I'm Not So Scattered After All.

For a long time, I felt like I didn't have just one thing I was supposed to do. I read a blog post by Susan Fowler years ago, and it made me feel seen. My friends and siblings seemed to know what they wanted. But I was interested in so many different things.

When I was growing up, my family wasn't sure what I would end up doing. I think they were a little worried. That might be why they sent me to a military high school. They also got me involved in the family business early on. I even started at the military academy. The idea was for me to become a lawyer in the army.

Back home, your results from Junior Secondary School 3 pretty much set your path for senior secondary school. I got placed in the science class. I wasn't really interested in it. So I moved to the humanities class. I wanted to become a lawyer. That was my main interest at the time. Then I got into political economy too. I thought I could do both, law and political economy. I even thought about running for office someday.

But things changed. I got a chance to study in the U.S. Our law system back home is totally different from American law. Studying law in America wouldn't really prepare me to practice back home, so it wasn't the best choice for my plan to return. I picked computer science and cybersecurity.

After I came to the U.S., I could have changed my major. But I took a class called Datacom 101. The professor, Professor D, made it really easy to understand. I really liked it, so I stuck with cybersecurity. I also learned that in the U.S., you can go to law school no matter what you studied in undergrad. So my new plan was to do cybersecurity then go to law school later. I thought of law school as my kind of MBA.

Even though I was doing well in tech, I always liked the idea of starting a business. My parents and my older sibling had their own business. I grew up helping them. I even spent time learning the business right after high school instead of going straight to college. I was doing well in my tech classes and internships. I was making good money as an intern. So I think my family felt better, like I had found my path. I was also working on side projects, trying to make them into startups. They were mostly software businesses. My family didn’t seem too worried. They probably just thought I was very focused on tech.

Two things really helped me. First, my parents were very open about my career choices. They didn’t push me to stay in science class. My mom really believes that only God knows what someone will become in life. She just wanted me to be good at what I did and to focus. My dad didn't seem bothered that I switched from science. I think he once hoped I would study engineering. He mentioned it one time when I was on holiday from JSS3. But he seemed happy that I was doing well with computers. He even told me I knew more about computers than he did. He used to be the tech support person in our family. Though I was the one who knew how to lock the TV remote when I was watching the Tour de France.

My older sibling was also a big help. She always told me to take tech seriously and try to build a career out of it. I do like tech. I’ve never thought about quitting since that Datacom 101 class. But as I got more into tech and read more, my interests just kept growing. I wanted to try everything. One day, my sister called me. She told me to just choose two things for now and focus on them. I had about seven interests then. I told her I would stick with tech and entrepreneurship. At that time, I had also just worked at a VC firm. So I was also interested in finance, like hedge funds and quant trading.

I kept thinking about how I could do all the things I was interested in without messing up my life. Once I figured out their main worry was my safety net (financial and social), I started to focus on building a really good base for myself. That way, if I wanted to try other things, I wouldn’t be in a bad spot.

That focus on building a good base wasn't just about making my family feel better, and it's not about just chasing money all the time, even if I know people might sometimes see it that way when they see someone doing many things and always putting in consistent effort. For me, financial and material stability is one really important piece of how I see things. I’ve realized I’m really aiming for a few core things in life: happiness and life Satisfaction, good mental and physical health (and honestly, having enough money really helps with both of these; it lowers stress and gives you room for your health and hobbies), finding meaning and purpose, building character and virtue, having Close social relationships, and yes, that financial and material stability.

I’m not trying to just pile up a lot of wealth. It’s about having enough money: enough to feel secure, enough to pursue the projects and causes I’m passionate about, and enough to hopefully have a family and take good care of them one day. Having that kind of stability is super important. It gives you the base you need to do work that matters, to try new things, and to support all the other good parts of life.

Getting to that enough point and staying stable isn't always easy or straightforward, especially because things can change so fast these days. For example, people might face unexpected job losses, big changes in their industry, or companies reorganizing. This is also true when you’re trying to build new things from the ground up. You often need to be really resilient and deal with these kinds of surprises. But having enough money to be stable is a big help for everything else I want to do and experience in life.

Recently, I was talking to a date. That conversation made me think. We were talking about our careers. She is a doctor. She said if she could do undergrad again, she might study finance or tech instead of medicine. I told her I was actually thinking about looking into the nursing program at the community college. She asked me, "Wait, law or nursing, which one is it?"

I tried to explain. I said that a lot of knowledge jobs might get automated because of AI. I wanted something else I could do. Also, I worked on a project for a big hospital last year. I saw a lot of problems with their electronic health records and how different systems didn't work well together. I wanted to learn from a nurse's point of view. Maybe I could become a Clinical Informatics Nurse or something like that. I was more interested in the technical part of nursing. But the way I said it made me sound like I was all over the place.

After that talk, I really thought hard about what I’m interested in right now. It’s still law, tech, public service, and political economy. But then I saw how they connect. For political economy, I don’t have to be a professional political economist. I could do a JD/PhD to study both. For law, I’m mostly interested in Intellctual Property law or security and privacy law. These are very connected to tech. Things like AI, copyright, intellectual property, privacy, and security of systems. So that’s still tech. For public service, that’s something for later. And law can help me get there. My interest in entrepreneurship is also tech. I still write code and do consulting for security, software, and AI. And within tech, my main interests now are AI, cybersecurity, and robotics. Robotics is new. That came from working in warehouses.

So it feels like my interests are not so scattered anymore. They actually fit together. Maybe I do have a kind of singular destiny now. Not just one narrow thing, but a group of things that make sense together. And when these different parts of my life work together, it helps me move towards those bigger life goals I'm aiming for: finding meaning and personal happiness, but also building and nurturing the close social relationships I value, and creating a life of purpose that I hope to share, all on that important foundation of stability.