Introduction

To do great things you should aim high. As they say, “Aim for the Moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Ferris claims that setting ambitious goals and doing unreasonable is easier than realistic goals. When your target is not that high, so will your effort be. Since unambitious goals don’t have a big payoff, they will not incentivize you to do great things. Mediocre targets will beget mediocre actions.

Section 4 of the book, “Being unreasonable and unambiguous”, is about dreamlining. Doing great things first requires us to define them clearly. Write down your answers to the questions below. Don’t focus on what you find lucrative or realistic or important for mankind. Just write down goals that excite you.

1. What would you do if there were no way you could fail? If you were 10 times smarter than the rest of the world?

Ferris’ suggestion here is to create two timelines, namely 6 months and 12 months, for five things you want to have, to do and to be. You can dream of having a large house or an expensive sport car, for example. For “being” you can write down what you crave of being at the moment – being great at programming, being fluent in the French language etc. Finally, examples for doing include but are not limited to, visiting a country (e.g., Japan) or completing an astronomy course. You don’t have to worry about how you’ll achieve your goals. (You recall the importance of being unreasonable or unrealistic, right?)

I would, and will, complete two courses on computer science I’m currently taking. One of them is one of most popular online courses called “CS50x – Introduction to Computer Science” by Harvard University. It is a very good introduction to the field of computer science taught mostly in C. The second one, taught by Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is “Build a Modern Computer from First Principles.” This is mostly a hands-on course where students build a modern computer system from scratch. Both courses are challenging, and I have great difficulty with them. But since I am determined to be a good programmer, I aim to complete them by the end of 2023. I have a bit more than four months which is a quite strict timeline. But that is a feature, not a bug. To loosen the deadline would decrease the importance of those courses for me.

That is about “being”, being a good developer by the end of this year. For “doing” part, I have a dream of launching an e-commerce business, namely selling books. I have many books that I am not reading and am not intending to read in the future. To be frank, starting the book business is NOT the goal in itself; I hope to learn from this experience to launch other businesses. My greatest business dream is building a trivia quiz website where participants paying a small fee stand to win big. This business would combine most of my passions: trivia, programming, and starting my own business.

Another passion of mine is writing. I just love it. Had I quit my job, I would write on topics that are exciting to me, such as crypto and financial markets. To be clear, I write at least 500 words on a daily basis, but I’d have more time, I believe I’ll be a more prolific writer (if it’s possible to refer to myself as a writer).

1. Drawing a blank?

For all their bitching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from. This is particularly true with the “doing” category. In that case, consider these questions:

1. What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?
2. What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?

1. What does “being” entail doing?

Convert each “being” into a “doing” to make it actionable. Identify an action that would characterize this state of being or a task that would mean you had achieved it.

My goal is to be a great developer, especially in the field of quantitative trading and maximum extractable value (MEV) which is unique to crypto. So, after completing the two courses I mentioned above – which is the first step towards the goal – I plan to write several trading programs in Python. To be more specific, one of the scripts may be for a mean reversion trading strategy, while the other one would be for a trend following or momentum strategy. Since I want to explore and profit from MEV, which both intellectually and materially excites me, I intend to learn Solidity. It is the programming language for the Ethereum blockchain and the most widely used language in Web3 nowadays. I think all this can be achieved within 6 months. Definitely challenging but totally doable. That deadlines are so tight is yet another factor what I love about this path.

So, the path would roughly be something like that:

• Complete “CS50x” and “Build a Modern Computer from First Principles”.
• Write at least two quantitative trading scripts in Python of moderate complexity (400 – 500 lines)
• Study MEV. Read as much as possible about MEV.
• Learn Solidity. Write elementary programs, such as building a staking app or a simple version of decentralized exchange (DEX).
• Build a simple arbitrage or sandwiching bot.
• Gradually improve and optimize the bot to make it profitable.

I also dream of being a good currency trader. Though making money is the first, ultimate and foremost target of any trader, when I say “good”, I don’t mean only being profitable. That’s because you can be a very skillful trader struggling to make money for some time – your strategies will suck during some market environment, your problems in your private life will impact negatively the trading performance, or you just can have a bad day. I’ll go through extremely tough days as a trader I know. Conversely, I can be a bad trader but out of sheer luck I can make money for some period, and then give all of it back to the market. So, the idea is not to measure my performance with profit or loss initially. I would myself a good trader if 1) I am consistent in taking trades my strategy signaled, 2) I make fewer and fewer mistakes over time, 3) I don’t trade out of boredom, and 4) I treat my trading as business.