94 · The Courage to Look Stupid

The courage to look stupid — yes, that is going to be your edge. I don't know a single YouTuber who runs his own hedge fund; everyone is secretive, and I understand that's how the game works. But what if the opposite were also true? What's your God-given gift? Find it and amplify it to the universe. Mine: intellect and high-pressure performance. PhD-level maths, physics, CS — and then going to every single maths, physics, engineering, coding, programming, startup, speed-programming competition and taking first on every leaderboard. That's the show.

I honestly was thinking of going all-in on YouTube — scaling the personal brand with sheer volume, providing free value, sharing the journey to becoming a world-class mathematician and physicist. Talking about maths, reading books, book reviews, learning to trade, losing money, mental breakdowns, gym vlogs, video-editing practice, life revelations, live Korean SAT problem-solving, live STEP problem-solving, live backtesting, live learning-anything-in-eighteen-hours — recording those long sessions and giving them away.

You know the wild thing about the maths-tutor market: you can already start now. You don't have to wait until you get into Cambridge or take the Putnam to post. In fact you can post double the content — the sprints through past papers, and the videos teaching them. Recording sessions of solving the TMUA live. Just record all the past-paper study sessions — that's the start. Do it before bed, every night, consistently, for a decade. It is impossible not to gather eyeballs doing that daily for ten years. Go long-term.

Bro, one personal challenge that lives rent-free in my head: get really good at clipping YouTube videos and scale a university's social media as CTO of marketing — hiring my own videography team, folding new talent into the edits. These UK universities have some conservative grandma posting one short a day; I could make a hundred quality shorts a day for them and make the world want to study there. Harvard and the Ivies market well; Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LSE, UCL barely try. Universities are one of the UK's leading export industries and their content is asleep. I'm not from there, but I love it — and I see the gap.

On YouTube you stand out by being unique. The way you present matters almost more than the content itself. There were so many generic advice videos with no pragmatic instruction when I was preparing — the content I needed didn't exist. That's why I have such strong conviction: there is value I wish someone had given me, and I can be the one who gives it. Some proper guidance for every single stage of the admissions process. People preparing for the TMUA in October carry real anxiety, and you can meet them at each round.

And the aesthetic is decided: royal, gothic vibes. Fountain pens. The berets. Dressed like the library owns you. Personal brand isn't vanity — it's the distribution layer for everything else I build: the tutoring, the courses, the fund, the book. Fundamental Fund Mentals — my best-selling quant entry book that I will write during my time in Cambridge. The title is already done; the rest is reps.