I was always good at school, mainly because it felt like a game I could win. My goal wasn't to be valedictorian, but to have grades good enough to play basketball in college.

I only cared about 1 or 2 classes I took growing up, but I cared about the all grades. I needed a 3.5 GPA to meet my goal, and all my actions stemmed from there. I studied just as much as I needed to, and the rest of my time I spent on basketball.

In college, I enjoyed 4 or 5 classes I took, but I was still more focused on grades than actually learning. All I cared about was getting a 3.6 GPA -- the bare minimum to get management consulting interviews my senior year.

Now that I’m done with school, I am trying to change my relationship with learning. I’ve been doing my own thing for about 6 months now, but up until two weeks ago, I haven’t taught myself anything for fun. Everything I’ve done until now has been with one goal in mind — starting a profitable business.

Whether it was making Tik Toks, learning how to use vector databases, or working with AI generated voices, I asked myself one question before doing anything: “how will I directly profit from this action?”. If the answer wasn’t obvious to me, I wouldn’t do it.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this mindset. If you have a clear mission, it can be a good guiding mechanism. Absent an idea you’re committed to though, it can be quite draining. About 4 weeks ago I pivoted away from my latest business, and this mindset stopped serving me. I decided I’d try on a new mindset instead of jumping into the next thing right away.

For the past two weeks, I’ve done two things that I would have never done before:

1. Build something that I don’t plan on selling

2. Read a textbook for fun

I’m building is an AI agent to help me plan my friend’s bachelor party next fall. I’m doing this to learn about various approaches to building agents. It's also a nice way to avoid procrastinating on my best man duties -- which is something I'd 100% do otherwise. Do I think an AI agent for planning bachelor parties would be worth pursuing as a business? No, but building it may spark some new ideas, and it’s been a fun challenge. I’ll be shipping a demo of this project soon as well as a blog about what I’ve learned about AI agents from building it.

The textbook I’m reading is a practical intro to Deep Learning from fast.ai. In the past, if I were to take a course, I’d focus on something immediately applicable. This book is practical for an AI engineer, but it's not the most impactful thing I could read right now. Building an agent has made me curious about how generative AI works under the hood, and I want to explore that. This knowledge may or may not help me build better products, but for once, I don't care. This book is the most interesting thing I could read right now, and that’s all I care about.

It feels strange but nice to be following my interests with no specific goal in mind for once. I won’t stay in this mode for long -- I need to find a way to pay my bills. For at least another week or two though, I’m going to enjoy my time tinkering and thinking.