Fearless Beginning

There are people whose lives seem to follow an orderly, almost predetermined structure. Their childhood is mapped by achievements, their academic choices appear obvious, and their professional trajectory unfolds along a well-lit path that others drew for them. I grew up inside a similar framework of expectation, where the future was described to me in advance: continue excelling at school, enter a respected university, build a stable, predictable life. On paper this path looked safe, dignified, and even admirable. Yet, even as a child, I felt an unease with this sense of inevitability, as if the lines drawn for me were too narrow for the kind of life I imagined.

What I understood early on was that progress is rarely a straight line. It is seldom the result of obediently following a plan. For some of us, the desire to move beyond the given boundaries is stronger than the comfort of staying within them. This impulse — difficult to explain but impossible to ignore — eventually carried me across continents, first to New York and later to Oxford, and placed me in environments where certainty was replaced by experimentation, and where every new chapter began with an unfamiliar landscape.

My work in technology has only deepened this understanding. Building in the world of AI is, at its core, a continuous conversation with uncertainty. It is a discipline defined not by immediate clarity but by encounters with limits, incomplete ideas, technical dead ends and prototypes that refuse to cooperate. Much of the progress happens quietly, without witnesses, and often without immediate reward. You spend months working toward a direction that may or may not become viable. You invest time, energy and intuition into something that might dissolve before it becomes meaningful. And yet, for reasons that are almost existential rather than practical, you return to the beginning and try again.

Recently I have been reflecting on what makes some people step into this cycle of reinvention, while others remain within the familiar structures of the lives they inherited. Perhaps the difference lies not in talent or opportunity, but in our relationship to our own thinking. Innovation, in many ways, begins with noticing the ceilings we unconsciously absorbed, questioning them, and teaching ourselves to move through them. It demands the ability to see a boundary not as a warning but as an invitation. I have spent the last several years learning to recognize the hidden limits in my own mind — the assumptions, the fears, the habitual patterns — and to dismantle them one by one. It is never a comfortable process, but it is the only way to build something that has not existed before.

This personal work has shaped the rhythm of my professional life. I often find myself in a state of beginning: beginning a new product, beginning a new idea, beginning a new conversation about where technology could go if guided not only by logic but also by intuition. With every new attempt comes the familiar mixture of excitement and hesitation, the knowledge that I may fail and the deeper knowledge that failure is part of movement. To begin is to accept the possibility of being wrong, but also the possibility of becoming someone new.

In the coming days, I want to explore this threshold more openly.
On 2 December, between 12:00 and 12:45, we will gather with our members on Luma — a smaller, more intimate space for women in our circle to reflect on their own cycles of beginning, doubt, and movement. It is a conversation meant for those who are actively working through their limits, even when those limits are invisible to others.

Then, on 5 December, also from 12:00 to 12:45, during our first Fearless Beginning Instagram Live session, I will speak with two remarkable women from our community: one building her own fashion brand through a delicate balance of creativity and resilience, and another reshaping her career with clarity and conviction. Their paths are different from mine, yet they echo the same underlying question — what does it mean to start, especially when no outcome is guaranteed?

This series of conversations is for women standing at the edge of their own beginning, sensing a shift they cannot yet name. For those who are learning to trust themselves in unfamiliar territory, who are challenging the boundaries they inherited, and who feel called to move even without certainty. We invite you to join us — to reflect on the quiet bravery of starting, and to explore how courage grows not from the absence of fear, but from the decision to continue in spite of it.

This conversation is for women who sense that a new chapter is approaching, but do not yet know its shape. For those who are learning to trust themselves in unfamiliar territory, who are confronting the limits they inherited, and who are choosing movement over certainty.