Note: I wrote this one week before moving to a new city with a bag full of dreams. Hope everything works out. Take a coffee, clear your mind, and give it a read.

Personally, I feel a little icky when someone uses connects some behaviour with our “primal brain instinct”. I feel it over-generalizes our actions and give us a free pass to “blame it on evolution”. Regardless of my pre-conceived notions about it, I’ll use it this time to convey how far we’ve come so far as a species, and just how significant the role of language and tools have been in it. Tools are how our ancestors have provided for their families, whether it be using tools to hunt, or to use it for agriculture, or to protect themselves. From the invention of wheel, to the steam engine, to the computer - we can label every invention as a tool that solved a problem that felt unfathomable to our ancestors. While on one hand we have tools that make our lives easier, language is something help us document information to our progeny. Language is how I’m able to convey this very thought through this blog. First we developed the tools, and then used our language to convey to others. Once you go down a deep enough rabbit hole, you’ll realize that the world around us is a direct result of eons of tools building and language understanding.

Without realizing, or even having the ability to realize about these things, in me there was always a desire to create something. When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut not because I wanted to go into space, but because I thought astronauts made rockets. I was never really the smart kid in the traditional sense, but I’ve always treated my work with dedication and willingness to learn because I believed it provided me with knowledge to create something on my own. Creativity has always been a muscle rather than something you are born with, at least for me. The process of making something that people want - the idea of leaving something behind and doing something meaningful resonates deeply with me. I’ve talked previously about the idea of craftsmen, and how throughout history we can find countless people who found their ikigai by honing their crafts.

I’ve been learning/working in AI from the past 6 years. I’ve always treated work as craft and each treated milestone as an opportunity to learn something new. I’ve worked on many really interesting projects solo to prove that I too can build tools. I learned early in my life that “all talk and no show” is of no use, and I need to backup my knowledge with something actual to show. When I was 13, I build my first video game without knowing programming, then began working on a second 3D game without knowing Unity, learned 3D graphics design in Blender a year later, picked up solving math and cs algorithm problems in Python, worked on designing a dating app(a point to be noted is that this was during a brief period of motivation after watching Social Network). Almost none of them worked, but it taught me an important lesson that obsession and agency is one hell of a way to satisfy curiosity. During this journey, I developed an appetite of risk, stepping into unknown territories, resistance to fear of failure and as a result - a thick skin to brush off any doubt. You’ll be surprised how many ideas die because people aren’t obsessed or they give up really early. I get that not all ideas work, but it is better to fail in the real world than to fail in your mind.

I’m a tool guy, but let us step out of fairyland and be pragmatic. I can talk all about how I’ve had “calling” and make it cinematic, but the reality is that I’m far away from the goal. Turns out making “tool” and using “language” to broadcast your work is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY hard, and the initial analogy is brutal oversimplification of providing value in society. How do you know what to build? Do you know what people want? Do you know even what YOU want? Can you innovate something that hasn’t been done before? Even if you know all these, do you have the language to sell your tool to people? These are all really hard questions that have puzzled people for decades and have no clear roadmaps. You make your own story, one step at a time. With all the work I’ve done so far in my small career, I just have ideas of what tool I want, and have build only that(and maybe a little on how to convey it through language). Building tools for myself helped me develop an intuition for clarity. There is a huge challenge in understanding in what people want, and then making it, and then another hurdle in getting it to them.

I’m really optimistic about the future, even though I feel I’m behind, an unfinished path often means there are opportunities to learn and progress to be made. I still have to learn the language of tools, and then learn all about the language of selling the tools. One thing that makes me really looking forward to future is that I’ve had proof just how invaluable having obsession and agency is in your journey. The dots only make sense when you connect them backwards, so stay hungry and stay obsessed.