🚀 The only career advice you need:
The actor Glen Powell auditioned to play Rooster in Top Gun: Maverick.
When the role was given to Miles Teller, Powell was devastated. He was offered a smaller role, but declined.
Tom Cruise summoned Powell to his house and asked him:
“What kind of career do you want?”
Powell responded:
“I want to be like you—an iconic movie star. You always choose great roles.”
Cruise shook his head.
“You’re wrong. I choose great movies, then I make the role great.”
Powell got the message. He accepted the role of Hangman—and nailed it.
Now Powell says:
“It changed the trajectory of my career.”
When young people ask me for career advice, I tell them something similar:
🚀 Attach yourself to a rocketship.
Join companies that are growing quickly. Work with people who are going places. Be part of something great.
Play your role—no matter how minor—exceptionally well.
The rest will take care of itself.
P.S. I don't write engagement bait, so I need your help to spread the word. If you enjoyed this post, would you like, comment, and repost?
I have seen intelligent people destroy their careers by never learning to play dumb.
Conveniently, game theory explains why that happens:
In most high-stakes hierarchies, influence is perceived as a zero-sum game.
If you appear "too intelligent," you are perceived as a threat. That can lock you out of important networks.
Let the others feel superior for a while and hide your intelligence until deployment.
Unfortunately, most people will never utilize this strategy. It necessitates acting strategically, not egoistically.
When a man shows no emotion, he’s heartless.
When a man expresses sadness, he’s weak.
When a man expresses anger, he’s toxic.
When a man expresses fear, he’s a coward.
When a man sets boundaries, he’s insecure.
When a man has standards, he’s a misogynist.
When a man expresses emotions, he’s a simp.
In the end you can’t win so do what is right by you, your family, and your heart.
Nothing else matters.
You're already doing alright.
The world can judge.
Sometimes i feel…
ada yang off sama cara hidup zaman sekarang.
Everything moves so fast,
but somehow kita makin lost ttg mau ke mana.
Some people belajar bertahun tahun,
some people viral in one night.
Yang satu dihargai krn process,
yang lain krn exposure.
And we’re stuck in between.
I watched cowboy bebop when I was around 8-10.
Im 30 now.
Re watching Cowboy Bebop as an adult hits different.
When you’re younger, it’s easy to latch onto the cool fights, the jazz, Spike being effortlessly smooth. But coming back to it later, you start feeling the weight of the themes. Loneliness. Regret. People running from their past instead of healing it. Characters stuck in emotional orbit, unable to move on.
Stuff that flew right over our heads as kids suddenly lands hard af.
Honestly, I recommend any older anime fan do this. Revisit the shows you loved growing up. You dont just rewatch them, you re-contextualize them. Your life experience fills in the gaps the story always had waiting for you.
Same anime. Different you.
And somehow… its just better.
Cowboy bebop is a 10/10.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
taste in engineering.
you can teach someone to code, wire, or design circuits.
you can’t teach taste.
taste is when you can look at a system and just feel it’s elegant.
you know when a mechanism is overdesigned.
you know when a PCB layout “flows” well.
you know when an algorithm is beautiful; not just functional.
it’s that quiet sense that tells you:
“this is good engineering.”
not because it’s complex; but because it’s clean, efficient, inevitable.
taste comes from building, breaking, rebuilding, reading datasheets, staring at other people’s designs, and realizing why they made certain tradeoffs.
most engineers focus on skills.
the great ones develop taste.
because taste is what separates the one who just builds,
from the one who builds something worth staring at.