I think everyone needs a renaissance.
Personally, I find myself in a winter. Not just because New York is literally frozen right now, but because I'm in a winter in terms of personal growth and momentum. If I reflect honestly on the past few weeks of 2026, I have to accept certain uncomfortable facts. A personal renaissance isn't something nice to think about. It's what's needed to get past where I am.
Here's what I'm reckoning with.
We spend years, months, building our own belief systems, our own way of operating in the world. Like how products have product-market fit, our beliefs and thought processes also have to fit into different environments. And I always expected that the success mantras I held, the perseverance I believed in, needed to be environment-invariant — universal, something that holds true regardless of where I am or what I'm doing. But I'm reflecting now, and I'm starting to see that that may not hold true. There are realities I need to accept. I have to keep learning.
Take a couple of things. I was so adamant that I didn't want to apply to hundreds of internships. Last year I barely applied to four or five companies. I also believed deeply in networks — that building genuine connections, as opposed to just participating in collective behavior, was worth doing and worth protecting. But my understanding of networks versus how networks actually function turned out to be quite different from each other. There's a trade-off that has to be figured out to improve the odds of winning, and I hadn't figured it out.
And then there's this. Consider it a very simple choice-making process. We have ideas, we pitch those ideas, we create what we believe is value. But what I consider important isn't what the ecosystem perceives as important. I often believed that if my definition of success matched what everyone else is looking for, what everyone else is agreeing upon, then I should have followed very typical ways of getting there. Becoming an influencer. Becoming a lead coder. Joining a group and getting a paper published. But somehow the belief system and value structure I've created over the years doesn't allow me to do that. Not inauthentically. And when what I've built gets evaluated against the typical definition of success, there exists a fundamental mismatch.
To put it simply, it's winter. There is no success. There is no warmth. There is no momentum.
It's very new for me to face rejections from all directions. Left and right, from all the places. And while sitting with that, I notice something else — there's an atrophy that's happened in how we even think about renaissance. We're always looking for success stories. Always lowering the definition of success to make ourselves feel good about things that aren't really worthy of celebration. Many things celebrated here are worth nothing. That climb of success people celebrate — it's really nothing. It doesn't take us forward. It doesn't give us a path to the next orbit. It's just a temporary way of turning the attention of others toward you for a moment. I truly see that now. Or maybe it's still a hypothesis I'm validating. But I keep seeing evidence.
So where does that leave me?
The one fundamental thing is this: I don't want to change what I believe in. The objectives and expectations of this ecosystem are completely different from what I'm trying to be. And to reconcile what success could actually mean, what real satisfaction could look like, I need to work toward that — toward my own definition, not the borrowed one. All the intermittent measures, the auxiliary definitions of success that everyone chases — they should be overruled. I shouldn't really care about the small things that everyone else treats as milestones.
There are a lot of illusions out there. I can see that clearly now. There's no use pretending otherwise.
I need to find the better me. Focus. Build. Iterate.