The Freedom Manifesto: 7 Rules to Live a Life of Your Calling

by Karan Bajaj

natural tendency. In Buddhism and Vedic philosophy, every living being has a dharma, a natural instinct they can’t help but express. A tree grows and bears fruit. The river flows and enriches hundreds.

What is your dharma, your natural thrust, your innate tendency? Did you visualize financial independence, the most fundamental of the soul’s cries, so that you can be liberated to pursue your calling? Or did you envision having a large impact on the world? In both cases, the next few pages will give you a step-by-step guide to reach your goals.

I’d been reading a lot about online passive income and ‘four-hour work weeks’.

You may create a great online course (depth), but the task of getting users (magnitude) means there’s nothing passive about it. Instead of

writing a novel on the side, my time quickly filled up with getting more folks to sign up for the course with guest blogs, paid advertising, partnerships and barter deals. The work was 24x7 active.

intentions didn’t matter on television. The shows were just not engaging enough.

I felt a deep sense of contentment. This was life. Being in nature, pushing yourself to the brink and finding deep reserves within you to continue.

Experiences trump possessions.

Cinema Paradiso (1988), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Malcolm X (1992),

Internal Evaluation: The ‘Magnitude and Depth’ Formula • Magnitude: Does your idea touch millions of users? • Depth: Does it meet a deep, fundamental human need ten times better than the alternative?

as Zero to One, The Lean Startup, and The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

Domain-specific knowledge on product, tech, design and operations, such as Hooked, Hacking Growth and High Output Management.

In all my funding rounds, I saw that the moment you had the first investor term sheet, suddenly everyone else followed. The best venture capitalists show independent conviction rather than waiting for others to jump first. For instance, Anup Gupta from Nexus was the first to show conviction when others were still indecisive

For instance, an associate from a top venture capitalist firm in India called me to meet him at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai, an hour-long commute from Andheri East where our first office was, twice in two weeks.

Procter & Gamble pioneered a strategy called ‘Delight Don’t Dilute’ for mass entry.

Start-up valuations are strange at an early stage. A young start-up’s value is almost all in the future and not in the present.

The only two things that matter for valuation are: (i) your future vision and (ii) your current business. Your Future Vision. How ‘Big and Obvious’ Is Your Vision for Tomorrow?

Magnitude: Does it transcend categories and countries? • Depth: Does it meet a deep, unexpressed human need? If not, dig deeper and make it as big as you can make it, and never hesitate to present it as such.

every start-up needs three roles in a founding team—a hacker, a designer and a marketer.

The founder is typically the designer, who conceptualizes the complete product, and will perhaps do either one of the other two roles well—either the hacker (tech) or the marketer (business) role. The co-founder does the other role.

You can’t find an ace co-founder on demand. And beyond competence, you’re looking for mad conviction in the idea, co-location, comfort with throwing away everything on an instinct; any one of these is hard to find, leave alone all three.

The best people generate an extraordinarily insane amount of value. Ten per cent of hyper-performers generate almost 90 per cent of start-up output. One great hire can change a start-up’s destiny. And WhiteHat Jr’s scaling was entirely due to a few of these hires in tech, product and business. Is your prospective co-founder truly an extreme power-law value generator? If not, go solo.

Source: Paul Graham4 Top business talent motivations are simpler as they are driven most by an accelerated career trajectory. In line with your own Freedom Rule Number 3, make a 30x7 commitment to all business hires: ‘We’ll replace thirty years of low-intensity work with seven years of high-intensity work. And you’ll compress thirty years of personal and professional growth in these seven years.’

A. What are your improvement areas?

‘I’m not good at promoting myself’

B. Where can our business model go wrong?

me penetrating questions on the business model and margin structure as well as the competitive moat of our content daily for one week after I interviewed him until he was fully convinced that I knew what I was doing.

C. What are you reading/learning now?

Facebook advertisements and YouTube videos on career-oriented messages like how artificial intelligence was the future of work, and urgency messages on limited spots for free trial.

Scale one month too early and you’ll lose all your money since your product is not ready. One month too late, however, and players with ten

times your funding enter and make you redundant in the category you created. You have to blitz-scale the moment you know you’ve created a category. Anything less is a lack of conviction.

any large well-reviewed SaaS (Software as a Service) provider can meet 80 per cent of your use cases. And your in-house engineering team has to develop the remaining 20 per cent. Speed is your lifeblood. Simplify to scale. And seldom build in-house systems that SaaS companies have spent years perfecting.

Disseminate Company Values with the ‘Rule of Seven’

Recruitment: Recruiters were trained in evaluating and giving feedback to candidates based on values. 2. Orientation: Values were central in our new hire orientation. 3. Team discussions: Each small team in the organization discussed how they would bring the values to life in their own groups. 4. One-to-one managerial feedback: We encouraged values to become a critical part of the manager–employee one-to-one feedback. 5. Weekly department recognition: Each week, people who had over-performed were highlighted in the department town halls. 6. Quarterly company-wide town halls: We celebrated quarterly value champions in organization-wide town halls. 7. Annual performance appraisal: Values were given 30 per cent weight in performance raises and career progression.

I hope this helps you get more things right than wrong in your scaling. You’ll make your own mistakes in this often-chaotic, always-energizing phase, but you’ll look back at this time fondly because of the hundreds of customer lives you touch and the jobs you create along the way.