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How To Be An Ideas Guy With No Downsides

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One of the biggest memes among business owners is making fun of the “ideas guy”.

I don’t think the strawman version of this idea needs to be attacked because the entire internet has already done that.

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Now for the sake of this article, let’s assume you dear reader are an ideas guy or gal. There are a lot of downsides with being the ideas guy and here are all the perspectives I’ve used over the years to avoid most of them.

Ps. yes, I feel just as stupid as it sounds calling myself an ideas guys. But some of you take the strawman “ideas don’t matter” too seriously so this is necessary.

Jeremy Noronha, Ideas Guy👉

Ted Mosby, Architect👉

99/60

As a kid I was a 99% or a 60% student, my sister in comparison was always a 90% student.

eg. I got 100/100 in Maths & Physics the same time I failed in Portuguese and Biology. I got 10/10 in my essays but got negative marks for bad handwriting.

I’m sure a few of you reading this will resonate with the 99/60 extremes. That’s very different from just being “smart” in the traditional sense.

It’s the world where one teacher thinks you’re the best student ever and let’s you get away with anything while the others hate you.

Now it wasn’t even just subject based, it was motivation.

When I was in high school I was one of 5 students sent to the advanced classes cause I was the “smart”. But then, I lost the drive and desire and immediately became a 60% student in the same subjects I was considered just a genius in 6 months ago. Read: Fake Positivity

The normie solution here is adderall.

Adderall/Lockin culture often makes these 99/60 people into 90% people. The downside (60%) is removed but the upside (99%) is capped.

Talk to any 99/60 person who made themselves into a 90% percent and you can see the untapped potential behind their eyes, they know that it exists but they gave it up cause “we live in a society”.

Note: Never never ever ever let someone get away with “we live in a society” as an excuse. It’s always a cover story for being a coward.

Becoming a 90% brick in the wall maybe was a solution that made sense in the 90s, today you don’t ever have to make that sacrifice.

So let’s start off by saying “fuck that” to the adderall to study/work world.

My solution is to be indiscriminate to that world. Ignore the 60% world.

Just ignore it. It doesn’t matter.

We live in a time of infinite leverage that you can get paid so much for your 99% that you can always outsource the 60%.

Note: Obviously your 60% world is different from my 60% world.

Basically be as minimal functional as necessary in your 60% world while becoming more selective with it such that it disappears to absolute 0.

The most popular examples of this is if you’re a sales person, let someone else do the fulfillment of the service. or vice versa.

The version I’ve talked the most about on this blog is how degrees are completely irrelevant if you just dropout and just do. eg my old story at dropping out to travel the world at 18

But a even more relevant extreme that most of you will need to do, Quit the job every one of your friends would kill someone for

The only way to live the “fuck you money” life is to start saying “fuck you” earlier, the longer you wait the harder it gets.

Then “fuck you money” becomes “more money”

I’ve shared this before, but here it is with the $ amounts:

I was working in SEO and ran one of the largest travel blogs in the world, I was making around $5k/month living in south east asia and I never had a single week with more than 2 zoom calls, I was probably working less than 15 hours/week.

2 zoom calls/week!

I quit that job and shut the blog down because the downsides of fame as well as boring SaaS wasn’t worth it.

Even today that’s a job most people would brag about and hence why I never shared the $ amounts when I wrote about quitting work back because everyone would’ve called me stupid back then.

Here’s how I tried to share this idea Quit Freelancing with all my caveats and holding back that I don’t do today.

I spent the next year not opening my computer at all for a whole year and then when I worked the year after that my businesses only made half of that for the first year. Letting that “good” job go, gave me the freedom and time that makes the “ideas guy” a reality today.

I’m not Full of Shit/A Bad Person

One of the things the internet is really good at making people do is caveating everything they say.

and it’s often not even useful caveats that help people understand the idea, instead it’s a “I’m not full of shit” “I’m a kind person” tax.

People are so afraid of saying something that people will perceive as rude, mean, ableist, sexist etc etc that people instead end up saying nothing.

You waste all your time covering all the caveats that you don’t have a real point and not willing to stand for something meaningful.

Also the most ideas are often sound dismissive because sharing solutions are 1/100th the effort of describing the problem and solutions are more important, not being descriptive.

If I put any of my articles into Claude, its knee jerk reaction is to highlight systematic changes like every social studies student who never had a real job.img_0175

One of the things I do with my audience is that assume they aren’t stupid and especially that they’re not childrenlooking for a kind cozy friend in every author you read.

The audience that only joins you for ideas as long as the vibes are good often move too slow and will probably hold you back when the times get tough.

I think everyone would benefit more from reduce their caveats and stop holding their perspectives back as much.

90% of people would be better writers if they just stop self censoring.

WoO Solutions

The internet is often very anti-psychedelic and other esoteric solutions because it caters to the bottom quintile.

Ala the world that believes telling people to go to the gym is dangerous cause people will injure themselves.

I personally always act like the bottom quintile doesn’t matter and in the process believe everyone can leave the bottom quintile.

Basically, if individuals choose not be the bottom quintile, very quickly there isn’t a bottom quintile. (Yes I know that’s mathematically wrong, but true with reality)

Your culture isn’t an excuse, it’s just your starting point.

I started doing psychedelics a decade ago and always had it under control such that it never had downsides in my life.

Example: I’ve had months where I’ve smoked weed almost every day but then followed by years off it. My birthday cakes when I turned 16-18 years old were weed cakes that I made in secret. (Hi Mom! Happy I can still surprise you with my blog after all these years☺️)

Not only did I quickly learn that psychedelics didn’t take away my “punch”. I also knew it never became “normal/addictive” which meant I very early on let that fear everyone smart has.

I learned that psychedelics made me do more, never less. At least in a good way.

It obviously made me do less in the slow living sense, but never in the ideas/biz/fitness/relationships sense.

Just as my retirement article was about how retiring isn’t about becoming a “drunkard on a couch”.

I think psychedelics is something that gets a more bad rep than necessary especially by ideas folks because they have always seen someone do it wrong.

The fear overpowers the “just try in a safe controlled environment and see for yourself” to find your own solutions.

I think everyone has a “my parents had a friend who got crazy cause they did too much” which is a counterfactual that I believe would’ve happened either way.

It’s the bottom quintile, the person would’ve gone “crazy” either way. Marginally yes psychedelic use causes more people to lose their mind but the marginal experience doesn’t have to be your experience.

It’s like saying “marginally promoting gym culture is bad cause some naive people will jump on steroids.”

yes ignore those people, and you’re obviously not that stupid, Right? Right.

By being able to articulate the downsides you probably have already prevented them from ever affecting you.

One version of this idea would be that you can choose not to be a bottom quintile person mentally. Just as you can physically.

But then that’ll cause you to level the hell up in everything in your life, not just take a drug.

For example, my pro-psychedelic perspective includes meditating for years + doing vipassana + going off the internet for months camping alone + doing multiple 10-day hikes + building multiple business + focusing on physical health, stress and relationships over everything. ALL these things first, then also psychedelics.

Often a wrong coping mechanism I’ve heard over the year is that “not everyone can do ALL that” and it’s a false belief that if you want to be an ideas guy will have to let go. You can, if you just choose to.

I’m not a pro “take a 7-day vacation from a job and do Ayahuasca and then go back to job” person. Of course not.

But here’s the point of this section, it’s not about psychedelics that’s just one (of many) of my personal solutions, it’s that you never take the worst stupid internet advice seriously:

You do a 10-day hike without your phone or go to the gym or quit shitty jobs before you ever take Adderall or some other bullshit idea.

This is how you enter the “obvious” world.

Be Independently sufficient

If you are an ideas guy, your biggest paychecks (+ fun work) will be advisory and consulting roles.

Now if you’re desperate you’ll say yes to “shitty” or maybe “good” opportunities.

You won’t quit “Amazing” jobs like being an instagram influence.

You don’t have to live in that world.

If you have ideas, if you claim to be a smart ideas guy, one of your most shitty ideas could easily make $5k/month if you’d just execute.

Whatever boring-ass shit. Affiliate? Affiliate. E-commerce? E-commerce. SaaS? SaaS.

If you read my old articles you’ll notice that subtly within a year I was bored of “SaaS”.

Once I understood how the “dynamic worked”, eg. got featured in Hubspot, grabbed drinks with the influencers etc. I was bored.

But here’s the biggest surprise, I got disillusioned with it even before my peak/success.

It wasn’t success -> boredom, it was boredom -> can still do it either way cause upsides worth it ->success.

Disillusionment doesn’t have to mean inaction, it can mean action without too much attachment.

Because I wanted an extra couple thousand that would improve my life, I just became a #saasbro.

When you start a business and leave your stupid cave of inaction ideas folks, you’ll realize that you’re competing against people who haven’t read a book this year.

Just stop being whiny, just start something, don’t be highly incompetent and you’ve got a profitable business.

Now since you’re independently sufficient you can say no to everyone and everything until the right opportunity comes along.

You don’t have to waste your time saying yes to pay next month’s rent.

Actionable: Build a low maintenance $5k/mo business so you don’t have a day job and only need to say yes to the advisory roles you want to do. Block everyone who hasn’t built businesses if you actually want to take this idea seriously.

Adjust numbers to your personal life. But increase your $ amounts, stop comparing yourself to where you started.

My version: Technical SEO, then built affiliate niche sites (read: Zoom out), and then became an advisor to finance firms. They are all relatively “boring” shit to me, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t very good at it. They pay all my bills that I write articles and all the projects I work on don’t have to make money.

I just assumed incompetence everywhere. That everyone else won’t read the manual or a book or google things.

I did and everything from market making to SEO is “Easy (and once I understood things, boring)”.

Here’s where the ideas guy come in

Because of the above I now have the ideas world on ‘easy mode’

‘I have a lot of friends who run businesses who hire me to be inside the company and just watch what’s happening and come up with ideas. I do whatever I want and because I have my own stuff going on I never have to say yes to work.’

This world can exist for a lot more people but it can sound crazy to talk about lol which is why I scared away people with the psychedelic talk before I got to this.

Safety Valves

Once I started getting early success in this world I came up with useful (but mostly false) beliefs I like to call Safety Valves.

A safety valve is a valve that acts as a fail-safe. An example of safety valve is a pressure relief valve (PRV), which automatically releases a substance from a boiler, pressure vessel, or other system, when the pressure or temperature exceeds preset limits.

I had 2 versions that are relevant here:

1. When I dropped out of college I set the infinite goal of being able to travel wherever I want and to be able to do whatever I want all the time.

Which is exactly what I did.

But at the same time I knew I had to keep the fomo in check with reality. I had an Indian passport (reality:visas) and had $200 (reality:money), 0 connections, 0 remote work basically 0 everything.

So reality made me add the “rule” of “only south east asia for 2 years as I build” (2016)

Message I sent a friend in the month I started this 9 years of full time travel.

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This is where I don’t understand the “I just became a third world digital nomad and I want to live in Switzerland, today! NOW NOW NOW!”

Cool. You want to optimize the 10 year goal, including visas or not? You can have it all and living in Vietnam/Thailand/Indonesia was fucking awesome.

This safety valve helped me not be a prick about not having passport privledge or whatever whiny people on the internet want to complain aboout. I care about reality too much to get stuck in the infinite loop.

2. 20s are for playing

Once I realized the issues wasn’t success anymore. Aka I felt the “you can just do things” through my bones. I have to channel it right.

My version was my blog growing to 10k readers a month, Facebook posts getting 1k likes, getting featured on 2 newspapers every month.

I was 19 and knew that the “success” would get to my head and create too much fomo on building bigger and bigger stuff.

So I came up with the rule, “My 20s are for playing and learning, in my 30s I will build something” (2017)

Because at this point I knew I was an n=1 and I couldn’t depend on the 30-40 year olds for advice.

They feel like time is running out cause they lived in normie world before this world, I didn’t. This crazy world is my default.

Also I didn’t believe I was as smart as everyone else around me was treating me. I used to listen to soo many people smarter than me all the time, watch conversations where I only understood 10% so I felt like I had so much to learn and hence needed time.

I had to go and read the 100s books and listen to the 1000s hours of podcasts cause I had to build my solutions almost entirely from scratch.

So the safety valve was the best excuse I came up with mainly to myself to stop taking myself too seriously.

I always knew it was a lie and completely arbitrary but it helped me make my 20s for learning as I’m doing right now

Probably turning 30 soon won’t change that cause the rule was to help my 19 year old self. I don’t need it anymore.

Sidenote: A completely different rabbit hole. But “does a placebo still work if you know it’s a placebo?” answer: with ideas I believe yes!

Pay your dues

If you’re an ideas guy stop paying your dues. You never have to do the middle steps.

If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months? – Thiel

A version of the above is “If you have 10 steps on the journey to get somewhere, you should ask: Why can’t I just do step #10 now?”

Life isn’t school, you don’t have to “show your work”, you just need the answer. Skips the steps.

Eric Weinstein (who is primarily Thiel’s idea guy) once said “in the 70s you had space in the academics and universities for a guy like Chomsky (ignore his politics) to just exist in his corner and do whatever he wanted. He didn’t have to conform to the ideology of the institution he was in. But you don’t have that today.”

Gwern wrote on the internet for free for 15 years before his podcast and donations went viral. 15 years.

Sundar Pichai was an engineer who rose to the top, but he was an engineer 30 years ago.

Do you want to wait a decade? Do you want to imagine a world where you’ll speak your honest mind after tenure? or after you make it in your 40s?

Spoiler: Most of you won’t, you’ll just blame a mortgage or your kids then.

Don’t imitate people in their 40s/50s (even the best ones) if you’re in your 20s/30s.

They had to grow up in a world without the internet, you don’t.

Start acting like the internet exists. Most of you are not. You’re still acting like you’re in the 90s.

This is why Tyler Cowan says he wouldn’t be in academia if he was young today.

I picked the rabbit hole life at 20. There’s no reason to wait.

You can just decide and then do all the hard work necessary to make it reality.

Here’s an example of how all these ideas come together:

Tyler Cowen is one of the most ideas guys who is surrounded by ideas guy folks and funds ideas the most.

Imagine 2 scenarios.

  1. You’re an engineer at Google/OpenAI or doing a PhD at Standford.
  2. You listen to this article, are independent and just free doing whatever you want.

If you met Tyler Cowen at a party or a conference and have a 30-minute conversation, outside the first minute the entire next 29 minutes of the conversation is the same in both scenarios.

You’ll even get the same result (eg funding) in both scenarios cause Tyler likely doesn’t care about your status/title.

This is why I don’t believe people are ready to have an intelligent conversation about college cause it’s not about facts or wage premiums, it’s emotions, it’s confidence and self-esteem.

”OMG why would Tyler want to talk to me, who am I”

“What do I introduce myself as, I don’t have a label, I’m a nobody”

The usual stuff,

But it’s only 1 minute of 30 and if you’re a real ideas guy, the other 29 are what’s interesting not your name or job title.

Optimizing for that first minute is the most expensive thing you’ll ever do in terms of $ and time.

One of the big reasons I always talk about dropping out of college is cause it taught me that other people’s emotional fears should never be tolerated. Doesn’t matter what Asian parents believe, smart 18-year-olds should just grow a spine and do the right thing.

We need more “just do it” in a world full of fear.

This is where even the normally smart people like Emmett go wrong or lack the “will of power”.

They miss the “shut the fuck up and go to the gym” pov (often because they don’t go to the gym lol).

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If the path is A -> B -> C

And B turns out to be a waste of time or money. The solution isn’t what smart people have been doing for a decade:

A -> Better B -> there’s no better B so just do B -> C

The solution is ✨obvious✨

It’s A -> ✨Nothing✨ -> C

Haven’t you guys learn nothing from all the buddist and meditation content that got popular the past decade?

Don’t you understand the value of ✨Do nothing✨?

Just do C today, you don’t need to pay your dues.

And yes, this applies even if you’re starting with disadvantages.

Now if you don’t want to skip the ‘B’s of the world. Go ahead, waste your time, it’s a free world.

Just don’t do a 2021 and use the state to push your “fake security” “just in case” bullshit onto others.

And if you’re in a position to give advice to others, stop spreading your perspective of fear as a default and sending young people down the path of inaction and choicelessness.

You have a chance every day to prevent smart people from paying the fake dues of the world.

If you expect 20 year olds to go to the gym, sleep 8 hours, some actually do! Raise your expectations of everyone (and yourself)

This is partly a version of a paradox because until 1 person just skips the thing, everyone lies to themselves and says it’s not possible.

I think this is what I’m trying to instill in my friends.

Even in 2018 the only time I gave a talk at a Toastmasters it was about fear. (A rehash of Ferriss’s fearsetting ideas)

It’s always been about fear. Yes, I see that it exists and I see how all the opinions all around you have power over you.

Do it either way, overcome your internal fear of failure and overcome your fear of the opinion of the crowd.

You can.

People who obsesses over statistics often use it as a cope instead of just being the first person to do something.

10 years ago: “There’s no good replacement for college, let’s just go to college”

Today: There’s no legible replacement for college, just go to college.”

10 years from now: “There….”

You’ll always have B’s in your life so it’s best if you start to see them early to skip them whenever they come up.

Feedback

I’ve written a lot on this side about negative feedback. About how to ignore people telling you that you’re wrong.

I think just as or even more important is ignoring people telling you that you’re right or specifically smart.

Here’s an example to actually explain what I mean:

Over the past couple of years one of my high school friends started living the digital nomad life, he started working online built a big marketing agency making six figures and then sold it. Bought a farm in Thailand, got jacked etc etc.

The stuff I keep calling ✨obvious✨on this site.

So over the next months he started being social. Very quickly everyone started calling him a genius and that stroked his ego. “wow you can work and travel! That’s so cool tell me more…” etc.

If you’ve never been called a genius before, you might enjoy this phase where people call you smart.

But here’s where you have a choice, you can choose to stay in that bubble and get high status for good ideas.

Or you can let that world go for better ideas.

If you’re an ideas guy being called smart gets boring very quickly.

Why are you patting me on the back for an idea that Tim Ferriss shared in a best selling book in 2007. It’s almost a 20 year old idea, da hell. Read a book!

My most vivid example of this was physical first not in ideas. I got instagram famous as a teen for having a six/eight pack abs when I got into the gym.

Status is easy when you have a six pack especially in high school. However, I went long distance hiking at 18 for the first time and never felt as unfit as I did hiking up the mountain, a 65 year old man was faster than me.

I could’ve been stupid and said “hiking is not for me”. But instead I decided to “go further”

My level of fitness leveled up soo much that the idea of sixpack being “fit” felt like a “stupid old idea”.

This is where you have to choose how to channel positive feedback .

Say it’s obvious and go further. Don’t waste your time convincing others of the obvious, because you’ll never finish convincing people.

I stopped acting like the six pack/deadlifting ideas need to be explained or it was anything special.

I’ve had a six pack every year for a decade, even when I took a 5 year break from the gym, it’s an obvious “don’t be stupid” baseline.

“everyone can’t get a six pack” “It’s not obvious” lmao shut up, go lift and sleep 8 hours with the sun. I already wrote an article titled that in 2016 when I last took pespectives like that seriously.

By choosing to be immune to negative as well as positive feedback, by not getting praised for just having a six pack, I could have it all x100. A six pack is the most simplest and obvious of things and people that say it isn’t just are low in action.

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Top Left (2015): Getting a six pack is obvious.
Top Right (2016): Wow I’m so unfit that a 65 year old can hike faster than me.
Bottom Left (2018): Hiked so much even the most insane Georgia hikes became normal.
Bottom Right (2023): Infinite energy, Get jacked while also hiking mountains and also being yoga teacher and also …. have it all! With less time/effort than the initial six pack abs.

It’s the same with ideas, I’ve avoided conversations of if 8 hours sleep is important (duh) or if it’s possible to work online (of course) or if degrees are necessary (nope lol).

Relevant to this article are the questions like “Is an ideas guy a real thing” “can everyone that wants to become an ideas guy” “post modernist bullshit like how do you know you’re or anyone is right or that truth exists” etc etc.

My purpose with this article is to help the few people who’ll actually make it to the end who have the potential to be ideas people and don’t have to hold back by the positive confirmation of the world.

It’s not that being able to get a six pack isn’t a “good” idea. It’s good, but if you call it obvious early you’ll always find better health/ideas.

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Even Chris Williamson got bored of “abs” and finds ideas more interesting lmao 😂.

Useful feedback (eg. Of this article) is along the lines of “if you’re an ideas person who’s optimized their life similar to this article and you’re able to do things publicly is there any thing you think I’m missing, that can help the perspective go further. If so, tell me cause I’ll incorporate it cause I’m just figuring this out and sharing what works so far.”

FYI. The reason I use the word obvious isn’t cause I think the world is simple. The opposite actually, I believe that there are a lot of questions where the answer is not obvious. For example I got asked today “how do you prevent from accidentally passing on your trauma onto your kids?” That’s not obvious or ever simple, it’s a 100 hour conversation that will lead to a solution that still won’t work with certainty.

But Sleep? Weight loss? Gym? Hell even business? Creatine & vaccines?✨Obvious✨

Once you do obvious shit in those worlds, we can then be able to have the conversation about the non-obvious stuff without caveats

Positive feedback is just as harmful as negative, and needs to be channel in the right way.

This is why you want to break free from mimesis and use reality as your feedback to judge theories/ideas.

Did the weight leave the ground?

Did the subject line lead to more conversions?

Does the relationship survive and says enjoyable?

Why settle for opinions when you can have reality.

Give Crazy A Change

I’m pushing the boundaries about the things I’ve talked about publicly with this article and every single article after this in the hopes that more people push the ideas that they share publicly.

I vaguely mentioned psychedelics in the past but always held back from going all the way and think it’s actually been a disservice.

eg. being explicit that I did a Acid and Mushrooms in 2016 or that I did Ayahuasca last year or the exact $ amounts and especially talking about relationships more to help turn this loneliness epidemic around.

I think I tried to caveat my perspectives out of fear of being considered crazy and I’ve learned something from nearly 10 years of doing this.

Even when held back and caveated, everyone still thought I was crazy. (in the short term)

So this is where the idea of a “compromise” comes into play.

One definition I heard from CGP grey of a compromise is “where neither party is happy.”

So no matter what you do, people are going to think you’re crazy so be explicit and embrace it.

You’ll save time and over the longer term no one actually ever thinks you’re crazy.

A long time ago I shared the quote “Everything you want is on the other side of fear” that is still true today

Well, here I’d like to add that “Everything you want is on the other side of crazy” :)

Especially if you have an Underground Mind

Give Crazy A Chance

it just might surprise you…

About Jeremy Noronha

Hey! I’m Jeremy Noronha and I’m a online marketer and full time traveler.

I’ve been living out of a single backpack traveling the world since early 2016. I used to work as Technical SEO Consultant (Former Head of SEO at Foundr.com) and travel blogger.

I now blog on JeremyNoronha.com writing about whatever is on my mind 😁

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