I’m 23, and I’m Trying Everything Before I Turn 25

I’m a kid who is curious, often weird, and different from the crowd in the traditional sense.

Recently, after reading a book, I set a goal for myself: until I turn 25, I’m going to try everything I can. I want to find out what I’m really good at, what I genuinely enjoy doing, what feels like play rather than work, and what I can actually make money from.

And once I find that thing, I’ll go ALL IN.

Looking back, I realise that, knowingly or unknowingly, I’ve been doing exactly that since the beginning.

For some people, this might sound like a stupid idea. Everyone tells you to pick one thing, stick with it for a long time, and get really good at it.

And I get it. There’s a lot of truth in that.

But come on, we’re all going to die someday. I’d rather try different things, discover what I truly love, and spend my life doing that than commit myself to something I may or may not enjoy.

Especially now, when technology enables you to build almost anything you can imagine. It’s honestly like magic.

Right now, I’m sitting somewhere in a café, writing this, and you might be reading it from a completely different part of the world.

Think about that for a second.

Anyway, let me tell you how all this started.

The Justin Bieber phase

I’ve always been a huge Justin Bieber fan, and I still am.

I thought I wanted to become a singer like him. So, I went a little crazy.

I literally wrote down the lyrics of most of his songs in my notes and sang them. I bought a guitar, learned to play it, and even performed a few songs at college hostel events.

It was fun. I enjoyed the music, the instruments, and the whole process of learning something new.

But somewhere along the way, I realised something about myself.

I’m an introvert. I overthink a lot, and I am not a person who can talk to everyone easily.

I began to feel that maybe becoming a singer wasn't for me, cause I don’t really enjoy being on stage in front of lot of people

So I stopped it, but yeah I still love listening to music, though. And I still find learning musical instruments fascinating.

That was my first little experiment.

How an arts student got into machine learning

During my final year of graduation, I got my first laptop.

Buying a laptop was a huge dream for me back then. And not just any laptop , Its a MacBook.

Thankfully, someone travelling from the US bought one for me, and that laptop opened up an entirely new world.

I started exploring all kinds of nerdy stuff.

I come from an arts background. Nobody in my hostel block was really into coding, so I thought it would be pretty cool to learn something that made me look like a hacker.

I used to find some code on the internet or GitHub, copy and paste it into Jupyter Notebook, run it, and create graphs using Matplotlib.

And I loved it.

Imagine writing just a few lines of code and watching a graph appear on your screen. You could take some data, run a program, and suddenly see something meaningful.

It felt amazing.

Eventually, I started digging deeper and discovered that these were some of the things people did in machine learning.

At the time, machine learning was a huge buzzword. So I did what any curious person would do.

I searched for “Machine Learning Engineer.”

I found courses, certifications, and all kinds of learning resources.

Of course, I barely knew what I was getting into.

I wasn't from a science background. I didn't know much about mathematics, and I could barely do anything beyond opening a Jupyter Notebook and running code I found online.

But I thought, okay, let's learn machine learning and see where this goes.

While most of my classmates were reading sonnets and fiction, I was sitting there trying to understand something I didn't fully understand myself.

Somehow, I kept going.

Initially, I thought machine learning was mostly about coding. But the deeper I went, the more I realised how much mathematics was involved.

so I had to learn calculus, integration, and a bunch of other things that were completely new to me.

It was hard, but I decided to learn them anyway. I enrolled in courses, worked through the concepts, and eventually completed an advanced programme where I ranked second.

Not bad for someone who started by copying code from the internet.

After that, I wanted to build something real.

I started experimenting with chatbots and OpenAI's API. The idea that you could connect a language model to your own data and build something useful with it felt like magic.

I could build something, make it respond to questions, and see it actually work.

That feeling was addictive.

And somewhere along the way, I got into reading books.

That turned out to be one of the best habits I've ever developed. It's something I'm genuinely proud of even today. I’ve read 80+ books so far.

The urge to build something of my own

Eventually, I got my first internship — an international one, working with a startup.

I didn't know much about how things worked in the real world. But I was curious, willing to learn, and ready to figure things out as I went.

I later did another internship.

Both experiences taught me a lot, but I started feeling that I wanted to do more.

I was young. I wanted to explore. I wanted to build things on my own rather than just work on someone else's ideas.

So a friend and I started a marketing agency.

At the time, my friend knew how to run Meta ads, set up websites, and create campaigns. Together, we figured things out and started working with clients.

That experience taught me things I couldn't have learned just by taking courses.

Cold emailing. Talking to clients. Building relationships. Running campaigns. Understanding what businesses actually need.

I also built my first website from start to finish and launched it on WordPress.

It took me almost a week to complete.

I even found a premium template online, downloaded it for free, customised it, and made the whole thing work.

Looking back, it wasn't anything extraordinary. But at the time, building something from scratch and putting it on the internet felt like a big achievement.

Because it was.

I was learning by doing.

Teaching machine learning, building a community.

Around the same time, a course mate and I started a community for curious people.

I began teaching machine learning, created a course, and even received appreciation from FreeCodeCamp.

It was exciting to share what I'd learned with others.

But eventually, I started losing interest.

I couldn't clearly see the meaning behind what I was doing anymore, and I realised I wasn't enjoying it as much as I had expected.

So I quit.

I've done that a few times in my life.

Started something with a lot of excitement, spent time on it, learned a bunch of things, and then realised it wasn't something I wanted to keep doing.

Some people might call that a lack of consistency.

Maybe they're right.

But I also think there's a difference between quitting because something gets difficult and quitting because you've genuinely learned enough to realise that it's not for you.

Of course, knowing which one you're doing isn't always easy.

I'm still figuring that out.

The Discord days and an international AI startup

Back then, I was extremely active on Discord.

I was online for ten hours a day.

I was chatting with people, joining different communities, participating in discussions, and making friends from all over the world.

At that time, AI agencies were becoming a big thing. Everyone seemed to be talking about how businesses could use AI, and I wanted to explore that space further.

That's when I met a friend from Australia.

He was a working professional who was interested in starting an AI agency, and I was equally excited about the idea.

After a few conversations, we decided to build something together.

We brought in a few more people — one from Thailand and another from the US.

We were an international team, full of ideas and excited about what we could build.

I genuinely believed we were going to do something big.

Then one of our co-founders, who was around 60 and had spent more than 35 years in the automotive industry, introduced us to a problem he believed was worth solving.

He understood the industry far better than we did, and he saw an opportunity that we hadn't considered.

We trusted his experience and decided to build a product for the automotive industry.

And that's where things got interesting.

We worked incredibly hard on the product. But somewhere along the way, we got trapped in the perfectionism loop.

We kept telling ourselves that the product wasn't ready to launch.

There was always something else to improve, something else to fix, or something else to add.

We were also relying heavily on third-party tools to build parts of the product, and they have limitations.

Eventually, it took us more than 15 months to launch something.

By the time we got there, other players were already in the market, and our product wasn't positioned well enough to compete.

Some customers liked what we'd built, which was encouraging. But we had lost so much time getting to that point.

And because nobody was getting paid a salary, everyone had to focus on making a living.

The team's interests gradually shifted. People got busy with their own work, motivation disappeared, and the project slowly went silent.

Including for me.

It was a tough experience.

We had spent so much time building something, only to end up with very little to show for it.

But I learned something important: building a product isn't just about building a good product.

You need to talk to customers, validate the problem, get something into their hands early, and learn from the market.

Perfectionism can be expensive.

Sometimes, the biggest mistake isn't building something bad. It's taking so long to launch that you never give yourself enough time to find out whether it's good.

The first time I made $1,300 from a project

At some point, I needed to make a living, so I started freelancing.

And that's when something happened that genuinely changed how I thought about money and technology.

I got my first client who paid me $1,300 to build a simple chatbot.

At the time, that was a lot of money for me.

I remember thinking about how I had made enough money from a project that took roughly a week to complete to buy another MacBook.

Just by building something with technology.

It felt crazy.

Until then, making money had always seemed like something that required a lot of time, a traditional job, or an established business.

But here I was, solving a problem for someone, using skills I'd taught myself, and getting paid for it.

I went on to complete a few more freelance projects, mostly building AI tools and internal systems for businesses.

And I started thinking differently about what was possible.

The internet gave me access to knowledge. Technology gave me the ability to build. And the internet also gave me access to customers who were willing to pay for what I built.

That combination was fascinating.

Around this time, I was reading a lot of books, almost every day.

The more I read, the more I became interested in leverage, freedom, and the idea of building things that could create value without requiring me to exchange every hour of my life for money.

I wanted to build something in tech.

Something of my own.

I also started experimenting with podcasts and content creation, just to see where those things might lead.

At this point, I had no idea how many different directions my life would take.

The idea that brought me into the delivery business

One of my uncles had an idea for a peer-to-peer delivery platform.

And for some reason, the idea resonated with me deeply.

Remember how I got my MacBook?

Someone I'd never met in my life bought it for me from the US.

That experience had shown me that people could connect across distances and do things for one another in ways that weren't possible in the traditional sense.

So the idea of connecting people through a delivery platform felt meaningful to me.

I thought, why not build something around this?

There was just one problem.

I had almost zero experience building mobile applications.

But I said yes anyway.

I hired two people to help build the product, and eventually, one of them became co-founder.

We started building the app.

And we did this before AI coding agents became what they are today. ChatGPT existed, but its coding capabilities were nowhere near what we're used to now.

A lot of the work involved figuring things out ourselves, learning as we went, and solving problems we had never encountered before.

It was challenging, but I loved the process.

I was building something real.

Something that could potentially be used by people outside my immediate circle.

And that was exciting.

Running a courier franchise to understand the market

While working on the delivery app, I wanted to understand the logistics industry better.

I didn't want to build a product based entirely on assumptions. I wanted to see how the business actually worked, understand the problems people faced, and learn what customers needed.

So we took a courier franchise.

Those days were intense.

I worked incredibly hard, often without proper food or sleep, trying to get the business running.

Somehow, we managed to break even within three months of starting.

Over time, the franchise grew to around ₹2.5 lakh in revenue.

For me, it was a valuable experience because I wasn't just learning about logistics from the outside anymore. I was actually operating a business in the industry.

I could see the challenges, understand the workflows, and learn how things worked on the ground.

But after about a year, I decided to quit.

The business had become profitable, but I felt I wasn't learning much that was new to me anymore. I also realised that running the franchise wasn't what I ultimately wanted to spend my time doing.

My original purpose was to understand the market so that I could build a better delivery product.

And I felt I'd learned enough to return to that goal.

So I moved on again.

Some people might wonder why I'd leave a business that was generating revenue.

Honestly, I asked myself the same question.

But for me, money wasn't the only consideration. I wanted to build something in technology, and I didn't want to lose sight of that just because I'd found another business that was working.

Maybe that was the right decision. Maybe it wasn't.

Either way, it was mine to make.

Seeing my own app on the Play Store and App Store

After leaving the franchise, I went back to building our delivery application.

Eventually, we launched it on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

I can't properly explain how I felt when I first saw our app available for download.

I'd spent so much time learning, experimenting, and building things. And now, there was an actual application that people could download onto their phones and use.

It wasn't just an idea anymore.

It was a product.

I could open the Play Store, search for our app, install it on my phone, and use something that we'd built.

Anyone with a compatible phone could do the same.

That feeling was incredible.

We crossed 5,000 users, got featured in a few startup communities, and started seeing signs that we might be onto something.

For a while, I genuinely thought this was going to become something big.

But eventually, we discovered a problem.

The business model we'd chosen wasn't going to work at scale.

We had built the product, acquired users, and put it out into the world, only to realise that the underlying model needed to change.

It was another one of those moments when you have to take a step back and question everything.

What are we actually solving? Who needs this the most? How should the business work? And what would make it sustainable?

There was a lot of overthinking.

A lot of uncertainty.

And a lot of trying to figure out what to do next.

Then, one night, somewhere around midnight, I started thinking about a different approach.

What if we connected small and medium-sized businesses that needed same-day deliveries across a city?

What if, instead of focusing on the model we'd originally chosen, we focused on the actual delivery needs of businesses that were struggling to serve their customers efficiently?

I started talking to SMEs, understanding their requirements, and exploring whether there was a real demand for this.

And the more conversations I had, the more interesting the opportunity became.

So we went back to the drawing board.

We changed the business model, reworked the product, and started building again.

And that's where I am right now.

Still building. Still learning. Still trying to figure things out.

So, what have I actually learned?

I'm 23 now.

And when I look back at everything I've tried, it feels like I've lived several different lives already.

I've tried music, learned machine learning from an arts background, taught others, built communities, started marketing agencies, worked with international teams, built AI products, freelanced, created content, started a podcast, operated a courier franchise, and built a delivery app.

I've experienced the excitement of starting something new.

I've experienced the satisfaction of making money from my skills.

I've experienced what it feels like to launch a product into the world.

And I've experienced the frustration of working on something for months, only to realise that it isn't going to work the way you imagined.

I've learned about sales, marketing, technology, product development, client relationships, business models, and working with people.

I've also learned about burnout, perfectionism, uncertainty, and what happens when your excitement for something slowly disappears.

But perhaps the biggest thing I've learned is that I don't have everything figured out.

And that's okay.

For a long time, I thought I needed to find the one thing I was meant to do.

The one thing I was naturally good at. The one thing I'd enjoy forever. The one thing that would make everything else fall into place.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether that's even how it works.

Maybe you don't discover what you want to do by sitting in a room and thinking about it.

Maybe you have to try things, build things, work with people, make mistakes, and experience different parts of life before you begin to understand yourself.

Maybe you have to do the work before you know whether you actually like the work.

And maybe some of the things you try aren't supposed to become your career. Maybe they're just there to teach you something you'll need later.

I don't know.

I'm still figuring it out.

Before I turn 25

I still have this goal.

Until I turn 25, I want to keep exploring.

I want to build more products, experiment with different business models, meet interesting people, learn new skills, travel, create things, and understand what I'm genuinely good at.

I want to find something that combines three things:

Something I'm good at.

Something I genuinely enjoy doing, where the work feels almost like play.

And something that creates enough value for people that they're willing to pay for it.

If I can find that intersection, I want to go ALL IN.

Not because someone told me that's what I should do, but because I'll have experienced enough to make that decision for myself.

Maybe I'll find it before 25. Maybe I'll find it after 25. Maybe the thing I think I want today will change completely a few years from now.

Who knows?

Maybe I've been doing everything wrong. Maybe I've been doing exactly what I need to do.

I honestly don't know yet.

But I do know that technology has given me the ability to explore things that would have been much harder for someone like me just a few decades ago.

I can learn almost anything online, build products from my laptop, reach people across the world, and turn ideas into things that actually exist.

And I don't want to waste that opportunity by being too afraid to try.

So, for now, I'm going to keep building, keep experimenting, and keep following my curiosity wherever it takes me.

Maybe one day, before or after I turn 25, I'll come back to this blog and say it out loud:

I found something I truly love doing. And I'm going ALL IN.

Until then, let's see where this takes me.

Thanks for reading.