three sentences that governed my entire life

I just realized something and I need to write it down before I lose it.

There have been three sentences that governed my entire life. Not books. Not frameworks. Not mentors sitting me down and handing me a philosophy. Three quotes I picked up at different moments, from different places, that each rewired how I operated for years at a time.

I didn't notice the pattern until today. But now that I see it I can't unsee it. Each quote defined a phase. Each phase had a clear beginning and end. And each one only made sense because I'd fully exhausted the one before it.

Let me walk you through them.

Phase 1: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

I don't remember where I first heard this. Might've been Reddit at 3am. Might've been a YouTube video I can't find anymore. But it hit me at exactly the right time - I was a first-gen kid in college who couldn't name the career he was reaching for, couldn't get a single recruiter to respond to 300+ applications, and had no one in his family who could explain what a startup was.

I wrote about this recently - the specific flavor of desperation that comes from knowing you can do real work but having nobody who will let you prove it. The furious confusion of having a 3.9 GPA and a product that 14,000 students used and literally getting zero callbacks.

That quote gave me a framework for the chaos. If luck isn't random - if it's the collision between preparation and opportunity - then I can't control the opportunity. But I can control how prepared I am when it arrives.

So I prepared for everything. In every direction. All at once.

I joined clubs I wasn't sure I belonged in. I cold-emailed people I had no reason to email. I built things with no clear application. I said yes to conversations that had no obvious point. It was messy and directionless and felt like throwing spaghetti at a wall in the dark.

But the logic was airtight: if I can't predict which door will open, I should be standing in front of as many doors as possible.

I graduated summa cum laude from UW at 19. Not because I'm a genius. Because I was terrified of being unprepared. I built Course Finder because nobody helped me pick my classes. I built Aristotle because nobody helped me practice interviews. I applied to everything. I showed up everywhere. I created dots - frantically, without a map - because Steve Jobs was right that you can only connect them looking backward, but nobody tells you the corollary: you can't connect them backward if you never created any to begin with.

And then one day, Varun Puri - a person I cold-messaged on LinkedIn with zero expectations - referred me to the AI2 Incubator without me ever asking. One of those dots connected. And my entire life changed.

That was luck. And it was preparation meeting opportunity. Exactly like the quote said.

Phase 1 worked. I'd maximized it. I'd cast the widest possible net, touched every surface, and the collision happened. I was in the room.

But once you're in the room, preparation alone isn't enough anymore. You need a new operating system.

Phase 2: "To teach is to learn twice."

Joseph Joubert said this. Or at least, he gets the credit. I picked it up somewhere during my first year at the incubator, and it immediately replaced the first quote as my compass.

Here's why: at AI2, I was surrounded by people who knew more than me about everything. Startup veterans. PhDs. People who'd built and sold companies. For the first time, I wasn't the scrappy kid figuring it out alone on Reddit. I was the youngest person in the room, and the gap between what I knew and what everyone else knew was enormous.

The preparation-meets-opportunity framework couldn't help me here. I was past the door. I was inside. Now what?

The answer turned out to be counterintuitive: I started teaching.

Not because I had anything figured out. But because the act of trying to explain something to someone else forces you to understand it at a depth that passive learning never reaches. You can't fake it when someone's looking at you waiting for the answer. You have to actually know.

So I started sharing everything I was learning, as fast as I was learning it.

I spoke at every single buildspace cohort kickoff at UW. Not once - five times. I mentored and showed up every week for the first few cohorts. Each time I knew slightly more and could give slightly better advice. Each talk forced me to synthesize what I'd absorbed into something coherent enough to hand to someone else. It gave me a pulse on how the world was evolving past GPT-3.5 Turbo.

I hosted job fairs at UW on behalf of AI2 Incubator. I started taking friends and curious people to hackathons with me, pushing them to build and ship. I open-sourced my entire development workflow, learned through years of deep AI exploration and experimentation, at runpane.com and wrote a deep breakdown of how Tyler and I ship 300k lines of code with zero engineers - not because I wanted clout, but because talking about it forced us to understand our own process at a level we hadn't before - the writing was an artifact of a hour long meeting we had.

I shared resources with the DubHacks Next community. With the AI2 Incubator. With Foundations. If you go into the DubHacks Next Discord right now and look at the resources channel, you'll still find things I posted there. Still relevant. Still providing value. That's the thing about teaching - the artifacts outlast the moment.

Zack and I cold-emailed Dr. Zvi Galil and convinced him to help us build Turing Minds - a speaker series with 22 speakers including 5 Turing Award winners and a Nobel Laureate, 10,000 attendees across Stanford, MIT, Yale, ETH Zurich. Free. A kid who nobody showed how got the founders of computer science to show everyone.

That wasn't preparation meeting opportunity. That was teaching as learning. I didn't organize those talks because I already understood the material. I organized them because I wanted to understand it, and creating the platform forced me to engage with it at a level I never could have alone.

Every single thing I taught during this phase, I learned twice. The blog posts. The talks. The resources. The hackathon coaching. The speaker series. None of it was charity. It was the most selfish form of generosity - I was giving things away because giving them away was how I learned them.

Somewhere along the way I won two massive hackathons, my first times visiting SF, and that got me invited to both OpenAI and YC's offices to meet the teams. Somewhere along that way I went from employed to founder.

Phase 2 lasted years. Through AI2, through Moondream, through starting Foundations meetups, through the early days of building Doozy. And I think I've finally maximized it.

Because I've started to notice something that teaching can't fix.

Phase 3: "Serendipity doesn't scale."

This one is mine. And I only just realized it's mine.

It came from writing that "nobody showed me how" piece. I was listing the moments that changed my trajectory - Varun's referral, Jacob's hiring decision, Jay taking notes in a conversation he had no reason to care about, Zvi saying yes to a cold email - and I noticed something that shook me:

Every single inflection point traced back to a specific human being who chose to show up at the right moment with the right generosity. Every one.

And the terrifying corollary: what if they hadn't?

The whole system - the career system, the tech pipeline, the way talent gets discovered and opportunity gets distributed - runs on serendipity. On the right person reading the right email on the right day. On one generous stranger deciding to push a door open for someone they barely know.

That's beautiful. It's also completely broken.

Because for every me who got a Varun, there are ten thousand kids with the same intelligence and the same itch who sent the same cold message and got nothing back. Not because nobody cared. Because nobody saw it. The system doesn't scale. The moments that change lives are random and rare and nobody is working to make them less random or less rare.

Phase 1 taught me to prepare for luck. Phase 2 taught me to multiply what I know by giving it away. Phase 3 is different.

Phase 3 is: stop relying on luck entirely.

Not for me - I've been lucky enough. Four or five extraordinary people showed up at the exact right moments and I will spend the rest of my life grateful for that.

But for the 17-year-old scrolling Reddit at 2am right now who doesn't have a Varun yet. Who's building projects nobody sees. Who's applying to jobs that won't respond. Who has the talent and the drive and the furious confusion and nobody in the system paying attention.

I wrote about context transfer being dead - about how AI just made the clipboard work of knowledge work free, how communication was always two things duct-taped together, and how the people who separate discussion from context transfer are operating in a different reality.

But the deeper thing underneath that piece was this: the reason context transfer matters so much isn't just productivity. It's that context transfer was the bottleneck for human connection too. The reason Varun could help me was that he had the context - he knew what I was working on, he knew what the incubator needed, and he could see the match. Most people never get that context about someone else's life. Not because they wouldn't help. Because they're too busy, too overloaded, too buried in their own 275 daily notifications to notice.

What if context wasn't the bottleneck anymore?

What if a system could hold the context of a 17-year-old's projects, skills, interests, and situation - and proactively connect them to the opportunities that match? Not a job board. Not a career quiz. Something that actually knows you. That pays attention when nobody else will.

That's what I'm building. That's what all of this has been leading to, through every phase, every quote, every draft that hit a wall.

Phase 1 was about maximizing my own luck. Phase 2 was about multiplying what I'd learned. Phase 3 is about making luck unnecessary for everyone else.

Here's the thing about these three phases that I only see now, looking backward.

Each one was about the same thing at a different scale.

Phase 1: help yourself. Cast the net. Create the dots. Be ready. Phase 2: help the people around you. Teach. Share. Open-source your learning. Phase 3: help everyone. Build the system. Scale what shouldn't be scalable.

The scope kept widening. Me → my community → everyone.

And each transition only happened because I'd fully exhausted the previous one. You can't teach what you haven't learned. You can't build a system for something you haven't lived. The phases are sequential. You can't skip one.

I think that's why the quote "serendipity doesn't scale" feels different from the first two. The first two were things I heard from other people at moments when I needed them. This one came from inside. From writing. From reflecting on the pattern while the pattern was still forming.

It's not a quote I found. It's a quote I earned.

I don't know what Phase 4 is yet. I don't even know if I'll recognize it when it arrives. I didn't recognize the transitions between the first three until right now, sitting here writing this.

But if the pattern holds - if each phase is the same impulse at a wider scale - then Phase 4 will be something bigger than I can currently imagine. Something that only makes sense after I've fully exhausted Phase 3. Something that takes the thing I built for everyone and turns it into... I don't know.

Something I don't have the words for yet.

And that's ok. I've learned that the not-knowing is the feature, not the bug. You can never connect the dots going forward. You just keep creating them.

My wish is to one day give back with all that I've learned/earned/done so the world doesn't have to repeat my mistakes.

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." "To teach is to learn twice." "Serendipity doesn't scale."

Three quotes. Three phases. One kid who nobody showed how, figuring it out in real time.

I wonder what the fourth one will be.

-parsa