do cool shit

4 days ago, I asked my Fua why he was watching TV.

I’d started the trip in Mumbai with my Fua and Fui, gone to Bangalore, and then come back before flying home. The return became slightly more complicated because Sachee was tying rakhis to me, Waris and Adi before we left for the airport. We ended up late enough that I could sprint through and make the flight, but my suitcase couldn’t make it on with me.

They then went absurdly far out of their way to get it back to me, booking a flight to Mumbai that same day. Obviously, I wanted to bring them ocean water and spend whatever time I had left with them after that. So I disappeared from home again, spent much less time with my Fua and Foi than they’d expected, and they were understandably a little upset.

So I went back to sit with them before leaving. My Fua was watching television, and I asked him why.

“To distract myself from work.”

My dad gave me the same answer a few months ago. I don’t think either of them is wrong for feeling that way. They didn’t come from the background I did, where I could sit around at 19 wondering what work would make me feel most alive. They had to make decisions out of survival, provide for people and build the stability which now gives me the luxury of asking these questions at all. They deserve their flowers for that.

The answer still stayed with me though. I wasn’t judging my Fua for watching TV. I was wondering, though, whether work had to become the part of the day you survived before earning the right to distract yourself from it. Their lives gave me the chance to choose differently, and it would be quite stupid to inherit that chance and then sleepwalk into the exact same relationship with work anyway.

I also got lucky because the idea never fully stuck while I was growing up. My dad spent a lot of time outside work studying and, besides, he was working on rockets.

That was cool enough.

Watching him made studying feel like something you could do because you were genuinely interested, and I had my own version of that relationship with research. I’d find some shit fun, read everything I could about it and try doing it without needing a sensible reason. {i.e. hacking my secondary school's wifi network when i was 12}

Running the agency slowly kicked a lot of that out of me. As soon as I started optimising everything for a commercial outcome, every rabbit hole had to justify itself, and I stopped wanting to research at all. Somewhere along the golden brick agency road, I lost the instinct to learn things just because I found them cool.

This year, especially, helped me find it again. San Francisco, New York and then Bangalore put me around people who would also probably do some version of their work for free (this is not normal in Milton Keynes). In Bangalore, it was Chaitanya, plus all the other crazy founders I wrote about in my last essay who properly re-catalysed the thought.

Being around these guys long enough made me start reading, researching and building things simply because I found them fucking cool again. That included a robot that could kiss me, an emotional latent space for your Claude chats, a coding-task verification engine and a maths agent going head-to-head on benchmarks with Google’s AlphaProof: which i've now realised is called neurosymbolic AI research.

Sounds cool.

None of these began with some serious declaration that I’d found the thing I was going to spend 10 years building. I just wanted to know whether something could work, so I started pulling at it. One question produced another and, before long, I’d done a fairly unreasonable amount of work without ever having to convince myself to start.

That’s why I think having fun is a huge fucking cheat code. What feels like fun to you looks like work to everybody else.

I kept coming back voluntarily. I thought about the problems in the shower, in the back of an auto and while zoning out over food.

For the first time since I was in year 12, I read papers without first putting “read paper” into Notion and moving it between 3 different lists. From the outside, this can look like working incredibly hard. Most of the time in Bangalore, it was just the most interesting way I could think of spending the day.

I loved swimming and still had mornings where getting into the pool felt horrible. I didn’t reach the pinnacle I wanted, but I kept pushing because becoming slightly better was worth the shitty morning. The bad mornings didn’t make swimming stop being something I loved.

Naval has this point that inspiration is perishable, so you should act on it immediately. I think that’s largely right. The moment I find something cool is usually the easiest moment to begin. If I wait a week, the idea becomes grander, more distant and somehow much harder to touch. I start telling myself I need the right headspace, the right person or an actual reason to do it.

The original reason was that I thought it was cool. That was enough to start.

I once read a line one of my friends attributed to Krishna: a man without purpose is a man fuelled by distraction. I’ve since learnt that it was probably a mistranslation, but I still think it gets at something real. Distraction is terrifying because you can look at what you’re doing, know you aren’t proud of it, and still be addicted to doing it anyway.

I think that’s why the line stuck. When I didn’t know what I enjoyed, distraction became very easy. I could wait months to discover my passion while making sure I was never alone or bored enough to notice it. A few months ago, I was doing exactly that: promising I’d find the interesting thing later while filling the present so I never actually had to look.

Spending some time alone helped. So did spending time with people who made me want to do cool things. Eventually, their energy became enough activation energy for my own curiosity. I started projects without asking each one to justify the next 10 years of my life first.

This is why “follow your passion” never felt particularly useful when I didn’t have one. Fun was much easier to notice. What did I keep reading about? What would I build even though nobody was waiting for it? What made me forget that I normally needed distraction?

All my projects live on an SSD called Gabbar Singh, named after the villain from Sholay, which i'm hopefully seeing in a few weeks at the royal albert hall. He killed 3 dudes in spectacular fashion, so my completely rational thesis is that whatever eventually comes off this SSD should kill 3 companies in the same fashion. I hope.

I don’t know which folder does it yet. One of them will kill 3 companies, and the others will be the strange reasoning traces which got me there.

And that's pretty fucking cool.