75 · Eggs Before Chickens

Don't count your chickens before they hatch. Whenever you catch yourself dreaming about what this could become, tell yourself: stop counting chickens. Nurture your eggs.

You already have too many ways to make money. Take action on the ones you can fully exploit, and only then will you know the next step. It's my biggest personal habit — and if you're a dreamer, which you should be, this is the practical next step. At some point you start trying to perfect the plan: you amplify the dream, count the number of chickens, project how they'll scale into more chickens — when the entire focus should be on building the systems that raise the conversion rate from eggs to chickens. And the power of scaling is real: one chicken laying eggs can build a warehouse of a million chickens. But hatch the first egg.

The two micro-goals for Winnipeg: building websites for local businesses, and tutoring. The potential upside is SMMA plus high-ticket online consulting — a small market, but progress. That's it. No grand ambition beyond it for now; don't let your ambition become the bottleneck. Do something that does not scale.

There is absolutely no excuse for why you are not making money now. You are too smart and working too hard, while people putting in one percent of your effort, knowing nothing at twenty, are making forty, fifty, a hundred million — some random guy in India. This is real. Make it happen. The work trains your ethic, but the opportunities you must create yourself. E-books and digital products online — we don't need to be millionaires from this. My goal is the first five hundred dollars online, replacing the Tim Hortons job.

The map is not the territory. Growth is supposed to be dynamic — never linear, always radically turbulent in the early stages, and the more turbulent early, the more streamlined later. It is never "month one: learn coding; month two: programming; month three: sales." You continue with the work and pick up skills along the way. Build the best websites every day and fall in love with the process — it's going to be hard and throw everything at you. All in.

What is the highest-leverage skillset to learn? Don't be afraid to pivot and kill visions of lower ROI. Entrepreneurial skillsets come first — you can learn physics at Cambridge later; it's far easier to learn physics there than to learn the tools now. Some work has a time window on it, and you must act fast: there is a short gap in which to learn AI, agents, the new tools, better than anybody else in the world. Hop on the trend now — you are nowhere near late. Learn everything about computers — hardware, software, programming, AI, ML, neural networks, building websites front and back, circuits, Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pi, the mathematical modelling and scientific computing — and eventually you'll see something majestic: the quant projects and the software engineering coalescing.

Early optimisation is just unnecessary optimism. To optimise is optimistic, and to be optimistic is to optimise. Know the potential pathways — but 99% of you belongs to the now.

Stay small enough long enough, and you will grow big enough soon enough. And as soon as you spot yourself repeating something manually, find the AI tool that automates the process. Usually Claude, ChatGPT and Perplexity alone will do.

You must take action. What is the first thing you can do right now? Stack those first. Stumbling toward the light means running toward the light. The worst case has a name and a face: TMUA tutoring at £200 an hour with a certified 9.0. That's the floor. So swing.