Published: May 30, 2026
There is a question that follows us as we get older. What is my purpose? For me and many others, graduation looks like an open gateway to endless possibilities, but really it leaves you standing in front of it asking what's next.
People love to answer that question with the phrase the world is your oyster. I never understood it until now. Shakespeare wrote the line in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the original meaning is much sharper than the way we use it. The character who says it has just been refused money, and his point is that the world has closed itself off to him, so he will force it open by the blade. The way you pry open an oyster to get to the pearl. Over time the edge faded and the phrase softened. But the original is closer to the truth. The world does not open itself for you. You pry it.
The question, then, is not whether the world is your oyster. The question is what you are prying for.
There is an old Japanese concept called Ikigai. A reason for being. It is a Venn diagram with four circles. What you love. What you are good at. What the world needs. What you can be paid for. The point in the middle, where all four meet, is the pearl. That is what you pry for. Without it, you can spend your whole life prying and still come up empty.
I have been thinking about all of this since I got on a call with Damien Niyonshuti. He is the one who introduced me to Ikigai. But more than that, he is the clearest example I have seen of somebody who has pried open real doors — Ford, Tech X Labs, Forbes — but is still prying. That is why he belongs in Entry 7.
Damien grew up in Rwanda and came to the United States at 19. Early on, he found mentors he had never actually met — people whose videos he watched and writing he read. One of them was Naval Ravikant. Naval talks about three forms of leverage you can build a life on. Capital. People. And code. The first two require permission. Code does not.
"Code was permissionless leverage. You don't need to ask permission."
A kid with a laptop could compete with anyone, anywhere.
"I knew that if I could learn this skill, the opportunities could be endless."
So he committed to code and went deep.
It is easy to read this story and skip the middle. The middle is where it gets honest.
A few years into being in America, Damien wrote a LinkedIn post looking back at his journey. He said the part nobody talks about. He had to teach himself touch typing for three hours a day for six months because how fast Americans typed scared him more than code did. He quit all his on-campus jobs for a whole semester to focus on learning to code, with nobody to fall back on for his bills. He took it as a risk. As a sophomore, he spent almost all of his savings on LeetCode and LinkedIn Premium subscriptions to try to land a software internship.
He sent over 100 cold messages on LinkedIn asking for opportunities. Most were ghosted. Three of them led to internship offers and a full-time job.
None of those late hours look like progress while you are inside them. They only look like progress later, when somebody finally responds.
By his second year of college, Damien was working at a startup. By his third, he was at a bigger company. He has been moving between the two ever since.
Startups, he said, teach you how to build rockets while they are already flying. Big companies teach you the opposite, how to connect the dots, how to coordinate across a business with a thousand moving parts. He works at Ford now, the company that invented the moving assembly line. Ford can build a car in under 10 minutes.