Hey everyone, this is Ashish

This is written in my own voice, no AI, so you can actually feel what I felt.

I'm Ashish, and honestly, I'm just an explorer. Exploring people, life, technology, value. And if you really think about it, everyone reading this is also just another explorer, trying to find something, and nobody quite knows what, haha. I'll leave that as an open thought for you to ponder upon.

But the part of my story I actually want to tell you is about seven days in Japan, what they did to my head, and everything that came after.

Before Japan

In school I was the kid who never stopped tinkering. I studied at Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan, and alongside that I was freelancing, building for game engines, working on mathematical labs, poking at whatever I could get my hands on. What I loved most was combining fields that don't usually sit together. What happens if I put biology and computer science in the same room? Why does this thing have to work the way it has always worked?

I was always in that spiral: break the thing into its basic parts, then build the understanding back up.

But one thing was always missing, and it took me years to name it. Your brain can only expand its horizons as far as your exposure allows. If you believe that reaching another part of the universe is impossible, you will never even start. That's a vague example, I know. Here's the sharper version: most of the time the difficulty is not the solution. It's the problem. Understand the problem deeply enough and the solution arrives on its own.

KVS backed me through all of it. I spent hours in AI labs trying things that mostly didn't work.

And then one day, in the middle of all that experimenting, my class teacher, the one who had long since stopped asking why I was still in the lab at seven in the evening, walked up and asked: "Do you want to go to Japan?"

I was in shock. The next thing she said was that I'd have to submit all my contributions to be considered. Thanks to all the "time waste" I'd done on research, I had enough. It honestly didn't feel like enough, because in India there is no stop to talent, but it was enough.

Then I actually looked up what Sakura was, and oh my god. Japanese scientists, research labs, Nobel laureates, and a group of people pulled in from every corner of the country and the world, all in one place, all of them right there to talk to.

Now you know where I was going. This was exactly the place to expand the horizon of what's possible.

Japan

I still remember all of us gathered in one place in India, waiting for that plane. Strangers, mostly, people from states I'd never visited, who I would never have crossed paths with in any other version of my life. Everyone recording videos, everyone's face lit up, everyone's heart still catching up with the news that we were actually going. For most of us it was the first country we would ever see outside India.

We landed in Tokyo, took the connecting flight to Osaka, got to the hotel, and from there it just didn't stop.

Hiroshi Kitagawa's session was the first thing that properly rearranged something in me. I had a vague sense that I could learn anything, but it was blurry. He made it sharp.

What I carried out of that room was this. It doesn't matter which era you're standing in, pre-AI, AI, whatever comes after it: the thing actually worth having is not any particular skill. It's the skill of learning itself. Everything you know right now has a shelf life. The speed at which you can pick up the next thing doesn't.

I walked into that session thinking I was good at learning things. I walked out understanding that this was the job, not a side effect of it.

My own addition to what he said: if the solutioning feels hard, you probably haven't understood the problem yet. Do that part properly and the solution is almost embarrassingly simple.

The second thing was boredom. A lot of people I meet are dealing with brain fog, can't think clearly, can't communicate, too many things running at once. And we all know the culprit. It's social media, and the sheer volume of things pouring into our heads every single day. But in Japan I watched people just sit. Do nothing. Be bored on purpose, just thinking. And I tried it, and it turns out that when you have nothing, you start generating more than ever. You start going deep. That's meditation, in the simplest terms I can put it.

The third thing was the Otowa Waterfall. Three streams: longevity, success, love. There are rules about how many you're allowed to drink from, and there's a lot of interpretation around it, but here's mine.

It's the best mindfulness lesson I've ever received. In this world we want to do everything at once. Wanting all three is not wrong, but if you're greedy and chase all of them together, you end up holding nothing. Prioritise. Step by step. That single idea reorganised how I think about my own life, and I got it standing in a queue at a waterfall.

Then came RIKEN and Kyoto University, and oh my god, I don't think I've fully recovered. The exposure was so immense that something in my brain wiring actually changed.

Here is the thing I took out of it. In almost every problem there is one bottleneck. Find that, solve that, and you're done. Everything else is decoration.

Take earthquakes. When one hits, you get a disaster, and the obvious response is better bricks, better structures. You improve the pieces and you still end up nowhere near solving it. That was as far as my thinking went.

Then I saw them lift the entire building. Not reinforce it. Lift it. They went to the foundation, literally and conceptually, and solved it from there.

That's first-principles thinking. Not a phrase in a talk. A building leaving the ground.

The supercomputer had the same effect on me. So did the see-through frog, bred across generations until the skin turned translucent for life, so you can watch the organs, the blood vessels, even the eggs, without ever cutting the animal open. Somebody looked at "we have to dissect frogs to teach biology" and went underneath the problem instead of around it.

None of these come to you naturally. They come from breaking something down until you hit the bottom, then building back up.

At the end, I got to give the closing speech as a Sakura alumnus, in front of all the esteemed guests and my fellow participants, still one of the honours of my life. And for the last few days, we barely slept. None of us wanted to miss a single hour of Japan before it ended.

The part I didn't expect

Everyone tells you that you'll come back from something like this with your head rewired by the science. That's true. Nobody warns you about the other thing.

That group of strangers I boarded the plane with, people pulled from every corner of India, thrown together by an application form, is still my circle today. Years later. Not "we catch up occasionally." Actually my people. The ones I call when something works, and the ones I call when something doesn't.

And it wasn't only us. Some of the best conversations of that week were with people from countries whose science I knew nothing about, sitting around long after we should have been asleep, all of us explaining our worlds to each other in our second and third languages.

I went expecting to bring home the labs. I brought home a group chat that has never once gone quiet.

If you're reading this as someone about to go, that's the part I'd tell you to protect. The sessions end. Those people don't.

What that week set in motion

I came home and made research my full-time passion. Applied research, research that touches something. Some of it ended up published, most of it didn't, and that ratio is the honest one.

I started working with labs while still in school. I built a multimodal engine that generated images and video at a fraction of the going cost, and it ended up being used by teachers on the PM e-Vidya channels, which is how I ended up meeting the Prime Minister of India. Projects after that picked up Intel awards. At eighteen I became the youngest Google Developer Expert in the world.

Now let me ruin that paragraph, because written out like that it looks like a straight line going up, and it wasn't.

Behind every single one of those things is a stack of rejections. Talks I submitted that didn't get selected. Applications that came back as no. Projects nobody has ever heard of because there was nothing to hear about. If you saw the actual ratio you would not describe it as a rise.

But this is exactly where the lesson kept doing the work. A rejection is just a problem, and problems have structure, so treat it like one. Every time: why specifically did this not work? Not "they didn't see the value in it," because that's not an answer, that's a feeling. What was actually weak? Where was the thing genuinely not good enough yet? Then don't make that particular mistake again. Go and make a new one instead.

That is how they build things at Kyoto, and it is how every serious scientist I have met in India works too. That's the whole method. There is no other trick hidden in here.

Around the same time I was preparing for JEE Advanced, and I got into IIT Delhi.

And then I left it to join Microsoft.

I want to be very careful about how I say this next part, because it is the easiest thing in the world to misread. IIT Delhi is one of the finest institutions in this country. Getting in was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Preparing for competitive exams trains your brain to chase hard things, and honestly that is worth more than clearing the exam itself. Nothing about my leaving was a verdict on that place.

It was a timing problem, and mostly a me problem. I had already started down a particular road, and the shape of my days there wasn't letting me stay on it. That isn't the institution failing. That's one person and one place not fitting each other at one particular time. It happens, and it says nothing much about either of them.

So if you're reading this from inside a programme you love: stay in it. I am not the argument for leaving.

Microsoft came along at a moment when I was already gone in my head, and I took it.

And I will always be grateful to the leadership there. I walked in young and without a degree, and in our country that is usually the first question a room asks and sometimes the only one it needs. They never asked it. Not once has anyone in that building looked at me and seen a number of years first, or a piece of paper I didn't have. They set all of it aside and looked into me instead. They saw someone who just wanted to explore technology and build things, and they decided that was enough to begin with. I love my leaders for that.

And then they kept going. More doors, room to experiment, room to build, room to go and show real impact.

Do you know how rare that is? Most people wait years for one person to look at them that way. I got a whole team of them, right at the start of everything.

That is what taught me what leadership actually is. The best ones read your appetite, because appetite is the only thing that tells you anything about what someone will do next. I cleared the rounds

And at that moment I became one of the Youngest Engineers at Microsoft at the age of 19.

When I did, the reactions were all over the place. Good decision, bad decision, huge mistake, brave call. I heard every version of it, sometimes from the same person on different days.

Some of it came from people whose opinion I had no particular reason to weigh. Some of it came from the handful of people whose opinion was the only thing I actually cared about, and that's the version that keeps you awake. I'm not going to pretend I was calm through it.

And walking down that road afterwards, I landed on something I still hold:

There is no right decision or wrong decision. There is only your decision. After that, it's your job to make it right. Period.

Take the asymmetric bet when it's actually in front of you. Just don't lose your head doing it, because the bet only pays if you're still standing to make the next one.

In this era of AI especially, adaptability is the whole game.

Since joining the industry, I've had the bandwidth to keep learning on my own time, to experiment, to build things on the side, and to work with genuinely brilliant people I would never have had access to otherwise. The one thing that has never switched off is the questioning, going down and down and down until I actually understand the thing.

What I do next, nobody knows yet. But whatever society has handed me, I want to put back into it. Because people don't remember you for your achievements. Achievements establish your credibility, sure. But Sakura and Indian culture both taught me the same thing from different directions: no matter how big you get, people remember how you treated them. I think that's the part my generation needs to sit with.

One last thing

I get told I'm god-gifted more often than you'd think. And the flip side is worse. I meet students who have already decided that they aren't, and so there's no point in them even trying. Here's the honest part.

If you've followed me from the start of this to here, you already know that's not it. You've seen the rejections. You've seen the teacher who noticed, the strangers who became permanent, the researchers who showed me a building leaving the ground.

There's no such thing as a god-gifted child. There are only god-gifts, and they arrive as your teachers, your mentors, your friends, your parents, the person who gave me my first computer, the teachers who held me along the way, the short conversation that opened the eyes, the leaders who see you as it is, all the relationships that turn up to light the road you're on.

Without them I'm nothing. None of this happens.

My life has only just begun. I'll get things wrong hundreds of times, probably thousands, haha. What I ask of myself is smaller and harder than getting it right: look at every failure honestly, work out exactly what broke, and carry that forward into something new as learning.

And trust me on this one, embrace the failures. Because the day something finally works, those failures are what shine. That's what people actually connect with, not the win. Yes, the destination is good, it feels amazing, of course it does, but it's the journey, the road to it that you remember for the rest of your life, that's the most beautiful part of all of this, and that is exactly why success is a journey and can never, ever be a destination.

Thank you