Aish Asesh on staying curious – and why overnight success is a myth

Aish Asesh’s life ambition is to become a billionaire.

However, he isn’t content to merely amass a fortune and join the ranks of wealthy moguls like Jeff Bezos and Oprah Winfrey. Instead, Asesh intends to positively impact a billion lives or more, and he calls this extraordinary target his North Star.

“It’s about aligning my passion and actions towards my aspirations,” he explained. “It's about how many lives I can affect by doing good things and also giving back to the community.”

He knows it’s a long journey, but he’s already on the path to achieving his lofty goals.

Hitting the ground running

Originally from northern India, Asesh first joined Adobe in 2017 as a data science intern, while he was studying for his Master’s in Computer Science at the University of Utah. After that experience, it was clear Adobe was where he wanted to land after graduating.

“The impact of our work here is immediately obvious, how we empower customers and the joy that brings them,” he said. “I can see the effects of my work going out to the entire world, because Adobe’s products are used globally. I love being a part of that.”

As an Adobe employee, he now holds five patents, the first of which was filed just nine months after he joined the company — and he was one of the youngest to do so at Adobe. That first patent, which focuses on time series analysis and anomaly detection, is still the one Asesh says he is most excited about. “It was a huge change for Adobe analytics,” he said proudly.

Even further, in 2021 Asesh was awarded a United States O-1 visa, also known as an Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement visa, which he received for his knowledge and accomplishments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. “Adobe has been very encouraging in my entire journey so far,” he said.

The secret ingredient

When asked what’s his recipe for success at such a young age, Asesh cites hard work, patience, and perseverance. “Overnight success is a myth,” he said. “Start small, make errors, and learn. If you improve 1 percent every day for a year, you’ll get nearly 38 times better.”

But what really drives him, he claims, is curiosity, which manifests in every corner of his life and enables an offbeat perspective.

As a seasoned globetrotter who’s visited many countries, Asesh has become particularly fond of road trips exploring the U.S. His favorite excursion so far involved getting delayed for over six hours in a blizzard on the way to visit Lake Tahoe. Though locals might cringe at such a tale, Asesh instead describes being in the middle of a winter storm while looking out at stunning Sierra Nevada views as “very neat, an experience of a lifetime.”

His perspective about his love of video games is similarly unexpected. “When I was a kid, there were certain levels that I couldn’t pass but my cousins could,” he recalled. “I realized that there’s something in the algorithm that they’re integrating that I wasn’t able to. That inspired me to start thinking about the computer perspective, and eventually that led me to AI and ML and how it can help people.”

And of his many ambitions, as an adventurous “foodie” himself, he is particularly passionate about possibly one day launching a food truck with a fusion menu — conceivably a mixture of Mexican, Indian, and Chinese cuisines. “That’s what the world needs to taste someday,” he said with a smile.

The journey continues

Asesh credits his determination and unconventional world view to his family, pointing to Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, “All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother.”

As for what’s next, his newest adventure is moving to the digital media organization as a data scientist for demand conversion, an exciting step on the long road on the way to his North Star and one that he says he’s glad to take — and he encourages others to take the same view. “Even though we cannot control the twists and turns of life, we must deal with them as best we can,” Asesh said. “I've always been a person who asks a lot of questions and is keen to learn things. That has helped me in finding answers.”

“We tend to look at how far we still have to go, instead of how far we have come,” he continued. “While you follow your North Star, don’t forget to stop sometimes and actually gaze up at the stars.”