Year of Failures

2025 was the year I failed more than ever, hands down. This was one of the hardest years I have lived. But as a friend says, “number of times I failed > number of times most people even tried,” and this year was definitely the year I tried more things than ever.

Lots more to be done. The work is not done.

1. Age doesn’t matter. Experience barely matters.
   What matters is how someone spends their time.
   A 4-year degree can be learned in months if speedran efficiently. A 6-month relationship can teach you more than a 3-year one.

2. Success timelines are fake.
   Silicon Valley messes with your head because you see 20-year-old founders everywhere.
   Outlier success is real — and also basically not unpredictable. Just hear the stories of Red Bull Founder, the Michelin Tire founders. Especially the Red Bull founder, who graduated from college at 27, never started a business until 40. And then made RedBull. David Senra’s podcast summarizing his biography is exceptional.

3. I did more than ever and became less ambitious in a good way.
   I used to think: if I don’t die having built something revolutionary, life wasn’t worth it.
   That impatience has been ego.
   The best people I met weren’t “planning greatness.” They followed curiosity and stumbled into something the world wanted.
   Which rarely can be planned. A good example of this is Slack — how the founder of Slack was merely making a video game that Ben Horowitz was investing in, and it turned out to be that. Same even with Ben Horowitz, where their Opsware main product wasn’t valued by the market anymore so they made something extraordinary through pivoting a part of their business into the main product in layman’s terms.

4. Market matters.
   You can be the exact right person, with the right product… and still lose if the market doesn’t care.

5. Managing egos is a real skill.
   Big events, big ambitions, “successful” people — it’s all ego management, a surprising number of times.

6. Delayed gratification is more important than ever in this time when no one is willing to do deep work. Humans have all kinds of cheap urges. If we just give in to every single urge, I think we practically lose free will. You’re not a product of your decisions, you become a product of your circumstances — the pressure felt from the outside world, the urge felt from inside. It turns out just being a reactive person, not setting goals and a direction, but going where life takes you. I don’t think one can live a full life with satisfaction by giving in to every urge. Resisting urges requires making hard decisions that are uncomfortable in the moment. Every decision we make, even the smallest ones in our daily lives, is a vote for the future self we’re going to be. From checking our phones to subconsciously saying thank you to family even though it feels awkward, sticking to saying the truth to avoid even a white lie to just save some time and not over-explain, not falling in people pleasing traps.

   There is a character in Breaking Bad who is a drug addict who says:

   "I've gone where the universe takes me, my whole life. It's better to make those decisions for yourself."

   I personally became prey of a couple of bad habits when I found myself having too much unstructured time at times of the year, and this year, I want to eliminate these habits.

7. While you delay gratification by not acting on urges, I think it’s equally important to act AGAINST the urges to not do things. For eg. the urge to keep perfecting that one application for eternity. The compulsion to stay quiet and not ask out that one person when you really want to. The compulsion to not to compliment someone at the gym. I have been trying to practice this to the max recently for the funzies. It’s mostly social-based. The idea is simple. To start a conversation, to give a compliment, anytime I feel a bit nervous. Anything which feels a bit absurd to do needs to be done the moment I realize this compulsive feeling of nervousness. This has been a solid challenge. Getting in a habit of getting rejected is so unbelievably important. Because once I’m in this habit, it becomes a lifestyle. And you only want this habit to go right once or twice to change your life — say for finding a future cofounder, life partner, great friend, or company. It genuinely generates outsized returns.

8. Judge people by actions, not words.
   Judging a person only by their actions. The more I realize, the harder it has become to detect lies. The best way I have found for people to gain respect for themselves from me is by consistently taking actions that reflect that. If I have to think of two people whom I respect the most in the world, they’re incredibly dedicated to their craft, and they are consistently obsessed with it. They usually forgo all distractions to stick with their goals, which is by far the most attractive trait I find in friends, partners, bosses, and sponsors. Seeing that kind of obsession towards a certain goal is genuinely beautiful.

9. The most attractive thing you can do is do what you love, publicly.
   It sounds cliché, but it’s real — the energy is contagious.
   The world is built by people who still have a child in them.

10. Less LinkedIn. Less Twitter. Less noise. I now aim to spend 5-10 minutes max on these with many screen blockers.

11. Keep the homies close.
    I think there are only rare times in one’s life when we come across similar people. I was in the trenches for the past 3 months, and I’m more than grateful that nearly every week, I had one of my five closest friends check in on me and just always be there to listen. I cannot put into words just how loved I felt, and it truly makes all the difference. The thing is, when you’re doing something unconventional, you’re almost always a lone wolf, and it is a solitary path often, but I could have people I love close to me, care for me, check in on me, even when they don’t necessarily agree with all my choices and my way of living. And it’s simply because we share the same values. I’m incredibly grateful to William, Abinaya, Chandan, Kei, Suhas, Jolie, my brother, Aditya, for genuinely always being there. I feel incredibly lucky to have people I can ring at any point.

12. Only go all in. Last year, I went back to school in half spirits. And I wasted my time. The risk with going all in is that you will have conflicts, waste time if the leader is unclear or get hurt, in a relationship context. But I think it’s an even bigger waste of time to have one foot in the door and one out. No matter how it ends, I think I rarely have the regret that I didn’t put effort into a thing. Or just don’t do it.

13. Personality doesn’t predict success in capitalism.
    Kind people can fail. Assholes can win.
    The world only pays for value delivered at scale. It’s not moral. It’s just true.

14. Until a contract is signed, nothing is real.
    Verbal offers mean nothing. People disappear. Even “frontier” labs.

15. Love is one of the best feelings in the world — and also terrifying.
    I used to think I processed loss well and was bulletproof. This year humbled me. But as the quote from Good Will Hunting says, “You don’t know real loss until you’ve loved something more than yourself.”

16. Credentials help get a foot in the door. If there’s nothing below that, you just get fired. You could have all the right badges and the right experience working, but if you didn’t do work of significance, you don’t really make it past the interviews. I realized this was a project I worked on in the summer of my 1st year of university, which was this research software I made with a professor for the Government. In hindsight, I never thought too much of it. It wasn’t a prestigious project. I was getting pennies compared to what I have gotten today (I am very lucky). But years later, when I started doing interviews and had reference checks, I realized just how immensely it mattered. I had an impeccable relationship with my boss and still do. Every time it comes to give a referral, written or verbal, my guy hypes me up to the maximum, and it has opened more doors for me than, say, a friend of mine who worked at a FAANG who felt like he wasted time for a solid 2 months there. Not saying do FAANG or not. Or just do low-salary projects. But the team, the level of critical work, and the level of impact matter significantly more. Though I don’t think having one or two badges hurts either — I’m hoping I can just surpass that with a bigger and better network of people built on proof of work.

17. You don’t need to listen to every thought you have.
    Especially if you’re prone to overthinking. Also, be careful with GPT/Claude — smart overthinkers can turn it into a coping mechanism.

18. Health is everything. I lift regularly now and am on track with my weight goals. I ran 45 kilometres one night till morning on a whim in SF in December, and it fixed me. Highly recommend. I have fortunately also kept up after my lil surgery with working out, which has been great.

19. Food + sleep regulate the nervous system. This is a life hack I was not aware and it has helped me recover from a tough phase, but basically every time I feel not so great, I just eat food and make sure I am sleeping 8 hours every day. Keeps my mood way more regulated in tougher phases of life.

20. Structure creates freedom.
    Sometimes school/job isn’t a cage — it’s the container that lets you ship.

21. Success is variable, but the baseline is often simple. Deep work + consistency beats everything. I watched this episode of Dwarkesh Patel and Sonith a couple of months back. And Dwarkesh said, and I’ll paraphrase it, that he does something very simple. He just deeply researches every person he wants to interview over a period of a month and sends them a list of questions that are very good over a cold email. That’s how he got people like Satya Nadella on for the podcast. The beautiful thing I like he mentioned was that “you could go to GPT and ask it how to make a successful podcast with interests like mine and it’ll you just my method…the only thing is nobody just does it.” I am still paraphrasing but this stuck with me. You could just ignore the world and do a thing that GPT suggests based on your unique skillset for a long time and chances are you’ll get rich and probably succeed. Very likely.

22. Follow through on your word, or don’t promise. Reliability and integrity are rare and insanely valuable. People like reliable people who are a bit less talented than more talented people who are less reliable.

23. You can’t plan life.
    You can plan habits, values, and inputs. The rest unfolds. Sticking to good habits, values and inputs can be very hard initially, but the people I see winning from 2 years ago, when I spent the time in the valley, were the people who ignored all events, ignored the hangouts, and just always stuck to their non-negotiable habits.

24. Read often. I am trying to build this habit where I don’t use my phone for the first hour of the day and just read. The days I do it, I feel phenomenal. Currently, I am reading this book called Meditations, recommended to me by my life coach Aatik. (highly recommend Aatik btw, he truly keeps me sane).

25. Trust intuition.
    Intuition ≠ instant gratification.

26. Ignore most advice. Including this.

27. Don’t feel shit. Just start digging.
    Motivation is unreliable. Action isn’t.

28. You can’t plan life at all.
    The only real lever is habits + what inputs you allow near your brain.

29. Agency ≠ impulsiveness.
    Novelty-seeking can cosplay as “high agency” while quietly destroying compounding. I see this a bunch in the valley now. There’s less compounding but just validation seeking. Jasmine Sun puts it best here. I took some intentional time away from the Bay for this reason. I do plan to move back in early-March now, but it’s been good to take time off in my family home. (Update: we rented a three-story office space, we’re planning to make a phenomenal working space for people in marketing, growth, storytelling, but approaching it from more of an angle of high-quality storytelling. Think Stripe Press, but independent, with more mediums like video and writing.

30. Grow the puzzle around you.
    Instead of finding which game to play, you just figure yourself out by trying out a bunch of things and making initiatives and ideas around you. Jessica Livingston’s blog here is a gem. Paul Graham and her make me incredibly jealous of an aspirational relationship.

31. In a world where you can be anything, the hardest thing is being yourself.
    Authenticity is expensive — and that’s why it works.

32. Association with smart people doesn’t make you smarter.
    Bay Area has this thing specifically where every day you “feel ahead,” because of some cracked people around you. Take me, I felt very smart living in my first hacker house, where Cursor came out of, which is now a $30B valued startup or so. That was stupid. Each day I felt “ahead”, someone obsessed is passing you, and the best people only ever care about substance not association. Working hard is the soul of my life, and I want to work harder than ever before this year.

33. Less posting — higher density.
    Tweets and LinkedIn can become dopamine disguised as “building in public.” The best people go loud → then disappear → then return with something real. I find it hard to do this since my job is basically marketing now, but I think it’s still possible. I carve out very specific time to be on Twitter and then spend a lot of my time every day now learning AI Video-Gen and self-learning about VLMs. It’s been fun.

34. UGC / influencer marketing is secretly elite.
    Influencer marketing and UGC marketing mastery is looked down on for prestige, but under the table, everyone’s trying to hire these people and secretly, many consumer companies’ entire revenues are made by these marketing channels. I am currently doing a contract learning this for a company, which has rotted my brain maybe a bit, but wowzers. I’ll just say I know a couple of companies with $100M+ ARR with 50% revenue from IM and UGC. It’s insane.

35. Until the contract is signed, nothing exists.
    Until a contract is signed, do not take people’s word. So many people back out on contracts, it is crazy. I have multiple job offers where we had a verbal offer, they said they’d send a contract in 2 hours, told me the salary, I sent in my information for the visa, and then they just disappeared. This is a frontier AI lab btw.

36. Ignore most advice. Including this.
    Make your own philosophy through lived reps. This is not advice, just my learnings.

37. Delaying Happiness until an achievement.
    The two people I look up to consistently as mentors are incredibly emotionally stable, know that high ambition is a slow process, not a gap year project, not a 2-year startup, but a lifestyle. I used to delay my happiness for the longest time, but I realized it’s most fun — and only sustainable — if you enjoy the process.

38. Good relationships are everything. Whether it be friends, family, a partner, or co-founders. If you have people around you who push you consistently, it takes time to find such people. But once you do, life gets very enjoyable. I still feel I am in the trenches often, but being in the trenches with the people you love, is one of the best feelings in the world. There’s a certain beauty that comes when you look at your failures and can laugh at it and move on to a bigger project with these people you’re dedicated to building something real with — whatever it may be. When you have someone with whom you’ll shoulder-to-shoulder take on big challenges. Someone whose ambitions you’ll push higher, and they’ll push yours higher. I now understand this feeling is extremely rare to find with co-founders, friends and partners. I think once you find it, it is important to put your soul in to protect it. I am now way more vulnerable than I used to be with the people I am close to because of this quote I read earlier in 2025. “When you don’t tell me you’re in the mud, you take away the joy from me from sitting in the mud with you.” I have learned that sharing when I am in the trenches, rather than just pretending, has made basically every one of my relationships better.