Hello, World

I hated writing.

I also used to hate reading, debate, and just about anything I spent time on during school that didn’t have numbers. It didn’t make sense to me. How do I know what I’m doing was right? Why are the metrics by which my teacher is judging me by seem so arbitrary? How could I write a sentence, a long sentence, a sentence so long and tedious that by now I have probably lost the reader and all sense of rational discussion but at the very least I’m going to hit this quantifiable word count metric?

This is how my mind used to, and to some degree still does, work. It was only until after a couple years after leaving school that the true value in writing started revealing itself to me. It is because of this ambiguity that writing is so valuable. How do I get the Picasso-like painting of an idea that’s in MY head into the head of someone else? Especially if that someone else is myself, a year from now? Not only am I starting to appreciate writing; I want to actively pursue it.

Tomorrow I start the Write of Passage course given by David Perell. I am unbelievably excited. There are many themes that I’m trying to pursue right now that I believe the course will help jump start me into.

First and foremost, I have lost patience with my inability to communicate and I want to learn how to write. I want to learn other communication skills too, dreaming of one day being confident enough to give talks at conferences and having deeper conversations with people I know. But writing seems like a great place to start. It’s timeless. It forces me to be rigorous. It’s an incredible tool for learning more. I want to develop a system for producing it consistently so that I could get feedback from others and iteratively improve from there.

Secondly, the course talks a bunch about building a “personal monopoly”. It’s an idea that I’m absolutely obsessed with right now. A state in the future where the company I work for is called David Vargas and I’m not competing with anyone else because no one else could be me. There are a ton of examples of this right now; from big names like Joe Rogan to smaller names like Tom Merritt. These people are able to fund what they do simply because they love to do it so much they’ve brought value to others. I am fantasizing fanatically to get to that state. It’s this hunger for my personal monopoly that gave birth to this site.

The course is extremely expensive for me, but there are a couple things that encouraged me to pay it. One, I’m moving out of New York in exactly a month, which will lead to a sharp decrease of rent and saving more money each month. Two, the course has a full refund policy, demonstrating he has full confidence in the course and that I will get full value in return. Third, I am starting to view all money spent on educating myself not as expenses, but as investments, equivalent to stocks or real estate. This is because I’m confident that the ROI in these types of investments will be far greater than the 7-8% I will get from stocks or real estate.

After years of a robotic learning mindset, I am ready to expand what I know from just numbers and bits. It’s almost as if I’m embarking on this new journey. One where I can finally start to improve my ineffective communication and become a citizen of the internet, of the world.

Hello, World.