Real talk from someone who's been in the trenches: the secret sauce to building anything meaningful? Actually giving a damn about what you're creating.

When you're genuinely curious about the tech you're working with, when you wake up excited to solve that gnarly problem from yesterday—that's when magic happens. It stops being just another grind and becomes something you'd do even without the upside.

Too many builders chase trends without that spark. They're coding solutions to problems they don't care about. But the founders who make it? They're the ones who can't shut up about their domain at 2am, who read whitepapers for fun, who see every bug as a puzzle worth solving.

If you're trying to build something in this space, ask yourself: would you still be learning about this stuff if there was zero money involved? If the answer's no, you might be optimizing for the wrong thing.