10 Years Down, I’m Still The Guy Who Figures It Out

10 Years on, and am still the guy who figures it out.

Ten years ago I joined Tata Motors and I thought that was the start of a career. Most start their first job and say MBA in two years, consulting in 4 and get on the ladder thereafter.

I started my job and said I need to clear those loans we took for the degree from BITS Pilani and stabilize the family. I wasn’t particularly good at anything out of college. Just a car I built with a team and some time spent teaching kids in nearby slums. So when Tata Motors offered a PPO I took it.

One year into it, I landed a job at Ather which in 2017 was a reckless bet. Especially for someone with no family money to fall back on if it failed, and an industry no one believed in yet.

You know why I loved it?
Coz I drive an EV back in 2014 at E-Baja and fell in love with it. I chased Ather for almost 2 years (once in my final year and then while I was at TATA Motors) because I wanted to build an EV.

I figured, building was something I liked a lot.

From 2016 till almost 2020 while loans sat on my chest, every single month, I was in a role that exposed me to a wide variety of things at Ather. The true formative years of my life i’d say.

But exposure isn’t the same as experience.

Things only started looking better once I switched jobs. Along the way I cleared loans, it was a massive weight off my shoulder. Then Covid hit.

But I figured out a way to stick around and keep working my goals.

I guess goals is an exaggeration.

For me it was everything I had to do.
There was no other choice.

I figured out a way to set up a base for my family.
That took years, and it took not spending on a lot of things other people my age were spending on without thinking twice.

Along the way I found little joys wherever I could, traveling, writing, reading a bit. I never went deep into either, not the way I wanted to. No long sabbaticals, no six-month trips, no sitting down to write a book with nothing else pulling at me. I just took whatever slice of time I could grab and put it into those things. A weekend here. A blog post there. I knew It wasn’t enough to get them anywhere. But I didn’t have a choice.

And here’s the thing I don’t say out loud much — a lot of my peers, people who started at the exact same point I did, got to enjoy things I didn’t. Trips I skipped. Purchases I delayed. Evenings I couldn’t take off. That’s not a complaint, it’s just the trade I made. I picked stability for my family over ease for myself, and I’d pick it again, but I’m not going to pretend it didn’t cost something.

I made mistakes too. Personal ones, professional ones. Bet on the wrong things sometimes, trusted the wrong situations, took longer than I should have to walk away from a couple of them. None of that was free either.

But here’s what all of it built, and this is the only part I’m actually proud of: I became someone who never knows what it feels like to be helpless.

Financial crunch, family pressure, COVID shutting the world down, now AI trying to rewrite what my skills are even worth?
None of it has ever left me stuck.

I don’t do stuck. I will always figure out a way. That’s not a mindset I read somewhere and adopted. It’s just what ten years of not having a choice turned me into.

I never stand somewhere I don’t fully accept. If I don’t like where I am, I find the way out. That’s the whole story.

The job titles, the companies, the pivots and everything else is just detail.

Ten years down.
I’m still the guy who figures it out.