I’ve always been someone who wanted more than a normal life.
Even in my early and mid-20s I was pushing learning, side projects, late nights, trying to build something that mattered, constantly looking for the next level.
But couple of days ago I went to the Bay Area for the first time.
And that trip didn’t just inspire me it re-calibrated me in ways I didn’t expect.
Walking around Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, standing in front of the actual buildings where NVIDIA, Apple, Google, and others do their work… it already hit hard.
But what really shifted things was realizing this place doesn’t just have big companies it has an endless pulse of events that keep the entire ecosystem accelerating.
Every single day there are meetups, hackathons, founder breakfasts, AI nights, VC office hours, startup mixers, deep-tech panels, agentic AI experiments, robotics demos, and full-scale conferences.
From small 30-person rooms talking about the next jump in inference speed, to thousands gathering at NVIDIA GTC, DeveloperWeek, QCon, Startup Grind, or the constant stream of AI-focused events run by communities like Bond AI.
People aren’t just working in isolation they’re constantly bumping into the future at these events: pitching, listening, recruiting, collaborating, stealing ideas, giving feedback, finding co-founders, landing intros.
You feel it immediately:
This density of ambition isn’t only inside the campuses.
It spills out into the evenings, the weekends, the coffee shops at 10 p.m., the mid-week mixers, the Thursday night agent-hacking sessions.
The Bay Area basically runs on a parallel calendar of tech events that most places in the world only dream about having once or twice a year.
I didn’t come back thinking “I need to start caring”.
I came back thinking:
“The version of hard I’ve been doing is real but it’s not yet the version that puts me in those rooms, those conversations, those late-night threads that turn into companies.”
Because the gap became very visible.
Not the gap between lazy and hardworking.
The gap between hardworking and hard-working-at-the-right-problems-with-the-right-intensity-next-to-the-right-people and showing up where the signal is strongest.
That distinction hurts when you see it clearly.
Because suddenly “solid effort” and “very respectable career” start feeling like different things from “full throttle life” in a place where the calendar is packed with chances to level up every week.
The realization wasn’t that I had been unambitious.
It was that even good ambition can become average ambition when you’re not swimming in the fastest current and the Bay Area is basically an ocean of fast currents, with events feeding new ones every day.
And average ambition no matter how hard you’re grinding inside that frame still ends up producing an average ceiling.
A life that’s comfortable, respected, safe… but not alive in the way I want to feel at 40, 50, 60.
So the trip didn’t flip a switch from “unmotivated” to “motivated”.
It raised the stakes on what motivated already means and showed me that staying plugged into the ecosystem of events is part of the game, not a nice-to-have.
Now the internal conversation is different.
It’s not “I should work harder”.
It’s “If I’m going to work this hard anyway why not aim it at the thing that actually moves the needle for the next 10–20 years… and why not show up where the people already doing that are gathering?”
So yes work extremely hard every single day.
But not in a generic “grind culture” way.
More like: ruthlessly clear about what world-class actually looks like right now, then point every hour toward that definition and treat the ecosystem of meetups, conferences, and spontaneous collisions as a core part of the strategy.
Reach the level you’re aiming for.
Then re-assess, re-strategize, raise the bar again but never drop the intensity.
Because I’ve seen what the other side looks like up close.
And once you’ve felt that air where every week brings new signals, new people, new possibilities “good enough” stops feeling neutral.
It starts feeling like choosing to leave part of your life on the table.
I was already running.
The Bay Area just showed me how much faster the race actually is and how many more lanes open up when you’re in the middle of the action, week after week.
If you’ve made it to the end, thank you for reading and send me 796 as a code of acknowledgement.
Apple Cupertino
Google Mountain view
NVDIA Santa Clara
