I Spent $67,000 to Become a Productivity Guru. Here's the One Thing I Learned: It's All a Lie.
My name is Jai Bhagat. For three years, I was a willing prisoner in the productivity trap. This is the story of how I escapedâand how you can too.
The Confession
Let's be brutally honest.
Between 2019 and 2022, I spent $67,481 on self-improvement. Courses, masterminds, coaches, books, apps, systemsâyou name it, I bought it.
I was a high-performing software engineer who, on the outside, had it all together. On the inside, I was drowning. My Notion workspace was a digital graveyard of 47 abandoned projects. My calendar was a colorful work of fiction that fell apart by 10 AM every Monday.
I could lecture you on Getting Things Done, the Pomodoro Technique, or the Eisenhower Matrix. I was an expert in the theory of productivity.
But I couldn't ship a single damn thing that mattered.
I was the definition of a "frustrated genius"âsmart enough to understand every complex system, but unable to escape the simple, crushing feeling of being an impostor. Every unfinished project was another piece of evidence that I was a fraud.
The Breaking Point
The moment everything changed wasn't in a high-priced seminar. It was in a cold car on a Tuesday night.
December 15th, 2022. I had just failed to launch another project. I was out of excuses, out of energy, and out of hope. I was literally googling "why am I so smart but can't get anything done?"
My partner, seeing me at absolute rock bottom, said something that made no logical sense.
"Just pull a tarot card."
I'm an engineer. A man of logic and systems. But I was desperate, so I did. I pulled a card from a deck we had lying around.
It was The Fool. Card zero. The beginner. The idiot who walks off a cliff with a smile on his face because he doesn't know any better.
The Epiphany
That symbolâthat permission to be cluelessâshattered my entire worldview.
The problem wasn't that I needed more information. The problem was that I was drowning in it. The answer wasn't in another complex system; it was in the simple, foundational work I had been avoiding all along.
I had spent $67,000 trying to optimize my brain, when the real problem was my environment. I was trying to use willpower to swim upstream in a river that was flowing against me.
That night, I threw out all 47 of my systems. I started with a blank page and one question:
"What if I stopped trying to be 'productive' and started designing a life where focus was the default?"
The Mission
Over the next 90 days, I developed two frameworks from scratch. Not based on theory, but on the brutal reality of my own psychology.
- EROS (Environment, Reduce, Order, Systems): To fix the world outside of me.
- FOCUS (Frame, Object, Clarify, Undermine, Synthesize): To fix the world inside of me.
They worked. I went from 47 dead projects to one profitable business. The constant anxiety was replaced by a quiet confidence.
Now, my mission is simple: I help other frustrated geniuses get out of the trap.
I don't sell productivity. I sell liberation. I'm here to give you the keys to the cage you didn't even know you were in. Because the world doesn't need another person who knows a lot. It needs you to finally ship the work you were born to do.
My story doesn't have to be your story. You can skip the $67,000 mistake and go straight to the breakthrough.