Some questions and a gap year
How I’m hacking the year after my high school
I’m an 18 earth-years old human. I am a very curious person. I like to discover the way things work and create new things.
Machines fascinate me. All kinds of machines — electronics, trains, cars, excavators, industrial machines, everything! They are magical! I’ve always wanted to build those, to figure out how we can make something do a particular task for us. So that we have more time to think about other things to build and be happy and read books.
I love reading science fiction, because it inspires me to dream big and crazy. It validates that I’m not the only nut case in the world.
I have never been good at initiating conversations or being social. I feel that building things for people is how I can make people happy. Even for my girlfriend’s birthday I built a website as a gift instead of a ‘normal’ gift.
I’m a self-taught programmer and have an experience in Android and back-end development of almost 5 years. Software primarily fascinates me because unlike hardware I don’t have to buy new parts for every new project I want to build. It feels like a real-world superpower. It is such a powerful tool to improve our lives!
Having finished high school last month, I’ve taken a gap year. The purpose is to explore and discover new things, and learning by doing.
Of course, I’ve made mistakes along the way and I learnt along the way.
These mistakes taught me many valuable lessons and I’m glad I could make them early on. The most important thing is not repeating these mistakes, because repeating a mistake means that you haven’t learnt anything from past experiences. The cycle of trying, failing, and learning is vital. I don’t think it is possible to never make mistakes and still get the learnings. So, it is important to make new mistakes and adding the conclusions to our ‘database’.
These lessons brought up some precious questions:
Should I run a business now? With this Co-Founder?
The co-founder experience taught me that genuine intentions are more important than the skills a person has. It is the values and ethics that matter more than short-term success and appreciation. Also, I learnt that it is important to say no sometimes, I understood that I’m always going to ‘miss out’ on something so I should not worry about all the things I’m missing and focus on what I really want to do.
I had to shut down my startup in October 2017, 4 months before my 12th grade final exams. I thought that I can build many more startups after high-school, these 4 months of academics would give me much more than continuing with a dead startup. I took a long time getting over my startup’s shutdown though, I couldn’t believe it was gone. It was somewhat like being married. There was some serious commitment involved. And I think I should focus on gathering as many diverse experiences as possible at this point in my life. Running sustainable businesses is what I’ll do throughout my life anyway.
Does formal education make sense at all?
I recently received my 12th grade result. I passed with 74% overall percentage. Although a bit disappointing it was pretty good if I consider that I had almost dropped out of formal education in the beginning of the academic session. I was sick of following a mundane, non-practical syllabus and thought it was absolutely unnecessary for me to go to a building and spend money to learn the content that is freely available on the Internet anyway. My announcement to completely drop out of formal education came as a shock to my parents and mentors alike. They were practically scrambling to give me valid reasons for staying in school. I was focused on the content aspect of school, but overlooked the ecosystem, the people, the discipline it gave me. Again, it took me some time, some counseling by parents and mentors, some open discussions, and a lot of thinking to realize the things I had not considered. Formal education helps me give a structure to my efforts, it teaches me discipline. The interaction with my friends, and teachers sometimes pushes me out of my technologist mindset and comfort zone. Thus, the value existence of formal education for me got validated.
Let’s pause, look around, breathe, and go :)
Even though I decided I was going to continue formal education the idea of being academically unaffiliated for some time and being ‘free’ in that sense excites me. I had many thoughts pass my mind during school-time which made me wish I had some time off all of this. I wanted to build projects, take up internships, do something I had never done before. I want to work in various parts of the world during this year to experience as many diverse work-cultures as possible. I want to observe how people perceive innovation in different parts of the world. I think this bag-full of experiences will give me something very valuable, I honestly cannot pinpoint it but I’m very positive about it.
I want to be challenged and push myself to improve my skills further while keeping my sense of purpose intact.
What after that?
After my gap year I hope to attend one of the top universities in US for my undergrad course. I want to take Computer Science as my major course, and Math as minor. I’m really passionate about computers and I want to learn as much as there is to learn about them.
I see myself as a lifelong innovator. I want to build sustainable businesses around solutions to crucial problems. I don’t think I’m a messiah who’s here to rescue people from their troubles, but I sure want to make as many lives as possible better because it makes me happy. I want to do it for myself.
I have taken this gap year because I want to learn from different experiences — research oriented, operations oriented, anything else there is to learn.
I don’t have a specific kind of companies in mind. I’ll be happy to know what the readers think :)
