Careers Aren’t Found. They’re Compounded.
What ten years of trying, learning, and stacking skills taught me about meaningful work.
I didn’t have a master plan. No 10-year vision board.
I wanted to be a doctor, but ended up doing dentistry.
I didn’t love it, but I became an Oral Pathologist.
Then I built a YouTube channel. Then an e-learning business.
Then I chased bug bounties and dived into cybersecurity.
Then I got lost.
Today, I’m a full-time product designer, doing work that feels like the sum total of every strange chapter I’ve lived.
Looking back, it’s easy to make it all sound neat. But at the time? It was chaos, anxiety and confusion. A lot of second-guessing. It was also the best kind of education I could’ve given myself. It was built more on momentum than clarity.
The truth is, meaningful careers can be non-linear. The good ones emerge from stacked skills, small bets, and the willingness to explore without a script.
This is what I’ve learned from a decade of wandering and how, piece by piece, it became something I couldn’t have predicted, but wouldn’t trade for anything.
Clarity lives on the other side of momentum
Most people wait for clarity before they act. I think that’s one reason so many people never start. They think they lack clarity. Ironically clarity is an illusion.
When I made the decision to quit dentistry, I didn’t have a grand plan. I picked a problem I genuinely cared about: How can I teach dental concepts in a way that’s visual and engaging? And how could I do it at scale?
I wanted to create engaging sketch animation videos to teach complex concepts and that question led me to YouTube.
I didn’t know anything about digital sketching, video editing, voiceovers, but I started learning anyway. My goal was to learn quickly to gain just enough skills to know how to create a sketch animation video. I didn’t have to be a pro. I produced one sketch video. Then another. And another. Over time, I created more than 100 of them.
Eventually, the channel evolved into a full-fledged e-learning platform called hackdentistry.com (with the help of my best buddy) - a project that gave me my first real taste of building a product from scratch. I had to learn everything from content creation, building the platform with no-code tools, payments, marketing, analytics. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was immersive. And I was learning at speed.
There was no clarity. I just kept pushing forward, riding the momentum I created each day.
If I had waited for everything to make sense, to be the best video editor or acquire business acumen, I would’ve done nothing. But when I moved, even slightly, something shifted. I felt alive. Ideas showed up. I had a lot of energy.
In the beginning I thought I had clarity. I didn’t. I started moving. I built momentum.
Just because improvements aren’t visible doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. Early wins come easy. Lasting wins require a lifestyle.
- James Clear
Not everything has to be love at first sight
I’ve been passionate before.
I was genuinely passionate about Oral Pathology, my specialization in dentistry (a bit of a conundrum. I hated dentistry but loved Oral Pathology.). I loved studying disease patterns, looking at lesions under the microscope, presenting cases, reading and writing research papers. I enjoyed the work. That passion was real.
But here’s the part no one tells you. Passion is over-rated.
Academia was hierarchical. Promotions were slow and political. The day-to-day work was monotonous. And despite doing well in the field, I couldn’t see a viable future, financially or creatively. Over time, the excitement wore off. Passion alone wasn’t enough to sustain me in an environment that didn’t reward or energize me.
On the flip side, was I passionate about animation or editing?
Not at all. But I was interested. I had enough curiosity and just enough aptitude to stay with it. That was enough to start. I kept learning to script, sketch and edit. I began to get good. And as I improved, the work became more satisfying.
The same thing happened with design. It wasn’t exciting at the beginning. But as I got more competent, the work was more enjoyable.
This was in line with Cal Newport’s line of thought:
Put in the hard work to master something rare and valuable, then deploy this leverage to steer your working life in directions that resonate.
- On Passion and Its Discontents by Cal Newport
Passion may fade. Markets shift. Roles evolve. But if you focus on what you can get good at, you’re far more likely to end up doing work you care about.
Maybe passion isn’t a reliable starting point. It’s something that emerges at the intersection of effort, usefulness, and time.
The worst advice you will ever hear…and you will hear it every week during your entire business school career… “Follow your Passion”. What utter bullshit! If someone tells you to follow your passion it means they're already rich.
The bet that didn’t pay off…but still paid me
My online course platform wasn’t making me a living right off the bat. It was slow to take off. In the meantime, I got a little restless. Trying to find a venue to make some extra cash, I stumbled into cybersecurity, specifically bug bounty hunting.
For a while, I went all in. I studied networks, vulnerabilities, OSINT, terminal commands. I picked up a few certifications too. But tell you what, it wasn’t sustainable. I wasn’t improving at the rate I thought I could. The work stressed me out. I eventually burnt out.
I was failing because I had stretched myself too thin.
In hindsight, even though it didn’t work, it taught me how to troubleshoot systems. How to break things down logically. How to spot flaws and trace issues in “user flows”. In general I learnt a lot of tech and got comfortable with all of the jargon.
All of which would later become my strengths in product design. And that’s the thing with small bets.
The cybersecurity phase didn’t get me where I wanted to go but it eventually got me “out” of where I was.
Stacking skills, and not specializing early
Dentistry gave me the discipline to go deep on complex subjects.
Teaching taught me how to explain things with clarity.
Building HackDentistry taught me how to create, ship, and market a product.
Cybersecurity taught me how to break systems.
Design became the field where all of it converged.
I am a late specializer. I spent more time fumbling and testing, but I stayed with it long enough, to build a career I didn’t plan. David Epstein calls this “match quality”, a degree of fit between the work someone does and who they are.
In hindsight I realize I was stacking skills. Not mastering one vertical, but building lateral depth.
Back then, I thought I was behind. Now, I realize I was building a career that actually fit me.
Closing thoughts
Many of us, more often than we admit, are still in the middle of figuring things out. The path may feel uncertain right now and that’s okay.
You’re allowed to move forward before everything makes sense. You’re allowed to build with curiosity instead of clarity. You’re allowed to outgrow plans that once made perfect sense.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not glorifying confusion. It’s about staying in motion, consistently, even when things feel unfinished. “Becoming” rarely looks like a plan. It looks like showing up, shifting course, and trying again.
You’re not lost. You’re learning.
And that’s enough.