The 10-Mile Walk and the Only Question That Matters

The morning I walked 10 miles to my first job in America, I wasn't trying to make a statement.

I was 22, maybe 23. I had just dropped out of an MBA program — quietly, without telling my parents, the way you do when you know the decision is right but the conversation isn't ready to happen yet. I was living in Southern California, which is, as I would learn that morning, not a place designed for people without cars. I left at 6 a.m. I waited at bus stops that didn't seem to connect to anything. Eventually I just started walking.

When I arrived at the office, drenched in sweat, my manager looked at me and asked what happened.

"I walked," I said.

He turned to the office and announced it like a sports result. Ajay walked to work today. The whole floor looked up. There was a beat of silence, and then something shifted — not dramatically, not in a movie way, but in the way that rooms shift when someone has done something that nobody expected. After that day, my colleagues gave me rides. Every single day. I had become, without trying, the person people wanted to look out for.

I tell this story not because it's inspiring — though maybe it is — but because it contains the only career lesson I've ever actually believed.

Life Is Not a Project With a Finish Line

We are trained, from the moment we enter school, to think of life as a sequence of deliverables. Finish the degree. Get the job. Hit the number. Achieve the thing. Move to the next thing. The problem with this model is that it treats arrival as the point, when arrival is almost never the point.

I've shipped products at Google, Microsoft, and Sutherland. I've built startups that worked and startups that didn't. I've gone back to jobs after startups failed, which is one of the more humbling experiences available to a person with ambition. I've sat across from VCs who passed, and across from clients who said yes, and I can tell you that neither moment felt like what I expected it to feel like. The finish lines keep moving. They're supposed to.

What I've come to believe is this: life usually begins when you solve it a little. Not when you solve it completely — that never happens — but when you solve it enough to see the next layer of the problem. The walk to the office wasn't the story. What happened after the walk was the story. The walk was just the thing that put me in the room.

The Narayana Murthy Question

A few weeks ago I wrote something arguing that Narayana Murthy was wrong about 16-hour work days. I still believe that, in a general sense. Mandatory suffering is not a productivity strategy. Burnout is real. Rest is not laziness.

But I want to complicate that position, because the full truth is more interesting.

If you are in your twenties, and you have not yet found the thing you love doing — the thing that makes time disappear — then yes, I think you should work 16 hours a day. Not because suffering builds character. Not because your employer deserves your youth. But because the only way to find what you love is to do a lot of things, and doing a lot of things requires time, and time is the one resource you have in abundance right now that you will never have again in quite the same way.

I spent years doing things I didn't love. Data analysis at startups. Product management at companies where the vision wasn't mine. Consulting work that paid the bills but didn't light anything up. I don't regret any of it. Every one of those experiences was a data point. Every one of them narrowed the search. The 10-mile walk wasn't wasted time — it was the morning I learned that I would do whatever it took, which turned out to be the most important thing to know about myself.

You find what you love by elimination as much as by discovery. You have to try enough things to know what doesn't fit. And that takes time. A lot of it.

The Tool Problem Nobody Is Talking About

Here is something I find myself saying to every young person who asks me for advice right now, and I want to say it here because I think it's the most important thing I know:

Never in human history has one person had access to this many tools.

I'm not talking about productivity apps. I'm talking about the fact that a 22-year-old with a laptop and an internet connection can today build, ship, and scale a product that would have required a team of 50 people and $10 million in funding ten years ago. The tools exist. The infrastructure exists. The knowledge is free and searchable and available at 3 a.m. when you can't sleep because you're thinking about the problem.

I've been writing about AI product management since 2017 — back when chatbots were the frontier and most people thought Siri was the ceiling. I wrote about building bots at faq.dog, about introducing AI into products, about the RAG pipelines and clinical digital assistants and customer service automation systems I was shipping while most companies were still writing strategy documents about AI. The tools kept getting better. The gap between what one person could build and what a team could build kept shrinking.

And now that gap is almost gone.

Which means the only differentiator left is time. Not talent — talent is more evenly distributed than we admit. Not access — the tools are free or nearly free. Time. The willingness to sit with a problem for 16 hours when everyone else stopped at 8.

What the Musicians Know

I keep coming back to musicians when I think about this, because musicians understand something about time that most people in technology have forgotten.

A guitarist who practices 8 hours a day doesn't get better at a linear rate. They get better at a compounding rate. The first year is mostly frustration. The second year, something clicks. By the fifth year, the instrument starts to feel like an extension of thought rather than a separate object. By the twentieth year, the music comes from somewhere that the musician themselves can't fully explain.

And here's the thing: the musicians who sound best are often the oldest ones. Not because age brings wisdom in some vague, greeting-card sense, but because they have the most accumulated hours. Miles Davis at 60 was playing things that Miles Davis at 30 couldn't have conceived of. B.B. King at 80 had a tone that took 60 years to develop. You cannot shortcut the hours. You can only decide whether to put them in.

I am still putting in 16-hour days. Not because I have to — I've been doing this long enough that I could probably coast. But because I found the thing I love, and when you find the thing you love, time stops being a cost and starts being a gift. I work from Vision to Product to Delivery to Compliance to Legal and back again. I get involved in everything. I can't not.

That's the tell. When you find the right thing, the question stops being how do I motivate myself to work and starts being how do I stop working long enough to sleep.

The Only Question That Matters

So here is what I want to say to the young person reading this — the one who is 22 and confused, or 28 and feeling behind, or 35 and wondering if they missed their window:

You haven't missed anything. The window is not a window. It's a door, and it's open as long as you're breathing.

But you have to be honest with yourself about whether you've found the thing yet. Not the thing that pays well. Not the thing your parents approve of. Not the thing that looks good on LinkedIn. The thing that makes you forget to eat. The thing you think about in the shower. The thing you'd do for free if you had to.

If you haven't found it yet, the answer is not to wait. The answer is to do more things. Try more things. Fail at more things. Walk the 10 miles. Show up sweating. Let the room notice.

And if you have found it — if you know, in your bones, what you're supposed to be building — then the only question left is how many hours you're willing to give it.

I know my answer. I've known it for a while now.

Time becomes love. And when you love something, time doesn't exist.

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I'm building Jetty AI — a safe harbor for people who love what AI can become. If you're a builder in your 20s who wants to work on hard problems with people who take them seriously, reach out. The energy I'm looking for is the same energy that walks 10 miles when the bus doesn't come.