The Kid Who Wanted to Change the World — and Kept Getting Closer

There is a moment in every curious child’s life when the universe cracks open. Not violently — quietly. A name, a story, a picture in a book. For me, that crack had a name: Albert Einstein. I didn’t yet know what he had done. I didn’t understand relativity, mass, or energy. But I understood, with the total clarity only children have, that this man had changed something fundamental about how the world was seen. And that was enough to ignite everything.

Soon after came the ancients — Thales staring at the stars over the Aegean and daring to ask why, Descartes sealing himself in a heated room to rebuild all of human knowledge from a single sentence. I devoured these stories like myths. Because for a young mind with no measure of how hard these things truly were, they felt like myths — grand, achievable, personal.

Six years old, and already writing manifestos

Between the ages of six and eight, I wrote something in a small personal agenda — the kind with a flimsy plastic cover and narrow ruled lines. The words were simple, probably misspelled, but the intent was absolute:

I closed the agenda. And my brain has not really stopped since.

I became the kind of child who could not watch a documentary without it spawning ten questions. Who looked at clocks and wondered who invented the gear. Who fell asleep thinking about things that hadn’t been invented yet. I was a dreamer in the most literal sense — someone for whom the boundary between imagining and doing felt thin, almost translucent.

The fantasy of being born in the right century

I used to tell myself — half joking, half desperate — that if I had lived in Newton’s time, I would have seen the apple fall. If I had been there alongside Faraday, I would have noticed the connection between electricity and magnetism. I would have discovered it myself.

But that fantasy was never really about arrogance. It was about hunger. A need to be where things were being made — at the frontier, in the room where the question was still unanswered. It created in me a gravitational pull toward innovators, toward creators, toward people building things that hadn’t existed before.

I was always searching for that room.

The distance between history and now kept shrinking

Something remarkable happened as I grew older and moved through my education. The gap I had felt — that yawning distance between the legendary eras of discovery and my own ordinary present — began to close.

Near my graduation, I found myself studying topics that had been born less than ten years before. Frameworks and algorithms and paradigms that were not yet old enough to have textbooks. The knowledge humanity was producing was no longer distant history — it was almost warm. Fresh. Still breathing.

The fascination did not diminish. It transformed. From romantic longing into something more purposeful: a decision.

Going to the source

In what I can only describe as the biggest move of my life, I decided to go to the place where advancement lives — the berceau of modern technology. Not to be a tourist of innovation, but to be inside it. To work with the latest tools, to think about real problems, to be close to the people who were actively shaping what comes next.

It was not a small decision. But it was, in retrospect, the most coherent one I have ever made. It was the grown-up version of that child writing in the agenda — still chasing the same thing, just with a clearer map.

The notebook is still open

Today, I work on technologies that sit at the edge of what is currently known. I encounter real bottlenecks — problems that don’t have clean solutions yet, questions that the field is actively wrestling with. And something extraordinary keeps happening: I think about an approach, write it in my notes, turn it over in my mind for some time. Then I read a new paper, a conference talk, a technical report — and I find that somewhere, someone else arrived at a similar place.

I am not claiming to have discovered anything. That would be a distortion. But I am saying this: the way of thinking that was ignited in a child by a name in a book, sharpened through years of study and longing, and finally placed at the frontier through deliberate choice — that way of thinking is now in the conversation.

The journey is not finished. It was never meant to be. The agenda is still open, the pen is still moving, and the question I wrote at six years old — how to create something that benefits humanity — is still the most interesting problem I know.