Ero

I came on this forum in 2018 as a 16 year old. I was broke, sleeping on a mattress on the floor with my siblings (family of 7) in Bulgaria. I am now a millionaire in NYC, helping my parents and paying my sister's education. And this ain't even the fucking start. I have been on and off the forum over the years, but I always circle back to Leo's work. All of it is real. Take this shit serious. Drop the bullshit.

@EternalForest I think the YC approach of iterating daily on software applications is this day and age’s get-rich method. With AI, this is easier than ever.

Cryptography is the field which uses hard math problems to encrypt your information as to prevent hackers and bad actors from stealing it. That’s how credit cards, passwords, https and a lot of other stuff works.

Depends on which department you are in, but in general, there’s lectures twice a week, section once a week and office hours. Section is where people discuss in groups. Math didn’t have the latter.

As psychotic as it may sound, I would lock myself in a room for 12-13h a day and would bang my head until I figure it out. I met kids at Harvard who would do it in half the time or one fourth. They were definitely gifted. I am just stubborn.

Thanks brother, I very much agree. That’s what most people started personal development for. Nothing like a bowl of rice a day to make you fiend for success.

I would say I have been very ambitious and intuitive from a young age so it felt only natural.

Never seen him but this is like peak YouTube cuz I can’t tell if it’s serious or satire.

@Jacob Morres My guess is most your “ivy friends” are muggles and coasted through college on easy mode. Harvard’s PhD-level math I did with Fan Ye, Yum Tong-Siu, Alexei Borodin and Mark Sellke made hallucinate. So yeah, shit was like Hogwarts.

I powerlift. For weeks, the only thing that would break the monotony would be the weights.

1) check Leo’s booklist. Some real diamonds there. 2) since 13-14 years old. Spirituality at 15. 3) Not “all”, because there is a lot of technical knowledge behind my success. That said, discovering what is that I should have been working on was very much the outcome of my self-actualization journey, grounded in my skills, sensibilities, situation and LP.

There is a lot of temptation around where I have been. Once you discover your LP, those hold much less sway because you no longer entertain them, knowing they have nothing for you.

I would make the opposite causal relationship - I had to overcome challenges with purpose, identity and relationships. Finding my LP and building myself and my network around that was the foundation.

One of my friends from Oxford who is doing her PhD in longevity stuff told me there is maximizing health vs lifespan. The latter is Bryan Johnson - style, whereas the former is about getting as much juice out as you can (which is what I do). Think of it like maximizing all your vitals as to produce the maximum output possible. If you are sacrificing health, then you are not doing it right. As for the second comment, I think it is both - by fixing your habits, diet, sleep, mood, etc. you can become much more proactive. But there is a degree to the intensity that you are either born with.

First one was a cybersecurity company, providing IDP and passwordless MFA for enterprise, built on top of a novel algorithm made by me. My second company is building novel observability and steering tools for LLMs and agents. Without a shadow of a doubt. One of the most impactful experiences in my life. When it comes to academic disciplines, such as mathematics, you should think of Harvard like Hogwarts. They don't hold your hand but drop you in the deep waters. The intensity of some of my math classes made me hallucinate sober akin to a 150ug LSD trip. When it comes to people, about half are dumbwits who got in because of varsity sports, family donation or legacy (i.e a relative went there before them). But among the rest there are some special individuals. The name alone has opened doors I otherwise could not have walked through.

The reason I care less is slightly different. I do believe the space of minds is very high-dimensional and comparable IQ points do not translate in terms of which submanifolds you can access from that space. Consider a crude example of Terence Tao v., Grothendieck. The first is an analytic prodigy and you see this in the type of math he is prolific in - harmonic and real analysis. When he was young and tested by specialists, they remarked he was willing to overlook faster and more intuitive spatial solutions for the sake of bashing it out analytically. Grothendieck was very famously the opposite - analytically/procedurally slow (Grothendieck prime 57) but visually and intuitively an absolute freak. That said, I also don't fully discard IQ as a marker. I don't believe it is normally distributed (\sim \mathcal{N}(100, \sigma)), but rather Heavy-Tailed. My Abstract Algebra professor was Noam Elikies, who by all accounts is most likely with an IQ above a 200. And you can fucking tell - he feels like an actual alien.

I will answer your question for the sake of transparency but I genuinely believe IQ is much less of a signal above a certain level . I have never done an official/certified test but my score on a few of the sample Mensa ones is about 147

I need to accumulate a significant amount of resources for my LP, so I am nowhere close to done. I want to build the future - nuclear fusion, superconductors, quantum computing, UFOs.

Core principle - curiosity, open mind and agency/accountability.

My stake in the company is worth about 4.2M and I generated more that 1.25M in cash flow.

Thank you for the words. Being 18 on this forum is already miles ahead the masses. You got this shit. You should aim to be the best at what you do, otherwise why would people pay you.

I moved to the US, check earlier post. The answer to the second question is a little more complicated.

ENFJ

1. I have not. My business is an intermediate step towards my LP. 2. I was fulfilled before I was rich, but I am barely even getting started. 3. Business gurus are very scammy ime. If there is a course about it then you are too late. 4. When you take on this journey of self-actualization, you will lose a lot of people to jealousy and insecurity. It’s part of the process. 5. I don’t believe in a balanced life, but in a healthy one. I work long hours and there’s no way around it. Seasons are necessary, especially when it comes to women. About year and a half was full on celibacy. Last month I been catching up with sex and intimacy. 6. Not just important, but a bedrock of real business. 7. Take more risk. Especially if you are young, you are already broke. You might as well swing for the fucking fences. 8. AI is very extractive in terms of data and ownership. There really is no intellectual property. I am actively trying to fight against that.

My best decision was to take the risks. Shit got real fucking gritty but we still here. Worst was that I let my naivety about being an immigrant take over first 2 years of college. I also didn’t make it on the first one. I am pulling this stat out of thin air but I heard somewhere that 90% of companies fail but 80% of those that keep swinging eventually make it.