A guide for ambitious teenagers who want to grow

This thread contains guidance related to:
• Twitter Networking
• Avoiding Naive bBlunders
• Growing on Twitter
• And anything I could tell advise you like an elder brother

Thread Continued

No one is perfect from the beginning. Self development is a journey.

I made almost all of the mistakes I've mentioned further in the thread
1/

Be patient when you reach out people (especially the ones with more than 1k followers) on Twitter

You may not get reply for couple of days. This happens cuz the person has many DMs pending and is left with no bandwidth to reply
2/

So don't be like "???" or "will you reply???"

Be more generous in the approach. Follow up more politely with sentences like "looking forward to your reply"
3/

Whenever you send a Cold DM, keep the message short and precise.

@palakzat and @SumneshSalodkar guided me in the right direction with this
4/

Do not add anything irrelevant in the message, especially while asking for help. Ask yourself whether the sentence serves any purpose in the communication or not
5/

Also, while cold DMing important or busy people, do not start with "Hey" or something like that

Instead, introduce yourself in 1-2 lines and in the next 2-3, explain the reason/favour/purpose of your message
6/

Avoid reaching out to important/busy (I don't have a better word for them) people without a solid purpose. Don't just randomly text them

Again, this comes from @palakzat
7/

If you want to grow on Twitter as someone who's interested in startups, tech or anything related to productivity and ambitions, strictly avoid shitposting.

You can build an audience only when keep giving out value, consistently

Thanks for the lesson @join2manish sir
8/

Avoid DMing anyone on WhatsApp until and unless you've joined their WhatsApp newsletter

https://t.co/EoYEWJp3cY
9/

Audience >>> Followers

Don't run after followers, they're just vanity metrics. Build an audience, it'll surely pay off

Learned this from @ankitkr0 and @nipunnyy
10/

Choose a specific niche, post content around it and build an audience
11/

Never ask others anything that you can easily find on Google. May it be during a conversation, or if you don't understand a term in tweet. Don't just comment right away, "What's X?"

Make this a habit, always Google what you don't understand, right away
12/

Do your homework

Before you hop on a call with someone who's important for you, do a solid research about him/her first

I learned this from @nikhiljoisr
13/

Always have a profile picture of yours. Means, your face should be in the DP

Learned this from @shlokafc
14/

Have a neat and precise bio. Don't add anything that doesn't depict what you do or what you tweet about

Advise from @nipunnyy
15/

Never message busy/important people asking "What are your thoughts on..."

As mentioned previously, message only with a purpose

Learned this from @warikoo
16/

I personally never ever sent my thread to anyone and asked them to retweet it. Not a single time.

So I'd reccomend you to not do this either.

The logic behind this is, your content must me so damn good and value packed, that people can't resist resharing it
17/

Avoid scammy self help gurus and courses.

The world is big enough to not follow these things and still have pinnacle quality content and people for you to follow
18/

Prioritize health (physical and mental)

Compromising health for short term sprints will do nothing but harm in long term

Life is long enough to not hurry at the cost of your health
19/

Don't fall prey to things on Twitter. For example, you don't need a fancy "productivity setup" to pull of great things.

I used this dumper laptop for years. I did EDM production, graphic design, 3D design, etc. on it. Only when I started earning, I upgraded
20/

Don't spend your parent's money for buying expensive things that have cheaper alternatives.

Like, don't buy a ₹7k keyboard with your parent's money. Rather save that money, invest it somewhere.
21/

Maximize on free resources. If something like @nntaleb's ebook is for free, doesn't mean that it doesn't provide value.

There are plenty of free resources for almost everything. Take advantage of that
22/

I've intentionally added many terms in the thread that most of the teenagers won't understand.

If you didn't Google them right away, this is the signal to begin with it asap or else I'll be nonplussed to see you not apply the advice
23/

I have a detailed article coming with @internclick, on internships. So stay tuned for that. It covers everything you need to know related to internships

And a thread on how to write threads is coming soon too.

More from Atharva Kharbade

More from Twitter

This is why I'm not a critic of "cancel culture." It's crucial to impose social costs for the breech of key social norms. The lesson of overreaction is that we need to recalibrate judgment to get it right next time, not that we need a lot more bad judgment in the other direction.


Obviously, people will disagree about which norms are important, about how bad it is to violate them, and thus about how severe the social cost ought to be. That's just pluralism, man, and it's good.

It's important to openly talk through these substantive differences, which is why derailing these conversations with hand-waving moral panic about "cancel culture" is obnoxious and illiberal.

Screaming "cancel culture!" when somebody pays a social costs other people have been fighting hard to get others to see as necessary is often just a way to declare, with no argument, that the sanction in question was not only unnecessary but in breach of a more important norm.

It's impossible to uphold social norms without social sanctions, so obviously anti-cancelers are going to want to impose a social cost on people they see as imposing unjustly steep social costs on others.

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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.