If you want to be another Buzz Lightyear toy—mass-produced, interchangeable, forgotten—close this essay. If you want to be like most people who contribute nothing to humanity, who consume the resources created and produce only entropy in return, you won’t get the point of this essay. If you want to actually extend a frontier, you aren’t just “building a business”. You are fulfilling the purpose of a conscious mind: to defeat the heat death of the universe through the creation of new knowledge. And you have to understand something people like us get wrong: You Don’t Become Exceptional by Copying Exceptional People Mediocre people copy mediocre people. Ambitious people make a mistake by switching to copying exceptional people. If Steve Jobs had failed, the biography would highlight that it was due to his stubbornness. He succeeded, so it highlights his vision. If Steve Jobs tried to recreate his life by mimicking himself, he would fail. Your self is unique. Your environment is unique. This year, these circumstances have never existed in history. There is no role model. There is only the frontier. Start Your Own Sequence 2, 4, 8, ___? The “smart” person fills in 16. The inventor created “2” from nothing because they needed to measure. When you’re at the true edge, there is no sequence. No pattern. No “next”. You are in the Model-Free Zone. The Model-Free Zone is where no one has built the map yet. The Model-Free Zone is where no one has built the map yet. When the Wright brothers wanted to fly, there was no “How to Build an Aeroplane” course. No equation for lift-to-weight ratio. No wind tunnel data. They had to invent the wind tunnel, run thousands of experiments, fail repeatedly, and build the model themselves. When SpaceX wanted reusable rockets, NASA said impossible. The entire aerospace industry had concluded it wasn’t economically viable. SpaceX had to invent new welding techniques, new materials, and new control systems. They built the model. Your mind, desperate for a map, will scream for a playbook. This scream manifests as searching for “prerequisites”. “I need a lab.” “I need funding.” “I need a team.” “I need a degree.” “I need a mentor.” You are identifying the wrong constraint. The constraint is never resources. The constraint is always knowledge. If It’s on YouTube, the Alpha Is Gone. “The AI Gold Rush”, “Top 10 Blockchain Opportunities”, “Highest Paying Machine Learning Roles”. Check the view count. Check how many similar videos exist. You’re not early. You’re chasing leaves. If it were obvious, it would be done. If you keep searching for lists—jobs, APIs, SaaS ideas, side hustles, courses, ChatGPT’s opinion, trading signals, prerequisites—you will not find your breakthrough. Searching for prerequisites is proof you’re not serious. You’re posturing. If you were serious, you would have started. Look at the asymmetry of the risk: If you attack the frontier and fail, your ‘failure mode’ is becoming a world-class expert in a breakthrough field. If you follow the ‘safe’ prescribed path and fail, your failure mode is wasted years and a set of replaceable skills. Go to the Mountain I remember building a web app in high school with Python. Hosting was expensive. I had to rewrite everything in Node.js. I hadn’t coded JavaScript before. I didn’t look for JavaScript tutorials. I went directly to the goal: how do I build this on Node.js? I solved every bottleneck as it came. As a side effect, I can code JavaScript now. People say they want to create a chemical revolution and spend their time memorizing compounds instead of creating. They’re preparing to look the part instead of doing the part. People say they want to solve unsolved mathematical problems and memorize unrelated Fermat and Poincaré formulas instead of attacking the problem. The difference between looking the part and doing the part is as far as the east is from the west. When you extend a frontier, you’re consumed with the work. Your brain naturally memorizes what matters. You look up that molecular structure fifty times while solving your actual problem. By the fiftieth time, your brain stores it permanently. No flashcards needed. Start from the end. Start from the mountain. This is the difference between pattern-matching and model-building. Don’t pick ‘shoulds’ and ‘don’ts’ from people, including this essay. Seek the accurate explanation of cause and effect, not compressed wisdom. There are no rules. No prerequisites. Only physics and human nature. Dishonest Scales and Vanity Metrics Don’t Cut It. People obsess over signals that make them look the part without doing the work. Networking. Reading lists. Credentials. They collect contacts like Pokémon cards. They count LinkedIn connections like it’s a high score. “Do you know how many people are on my network?” “I read 52 books this year. I’ve listened to every podcast on First Principles.” “I have a PhD from [X] / I worked at [Big Tech Firm] / I was ‘Thirty Under Thirty’. / I have 10k followers on X.” These metrics are proxies. They’re associated with successful people who did incredible things. So people chase them to signal they’re part of that class. But those successful people achieved those things as second-order outcomes of what they were really trying to achieve. The PhD came while solving a problem they were obsessed with. The job at Big Tech came because they built something undeniable. The network materialised around the work. If you make ‘looking the part’ the goal, you will take shortcuts. Your brain naturally understands the “go straight to the mountain” principle—so it will optimize for the appearance of the mountain instead of the climb. You’ll end up empty, with impostor syndrome, because deep down you know you didn’t do the work. If you build a life on vanity metrics, you have ‘skin in the game’ for the wrong thing—status, not truth. Looking the part is a tail risk: it works until it doesn’t, and then you’re a turkey. If your eyes are fixated on the status of looking smart, appearing sophisticated, and looking rich—you aren’t serious about inventing. And I wonder why you’ve read this far. Status will always get in the way. Extending a frontier requires playing dumb sometimes. Other people will call you crazy and dumb until you achieve the long-term play. If you can’t work like that, you’re not serious. Becoming exceptional means, by definition, having conviction and making things happen that people couldn’t imagine would work. It requires embracing uncertainty and risk. It is less about your self-image and more about your performance, your utility, and your output. You can reach anyone you want. The internet has torn down barriers. You can contact Elon Musk. You can email Karpathy. Access is not the problem. The problem is: do you both find each other interesting? Can you mutually create synergistic value? Is the output of working together larger than the sum of your individual outputs? I used to DM people I admired, looking for validation. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Now, I’ve connected with people who know people who know people at the top. We exchanged words. They said what I showed them was cool. Then there was nothing left to talk about. I realized it doesn’t even matter. Once you crack a frontier that matters, you can reach whoever you need to reach to scale it up. The network will materialize around the work. The network is the side effect, not the prerequisite. The network is the side effect, not the prerequisite. Cracking the thing that’ll get their attention is the core part. Not collecting business cards. You have to pay attention to the things you believe are prerequisites. If you cracked a fundamental step towards curing cancer or towards cracking AGI, do you think you will struggle to raise funds? Build a network? The first step is not to look for tutorials, collabs, or funding. The first step is knowledge creation. Once you create the knowledge, everything else will fall into place. Reflect What are you actually optimizing for? Not what you tell people. What are your actions optimizing for? Comfort? Approval? The avoidance of ridicule? What are your real constraints? How many are real (24 hours, your health, the laws of physics) versus proxy (”I need a manager’s approval”) or self-imposed (”I’m not the type of person who…”)? If you keep doing what you’re doing—copying paths, waiting for permission, chasing leaves from last season’s gold rush—where are you in ten years? Be honest. Are you inventing something that extends a frontier? Or is it a slightly more comfortable version of a replaceable life? Everything you have—antibiotics, semiconductors, the electricity in your walls—was created by people who operated in the Model-Free Zone. They didn’t have more resources than you (they’re the ones who created the resources). They created new models. New abstractions. New explanations. What are you producing? If the answer makes you uncomfortable, good. That desire is for greedy people like us who refuse to die having produced little. If you enjoyed this essay, do well to subscribe to my newsletter: https://crive.substack.com; the next one will build on this by the weekend. Share this essay also. Bye
