The phenomenon of individuals failing to identify what they truly want in life represents a foundational challenge within contemporary behavioral science, cognitive psychology, and social philosophy. While modern industrial societies offer an unprecedented expansion of personal autonomy and consumer choice, self-reported metrics of purpose, fulfillment, and long-term life satisfaction frequently stagnate or decline.

This paradox suggests that the primary obstacle to self-directed fulfillment is not a lack of opportunity, but an underlying epistemic deficit regarding authentic goal selection. Individuals routinely pursue trajectories that fail to generate lasting well-being, raising critical questions about how personal preferences are constructed, internalised, and evaluated.

An investigation into this intentionality crisis reveals that human desire is rarely generated in an isolated vacuum. Instead, goal selection operates at the dynamic intersection of two primary mechanisms: the social transmission of desire via imitative frameworks, and the psychological misregulation of internal motivation.

By synthesizing René Girard’s theory of Mimetic Desire, Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot’s Self-Concordance Model, and Daniel Gilbert’s research on Affective Forecasting, this piece analyses why individuals struggle to discern authentic ambition from socially mediated imperatives — and outlines the structural pathways necessary to reclaim psychological goal ownership.

The social architecture of wanting

A foundational misconception in classical economic and psychological models of decision-making is the assumption that human agents possess autonomous, internally generated preferences. Anthropological and philosophical scholarship — most notably the mimetic theory developed by René Girard — demonstrates that human desire is inherently relational and imitative.

Rather than moving directly from the subject to an object based on intrinsic utility, desire requires a mediator: a model whose valuation of the object signals its desirability to the subject.

In this triangular structure, the subject does not desire the object for its inherent properties; the subject desires the object because the model desires it. The model serves as an existential exemplar, promising a sense of completeness, status, or identity that the subject feels they lack. Consequently, what individuals perceive as deeply personal ambition is frequently an unacknowledged copy of another agent’s preference.

Girard distinguishes between two operational modes of mediation:

• External mediation occurs when the mediator is distant from the subject — geographically, socially, or historically — preventing direct contact or rivalry. The subject imitates the mediator’s choices without entering into personal competition, allowing the model to serve as an idealized benchmark.
• Internal mediation occurs when the mediator exists within the subject’s immediate social sphere: peers, colleagues, family. Here the distance between subject and model collapses, converting the model into a direct rival. Because both agents compete for identical status markers within the same domain, internal mediation inevitably generates friction, envy, and social escalation.

Modern digital ecosystems, particularly social media platforms, hyper-accelerate internal mediation by collapsing social distance. By constantly exposing individuals to the curated lifestyle choices and achievements of near-peers, these platforms present an endless array of mediators — immersing users in perpetual mimetic competition and severely distorting their perception of personal priorities.

Thin desires versus thick desires

Building upon Girardian mimesis, contemporary motivational analysis categorizes personal ambitions along a spectrum of authenticity, contrasting thin desires with thick desires.

Thin desires represent preferences adopted rapidly from external models without critical reflection or integration into the individual’s broader identity. They are volatile, highly reactive to social environments, and driven by the implicit promise of immediate social validation. Because thin desires do not originate from deep personal values, attaining them yields negligible psychological satisfaction — often leaving the agent with a sense of emptiness.

Thick desires are enduring commitments rooted in an individual’s personal history, core values, and authentic interests. They exhibit remarkable resilience against social pressure and environmental fluctuation, reflecting long-term identity development and generating sustained well-being when fulfilled.

The systemic inability to distinguish between thin and thick desires accounts for much of the directional confusion experienced in adulthood. Individuals frequently dedicate years to pursuing thin desires — specific corporate titles, prestige metrics, lifestyle symbols — only to discover upon achievement that the reward fails to satisfy their underlying psychological needs.

The internalized trap: introjection and the “should” imperative

While mimetic theory explains the social vectors through which external goals are transmitted, self-determination theory explains how these goals are processed within the psyche. Kennon Sheldon and Andrew Elliot developed the Self-Concordance Model to evaluate the degree to which personal goals express authentic interests and integrated values rather than external pressures.

The model classifies goal pursuit across four motivational regulations, positioned along a continuum from controlled to autonomous:

1. External regulation. The goal is pursued purely to achieve tangible external rewards or avoid punishment — the most controlled form of motivation.
2. Introjected regulation. The goal is driven by internalized pressures such as avoiding guilt, anxiety, or maintaining ego-defensive self-esteem. The goal resides within the person, but remains unintegrated with the core self.
3. Identified regulation. The goal is consciously valued as personally important, even if the underlying tasks are not inherently enjoyable.
4. Intrinsic motivation. The goal is pursued because the activity itself is interesting and engaging — pure autonomous regulation.

The Self-Concordance Index is quantified by assessing the relative strength of autonomous reasons over controlled reasons across a set of personal goals:

High self-concordance scores (SC > 0) indicate genuine goal ownership. Negative scores indicate that an individual’s goal structure is dominated by external obligations and introjected compulsions.

The tyranny of “should” and the hollow victory

A critical linguistic and psychological signpost of low self-concordance is the systemic reliance on the word “should”. When individuals conceptualize their aspirations in terms of what they should do — rather than what they genuinely want or value — they reveal the dominance of introjected regulation. The “should” imperative reflects an internalized proxy for external expectations, forcing the individual into an ego-defensive posture where failure threatens basic self-worth.

This dynamic culminates in what behavioral scientists term the hollow victory phenomenon. The causal chain begins when an individual selects a goal based on introjected or external pressures. Through intense effort and raw willpower, they attain it. But because the goal was not self-concordant, its achievement fails to satisfy the three basic psychological needs central to well-being: autonomy (volition over one’s life), competence (feeling effective), and relatedness (meaningful connection).

Consequently, the individual experiences an abrupt sense of cognitive dissonance upon reaching major milestones — asking “now what?” because the anticipated emotional payoff never materializes.

Cognitive miscalculations: affective forecasting

The challenge of self-knowledge is further compounded by systemic biases in how humans project their future emotional states. Even when individuals attempt to choose goals independent of immediate social pressure, their capacity to anticipate what will actually make them happy is structurally limited by errors in affective forecasting — a domain extensively investigated by Daniel Gilbert and Tim Wilson.

These errors operate through three primary distortions:

1. Impact bias. The systematic tendency to overestimate both the intensity and duration of future emotional reactions. Individuals mistakenly believe that achieving a desired goal — a promotion, wealth — will permanently alter their baseline happiness.
2. Focalism. The tendency to focus exclusively on the target event being imagined, while ignoring the complex array of routine activities, daily hassles, and secondary stressors that will continue to shape future emotional states.
3. Immune neglect. The failure to anticipate the mind’s capacity for hedonic adaptation. The psychological immune system rapidly normalizes positive outcomes, converting newly acquired circumstances into a taken-for-granted baseline and eroding the anticipated affective gain.

These cognitive errors work synergistically with mimetic desire. An individual perceives a social model enjoying an object or status; assumes through impact bias that acquiring it will produce enduring joy; hyper-focuses on the target while ignoring the daily friction required to maintain it; and ultimately experiences hedonic adaptation upon attainment. This cycle locks the individual into a repeating loop of misdirected effort.

Second- and third-order implications

At the individual level, sustained commitment to non-concordant goals depletes executive function and self-regulatory resources. Because controlled motivation relies on effortful self-control rather than autonomous energy, agents operating under high introjection experience chronic cognitive fatigue and elevated psychological stress. Over time this generates ego-depletion and chronic burnout — consuming immense self-regulatory energy without yielding psychological renewal.

Prolonged suppression of authentic preferences in favour of imitative status markers causes mimetic anhedonia. Individuals gradually lose interoceptive awareness of their genuine interests, rendering them incapable of registering spontaneous pleasure or curiosity. This manifests mid-career as severe identity crises — occurring when individuals achieve long-sought metrics mandated by internal mediation, only to realize that their entire trajectory was built around preferences that were never their own.

At the institutional level, widespread mimetic desire generates zero-sum dynamics that distort labor markets. When large populations operate under identical mimetic models, societal talent concentrates unnaturally within a narrow band of high-prestige industries regardless of structural need or individual suitability. Concurrently, as internal mediation escalates within organizations, colleagues view one another primarily as rivals competing for identical thin rewards — eroding relational trust, diminishing psychological safety, and replacing collaborative innovation with defensive status preservation.

Reclaiming goal ownership: the diagnostic audit

To establish true goal ownership, individuals must subject their ambitions to structured diagnostic evaluation — separating thin, mimetic preferences from thick, autonomous commitments.

1. Origin traceability audit. Identify the specific historical context or social model from which a candidate goal emerged. Asking “whose life was I observing when I first decided I wanted this?” disrupts subconscious mimesis by bringing the mediator into conscious awareness.
2. Counterfactual public-visibility test. Evaluate whether the goal would retain its appeal if stripped of all public visibility and social recognition. If its subjective value drops to zero without an audience, it is driven by external or introjected regulation.
3. Value alignment test. Evaluate the goal against long-term personal history and core values. Thick desires demonstrate deep continuity with an agent’s narrative; thin desires appear as abrupt disruptions driven by recent social exposure.
4. Process vs. outcome friction assessment. Analyse whether you value the daily operational activities the goal requires, or merely the abstract status of completion. High self-concordance requires that the process itself provides engagement or identified meaning.

Operationalizing self-concordance

To shift motivation from controlled to autonomous regulation, both individual practice and environment must incorporate structural safeguards:

• Model distancing and environmental design. Deliberately creating spatial and digital distance from toxic mimetic models reduces the constant reinforcement of thin desires. Limiting exposure to status-driven platforms resets baseline perception and creates space for authentic interests to surface.
• Explicit value hierarchy mapping. Establishing a prioritized ranking of core personal values provides a structural buffer against external mimesis. When forced to choose between competing pursuits, decisions are arbitrated by explicit hierarchies rather than immediate social pressure.
• Cultivation of unstructured silence. Extended periods of solitude devoid of digital stimulation or social monitoring allow low-level internal feedback mechanisms to re-emerge, disrupting the continuous loops of internal mediation.
• Linguistic reframing. Systematically replacing “I should” with “I choose to” or “I value” forces cognitive reassessment. If an ambition cannot be reframed in terms of authentic choice, it must be flagged for elimination or realignment.

The path to autonomous goal selection

The widespread inability to discern genuine personal desires is not an intractable flaw of human nature, but a predictable consequence of unexamined social imitation and misregulated internal motivation. When individuals operate without awareness of mimetic dynamics, they default to copying the ambitions of surrounding models — pursuing thin desires that promise fulfillment but deliver hollow victories.

This structural failure is reinforced by the cognitive biases of affective forecasting and the internalized pressure of introjected mandates, binding agents to life trajectories that fail to satisfy fundamental psychological needs.

Reclaiming direction requires a deliberate transition from controlled to autonomous intentionality. By deploying diagnostic tools to audit the origins of desire, mapping explicit value hierarchies, and establishing boundaries against external mimesis, individuals can systematically filter out introjected expectations. The realization of authentic intentionality lies in aligning personal striving with self-concordant values — moving away from imitative compliance and toward goals that are genuinely owned, deeply valued, and intrinsically fulfilling.

We've built an entire system around the idea that this one decision locks in your next forty years. Pick Computer Science, you're coding forever. Pick English, you're teaching or editing manuscripts. Pick something like Philosophy or Art History, and everyone around you starts asking what your backup plan is.

I dropped out after one semester. Not because I didn't respect education — because I realized the degree was a proxy for something I could get faster by just building.

Here's the thing nobody tells you at eighteen: the connection between your major and your career is mostly a myth.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has the data to back this up — roughly 27% of college graduates end up working in a field directly related to their major. Flip that number around and it means three out of every four people in any office, agency, or boardroom are doing something completely disconnected from what their diploma says. The system we're all pressured into optimizing for barely predicts the outcome it claims to guarantee.

Why the degree stopped mattering

Employers hire skills and character, not course codes.

Unless you're heading into a strictly licensed field — medicine, civil engineering, law — nobody's actually checking your transcript. What they're checking is whether you can think clearly, communicate under pressure, adapt when the plan falls apart, and execute without someone holding your hand.

A philosophy major who can break down a complex argument and explain it simply will outperform a business major who can't string two coherent sentences together in a client meeting. I've seen this firsthand building teams — the person who studied something "impractical" but learned how to think rigorously is often sharper than the person who memorized a syllabus that maps neatly to their job title.

College was never about the content — it was about learning how to learn.

The actual value of those four years isn't the specific facts in the textbook. It's the discipline of showing up, structuring an argument, managing your own time without a parent enforcing it, and navigating environments full of people who don't think like you. That's the real curriculum. The topic of your term paper is just the vehicle.

I got a version of that compressed into a year of building instead of four years of lectures — different vehicle, same underlying skill: learning how to learn fast, under pressure, with real stakes attached.

The market moves faster than any university can.

Universities are slow by design. Curriculum changes go through committees, approvals, tenure reviews — a process that takes years. Meanwhile the actual economy shifts every few quarters. Growth marketing, prompt engineering, signal intelligence, no-code development — none of this existed in a syllabus when most current professionals were choosing their majors. By the time a specialized textbook gets published, half of it is already outdated. You end up learning the real version on the job regardless of what you studied.

Why so many people walk away from their major

If the major doesn't lock in your future, why do so many graduates actively pivot away from what they spent four years studying? A few patterns keep showing up.

The gap between the classroom and the actual job. Political science looks fascinating when you're debating international relations theory in a seminar. It looks a lot different when your entry-level job is 80 cold calls a day for donor outreach. The academic version and the working version of most fields are barely related. When people realize this, walking away isn't failure — it's clarity.

Money is not optional. Passion for literature or sociology is real. So is rent. So are student loans. When the entry-level pay in your field of study doesn't cover your actual life, pivoting toward higher-paying, higher-growth industries isn't a betrayal of your interests — it's basic math.

You're not the same person you were at eighteen. Nobody has enough life experience at that age to lock in a forty-year career decision. Your twenties expose you to industries, people, and problems you had zero visibility into as a teenager. A biology major discovering they love product design isn't a contradiction. It's just what happens when you actually go out and live.

Burnout is real and preventable. Certain paths — pre-med, corporate law, high-finance tracks — come stapled to brutal hours and toxic cultures. Plenty of people get a taste of that in an internship and consciously choose a different life. That's not weakness. That's someone who did the math on what their twenties and thirties are actually worth.

Skills stack, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Writing essays becomes copywriting. Running a lab experiment becomes structured product thinking. Organizing a student club becomes running events and managing timelines under pressure. Once you notice that your foundational skills translate everywhere, staying boxed into your declared major stops making sense.

The best industries right now didn't exist when the curriculum was written. Growth, content strategy, AI-native products, signal intelligence — these are fields being built in real time. Nobody teaches them in a four-year program because the field is younger than the students studying it. If you want to work at the edge of what's actually happening, you have to step outside the classroom to find it.

Building something yourself teaches you more than any single major could. Running a company forces you into sales, branding, financial management, and client relationships simultaneously — often in the same week. No undergraduate track prepares you for that kind of range. You build the range by doing the thing, not by studying an abstraction of the thing.

What I'd tell someone staring at this decision

Stop treating your major like it's a contract you can't break.

Your degree — or the absence of one — isn't a life sentence. It's not even the most interesting thing about you. What actually matters is whether you can set a goal, push through the boring parts, synthesize information fast, and finish what you start. You can prove all of that inside a classroom or completely outside one.

A few things I'd actually act on if I were starting over:

Own the narrative instead of apologizing for it. Whatever background you have — finished degree, dropped out, self-taught — frame it as an asset, not a gap you need to explain away. My own path gets brought up in almost every serious conversation I have with investors or collaborators. Nobody's ever penalized me for it. If anything, it's the first thing that makes people lean in.

Build a portfolio, not a transcript. Nobody hands me a job because of a piece of paper. They look at what I've shipped — the company, the content studio, the actual output. Proof of work will always outweigh a line on a resume. If you're not in school, this matters even more. If you are, start building it now instead of waiting for graduation.

Become a permanent self-educator. The people actually winning right now aren't the ones who memorized a textbook once. They're the ones who never stopped updating their skill set — through real projects, real failures, and constantly rebuilding their understanding as the field moves.

Your major, your degree, your dropout story — none of it is the finish line. It's just where you started running from.

Where you go from here is entirely on you.

Not what you know — that's searchable. Not what you can do — that's trainable. How you think. The speed at which you process ambiguity, the depth at which you evaluate risk, the precision with which you filter signal from noise. That's the last competitive advantage that can't be outsourced to a model or a machine.

And most people have no idea how it works.

What is cognitive thinking?

Cognitive thinking isn't a personality trait. It's not "being smart." It's the operating system your brain runs on — the neurobiological machinery that takes in raw data from the world, interprets it through everything you've ever learned, holds it in working memory long enough to reason about it, and transforms it into a decision or an action.

Every time you read a financial report and notice the number that doesn't add up. Every time you learn a new tool and understand it faster than the last one. Every time you sit across from someone and sense that what they're saying and what they're thinking are two different things. That's your cognitive stack firing — billions of neurons exchanging electrical signals in fractions of a second, running processes you never consciously asked for.

These aren't abstract brain functions. They're the machinery behind everything that matters in your daily operating performance.

Learning and processing — how quickly you integrate new information with what you already know. The first time you see a financial model, it's noise. The second time, it's structure. The third time, you're building your own. That compression from noise to structure to creation is cognitive processing at work.

Problem-solving — not just finding answers, but finding the structural friction that's creating the problem in the first place. Most people solve symptoms. Clear thinkers solve architectures.

Evaluating and judging — the ability to weigh evidence objectively while filtering out emotional noise, social pressure, sunk cost bias, and the twenty other cognitive traps that make humans predictably irrational.

Concentration — sustaining focus on what matters long enough for it to compound, while the entire digital infrastructure of the modern world is engineered to pull your attention away every eleven seconds.

These four processes aren't separate. They're running in parallel, constantly, and the quality of their output directly determines the quality of your life.

The 8 core skills running under the hood

Your cognitive system isn't one thing — it's eight interconnected sub-skills stacked in three layers. When they're all firing in sync, you get high-level analytical reasoning. When even one of them lags, you get cognitive fatigue, decision errors, and that frustrating feeling of knowing you're not operating at your best.

Here's the stack, from bottom to top.

The foundation: processing and memory. Everything starts here. Before you can think about anything, your brain needs to take information in and hold it somewhere.

Processing speed is the clock rate of your brain. How quickly you absorb information, pass it through your cognitive filters, and compute a response. Some people read a page and need to re-read it. Others read it once and start arguing with the author by paragraph three. The difference isn't intelligence — it's processing speed.

Visual processing is your brain's ability to interpret spatial relationships, diagrams, written patterns, and imagery. When you glance at a dashboard and instantly see which metric is off, that's visual processing. When you look at a system architecture diagram and immediately understand the data flow, that's the same skill.

Auditory processing is the speed and accuracy with which you analyse spoken information. It's why some people are exceptional listeners who catch nuance in tone and phrasing, while others hear the words but miss the meaning.

The middle layer: attention. Once information is in, you need to direct it. Attention is the traffic controller of your cognitive system — it decides what gets processed deeply and what gets discarded.

Sustained attention — your ability to stay locked on a single task for an extended period. This is inversely proportional to the number of stimuli competing for your bandwidth, both internal (stress, anxiety, that conversation you keep replaying) and external (notifications, noise, someone walking past your desk).

Selective attention — the cognitive filter that lets you zoom in on what's relevant and tune out everything else. Writing code in a noisy coffee shop. Extracting the one insight that matters from a forty-page report. Listening to the question behind the question in a negotiation.

Divided attention — the ability to process multiple information streams simultaneously without a complete collapse in accuracy. This one is controversial because true multitasking doesn't exist — your brain is actually rapid-switching, not parallel processing. But some people switch faster and lose less in the transition.

The top layer: executive function. This is where thinking becomes doing. Executive function is the CEO of your cognitive stack — it takes the processed data, the filtered attention, and turns it into decisions and actions.

Short-term (working) memory — your brain's scratchpad. It temporarily holds and manipulates information for immediate use during active reasoning. When you're doing mental math, holding a conversation while planning your next sentence, or keeping three variables in your head while debugging — that's working memory. It's limited. Most people can hold roughly four to seven chunks of information at once. The people who seem to hold more aren't superhuman — they've learned to chunk better.

Long-term memory — the archive. Every fact you've ever learned, every pattern you've ever recognised, every mistake you've ever made and internalised. Long-term memory is what lets you solve today's problem with yesterday's lesson. The deeper and more organised your archive, the faster your retrieval, and the richer your pattern recognition.

7 strategies to upgrade your cognitive hardware

Here's the part that changes everything: your brain isn't fixed. Neuroplasticity — the brain's ability to rewire its own networks based on how it's used — means that cognitive skills are trainable. Not in a vague, eat-more-blueberries way. In a specific, mechanistic, do-this-and-this-improves way.

1. Move your body. This isn't wellness advice. This is neuroscience.

Physical movement triggers the release of BDNF — Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor — which is essentially fertiliser for your neurons. It promotes neurogenesis (the creation of new brain cells), strengthens synaptic connections, and reduces cortisol, the stress hormone that actively degrades cognitive performance over time.

You don't need to train like an athlete. Thirty minutes of elevated heart rate — running, cycling, even a fast walk — is enough to measurably improve processing speed, working memory, and attentional control. The research on this is overwhelming and unambiguous.

2. Protect your sleep like it's infrastructure. Sleep isn't rest. Sleep is maintenance.

During REM sleep, your brain consolidates short-term memories into long-term storage, clears metabolic waste products that accumulate during waking hours, and repairs neural pathways. Skip it, and you're not just tired — you're literally running on degraded hardware.

One night of poor sleep reduces working memory capacity by roughly 30%. Sustained sleep deprivation compounds. After a week of sleeping six hours instead of eight, your cognitive performance drops to the level of someone who's been awake for 48 hours straight — and the worst part is, you stop noticing. Sleep-deprived people consistently overestimate their own performance.

3. Have real conversations. Social interaction is the most underrated cognitive workout.

Real-time conversation — not texting, not commenting, not posting — forces your brain to do something extraordinarily complex: process incoming speech, interpret tone and intent, formulate a response, predict how the other person will react, and adjust all of this in real time. It's the cognitive equivalent of a full-body compound exercise.

People who have regular, substantive conversations show stronger auditory processing, faster response times, and better perspective-taking ability than those who primarily communicate through text.

4. Train your selective attention. Your attention is a muscle. And like any muscle, it atrophies if you don't train it.

Every time you check your phone mid-task, you're training your brain to break focus. Every time you resist the urge and stay locked in, you're strengthening your selective attention circuit.

Start small. Work in 25-minute blocks with zero interruptions — no phone, no tabs, no "quick checks." The first week will feel uncomfortable. By the fourth week, you'll notice that deep focus comes faster and holds longer. You're not just building a habit — you're physically rewiring the prefrontal cortex.

5. Expose yourself to novelty. Your brain builds new neural pathways when it encounters unfamiliar patterns. Novel environments, new skills, unexpected problems — anything that forces your brain to synthesise information it hasn't processed before.

This is why travel sharpens thinking. Why learning a musical instrument improves mathematical reasoning. Why the best problem-solvers tend to have diverse interests — they've built more neural highways, which means more routes to a solution.

If your daily routine is predictable, your brain is in maintenance mode. It's keeping existing pathways alive but not building new ones. Break the pattern regularly.

6. Learn a new language. Language acquisition is the most demanding cognitive exercise you can do. It requires structural pattern recognition, rapid recall, real-time grammar construction, and the ability to switch between entire frameworks of meaning.

Bilingual and multilingual individuals consistently show stronger executive control, better working memory, and delayed cognitive decline in later life. The effect isn't small — it's one of the most robust findings in cognitive science.

7. Play strategic games. Chess. Go. Real-time strategy games. Complex card games. Anything that requires you to forecast outcomes, evaluate multiple variables simultaneously, and adapt to an opponent's unpredictable behaviour.

Strategic gaming improves visual processing speed, decision-making under uncertainty, and spatial reasoning. It's not a substitute for the other six strategies, but it's a high-leverage supplement — and unlike most cognitive training, it's genuinely enjoyable.

The bigger picture

Your cognitive system isn't a fixed inheritance. It's a living architecture — one that degrades with neglect and strengthens with deliberate use. Treating attention, memory, and processing speed as trainable assets isn't self-improvement fluff. It's the most practical investment you can make in your own performance.

The world is getting faster. The problems are getting more complex. The information volume is getting louder. The people who thrive in that environment won't be the ones with the most knowledge — knowledge is everywhere now. They'll be the ones with the sharpest cognitive stack. The ones who process faster, focus deeper, remember better, and decide clearer.

Your brain is the one tool you use for everything. Sharpen it.

Who are you dialling?

You're not calling the friend who sends you podcast recommendations about resilience. You're not calling the colleague who panics when the Wi-Fi drops. You're calling the person who finds a way when everyone else sees a dead end. The person who hears "that's impossible" and immediately starts asking why — not to argue, but to map the gaps in the wall.

That quality isn't charisma. It isn't intelligence. It isn't optimism.

It's High Agency.

And it's the single most underrated trait separating the people who talk about doing things from the people who actually do them.

What is high agency, really?

Most people operate in what I call default mode. Low agency. Autopilot. They take the world as it's handed to them — the rules, the norms, the "that's just how things work" assumptions — and they build their entire life inside those walls without ever checking if the walls are real.

When someone tells a low-agency person "that's not possible" or "that's not how it's done," the conversation ends. They accept it. File it away. Move on to something easier.

High-agency people hear the exact same sentence and something different happens. It doesn't end the conversation — it starts a second one. A quiet, internal dialogue that sounds like: "Okay, they said it's not possible. But is it actually not possible? Or is it just not possible the way they tried it? What if I approached it from here instead?"

That's the difference. Low agency treats resistance as a wall. High agency treats it as information — a data point about one path that didn't work, not a verdict on all paths.

High-agency people view reality as malleable. Not in a delusional, manifestation-poster way. In a practical, hands-dirty, "the physics allows it so let's figure out the engineering" way. They see the world as something to be actively shaped by human initiative, not passively endured until something better falls from the sky.

The three-wheel formula

Here's what I've noticed about high-agency people — it's never just one trait. It's not raw willpower. It's not just being smart. It's not just being stubborn. It's three things running simultaneously, and the moment you remove one, the whole system breaks down.

1. Clear thinking. The ability to strip away conventional wisdom, inherited assumptions, and borrowed opinions — and look at a problem from first principles.

Most people solve problems with templates. They ask, "What did someone else do in this situation?" and copy-paste the answer. That works until it doesn't. Clear thinkers ask a different question: "What is actually true here, independent of what everyone believes?"

This is the difference between knowing the recipe and understanding the chemistry. One makes you a cook. The other makes you dangerous.

2. Bias for action. Ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas. Your Uber driver has a startup idea. Your cousin has a business plan in a Google Doc somewhere. The world is drowning in ideas that never made contact with reality.

A bias for action means you refuse to let hypotheses stay theoretical. You test them. Quickly. Messily. Before the plan is perfect, before the deck is polished, before anyone gives you permission. You'd rather have ugly data from a real experiment than beautiful logic from a thought experiment.

The gap between thinking and doing is where most potential goes to die. High-agency people don't let things live in that gap for long.

3. Constructive disagreeability. This is the one most people are missing.

Clear thinking and action are great — but they collapse the moment someone in a position of authority tells you to stop. A manager. A professor. An investor. A parent. Society in general.

Constructive disagreeability is the willingness to push past "no" when you've done the thinking and believe the no is wrong. It's not being contrarian for the sake of it — that's just noise. It's having the spine to say, "I hear you, I respect your position, and I'm going to do it anyway because I've thought about this more than you have."

Remove any one of these three and agency collapses. Clear thinking without action is armchair philosophy — the internet is full of people who can diagnose every problem and solve none of them. Action without clear thinking is reckless chaos — you're just moving fast in the wrong direction. And both are useless if you fold the moment someone with a title tells you to sit down.

Four operating rules to rewire your default settings

Agency isn't something you're born with. It's a set of mental defaults you can install — like upgrading your operating system. Here are four rules that high-agency people run on, consciously or not.

Rule 1: Does it defy the laws of physics?

This is the ultimate filter. When someone tells you something is impossible, run it through one question: Does this violate the fundamental laws of physics? If the answer is no — if thermodynamics, gravity, and the speed of light aren't standing in your way — then it's not impossible. It's just unsolved.

Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp wanted to beat the house at roulette. Every gambler in history had tried and failed. Standard wisdom said it couldn't be done. But Shannon and Thorp didn't listen to standard wisdom — they listened to physics. The roulette ball obeys Newtonian mechanics. Its trajectory is predictable if you can measure velocity accurately enough. So they built the world's first wearable computer, hid it in a shoe, and improved their odds by 44%.

They didn't break the rules of the casino. They used the rules of the universe.

Most "impossible" things are only impossible because nobody with the right combination of clear thinking and audacity has tried the right approach yet. The laws of physics are the only real constraints. Everything else is a story we agreed to believe.

Rule 2: There is no single right way.

This one kills more potential than anything else. The belief that there is one correct path — one proven playbook — and your job is to find it and follow it.

Look at tennis. Rafael Nadal warmed up with raw, violent aggression — every ball hit like a personal grudge. Novak Djokovic warmed up with clinical, mechanical calibration — each stroke measured and optimized. Roger Federer warmed up like he was playing in his backyard — relaxed, loose, almost casual.

Three of the greatest to ever hold a racket. Three completely different operating systems. They didn't succeed by finding "the right way." They succeeded by finding their way — the exact model that suited their body, their mind, their temperament.

The same applies to building companies, writing, investing, creating content, and every other domain where people obsess over best practices. Best practices are averages. They tell you what works for most people most of the time. If you're trying to be most people, follow them. If you're not, find your own operating model and commit to it fully.

Rule 3: The "adults in the room" don't exist.

This is the one that freed me the most.

Low-agency thinkers carry a quiet assumption that somewhere, above them in the hierarchy, there are competent adults who have everything figured out. The experts. The authorities. The people running the show. And because those people exist, the best strategy is to wait — wait for instructions, wait for approval, wait for someone smarter to tell you what to do.

Here's the truth: those people don't exist. Not the way you imagine them.

Steve Jobs was fired from his own company before he built the most valuable corporation on earth. Wolfgang Mozart died broke. Isaac Newton spent years chasing alchemy — literally trying to turn lead into gold. These are the giants. The legends. And they were all deeply, fundamentally flawed humans figuring it out as they went.

Nobody has the complete map. Nobody has all the answers. The people you admire are just people who started moving before they felt ready — and kept adjusting along the way.

Once you internalize this, you stop waiting for permission. You stop looking for the adult in the room. You realize that the adult in the room is whoever decides to act like one. And that can be you. Right now. At any age.

Rule 4: Don't trust — verify.

The default human behaviour is to download consensus. "They say the market is crashing." "Experts agree this is the best approach." "Everyone knows you need a degree to be taken seriously."

Who is "they"? Which experts? Everyone where?

High-agency people don't accept popular opinion as a data source. They go to primary sources. They read the actual paper, not the headline about the paper. They talk to the person who did the thing, not the person who wrote about the person who did the thing. And most importantly, they question whether the right question is even being asked.

Sometimes the consensus is right. Often, it's a game of telephone — someone credible said something nuanced, it got simplified, then oversimplified, then repeated until it became gospel. By the time it reaches you, the original insight is buried under layers of lazy interpretation.

Verify everything. Especially the things everyone agrees on. Unanimous agreement is often a sign that nobody bothered to check.

How to spot high agency — in yourself and others

You can't measure agency on a resume or in a job interview. But you can feel it. Here's what to look for:

The energy test. After spending time with a high-agency person, you feel charged up. Not drained. Not overwhelmed. Energized — like the ceiling on what's possible just got higher. Low-agency people leave you feeling heavy. High-agency people make you want to go build something.

The background test. Their opinions don't fit neatly into any pre-built mould. They're not parroting a political party, a business guru, or a Twitter thread. Their worldview is assembled from direct experience and independent thought, which makes it unpredictable — and usually more interesting than anything you'd find in a book.

The prestige test. They're willing to walk away from comfortable, high-status positions to build something from zero. The corporate title, the safe salary, the social approval — none of it has enough gravity to keep them in a place where they're not growing. They'd rather be broke and building than comfortable and stagnant.

The question test. Before rushing to solve a problem, they stop and ask whether it's even the right problem. This is subtle but powerful. Most people waste enormous energy solving the wrong problem efficiently. High-agency people spend time choosing the right problem — and then attack it with everything they have.

The real takeaway

Low agency is our evolutionary default. It's the survival software that kept our ancestors alive by staying inside the tribe, following the leader, and not questioning the way things were done. That software made sense in a world where stepping out of line meant getting eaten by something.

It doesn't make sense anymore.

The world we live in now rewards the people who test the edges. Who ask "why not?" after everyone else has accepted "no." Who treat the rules as a first draft, not a final copy.

You are not a passive viewer watching a fixed world play out in front of you. You are not a bucket, sitting still, waiting to be filled by whatever life pours in.

You are a tap. You control the flow. You decide what gets built, what gets challenged, what gets changed.

Reality bends far more than most people ever bother to test. The only way to find out how far is to push.

It's the truth.

"You're fat."
"You have a bad attitude."
"You don't look good."

Stings, doesn't it?

Good. That sting means it hit something real.

The door most people slam shut

Most people can't handle it. The second truth shows up at their door, they slam it shut — argue, deflect, block the person who said it. All to protect a version of themselves that isn't even working.

Think about that for a second. You're going to war to defend a version of you that you're not even happy with. You already know something's off. You feel it in the mirror, in the silence after a conversation, in the way you avoid certain topics. The truth didn't create the problem. It just made it impossible to ignore.

And instead of thanking the messenger, you shoot them.

That's not strength. That's fear dressed up as pride.

What the rare ones do differently

The rare ones? They go quiet. They don't fire back. They don't write a paragraph about how the other person is wrong or toxic or jealous. They sit with it. They let it cut deep — because they know the cut is where the growth starts.

Every scar I carry from a hard truth became a turning point. Every time someone said something that made my chest tight and my jaw clench, I had a choice: protect my ego or upgrade my life.

I chose the upgrade. Every single time.

Not because it felt good. It felt terrible. Truth doesn't arrive gently. It doesn't knock and wait. It kicks the door in at the worst possible moment and says, "We need to talk."

But here's what I've learned — the people who tell you comfortable lies are not your friends. They're your audience. They're watching you stay the same and clapping so they don't have to change either.

The delivery doesn't matter. The data does.

I don't care how the truth is delivered. Blunt. Brutal. Unsolicited. Wrapped in sarcasm. Thrown at you in an argument. Said behind your back and repeated to your face.

If it's facts, it's facts.

The packaging is irrelevant. People love to dismiss truth because it came from the wrong person, at the wrong time, in the wrong tone. That's just another defence mechanism. You're not rejecting the message — you're rejecting the discomfort.

The person willing to say what everyone else whispers behind your back? That's the realest person in your circle. Everyone else already thought it. They just liked you enough — or feared you enough — to keep it to themselves.

The one who said it out loud? They respected you more than your feelings. That's rare. That's valuable. That's the person you keep close.

Comfort is a trap

Most people want comfort. I want progress.

And progress doesn't come from people who tell you what you want to hear. It comes from the ones who tell you what you need to hear. The mentor who says your pitch is weak. The friend who says you've been slacking. The stranger on the internet who points out something you've been hiding from yourself.

Comfort feels warm. But it doesn't move you. It just keeps you where you are — in a version of your life that's safe, predictable, and slowly shrinking.

Hard truth feels cold. It stings. It makes you want to defend, explain, justify. But if you can sit in that discomfort for five minutes without reacting — just five minutes — something shifts. The ego steps aside. The real you steps forward. And that version of you is ready to do something about it.

Don't react. Sit with it. Then rise.

That's the whole framework. Three steps.

Don't react. Your first instinct will be to fight back. Don't. That's the ego talking, and the ego has never once made you better. It's only ever made you louder.

Sit with it. Let the truth settle. Ask yourself — is there even a shred of accuracy in what was said? If there is, that shred is a seed. It'll grow into something if you let it.

Then rise. Not with words. Not with a social media post about how you're "built different." With action. Quiet, consistent, undeniable action. Show up different. That's the only response that matters.

The truth is a gift. It's just wrapped in discomfort, handed to you by people brave enough to risk your reaction.

Most people are too soft to unwrap it.

Don't be most people.

There's a word for the thing I've been doing my entire life without knowing what to call it. The word is autotelic — from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal, purpose). An autotelic person is someone who does things not because the world told them to, but because the doing itself is the point.

I dropped out of Manipal after one semester. Not because I was failing. Not because I had some grand exit strategy or a term sheet waiting in my inbox. I dropped out because the thing I was building felt more real than anything a classroom could hand me. The act of building was the reward. The degree was supposed to be the reward, and it just... wasn't.

That's the autotelic instinct. You don't need the trophy to justify the race.

The scoreboard nobody sees

When I was younger, I played a cricket match in Hosur. I was unwell — the kind of unwell where people tell you to sit this one out. I took four wickets that day. Got Man of the Match.

Here's the thing people misunderstand about that story: they think the point is the award. The stat line. It's not. The point is that I walked out to play anyway. Not to prove something to the crowd. Not because someone needed me to. I walked out because I couldn't not. I wanted to play. The game itself was pulling me forward.

That's what being autotelic feels like. The scoreboard is for everyone else. You're playing because you love the sound the bat makes when it connects clean.

Why most people burn out (and I don't)

I run a B2B SaaS company. I run a content studio. I make AI-animated films for fun. I study markets and build investment portfolios. I'm 19.

People ask me how I don't burn out. The honest answer is: because I'm not doing any of this for something. I'm doing it as something. There's a difference.

When you work toward an external goal — a funding round, a follower count, a salary — you're essentially borrowing motivation from the future. You're saying: I'll suffer now so that I can feel good later. That's fine. It works. Until it doesn't. Until the round doesn't close, the followers don't come, the salary doesn't feel like enough. Then you crash, because the fuel was never yours. It was rented.

Autotelic motivation doesn't rent. It owns. The work is the fuel. The curiosity is the engine. The thing you're building teaches you something, and that lesson opens a door, and behind the door is another thing to build. It's recursive. It feeds itself.

I don't burn out because I'm not burning anything. I'm generating.

The dropout question

Every founder who left college early gets the same question: "Was it worth it?"

The question assumes there was a trade. That I gave up one thing to get another. A degree for a company. Security for risk. But that framing only works if the degree was the goal. It wasn't. The goal was always to be in motion — to be making things, learning by breaking things, talking to people who are building the future instead of reading about people who already did.

I didn't drop out of something. I dropped into something.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — the psychologist who gave us the word autotelic — spent his career studying flow states. That feeling when time disappears and you're completely absorbed in what you're doing. His research showed that autotelic people experience flow more frequently, not because they're special, but because they choose activities for the experience itself rather than the outcome. They structure their own challenges. They find complexity where others see routine.

When I sit down at midnight to figure out how to score buying-intent signals from the open web, nobody's watching. There's no deadline. No investor breathing down my neck. I'm doing it because the problem is beautiful. Because signal detection at scale is a puzzle that rewards you with better questions the deeper you go.

That's flow. That's autotelic. That's the thing.

The myth of the finish line

Here's what nobody tells you about external goals: they move. You hit the revenue target, and now there's a bigger one. You close the round, and now you need to close the next one. You get the thing, and the thing becomes the floor.

Autotelic people don't have this problem — not because they don't set goals, but because the goal was never the point. The goal is a compass direction. It tells you which way to walk. But the walking is the life. The goal is just an excuse to keep walking.

I set aggressive targets. I want Cnvrted to be the signal-intelligence layer that every sales team in the world runs on. I want Banao to be a media empire. I want to eventually run a portfolio management firm. These aren't small ambitions.

But if you took all of that away tomorrow — the product, the team, the traction — I'd start building again on Monday. Not because I'm disciplined. Because I can't help it. Because the building is who I am, not what I do.

A note for the people who recognize this

If you're reading this and something clicks — if you've always felt like the process mattered more than the prize, if you've been called obsessive when you were really just engaged, if you've ever stayed up until 4 AM on something nobody asked you to do and woke up wanting to do it again — you might be autotelic too.

It's not a personality type you develop. It's one you recognize. You've always been this way. You just didn't have the word.

Now you do.

The word is autotelic. And it means the goal lives inside the doing. It means you are both the runner and the finish line. It means the work is not a means to an end — it is the end, endlessly unfolding.

Welcome to the loop. It never stops. That's the whole point.

nearly 88% of all ai startup funding in 2026 has gone to companies based in the united states.

not 60%. not 70%. eighty-eight.

which means everyone else on earth — every founder in bengaluru, berlin, são paulo, lagos, tel aviv, singapore — is splitting the remaining twelve percent. i am one of those people. i'm 19, i dropped out, and i'm building a b2b company from indiranagar while a handful of labs in san francisco raise more money in a single afternoon than my entire addressable market is worth.

i want to be honest about what that feels like, and then i want to be honest about why i don't think it's the disaster it looks like.

The numbers are genuinely absurd

AI startups took roughly $202 billion in venture capital in 2025. that's close to half of every venture dollar deployed on the planet, and up 75% from the year before.

openai and anthropic alone absorbed something like 14% of all global vc. two companies. fourteen percent of everything.

anthropic is now reportedly the most valuable private company in the world — around $965 billion post-money after a $65 billion round in may. openai sits behind it at ~$852 billion and is reportedly lining up an ipo at close to a trillion.

q1 2026 saw roughly $300 billion in new startup investment globally. more than double the quarter before it.

read those numbers again and then remember: 88% of the ai slice landed in one country.

this is not a funding boom. it's a funding funnel, and it has a very specific shape. capital is not spreading out. it is concentrating — into fewer companies, larger rounds, and one geography.

What that actually means if you're not in that room

the tempting reaction is despair. the other tempting reaction is cope — some line about how india will "build its own openai." both are useless.

here's the read i've actually landed on:

The foundation model layer is closed. it's done. it closed while most of us were still reading about it. you cannot enter a category where the table stakes are ten billion dollars of compute and the incumbents have sovereign wealth funds on their cap tables. anyone in india telling you they're raising a seed round to build a frontier model is either lying to you or to themselves.

but the layer above it has never been more open. every dollar poured into those labs makes intelligence cheaper for me. the models i build on top of got dramatically better and dramatically cheaper while i wasn't paying for a single gpu. that capex was, functionally, a gift. someone else spent a hundred billion dollars building the road i drive on.

the question was never "can i compete with openai." the question is "what did openai just make possible that wasn't possible eighteen months ago, and who has a budget line for it."

that's a question a 19-year-old in bengaluru can answer as well as anyone in menlo park. maybe better, because i'm not distracted by the possibility of raising at forty times revenue.

the part nobody says out loud

there is a version of this concentration that is actively good for founders like me.

when money is abundant, everyone is your competitor. every mediocre idea gets funded, every category gets crowded, and you spend your first two years fighting eleven venture-subsidised clones who are giving the product away for free.

when money concentrates, the clones die. the ones burning $400k a month to look like a company run out of runway. what's left is a market where you have to actually be good, and where being good is enough.

i'd rather build in that market. i think most honest founders would.

and the valuations, since we're being honest

the median ai seed pre-money is now around $17.9 million. seed-stage ai startups get valuations roughly 42% above their non-ai peers. most of the category trades somewhere between 10x and 50x revenue.

i've spent three years around markets. i've watched what happens to a multiple when the story stops working. and i know exactly what a 40x revenue multiple on $2m of arr is: it's not a valuation, it's a promise. a promise that you will grow into a number someone else picked for you, on a clock someone else started.

so when i price my own round, i'm not trying to win the headline. a high seed valuation is a loan against a future you haven't earned yet, and the interest is paid in your series a — either as a down round or as eighteen months of pretending. i'd rather raise at a number i can grow into, keep the cap table clean, and never have to explain to my team why the story changed.

that is an unfashionable thing to say in 2026. i think it will be a very fashionable thing to have said in 2028.

both altman and goldman have publicly warned about bubble dynamics. mit sloan opened its year by asking not whether the bubble deflates but how fast. when the people holding the balloon start describing the balloon, you should probably listen.

the labs with real revenue will survive a correction. so will small companies with real customers and low burn. the casualties will be the middle — the wrappers priced like frontier labs, funded by people who confused a sector with a business.

So, twelve percent

i don't get to change the 88%. neither do you.

what i get to change is whether i'm building the kind of company that needs a bubble to make sense.

i don't have a $965 billion valuation. i have customers who have a problem, a co-founder who can build, and a runway i control. that's not a consolation prize. in about eighteen months, i suspect it's going to look like the only sane way anyone was building at all.

the money went to america.

fine. the problems didn't.

Let me tell you who I really am before I tell you what I did. I'm just a curious kid who has never been able to sit still when life offers a challenge — even the ones nobody asked me to take. I go looking for them. I always have.

I haven't sat inside a regular classroom since the 9th grade. For almost ten years, I played professional cricket instead. Ten years of early mornings, aching legs, and learning how to hold my nerve when everything was on the line. It was the best chapter of my life, and it taught me more about discipline and about myself than any textbook ever could. I walked away from cricket in June 2025. The why behind that is a whole other story, and it still hurts a little to tell, so we'll save it for another day.

Then one fine day, I joined Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Bengaluru for a Bachelor's in Commerce (Hons). And I was genuinely excited. A classroom, a campus, a normal life — it was brand new to me. I chose the course on purpose. I love finance. I love investing. This wasn't random.

My plan was clean. Finish the degree. Do an MBA from a good college. Land a role at an investment bank. And then, one day, build something of my own, create real brand value, become someone who mattered.

While a lot of my friends were still trying to figure out their next move, I already had my map drawn. And I was proud of that map.

The break that broke my map

College life was good. I made friends — some I'll carry for life, some I've already outgrown, and one quiet college crush that only a couple of people know about (yeah, we'll come back to that).

My attendance was a disaster. My grades sat at a comfortable average. But I finished my first semester, and then came a month-long break.

That one month rearranged everything I thought I wanted.

I couldn't sit idle, so I threw myself at everything. I tried content creation with a page called Burfi. I started a tiny marketing agency and shut it down a few weeks later. I did a sales internship. I met people who had nothing to do with college, people building real things in the real world.

And slowly, something inside me shifted. For the first time, I could see the world clearly — where the market was heading, what the job market actually looked like underneath the shiny placement stats, how much your connections quietly decide your future, and how badly you need to keep learning skills that match the times you're actually living in.

I walked back into my second semester as a different person than the one who left.

Everything felt slightly off now. Some friendships had grown closer, others had gone cold. The same crush, still there in the corner of my mind. And the dream itself had quietly changed shape: forget investment banking. I could see where that road was heading, and I didn't want to spend my one life betting on it. The new plan was simpler and scarier — build my own thing, create brand value, run startups, and drop out.

The word that gave me permission

Around this time, I grew close to my cousin brother, Vishnu Vijayan. We talked about life for hours, worked on a few projects together, and one day he handed me a phrase I didn't understand yet. He calls me chotu. He said, "Chotu, you're a high-agency guy."

I nodded like I got it. I didn't. So later that night, I Googled it.

High agency: the ability to shape your reality by taking personal ownership of your outcomes.

I read that line three times. Something in my chest went quiet and certain. He told me what he already believed about me — that I was meant to build, to lead, to matter. And then he did the thing everyone needs at least once in their life: he backed me. Figure it out, he said. And go.

Here's the part I can't skip over. It was the second month of my second semester. My attendance had crashed to 27%. And the truth is, I had a dream but no plan — no clear idea of what I'd actually do the morning after I walked out.

I decided to pitch it to my parents anyway.

Two nos and one very long night

I already knew how it would go. My dad might understand — he's the one who once told me to leave school after 9th grade and go all-in on cricket. My mom would shut it down before I finished the sentence. That was the script playing on loop in my head.

So I flipped the order. I sat my mom down first and laid out everything — the dream, the plan, all of it. And to my complete shock, she kind of agreed.

Then came my dad. I walked in full of confidence.

He said no.

Finish your degree. Then we'll see.

I went numb. And the hardest part wasn't the rejection — it was that he was right. I still couldn't look him in the eye and tell him exactly what I'd do once I left. He wasn't crushing my dream. He was protecting me from a version of it I hadn't built yet. And I knew it.

So instead of sulking, I got to work. I got serious on LinkedIn. And later that same week, everything cracked open — I landed an offer letter from Morphic, an AI company, with a real monthly salary. I won't share the number, but it was more than I'd have earned walking out of a Big 4 placement with a degree in hand.

Finally. A first step I could actually point to. I pitched it to my parents again, around late March 2026.

They said no. Again. And this time, my mom teamed up with my dad. Finish your degree. We'll see later.

I can't lie — that second no hit harder than the first. When the two people who love you most both say no, you start to wonder if you're the fool in the story.

The thirty minutes that ended the argument

The next day, I met a guy named Palak Zatakia, a growth lead at Morphic. We sat down at Araku Coffee in Indiranagar for thirty minutes and talked about my role, my life, my plans. Turns out he's a dropout too — and he's doing beautifully, touch wood.

So I asked him the question I really came to ask: "If you had the chance again, would you still drop out?"

He said yes. No pause. No flinch.

Then I asked, "Would you tell me to drop out?"

And he said something I've carried with me ever since:

"The credit and the blame should belong to the same person — you. Make your decisions, and stand solid behind them."

I thought about that line the entire day. Because he was right. I'd spent weeks asking everyone else to hand me permission — my mom, my dad, my cousin, a stranger over coffee. But the credit and the blame were always going to be mine anyway. So the decision might as well be mine too.

The next morning, I walked into college and applied to withdraw. And just like that, I dropped out of Manipal.

Then I went home and told my parents what I'd done. Not asked. Told. I made the call, and I stood behind it — trembling a little on the inside, but standing.

Where I am now

I'm writing this on the day it all feels real.

I've been at Morphic for five months. I've started a sales intelligence startup, Cnvrted, which I'm building shoulder-to-shoulder with Kailas Krsna and Sharan S. My days are packed with founders and creators, an inbox that never empties, and WhatsApp threads full of VCs and startup madness. It's chaos. I love it.

And my parents — the same two people who said no, twice — are now my biggest believers. My dad has quietly become the best mentor I could ever ask for. My mom has become my best friend. And Vishnu is still right there in my corner, exactly where he's always been.

I'm learning 10x more than I ever did in a classroom. Every single day is ups and downs, shipping things I once thought were out of my league.

(Still the same crush, by the way. Ha. Some things don't change.)

Strip it all back, and I'm just a 19-year-old kid walking toward everything he ever dreamed of — no map, no safety net, just conviction and the people who love him.

If I could hand you one thing from all of this, it would be this: you will make a million decisions in your life. Make them yours. Own the credit, own the blame, and stand solid behind every single one. That's the only lesson you'll ever really need.

Do I miss college? Yeah. Of course I do. Mostly the friends, and all the stupid, beautiful things we did together. I'll never pretend that part didn't matter.

But if you asked me to walk back into that classroom and choose again?

I'd make the exact same call.

And that's it.

a first-year analyst used to be worth hiring because they'd grind through the work nobody senior wanted to touch. that work is now a $20 api call. the bottom rung didn't get harder to climb — it's being sawed off while people are still standing on it.

that's the whole story. everything after this is just people refusing to say it out loud.

two camps own this conversation and both are lying to you, just in opposite directions. camp one — the bloodbath: dario amodei, may 2025, ai wipes out half of entry-level white-collar jobs in five years and pushes unemployment to 10–20%. camp two — nothing's happening: the yale budget lab finds no real shift in the occupational mix since chatgpt shipped. one sells fear, one sells comfort. neither tells you what to do on monday.

here's the tell nobody sits with: the loudest doomer already flinched. amodei quietly walked himself back to the jevons paradox. altman flatly said he was "pretty wrong." when the prophets soften, stop reading prophecy and start reading the tape.

the tape is uglier — and more specific — than either camp wants to admit.

it's not unemployment. it's the door quietly locking behind you.

ai doesn't eat jobs. it eats tasks. and it eats the routine, codifiable, clean-input-clean-output ones first — which is exactly the work junior people were paid to do. basic coding, drafting, data cleanup, first-pass research, tickets. gone, or going.

the numbers aren't subtle. revelio: entry-level hiring down ~11% in 18 months. signalfire: big-tech new-grad hiring down nearly 50% from pre-pandemic. challenger: ~55,000 us layoffs in 2025 pinned directly on ai. and still no aggregate unemployment spike — which is exactly what makes it dangerous. nobody sounds an alarm for a door that closes silently. you only notice when you're the one standing outside it.

pwc chewed through a billion job ads and found the knife's edge: "seniorised" entry roles — junior titles that now demand judgment, leadership, taste — up 35% since 2019, while ordinary entry roles shrank. ai-exposed junior roles are 7x more likely to demand senior skills. translation: the entry level still exists, but it now asks you to already be good before anyone lets you start. the training wheels came off and the bike got faster.

the ladder is on fire and everyone's applauding the flames

this is the part the optimists refuse to price in.

junior grunt work was never just work. it was tuition. you did the boring analysis to earn the judgment. you built the bad list to learn what a good one looks like. that was the on-ramp — the only on-ramp — to becoming senior.

kill the grunt work and you kill the classroom. companies pocket the margin this quarter and starve their own senior pipeline for the next decade. you cannot grow ten-year operators if nobody survives year one. this is a slow-motion break in how humans get good at anything, and almost nobody is funding a fix — because the pain lands years after the savings, long after the person who cut the cost got promoted. that's the trap, and it's already sprung.

india: we built the exact machine ai was made to replace

say it plainly. indian it is the pyramid model in the flesh — hire freshers by the tens of thousands, park them on maintenance, testing, support, bill the client for warm bodies. a wide base of humans doing codifiable work isn't merely "exposed" to ai. it is the thing ai was built to do. structurally, we are the most replaceable labor pyramid on earth. pretending otherwise is cope.

the market already voted. nifty it down 20%+ in 2026. tcs cut ~12,000 and ended fy26 down ~23,000 heads. xpheno: fresher demand down 44% year on year. niti aayog: on a business-as-usual path, tech-services headcount falls from ~7.5–8 million toward 6 million by 2031. saurabh mukherjea, no theatrics: the people it services need in an ai world will be "orders of magnitude lower."

yes, ai hiring is up 32% toward ~380,000 roles and shows up in ~74% of new contracts. but read that honestly — those aren't the same people. the fresher who got cut is not the ml engineer who got hired. the jobs didn't move down the hall; they moved up the stack, past everyone who didn't retrain. one number tells the whole story: revenue per employee, climbing as headcount falls. that ratio is the obituary and the opportunity in a single line.

the market isn't panicking. it's repricing you.

the nifty it re-rating isn't macro noise about yields and oil. it's the street pricing a cold structural truth: fewer people, more output each, ai stapled into every deal. the metric that mattered flipped from headcount growth to revenue-per-head and ai-attach-rate. and here's the fact pwc surfaced that should end the debate: the biggest ai winners are raising wages and headcount faster than their peers. the firms just firing to look lean are optimizing themselves into a smaller box. austerity isn't a strategy — it's a slow exit.

what actually happens — and what you do before it happens to you

the barbell wins. the middle dies. two ends survive: deep human judgment (taste, leadership, relationships, strategy) and ai-native operators who genuinely 10x output. the mushy middle — competent, routine, replaceable — is the kill zone. "solid, reliable, does what's asked" used to be a compliment. now it's a layoff waiting for a quarter to arrive.

ai fluency isn't an edge, it's the floor. a third of entry roles already demand it — triple a year ago. it's the new excel. being good with ai won't get you hired. being unable to use it will get you cut, and nobody will bother explaining why.

compress your own ladder or the market compresses you. the on-ramp is shorter, so reach judgment faster than the generation before you. own outcomes, not tasks. the intern who ships beats the intern who "assists" every single time, and it isn't close.

founders — my seat. lean isn't a virtue anymore, it's the whole game. three people with agents do what fifteen used to. i'm building cnvrted on exactly that bet: the work a room of sdrs used to grind — research, signal-hunting, list-building — collapses into software. i'm not theorizing about displacement from a safe distance. i'm shipping it. that's not cruelty, it's the shape of the decade — smaller teams, higher leverage, more built by fewer.

the degree is a receipt, not a résumé

kill the sacred cow. the degree does not matter. the skill does. a degree proves you paid the fee and outlasted the syllabus. it says nothing about whether you can do the thing — and the market has stopped pretending it does.

the numbers are humiliating and worth staring at. only ~42.6% of indian graduates are employable at all, per mercer-mettl — and it's falling. scope it to engineers and the employability reports have for years put the unfit share near 80%. more than 80% of recruiters say they can't find people who can do the job. the economic survey: just 8.25% of graduates work in a role that matches their qualification. we mint degrees by the million and starve for skill. that isn't an ai problem. ai just turned the lights on.

so no — ai isn't killing jobs. it's exposing the people who stopped learning the day they graduated. it always was going to. it just used to be survivable to coast.

now the blunt part, because you came for truth. this will not be equal and it was never meant to be. the passive get flattened — the ones who got comfortable, stopped learning, and sat around waiting for the old world to walk back through the door. lazy loses now, fast, and in public. not because ai is cruel, but because they opted out of the revolution and it did not wait for them. meanwhile the high-agency ones — the people who grab the new skill the week it drops and read every shift as a door instead of a threat — end up exactly where they wanted to be. usually further. the distance between those two groups is about to become the widest gap of our generation.

this isn't born-smart versus born-dumb. it's a decision you re-make every quarter. staying sharp is a choice. going dull is also a choice — most people just make it without noticing, one skipped learning curve at a time. the skill that makes you valuable today didn't exist eighteen months ago. the one that saves you in 2028 hasn't been built yet. so the only durable state is permanently mid-learning-curve: always a little uncomfortable, always slightly ahead. comfort is the risk now. comfort is how you get caught standing outside the door.

i believe this to the core, and not from the cheap seats — i've bet my life on it. skills over credentials. agency over permission. every revolution splits people into two: the ones it happens to, and the ones who show up and build it. nobody is coming to save the first group. be the second. always.

no soft landing

ai isn't a bloodbath and it isn't nothing. it's a repricing — of skills, of the ladder, of what a "team" even means. the people who lose are the ones standing at the base of the old pyramid, waiting for the on-ramp to reopen.

it's not reopening. it's not going to. go build the new one — or get comfortable standing outside the door, wondering when exactly it locked.

Yes, it's a bubble.

I run an AI company. I've spent three years managing a portfolio through cycles. And I'm telling you the thing most founders are too invested — literally — to admit: the market has priced AI like it already won, when most of it hasn't even shipped a return yet.

That's not a doomer take. It's just what a bubble looks like from the inside.

What a bubble actually is

People hear "bubble" and think "fake." Wrong.

A bubble isn't a lie. A bubble is a truth that got too expensive.

The internet was real. It still 10x'd, then lost 80% of its value, then 100x'd again. Railways in 1840s Britain were real — they rewired the entire economy — and they still bankrupted a generation of investors on the way there. Fiber in 1999 was real. We're literally still using cable that got laid during the crash.

The technology being world-changing and the valuations being insane are not opposites. They're roommates. They show up to every mania together.

So when someone tells you "AI can't be a bubble because look how powerful it is" — that's not a counterargument. That's the setup for one.

The numbers that don't sleep at night

Here's what actually keeps me up.

The spend and the return aren't in the same room.

Hyperscalers are pouring hundreds of billions into data centers and GPUs on the promise of demand. Meanwhile, a widely-cited MIT study last year found that ~95% of enterprise generative-AI pilots produced no measurable P&L impact. Ninety-five percent. Read that twice.

The money is running in circles.

Nvidia invests in the labs. The labs use that money to buy Nvidia chips. Cloud providers sign compute deals with the same labs they're funding. It's an ecosystem financing its own demand. When the customer, the supplier, and the investor are the same three companies wearing different hats — that's not a market. That's a group chat.

The whole index is leaning on a handful of names.

Strip out the AI mega-caps and a lot of "the market is up" evaporates. Concentration like that isn't strength. It's a single point of failure with great PR.

None of this means the tech is fake. It means the price of believing in it got detached from the proof it's delivering.

That gap — belief minus proof — is the bubble. Always has been.

Why I'm still building in it

Now here's where I lose the doomers.

I'm not selling. I'm building faster.

Because if you actually understand bubbles instead of just fearing them, you learn the most important rule: bubbles overbuild the infrastructure the next decade runs on.

The 1999 fiber glut is why your broadband got cheap in 2005. The overbuilt railways became the network that made everything after them possible. The money that gets torched in a mania doesn't vanish — it gets converted into rails that survivors ride for free.

Right now the world is subsidizing GPUs, models, and compute at a loss so I can build on top of them cheaply. Founders who see a bubble and run are misreading the moment. The move isn't to avoid the bubble. It's to be the thing still standing when the price catches down to reality.

Amazon didn't win because it dodged the dot-com crash. It won because it survived it.

The only two questions that matter

Forget "is AI a bubble." That's a comment-section question. Here are the two that decide whether you make it out:

1. Am I selling the narrative, or building the fundamentals?
Companies priced on story die when the story cools. Companies priced on revenue, retention, and real usage just get cheaper to acquire customers. Build the boring version. The boring version survives.

2. Do I need the mania to be right, or do I win either way?
If your entire thesis needs valuations to keep going up forever, you don't have a business. You have a lottery ticket with a nice landing page.

I want to be the guy who's building something that works whether the market is euphoric or terrified. Because both are coming. Probably in that order.

The bottom line

AI is a bubble.

The tech is also the most important thing built in my lifetime.

Those sentences are best friends. Anyone telling you to pick one is selling you something — usually their own book.

So don't run. Don't cheerlead. Do the third thing almost nobody does:

Stay clear-eyed while everyone else picks a side, and build something that's still there when the tide goes out.

Bubbles don't punish the people who see them coming.

They punish the ones who forgot they were standing in one.