Sora Kalden

Ten years of anime made me fall in love with Japanese, so I decided to learn it during my three months in Osaka. I spent the first month learning how to learn it instead, and found a method that taught me a thousand words in 20 hours. That's A1, barely conversational, but enough to spend my days with friends who spoke no English. I've spent the two years since turning that method into Flua, on a quest to build the fastest language learning app in the world. Now I'm speedrunning French to B2 to prove it scales.

I fell in love with board games the day I found BGG. Six months later I owned fifty of them, curated for any occasion. That led to D&D, which I ran for 30+ people across a year in New York before I had to leave (my group held a funeral-esque service in my honor). The whole collection is still in a storage locker somewhere in the city, though I've started a smaller one in Nagpur for when I'm away. I built a board game finder to search and filter BGG's top 1,000, with Indian store prices and availability alongside them.

The more I played, the more every game's rules and design made intuitive sense, and I fell in love with designing them too. Forced to play Jenga on Avoy's birthday, I came up with a game I called Reverse Jenga. Over time it became my favorite party game anywhere I go: Kuzure.

For game nights I also make soundtracks paced to each game, and a few things to print.

You can't read everything, so I built a list of two hundred books: the highest-rated in every field, chosen so each one buys the twenty percent of a discipline that does eighty percent of the work. History, philosophy, psychology, design, business, marketing, self-help. On my way to becoming a multi-disciplinary superhuman. Maybe one day they'll call me ChatGPT (though OpenAI already named their video model after me).

I published a book at the age of 14 in my third language. Somewhat by accident. Here's how it happened.

Mine started with a dream, which turned into a few pages of a story, which turned into an excuse to buy a gaming laptop so I could "write" the book. (I mostly played Far Cry 2 on it.) I kept adding a few pages to keep up the pretense, and over a few years that added up to a real manuscript. When I realized what I had, I sat down and rewrote the entire book eleven times. At fourteen, I published my first novel.

It didn't sell.

So with my mom's help I started my own publishing house, found distributors, sent free copies to schools across India, and within a year had thousands of copies in circulation, my name in a dozen newspapers, and signings and speeches at every school that asked. Somehow I still managed a perfect 10 CGPA that year.

These days I mostly write YouTube scripts that will never get made, and Fable prompts so an AI can do my work for me. Keeping up the spirit of what started it all.

My one true skill was attending zero lectures, knowing absolutely nothing, and still somehow crushing the test. Even at Carnegie Mellon.

The bad habits, and a wrecked sleep cycle, eventually caught up with me. I bottomed out at a 2.5 GPA one semester and failed a course outright.

The next semester, with a homework due in nine hours that I hadn't started (the average CMU student needed two days for it), I chose sleep and passed out for four. I woke up weirdly zen, read the lecture notes, started the homework, and finished it an hour before the deadline with a perfect score, in the same course I had just failed. I went on to get an A in it, and in every other course that semester, and made the Dean's List. I was so on my shit that semester that in one of our hardest classes I started a homework the moment it was released and submitted it two hours later, only to get a call from an unknown number. The professor had looked me up in the student directory to ask whether the homework was too easy, and whether he should pull it and release a harder version for the whole class. I convinced him not to, to the relief of everyone else in it.

Years out of college I finally worked out what made the difference. It was sleep and mindset, nothing more. I also worked out what actually mattered in my four years at the best computer science school in the world, and distilled it into courses you can sign up for. They don't teach computer science. They teach the way of thinking Carnegie Mellon taught us, the part that insured us against the era of AI and keeps us relevant. Mathematical Thinking, Statistical Thinking, and Computational Thinking.

Rocket League Grand Champion, two thousand hours, some regret. Hunt: Showdown and Battlefield 1 over every other shooter. Kingdom Come and The Witcher for months at a time, FTL and Balatro in between. I've also watched most of the best anime ever made, mainly to work out why they're the best.

My weight loss stalled for six months, so I debugged it like a bug, and it worked. The tracker I built along the way is Weave. My mom lost seventeen pounds with it, the first thing that ever worked for her. What I eat is a list I pick from at random.

Somewhere in the last few years I started treating my own day like a system to debug, and read most of what's worth reading on it. The version that works, most days: out of bed without an alarm and onto the terrace for sunlight within the hour. An hour of unstructured thought before I touch a screen, three sentences of journal, a daily weigh-in I only judge by the seven-day average. One primary goal for the day and four hours of deep work before anything else. No food until 1:30. Lift three times a week, ten thousand steps, two hours of reading, screens off two hours before bed, and a habit tracker so I can't lie to myself about any of it.

Sleep is the one that carries the rest, so I wrote down everything I know about it. Atomic Habits is how I got any of these to stick. The two I still lose most weeks are the unstructured hour and the fixed bedtime, which is annoying, because those are the two that matter most.