The Wrong Mountains

Imagine you’re on an expedition to Mount Everest. It was never a one-day trip. You’ve spent weeks preparing, training both your mind and body, saving money, sacrificing time. And finally, you’re two-thirds up.

Then your sherpa stops, looks at you with worry, and says the path ahead is blocked due to a recent avalanche. You have to descend now.

But how? You’ve worked so hard, prepared for months. Every book you read told you the world conspires for your success, and yet here you are, stuck with no way forward.

Do you descend and try again on another path, which will likely take several more months of planning? What about the time, the money, the pride, the plans waiting for you after this? Is all that hard work just wasted?

Stay with me, maybe I can help you decide.

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For the past two years, and still, I have been building the first product of my toy startup 'ktoys.in'. An AI-powered toy, inspired by the local fables and stories.

I knew how to write algorithms. My teammates help with electronics. But making the body of the toy, the most important part of a toy product, became my Everest.

I had no 3D modelling background beyond a little designing done during my bachelor's. Still, I was delusionally optimistic. "How hard can it be? After all".

First, I worked with a freelance 3D artist from abroad, found online. He had no idea who King Mahabali was, the character I was designing ( A loved character from South India). We worked for two to three months. I had to explain every little detail; he did his best, and I thought it turned out well. I showed it to friends, and "Ouch", they said, it looked scary. Someone even joked that it would bring bad omens if turned into a toy.

So I started again from scratch, this time with a friend of my brother's. Spent close to three months, he was working during his free time. But this time, I shared drafts and asked for feedback at each intermediate stage with my friends and even their kids. The result was beautiful, exactly what I had in mind. We took feedback from kids and parents alike, and they loved it, "Perfect"!

Thus, we had the outer body. I worked on the interiors myself; there were motors, sensors, gears, PCB, battery, screws, and everything had to be accommodated inside. I spent hours designing the interior, 3d printing several prototypes, and adjusting. It took several more months to get the preliminary electronics, PCBs, and algorithm ready. But it all clicked. We even planned a launch.

For mass production, from the start, our idea was to go for injection moulding. So we went to meet a mould manufacturer in the neighbouring state. And then came the revelation: the model was not mouldable. For moulding, the wall thickness, the angles of the walls, and other design parameters had to be optimal.

A mild setback, but I had enough motivation to go back and redo the whole design. Two more months passed. Found a manufacturer nearby. We talked through every detail. I even signed a non-disclosure agreement with his tooling company, but paranoid me never sent them the actual files.

Fast forward, and I was all set to actually start the injection moulding process. We were really confident; we even started taking online preorders. At last, I sent the manufacturer the designs for checking. He opened them, looked, and turned to me and said that my design wasn’t machineable. Because the sculpted surface I had started with, the parent model, the one that I dearly held on to, was a meshed file. That means it had rough sculpture, full of tiny ridges and curves, rendering it unsuitable for manufacturing.

Two years of work collapsed in that single moment.

The ride home felt heavy. I didn’t even understand the feeling. I was more concerned about myself, strangely sympathetic to my own situation. Because I was certain, I didn't have the time to rework this design again. There was nothing I could do with this model. I wanted to give up. I was fully burnt out and frustrated, doing all this alongside a full-time PhD. But how could I leave this dream unfinished?

But then, on the way back, sitting in a teashop, thinking over everything, I felt that the real issue wasn’t that I lacked technical skills or effort. It was that I was clinging too tightly to the path I had taken. Two years of staring at that character model, memorising every corner and line, had shut me off from other possibilities. I knew all the shortcomings. I knew what needed to be done next. So why not just make the model once again, fresh?

I went home, kept aside the old files, and started anew. This time, using everything I had learned from the previous two years, from how to structure the interiors, to keeping surfaces machine-friendly, to knowing what mattered, I pulled it off in just three days! I sent the files to the manufacturer, and the thumbs-up was immediate.

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The Wrong Mountains

The mountain was a metaphor for anything we pour ourselves into. Maybe it is a project, a product, or even a relationship.

The truth is, the people who build a sustainable career or a company, I believe, aren’t the ones who push blindly through avalanches. They’re the ones who learn when to turn back, quietly swallow their frustration, learn from mistakes, and then do it again. Maybe that’s why they say, fall in love with the journey, not the destination. Since the destination is never promised, only the journey is.

Looking back, maybe it wasn’t resilience that saved me. Maybe it was the ability to admit I was on the wrong path to the top, to swallow my ego and pride, and start again.

Another lesson I learned is that you can’t build big projects all by yourself. You need to ask for help. And you don’t have to be afraid of sharing your abstract idea with others. If I had shared at least one file with the manufacturers at the start, I could have known its shortcomings earlier.

Nobody in this world has the time and passion for your idea the way you do. Go on, even scream your idea through a loudspeaker; no one is going to bat an eye

If you are stuck in your path, go and ask for help. After all, we humans are social animals, and to support and help out our fellow beings is our intrinsic evolutionary trait. *My understanding of the world changes with time, so do my perceptives and ideals, I will update this write up, if needed, when I learn more.