Scan time: 2-4 minutes / Read time: 4-6 minutes
⠀
Hello rebel ideapreneurs 🦸♂️🦸♀️
⠀
🙋♀️ Nora’s list of topics she’d have to learn first
Nora is a UX designer planning a YouTube channel that teaches design to non-designers.
She writes down five topics, and every one of them is a subject she would have to go and learn from scratch.
🧩 Her struggle:
She thinks the hobby she spends every free evening on is too ordinary to count, so she never records a first video.
Folding laundry that evening, she hears a podcast with the real story of a young stockbroker
who also spent his hours on something most people found boring,
and became one of the richest people alive.
He started with the books everyone else left on the shelf.
⠀
📕 The twenty thousand pages nobody else read
In 1951, Warren Buffett was twenty-one, and he had just been turned down for the only job he wanted.
So he went home to Omaha, Nebraska, and took a job at his father’s small firm, selling stocks.
Every firm like his father’s kept a set of books on the shelf called the Moody’s manuals.
Nobody read these books from cover to cover.
They were like a phone book.
When a customer asked about one company, the stockbroker looked up that one page, read it, and put the book back on the shelf.
But Warren read the whole set.
He read every page, from the first company to the last.
When he reached the last page, he went back to page one and read the whole set a second time.
In his own words: “I probably went through 20,000 pages in the Moody’s industrial, transportation, banks and finance manuals.
And I did it twice.”
Why read every page, when everyone else looked up one company at a time?
Because those books listed every single company you could buy shares in.
Not most of them.
All of them.
The only way to find the good ones was to look at all of them.
Nobody was going to call him up and tell him which company was a bargain.
He had to find them himself.
Get this — deep in the banking volume, he found a small insurance company he had never heard of.
It was in Fort Scott, Kansas.
The shares were unbelievably cheap.
Think of it this way.
Say one share cost $10.
Every year, the company made $10 in profit for each share.
So in one year, your share had earned back every dollar you paid for it.
There was one problem.
The company was so small and so unknown that its shares were hard to find.
Only a few hundred people in Fort Scott owned any.
So Warren ran ads in the local Fort Scott newspaper, asking those people to sell him their shares.
Then he put half of all the money he had into the company.
Warren calls the 1950s his best decade as an investor.
He says his money grew by more than fifty percent a year in those years.
Why so much?
Because those books were full of bargains like that insurance company.
They were waiting for anyone willing to read every page, and Warren was.
Warren read all twenty thousand pages, twice.
Nobody made him do it.
He did it because he enjoyed it, and he was curious about what was on the next page.
The work that bores everyone else never bored him.
That is exactly why he found the bargains they missed.
He still says he tap-dances to work every morning, because he loves the job that much.
⠀
🔥 The recipe
➡️ Easy for You, Hard for Them
Warren read twenty thousand pages of company numbers, twice.
Every other broker opened those books only to look up one company.
Warren enjoyed it, and it made him rich.
Paul Graham sold his company Viaweb to Yahoo in 1998 for more than $48 million.
Later he started Y Combinator, which puts money into brand-new startups and coaches them.
In a 2015 essay, he gave a one-line test for finding the work you are built for.
“If something that seems like work to other people doesn’t seem like work to you, that’s something you’re well suited for.”
This move is called Easy for You, Hard for Them.
Warren was not suffering through the work.
He found a hobby that felt like play to him, even though everyone else found it boring.
Then he built his career on that hobby.
So the next time you sit down to decide what your YouTube channel is about,
skip the impressive topic you would have to spend a year learning.
Pick the thing you already do on a free evening without anyone asking you to.
The hard part, learning the subject, is already done.
Build on the thing that bores everyone but you.
⠀
🛠️ Nora’s turn
So what about Nora, whose list of video topics is full of subjects she’d have to learn from scratch?
That night, she runs the prompt at the bottom of this email,
and tells it what she does on a free evening without anyone asking: fixing her friends’ messy slides.
Her AI sidekick comes back with one clear answer:
Make your channel about fixing the slides that non-designers make,
because that work feels like play to you and like hard work to them.
That Sunday, she records her first video.
In it, she fixes a slide deck her neighbor made for his book club.
⠀
🌅 Six weeks later
Nora has posted a video every Sunday since.
Strangers now email her their own messy slides.
They ask her to fix them on camera.
About four hundred people subscribe to her channel.
The thing you do on a free evening might be the one topic you never wrote down.
Do the work everyone else finds too boring to finish, and build your channel on it.
That’s it, my fellow anti-status-quo-ers!
Yours ‘helping you skip years of pain and frustration in your life and business’ Vijay Peduru 🦸♂️
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
⠀
🏄♀️ The prompt
The prompt below finds the thing you do easily that tires everyone else out.
You just tell it how you really spend your time.
🧰 What you’ll need
What you’d happily do on a free evening, and what people say when you tell them
- Type it, or say it out loud with a voice tool.
- e.g. spending a whole evening fixing a friend’s messy slide deck before her big meeting, and people say “how do you even notice that?”What people already come to you for, without you offering
- e.g. friends send me their slides before any big presentationThe topics on your list that don’t feel like yours
- e.g. a video series on 3D animation, one on brand strategy, one on coding a website
🚀 How to run it
Open your AI sidekick, ChatGPT, Claude, or whichever one you use.
Swap the three examples, the text inside the curly brackets, for your own, then run it. If your AI sidekick can already see your notes, you can run it as is.
🧪 Want to test it first? Run it without changing anything, and it will use the examples.
CONTEXT:
- Use my own material first. If you can see my video list, my analytics, or my drafts, pull the real details from there instead of the examples below.
- If you know how I write, use my voice. Otherwise, write in a clear, warm, no-jargon voice — first-person, plain words, no startup-speak.
- If you know who my readers are, write for them. Otherwise assume people who are not designers but still have to make slides, flyers, or a simple website look good.
- If I have replaced the examples, use only mine. If an example is still there, fill it in from what you already know about me, and mark it as your assumption. If you don't know anything about me yet, use the example exactly as written.
- If you can see my notes, messages or calendar directly, pull what I actually spend spare time on from there. Otherwise, use what I paste below.
=============== INPUTS — edit these, or just run as is ===============
Things I do without being asked that I would happily do on a free evening, and what other people say when I tell them:
{e.g. spending a whole evening fixing a friend's messy slide deck before her big meeting, and people say "how do you even notice that?"}
What people already come to me for, without me offering:
{e.g. friends send me their slides before any big presentation}
The ideas on my list that do not feel like mine:
{e.g. a video series on 3D animation, one on brand strategy, one on coding a website}
======================== END OF INPUTS ========================
Outputs:
1. My list — everything I do easily that the people around me clearly find tiring.
2. The strongest one — which item is unusual to others AND saves them money or hours, and why.
3. Why I missed it — the reason I've been treating it as normal instead of special.
4. The thing to sell — not the work I enjoy doing, but the finished answer other people get from it.
5. How it makes money — who pays, for what, and one real business already doing it this way.
6. My first four videos — the first four videos I could publish, all built on that one thing.
Then name the ONE thing people already ask me for, that I have never charged for.