I often find myself dreaming about making awesome things – nothing defined – just awe-inspiring and valuable things. I also love being in spaces where other people make amazing works. But across every phase of my journey, I have faced significant inhibitions. Most of these are characterised by low depth, low competence and low aspirations in spaces that are meant to inspire the opposite.

I take a shot at my university – where I dreamed to learn all the beautiful things about mechanical engineering design – with applications in automotive engineering. My face was splashed very early with the cold waters of outdated curriculums, broken or dated labs, uninspired teaching, poor history of breakthrough research, and a daunting race to score high grades in mediocre places. I was too naive to hope to be catered by this institutions and its people. I lost interest very early. I found solace somewhere else, but retained my flaming desire to be in spaces where people do great work — awe-inspiring works that excite intelligent minds and solve critical problems.

Straddling great inhibitions with great dreams transforms your ambitions. A few more people must build the foundations that will allow more people the opportunity to dream. I think one of the most common casualities of great inhibitions are parents, who must shelf their own ambitions to make it possible for others to live theirs — perhaps their own children, perhaps other people like their children. Others come in the form of activists, leaders or founders leading a movement or an organisation aimed at improving people’s access beyond the great inhibitions. Sometimes they get it right, more times they don’t – like any venture anyway.

The great tragedy, I imagine, is losing all of one’s dreams. I do not mean that such a life is a tragedy – I mean it is a tragedic thing to happen – even when the dreamer ends up with an equally good life.

I do believe that my dreams would come true – that they will survive these great inhibitions. I often hope that the integrity of those dreams would remain intact, but as time passes, I understand that the dreams would morph as I grow as a person. Some of it would fall away due to irrelevancy, some of it would suffer death by inferiority to new ambitions, some would remain true but refined. This is why I choose now to enjoy the journey and that across the phases of metamophorsis, I am fully present in the transformation of my ambitions.

My latest ambition is attempting to reform an underutilised research ecosystem. I consider it both ambitious and exciting. Exciting because of the prospect of building spaces where curious people can talk beautifully and explore intricately the mundanities of our everyday work. I think this is inspiring part. Increasing our chances of delivering true breakthroughs critical to our societies and the world. On the other side, ambitious because of the scale of the historically challenges that this ecosystem has faced, and those it continues to face. And more importantly, the culture and cycle of under-excellence it has reinforced. It is ambitious to try to change culture even when a promising future lays ahead. This is the dreary part we must overcome.