← III. Log

I cloned my brain to finish a master's at 2× speed

The best-performing thing I have ever published is a video about building a system — made two years before I had any language for why that mattered.

It went up in February 2024 and it walks through the system I built to get through a master’s in New York while working full time in finance: how the notes were captured, how they were organized, how the reading actually got done, and where the whole thing was allowed to be sloppy so that the rest could be exact.

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I thought I ran a filmmaking channel. The data disagreed, politely, for two years. The carefully lit filmmaking videos sit in the low hundreds. The three videos that actually built the channel are all about systems.

The title is the only part I would change. I cloned my brain was a hook, and a hook does not sell — a hook niches. It told one very specific person that the next ten minutes were for them and let everyone else scroll past, which is exactly what a hook is for. But it also filed the video under productivity, next to the mnemonics and the note-taking apps, when the thing being demonstrated was closer to engineering.

Because nothing in that video is about marketing. It is a student with an organization problem. But the move in it is the one I have made every year since: notice the work that repeats, write down the way you already do it, then build the thing that does it without you. Later the same move produced a CRM, a content pipeline, and an attribution report done by hand. It started as a way to read faster.

I have not re-recorded it and I am not going to. Some proof is better for being old.