This year is my 7th year as a working adult, pursuing the so-called "tech" job.
In my previous post I touched on my spiritual journey. I want to expand on how that journey changed how I operate day to day — because the shift has been quiet but total.
For most of my career, I was very good at surviving.
I engineered myself to thrive in a capitalistic world. I broke down what I should do by studying how the game works — who the final bosses are, what the win conditions look like, how my character can complete it. I saw people as items in an inventory. Unique ones could take me to places I couldn't reach alone.
The cold hard truth: it worked. I am at a place my 10-year-old self would never believe.
But somewhere along the way, I completely forgot about me.
Now, I'm trying to abandon the predefined game entirely. I want to build one from scratch — where I design the environment, choose my challenges, and follow what genuinely interests me.
Let me give you a concrete example.
I went to AAAI'26 earlier this month. Old me would have approached it tactically: what can I bring to the table to get X promotion or Y recognition? Realistic. Structured. Not me. Not what I actually care about.
New me walked in and just... paid attention to what arose naturally.
I started speaking to paper authors from all over the world — people I'd never have met if I hadn't walked up to them with genuine curiosity. I asked not just about their work but about their motivations, their history, what brought them to AI. I looked for posters where people were already mid-conversation, because the best learning happens in dialogue, not monologue.
A note on why I'd recommend going to a top AI conference despite the ~$1,300 ticket price: content moves too fast now. Papers, guides, blogs — it's genuinely hard to sieve through what matters as a working professional. A conference compresses all of that into conversations with the people who wrote the work. The signal-to-noise ratio is completely different.
I focused on the NLP and AI Alignment tracks, though there's plenty more — Machine Learning, Computer Vision, AI for Social Impact, Robotics, and others. I'll write separately about two papers that really stuck with me.
Coming back from AAAI got me thinking more carefully about my own trajectory.
I sat down and did something I hadn't done in years — listed every career highlight across six years. The industries, the roles, the projects I was most proud of. And a pattern emerged that I hadn't named before.
Its clear my career so far isn't a single deep specialization — no strong T-shape — but if I'm being honest about the one thing I've consistently done across every role, it's automation that indirectly improves the customer's product experience. From automating model experimentation into deployable real-time APIs, to revenue dashboard analytics, to setting up bash scripts that run monthly agent evaluations. That thread runs through all of it.
I've also come to terms with a trait I used to downplay: I'm shameless. I'm self-motivated. I put myself in rooms where everyone else has more experience than me, and I find my footing by being resourceful and humble.
I've failed a lot. I burnt money on wrong experiment configurations, needed concepts explained to me repeatedly, delivered features late, and had my colleagues ask me if I wanted to switch roles when they see my struggles. I said no — partly because I wanted to prove something to myself, and partly because I believe adaptability is the actual skill that matters in the age of AI. The market is shifting from I-shaped to T-shaped individuals. I want to be ready for that.
What I'm drawn to now are places with genuine craft — teams that deeply understand what they're building and can explain it clearly. Good documentation and good teaching are the same thing. They're proof of understanding.
That's the standard I want to hold myself to.
Six years of survival mode taught me a lot. But I'm more interested in what comes from actually playing my own game.
More on that as it unfolds.