It starts in your teens, not your twenties.
Nobody is coming to give you permission – it was already given the day a good AI model became free – the only question now is whether you use it or wait for a stamp that no longer means anything.
- Start now, not after graduation. Read widely, argue with people smarter than you, learn how three or four different fields actually work, and build something that runs – all of it, at the same time, starting at fifteen or sixteen. Your portfolio is what you built, what you shipped, and it’s the range of what you understand and who you’ve tested your thinking against.
- Treat knowledge as something you accumulate through work and dialogue, not attendance. Seek out people who disagree with you, who know things you don’t, who come from a different field or a different country. A real education is built in conversation and contested in argument or against reality – a lecture hall gives you neither.
- Choose mentors who have skin in the game over teachers who don’t. Find the people who ship — engineers, founders, builders — and apprentice yourself to them, formally or not. A professor who has never had a bridge fall or a company fail has nothing to teach you about consequence.