Call for ambition
A YouTube Shorts pops up on my phone. A guy is playing his guitar while a girl in the background bobs her head to the beat. The music is catchy, and I keep playing it on loop until I finally move on.
Two weeks later, YouTube recommends a video featuring Aisha Ahmed as an aspiring baker. It’s the same song, but now with a professionally shot video. “That was quick,” I think to myself.
Another two weeks pass, and I find myself at Sarjapur Social. It’s 1:15 a.m., and the place is about to close. Everyone, sweaty from dancing, has taken their seats. The DJ announces the last song of the evening, and the audio goes “Gungunaye, muskurake, choti moti baton pe muh fulaye.”
The whole club comes back to life. People scream at the top of their lungs. Everyone is back on their feet, trying to squeeze out the last drop of fun. On the way back in the cab, I find myself perplexed. I have witnessed something extraordinary.
‘Naadaniyan’ went from a front-camera video to a professionally produced YouTube video, to being the closing song at a club—all in just a month.
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Understanding how proteins fold inside DNA is a tremendously valuable pursuit in drug development. Researchers, often PhD students at Ivy League institutions, dedicate years to deciphering these complex structures. It takes about five years of PhD to determine the folding structure of just one protein. Until a few years ago, we had only mapped 17% of the 20,000 proteins in the human body.
DeepMind recognized this as a challenge worth tackling. Building on prior work from 2010, they launched AlphaFold in 2018—an AI program capable of accurately predicting the structure of 200 million proteins. In doing so, AlphaFold effectively saved an estimated one billion PhD years.
One billion Ivy league PhD years!
To put that in perspective, PhD as a degree was formalised in the year 1150. An estimate of 1% of the population holds a PhD. Since the 12th century, there has been a cumulative population of 10 billion. That means 100 million PhD awardees (not narrowing down on Ivy league). There has been only 500 million PhD years in the human history — which is a gross estimate in itself
This breakthrough didn’t just accelerate scientific progress; it fundamentally rewrote the limits of human capability. What was once a painstaking, decades-long process has now been reduced to mere moments.
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I spent the entire day debugging a Lambda function in Node.js, feeling completely stuck. At one point, I was convinced this was just too hard. But then a thought hit me—someone built Lambda itself, someone created Node.js, someone developed REST APIs, and someone wrote the LangChain library. Someone designed the compiler, and someone built AWS.
And here I was, struggling with a small bug in something I had built—standing on the shoulders of these giants.
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Sundar Pichai became the CEO of Google at 43. Barack Obama became the President of the United States at 47. Isaac Asimov wrote or edited 500 books and penned 90,000 letters and postcards in his lifetime. Pablo Picasso created over 45,000 pieces of art.
How insane are these lives? In the few decades we have on this planet, some people achieve more than seems humanly possible. It makes me question everything. Am I thinking about life all wrong? For me, progress feels linear—1 to 2 to 3. But for them, it leaps—1 to 10 to 100.
The thought echoes: I want to do something bigger with my life.
But then come the familiar excuses — I don’t think I have what it takes. I don’t think I can do it.
How long can I keep saying that? How long am I going to feel like this?
As Craig Ferguson would say—maybe I have a thinking problem. I haven’t yet grasped life as a non-linear thing. In my current mindset careers progress every two to three years and money grows at 7% in fixed deposits. Everything feels incremental and hence predictable.
But if we’re all just thinking about promotions, ESOPs, and financial independence then who will create the next great works of art? Who will shape the future? Who will build the next revolutionary companies? Who will push the boundaries of science?
The only way to fix this thinking problem would be to surround yourself with extremely ambitious people. People who make you think bigger — people in front of whom you can unabashedly sing the Pokémon theme song: “I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was.”
I have to completely rewrite the narratives I’ve internalized—about risk, security, what is possible, and what is not.
“But it’s hard and painful”, I worry. “It comes with sacrificing time with friends and family or compromising on your health. It means putting yourself in situations where you’ll be rejected, humiliated, and forced to confront your limits.”
And yet—why should it be easy? I think at other times. Why should life be easy? It’s a wild, unpredictable ride, a fleeting moment on a speck of dust in an infinite universe. Sure, career decisions are hard. But they’re not the hardest thing. Never before has life offered more chances for extraordinary outcomes.
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
- George Bernard Shaw
Somehow, society has made us too normal. We watch the same reels, discuss the same news, play the same sports on weekends, and party at the same places. What happened to us?
Let’s talk about sacrifice. I once met a top trader in Bombay who managed a ₹200 crore portfolio. He sat there, telling me his biggest regret: he didn’t have enough fun in his 20s. He didn’t enjoy his adult life. And honestly? That tradeoff makes sense. Maybe that is exactly the cost.
I think the toughest part is realising that Life can be absolutely fucking brutal for no reason and out of nowhere. I think many of us were raised to believe that if we did things a certain way or achieved certain things that we’d have a level of protection against the worst life can throw. Like, working hard or getting a decent job or finding a good partner. And the next thing you know, boom, you’re in an accident and bed ridden for months. Or boom, someone you love gets a terrible addiction. Or boom, miscarriage. Boom, fire. And the older I get the more I see it happen to others too - no one is exempt.
- Excerpt from a Reddit post
But think about it — life has no insurance. Life has always been risky and fickle. So why are we so obsessed with trying to buy one? Why are we hedging in our careers? In our relationships?
I try to imagine what it must be like to work at OpenAI — or any AI company blitzscaling. The intensity, the relentless pace — it must be brutally stressful. But maybe that’s the price of greatness. After all, how many companies in history can say they’ve rendered Chegg, Stack Overflow, and countless startups obsolete with just a few model updates? What a mission to be part of!
The post is a catharsis for all the anxieties we carry inside.
I want to befriend the wildly ambitious — the ones who dream bigger, who make the impossible feel within reach. I want to be infected by that energy, to surround myself with people who expand my sense of what’s possible. More than anything, I want to be an ambition multiplier — the kind of person who pushes others to aim higher, believe bolder, and chase the extraordinary.
I want to be an optimist — someone who trusts that life unfolds in strange, serendipitous ways. That Sisyphus is terribly happy
Ambition is fragile. It takes courage to voice it, and even more to pursue it. No one wants to hear, “But what about work-life balance?” or “You’ll struggle to pay the bills.” Especially not from the people closest to them.
Instead, I want to push people toward what sets them on fire — to see their eyes light up at the thought of what they could become.
So go. Do whatever you can do greatly. Build companies. Save the environment. Make music. Build bridges. Discover a new state of matter. Whatever it is — just do it with everything you have.