I stood at the podium and said the one thing you’re not supposed to say at a student sustainability conference. “Most of your projects will fail.” A nervous quiet fell over the room. I continued. They would fail not from a lack of passion, or funding, or even a good idea. They would fail because they were designed as school projects: a checklist of deliverables, a faculty advisor to please, a finish line defined by a grade. They were built to look good on a resume, not to survive in the wild. I knew this because I had a secret. My own grand projects—the ones I meticulously documented in my digital vault—were also failing. They were beautiful, complex, and utterly lifeless. They were architectures for a world that didn’t exist. That talk was a eulogy for my old way of thinking. I went home and began a brutal audit of my own work. I archived the grand theories and the world-changing-schematics. I started focusing on a harder question: what is the smallest, most elegant intervention that can create a cascade of change? Instead of designing a new university, I built a tool that helps a single student map their own curriculum. Instead of writing a manifesto on AI, I prototyped a simple app that uses it to compress technical papers into poems. I started building for the user, not the universe. This is the work I want to do at Stanford. Not to scale my projects, but to scale my thinking. Stanford’s culture is a crucible for this kind of work—it’s a place that understands the difference between a resume-project and a real one. It’s a graveyard of failed startups, which is why it is the birthplace of revolutions. The physics of failure are studied here as intensely as the dynamics of success. I am not coming with a flawless plan. I am coming with a portfolio of battle-tested failures and a refined method for producing better ones. I am coming to find the others who have also stared at their own beautiful, dead projects and decided to build something alive instead.