to sustain one or two people? Yes, I think that's possible.

01:05:00

Harish: Okay. And finally, what do you think is the future relevance of physical board games?

01:05:06

Ayush: Yes, yes, yes. They are a recent passion for me. And with kids, it's very important. How I raise my son is based on, like, board games are a big pillar of me and my wife's parenting philosophy. So plus, they give a lot of game theory. Basically, you learn game theory, when you play a lot of game theory is again, very important for future relevance. And you can read books and watch videos about it. But the best way you learn game theory is by actually playing games, but they can also be video games. They can be action games and live-action games. But my son is six. At this age, I don't want him staring at a screen. I don't even do classes, we don't do classes. Probably you should talk about education some other time. But yeah, it's a great way for us to teach him bonding, team building, game theory skills. So we had a wide range of board games. And I think, again, for a niche audience, a board game will make a lot of sense going forward.

01:06:18

Harish: All right, Ayush on that note, I think this is a fantastic chat, where we spoke about a whole range of things. You put yourself in the shoes of people on the other side of the fence or divide for you, as you would call it. And I think we've spoken to both kinds of audiences. People who would identify with you and would want to think and do the kind of stuff that you're doing right now. And to the people who should be dealing with people like you as well. Right. I think I probably did justice to both sets of audiences. So thanks a lot. It was great talking to you. And I think we should set up another slot for trading notes on education as well.

01:07:07

Ayush: Absolutely. I have very spiky opinions on parenting and education.

01:07:14

Harish: So yeah, that's one more thing then.

01:07:20

Ayush: Sure thing, awesome. Thank you.

If you like this, you know you care about your and your team's future generations. You can find us and click on the subscribe button on Youtube, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. There are two ways to enter the Insider Group of Friends of CTQ, a Telegram Channel where you'll get daily tidbits that help you think about future relevance. And our weekly email newsletter called the Upleveler. Got some fabulous testimonials from our subscribers. We also share special discount codes for CTQ Compounds and exclusive invitations for events on both these channels. Visit choosetothinq.com, you owe it to yourself.

CTQ Smartcast, Future Relevance, Smart Conversations, Systematic CuriosityChoose To ThinqFreelancing, Solopreneur, Time Management, ProductivityComment