Exposure Is The Engine

How I Got Unstuck, Again and Again

I never planned this life (at least not planned the whole thing).

There was no master strategy. No 5-year plan. Just a series of environments, each so different, it cracked me open in some new way.

At first, I didn’t realize what was happening. But now I can name it:

Exposure.

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Not the surface-level kind. I mean deep collisions with entirely different value systems. Worlds where the rules, ambitions, and feedback loops were unfamiliar. Sometimes intimidating. Always transformative.

And over time, those collisions rewired me.

The First Collisions

In college, my first close friends were deeply into politics. These weren’t Twitter theorists. They lived and breathed ideas of nationalism, reform, identity. They were idealists with manifestos. Their world was loud and principled. I listened a lot. Like many other Indonesian idealist, the books they read are the likes of Tan Malaka’s Madilog, Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet. I read them all even before it was popular both in English and Indonesian version.

A year later, I stepped sideways, into an engineering research club. Pure pragmatism. Sensors, code, soldering irons. These folks didn’t care about ideology. They optimized systems and debugged failure modes.These weren’t debaters, they were builders.

It was like teleporting between two universes.

Then came the big one: student onboarding. I helped run programs for over 30,000 first-year students across my university. A year later, I play role in organizing onboarding for 3,000 students in my faculty. The scale was overwhelming. Bureaucracy meets chaos meets culture-building.

Every role required a different version of me. Every tribe came with its own gods and gravity.

Each of these roles stretched me. But I didn’t understand just how much until I hit my first real inflection point.

The Chain Reaction

I was selected to represent my university at Pekan Kreativitas Mahasiswa Nasional, Indonesia’s national science fair.

I thought I was ready. I wasn’t.

These students? They were playing a different game. Well dressed. sometime wear custom uniforms for their team, custom-designed report books, tight visuals, choreographed presentations. They had answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask.

They were polished down to the atom.

I was stunned — and inspired.

So I did what I would continue to do throughout my life: I observed, borrowed, and leveled up. I stole it. I stole their structure, precision, presence. It raised my floor. From that point forward, I never “prepared” the same way again.

Microsoft MACH: Entering the Big Leagues

My next big leap came through Microsoft’s MACH internship program in Southeast Asia.

I landed in Bangkok. Most of the other Indonesian interns came from Universitas Indonesia and ITB not less popular from Universitas Gadjah Mada where I’m from, but more ambitious. You could feel it, they carried themselves like they were untouchable. No fear. No hesitation. Professional, confident, calibrated. I felt outclassed, again.

But something flipped.

I watched how they worked. How they presented. How they managed perception. And slowly, I found my footing. By the end, I was outperforming people who initially intimidated me.

And it wasn’t just Indonesians. I met students from NUS, NTU, the University of the Philippines, top schools in Bangkok, KL, and beyond. Five years later, many of them are crushing it, some in Silicon Valley, others in government or startups. One went to MIT.

That week in Bangkok was another collision. Another graph jump. Another ReLU.

From Flatline to Flight: My ReLU Year

After that internship, I started my first full-time tech job. But I didn’t walk in as the same person who had left for Bangkok. I applied everything I had absorbed, the way people presented, how they structured meetings, how they carried themselves with quiet confidence. I mimicked systems I had seen work. I started thinking in loops, not ladders.

Within 18 months, I was promoted twice, nearly tripled my salary, and interacted directly with the CEO, and later, the CEO who acquired the company.

This acceleration wasn’t brute force. It wasn’t 10x hustle.

It was activation.

In deep learning, there’s a function called ReLU — the Rectified Linear Unit. It works like this: below a certain threshold, it outputs zero. Nothing. No signal. But once input crosses a threshold — it activates. And after that, it increases linearly.

|
|          /
|         /
|        /
|_______/__________
         ^
      Activation
       Point

Exposure is the threshold. Activation is what turns it into value.

This is the part that gets overlooked.

You can’t just join five impressive organizations, go to three elite events, and expect transformation to happen by osmosis. Exposure on its own is passive. It only creates potential energy — not momentum.

You have to internalize it. Act on it. Reflect, copy, stretch, steal, apply.

It’s not who you meet, it’s what you steal. It’s not what you observe, it’s what you integrate.

ReLU doesn’t fire just because the world gets brighter. It fires when you step into the light and do something about it.

That was my inflection point, not the internship itself, but the version of me that came back from it.

That was the moment the slope changed. The moment flatline became flight.

Startup Chaos and Country Hopping

Eventually, I left the stable job to join a startup. The pace changed. The chaos increased. I spent years bouncing between Indonesia and the Philippines, learning how to manage people, navigate politics, ship fast, and recover faster.

The graph changed again. And again.

I met founders, operators, designers, VCs. I made friends and mentors through collisions I never could’ve planned. And from those collisions came more introductions, more decisions, more leaps.

Then I moved to Poland. Then I moved again, now to the Netherlands.

Each shift brought new codes. New habits. New ceilings.

Each shift rewired me.

The Hidden Sun: A Physics of Serendipity

Here’s the best metaphor I’ve found for what this feels like.

Imagine you live in a giant empty landscape. There are radiant sources of energy scattered around — suns — but you can’t see them all. You’re stuck in one spot, in the dark, because there’s a mountain between you and the nearest sun.

You assume there’s no light. But it’s just blocked.

Now introduce randomness. Shake the graph. Move a little. Add entropy.

Suddenly, you’re in the open. The radiation hits you. The light floods in. Not because you worked harder, but because you moved.

That’s what exposure does.

It changes your position in the space of possibility. And lets you see things that were always there — just hidden.

Exposure Creates New Wants

You don’t dream of MIT if your school doesn’t know what it is. You don’t build a startup if no one you know has ever left corporate.

Most people aren’t lazy. They’re just unexposed. Their ambitions are limited by the menu they were handed.

Exposure expands the menu. And sometimes, it rewrites the whole restaurant.

Life Is Not a Ladder

We think growth looks like this:

o → o → o → o → o

But it’s not. It’s this:

        o
      ↗
o → o → o → o
      ↘
        o → o → o

Each node is a new circle. A new ceiling. A new upside distribution.

And all it takes is one jump to change your trajectory forever.

Engineer Your Entropy

You don’t need a 10-year plan. You need collisions.

Try this:

• Volunteer for something above your level
• DM someone sharper than you
• Move cities, even for a few months
• Hang out with weird people doing strange things
• Write online and let serendipity find you

Each action adds randomness. Each randomness increases surface area for upside. And somewhere, a sun will break through.

Final Thought: Move Until the Graph Bends

I almost stayed in one system. Same town. Same inputs. Same ceiling.

But PKM changed me. MACH changed me. Tech. Startups. Poland. Netherlands. Each leap shattered and reshaped my expectations.

I stopped trying to optimize within the system. I started jumping to new ones.

You don’t need to predict the future. You just need enough collisions with better ones.

Move until you find the sun. Move until the graph bends.

And when it does, let it take you somewhere unimaginable.

One Last Note

If I didn’t apply to that science fair, If I didn’t say yes to the internship, If I didn’t steal ideas from the people who outclassed me, If I didn’t leave the safe job, If I didn’t move countries — twice, If I didn’t keep showing up to unfamiliar rooms, If I didn’t keep moving just enough to catch new light…

I imagine what my life would be like.

Probably stable. Respectable. Predictable. But smaller. Less textured. And honestly, a bit darker.

Because the brightest things in my life didn’t come from plans. They came from exposure, randomness, and collisions.

And I think, If you move, even slightly, Yours might too.

Vale. Be strong!