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Why I started a new website, again?

Why now?

    Recently, a new friend requested a link to my social media or any other digital profile. As an idiot 🤦 that I sometimes can be, I openly mentioned I don’t have one. I mean, I have a LinkedIn profile, but that too is barely maintained—yikes! 😬 This is ironic, especially given that I have completed a PhD 🎓 and, thereafter, spent 5+ years growing several digital products. It’s not like I hate the digital space; in fact, I used to have a website a couple of years ago to attract worthy interns or like-minded colleagues. But lately, I just haven’t had sufficient time or energy out of my personal life to maintain anything of the sort (perhaps, I’ll explain why in a future blog).

    You know what’s more ironically hilarious? My aged parents own a healthy website 🌐 to showcase their best works and life values: www.physicianhub.org, along with 14 digital books 📚 (Amazon.com: Dr. Sandeep Kumar Verma & Dr. Renuka Verma) on various medical guidelines from their combined 70+ years of work experience. LOLs on me! 😂

    Lately, I’ve also realized that I am losing a lot of growth potential 📈 and recognition from several years (if not decades) of hard work just because I haven’t properly catalogued it in one easily accessible place. For instance, recently, I was nominated for the BITSAA 30 under 30 award 🏆 (2025 edition, BITS 30 Under 30). Likewise, the committee was requesting a significant amount of information from me within a short time span, which, unfortunately, I couldn’t fulfill. YIKES! 😱 Hence, it goes without saying that an online presence is a must, and thereby, this website is born.

    At some point, I did consider other forms of recording my digital presence, such as audio podcasts 🎙️, IG reels 🎥, or YouTube videos 🎬. However, I found that these require overcoming much higher levels of entry barriers—such as a good microphone 🎤, consistent lighting 💡, significant onscreen energy ⚡, and a lot of post-processing time ⏳—haha. Instead, I find writing ✍️ a very comfortable form of expression with a much lower entry barrier. As of now, I’m also assuming that my target audience of intellectual people 🧠 will likely resonate more with my notes than my media. Although, some experts have already proven me wrong on that, but life’s a balancing act, right? ⚖️

My intentions

    Similar to my parents and many others who have inspired me (such as Ali Abdaal, Mark Manson, etc.), I want to document and share my learning and growth so far—and in the future—via relevant blogs here. This is a great way to socialize and connect with people when they read my thoughts and ideas in their leisure time. Thereby, we have something real to talk about in the next meetup, instead of having shallow conversations or scratching my head on what to talk about—haha. 🤭

    I remember one time I had attracted an amazing intern who resonated with something I had written online. I used to think perhaps no one reads such articles, but apparently, that intern proved me wrong. Likewise, in the long term, I believe this website will one day become a worthy leverage for me to connect with high-value individuals. 💡

    More importantly, I plan to openly broadcast my key long-term goals 🎯 and intentions in life on this website. In the best-case scenario (my hopes 🤞), this approach will help me attract a lot of high-value people in my work and even personal life. In the worst-case scenario (my worries 😟), this will help me realize what critical points I have overlooked, leading to some of my failures—and hence, good learning points and key reminders for future. But the most likely case (my mundane reality 🙃), this will indirectly reinforce myself and everyone around me to keep giving me a tiny kick in the butt 😏🤭😉 if ever my actions don’t keep up with my own words.

    Honestly, I am already surrounded by extremely talented people in my workspace, as there are thousands of Masters and PhD graduates 🎓 from across the best global universities working in A*STAR. Yet, I believe these blogs and this website will further highlight the topics that I would like to spend more time and energy discussing with everyone.

My approach

    I intend to build a simplistic but functional website. There are thousands of website development tools 🛠️ out there to build a (blogging) website, such as Squarespace, Ghost, WordPress, etc. Ali uses and hence recommends Ghost, which I had also used earlier for my previous website. Personally, I found that Ghost is highly focused on blog handling i.e., direct newsletter integration 📩, ease of drafting online, scheduled publication, viewership records 📊, etc. However, in my opinion, a Ghost website can be a bit too tricky to customize (especially for low-tier subscriptions). Btw, Ghost is also an open-source platform 💻, just in case you wanna save every last penny on hosting a website 😉. Although, I don’t recommend doing it. If anyone reading this is serious about writing, then simply pay the money 💰 and, in return, let some company handle the hosting problems for you. Totally worth it!

    For this website, I’ve decided to use Bootstrap Studio. I already have a perpetual license 🔑 for myself, bought for some other website building (I’ll disclose details in a future blog). It doesn’t have newsletter integration, so I might have to create a MailChimp/Brevo integration if needed. Luckily, nowadays, we don’t really need a newsletter setup, as most breathing humans (apart from myself, lol) are already hyper-active on some social media platform, where I’ll be sharing links to these blogs.

    Given all that, I intend to write about 1-4 blogs per year—that’s it! ✍️ I know it’s a very low rate. Mark Rober typically publishes <1 video per month, Ali Abdaal and Mark Manson follow weekly schedules, Nas Daily follows, well, a daily approach; whereas pros like Alex Hormozi prefer multiple every day—hats off to them! 🫡 However, with this website and upcoming blogs, my focus is heavily on high-quality content and the value it provides to society. In other words, my intention is to breakdown extremely complex concepts in high-value generation pathway to make it obvious even for most people. I think of these blogs as book chapters, which typically takes months to write.

    Thereby, at least in the near future, you won’t see any affiliate links on this website. But I am open to life in case, this website becomes as profitable as those of Cal Newport or Nicolas Cole someday in far future, hehehe. This approach of slow growth is heavily inspired by the book “Slow Productivity” by Cal Newport; and proven functional in reality by Mark Rober who has reached over 65M subscribers by publishing <1 video per month😐. Honestly, that’s just manic! More importantly, having sufficient time to think what I’m writing about will likely help me leverage the content shared in the previous blogs, thereby gradually start focusing on high-value content generation.

    Lastly, in all my blogs, I will include some clear "call to action", both for myself and the readers. Thereby, anyone reading this (even in far future) will likely have a clear series of steps for our growth in our own individualistic lives. Well, speaking of which . . .

Call to action

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