Things I Would Tell My Younger Self

There’s a tricky thing about advice to your younger self: if you were the kind of person who’d have needed it, you probably wouldn’t have become the kind of person who wants to give it.

Still, I think there’s value in writing it down — not because younger me will read it, but because someone else might be standing at the same crossroads, confused about the same things, asking the same questions but with fewer words to frame them.

And the first thing I’d tell him is:
you were right about almost everything.
You just didn’t know how to trust that yet.

Obsession is Not a Phase

You worried that your fascinations were a little too intense. That staying up until 3AM reading about 14th-century cities or trying to reverse engineer someone’s website design made you weird. That building little products no one asked for wasn’t “productive.”

But looking back, those were some of your best moments. You weren't being inefficient. You were rehearsing. Practicing a form of deep work before you even had a name for it.

If I could whisper one thing to you back then, it would be this:
stay weird.
Weird is not a side effect — it’s a compass.

Write More

You had this impulse to write, and every time you did it seriously, something shifted. Your essay about Utopias, for example — that was the moment I think you became someone else. Not because of what you wrote, but because of what writing did to your thinking.

You should have done more of that. Not for an audience. For yourself. Writing is the one form of self-exploration where every failure leaves behind a map. Most people go their whole lives without seeing their own thoughts clearly. You were accidentally building mirrors. You just didn’t realize they were useful yet.

Don’t Optimize for the Wrong Game

You were always a little conflicted about grades. On the one hand, you cared. On the other, you couldn’t pretend they measured the things you really valued.

You were right.

Grades are a game that reward precision, conformity, and obedience to invisible boundaries. The world, it turns out, doesn’t. The world rewards clarity, creativity, and an ability to solve problems no one else noticed.

I don’t mean that as an excuse to underachieve. You still needed to be near the top. But trying to be at the top — the perfect GPA, the valedictorian slot, the test with 100% — those were distractions. They trained you to play a narrow game really well, and worse, to crave the approval of people you didn’t admire.

And now that you’ve met some of the real “top performers,” you can finally say it out loud:
being the best at school doesn’t mean you’ll matter.
Being obsessed with understanding might.

What Were You So Shy About?

This part is hard to write without sounding smug, but I mean it with love:
you already saw more than most people around you.

You saw the cracks in systems. You were asking questions no one else around you was even curious about. You sensed that the world didn’t work the way it pretended to. You noticed how most people play pretend until it’s too late to stop.

You assumed everyone else knew something you didn’t.

That wasn’t it. You were just early.

You Stopped Too Soon

You learned to code. You made tools. You had this strange joy in making digital things move. And then… you stopped.

Why?

Because the thing “worked”? Because it was “done”?

That’s not the finish line.

The thing is done when someone else uses it.
The real magic isn’t in making the product. It’s in making something useful enough that someone wants it.

The goal isn’t just to build.
It’s to solve.

Everything you will ever value in this world — money, impact, freedom, influence — begins with solving real problems for real people. You had already built that instinct. You just hadn’t pushed it far enough yet.

You were exploring. And maybe that’s what I’d really try to explain to you — not as advice, but as a frame.

Explore, Then Exploit

There’s this idea in computer science and reinforcement learning: the explore–exploit tradeoff.

When an agent (or person) is in a new environment, they don’t know which actions produce the best rewards. So they have to explore — try different things, gather information, map the landscape. But eventually, if they want to make progress, they have to start exploiting what they’ve learned. Doubling down. Optimizing for outcomes, not curiosity.

Most people in life under-explore. They cling too quickly to safe bets and familiar paths.

You had the opposite instinct. You explored a lot. And thank God. That’s why you have such a wide map now.

But I wish you had started exploiting just a bit earlier.

If you had picked one tool, one problem, one itch that others had too — and committed to solving it all the way — you would have learned more, earned more, and helped more people, faster.

Exploration is what makes you unique.
Exploitation is what makes you effective.
The art of life is knowing when to shift gears.

Stay Skeptical, Not Cynical

You were always skeptical. You never quite bought what everyone else was selling — whether it was religion, politics, or prestige.

That turned out to be a gift. Not because you were always right. You weren’t. But because your mind stayed loose. You could entertain fringe ideas without becoming unhinged. You could hear conspiracy without believing it. You could spot what was broken without becoming bitter.

That’s rare. And it’s royal.

As your mom said:
a king hears counsel from all, but acts decisively on his own judgement.

You learned to listen without surrendering judgment. To observe without needing to belong. That instinct will save you more times than you can count.

So what would I actually tell my younger self?

Not much.

Mostly, I’d just stand beside him, quietly proud.
Not because he knew what he was doing — but because he didn’t.
And he kept going anyway.

That’s all it ever is.
Look closely at the people you admire.
They’re not the ones who had the answers early.
They’re the ones who kept asking the right questions for long enough
that the world eventually had to answer back.

And if you happen to be reading this — whoever you are — and you’ve been exploring for a long time, unsure when to shift gears?

Maybe it’s time.
Maybe you already know enough.
Maybe now is when you exploit.

- Ali