If you just want the TL;DR: I talk to God and talk to Claude and talk to myself on this blog.

The titans of the creator economy want me to “write like I talk,” articulate my place in the marketplace like Hemingway.

For a long time, I believed the digital gods. Niche down. Pick a lane. Find your one thing and beat it to death. “The riches are in the niches,” they said, while they captured the masses with their Twitter threads on Rick Rubin — back when growth was just posting a thread and sharing it with your engagement groupies.

Then the creator economy matured into a multi-billion dollar industry. We started harnessing the power of digital tools, to build income streams which created the market for online courses and info-products. Moms. Grandmas. Kids. People all over the world started building their suite of digital offerings. But not me. I was in college doing non-college things. Like grinding for the global ranked leaderboards on Call of Duty. I had not yet committed to writing on the internet.

And now, we find ourselves among armies of agents. Wasting tokens to save time. I never thought I would ever use the terminal of my computer. Forget about writing like Hemingway. Now you can burn 2476x more tokens than The Old Man and the Sea and turn Hemingway into a full-stack marketer and engineer. Yet still, the whispers of online gurus saying “Pick a niche” linger in my psyche.

This is why Devotion is my core operating principle.

3 years ago, I started writing so I can selfishly grok and make money. Very soon, I realized those 2 things don’t go together in the business of online writing. It made me go into a deep paralysis followed by a deep inquiry for months. The fact I had quit my certain niche 9-5 job to start an uncertain niche 24*7 job, did not sit well with me. I was still addicted to the monthly salary.

Picking a niche works. It worked for me. Helped me make my first dollar from the internet. But it was setting a weak foundation for my brand.

What if I get bored with it like I usually do with most things?

“Just change your niche,” said my ghostwriting coach.

And bored is what I got. The euphoric high died after I saw my dream amount in my bank account.

A lot of marketers make the mistake of thinking that being a brand means your job is to sell products or cultivate engagement in your niche.

Which is load of dog shit mixed with cat shit.

Why do people buy from you? To be liked. To feel important. To be sexy. To gain knowledge. To make money. To be secure. To save time. To make work easier. To be right. Out of fear. Out of greed. Out of guilt. A hundred reasons.

Notice what’s not on that list? I’ll wait.

...

...

“Because you picked a niche.”

People don’t buy just because you’re selling. If you want a harsh example, every time I drive from my gated society to the nearest McDonald’s, I see homeless people selling very niche things. Like plastic fans and microfiber cloths and pens. Odd things. But I have never seen anyone buy them unless they’re in a charitable mood. People buy ideas, not products. And they buy when they feel like it, not when they can. If you show people their “desired self” and give them a pathway to get there, they will feel like buying.

Everything is energy. For a thing to exist, it has to exist as an idea. Products help you channel energy, ideally. So you can realize ideas. So that energy serves you.

Essentially, every product is really a service. Nobody buys “the thing.” People buy for the service the product offers. Yes, it might or might not serve its purpose later. But the key thing is people buy because they feel the product serves their “desired self.”

You take a literal shit every morning (I hope) because it serves your colon health.

You take electrical energy and turn it into intelligence that produces answers in real time because it serves humanity.

So the bulk of the work as a marketer is understanding the buyer, their “desired self,” the ideas that move them, and showing them the path. Marketing is more about cognitive fitness than writing prowess. 94% of it is obsessing over a problem more than the person who is experiencing the problem.

As a result, the ideas you create, share, and associate with — accumulate to form your brand — which is also why branding as a concept is sooo abstracted.

My point in all this is to dig deeper into my core principle.

When you have this big idea, it is like staring into this point in physical space (that we call a market or TAM). And then you take certain actions in alignment with this idea to serve your ideal customer. But human desire is limitless. Why must I rely on creating artificial scarcity in the age of abundance? Why stare into this point in physical space? What if my point, my big idea exists on a higher, overarching vector space? That serves a higher purpose beyond me and you. Why must I use cookie cutters and frameworks and funnels to keep people in fear, uncertainty and doubt? Why can’t I just say it like it is — the naked truth about what I’m trying to sell?

By design, I will never achieve this “higher” point. I won’t finish what I’m really building in one lifetime. I’m stacking bricks for someone who may never exist to meet me. But I get handsomely rewarded anyway. When I work like this, people actually want to work with me.

Why should I die a miserable accomplishment when I can die a blissful failure?

The digital gods of the creator economy need to pause with all the “jack of all trades is a master of none” and catch up on their reading because the full statement is: A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

Come on guys. We’re in the digital renaissance for god sakes.

When I was a kid, questioning things was seen as disrespectful. Only the kids who had the answers were the good kids. Everyone who was paid to grade my economic fate said that I didn’t write “the right way” because I wrote “in my own words.” But I refused to grow up despite multiple murder attempts on my curiosity...

And oh how the tables have turned. Answers are a commodity now. And all of a sudden, my tendency to “Why???” is an asset.

Yea yea, I (might) get replaced if AI somehow develops the ability to feel emotions and devote itself. But what’s funnier is that most of the knowledge gatekeepers who shoulder-shrugged my curiosity as “above my pay grade” will get replaced before me.

Really Karen? Asking how many newsletter subscribers we have is above my pay grade? Pointing out that we have a 100,000 followers and 0 engagement is above my pay grade? I’m supposed to just write stuff and wait for my next topic like a good boy?

The path of Devotion is a real, genuine search for truth — an inquiry beginning, continuing and ending in intense maddening love.

As the path of devotion requires you to employ your emotions, one can say my lifelong struggle with emotion led me to this path. Or it can be that I’m lazy. And the path of devotion is known to be the easiest and the fastest. Or it can be the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding debates with imaginary people. Or the feeling of being isolated and undervalued in society. It can be that, ever since God kidnapped me without my permission, I find myself under the influence of unhealthy amounts of devotion. It can be the disagreeable mannerisms I acquired as a young kid. Or my disdain for the buffoons that run this planet. It can also be the lore about one’s tendency to absorb one’s name for my name literally means Great Devotion. It can be my ability to face the unpleasant facts of life. Or it can be my obsession with marketing, human nature, rhymes, eloquence, persuasion — the sonic science of words — that brings me here.

But all it took was one. One moment of this intense maddening love.

This love. Oh this love. You keep this love. This love destroys your limited and rigid personas, your illusions of individuality, your tidy likes and dislikes, and your ability to “pick a niche.”

This love is all-inclusive. It does not discriminate.

The endless nature of human desire — making your first dollar, then a couple more, your first $100, then $5000, then the euphoric high, then the euphoria dies, then $10,000, then $30,000, then a bigger car, then another wife, then a bigger portfolio, then you want control over the world’s money supply — is an expression of this love.

This love you have for the infinite. This love that you seek in installments.

In the yogic sciences, Devotion is seen as the most spiritual path, but it has its own pitfalls. For instance, I truly don’t know if I’m moving forward or backward. When you’re under the influence, it can lead to all kinds of delusions. In its lower forms, devotion degenerates into hideous fanaticism. The fanatical crews of various faiths and religions and ideologies are exclusively recruited because they dwell in the lower planes of devotion. Being so devoted to one’s ideal, but turning into a howling fanatic when it comes to any other ideal is a sign of a weak and immature mind. There is countless evidence suggesting that the mind works best as the engine, not the driver. The slave, not the master.

While using devotion as a tool to transcend logic, one can end up throwing logic out the window, and lo and behold, join the flat earth gang.

For me to serve you, dear reader, standing on a stable platform of logic is a no-brainer (no pun intended). It’s why Vivekananda said the bird needs two wings to fly — knowledge and love — and a tail, yoga, to steer. There isn’t much difference between knowledge and devotion as one might imagine as they inevitably converge at some point.

Through knowledge, you aspire to meet God “face-to-face.” You can measure your progress on the path of knowing. It is an “eyes-open” path. Devotion is more of an “eyes-closed” kind of path. “What’s fine and what’s not fine when everything is fine and divine eh,” the devotee says.

This makes me sound like a walking contradiction because writing is selfish and egoistic — it helps me keep my head above water so I can stack this bread for my unborn sons and daughters. While the path of devotion, is selfless by design. You are right, I am a walking contradiction. Anyone who says they’re not one is lying to you.

This devotion, this intense maddening love, is not between me and you.

The core principle of this blog is not to “love hard” or write bars on how deeply I care about your scars. No. This love is within you and me both. This love is boundless. This love does not need to be reserved for an exclusive list of things or people.

This love is its own fruition, its own means, and its own end.

Also, this love is not new. It is 5,000 years old. Devotion has been a constant theme among sages. So chances of me fetishizing old times on this blog are quite high.

There will also be times I brag about my swag, write poems like a New York rapper, tell you how I got molested, how I got arrested in Thailand — for this blog also serves as my resume, my dating profile, and the Library of Alexandria for my unborn child.

Rest assured, I won’t bother you with all my secrets. I tell most of them to Murphy, my Shih Tzu overlord. My selfish intent is to propagate the divinity of words, not propagandize it.