Building is learning by doing, accumulating early work, that will compound over time. It also signals skills, passion, agency, finishing things, creativity, intentionality, ownership. With great work, there also comes great network. If you are creative, and you know what to build that can create impact, then the opportunity cost of not building has never been higher.
The corollary of the previous conclusion is that, the opportunity cost of not learning has never been higher. With AI, you can learn anything (probably not Quantum Chromodynamics yet, at least not with o1, as a Princeton PhD friend told me before). Knowledge in certain fields has so much leverage. For one, concepts in software engineering is one of them. AI scaled the expertise of coding, so people can focus on finding and describing what they want. But the ability to describe what you want in the terms of engineering is a new skill that needs to be learnt. And this new fundamental skill, to me, seems a lot easier than learning how certain solutions is implemented. With the language of engineering, you can then command your fleet of AI agents to build for you, and you can build a lot more efficiently, which goes back to item number one.
- Principle #1: Learning: Breadth first, depth on demand.
- Principle #2: When AI commoditizes execution, conceptual leverage becomes 10x more valuable.
Finally, to source opportunities, I must (1) draw samples from the distribution of opportunities and (2) attract opportunities. When you ask for opportunities, most of the people will probably say no, but there are always chances that someone is willing to give you a chance. So if you ask enough people, you will get a chance.
To attract, you have to be seen. In 2025 this means you need to have an online presence via a personal website, an social media account that has your record of thoughts or work. More thoughts on this later.
I just wanted to say that, as someone who just graduated and doesn’t have a golden handcuff, I am very excited about the future!
To get a sense of why I am excited, here are some good reads:
- Reflections on OpenAI by Calvin French-Owen
- Searching for outliers by Ben Kuhn
- Software Is Changing (Again) by Andrej Karpathy