You’re supposed to figure out what you want, then go get it. I did it backwards. I figured out what I wasn’t willing to do, drew a hard line around it, and let everything else arrange itself behind that line. Decades later the whole thing looks deliberate, almost planned, which is funny, because I never had a plan. I had a short list of refusals, and I kept them when keeping them was expensive.

Let me rewind to school. I was a topper who fell apart the moment the medium of instruction switched from Malayalam to English, and by pre-university my scorecard ruled out the only two futures my family and most of Kerala could picture for a smart kid: engineering or medicine. Nobody around me had a category for what came next, because there wasn’t an obvious next. I didn’t even qualify as a promising dropout story. I just cleared my degree, and started answering phones at a web hosting company for four thousand rupees a month.

Somewhere between that first salary and now, I stopped optimizing for the things everyone else was optimizing for and started optimizing for a short list of things I decided mattered more. Not values I discovered along the way and dressed up afterward. Actual non-negotiables, held even when they cost me business.

Treat people the way I wished my first two bosses had treated me. Pay on time, whether or not the client had paid me. Invest in the right people even before they’ve proven they’re the right people, most of my best working relationships started as a bet, not a background check. Never let the customer sit above the relationship, a client who behaves badly is a client I’ve walked away from, repeatedly, on principle rather than on a full pipeline. Respect every stakeholder in a business cycle, including the vendor with no leverage to complain if I don’t. Work was never allowed to be the whole story either, that was a rule, not a work-life balance poster.

And the one that sounds strangest out loud: cap what counts as a good take-home. Decide in advance what enough looks like for the life you’ve actually designed, then stop there even when the table has more on offer. That single rule did more for my sanity than any other, because it removed the only reason most people keep saying yes to work they don’t want.

None of this was a five-year plan executed on schedule. It couldn’t be, you can’t connect these dots forward, only backward. What keeps it honest is the ritual around it: I check in on the goalpost every five years, not to hit a target, but to ask if the target still makes sense.

One of the older decisions quietly closed a loop this year, in a way I’d rather not spell out here. The specifics aren’t the point. What matters is that it worked without needing to, the exact same choices I’d have made anyway, just proven right a decade later than expected. The design never needed that particular outcome to be worth it. It just happened to produce one.

I still think most of the conventional wisdom about careers is backwards. School doesn’t prepare you for this. A good job isn’t the same as a well-paying one. Planning fifteen years out is mostly theatre. But I’m less interested now in busting those myths than in what replaces them once you stop believing them: a small, stubborn set of rules you actually keep, even when keeping them is expensive.

The comedy, the snake rescues, the photography, the puzzle games nobody commissioned, they were never hobbies squeezed into the margins of a career. They were the reason the margins existed. A couple of them have quietly stopped behaving like hobbies and I am thinking of pursuing those further. I’m not rushing that. Twenty-six years taught me exactly one thing about rushing: don’t.