F*ck Books, Fall in Love With Action

Life Update.

So it’s been a month or so since the last newsletter. And again, I feel like I’ve lived different lives.

We did the first Journey Club content trip to Bangalore.

Spent a week there, did a meetup with Moksh, Aryan, Priyanshu and many more people.

Filled out a cafe on a Monday night. Completely. No place to stand or walk around, it was chaos.

And I loved it.

Again, every time I’ve done meetups, it’s insane that how a guy who just films videos in his room, can get great people to show up and have real interactions.

Magical. Truly.

Next up, was the filming with Sagnik Ghosh and Jathin Mathad. The videos will be out soon.

And it was time to lock in, completely, for the last 2 weeks of June until the 5th of July.

That was the time of the Journey Club Retreat 2: Goa.

Absolutely mental, what we pulled off.

That villa had 10 rooms, could accommodate 30 people. Right by the beach.

This one was different from our last one.

Planned to the T, amazing people who coordinated with everything.

And we genuinely came back with new friends. This is only going to get bigger.

We’ll turn this into the best community for entrepreneurs and creatives in our country.

Now, it’s been almost 10 days since I’ve been back from the retreat.

I fired 3 clients, close 3 again, at higher retainers, in just the last 2 days lol.

Not gonna drop figures, but we’re doing decent. And I’ll let the work come out in a few months or a year. Then you all will see, from me, what we built.

This week was probably the most packed one I’ve lived through in recent times.

Daily, I’ve been staying awake till 3-4am. No schedule. Real this time.

Just extreme consistency with training and diet. Everything else is just work.

And it has to be done, there’s a lot of travel coming soon. Delhi, Home, Pune, Company offsite and much more.

Funny thing is, while I have been putting countless hours in work, I still managed to finish Better Call Saul. What an incredible show honestly.

Talking about TV shows,

I feel like this is the best time for me to get complacent, however, during this extreme schedule of me just stuck to my work desk, something has been changing.

The drive is getting stronger. All those years of work is finally making sense. I can see things happening.

I can pull levers. I don’t have time to learn everything, so the easiest choice for me is to not learn, and get someone who did and make my output faster.

Which is what I want to cover in this edition of curate. Remember, saying it here, these things can be summarized in a few sentences. But without context they’re not useful.

And it’s my job to make it so.

Put some noise cancelling headphones on, and pay attention.

Why you need to learn less.

The first 3 years of my journey, my work was either to learn from courses and in whatever time I had left, get the work done.

The output was slow, because I didn’t have enough lag indicators, or past data.

As I worked through countless failures, my data set of performance increased in size.

More data means, better predictability of future outcome. Lead indicators.

If I decide to learn a new skill every month, I can never predict how much time or effort a particular task will take me.

Because I don’t have relevant experience, time spent in the game, failures to learn from and eventually that eats you from within. Because you don’t know if you’re good or not.

That’s why popular opinion is to take more action. But popular action is to learn more. Funny how that works.

But you need to learn, you need to know what you’re doing.

That’s where 0-1 comes in.

You can go from a rookie, to somewhat decent fairly quickly in any skill. After a certain point, the growth rate per amount of time decreases, hence it takes more time to see changes.

If you keep on mentally masturbating all the time, in the name of “doing the work” because “you’re learning something new”. Welcome to the doom my friend.

This is how it looks:

You feel like you’re better than everybody because you are learning so much → Then you see others getting faster results → because you don’t have lag indicators to tell you where you’re wrong, you go back to your default settings → Which is to learn more → now you’re in an endless loop of inaction and blame.

Blaming everything due to the fact that you’re “excellent” and what you do.

But that’s not reality,

You’re “excellent” and consuming knowledge mindlessly. You’re watering down your own potential because most of what you think is helpful, is draining your focus and giving you even more shiny object syndrome.

Now the blame shifts on your past self, for not choosing what is right, right now. Because you couldn’t see it back then.

Or is it because you know “too much”?

I started my content agency when everyone did. Yet, over a period of 2 years, it’s at a point where hardly a fraction of people get to.

And the funny thing is, I hardly spent much time learning.

I did my 0-1 shift from 2020-2023. I realized I didn’t need it. The books on my shelf make my space look pretty.

It’s not time for me to go through all of them.

Stop watching the “3 books to get X”, or “5 business models/niches to try in 2025” bullshit.

Pick one thing. Most of what was relevant still works, and it will in future.

Agencies are going nowhere, services are going nowhere.

The way they’re done, that’s gonna change.

And as you go deeper in this journey, your time availability to learn new stuff decreases even more.

I have hardly any time to work on my personal brand right now, I know I need to take action there.

Why would I pick learning AI right now? Or to learn automation?

I have money, I can get someone who can do it for me.

Now I have extra human hours, who have proper lag indicators, to do my tasks at a higher success rate.

And funnily enough, without spending time learning, these past 2.5 years, I learned way more than I did before.

I just don’t have to showcase it in the amount of books or courses I went through.

Open a book → Find a one liner that helps me → Close it and back to the shelf.

Get a $3k course → Skim past most modules → Find the small segments that help me → Get to work.

When it’s time I’ll do it, not right now.

I know nothing about AI, my team does.

In the world of everyone being an AI expert, I choose not to.

Last time I tried stuff around with AI, it was GPT image generation.

I just use a trained chat on GPT, and perplexity to get most of my tasks done.

If I want AI images or edits, I ask my team.

If I want a workflow, I ask my team.

If I want something I don’t have in my team, I get them in my team.

That’s how simple it is.

All I have to do is buy the AI tools, lol, it’s a task that takes hardly a minute. Plus I get great output from the start because my team knows it? ABSOLUTE WIN.

They’re extremely good at it, so I don’t need to be.

As time goes by, the task list for me in the agency decreases.

At this point, all I do is sales, high level decision making and managing client relations.

And of course, paying a buck load of money to my team and software lol.

It’s all because of my one levers, pulling other levers.

How I pull leverage.

Understand this.

My brand has been the ultimate unfair advantage.

Been years since I have been hiring from MY distribution. These people already have the drive and pair that with someone they want to work with, even better.

I want someone who’s good at anything, I just put up a story. Pulling a lever.

I need something I can’t find. I put a post in my broadcast channel. Pulling a lever.

Hell, if I want a new hire. I tell my team. Pull a lever. They create a form. Them pulling the levers. I put it up on my story. My turn. They hire. Their turn.

You see, how much my input as reduced.

People do all sorts of campaigns, ads, and what not, to find one person. I can do it in a day with a story.

Bro, we got 16 people who paid us a good amount of money to join us on a trip for 3 days. Because we have leverage.

That’s distribution. Media.

Next one, which I use unapologetically right now, It’s capital.

I want more focus from my team members, I pay them more.

I want to weed out the bad ones with great talent, I can pay more than what all the so called “multi 6 figure agency owners” do.

And my team, who have now become a culture fit, spreads the culture, so our retention is higher.

So much so, that my team members regularly volunteer to do more work, why is that?

Because I have leverage, that creates a win win scenario for them.

Want to start a new project? Capital and people. Simple.

There’s endless use cases.

Now, for you, do it the other way I’d believe. I personally got lucky with timing and right effort.

I built distribution before I had money, so I grew a lot. Then that distribution made me more money.

However, I still believe, if capital is your foundation, distribution becomes way more effective.

As you appear high status.

There can be endless use cases.

Bottom line, for you:

1. Build leverage. Earn money.

2. Read all the books later. Sure that quote might look good on hinge, but what are you gonna do when you don’t have money for the dates.

3. Prioritize action time above everything.

4. Don’t be attached to saving too much money. Spend that extra 10-20% margin on creating something.

5. Trust people. The right ones. Let them do what they do best.

6. Pay them a LOT.

7. Build distribution. With good stories.

8. Have fun.

9. Failures in this online world aren’t really as bad as you think.

10. Stack proof of work. Case studies. Sexy portfolio is your ultimate flex.

11. Do everything possible to land more projects, and not “optimizing” for the next one.

12. Don’t be selfish.

13. Become a great leader.

14. Take pride in completing projects.

15. Make the time you need for learning, through action.

Conclusion

These are the lessons I’ve learned this year, that helped me get the most results in the shortest amount of time. So far in my career.

Leverage compounds the input needed for a task. Leverage is addicting.

Leverage gives you more “Time”.

Something we all fundamentally lack.

~Saksham Gaur