The end of your comfort zone

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone — Neale Donald Walsh

Does that include getting into 40k of student loan debt, moving to a new city, and being away from family, comfort, and money?

Or is that jumping off the cliff?

Hi, My name is Andrew. Ever since I watched a TED talk, I’ve been so excited and dedicated to how technology can amplify how we live. Ever since the talk of Pranav Mistry sixth sense technology, Ive had a voracious passion to develop software and explore emerging technologies on how they can enhance how we learn, communicate, and express ourselves.

This was my infatuation all through college, and this passion has led me to do research in HCI and work with greatest HCI researchers in the world. This passion blossomed at the MIT Media Lab, where I worked at the Tangible Media Group and the Fluid Interfaces group, developing Augmented Reality and real-time collaboration platforms that pushed my imagination on what tech could do even further.

Then the real world hit. A lot of people don’t care about this stuff, not much of it is entirely useful cause a lot of these powerful, paradigm shifting ideas are just mvp’s and prototypes, not massively scalable products that people use every day. Tech outside of school and academic research is focusing on developing robust software infrastructures to process account payables and invoices, or utilizing your coding craft for enabling businesses to make more money.

Not a wrong thing to be a part of, but I just didn’t feel purpose in that. As I was still hungry about emerging tech that can enhance our lives, I decided to stop working in the industry and pursue this dream.

As I am writing this the night before I leave to embark on this new journey, I realized how much my perspective has changed and how extremely comfortable I’ve gotten in my current lifestyle. I’ve been feeling anxiety and worry about student loans and sacrificing all of my savings to do go back to graduate school and pursue the work that I am passionate about.

As I am excited and blessed for this opportunity, Ive felt that life has been disconnecting me from my roots, and is binding me with doubts about my dreams and pushing my thinking towards, “I need to create a sustainable income”, or “I need to focus on what is going to get me a job.”

I keep forgetting that this is an investment to myself to change the world, to really shape the profession and future I want to live in.

I guess this rant is for the part of me that doubts my ambitions and dreams.

Go fuck youself.

This is my time, and I know that whatever happens, it will all work out and I just have to have faith that the dots will connect in the future.

Here’s a toast to all the dreamers, may you keep strong during the highs and the lows, may you never forget that when you are totally out of your comfort zone, this is when your life really begins.