Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
It is a tough world out there. You set out to find what you should work on and it lures you with all kinds of baits - power, fame, money, approval of society. These baits are so seductive that it’s easy to drift along. Heck, most times you won’t even know you have drifted. Navigating this labyrinth of bullshit is one of the hardest challenges of being like Steve Jobs.
At the core, this problem has a very straight-forward and well-documented formula -
Figure out what you want from life - fame, money, stability etc.
Figure out what genuinely interests you.
Find career opportunities based on your skills.
Find the largest overlap between 1, 2 and 3.
At the end of this post, I will be linking to 3 articles that have become my source of truth for finding what to work on. The formula isn’t the tough part though. It never was. The tough part is staying true to the goal.
I want to tell you four stories from my life that I think will help you navigate this challenge. I have drifted quite a bit - sometimes I listened to people I shouldn’t have, sometimes I didn’t understand what I was getting into, sometimes I lost sight of what was important.
Your reality has more colour than my words can ever paint. But the hope is, these stories will help you not make the same mistakes I made.
Campusfeed
In the final year of undergraduate school, three of my friends and I built Campusfeed, a messaging app for professors and students. Something like Twitter but for college. The reception was amazing. Within days of the launch, we maxed out our server budget. Things were looking good.
Campusfeed opened a lot of doors for us - collaboration opportunities, job offers, speaking engagements, you name it. For a bunch of college kids, this was the dream life.
As college neared its end, we all met to decide the fate of Campusfeed. Would we continue to run it after college?
Before I could bring up my take on the matter, all my friends told me they had found jobs that they were going to take. I got quite upset. I wanted that dream life to last - working with my best friends, being famous in college.
The funny part is, when my anger settled down a bit, I felt this huge sense of relief. I hated running Campusfeed.
In one year, I had developed a huge disdain for social networks - I had learned what it took to get one started and I just hated that process. And so even though I loved working with my friends and I loved that start-up life, I had to let go.
Today, I look back at that time fondly but I thank heavens that I didn’t continue building Campusfeed.
Business school
2 years into my job, I realised I did not like it all that much. I wanted to have that high of starting up again. Everyone told me - you need to learn business from business school. Not knowing any better, I agreed.
I prepared for the entrance exam, worked hard, got a great score and started applying to colleges.
But that process! That process crushed me.
To begin with, I found that I was part of the most over-represented demographic that applied to business schools - Indian IT male. I told myself, this should not matter; if I am good, they should take me in.
Next, for the college essays, I found advice after advice on how to NOT be yourself. How to sound a certain way. How to highlight that you are more than just a computer nerd. How to show you have an international upbringing. The more I read, the more confused I got about the point of all this. Everyone was faking. Somehow, even the expectation was to be fake. How was this okay?
I persevered anyway and applied to one of the top colleges. I had broken several rules and had let my essay reflect who I was truthfully. The hope was - maybe they will appreciate my authenticity?
It was when I got that letter of rejection from the business school that I let myself feel what had just happened. I was devastated.
It took me a while but I concluded that this wasn’t a game I wanted to play. I am sure there is some cheat code to writing essays that get you selected. I am sure I would have figured it out had I persisted. It was just not for me.
In hindsight, this event marks the day I started taking side-projects seriously. I wanted to learn business and if I couldn’t learn this way, learning by doing became my next best option.
Learning by doing turned out to be the best fit for me. It cut through bullshit and let me learn how simple business was at its core.
Easier said than done, but be ballsy when you see something that doesn’t make sense. This world has lots of games that make no sense.
Proso and education
Towards the end of college, I had gotten a strong feeling that I wanted to do something in the field of engineering education. It is a large problem with a big impact. I loved explaining tough concepts in simple terms, sort of like teaching. It fit my criteria.
After some thought, this is the pitch I put together:
We help make engineers awesome by working with them on live projects. We think real-world projects make for the best learning and so, we go out of our way to get you into the real world.
As it happens, challenging projects are hard to find in the world. Most are taken by huge conglomerates running to make a profit. That’s where we see an opportunity in the non-profit sector. It’s a simple equation really - we need projects to learn from and to make an impact with. Non-profits need ways to improve their effectiveness. We are putting them together.
Why do a library management software project when you can build a drone fleet management software for natural calamities? Why build a timer app when you can build a large-scale data collection app to analyse epicentres of human trafficking? Why build the same line-follower bot when you can reinvent the wheelchair?
In theory, this sounds like a good idea. Anybody who has run a marketplace, though, will realise how tricky this is. Let’s ignore that for the time being.
The first order of business for me was to find students to work with. For 2 months, I cold-emailed professors from random colleges everyday. Eventually, a college in Bengaluru agreed. We found a project from an NGO and setup a workshop for the students. The goal was to build a website for the NGO during the course of that 2-day workshop with the students.
I was psyched. I prepared a sexy presentation simplifying concepts of web development and took the stage. I wanted to dazzle the class.
The presentation lasted 30 minutes. The workshop was for 2 days. For the rest of the time, it was me and my friend going over to each student and helping them with their unique problem. Somebody was stuck with setup, while somebody else was mulling over why a line of code was written in a specific way. It was chaos.
This is when I uncovered the real problem statement in education. Students didn’t need the presentation. Content is already out there. They needed that individual attention.
Once I understood this, I kept running into roadblocks while finding solutions. My solutions were either technically impossible (AI tutor) or unscalable (become teacher yourself), or too expensive to implement (start an engineering college). It became a much harder problem, given my skills and what I wanted from life. Eventually, I had to take a step back.
Sometimes, love is not enough. Your timing is off, or the alignment is off. And that’s just the way it is. We got to move on.
Khanmigo by Khan academy is a recent example of solving this problem in a way that was impossible until recently.
Language, evolution and AI
For me, the most reliable signal for finding what I should work on was this -
What do you read about, without any prompting from anyone? Follow that line of curiosity.
I read a book named The Blind Watchmaker when I was 16. It talked in great detail about how bats navigate their surroundings. I found it riveting. That led me to a bunch of books on evolution and natural selection. Eventually, I found a book on natural language. It said natural languages are almost like an organism - their hosts are human minds, their goal is survival and replication, and they evolve and grow, just like an organism.
Mind was blown.
The more you read how English has reached where it is today, the more this will make sense. (imagine how this phrase came to life - “whodunit”)
You see how I am geeking out about this? That’s what you need. Your topic need not be technical. Maybe it can be remixed with one of your skills? It is a weird world - people are making a living doing all kinds of things. Take the job description of the waitbutwhy guy for instance -
“Writer of 8,000-to-40,000-word articles about a bunch of different topics, with cursing and stick figures, on a remarkably sporadic schedule.”
My line of curiosity eventually led me to wanting to understand how humans process and understand natural language. Why does English have such weird rules? How do I as a human immediately get the meaning of “trojan horse” in this meme below?
These questions get me going. I realise I am touting the same AI horn everyone else is talking about these days. But I have been at it since way before it was in. And I will be at it long after everyone moves on to the next cool thing too.
That being said, to be honest, I think Steve Jobs might have romanticised things a bit. Firstly, I still don’t know if this is what I will work on for the rest of my life. Secondly, it’s an effort to stay in love. It’s not a happily-ever-after. There are days where this pursuit drives me insane. It takes effort everyday to keep things going, just like any other relationship.
Now, on to the resources I mentioned at the start of this article. These essays do a great job of walking you through how to find what to work on; so I will ask you to go through them. Each one is a lot to take in. So take your time. This endeavour cannot be rushed.
All the best!