Visakan Veerasamy On The Curious Humans Of Twitter & Creating His Own Work

I connected with Visa on Twitter, where he’s made many friends over the past several years. I wanted to interview Visa to talk about his leap to self-employment over the past couple of years, but we talked about so much more. We talk about:

• What the word “nourish” means to him
• His evolution on procrastination and getting started
• How to find like-hearted humans on twitter
• The “asshole problem”
• The curious humans of twitter
• How he creates his own work

Thinking On Twitter

Visa has gained a reputation on Twitter for being someone who’s building a transparent “second brain” (h/t Tiago Forte), sharing whatever he finds with his followers.  

He says he does this mostly to keep track of what he’s learning and finding, but it also seems to be something that many people find value from.

• Link To All His Threads: Visa’s Threads

I asked him for his most overrated thread:

we already live in a boring dystopia pic.twitter.com/4feoT4DWSC

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) April 29, 2018

…and his most underrated thread:

1/ On growing up: A man should be
sensitive (to inputs from reality),
smart (at making sense of reality), and
strong (to effect reality).

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) April 23, 2015

His tips for getting started on Twitter

Many people worry about attracting the attention of influential people. Instead, he suggests you just focus on building genuine connections. Here are the five steps he recommends for anyone who wants to dive in:

1. Don’t follow institutions – if its interesting, people will retweet it
2. Don’t follow people that won’t reply (+3,000 followers): 
3. Follow people with max of 1,000-ish followers
4. Have conversations with people
5. Make friends with their friends

Taking the leap to self-employment

I love his own tips on self-employment. The following tweet summarizes how he’s thought about his own leap (he say’s he us currently on step 4!)

Stage 1: Do unpaid work for yourself

Stage 2: Use that as leverage to negotiate a position where you get paid to do work for others

Stage 3: Save up enough so you can be free to do more, higher-quality unpaid work for yourself <— I am currently here

Stage 4: We’ll see

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) July 7, 2018

He thinks people should be bolder in creating their own work and using their curiosity as a guide

you can do unpaid work for yourself. I suggest do anything you find interesting

He gives the example of a mean girls essay he wrote that (Power & Social Dynamics In Mean Girls) got a lot of attention from people who were “above his pay grade:

The trap some people fall into is they think they need to do what they think other people will be interested in…that;s like guesswork…and your guesswork is probably off by some degree that you don’t realize.

I love that model. Check out the episode and let me know what you think!