I provided myself some questions to answer and reflect on my business and how to stay relevant in this fast-paced world of AI. The following are my answers to it.
In this age of AI, how do you stay relevant when AI can produce outputs faster and more efficiently than you?
Everything is moving so rapidly that you can't trust businesses and institutions to save you. There was an incident last year where a former housemate of mine tried to stab me. At the time I was unsure how to resolve the situation, so I called the police. The police had so many competing priorities that they just didn't care about me as much as I care about me. Throughout the steady current of my life experience, this is evident and a common theme.
The way this relates to an economic perspective is that it's important to have self-sufficiency and provide for myself, my family, and close ones. People throw around concepts of universal basic income and the like to address people's needs when they become redundant, but invariably things in this natural world are never equitably distributed, as larger society doesn't care about you as much as you care about yourself. My takeaway is that nobody's coming to save you. To ensure you, your family, friends, and close ones are okay, it is important you have a means to provide for and protect your people.
In the absence of such institutions, I am trying to build my own brand and reputation that survives any shorter-term business games I'm involved in, and that I can transfer onto future endeavours.
In the natural world, humans (the genus Homo) have been around for one to two million years. Homo sapiens has been around for 100,000 years. Farming civilisation has been around for 10,000 years. The point is, Earth has been around for 6 billion years, and in another 6 billion years humans will not exist, or will be a radically further-evolved being that would be unrecognisable to us today. We are a transient data point.
So looking at ourselves in comparison to the natural world makes very little sense, as we are of drastically diminutive levels of permanence.
The question that's more relevant is: how do you maintain relevance within your community (Homo sapiens)? That question is more answerable. The answer comes down to relationships and connection. The more trusted and amicable relationships you have, the greater the relevance, and also the contentment, you have. So invest in that.
Whatever the game Homo sapiens play now and in the future, by virtue of it being a Homo sapiens game, you will be relevant if the key players find you incredibly useful and their lives are better for you being in it. I firmly believe this is mutually beneficial, as your life is made more contentful by these richer, more connected experiences, as well as theirs.
I want to reiterate this for myself more than anything. These games we play will change. In the days of hunter-gatherers, it was about who in the tribe could be more impactful in killing game, and the tribe rewarded that. And whoever was most liked, trusted, and respected, the tribe rewarded that too. In farming civilisation, whoever was impactful, liked, trusted, and respected on the farm to maximise crop yield was rewarded the most, by being kept around the longest and treated the best. In today's business world the question is: who's the biggest-impact player that's also trusted, liked, and respected in your game?
So when machines can achieve more productive and powerful utility outputs, at a fraction of the time or resources of yourself, what do you offer? The richer, more connected relationships with your tribe become the more valuable commodity.
I think respect is a part of this. Trust and likeability over the long term come from being respected. Respect only comes from following through with your word, standing for what you believe is right, and persisting through the storms, seasons and terrains of life, so much so that you're still standing after it all passes. In my life, the people who have demonstrated this, I respect the most.
How do you maintain clarity of the fundamentals, the bigger picture and what matters, in this relentlessly rat-raced world that changes every day?
These are deliberate daily anchoring activities that balance me and provide me with grounded perspective.
Meditation
Currently I do about 10 minutes a day as part of my morning routine, but it is feeling quite rushed. The way I can have a better experience of it is by being deliberate in my engagement with it, and following the meditation practice more intentionally.
Over the long term of doing this religiously every day for the past two years, I feel more balanced, have fewer knee-jerk mental and physical reactions to situations, have more clarity, and I'm happier. The key benefit I appreciate the most is the firm separation of mind and body as being separate to you. I am insignificant stardust that is a connected part of the universe, and that in its current configuration will be no more in a long enough time span. My mind and body are tools that I have access to now to create things.
Daily exercise
Keeping your heart, bones, and muscles strained and exerted keeps your faculties sharper and more tuned to the world, and to respond to it. On a more dialled-down level, you feel better and are more able to immerse yourself in life's experiences.
Collectively, meditation and daily exercise are my deliberate daily activities, and all I need to do is spend 10% of my waking hours on them (10% of 16 hours is 1.6 hours) to keep me in good shape. I have before fallen into the trap of filling my day with exercise and all these lengthy journalling routines (which are really cool, but end up taking so much more time that they become the main activity of life rather than supporting it). So that's a key mental reference to keep in mind:
This stuff is supposed to help me in life. It is not the main thing in life.
Time in nature
I'd ideally like to spend at least two days of the week in nature, but that's hard to do because I have a business and work that needs building. At the very least, going on one hike a week that's at least an hour long, plus my usual walks around the neighbourhood, are good things to keep up.
New experiences and conversations
Having frank, honest, well-intentioned conversations and new experiences with friends, family and new people you meet invites fresh perspectives. Aligned with how people say novelty is the spice of life, I think these sorts of experiences keep things fresh and help me evolve.
Just do more real-world stuff
Do more that's removed from intelligent machines, curated algorithms and outputs. That anchors me to the actual earth: martial arts, running, swimming, cycling. And things with my hands, such as:
- mowing the lawn
- painting the fence
- cleaning the toilet
- assembling furniture
Keep open time for serendipity
Keep open time for life to happen. Don't plan every hour or day. There are seasons for both.
Discipline and hard work
All these anchoring activities that provide me balance and perspective have the common theme of discipline and hard work. They require me to show up every day when it's tough, and to really persist in moments where I don't feel like it. But persisting in those very moments where you want to quit is when you unearth a truer and more capable part of yourself. When you stack such moments of everyday show-ups, and persist when you don't feel like it, you will be an unrecognisably more evolved person a year down the line.
To honour these truest parts of yourself in this lifetime, you have to build that muscle of persistence, so in harder moments you get through. That's what really breaks through the glass ceiling. In everyday harder moments, having this discipline and ability to hang in there helps you:
- Not get thrown off by haters, detractors and other things that enter your mind and steal away your single-minded focus on what you've got to do. For example, others talking about me wasting time starting a business that's not even as profitable as my day job: why commit all that time, money and energy to have nothing substantial to show for it? Discipline is required to believe in the vision, and in the end state of the opportunities and prosperity I can provide for myself, my close ones, and the causes I care about to make people's lives better.
- Not have sleepless nights, and switch off, so you can rest up to tackle the next day as best you can.
- Be present in the moment, and not worry about a client delivery or an uncomfortable client interaction when I'm on the beach playing with my mates, or having dinner with my partner and family.
Technology-free blocks
Have technology-free blocks of the day (say half a day to a full day at a time), for example Friday night and Saturday morning, when client responses are less likely and less urgent. It balances me. I'm even writing this journal entry with pen and paper first.
Is my rat race really that important?
Literally each of the eight billion others on Earth has their own rat-raced frenzy that consumes them within their own mind and personal universe. Is each of our rat races really that important?
- There is a rare-earth-mineral miner in Nigeria, living in the slums, working his backside off for 12 hours a day to earn what money he can for his wife and three children.
- There is a Year 12 student in Sydney studying his backside off to do really well in his Higher School Certificate exams, spending every waking moment focused on his subjects.
- There is a mother in Gaza with three children, worried about how to provide bread or some sort of nutrition for her children and extended family, and just to survive each day.
- There's a man in Japan who hates his job but has to show up every day under a very oppressive boss, and maybe kiss up, just so he can put food on the table for his family and abide by the social customs of respect there.
- There's an Uber Eats delivery driver in China who is busting his backside for four months straight, with only one day off, 13 hours a day, to pay the bills and provide for his two elderly parents.
Everyone's really got their own whole universe of pains, troubles, desires, motivations, and things that occupy their entire consciousness.
You personally, Harshan, have this mad race of things to get done for the day, and it feels like if you don't hit it, you will be worse off by the end of the day.
In reality, whether you hit that day of rat-raced, noisy business activities six months ago or not has not materially changed your circumstances today. Of course, there is a distinction between these noisy activities and the essential inputs to the business that you have to do each day, such as client acquisition work.
An escape from this rat-raced world is to go away, often in solitude, in nature, and immerse yourself in the natural elements (sun, sand, water, breeze, flies), with just a pen and paper and nothing else around you. Part of me feels that, even in a worldly sense, that clarity (and everything downstream from it: business strategy and execution) will actually help me get further in life and become more contented than if I just keep running as a rat.
What are some personal levers that get the best efforts and outputs out of me?
Environments and community
Environments and community are big levers of productivity and gains for me:
- Run with runners better than you. You're forced to keep pace with them, or feel really shit about yourself if you don't.
- Be in business communities that are more capable and ahead of you. Be a part of those conversations, and again you either play at that level or you feel real shit about yourself.
- Work in environments, such as a closed study room, where you are forced to do nothing but work.
The theme here is: design, or insert yourself into, environments where it's hard to do anything but the thing you have decided to do.
Stick to my time blocks
This is a personal Achilles heel of mine: I drag work on beyond the time I've set for myself. I often end up completing what I set out to do, but with three hours of sleep before the next day begins. This is okay from a macro perspective of getting things done, but it doesn't improve my productivity and sense of urgency.
I think I should be a bit more religious about this. If I don't complete a task by the time I've set, I stop working at that deadline and re-engage with it another time. Then these personal deadlines become more real, because I respect them.
Of course, in reality this needs to be balanced with getting the stuff done that has to be done by the night's end, however long it takes.
Smooth is fast
I have all these things to get done in the day. How do I get all of it done?
The answer is not to rush. It's smooth is fast, fast is smooth.
Don't rush, because zoomed into the current moment it may feel like you're getting more done, but zoomed out you are only getting 20% more done than if you didn't rush that day or month. And you're just not as present or as effective as if you'd done it smoothly, taking your time.
I consider myself (and others have described me as) a freight train. It takes me a bit of time to get going, but once I'm going I'm unstoppable. In a short-term activity such as study or work, it takes me maybe 30 minutes to an hour to get into the momentum of real gains, where I'm learning a fair bit or getting a sizeable chunk of work done. For a longer-term activity it is the same: only about a year after starting the business did I become profitable.
In the zone
I believe the finest expression of oneself is when you sit down, uninterrupted, and just do the task or single-minded activity without any unnecessary body movement, twitches, getting up, scratching your back, going for a walk, or anything else. In the zone for hours at a time, with nothing but the task at hand.
A high-performance steady state
Becoming an effective, efficient businessman is similar to being a professional athlete. Intense work, and scheduled rest and recovery, are both important to get the best out of you. It is like LeBron James, or a combat-sport athlete who has a regimented, steady-state fight camp. He pushes incredibly hard during those sessions (where he is exceeding his level), but still sets aside dedicated time for relaxation and rest. All of this is required to get him to an optimised fight state, come fight night.
How do I make my business run more autonomously, without me?
Four departments, and getting myself out of them
I think the answer lies in working with urgency, in a more strategic, systemised manner.
In my business I have four departments I struggle to commit time and output to each day: client acquisition, client delivery, marketing, and business operations. Everything else helps serve these.
The solution for keeping these four departments running well each day is not for me to work with a "factory worker mentality" and just hustle one by one on each activity. Instead it is to be smarter with the systems, so they get 10x more done without me lifting a finger. I need to be removed from the system's operations and execution as much as possible, without materially diluting the quality of inputs and outputs.
Client acquisition
- Freelance job applications. Curate the jobs I apply for to be higher quality, and reduce the friction so each application takes under 10 minutes. Currently, on a good day, it's 12 minutes an application. The easier it is to do, the more I do it (for example, Upwork applications).
- Cold email, running autonomously. All I do is respond to interested leads and close them on sales calls.
- Facebook ads. Same again: I just respond to interested leads and close them on sales calls.
AI skills I need to build:
- Generate a CV for each new job, based on my templated structure and past applications.
- SEO- and GEO-optimise my landing page.
- Convert my authentically recorded VSL video into a production-ready Facebook ad, and post it.
Client delivery
Get AI to do most of the work. Set up the infrastructure and playbooks so it can replicate them for each new client quickly, with little new prompting.
- Make it possible to hand delivery to contractors who help me out. For example, set up 1Password to give them access to certain passwords, and set up my CRM so they can update it at will too. It is just not wise to spend 80% of my time getting lost in the minutiae of business processes, done manually.
- Make it possible for me to work on the go, on my phone, any time, securely. Maybe load all my work into GitHub, so Claude Code can access that information more easily.
AI skills I need to build:
- Different playbooks for different activities.
Marketing
- Batch content ideas and scripts one day a week.
- Set things up so video recording, editing, thumbnail creation, posting on YouTube and repurposing for Instagram are automated by AI.
- That means I can record my consciousness and words, and post them (or have them ready for posting) within one hour each day.
AI skills I need to build:
- Generate YouTube video ideas.
- Generate YouTube video scripts.
- Generate thumbnails.
- Post on socials from the one AI dashboard.
Business operations
Things I can automate now:
- Direct all important notifications to my Slack channel, especially for applications I don't use regularly (YouTube, Loom).
The theme
Do all things from one AI dashboard, and enable as much as possible to run autonomously, without me.
What are things in my day that I can automate, so I have more time?
- Ordering groceries for delivery to my doorstep.
- Buying stuff online without going to the physical store all the time (e.g. the new perfume).
- Mowing the garden.
- Automating subscriptions, payments and bills.
- Car washing and cleaning.