The myth of doing “one thing well”
why your early 20s should look messy, unplanned, and wildly unserious on purpose
For the first time in years, I work inside a real company. There are structures, teams, processes, and calendars that actually matter. Decisions aren’t made on instinct alone. It’s disorienting because nothing in my career has looked like this before.
I spent the last few years inside small, early-stage setups where the only rule was to make something and ship it. If it broke, it broke. If it worked, it worked.
My work never sat in the revenue column. It lived in what you might call the internet column: growing Instagram accounts, writing scripts, building YouTube channels, making Twitter and LinkedIn accounts pop off, helping founders find their tone and their first few thousand strangers who cared.
I worked with people who were far more experienced than me—Paras Chopra, Ayush Wadhwa, others—who were kind enough to let me learn by doing. Even then, the work felt like craft rather than corporate. No dashboards. No ICPs. No funnels. No weekly business reviews. Just ideas, experiments, and your gut feeling telling you what to do next.
This new environment is different. I have to set goals, track them, deliver against them, collaborate across teams, plan, delegate work, and keep a dozen moving parts steady without losing the version of me that has always operated through curiosity and instinct.
One concept keeps appearing in meetings: ICP. Ideal Customer Profile.
It makes perfect sense for a funded AI company with a clear market, a tight product roadmap, and serious money involved. But I’m 24, early in my career, trying to understand internet culture, code, content, agents, image models, product, growth, and a dozen other things. For people like me, ICP feels like the wrong advice.
Curiosity doesn’t have an ideal persona. It doesn’t fit in a box.
The past month proves this. I built three completely unconnected things simply because I wanted to understand how they worked:
a tweet-writer that learns from the best posts on Twitter and generates memes,
a Chrome extension that fills forms automatically,
and a Welcome-themed hangman game that makes no sense but exists anyway.
None of this was built for money. None of it was validated. I didn’t talk to users. I didn’t even consider whether these things should exist. I paid for infrastructure, fixed bugs, wrote huge ass prompts, connected databases, and kept going because I enjoyed the process. In the middle of this “unplanned” work, I learned more than any structured roadmap could have given me.
I worked through technical documentation, learned how image models work, figured out vector search, semantic search, tool-calling, and parallel processing to decrease turnaround time. I rebuilt things I broke by accident. I played with Supabase in ways I’m not sure Supabase intended. Every project led somewhere else. None of it came from being focused. It all came from following whatever caught my attention that day.
Surface area beats optimisation
No one says this out loud, but when you’re early in your career, doing things without logic is how you accidentally become the best. You’re not supposed to optimize for correctness. You’re supposed to optimise for exposure: to ideas, tools, domains, people, and mistakes. The wider your surface area, the more likely you are to stumble onto something you didn’t know you needed.
You don’t get that from frameworks. You get it from building things nobody asked for and telling the internet you did it. You get it from touching every room you can, from letting your curiosity roam instead of trimming it early in the name of professionalism.
The world is getting more predictable because everything now comes with instructions. Playbooks for growth. Templates for virality. Roadmaps for product-market fit. Even creativity has become a checklist. In a world like that, the only real advantage left is to remain a little bit unstructured, to keep some chaos alive, to follow threads that don’t look useful yet, to learn for the sake of learning.
These are the people who end up somewhere unexpected. Not because they planned better, but because they kept their imagination loose enough to reach places structured paths don’t go.
Stay unstructured while you can
If you’re at the start of your career, or even somewhere in the middle, don’t force your life to fit into someone else’s framework. You can learn the process later. You can learn discipline whenever you want. But curiosity doesn’t wait. It fades if you don’t follow it.
There’s time to find your ICP. But there’s no time to shrink yourself before you even start.
Onto things I’ve been reading
I found a really cool website this month. The kind you open once and suddenly lose an hour because everything in it is just wow. It breaks down how tech works in the simplest way possible. Electrons, lasers, coordinates, the web, compilers… all the stuff we pretend to understand but actually don’t. It’s great. Take a look.
Another great find was this AI glossary by Julien, a design engineer. When we started building in AI last year, none of us knew what embeddings were, how vector search worked, or why context windows mattered. All of it felt impossible. We learnt it the hard way, and honestly, it’s still my favourite party trick around AI-curious people because most folks who say they “work in AI” are still stuck at prompting LLMs.
And then I went down a rabbit hole about media types after reading a TBPN post. I asked ChatGPT for more, kept digging, and ended up reading this new media piece from a16z. It got me thinking about how much India lacks in this space. Feels like a space where India should do well but isn’t even trying yet, especially in tech, defence, and internet culture.
What’s happening outside work
As part of my quarterly “do hard things” checklist, I ran my first half-marathon in September. For this quarter, I signed up for a jiu-jitsu competition. I know it’s early. I’m not even a year into training. But this is how I convinced myself:
If I don’t compete, I won’t lose.
If I don’t lose, I won’t see where I stand nationally.
If I don’t see where I stand, I won’t feel pressure.
If I don’t feel pressure, I won’t grow.
I want the accelerated learning path, not the comfortable one. And luckily, the people around me - coach, family, friends - push me in the same direction. So let’s see how it goes.
Also, I’m running out of good writing on the internet. Long-form especially. If you’ve read something solid recently, drop it in the comments.
And if you enjoyed this issue, share it with someone who would actually appreciate this kind of writing.
See you next time.
— t
Looking at things in hindsight, things do really connect.