Brain dump on goals, ambition, fulfillment and agency

An old screenshot I found in my gallery. It's such a paradoxical thought.

I found this old screenshot in my gallery recently. I don't remember when or why I saved it, but for some reason it stuck with me this time.

I've been feeling some version of this lately. It's a kind of puzzle some of us face at some point in our lives. And I think it's worth thinking about.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that we don't simply want to achieve things. We want to feel something about the way we achieved them. If something comes too easily, there isn't much satisfaction in it. You wanted something, you got it, and you didn't really have to grow to get there. But you can also take it too far in the other direction. You can chase something that is so far beyond your reach that no amount of effort seems to be enough. After a while, the goal stops being something you're pursuing and starts becoming a measurement of yourself. You didn't just fail at the thing. You start feeling like you failed as a person.

And then there is another kind of dissatisfaction that I find even more interesting. You can succeed and still not feel satisfied if you don't feel like you were the one who made it happen. Someone else opened the doors, made the decisions, or carried most of the weight. You got there, but somehow the success doesn't feel entirely yours. You got there, but did you really do it?

So I think that's why autonomy matters to me. By autonomy, I don't mean doing everything alone. I don't even believe anyone is self-made. How can someone ever be self-made? Parents, family, friends, opportunities, luck and circumstances have all played a part in where I am. There are so many things I could never have done alone.

Maybe this is why I've never been a very conventional person. I've never been very good at simply going with the flow. Even when I was younger, I had this instinct to ask myself, "But why this way?"

In college, I remember having a pretty clear sense that I wanted to do something different with my career. I was in a tier 3 college and came from a middle class family, so there were certain paths that were more visible and accessible to me, and there was nothing wrong with choosing them. They just didn't feel like what I wanted for myself. I was drawn towards product startups and small teams building something meaningful. It wasn't a particularly sensible path for someone in my position, and I wasn't even talented enough at the time to know whether I could pull it off. I skipped the campus interviews anyway.

It took almost two years after graduation before I got the kind of job I had imagined. In hindsight, you could call those two years wasted. Or you could say that I was steering. Eventually I ended up working remotely with crypto companies and a few different product teams, learning things and earning amounts of money I had never even imagined earning. None of that was part of some carefully designed career plan. I was just trying to get somewhere that felt more like me.

Of course, that path came with its own costs. There are so many things I missed out on, and there are things I would do differently now. But I still don't think the answer was to have simply gone with the flow.

I think I've been like this even in much smaller things. In college, I was constantly discovering things that weren't really part of what we were being taught. New ideas, projects, technologies, books, hackathons and opportunities. I felt there was so much more out there that people weren't getting to see. So one day I made a poster. Handcrafted. It had things I thought could spark some curiosity: interesting projects, new technologies, books worth reading, upcoming hackathons, programs like Google Summer of Code and whatever else I had stumbled upon. I put it up outside our classroom.

Quietly. Anonymously. I did this for as long as I can remember. At first, people just glanced at them. Eventually they caught attention and some students even started doing something similar for their classrooms. It sort of created a minor ripple effect. Nobody ever found out I started it, and I think that's exactly why it worked. The focus stayed on the content. That's when I learnt that when you remove ego, ideas can travel further. Sometimes sharing something with no expectation of recognition can be more fulfilling than being recognized for it.

Maybe that's also why I've always enjoyed making things. Even as a kid, when everyone else seemed more interested in sports, I was drawing portraits and monuments or making little 3D models of buildings out of thermocol. These were slow, slightly strange hobbies. Every pencil stroke required patience. Every little piece of a model had to be cut and placed carefully. I think I liked the feeling of taking something from my head and slowly making it real.

And maybe that's what I keep looking for in the things I do. I'm drawn towards things that stretch me a little beyond where I am. Things that make me spend nights trying to understand something that isn't working, throw away an implementation and start again, and finally get something right after failing at it repeatedly. There is something deeply satisfying about looking at something you've built and knowing that a piece of your thinking now exists outside your own head.

But I don't want to romanticize struggle either. There is a point where difficulty stops being meaningful and simply becomes suffering. Some things are just too far away from where you are, and endlessly pushing yourself towards them doesn't necessarily make you stronger. Sometimes you have to ask whether you're even climbing the right mountain. Maybe it's about finding that sweet-spot.

The relationship between challenge, likelihood of success and autonomy.

I've been thinking about all of this through the way I think about life itself. I've always imagined life as being on a raft, drifting down a river of time. I can steer, but I can't control the river. The current, the weather, the people I meet, the things that happen around me will always have some say in where I end up.

Maybe goals are like that too. I don't want everything to be guaranteed, because then there isn't much left to navigate. But I also don't want the current to be so strong that nothing I do can change where I end up. I want enough difficulty that I have to grow, enough possibility that my choices still matter, and enough uncertainty that I can't simply predict the ending.

Maybe that's the sweet spot I'm looking for.

Something difficult enough that I have to grow to achieve it, but not so impossible that failure is almost predetermined. Something where other people can help me, where luck can help me, where circumstances can help me, but where I can still recognize my own hand in the outcome.

I think that's also why visibility has been such a strange thing for me. Of course I want people to see what I build. I want the things I spend nights thinking/building/writing about to matter to someone other than me. But I don't want to become better at performing the appearance of building things than actually building them. I don't want to manufacture a personality because it travels faster than the work.

Maybe that's naive. Maybe it's part of why things have been harder than they needed to be. But I still want to recognize myself in the things I do. I don't need to have done everything alone. I don't need to pretend luck wasn't involved. I just want my own choices and effort to be part of the story too.

Maybe that's what fulfillment is for me. Not simply getting what I wanted, but feeling that the process of getting there meant something too. That I became a little different along the way, and that when I look back at what I built, I can still recognize something of myself in it.

I don't know if that's the answer. I'm still figuring it out.