I’ve always built things.

The impulse to build and the satisfaction of making something from nothing.

I got my first LEGO set (that I remember) in 2001.

I 3D modeled my bedroom in 2012.

I built my first computer in 2015.

I started 3D printing in 2020.

I was never that artistic, despite taking art classes. I wasn’t very handy either.

But I am a builder. I make things and I’ve always loved it.

For most of my life I didn’t have a word for what I was doing. Building felt like something other people did, people who were handy, or artistic, or technically trained. I was none of those things. I just kept making stuff anyway.

Growing up, I remember watching Mythbusters and being so interested in their experiments. I later followed Adam Savage on his YouTube channel, Tested.com. I learned about woodworking, 3D printing, model building, and more. Over the years I’d also built Warhammer miniatures, Gundams, and D&D figures. It was tiny, painstaking work, the kind where you lose two hours without noticing. I learned that slow craft has its own reward.

In 2020, I bought my first standing desk and decided to make my own tabletop for it. I bought an unfinished tabletop from IKEA and learned to sand and varnish it. I still use it every day, six years later. My dad was also into woodworking as a hobby and it was a chance for me to learn from him too.

Ten years ago, I entered the corporate world and have since pivoted from accounting to tech. In the past 3 years, I’ve learned what it means to be scrappy, to build something with a team that didn’t exist before. Doing something 0 → 1 is incredibly rewarding. There’s a particular feeling when a project or idea you pitched becomes something real. The feeling scales when other people are involved. Building alone is rewarding. Building something as a team that serves hundreds of thousands is a different kind of reward.

I haven’t built anything with my hands as much lately, and I miss it more than I expected. I’m still looking for my next project. Instead, I’ve been spending time with AI. I’ve felt both a mix of excitement and a little anxiety because of AI. Certain things were always out of reach for non-developers like me. Entire categories of building were always out of reach, gatekept by languages I never learned. AI changed that overnight. The speed and ease have been intoxicating. What I’m still figuring out is whether building so quickly rewards the same part of me that enters the flow state with slower building. I think it’s something different entirely, but it’s incredibly empowering either way.

Lately I’ve been exploring something different: building the systems for my own mind. For almost a decade I’ve organized my life into buckets, tracked what matters, and written to think. I have notes scattered across Notion, journals, and voice memos recorded at 2AM before the thought disappeared. I didn’t have a name for it then but now people call it a Second Brain. What AI has done is taken that accumulated thinking and made it dynamic, searchable, connectable, and alive in a way it never quite was before.

I’m still looking for my next hands-on project. But I’ve never needed the perfect conditions to build: just an idea and enough curiosity to start. That’s always been true, whether I was sanding a tabletop at midnight or shipping a product with a team or figuring out what AI can do in my hands. I’m a builder and I always will be.