You're dreaming big and doing absolutely nothing about it. You've had this same idea for 2 years, maybe 3 years, a great dream for your career, your business, your relationships, wealth maybe, but you haven't started yet. Why? What's getting in the way? That's what we want to cover. There are three traps. I've had this dream for over 5 years. Never got started on it until last year. And it was to start this very YouTube channel. And when I finally did it, all I could think of was, man, I should have done it much sooner. In the last eight months, we've added 1.2 million subscribers. For every second that this channel has been alive, roughly about 45 million seconds, someone somewhere has watched a video. The love and the warmth that I continue to receive every day is just overwhelming. is so hard to describe just impossible. So that's the story I want to share today and that's our case study and through that we will build a systematic process that helps you define those three traps and gets you out of all three of them. The third one took me 20 years to figure out and this video I thought would be different. It's raw. It's no animations, no effects, just unplugged. Because we're talking about the YouTube channel itself, I thought it should be just you and me. And I have the cameras on and I have some bullet points in front of me, but it's just going to be a conversation. So, let's get going. So, let's get going. I think the first trap is the hardest to escape. At least for me, we don't bet on ourselves. Our ambition is not a problem. I think the real problem is how we see ourselves. I'm not worthy. I don't deserve it. Who's going to care? You would rather take a chance on anyone but yourself. That's been my story all my life. In fact, the genesis of this very channel will tell you all about how that narrative has been trapping all of us. I was a young kid, a teenager, and I ran away from home for a while, and I became a monk in training, swept the courtyards, and cleaned the toilets and ate one meal a day from a a bowl. All of that. and and somehow over time I managed to become a musician and ended up going to MIT, worked on Wall Street, eventually became a CEO, board member, investor, all of that. But all throughout that journey, at every phase, the voice that has always kept repeating in my head has been saying, "What am I doing here? I don't belong here. I'm not supposed to be here." And eventually I got very lucky and I had two big exits and I was in tech. So I got to retire about three years ago. But even after that, this idea that I don't deserve it has never left me. And I don't know, it must be my chemistry or something. When I thought, oh, I should start something creative. I should start a YouTube channel because I saw my 8-year-old being completely fearless in starting his channel. And I thought, well, if he could do it, I can do it, too. But I was still so afraid about going it alone. So I went back to my old band members uh one by one I asked all of them to see if they would do it with me if we could start the band together and then the YouTube channel will be about music. And in that band I was the drummer. So I was never used to being in the center, you know. I was only comfortable on being on the side or at the back and unfortunately they were all busy with their own lives and their own dreams. So nothing came of it. And I remember feeling so down about it. And one late evening I was flying from London to New York and this thought suddenly hit me that I was just hiding behind them. I've been doing that all my life. I always wanted a partner, a co-founder. I had never bet on myself. And that's where I decided to just talk about personal growth, professional growth, AI, careers, finance, relationships, insights that the 22year-old version of me needed so desperately but never got. So that's how this channel came about. So, I went ahead and I hired an agency, a team uh to help me edit and manage this whole YouTube channel and the process. And I remember them asking me, "Hey, what do you want to call it?" And I said, "Listen, you can call it whatever you want as long as it's not my own name." Still hiding. So, we found a brand name. Some of you may remember that this channel's original name was the MIT Monk, and I love that name. Two contrasting ideas, and I had been both. However, I remember heaving a sigh of relief when we found the name. And the first thought that came to my mind was ghre this is all about this thing called MIT monk this avatar I don't have to be me I don't have to bet on myself so anyway the first video gets released in February of 2025 the long form video for the first eight months after that uh so until October October, November of 2025. Crickets, very few people watched what I was producing, even fewer subscribers. And you know, I was kind of relieved. I wasn't surprised either because, you know, there are 140 million videos uploaded on YouTube every week. And, you know, mine was one of them, lost in the same void. Fortunately, I did not need to make money off of this channel. So, I kept showing up every week, week after week. And I remember we crossed about 50,000 subscribers in late October of 2025, and I still heard the same voice. Why will anyone care what I have to say?

So, I remember I was on a Zoom call with the agency CEO and the creative director and I asked them, you know, it's October and we're at 50,000 subscribers or so. When do you think we'll cross 100,000 subscribers? And they looked at each other and said, you know, at this rate it will take you at least a year or more. So, October of 2026 maybe. And that's when we will cross 100,000 subscribers. And I was delighted. I was happy with that expert forecast. But then something surprising started happening in November. And I remember it was like November 1st or something like that. just water break because we crossed 100,000 subscribers in literally two weeks after that Zoom call. Whatever was supposed to take a year, we crossed it in two weeks. And in 8 months since November, we added 1.2 million subscribers. And the growth keeps accelerating. I kid you not. I don't really know why that happened. I don't really know why it's happening. I have some theories about it. But YouTube algorithm is an algorithm of attention. So why do millions of people, viewers like you, decide to give their time and their attention and their love to someone like me is um a total mystery box that I can't solve. All I can do is feel this immense gratitude that we get to spend time together and this thing keeps growing every day. But then came one more twist. As we were crossing that million subscriber milestone in April or May of of 2026, MIT called and they they were like very nice, you know, they were gentle and they said, "Hey, you know, we love the fact that you're doing this. It's it's uh very nice. The content is very good, but we're going to have to ask you to take down MIT from the brand name that you're using because people thought that there was an actual monk that worked at MIT as a faculty member. So, of course, I said yes because I am an alum. My team started scrambling for another brand name. I have this chief of staff of mine and I've worked with her for years. She's known me for years. and she asked me to get on a live Zoom call and she literally shared her desktop screen on Zoom and looked me in the eye and said, "I'm going to change the name right now." And before I could say anything, she added my real name on the YouTube channel homepage. The MIT monk became Sandep Swadia. And it felt so uncomfortable for me to see that name. I just wanted to keep hiding. Now, I've been to the absolute bottom and I've been to the top. I've been very fortunate. I'm not scared of losing. But standing up in the spotlight all by yourself and then accepting that you can deserve to be there, that's super hard. And researchers have looked at hundreds of studies on this. Only about half the people who intend to do something, who intend to follow their dreams, end up doing it. It's a coin flip. So, it's never about how badly you want it. Doing is way harder than dreaming. We get in our own way. So, what do you do this Monday morning? First, you have to realize that you are waiting for your own permission that will never come. And second, start with the smallest of the small bet that you can make. Just the first step, take it. Because this is what you will tell me later. I guarantee it. You will say, "I should have started it much sooner." It doesn't matter if no one else cares. If you care about it deeply, isn't that a great reason enough to get started? Here's another example. I love going deeper. And so I started writing a newsletter, I think two months ago. Every Tuesday it comes out and one insight, one tool, one practice that you can use every day. And and you can subscribe to it if you'd like. But it's something I I love to do. That's a reason enough. It's free. Link is below. But let's talk about the second trap now. And that is subtle and trickier. And I hear about it from thousands of inbound messages. The question is why start anything in the age of AI? The machines can do it better than me and faster than me. Some of it is partly true and it feels like you lost before you even started. But I think as AI gets smarter at intelligence, our human judgment is going to be more and more valuable. Let me give you two examples, two stories. One about creation and one about communication. Both stories are coming from building this YouTube channel because that's our case study. But the activity doesn't matter. the principles will apply to anything you want to build in the age of AI. So for every week I think about what I what the topics are going to be, what I want to talk about and I write the script every week and that's the biggest challenge because there's so much AI slop on YouTube as you know on any social media platform nowadays and building something original seems almost impossible Because AI by default wants you to talk like everybody else. That's how AI learned to talk anyway because it was trained on the content that existed on the internet. Creating something truly original takes two human faculties that aren't supposed to get along well. your hot-blooded emotions and your coldblooded craft, they fight each other all the time. Because when you focus on your emotions and your intuition and your imagination, you lose sight of the discipline to focus on the details of grammar and structure and and verification of the research and all of that stuff. Then on the other hand when you focus on the craft and the details and the structures that you want to neatly construct something then you lose that spark that that intuition that that humanness of it. There is a great Indian poet and I love him. I admire his work. His name is Jave Daktar and he says it brilliantly that it is this very contradiction that makes our output human that makes our output poetic. It gives it the the unique fingerprint that is yours. Here's the thing. the cold half, you know, the craft and the structure and and ideation, all of that. A machine can do that now instantly and free and better than you and faster than you. What it cannot do is the other half. That's your imagination, your intuition, your judgment. And working through this contradiction of emotion and craft is always going to be extremely frustrating. It is annoying for me because every week I spend hours and hours and hours trying to find something that is worth putting in front of you so that I don't waste your time. And every time it feels like it it's not going to work this week. It's not going to happen and I'm not going to make it. And but somehow every week it works out. And AI can be an expert at deep research. So I use it. It can be a very good thinking partner. There are lots of advantages, but I've never once seen something that I could just copy and reuse on this channel. Not even once. Maybe it'll get better over time. Nobody knows. But your judgment and your taste and your ability to struggle through this contradiction that we're talking about, that can still help you avoid the trap and create something beautiful. something that is entirely yours, something that is entirely you. That's the first principle. And the second principle is equally tricky because we tend to start believing in the so-called experts when we're starting on our dream. But they just hand us playbooks that worked for others. That may or may not work for you. Here's what I learned. When I started this channel, I it wasn't working out in the beginning. You know, we weren't getting the traction. So, I would speak to a bunch of YouTube experts who would tell me a long list of things that I needed to fix. You have to speak very fast. You have to be animated. You got to amp it up. Why aren't you saying please subscribe three times? It should be in the beginning, in the middle, at the end. You have to keep hammering it. Your videos are too long. Keep them under 12 minutes. 10 minutes. Do more shorts. Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. is the best time to release your videos. You need to use a whiteboard. You need to create a classroom vibe. And on and on and on. And actually, if you see my earlier videos, maybe the first two or three or four months, I am desperately trying to amp it up and look like I'm so excited. I talk like this all the time throughout all the videos. I don't know why, but eventually I couldn't recognize who that person was. I was following the advice of people who didn't know me. They had a a playbook and it was a great playbook. But you know following a standard operating process will only make you a standard operating product just like everyone else. So after a few months I stopped performing and talking fast and projecting and I just started having a conversation in in a normal way that we all usually talk. Now did any of that change have anything to do with the 8mon explosion that we've had? Maybe. We'll never know for sure. Maybe not. But I don't know that the viewers, you know, ambitious folks like you connect with this content at a very different level, at a different scale, at a very different emotional depth. So what's the action item here? Everyone will come to you with their playbook on what works when you start on your dream. They mean well, but they don't know. So, learn from them, but then make your own playbook. Here's an interesting proof point. You know, the experts told me that I should say subscribe. Please subscribe and like at the end of every video. Someone said, "Oh, you have to have a a a a cool signature line or gesture at the end of the video, like a a a wave or a salute or see you on the other side, adios, or something cool." And I struggled to come up with it, but couldn't. And I remember maybe around fourth or fifth of our videos uh that I was recording, I accidentally blurred out I love you all. And if you find that video on the channel, you'll see that it's an accident and the stuff comes out of my mouth and I look a bit awkward because it wasn't planned. And the agency team when they were editing it asked me if we should take it out and I somehow felt that it was a very genuine moment. So we kept it and became our our signature line. Now no playbook and no expert would have given me that line. No AI would have written it because it wasn't about conscious craft. It came from that inner part of being human. You'll never outrun AI on speed or stamina or smarts. What's scarce now is that very human part that we're talking about. Your judgment, your taste, your genuine authenticity, your emotions. That's how you avoid that second trap of commoditization.

So, okay, you bet on yourself. You got started. You figured out how to stand out from the crowd. What's the third trap? Let's go there next. The problem is that we spend our whole life becoming good at one thing. I am a lawyer. I'm an engineer. I'm a founder. I'm a marketer. I'm an HR expert. I'm a leader. I'm a CEO. But you're not one thing. You'll have things in your life that don't fit together. those parts feel like misfits, a a flaw in your resume. But here's the thing that I learned. If you look at a guitar, I have a guitar. It has six strings. Let's see. Here it is. And these these six strings have different thickness, different tension. Each one is tuned to a different note. Now, if you strum them open, it's just noise, it doesn't sound musical, unless it sounds musical to you. Most people will say, "Hm, what is that?" But if you learn to press at certain points, Sounds gorgeous. Right now, I play guitar like a drummer would play guitar. These are called cowboy chords. Anyone can learn them. But the point is each string resonates with the other. And that's how harmony is produced. And therein lies the trap and the solution. If you bring just one string to your dream and to your work and leave the rest of them at home, then you'll wonder why you're not able to make a song, why it's not working, why the music doesn't come out. Because our identities are kind of like that too. Each one may not seem connected. Me on Wall Street has nothing to do with me, the creator here, and me from the monk training era has nothing to do with me, the board member. But somehow they all resonate with each other at a deeper level, just like that guitar. So you may not feel like you're absolutely amazing at anything. Maybe you're above average at best at a handful of things, but that's the magic. Somehow, when you put all of that together in a certain way and you know where to press, it gives rise to a different type of harmony. Why a different type? Because that combination doesn't exist anywhere else. That's yours. So you have to keep experimenting with how you play with all these gifts that you have together like playing a guitar. And there's no right or wrong way of playing it. I'm not a great player, but I love playing it. There's only your way. And so you have to see everything as if it's an experiment.

This video is a total experiment. Normally, my team would pour in so much love and effort into cuts and edits and a-roll and B-roll and animation and all of that production. Every small detail matters to them, matters to us, matters to me. But today we thought, you know, this is about the YouTube channel and its genesis. So we got rid of every single layer. Now, do we know that it's going to work? We don't know. If it works, we'll do it again. We'll make some more. If it doesn't, we'll try something else. This channel is just a lab. Every week we run an experiment and we find out what actually resonates with you, what you find valuable. Life's kind of like that, too. So, here's what you do Monday morning. Don't kill yourself trying to be one clean thing. you're too many things, which is where the beauty is. Look at areas in your life that don't fit and find a way to bring all of it to your dreams. Because turning a massive dream into something real doesn't take a a sudden cinematic explosion of talent. It takes a a systematic process with the three parts that we talked about. One, bet on yourself and please get started. Two, rely on your human judgment. And three, never stop experimenting. And through that process you will change the the shape of your dream. And that dream will change the shape of you. And that interactive chain reaction will never stop once you start. So remember to start tonight what you've been putting off for years. And remember, a note you never play cannot become a song. And as I always say, thank you and I love you.