I am 23. I live in Abbottabad, Pakistan. I started from zero, with no capital, and today I run Buzz Capitol, an independent digital news site I founded and lead as CEO and Editor-in-Chief; Digi Skill Pro Academy, where I chair free online earning classes; findservicenest.com, a service-based site; and more than 15 YouTube channels. I have also written six books. People sometimes ask me what I would tell a 23-year-old starting today. Here is my honest answer.

First: start with a skill, not with a plan to get rich. A skill is something you can do for someone else, today, and be paid for it. That is the whole foundation. When I started, I did not have money to invest, and I did not have connections to lean on. What I had was the ability to learn something useful and offer it to someone who needed it. Everything else — the channels, the news site, the academy — came later, and it all came from that one starting point: be useful to one person first.

Too many people my age start with the wrong question. They ask: what is the fastest way to earn? The faster question is the worse question, because it leads to shortcuts, and shortcuts lead to nothing you can build on. The right question is: what can I learn well enough that someone will pay me for it? Answer that, and the rest has a shape. Without it, you are just busy.

Second: serve someone before you try to build an audience. I know this sounds backwards in a world that celebrates followers. I have more than 10 million followers across platforms, and I am telling you plainly: followers came after the work, not before it. The work that mattered first was client work — delivering something real for a paying client through findservicenest.com, keeping a promise, meeting a deadline, listening to feedback. One client who trusts you is worth more than a thousand people who scrolled past you. If you cannot serve one person well, you cannot serve ten thousand.

Third: stay steady. This is the least exciting advice and the most important. Most people quit in the quiet stretch — after the excitement fades and before anything looks like success. I have lived in that stretch more than once. Buzz Capitol did not become a news site in a week. The academy did not reach 10,000 students in a month. The channels did not grow overnight. What carried me through was not motivation. Motivation runs out. What carried me was a simple routine: show up, do the work, learn from it, repeat. If you can do that for a year, you will be further along than almost everyone who started with you.

Fourth: learn in public, but learn honestly. I run a free academy because I believe learning should not be locked behind a price. In 2025, more than 10,000 students joined our free classes, and more than 5,000 of them were reported as successful and earning. I share those numbers because they are what was reported to me, and I am proud of them — but I will not pretend that learning is easy just because it is free. It is not. Free removes the price, not the work. The students who succeeded were the ones who showed up, practised, and finished what they started. If you are starting today, be that student. Do not collect courses. Finish one thing.

Fifth: write down what you are learning. I have written six books — The Silent Disconnect, The Digital Empire, Echoes of Truth, The Resilient Mindset, Beyond the 9 to 5, and Behind the Headlines — and every one of them started as me trying to understand something clearly enough to explain it. Writing forces you to think. It turns a vague feeling into a clear idea. You do not need to write a book. A page a week, in your own words, about what you tried and what you learned, will change how fast you grow. And one day, those pages might become something bigger. Mine did.

Sixth: do not compare your beginning to someone else's middle. This is the hardest one, because the comparison is everywhere. You will see people your age who look further ahead, richer, louder. Most of what you see is a highlight, not a life. I know, because people see my highlight too. What they do not see is the early work, the failed attempts, the quiet months. Your path does not have to look like anyone else's. Starting from Abbottabad taught me that where you start does not decide where you finish. What decides it is what you do, day after day, with what you have.

Finally: keep your name clean. Everything I publish goes out under my own name — every article, every book, every post. I do that on purpose. When your name is on the work, you think twice before publishing something you cannot stand behind. That is not a burden. It is a filter. At 23, your reputation is the most valuable thing you own, and it is also the easiest thing to lose. Protect it. Be honest about what you know and what you do not. Correct your mistakes openly. Let people trust you because you earned it, not because you claimed it.

If I could hand a 23-year-old one sentence to carry, it would be this: learn one useful skill, serve one person well, and keep showing up. That is not a shortcut, and it is not a secret. It is the whole thing. Start today, and a year from now you will not recognise where you began.