Learning to take "risks"

When I graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and no understanding of it, all of the smart people around me were writing code, so that’s what I wanted to do.

I wanted to build a business and could not convince anyone else to take the leap with me, so I taught myself to code in the process of building my first startup. In hindsight, the business was set up for failure from the get go because of how unwilling I was to go out of my comfort zone. But the plus side of being the kind of noob entrepreneur who keeps building to avoid selling is that you get a lot of building reps in. And that's how I learned to code.

Once I realized the business was doomed to fail, I joined a pre-seed startup as a product engineer to learn from someone who was building an actual business. I was good at writing code and was learning what goes into building a business, but I kept coming back to this question- how do I know if writing code is what I’m meant to do? What if I’m really an interior designer inside, but I have no way of knowing because I would never try it?

A year in, I quit my job and moved to Singapore to start a company. The decision was easy. The upside? Exploring a new country, meeting dozens of incredibly smart people from all walks of life and maybe—just maybe—starting a real company. The downside? Quitting my job. But I could always get another one.

So I went for it.

A few weeks in I met my now co-founder. We were both 25 year old software engineers. As we started working together and I saw him write code, I immediately knew I was never going be in the 0.01% of people in the field irrespective of what I did. He was just that much better at it in a way that doesn't have much to do with working hard. He had an intuition about it that I had never experienced. In that instant, my nagging question was answered. Writing code was not my thing.

After years of teaching myself to code and having only that one marketable skill, it was difficult to accept that it wasn't my thing.

Looking back, the signs were all there. I didn’t enjoy the process of learning to code or even writing code, I only enjoyed the outcome- getting to the point where it did what I wanted it to do. I don’t even like dark mode and I don't know if there is a clearer sign.

So I moved to the other parts of running a business. Now I do sales, product, design, marketing and whatever admin work I can't convince someone else to do. So everything except writing code. I no longer question if I’m meant to do something else. At least not on an everyday basis. That's probably a good sign.

I just had to start over.

6 years later, I don't remember the specifics of any particular programming language, but I can tell if something is feasible from an engineering perspective, how long it would take, and what edge cases will need to be accounted for. Writing to code was what I wanted to do when I did that, and then later I wanted to do something else.

Same with moving to Singapore. Sure, it was uncomfortable. I moved to a country I had never been to and where I had one friend, felt like an imposter and didn’t know if it would lead to anything worthwhile. But I also made new friends, met my co-founder, started a real business, travelled across South East Asia, met my now-husband and overall had the time of my life.

Some decisions are like that—high upside, low downside. They are an easy yes.

But they're often labelled "risky". Because even when the downside is low, it doesn’t always feel that way. Life already has momentum in a certain direction, so making a big change can feel unnatural. But often the downside isn’t as catastrophic as it seems.

A useful question to ask is- At 80, am I more likely to regret doing this or not doing this?