A Shift in Mindset: The Million-Dollar Opportunity I Missed
A few years ago, I had an idea that turned out to be wrong. This idea was about the things that I worked hard on, but it didn’t work out. In the past, if I worked hard on something and the results were terrible, I would say at least I tried and set myself apart from those who didn’t. So I would console myself in this way. For me, this was the right mindset to improve myself.
With time, a few things happened, and most of the results were indeed terrible. I don’t know how this happened but suddenly I changed my mindset. My new mindset is, If the results are not how you imagined, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough. It should be the truth because they went to the moon 55 years ago with technologies that you would call impossible. If the mindset of the engineers there was like the first one I mentioned, do you think they could have gotten there? Probably no.
How I Missed Millions of Dollars
With this mindset, I felt like I was becoming a 10x better version of myself every day. I was indeed. Since I realized I could overcome my limitations, I have become more productive at work and in everyday life. My grades improved and I started coming up with more creative ideas. For example, before the summertime of my senior year, I had an idea to earn millions. I called this project short bot. You can check it out on github.
What this project did was to embed subtitles in the desired language in videos without subtitles and send you back the subtitled version. I made a demo project and showed it to my professor. He liked it and said he could count this as my thesis. 5-6 months passed and AI tools suddenly came on the scene and made this video process so easy that my project became useless. But if I had this mindset a long time ago, I could have thought of this idea much earlier.
How do I know that this project is worth a million dollars? Because when I did this, there were very few tools that did this and they were very expensive. People were really manually adding these subtitles themselves. I could also make a mobile app for it, so that people like vloggers, youtubers, travelers, etc. could add subtitles even if they only had their phone with them. But most importantly, people are making millions of dollars a year by giving anime girl prompts with the OpenAI API and making nerds talk to these GPTs. As a result, I gave up one more time. But thanks to this mindset, I was able think more creatively.
Looking back at when I tried writing a book 4 years ago, I see how my thinking has changed since then.
Writing a Book
Before all this, like 4 years ago, I wanted to write a book about fantasy stuff because I really liked LOTR. I thought it was amazing and wanted to make something like it. I told myself, you won’t know if you don’t try, right? So I started writing. I got about 40 pages in, but it was really hard, and I stopped. There was no ChatGPT back then, so it was all up to my own imagination. When I found my book again a few months ago, I saw some parts were actually pretty good. It made me think, if I had kept at it, maybe I could have finished a decent book. I wasn’t trying to sell it or anything, just wanted to make something cool.
Conclusion
So, what did I learn from all this? It’s that trying something and not making it is better than not trying at all. My short bot idea and the book thing didn’t end up like I hoped, but they taught me a lot. Especially about not giving up just because it’s tough.
If I had the mindset back then that I have now, maybe my book would have gone further. It’s all about how you look at problems and what you do about them. Now, I think if something doesn’t work, it’s not because it was impossible. Maybe I just need to try in a different way or try harder.
In the end, it’s about keeping going, even when things don’t look great. Maybe I’ll go back to that book idea with what I know now. Or maybe my next big idea is just around the corner. What’s important is I keep trying. Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll get one of those million-dollar ideas right, or finish a book that people actually like. It’s all about not giving up.