How to Be Everything!

For a long time, I thought there was something wrong with the way I built my career.

While many people around me were becoming specialists in a single field, I kept moving—from software engineering to industrial electrical systems, then to manufacturing, and now to Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. Every transition made me question myself. Was I losing focus? Was I starting over again? Had I wasted the years I’d already invested?

I asked mentors, professors, colleagues, and friends the same question over and over. Their advice always made sense, and for a while I would feel reassured. But after a few months, the same curiosity returned, pulling me toward another challenge that I couldn’t ignore.

Only recently did I realize that I had been asking the wrong question.

When I looked back at my resume instead of looking forward at my next step, I finally saw a pattern.

My years in software engineering weren’t just about writing code. They taught me how to think logically, break complex problems into manageable pieces, and learn almost anything using the internet and the generosity of people who had already walked the path before me. Working in startups exposed me to product development, UI/UX, graphic design, marketing, and one lesson that has stayed with me ever since: technology only matters if it solves a real problem for real people.

Moving into industrial electrical engineering wasn’t abandoning software—it was expanding it. Suddenly, the algorithms I had written became PLC logic. Software turned into control systems, wiring diagrams, sensors, drives, and machines that existed in the physical world. Growing up in a family where electrical engineering was always part of everyday conversations made that transition feel surprisingly natural.

Then manufacturing changed everything again.

Instead of only designing systems, I was building them. I learned machining, assembly, tolerances, production planning, and the countless practical constraints that never appear in textbooks. I stopped thinking only about whether something could work and started asking whether it could actually be manufactured, maintained, and improved.

Today, as I study Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, I no longer see these experiences as separate careers. They are different layers of the same foundation.

Software helps me build intelligent systems.

Electrical engineering helps me connect software with the physical world.

Manufacturing helps me understand how those systems are actually built and operated.

Artificial intelligence gives me the tools to make those systems smarter.

A few years ago I read How to Be Everything by Emilie Wapnick. At the time, it gave me permission to stop feeling guilty about having many interests. Looking back now, I realize my career was never a ladder that I needed to climb one rung at a time.

It was a constellation.

Every experience became another point. By itself, each point looked unrelated. But over time, the connections became visible.

Today, I don’t introduce myself as someone who changed careers several times. I see myself as an engineer who has been collecting perspectives from different disciplines to solve one kind of problem: building better industrial systems.

Maybe that’s what being “everything” really means—not trying to master every field, but allowing each field to shape the way you think.

As Steve Jobs said:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”