This newsletter is about growth; in life and business.

You have to seek in order to find, scrape the bottom, delve the depths, and know darkness to know light.

The Seeker ⭖ Quaestor Lucis

The way is revealed.

Brain worm:

The real reason that it’s so hard to build businesses and achieve your goals in life is fundamental. In other words, it’s a feature baked into reality, not a bug.

In fact, I’m talking about a fundamental law of the universe.

Entropy.

In my view a business is nothing more than an attempt at creating order out of disorder.

• Creating products out of thin air that resonate with complete strangers

• Organizing vast amounts of disparate data and people to get productive outputs

• Turning it into profit

Essentially, ordered systems tend to fall apart. All that energy you put into creation will eventually give way to disorder.

And, here’s the rub: the more complex the system, the more energy you’ll need to input in order to increase (or maintain) order.

Therefore, for most Solopreneurs with limited time and resources, simplicity is the ultimate key to maintaining an orderly and profitable system (a business) - it’s easier to maintain order in a simple system:

Mental Model

If that’s you too, here’s your mental model to run through:

• Stop. Breathe. It’s not just you, it’s literally everything. From your solo-biz to billion year old gas giants, entropy reigns supreme and will have the final say over everything. Every ordered system will move towards disorder. Just accept it.

• Take a step back. Try and identify what is contributing/introducing disorder in your systems. You’re looking for complexity. It’s probably you, but can be any other chaos agent: employees, VAs, software, etc. Each introduces new complexity into your system and a new vector for entropy.

• Accountability. Recognize your own contributions to the disorder in your life and business, and recognize the ones that you aren’t in control of.

• Simplify.

Why bother if everything will fall apart anyways? Bizarrely, despite the overwhelming odds against us, despite the vast odds against us, we are wired to be the eye in the storm, to create brief, ephemeral, sense out of nonsense.

The Dungeon

“The shadow is the greatest teacher for those who seek the light.” - Source, Trust Me.

Consider this: we’re all born into mental prisons designed to trap us and keep us from seeking growth and truth. I’ve heard it called the Jungle, the Maze, the Labyrinth. For me, I like the Dungeon (80s kid).

So many things hold us back and hold us down: beliefs, ideology, education, culture, and so much more. Nurture and Nature, all suppressing your potential. For some the Dungeon is really dark, and finding the way requires strength, but it requires one thing above all:

The desire to find the way out. You have to seek, to find.

At some point we all realize we can’t do it alone.

The Sovereign

The Sovereign makes his or her own way. 

YouTube is still king IMO when it comes to rapid growth, personal brand building, and audience building. It’s not easy, though. It comes down to more than SEO, titles, and clickbait-y images.

For sustainable growth, you need powerful storytelling.

Consider the channel, The Life of Riza. She grinded on her channel, unnoticed, for a long time, until all of a sudden, the algorithm started to love her content, then she exploded:

She combines simple, powerful storytelling with awesome cinematography. And people love it. We can all learn a lot about building magnetic audiences from her content.

Here’s an excellent breakdown on how she achieved meteoric YouTube success.

And for an incredible view into how to engineer explosive growth on YouTube, check out this tweet by @wono_strategy:

The Year 2050

This section explores any and all thoughts I have about the future.

“Invest where you want the world to be in 10-20 years.”

Skate to the puck. I read that somewhere, and it stuck with me. Cliche’s carry truth.

Right now I’m buying Robotics and AI ETFs for example.

Is right now a “2010 for electric vehicles” kind-of moment for ROBOTS? You know, where it’s basically a joke and only early adopters are raving about EVs and everyone else thinks they’re techno-lunatics but flash-forward 10 years and they are f—ing everywhere and FFS you wish you’d invested… I guess we’ll find out in 10-20 years.

My bet is on Robots being EVERYWHERE. Screencap this:

• In three years they will be dominating manual labor, factories, etc.

• In five years they will be visible in resource-demanding environments like aging centers.

• In 10 years they will be in most homes in the first world.

• In 20 years they will be everywhere.

It’s being called the “next trillion dollar” opportunity. I think it’s so much more than that over a long time horizon. Aight. I’m in.

Respice Finem

How to build businesses that last, that you’re proud of: Look to the end.

Note that I’m not talking about revenue streams, here. I have many of those, they can go away tomorrow, I’ll replace. Revenue is about leaping into fast moving trends and positioning yourself like a grizzly during a salmon run to catch as much as possible.