When I started thinking about building a business back in my college days, I needed something that paid more than minimum wage and could support the expenses I had. It wasn’t easy, especially as an international student in Canada.

I had been coding since my early days in secondary school, as soon as I got my hands on my first PC—the Pentium model, which was already capable of running Windows, starting with Windows 3.0 before it got fancier with Windows 95. I immediately liked the DOS and command-line environment and started hacking into it. I broke the PC and reformatted it every few days, then started fixing our neighbors’ and family members’ computers, all the way up to my father’s company. I loved solving puzzles and intuitively learning.

I started coding with QBasic, then moved on to Visual Basic. When I went to learn the C programming language, my teacher thought I was too early, since my school math hadn’t reached far enough to support the logic I was about to learn!

Something I realize now is that learning at an early age isn’t difficult at all. It’s probably something we naturally start to do as our brains are curious and love learning. At later ages, this is still the case, but now we are more complex—we have many interests, worries, and distractions.

As I began this post, I thought my inspiration stemmed from doing what I could to solve the first challenge I encountered. I started a radio station in college, which led to everyone knowing I was into digital stuff and could make websites! This was very unintentional, but it led to my entire career as a freelancer and, later, to developing our agency, Noble Pixels.

Since then, acting on the next idea has brought more opportunities than I could usually handle over the years. I’ve been fortunate to receive mentorships that helped me grow my network, build teams, and lead at times.

My next idea is often inspired while serving others—when I see their problems and realize how my time and energy could improve their lives. I’ve learned that identifying those challenges is the first key step. Having the resources, processes, and capabilities to solve them comes next in achieving those goals—and perhaps moving to the next inspiring idea!