Everything I Learned Before Turning 30
Lessons from construction sites, boardrooms, mountain roads, and late-night coding sessions — what building a career and a life actually taught me.
Turning 30 is one of those milestones that forces honesty. You can’t help but look back — at what you built, what you broke, what you wish you had understood sooner, and what surprised you completely.
Between managing construction projects, launching Khelkunja Arena, building web platforms, documenting journeys through Mero Safar, and pursuing an MBA, I have gathered lessons that no classroom could have given me. Here is my honest attempt to articulate them.
1. The Gap Between College and Reality
The most jarring lesson of my early career was this: college never taught me the actual problems you encounter on a construction site.
In a classroom, equations are clean. Soil behaves as the textbook says. Loads resolve neatly. On-site, you are dealing with safety risks no professor modelled, financial pressures that shift daily, subcontractors who don’t show up, and the complexity of coordinating over 50 skilled labourers who each have their own professional judgment and their own bad days.
The gap between theory and field reality is wide — and crossing it takes time that cannot be shortcut.
My advice to every new engineer I meet is simple: learn the field thoroughly before you jump into the business side. Spend time on sites. Get your hands on real problems. Build the kind of intuition that only comes from doing. The business knowledge will be far more powerful once it sits on that foundation.
2. Mastering the Art of Management
Becoming a Project Manager is not difficult. Being a consistently good one is one of the hardest things I know.
I chose to focus on Project Management during my MBA precisely because it sits at the intersection of everything I do — engineering, entrepreneurship, and team leadership. A good PM doesn’t just track timelines; they translate between technical realities and business expectations, hold multiple complex systems in their head simultaneously, and make decisions under uncertainty with incomplete information.
What has helped me most:
- The PERT method for scheduling and planning — it forces you to think probabilistically about timelines rather than optimistically, which is more honest and more useful.
- Cross-functional influence — the ability to align people who don’t report to you, across different disciplines and incentive structures, has been my most valuable management skill.
- Books that changed my mindset: The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, The Art of Letting Go, and The Psychology of Money each shifted something fundamental in how I approach both business and life. Business is as much about psychology — yours and everyone around you — as it is about spreadsheets.
I am still working on my communication. Knowing what to say and knowing how to say it in a way that actually lands are different skills, and I am actively developing the second.
3. Travel as a Teacher: The Lessons of Mero Safar
I started Mero Safar eight years ago, primarily to capture and store memories. What I didn’t anticipate was how profoundly it would change the way I see the world.
The trip that changed everything: Riding to Shey Phoksundo showed me exactly how raw and beautiful nature can be. There are places in Nepal that are so far outside ordinary experience that reaching them reshapes your sense of what is possible — both in the world and in yourself.
The most universal lesson travel taught me: Cultures differ. Languages differ. Customs, food, and daily rhythms differ. But human nature doesn’t. Whether I was in Dubai or Malaysia or a remote village in the Karnali, what I found was the same: people who love their families, take pride in their work, and are generous to strangers who approach them with genuine curiosity.
That is the thing about travel — it doesn’t just show you other places. It shows you what is constant underneath all the variation. And that knowledge makes you a better person to work with, to manage, and to be.
4. Digital Craftsmanship: How I Actually Build
My approach to building websites changed the moment I stopped starting with code.
Now, I start by writing down the problems the website needs to solve. What does a user need? What do they arrive with, and what should they leave with? What friction exists between those two states, and how does the site remove it? Only once those questions are answered clearly does the technical work begin.
My current workflow:
- Claude for AI assistance during development — for thinking through architecture, drafting content, and accelerating the repetitive parts of coding
- Antigravity IDE as my primary development environment
- GitHub for design and component references, and Wrangler for deployment
- Always testing on localhost before anything goes live — no exceptions
On optimisation, I treat SEO and GEO as equal priorities for every project. SEO ensures that humans searching on Google can find what I’ve built. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — ensures that AI systems can understand and cite it. For a platform like FreeConstructionCalculator.com, both matter enormously.
5. Looking Forward: My Vision for the Next Five Years
My goal for the next five years is financial freedom — but I want to be precise about what that means.
It is not about an arbitrary number in a bank account. It is about having the resources and the autonomy to invest in sectors I believe in: manufacturing, farming, and the emerging space of AI and data centre engineering. These are areas where I see genuine long-term value being created, and I want to be positioned to participate in building that value, not just observe it.
The personal goal I care about most, though, is simpler:
I want to become the kind of person who listens far more than I speak. The older I get, the more I realise that the most intelligent people in any room are usually the quietest. They are processing. They are learning. They ask the question that reframes the entire conversation.
I am still learning how to do that consistently.
On Legacy
People sometimes ask what kind of legacy I want to leave. I used to think about this in terms of buildings, companies, or platforms that outlast me.
I don’t think about it that way anymore.
I just want people to say I was a good person. That’s enough.
Everything else — the projects, the businesses, the content — those are the means. That is the end.
Here’s to the next thirty.