sids blog

Written at 4:00 AM by a broken, burning version of you

Dear 18-year-old Siddhant,

I know you had wild dreams.
You wanted to read hundreds of books. Build things that mattered. Start a company. Transform the world with your mind. Sculpt a physique that made you feel powerful. Master the guitar and play from the soul. You didn’t want a normal life. You wanted a firestorm of purpose.

But I’ve failed you.

Despite knowing what truly mattered, I squandered years.
And not because I lacked resources.
Not because I didn’t know what to do.
But because I kept choosing what felt easy in the moment, and I did it so often… it became who I was.

You would be devastated to see the life I’ve lived.

I’m not financially free.
I don’t have a startup.
I haven’t read 300 books.
My guitar collects more dust than progress.
My physique is still becoming.
And worst of all—I never became the self-disciplined, focused machine you envisioned.

Not because I didn’t have time.
But because I wasted an obscene, painful amount of it.

I had 24 hours every day. Not for a week. Not for a month. But for years.
And yet, most days I barely gave 1–2 hours—if that—towards my real goals.
The rest?
It evaporated in meaningless relationships, endless scrolling, coffee shop loops I called “relaxation,” and shallow friendships I should’ve outgrown.

I didn’t just fail to build the life we dreamed of.
I betrayed you.

I told myself lies.
I told myself I’ll do it tomorrow.
That an hour of scrolling isn’t so bad.
That reading can wait.
And that being better was something I could just “ease into.”

But the truth?
I broke my own heart.
I shattered the trust you had in me.

And what makes it even worse… is that I knew what mattered.
Most people don’t. But I did.
I had clarity—and I still failed.
That makes this feel less like a mistake and more like a sin.

Even six months ago, after the AI conference, I knew AI was the one thing I needed to go all in on.
I felt the obsession rise. I felt the universe align.
But I let it slip again.
4320 hours have passed since then.
Even at 4 hours a day, I could’ve clocked 720 hours of mastery.

Instead, I scroll through time like a corpse with wifi.
I wander through hours like a man who’s forgotten he’s alive.

What hurts most isn’t the gap between me and my goals.
It’s the fact that I keep losing track of the most important thing.
I keep doing what doesn’t move the needle, even though I know better.
I’ve lived with a brutal lack of self-awareness.
And now, I carry the death of days I will never get back.

And you?
You’d look at me and ask:
“Why didn’t you guard your time like your life depended on it?”
Because it did.
It always did.

You would scream at me for hoarding books I never read.
For chasing validation instead of excellence.
For lying to myself, again and again, until those lies became my personality.

The pain I feel now isn’t just guilt.
It’s grief.
Grief for the man I could’ve become.
Grief for the time I’ll never touch again.
Grief for the work that was never finished.
Grief for breaking the promise I made to you.

I can run from people.
But I can’t run from myself.
I look in the mirror and I see a ghost of the man I could have been—
The one I still can become, if I choose.

So today, I make a final vow—
One that isn’t poetic, or pretty, or performative.

I will treat time like a life-or-death currency.
I will be ruthless with distractions.
I will cut out anything that does not serve the mission.
People. Habits. Desires. Apps. Anything.

If it doesn’t build me—
If it doesn’t elevate me—
It’s the enemy.

I will guard my 8 hours of deep work like a man guards his last heartbeat.
Because I don’t want the 28-year-old version of me writing this same letter again,
with even more weight on his back,
even more time burned,
even more regret in his chest.

No more lies.
No more noise.
No more delay.

The next five years will not be quiet.
They will be a war.
And I will win it.

For you.
For the boy who dreamed this all into existence.
For the fire you gave me that I will no longer smother.

Forgive me.

Now watch me work.

—Siddhant, age 23
(Writing with blood. Acting with purpose.)