Oh my god, bro! I just realized that even though I have used a lot of flowery language about myself, even though I chase that image of multidisciplinary man or Renaissance man after being influenced by YouTube or whatever, I just realized where my wins have actually come from. Let’s classify a game into for like two dimensions. One is the scope and another is the boundedness. Okay. All my fucking wins and the progress, which is a lot, has come from my success in bounded games and especially by cheesing a single move. Basically, boundless games have always been a fucking pain for me and bounded games with like vast Scope have also been a pain. I will give you example. From childhood, the things that I have succeeded in, such as Olympiad, scholarship exams by Indian states, uh, tenth and twelfth exams, CA Foundation, GMAT, CAT, uh, my IIM interviews, my IIM placements, interviews, and also the series vectors and matrices. All of those are very bounded. Okay. Even though GMAT like feel like a Vast thing or whatever or CAT thing like vast thing or whatever no no no no. Vast thing actually is UPSC that is an example of thing that is bounded yet vast in scope okay. But CAT is like only three fucking subjects and you can easily nail them okay. I had excellent score I had like ninety nine point four five and my raw score was eighty three and forty five of those marks are coming from only VARC which is like The verbal section. So I cheesed the verbal part. Okay, cheesing essentially means in a video game you keep spamming one move from which you keep getting outlier results. Like for example, if you like hide behind a pillar and if you keep shooting and arrows from that angle, the bo- the villain is not able to hit you yet you’re able to hit him. That is basically an example of cheesing. Six months before I gave the CAT exam, I believed I am a animal who cannot read because my working memory was just totally melted. And yet I got one of the highest marks in the country in that, and that was because I was able to cheese a reading technique which I learned from the GMAT tutors on YouTube. So every time I have won in life, it has come from cheezing a single move. Okay, I, for example, I won in CA Foundation because it has like limited scope and I cheesed the law and the maths paper in it. Okay. Law I was able to cheese because there was a writing element in it, and maths because it was like statistics related and low level. So I just prepped those and those were able to get me passed. GMAT and CAT same thing. For placement interviews or IIM. interviews it is like if you are in front of them on the interview table they have read your resume and they know you are technically competent all you have to prove in those interviews is that you are a pleasant person to be around so I cheesed the HR questions and they just gave me the confidence to be in front of anybody so yeah everything you see I have won in life in and it has given me a lot of returns it has put me in the top percentile of The country has come from playing a bounded game and not even completing the whole scope of that, uh, bounded low scope game, but staying in the low scope and only choosing a single element of it, right? And I will now tell you about the games where I have had pain. For example, a boundless and vast game such as trading has given me a lot of pain. trying to build my own SASS has given me a lot of pain. Trying to find my own niche has given me a lot of pain. Okay. And bounded but vast game which has given me pain is CA intermediate or if I had gone for UPSC that would have given me a lot of pain. So I know where my success is coming from, okay. It is coming from games which are small scope, have clear boundaries, and are bounded. Okay, and that does not mean those games are not valuable. GMAT, CAT, IIM interviews are really, really valuable things.

For example, vectors and matrices, the video series I worked on. See, it is a bounded problem because all I had to do was create intuitive animations and have a really intuitive explanation. Okay, and the bar for it is like if I just read it, am I able to understand it? That’s all. So even if it is something like content that is boundless and vast in scope, if I have clear winning functions or boundaries, I can totally win. And that gave me an idea, like, hey, why are you trying to find your own niche? Why are you trying to find your own ideas? Why are you trying to find your own customers or viewers? Why don’t you look at a currently working channel or a company? And what are they exactly doing? That defines whatever the the bounded game is. Okay, whatever they are doing is the bounded game, and can I cheese whatever they are doing?

that means when it comes to content or business, I am not a innovator or a category creator or a product creator. I am the nightmare competitor who just cheeses his way into a good position.

Give me a finite game, let me understand the scoring function, and I will find the one stupidly effective move that lets me beat the game without becoming universally good at it.

Highly bounded × narrow scope × highly cheeseable.

Because since months or years I have been trying to build systems. You can go through my blog, you can see I am trying to build systems of how to make software, how to advertise, how to create content. These are all subconscious attempts by me to turn the things I’m engaging into bounded games somehow. Okay, so Bounded. Looscope. Games are my mothership. I yearn for them and I try to turn things into them. So instead of going through all that pain, let’s get to the fucking action and play the game. It’s been years since I have done it. Actually not years, I just graduated four months ago and I already crave the game again. Even during college we had to have a minimum amount of attendance or we will have grade downs and you can only have grade downs up to a level before they would fail you. I cheesed the attendance game as well. I kept exchanging absences for downgrades as long as I could maximize my free time and pursuits I was going for.

And maybe cheesing it is a proxy for reducing time complexity of a solution. That if you are able to cheese something, you are getting there in less amount of steps, less time, and less efforts.

I should never burden myself with the creation of a new niche, new product, new system, or new whatever. I am supposed to be the one who inherits a system and cheeses to a great position. That’s what I’ve done up till now, and that’s what I’m going to do in content and business as well. I’m going to be a ruthless competitor. If I see you occupying the space, I know you are playing a game that’s working out. That is clearly bounded. That is clearly low scope because you are a human after all. You build this business using a finite number of steps. So this is definitely a bounded game, and I’m coming for your ass now.

Because if I see a business that is doing really good and I believe that business is growing to grow, then even if I am not able to persuade any of that other person’s customers or viewers, and instead of that even if I am able to just capture the growth, that is such a good start.

1. Borrow the game.
Find something already producing the outcome you want.
2. Reconstruct the rules.
What do they repeatedly do? What are the inputs, outputs, constraints and scoreboard?
3. Find VARC.
Which single part of that system can you disproportionately dominate so that you don't need to be equally good everywhere else?

Plus Hollywood has understood it, every entertainment industry has understood it that movie is in the fucking sequels. Okay, make one movie, you might make a fan favorite that someone watches every Christmas or whatever, but billion dollar franchises are created by sequels. Avengers, Transformers, Home Alone, Drishyam, anything that you see which has decades long influence. Like Star Wars has sequels. Money is in the sequels. If we make a pie chart where we see the total earnings made by all media, you will see that things that have sequels capture more than majority of it. I’m willing to bet everything I have on it.

In 2019, franchise movies were only 42% of wide releases but captured 82.5% of worldwide box office revenue. Standalone, non-franchise films were 58% of releases and got only 17.5% of the money.

And this is why cheesing is so valuable that once you figure out a move that works, you have to spam it. You have to have sequel after sequel after sequel after sequel of the same move. That’s how you create value. That’s how you compound. Ninety nine point nine percent of things in the world just don’t work. When you find the zero point one percent, you have to run with it.You have to spam it. You have to cheese it.

And another perspective of this is if one entity is able to do well in the content or business space, people are most likely not gonna be angry that hey we have another provider of thing we love. It’s most probably is going to increase the size of the pie.