Stealing Time
I was 24 when I was working on the Android Wear team. I remember my manager as an extraordinarily ambitious old man. In my head, he was “past the hump”, because he was 35. This is the age I am now.
Where was he getting his energy and his drive from? It just didn’t make sense. I picked up on more clues about him along the way, but none of it fit my idea of where ambition came from. I couldn’t find a core trauma or sense even a particularly powerful melancholy from the guy. He seemed mostly even-keel, in pursuit of what he wanted and never seemed to question it. His energy was consistent where mine was burst-y. He seemed to know how long it would take for him to get where he wanted, he seemed fine with it.
I always felt like there was never enough time to get things done right. Which is funny, because I’m stealing time before going to a Friendsgiving to write this. I think I conquered my inner perfectionist :P
Opportunity
I jumped jobs recently and I cannot really tell you why in a concise statement. There are a bunch of elements I’m excited about: it’s small, it’s green technology, it’s hardware, it’s tons of autonomy. But, Homo Economicus would say I am taking a very strange deal. It’s not a bad deal, but it is strange.
I left Google. This isn’t the strange part, lots of people are doing that. I moved into the hardware space, something completely new for me, and to be fair, lots of people are doing that too. Zipline, Tesla, Cruise are all healthy businesses that hire lots of people like me. But instead of chasing the highest echelon of software as understood by most of my peers - AI startups like Anthropic, OpenAI and others - I went in the other direction. I couldn’t stop myself if I wanted to.
Whenever I heard someone talk about opportunities at these AI companies, my mind went blank. I just didn’t see them as opportunities. But this battery startup trying to make Gigawatt-hours of sodium-ion grid storage systems? That was cool. I don’t know why it’s cool but at least part of it is that most people don’t think it’s cool. Most people don’t even know about it.
Most of my life has been explaining to people where I’m from - Hyderabad, India. Most people in 1997 US knew nothing about India. Even these days, it’s the rare American who knows about Hyderabad.
Explaining something obscure, not fully understood by people but is actually quite important to me, fits a pattern of my being.
The Good Life
I am driven mostly by curiosity. Left to my own devices, I would just look up Wikipedia articles and read them. I’d then click through to the sources and make my way through those. When that was done, I’d Google certain phrases from the sources and find people talking about it.
I spent years in this mode, engaging in intellectual gluttony. I was eventually forced to reckon with this excess and organize it into something that made sense for my life. Somewhere around 2021 I came to a way of balanced living: curiosity with action. Learning and believing but also testing and playing.
The past few weeks have been very heavy on learning. There is something exhausting about making big changes in your life even if they are all good things that feel more like you. You just have to learn so many new things. You have to leave behind old ways of being.
It’s a good type of exhausting. I’m learning to recover from it better than I did in my 20s. And I hope there’s a lot more of this energy in the future, I’m ready for it.