Buying the best may not always be the best idea →

When I was a kid, every month or so I’d have a new hobby that I would suddenly take a passionate interest in — flight simulation, painting, music, geography, skateboarding, football, interior design, bicycling, being a tech geek – the list went on and on.

The moment I would start something new, I would want the best equipment to do it — except, my ask beg and ask again technique to get things from my parents wouldn’t always work, and so I would often have to settle for either cheap or no equipment.

The firsts —

As a result, I recorded my first music on a table chat mic that cost me Rs. 100 (€1.5) and some cheap headphones, and just my laptop. It took a lot to make that mic sound good, and I had to get creative with it.

My first music production setup!

I recorded my first video on a computer webcam borrowed from a friend, and then on the camera of a Nokia phone that was handed down from my parents, finding creative ways to transfer the videos to my computer using infrared (not even kidding).

My first guitar cost €20. And it was terrible. I thought I was a bad player until I played on some of my friends’ nicer guitars and I realised that it was just my guitar. I was actually pretty okay.

My second guitar was €80. It was an electric guitar, and I didn’t have an amp. I found a way to plug the guitar into our home Casio keyboard’s microphone port to get the sound out. It was sad, but it was creative! I ended up getting an actual guitar amp only much later.

My first camera was a hand-me-down digital camera from my dad. The second one was a Sony point and shoot that I had carefully selected because it had manual controls. Only after 3 years of being into

My first electric guitar! Rs. 6000, without an amplifier.

But —

Of course, at the time I was a bit pissed off to not have sometimes even the bare minimum (you really do need an amp for an electric guitar, mom), but looking back, I know that these moments and these situations were what made me resourceful and creative.

Moreover, it made it clear which things I was genuinely interested in, and which things were just a phase. In fact, for the things I was actually interested in, upgrading to nicer and better gear felt SO much better after playing on crappy gear for so long.

It genuinely felt well-deserved.

Keep it in mind —

I was a kid, so there was an outside force stopping me from splurging on gear. But now that habit has remained in me — Bootstrap, be cost-effective and test the waters at first with cheaper resources, and then scale up as necessary.

Never buy the nicest things first. Get the bare essentials, or barely even those, and try to max out what you can do with them before buying nicer stuff. It’s not even about the money, it’s about scaling.

If you get all the nice stuff right in the beginning, it’s just going to get in the way of actually creating and doing things with it!

Thanks —

Thanks for reading this far, and for supporting me.

Also thanks for answering my thesis survey! I’m finally done with my thesis defence, and I intend to be back on YouTube and this newsletter! Thanks for being patient, guys 😊

— M