77 · A Beat-Up Cherokee

During summer break, June to September, we're going on a road trip all around America. Starting from Winnipeg — all around the continent in a beat-up Jeep Cherokee, LA to New York to wherever. A good chance to get better at driving anyway. Maybe some wild detours. Before that, we just need to start the business and continue the trading so we only need to work four to six hours a day from the car.

We're hitting Toronto, NYC and DC in the winter; back in the lab in the spring; Vegas and SF; and for the summer, wilding out in nature. Clear the top twenty cities of North America during the Winnipeg years — this is what it means to compress years of life experience — then fly back to the UK and have the time of your life. In the next eighteen months: work like hell on the quant and coding projects, travel to twenty cities, pull off the Putnam as a fellow, get into Trinity College Cambridge with acceptances from UBC, U of T, McGill and Waterloo as the safety net, take IMC gold, write and publish an online course on how to study mathematics, launch the personal brand, run a YouTube channel teaching maths and solving wild problems, prepare admissions-test students — and have the year of a lifetime. The depth of the solitary grind during this time determines the outburst.

Your A*A*A* will open so many doors that you will be drowning in options. Lock in, king. You're a champion. You're a winner. You got this.

In my head I'm already too locked into the SF and Toronto big leagues. And I guarantee I'm already within the handful of the hardest-working people. Don't look up. Stay in the pain. That's one tacit rule for when I'm in the grind — I made this mistake before, seeing the light too early. Stay in the dark for the phase that calls for it. Don't pop the champagne early. Stay in the grind.

Remember the truth: you have to push daily until the flesh gives up — that's what it means to exert to the point of full failure. You should collapse after a session; that's what it means. HIIT is the way, for work too: two hours of full focus, then nothing, the off button, then back in the lab.

You need to find a way to suffer more, take on more accountability, carry more smoke — and at the same time identify how to reduce the amplitude of emotional disturbance. And still include more volatility. I can't explain it without paradox. The best I can articulate: suffer without suffering. Work without working. Carry the cross without carrying it. Listen to everything but hear nothing; see everything but look at nothing — the sensory shutdown. I have goals for the final summer batch pre-Cambridge. That's the aim.

Lock in, twin. Stick to the A-levels. Resist deviating into anything else with your life staked on it. Build up the potential — the work flooding in, held, not leaked into anything else. Hold the excess potential so that when the final exam ends, you snap back into the lab with unlimited energy for AI and all the new tools. Eighteen by thirty by twenty-four is a little over 10,000 hours into AI. Learn every possible thing and build. Clear the A-levels first. Then: bury my head and learn everything about maths, physics, computer science, algorithms, AI, ML, trading, investing, economics, finance — and build: quant models, trading models, online businesses, SaaS. Every waking hour for eighteen months, pre-Cambridge. And I WILL launch. Radically shorten the feedback loops and ingest the work. Finish three four-year degrees' worth of mathematics in a month pre-IMC — that's the type of shit I'm on. Rep through all the MadAsMaths past papers. Read a hundred books in a month. Conjure the intensity. Radical inputs and daily revamps are how you revolutionise yourself. When you're in a thirty-six-month bootcamp to be a billionaire, the daily manifestation looks like compressing a month of work into a day. You have no idea what kind of wild things you are capable of as a human being.