Look at it from an interview perspective. If I ask "are you interested in exploring ML", and you're enthusiastic, my next questions are : What have you done?

Look at it from an interview perspective. If I ask "are you interested in exploring ML", and you're enthusiastic, my next questions are : What have you done? Have you taken any courses? GitHub? Blog Posts? If the answer is that you're waiting for a special sign that it's worth doing before making an effort, then that really tells me that your enthusiasm for doing ML is not reality-based. Doing the ML thing is a pretty different mindset from other software jobs.