← Notebook · Session 09 · 2026-08-28
Guest Lecture · Rehan Allahwala
The decision this session forces
Build the tool. Somebody who does the same task in less time is worth more, and a tool is the only thing on the list that keeps buying that time back once you stop paying attention to it.
The short version
- Four steps, in order: find a problem, find the solution, build a tool from it, then scale it to everybody who has the same problem.
- The failures are the training. A hundred and fifty attempts is what makes the next one work, and there is no route around them.
- Ask a model for both sides of everything. They are trained to please you, and agreement is the one thing you should never buy.
- Apply to a hundred roles, not five. The volume is the point — you get good at asking, you learn what the market actually pays, and you meet the people who do the hiring.
- As machines get better at every skill, the thing that holds its value is trust. A friend does not ask what you know. He rings you with the work.
- Step three is where most people stop and step four is where the money is. Building a thing and selling it are two different jobs.
The four steps, with the story taken out
Find a problem. Find the solution. Build a tool from it. Scale it to the people who have the same problem. That is the whole method and it is deliberately boring.
The reason it is a tool rather than more hours is one sentence: somebody who does the same task in less time is worth more. Hours are the thing you cannot make more of. A tool is how you buy some back.
It is taught to children from about age eleven in his school in Korangi, where students build small businesses while they are still at school. If it can be taught at eleven, the difficulty was never the method.
A hundred and fifty attempts
He started at thirteen selling games, then hardware, then software. Companies registered in seven countries. Around a hundred and fifty startups, and most of them failed.
His own image for it: make bread a hundred and fifty times and it comes out round, and your hand stops burning. The failures are not the price of the training. They are the training.
Which means the number of attempts is a figure worth tracking, and it is one almost nobody writes down. If you cannot say how many things you have tried and finished this year, that is the measurement to start with.
What he told the twenty-five-year-olds
Move faster with the machines, and go further than asking them questions. Ask for the case against, every time — a model that only ever agrees with you has quietly replaced your thinking rather than sharpening it.
Revisit what you learned before any of this existed, two or three times. Learn the culture of the market you want to sell to. Be punctual, because it is the cheapest signal of everything else.
And the one he called the top skill: networking, which no school teaches. Every skill gets cheaper as machines get better at it. Trust does not.
Where the method stops, and why that is the useful part
The four steps end at scale it to people. That is not the end of the work — for most people who build things, it is the entire remaining problem.
It is easy to have finished step three several times over and never once have done step four. Five built products with nobody asked to use any of them is not a building problem. It is a distribution problem wearing a builder's clothes.
So the honest reading of this session is not go and build something. It is go and ask somebody to use the thing you already built.
Your note
Saved on this device as you type.
Credit Taught in Gharebon Ka MBA · Dr. Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani. Used here with credit, not as my own. https://www.zeeshanusmani.com/career-growth-accelerator/