No points for this

For much of my life, I did not have to decide what was worth pursuing. A competition decided for me.

There was a problem, a deadline, and a way to know whether I had done well. One round led to another. A placement opened the next stage. Even when the work was difficult, the direction was clear.

I started competing in math when I was young. For years, I trained without winning, and I took that personally. When I finally won in high school, the result made years of effort feel worth it.

The contests supplied their own curriculum: training sessions, mock rounds, modules, and another event waiting. Later, I became interested in competitive programming and hackathons. I liked the problems themselves. A good algorithmic problem demanded more than a plausible answer. I had to notice the pattern, understand the constraints, and find a solution efficient enough to hold up. I could spend hours on that kind of work because the difficulty felt clean.

That enjoyment was real. Competitions also tied it to another reward that was easier to see: a rank, a medal, the next round, or another credential. I did not need to separate the value of the work from the value of being recognized for it.

Recognition gave me a visible account of progress. When I later won my first programming competition, I treated the result as an answer to a much larger question: maybe computer science was my path. By my third year in college, I was still chasing that feeling through hackathons and credentials. Winning meant I was moving forward. When I had nothing new to show, I felt as if I were falling behind.

Achievement had become more than a measure of progress. I was also using it to measure myself.

That affected which work attracted me. I was interested in quantum computing and robotics, but I could not always separate the work from what pursuing those fields seemed to say about me.

I began to question that when I started asking what I actually wanted to build.

A harder question than winning

I have wanted to start a company of my own since before college. For years, that ambition could sit beside collecting credentials because I treated both as signs of progress. The difference became harder to ignore after hackathons, when I had to decide whether to keep working on a product once the competition ended.

A competition tells you what matters for the next few days or weeks. Building a company does not. There is no organizer assigning the right problem, no rubric proving that a solution matters, and no award that can settle whether the work deserves another year.

A working demo could answer the question the competition had posed: can this be built? It could not tell me whether anyone needed it, whether the unfinished work mattered, or whether I cared enough to continue once the interesting part was over.

Qu-Alz was one project that continued after the competition. We first developed it for SEA Quantathon, where it placed 1st runner-up. Afterward, we turned the prototype into a conference paper that was accepted for presentation at the ASEAN IVO Forum. Writing the paper required us to clarify the research question, methods, and results beyond what a short demonstration could show.

The paper brought another deadline and venue, so the work still had external structure. We had chosen to continue after the original event, but I still did not know whether I wanted to keep doing that kind of work. The question had shifted from whether we could solve the technical problem to why it was worth pursuing.

Paul Graham describes prestige as “a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy.” I recognize that pull. The work interested me, but so did the image that came with it. Hackathons showed me how quickly a technical method and a polished pitch could become a convincing story about impact. Sometimes the work deserved that confidence. Sometimes I had confused the ability to tell that story with a reason to keep building.

I could convince myself that a field was my future before I knew whether I wanted to stay with it.

Difficulty is not the same as importance

Competitions trained me to look for the hard part. In a defined problem, that instinct is useful. In an open-ended search, it can distort what I notice.

Difficulty answers a different question. It can tell me whether the work will stretch me, not whether anyone needs the result. I want work that can hold my attention and still matter to someone besides me.

Testing the work itself

Keeping every possibility open feels like freedom because I have not lost anything yet. But an open possibility is still only imagined. I want to explore almost everything, and each possible path makes the others harder to set aside. When I try to preserve all of them, I often move on none. I want to do everything, so I do nothing.

Procrastination reinforces the pattern. Reading about another field feels productive, while committing to one project creates the risk that I chose wrong.

My interest in robotics is not new. I remember visiting my father’s office after a math training session and seeing software running on small circuit boards inside industrial systems. I was fascinated that code could make something happen in the physical world.

That history explains the interest, but it still does not tell me whether I enjoy the work itself. I know part of the appeal is the engineering: making software work in the physical world. But I also like the idea and aesthetics of robotics, and that may not be the same as liking the day-to-day work.

I cannot answer that by imagining the work more vividly. A study by Paul O’Keefe, Carol Dweck, and Gregory Walton gave me a better way to think about difficulty: people who saw interests as fixed were more likely to lose interest when a new pursuit became difficult. A difficult first project would not settle the question on its own. What matters is whether the difficulty makes me want to understand the work more.

I am trying to answer two different questions. Do I want the work itself, including its ordinary parts? And does the problem matter beyond the identity attached to it? A project can pass one test and fail the other.

• Would I still want the ordinary work once the impressive parts are over?
• Do I return when there is no deadline or recognition?
• Who is affected by the problem, and what changes if it is solved?
• Would I care as much if I could not put the field in the title?

I plan to test that by building something small and seeing whether the process leaves me with another question worth pursuing.

Competitions gave me discipline, exposure, teammates, and the confidence to attempt difficult work. I do not regret them. I just do not want external recognition to do the choosing for me.

A scoreboard can tell me how I performed within a problem someone else chose. It cannot choose the problem for me or tell me how long to stay. I cannot keep every future open and still build one. For now, I will finish the experiment and see what question, if any, remains.