Was it worth it?

Everyone is racing to be successful right now, including me. Who doesn’t want success? But as you would guess, 99.99% of them will not get there. Not because they are lazy or they are not working hard towards it, but because I feel they are obsessed with the wrong thing.

They are reading a lot and chasing every new trend, maybe the latest Claude code skill that went viral or a YouTube video that promises to teach you how to run a business in 5 steps. The obsession keeps growing and most of these tactics honestly do not work in most cases

Think about it for a second. If it was really this easy, you could just follow five steps and get there. Everyone would be running a $100 million business but honestly they are not so these tactics are not going to work. These are not the right motivations you should have. But we keep believing they are because we are craving success from anything and everything that looks like it works.

If you are in the same group, I’m not putting you down. In fact two years back I was right there with you and honestly I still fall into the same trap again and again. Just today I got hooked on Grok bot and spent my entire Sunday morning playing with it. I knew it was just a trend and something better would come along soon but the mind plays its own tricks and it happens to all of us. (That’s when I realized and thought to pen it down.)

And that is really the point. It was never about a lack of tactics because it’s all available on the internet. It’s that our mind confuses being busy with actually moving forward. There is an old line from Sun Tzu that stuck with me:

Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

That is exactly it. Tactics feel like a quick fix, a short-term dopamine boost, but strategy is the actual progress. Most people don’t learn the difference until they have already wasted a couple of months or a year. Over time here’s what I have learned to do instead:

• Spend real time with people who are already there, where you want to go, and learn from them.

• Read the books that teach you an actual strategic move, not another list of hacks.

• Watch the videos that give you a genuine perspective (these are usually the underrated ones) instead of the one promising five steps to a million dollars. It has never worked and it’s not going to work.

Strategy is the thing that takes you from zero to one and a big part of strategy is knowing what to ignore. So before I think about any tactic or a shortcut, I try to strategize first.

• Strategize to get clarity

• Strategize to build your process

• Strategize to figure out your next step

• Strategize to figure out distribution

• Strategize to figure out your team and your culture

• Strategize to get your first 20 or 100 customers

• Strategize to build a routine to hit the gym or anything...

Let me show you what that actually looks like with something simple, like getting your first 20 customers. The tactic version is to post 10 times a day, run some ads, message 200 strangers, and hope something will stick around.

The strategic move here will be to figure out where those 20 people already have, what problem they are facing. Understand the one problem they keep complaining about (you get this information very easily nowadays). Show up there with exactly what they are craving, and that’s how you will get 20 customers (along with some more stuff, of course).

If you look around and observe closely, you will see that a tactic-level hack always ends in the same place and have never worked, in fact it brings disastrous results on longer run. You will feel busy, tired, and not closer to where you want to be. If you don’t spend time thinking strategically about your fears and your next stage, you fall right back into the same routine as everyone else. Six months or year later you are asking the same question again: “What am I doing with my life? Why me?”

The honest answer, if you retrospect, is usually this: that you were collecting tactics when you should have been picking a direction with proper strategy.

So take 30 minutes for yourself this week if you have for yourself. And just ask one honest question and reply with all the honesty to yourself: What am I actually trying to win? Did the last week move me any way near towards it or was I just keeping myself busy.

You will be amazed at what 6 months of focus can do. I have tried it & you should try that too.

Peace ✌️