The purpose of journalism is to disseminate a rigorously objective documentation of what happens in the world, without inserting the journalists' or any institution's biases, leaving the reader to form their opinion on the events about which they are reading.

This is the thesis I wholeheartedly believed, and enforced, as an Executive Editor of [*The Phillipian*](https://phillipian.net/) a year ago. In the newsroom, we called out every instance of possible editorialization: in phrasing, interview selection, what have you. Objectivity was *the* principle we operated by. Reporting on politics and international affairs are more complicated than reporting on the happenings of a school campus, of course, but I believed that the same principles, and expectation of operational excellence among journalists and editors, fully carried over. Attacks on news media organizations for biased reporting are fierce and frequent, but I had faith that every self-respecting news organization strove for objectivity, and were simply at varying distances and directions away from it.

Yet, as I read coverage of Trump's presidency, the Hong Kong protests, and the 2020 election, this faith began to break down. Institutional reporting on Trump's presidency seemed to legitimize his actions and rhetoric rather than present it directly; political comedy shows became the most accurate channel for information, some joked, perhaps only half-jokingly. Entire chunks of information about the Hong Kong protests I heard from friends in Hong Kong, and me being in mainland China at the time of the protests, were nowhere to be found in *any* of the intensive American reporting on the topic. In the last months of the 2020 election, I began to read Fox News alongside NYT, only to find that what aspects of events, and what events at all, were reported on were wildly different.

It's often convenient to chalk these inconsistencies up to deliberate pushing of a partisan agenda, sensationalism spurred by the pressure to up readership and profit, or whatever other reasons you can think of. It seemed to me, though, that there was something more deeply wrong with my understanding -- and the popular understanding -- of the nature and value of journalism. The distortions of journalism did not seem to arise from external influences, but from the very process of sourcing and delivering information to the public.

Eventually, a friend of mine sent me an article entitled ["Partisan News, the Myth of Objectivity, and the Standards of Responsible Journalism"](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23736992.2020.1780131?journalCode=hmme21) by California State University professor Christopher Meyers, published in the Journal of Media Ethics in June 2020. The article presents a clear framework for the intuition that I had began to develop: that objectivity is a construction, not anything core to the nature of journalism. "I argue that responsible reporting can also be partisan," Meyers writes in his abstract. "The proper standard is not (putative) objectivity, but a commitment to fulfill the public’s right to know through accurate and comprehensive reporting."

With much inspiration from the above article, I've since built a rudimentary understanding of the nature and role of journalism in our society centered not around the striving towards the abstract ideal of objectivity, but rather around journalism's relationship with the public and with other societal institutions. More specifically, **I argue that the true mission of journalism is to hold those in power accountable to the public, and objectivity is only a secondary construction created to support this mission.**

## Objective Journalism Cannot Exist

My first point is that objectivity in journalism is a construction that does not, and cannot, actually exist.

The truth of this point comes intuitively from an examination of the nature of journalism. It is impossible to capture every bit of detail about a story, and furthermore impossible to capture every story that could be reported on. "The map is not the territory," as the saying goes: for reporting to be useful, it must be a reduction of the complete reality. In other words, it is inherently selective.

This selection is carried out by both the journalist and the consumer of journalism: the editor must select what stories are "newsworthy" and worth sharing with consumers, the journalist must select what figures are relevant enough to be interviewed for the story and what facts to include, and the consumer selects what information to consume when browsing through a newspaper's homepage or printed folds.

For journalism to be vlauable to the consumer, there must be a shared set of vlaues and understandings between the consumer and the journalist, starting with agreement on what sort of information is valuable to report on and consume. Thus, by its very nature as a reflection of only a subset of reality, public journalism is inherently biased and opinionated.

To critique journalism **solely** on the basis of *not telling the whole story* or emphasizing certain facts over others is absurd: it is impossible not to do so. *The New York Times* must decide what subset of political and worldly happenings to put on its front page, as does Fox News; the question of what deserves to go there is by no means a clear-cut one, making "objectivity" a highly complex and ambiguous construction rather than a straightforward and overarching ideal.

## The Mission of Journalism Is to Hold Those in Power Accountable to the Public

How do we understand the purpose of journalism, then, after rejecting objectivity as its root ideal?

The key is in understanding that **journalism is a societal institution**, with relationships with other societal institutions, **and especially with the public.**

The purpose of journalism is one of public service: journalists provide a vital service to the public, or their targeted subset of the public, by providing them information. Furthermore, the unique value of this service is in **holding those in power accountable to the public**.

The specifics of the nature of the service vary by what is valued by the public. In present-day America, democracy and liberalism are broadly valued; thus, these are the topics with which the news media engages with, regarding our own government and happenings abroad. As Meyers points out, Partisan leanings do not necessarily detract from a publication's ability to fulfill its purpose, but can in fact boost the health of the overall journalistic ecosystem. *The New York Times* reports harshly on Trump and conservative politicians, while Fox News often avoids such coverage, not to carry out a deliberate agenda but simply because of value differences that lead to assessments of certain attacks as less interesting to cover. On the flip side, Fox News today is filled with critical coverage of Biden's press secretary, cabinet picks, and other progressive politicians, while most of this coverage has been absent from *The New York Times*, again not because of a deliberate agenda, but because of differences in what seems valuable to cover.

Today's [frontpage story about the DCCC's recent appointment of Dyjuan Tatro as an advisor](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dccc-dyjuan-tatro-capitol-police-white-supremacists), for example, seems thoroughly unremarkable to me: nothing in the article stood out to me as newsworthy or extraordinary. Yet, conservative readers might find plenty to critique and pay attention to due to conflict with their own values.  In reverse, coverage on conservative happenings in *The New York Times*, like a certain speech or effort by Mitch McConnell or some other lawmaker, might appear totally unremarkable to a conservative reader, but stand out to a progressive one as alarming and worthy of attention.

The combined effect of these competing publications, though, is that people and institutions in power, progressive or conservative, **will be held accountable to the values of the represented public**, whether they objectively deserve it or not. Objectivity is not core to the role of journalism, but rather an ideal constructed to give journalists credibility to both their journalistic subjects and consumers; **it is not in and of itself journalism's mission, but rather supports journalism's mission of holding those in power accountable to the public by lending the instituion of journalism, and by relation the public, more power to exercise against other powerful institutions.**

## Considerations For Ethical Journalism

At the end of his article, Christopher Meyers emphasizes that the constructed nature of objectivity does not at all relieve journalists of pressure to pursue fairness and accuracy in their reporting. "Responsible journalism seeks accuracy always. Just because knowledge is filtered through normative and ideological frames does not mean one should not still endeavor to get the facts as much right as possible," he writes; and furthermore, "acknowledging one’s biases does not excuse one from being critically independent of power brokers, even those with whom one is politically sympathetic."

Like other critical social frameworks, Meyers' exhibits a humanist bent. "Good journalism is competent journalism, completed by reporters, editors, and producers...knowledgeable enough to be able to situate the story within its historical and political context," he writes. "Ethical journalists treat persons – subjects, sources, consumers, and colleagues – with respect. They do not treat others as mere objects for the sake of a story or to advance a career. They also recognize that while good reporting often necessarily entails causing harm to story subjects, they reduce it to the extent possible."

This understanding of journalistic ethics, then, demands thorough, intersectional social analysis when conducting, consuming, and assessing journalism. The contrapositive of the thesis that journalism holds those in power accountable to those who are represented in journalistic publications, is that journalism does not hold those in power accountable to those who are not represented in journalistic publications. As an obvious example, this is why state-run media, or a media ecosystem far from representative of its constituent public's views, fails to fulfill its mission of enforcing public accountability. At a more nuanced level, consider how day-to-day news reporting reinforces any societal structure or construction not actively countered by the public at large's expectations for fair and valuable journalism.

Deconstructing the idea that journalism should strive towards objectivity is the first step in critically understanding journalism's role in society, and towards the practice of ethical journalism.

Deconstructing Objectivity: News Media's Relationship with Power and the Public

Saturday was an awfully unproductive day for me. After a long meeting in the morning, I ate and watched YouTube until mid-afternoon, then read for two hours, ate dinner, played Chess, played poker, and speedran a video game until 1 AM. There are three main buckets I want to advance in: building Updately, doing physics research, and creating content, and on Saturday I made progress on exactly none of those.

At first, I felt as awful about the day as you would think. Days, weeks, months, seasons, three months at this community house, eight months left of my gap year, and the lifetime beyond that are all finite, and short. Meaningful experiences and opportunities can slip by without a sound if you're not diligent about seeking them out.

But as I reflected on the day at 2 AM, my feelings soon took a turn. The idea that I had wasted so much time was...thrilling. It filled me with a sense of excitement and even pride: damn, I was able to waste AN ENTIRE DAY away!

The excitement wasn't about the act of wasting time, of course, but my ability to do so and not have my world fall apart. I didn't make progress on any of my three buckets, but those three buckets are all within my control, and I have faith that on aggregate I'll be able to push through and make good progress. My reading, for example, turned into [a blog post I published the next day](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2021/01/24/the-importance-of-theory-to-revolution-notes-on-lenins-what-is-to-be-done-chapter-1.html). This is in comparison to the deadline-driven life I was living before. A full time job, an event I was organizing, two other projects I was a part of...there were always more things to do, more deadlines to get ahead on, and critically they were out of my control.

External deadlines can be great. They push you beyond what you would have accomplished normally, and enable collaboration and group organization. But stacking up too many commitments quickly throws your life out of control, leading you farther and farther down paths you don't have chances to deviate from.

Passion is the driver of all good work, *especially* in entrepreneurship and research. The process of finding passion requires trying lots of things out, but also crucially reflecting on your experiences and making changes to your direction based on your reflections. In external commitments, you're rooted to your interlocking with the rest of the structure. When you're unrooted, with no job descriptions or deadlines pressuring you to do one specific thing or another, you'll naturally drift towards the things you care about. If you can [handle three buckets at a time](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2021/01/20/the-rule-of-three.html) and you've got five, you'll constantly be shuffling through them, but if you've got two or three, your energy will naturally flow into a third bucket of new meaning and opportunity.

The ideal is to find an equilibrium point between external pulls and internal pushes, between exploitation (of your current opportunities via external pulls) and exploration (of your actual passions via internal pushes). As I've [written about previously](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/12/14/how-i-achieved-exponential-growth-ft-mindsets-connections-high-standards-and-passion-and-then-burned-out.html), the process of finding equilibrium often takes the form of a damped oscillation over time:

![](/blog/2021-01/exploitation-exploration.jpg)

At the start, we have a hobby or skill we're developing purely for our own enjoyment. As we get good at it, we seek external applications of it. For dev work, for example, looking for jobs and projects to take on. It's very likely -- at least for me -- that we'll take on too much work and too many projects, and suddenly find ourselves without time or energy to do what we actually care about, be it interesting personal dev projects or other pursuits. So, we 180, cutting off commitments and projects in favor of personal pursuits once again. It's likely that we'll again overshoot and end up looking for new external opportunities soon enough, and when we take them on we may overshoot again, but by much less. When we cut down, it'll also be by much less, until over time we reach that fulfilling balance of external commitments and personal exploration.

This is an idealized model, of course. There are most likely many more things than your own desire keeping you from dropping external commitments, and self-evaluations of when you've overshot and need to adjust are often unclear. Yet I find this model incredibly useful. It tells us that, in the long run, overshooting is *a good thing*, that *we need to overshoot* to train our exploitation/exploration balance until we reach something sustainable.

In December, I wrote [a post](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/12/14/how-i-achieved-exponential-growth-ft-mindsets-connections-high-standards-and-passion-and-then-burned-out.html) very much at the exploitation peak of the oscillation, working on a massive stack of projects I had taken on after feeling like I wasn't doing enough before. Consequently I failed to do most of the projects well, and also didn't sleep more than six hours a night for an entire month. I made a commitment then to aggressively cut down. Since then, I quit my full time job, dropped a research project, and shut down a consulting contract negotiation.

This blog post, then, is written at the corresponding oscillatory trough of exploration. The realization that I had reached this trough is what made my reflection on a wasted day so euphoric. When I was at the exploitative peak, I felt like I would never be able to escape all my commitments and get back down to the ground. But now I've done it, and like a hiker after a treacherous climb I kiss the ground with relief. Having tossed aside the dozen buckets I was flailingly trying to keep hold of, my energy flows into (aside from Chess and speedrunning video games) a ridiculous amount of writing, a revolutionary reading club, and morning workouts with housemates, the true little sources of joyful fulfillment in life.

The Joy of Wasting Time: The Exploration/Exploitation Tradeoff of Life

"Being black should not influence a political view," reads one prompt in [Jubilee's "Black Liberals vs Black Conservatives" video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VspjfNMPHyc).

All three conservatives step forward in agreement. "Being Black should not influence how you think politically," says one of them. "What's good for us as Black folks should be the same as what's good for everybody else."

"I vote based on the issues I care about, and the issues that I care about stem from my personal experiences as someone who was raised in a conservative household," says another.

"Do you ever vote your religious beliefs?" the third questions him.

"Yes," he responds.

Why is it easy to politically identify alongside party and religion lines, but not race ones? One can be a Democrat, Republican, or Christian voter, and others will respect such identities, but as soon as you identify as a Black voter or Black political candidate, it's like you've committed a crime: discussion of policy ceases and personal attacks begin. "You're racist for seeing racial differences in political leadership and interests. Stop pretending it's the 19th century. We don't have slavery or segregation anymore, move on."

Towards most political identities one might disagree with, the reaction is first apathy, then perhaps questioning of the specific policies or ideologies attached to that identity. The conservative in the video's religious political identity led to a conversation about abortion, for example. But the aversion to racial political identity is different: the reaction is not apathy, but belligerance. There is something going on here.

That something is the ideology of color-blindness, a shield deliberately created to protect those who didn't want to from confronting actual systems and experiences of racial injustice. Nixon appealed to America's "color-blind" constitution in opposition of school integration. "We want a colorblind society, a society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people 'not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,'" Reagan proclaimed [in a 1986 radio address](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/259262) after establishing MLK day as a national holiday, while using this very same concept to shut down civil rights legislation.

Today, color-blindness and aggressive opposition to race as a political identity function in much the same way. Invalidating opinions because they are associated with race is a way to conveniently invalidate experiences and structural problems associated with race, while keeping them as far from the realm of serious consideration as possible. After the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other innocent Black Americans earlier in the year, I heard arguments that these deaths were the result of bad policing, not racism. Sure, you could look at subsets of facts until this argument is correct, but it begs the question, why do you feel such a need to pursue this alternate framing? Why are you so averse to framing it as an issue of race, when race is so clearly a factor, and a symptom of much larger underlying problems? Seek earnest answers to these questions, and you will observe white supremacy in action.

How Attacking Racial Political Identities Perpetuates White Supremacy

![](/blog/2021-01/innovation.png)

The CEO of a startup I worked for as a Product Manager asked me for one last contribution in the last week of my job: a write-up on how to make the team a high-performance one.

For privacy's sake I won't get too much into the specifics of this company's situation, but the gist of it is that they're a SaaS company that's been around for several years, dominated their market, and growing steadily, but not innovating. If you've seen a few SaaS companies, you know the type: a product that has no competition, whose dominance is cemented by the relationships they have with customers, with customer success and engineering efforts alike devoted to making existing and potential customers happy without higher ambitions.

The CEO and their co-founders, who had launched the startup in college, know what it's like to be ambitious, fast-moving founders. For all their success, they also know that their team has lost this ambition, their "hunger" as the CEO put it. And, try as they might to introduce new initiatives and activities, they struggle to bring the hunger back.

Joining the team as one of four engineers and the sole designer (under the title of Product Manager), I redesigned the homepage, navigation, and other key product areas. I ushered in modern React development patterns like functional components. I joined leadership meetings and set the company's 2021 Q1 OKRs. I brought the hunger to build and improve that the CEO so missed. Unfortunately for him, I found the environment unstimulating and quit my job after four months.

After receiving my last work order, I reflected on what this "hunger" really was, and how a founder could create a culture around it. In this post, I'll share the framework that I created, and some personal leadership examples to illustrate it.

## Execution Is Key

I'll start with a favorite quote of mine:

> The success of a startup is determined by the founder's ability to execute.[^nosource]

Execution is everything, I frequently remind myself. Idea, problem, experience, and naysayers all pale in comparison to a founder's willpower to simply get things done.

Ability to execute is easy to recognize when you see it, illustrated by a demonstrated record of success. But what actually is it? Arguably one can be very good at executing on certain things, or even whatever they set their mind to, but still very bad at innovating or leading an ambitious team. So what gives? How can we further break down this concept of execution?

## Velocity and Acceleration

There are two kinds of execution: velocity-based and acceleration-based.

Velocity-based execution is the process of reaching a set objective, overcoming all obstacles and uncertainty in the way. Think of engineers who can build any feature or fix any bug, companies who continue to grow through depressions and pandemics, or even pilots who crash-land crippled planes. This is what we typically think of when we talk about ability to execute. It's obviously crucial to getting anything, especially hard and innovate things, done.

Acceleration-based execution, though, is where the "hunger" comes from. If velocity-based execution is the process of hitting a set objective, **acceleration-based execution is the process of breaking free of set objectives and imagining new ones.** Acceleration-based execution drives a team not just forwards, but upwards to higher levels. Acceleration-based execution happens when a founder first comes up with a disruptive idea and sets about turning it into an impactful startup, or when a team member comes up with a new initiative that alters the direction of the project.

## Acceleration Is Separate From Velocity

Going against the physics of this analogy, acceleration-based execution is initially useful to think of not as a derivative of velocity-based execution, but a process that runs separately and in parallel.

Commercial pilots, for example, are incredibly good at flying airliners, complex systems that require continuous on-the-fly problem-solving and decision-making to operate. Even when things go terribly wrong, as in an engine fire or cabin decompression, pilots are tasked with bringing their passengers as safely as possible to the ground. These pilots are incredible velocity-based executors, yet they're not doing anything to push forward the standards of aviation or transportation. On the other hand, engineers at Boeing or Airbus don't have nearly the real-time execution ability of pilots. Instead, they operate in the realm of imagination, finding new problems to tackle as acceleration-based executors.

Neither form of execution is harder or superior to the other. Each is a different mode of operation, requiring their own mindsets and skills.

Ultimately, however, acceleration-based execution only matters if it enters the realm of velocity-based execution. Engineers' designs must become planes for pilots to fly. Product ideas must go through painstaking coding and selling to become real products. Innovative visions must lead to concrete execution to create an impact.

## A Case Study: *The Phillipian*

The best illustrations I have for this framework come from the year I served as Executive Digital Editor of [Andover's student newspaper, *The Phillipian*.](https://phillipian.net/)

For context, *The Phillipian* is not your average student paper. It's America's oldest high school newspaper at 142 years old. It's financially and editorially independent, with an endowment of several hundred thousand dollars and an annual $20K operating budget. It's been sued by Andover's Board of Trustees, and won.

As EDE, I was part of the six-person Upper Management that oversaw our 85-student board and ~100 writers and staff. Every week, we publish a 16-20 page paper, with 60-80 stories across five sections. Each story is written by a writer, edited by the corresponding section editor, edited by a member of Upper Management, edited by a Copy editor, and placed into the paper by Layout staff.

Maintaining this output at high journalistic standards requires relentless execution at all levels. New stories present new circumstances each week, requiring new applications of leadership and problem-solving. No matter what new challenges present themselves or what parts of the process fall through, someone has to pick up the slack to ensure that high quality reporting on the stories that matter are in the paper on Friday.

For all this execution, though, no real innovation is happening. The objectives being pursued are static, the standards set. This is the nature of velocity-based execution.

My mission as EDE, on the other hand, was one of change: transform the paper to a digital-first publication.[^digitalirony] Among other things, I pushed for the creation of a new section, a live broadcast news show called Phillipian Live. I designed the studio, new publishing workflows, new board and staff structure. Velocity-based execution was a side task: I would occassionaly weigh in on an editorial decision or help with the print paper, but for the first half of my tenure, most of my work was separate from the weekly grind. I worked not to pursue existing objectives, but to set new ones. This is the nature of acceleration-based execution.

I finished the core prep for Phillipian Live and recruited the founding team in the spring. When fall arrived, Live was no longer an abstract vision, but a set one that I was leading a team to pursue. I now put all my leadership energy towards the same kind of work my print-based colleagues did: make sure reporters make high-quality segments each week, make sure the show goes live every Friday, no matter what equipment failures, challenging stories, or staff shortcomings occur. The acceleration-based initiaitve of Live had successfully led to concrete velocity-based execution.

Interestingly, when I switched my own leadership over to velocity-based execution, some members of my staff, viewing the objectives I set as static, began their own acceleration-based initiatives. One reporter, for example, pushed to create pre-edited segments rather than completely live ones. Others were continuously suggesting small improvements: changes to our schedule, equipment, or style.

At an individual level, acceleration-based execution is something to train, just like velocity-based execution. I consider myself an especially strong acceleration-based executor, which I attribute to the influence of my parents and other experiences I've had.

The conditions for acceleration/innovation at a team level, though, are less straightforward. Why did I enjoy being a changemaker at *The Phillipian* so much, but not the startup I quit working at? How was Phillipian Live, under my leadership, an environment where my staff constantly pushed for innovation, but my CEO's team one that lacked this "hunger"?

## Creating a Culture of Innovation: Appeal to First Principles and Reject the Status Quo

The most important thing to understand about innovation is that it is fundamentally a break from the status quo. Innovation does not come as a result of good overall execution: intuitively, there's often more innovation in flawed areas than excellent ones, and as discussed previously, acceleration-based execution requires completely different mindsets and skills compared to velocity-based ones.

As a corollary, the biggest bottleneck to innovation I've seen in otherwise well-functioning teams is that they hang on to the status quo too tightly. They view their current objectives as fixed and immovable, basing their decisions on historical precedent rather than original thinking.

At the startup I worked for, the CEO often appealed to the company's history and promise: "I talked to some investors today, who shared yada yada, which just shows how much we've been on the right track!" When new opportunities or innovative initiatives came, they again centered the company and its existing vision: "This makes perfect sense given X existing project!"

These comments, and this kind of thinking, seems innocuous at first. It boosts morale, and what's wrong with appealing to the company's previous successes? With my framework of innovation in mind, though, it's revealed that these comments are actually exactly the stifler of innovation at said company. Through these comments, the CEO creates and continuously reinforces a culture where accumulated knowledge is king, the source from which growth is expected to be derived. [Culture is built through action and example](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2021/01/08/how-to-do-what-you-want-culture-as-the-key-to-sustainable-motivation.html), and the CEO's comments lead team members to think about the company and their own decisions in terms of company knowledge rather than their own creativity.

Parts of *The Phillipian* are also afflicted by this bottleneck. News writers and editors appeal to a standard "inverted triangle" structure of lede => body => tail, which is effective for pumping out relatively good stories, but leaves little room for creativity or improvement. Analysis of the decisions and projects of past boards precluded new design and experimentation.

The solution to this bottleneck is to strip away reliance on the status quo and instead appeal to the underlying first principles. As Executive Digital Editor, I was free of the literal century of precedent resting on my colleagues' shoulders. I had only the mission of the paper to work with: serve our readership, our staff, and our community, holding ourselves to the highest ethics and standards of journalism. From these underlying principles, there are endless directions for improvement. I spearheaded a digital-first transformation in pursuit of its various benefits, but my colleagues created new issues of the paper and instituted new workflows for training writers and writing editorials.

Appeal to first principles don't just happen in the absence of precedent, but are even more important when in-the-moment execution is crucial. Once Phillipian Live started up, making use of templatized segment and show structures was crucial to keeping it going. Editors outside of the section raised constant pushback and proposed direction changes: this is the nature of a precedent vacuum, so it was vital for us to build up a strong and somewhat arbitrary foundation to defend our existing vision.

Yet, with every precedent that I set, I made sure to emphasize the underlying reasons and principles. Segments need to be at least five minutes long because they need to be newsworthy and substantitve, not slip into the silly reaction videos that predated Live. Reporting needs to be live so reporters feel a greater sense of ownership over their work, rather than video editors having the final say in what makes it on air. With the underlying reasoning in mind, even when my decisions become relatively unquestioned tradition, conversation and leadership from my staff is vibrant and improvements continue to be suggested and implemented.

Since coming up with this framework, I've noticed that emphasis on first principles is a defining characteristic of my leadership style. In November, I started a series of speaking events called TKS Community Talks. Hosting the first round nearly alone, proving my vision to most community members who doubted the talks' value, I made a lot of initial decisions that now operate as precedents for the team working around me. When appealing to these precedents, though, I always make sure to share the underlying reason. More than any specific detail, I appeal to the three key objectives of the talks: 1) improve participants' speaking skills, 2) facilitate knowledge sharing in the community, and 3) strengthen the TKS community. Even though precedents are plentiful and heavily used for the second round, my emphasis on the underlying principles empower my teammates to imagine specific objectives other than the ones I set, driving continuous improvement and innovation.

Emphasis on underlying principles can be as simple as prioritizing a single metric. "The company does what the CEO measures," former YC president Sam Altman writes [in his playbook](https://playbook.samaltman.com/). "The founders of Airbnb drew a forward-looking graph of the growth they wanted to hit. They posted this everywhere—on their fridge, above their desks, on their bathroom mirror. If they hit the number that week, great. If not, it was all they talked about." This hyper-focused discussion is much more likely to inspire creativity and innovation than sprawling appeals to higher-order stories and ideas.

## In summary

Execution (velocity-based execution) and innovation (acceleration-based execution) are fundamentally separate processes. Execution moves a company closer to a set objective, strengthening the status quo, while innovation rejects existing objectives in favor of new ones, disrupting the status quo. Innovation is successful when the innovative initiative becomes the status quo to execute on. A culture of innovation can be built by de-emphasizing accumulated higher-order knowledge and instead prioritizing first principles thinking, such as a set of fundamental objectives or a single key metric.

[^nosource]: I don't remember the specific source. I've subtly forgotten and changed the specific words until a Google search no longer brings back its roots. I attribute it to Y Combinator in general, with its thickets of essays, playbooks, and blog posts.

[^digitalirony]: Ironically, most student papers aim to go the other direction. Another example of the many ways we're closer to a traditional news publication than a school paper.

How to Innovate and Create a Culture of Innovation

A week ago, I had an amazing conversation with Brennan and a few others at Edyfi. You know the type: it went on for hours, flowing powerfully from Taleb's essays about black swans, to startup and literary pursuits, to [powerful revelations on culture and motivation](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2021/01/08/how-to-do-what-you-want-culture-as-the-key-to-sustainable-motivation.html). It could have gone on for hours more if not cut off by the late hour.

It was only the third day we were at the house. As the conversation closed, we expressed our excitement for many more revelatory conversations like it. But, as someone who has [had similar conversations and been in similar situations before](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/02/22/platonic-slut.html), I had the sense that another one was not to come for a while, at least of the same duration and intensity.

Good conversations are amazing. They're where the most interesting intellectual connections and relationships are forged, insights and ideas that revolutionize industries or fields of study.

In the week since that conversation, I've written multiple blog posts and mentored dozens of students as they submitted applications for and are preparing to give talks at an event next week. I had a conversation with a friend about how to self-reflect, learn about yourself and the world from your experiences, and turn it into writing like I do on my blog, and another about the very act of learning and innovation.

What I've come to realize is that the same principles govern not just what makes good person-to-person conversations, but all manner and scale of internal and external dialogues. In this blog post, I'll share a few conditions I've identified that facilitate all internal and external learning, innovation, and creativity.

## The Sync Gap

The day after our initial conversation, Brennan asked me to share my knowledge about Existentialist philosophy with him. I replied that my knowledge is pretty limited, but I could share my understanding of the small amount I had read.

"Whatever you know, I just want to absorb as well," Brennan replied. "My unfamiliar-mental-model detector keeps going off around you."

This triggered the first insight: **good dialogues occur when there is a gap in knowledge or thinking to be crossed.**

This is an intuitive idea to grasp. A conversation in which you are entirely in sync with other participants -- same beliefs, perspectives, source readings -- isn't likely to be very interesting. Similarly, reading a book conveying familiar knowledge with familiar framing isn't likely to be valuable. Human curiosity drives us to seek out the new and surprising; only when your conversation partners, be they friends or authors, present you with ideas and experiences differing from your own do you experience the thrill of good conversation and the synthesis of new thoughts.

This straightforward idea of interesting dialogues arising from a sync gap has non-trivial implications, however.

For one, this sync gap being the root of good conversations is the pattern I recognized when I felt that another good conversation with Brennan and others was unlikely to happen for some time after the initial one. We entered the conversation more or less as strangers, with significant sync gaps, each bringing our own experiences and philosophies. Recognizing and building bridges over these sync gaps were what drove our conversation into the night.

The byproduct of this, though, is that the amount of available gaps to surface up in conversation has decreased significantly. We'll have to work harder, or encounter deeper and broader catalysts, to recreate the same abundance of mental chasms to cross. In fact, counterintuitively: **the better the initial conversation,** the more chasms are bridged over, and **the harder it is to find new chasms for good later conversations.**

The idea of new thoughts stemming from sync gaps also speaks to a deeper truth about creativity and thought synthesis. New thoughts do not come out of nowhere, nor do they emerge as a linear progression of accumulated experiences and knowledge. **Rather, discovery and innovation is found only in the gap between conflicting ideas or experiences.** Fundamentally, **creativity is a process of building connections between existing ideas, not synthesizing completely new ones.**

This truth asserts not only the value, but the necessity of intersectional pursuits for learning and changemaking. Whether across disciplines of knowledge or across conflicting directions in the same field, differing perspectives and opinions are the source of intellectual progress.

## The Goldilocks Zone

This is not nearly a call to devalue your current beliefs and seek out diametrically opposing ones, however.

The second condition for good dialogues is a subcondition of the first: the size of the sync gap matters. If the gap is too big, it will be too difficult to bridge over with momentum. If the gap is too small, it will be too insignificant for a bridge over it to create momentum.

This principle should also seem intuitive. Though a 40 year old most likely has a much richer collection of experiences and many more sync gaps with me than a 20 year old, I'm more likely to sustain a stimulating conversation with the 20 year old who has experiences much more similar to mine, but just different enough to create a flowing back-and-forth dialogue. Conversely, the fact that I learned calculus at a different school than my friend is most likely not interesting.

Once again, though, this principle has non-trivial implications.

Last night, I was talking to Mukundh Murthy, a friend working to tackle antimicrobial resistance (i.e. superbugs that rapidly evolve resistance to all antibiotic treatments). "It's one of the most complicated problems I've come across," he tells me, conflicted over whether to pursue a solution as the leader of his own team or a member of a more qualified one.

Mukundh brings up the idea of flow state, a state of mind in which one accumulates knowledge and builds innovative solutions seemingly effortlessly ("also known colloquially as being in the zone," Wikipedia humorously informs us).

The achievement of flow state is a function of your existing skill in and novel challenge provided by the task at hand. If you're good at doing something and there's nothing new to learn, you'll get bored of doing it. If you're bad at doing something and it's very difficult to grasp, you'll get anxious or frustrated and give up. With the appropriate balance of existing skill and novel challenge, though, one can enter a flow state, in which there is a continuous feedback cycle of curiosity and confidence that drives one forwards.

The goldilocks ratio of challenge to skill is 104%, Mukundh tells me. That is, you'll be at your most energized and productive doing something 4% harder than what you've done before.

Meaningful problems -- say, growing your first startup, or doing high-impact biotech research -- are usually far more than 4% harder than what you've done before. Ambitious people and initiatives regularly strive to "10x" themselves or their industries, after all.

But that 10x-ing cannot happen in one step, it can only happen in compounded smaller steps. These steps may be more than 4% steps; you might take 6% or 8% steps, pushing yourself beyond the boudns of naturally occurring progress. By doing so, though, you miss the momentum that 4% steps can create. Perhaps 4% actually is a hard lock on what our brains are able to absorb in a single step, and your perceived 6% or 8% steps are just multiple 4% steps crammed together.

When used properly, though, these small 4% flow-state steps can be immensely powerful. I'll point to my own experiences with web dev/software engineering as an example. My journey didn't start with the goal of becoming a web developer. Rather, I just wanted to tweak around a template a friend had coded for me, learning bits and pieces of CSS as I did so. Eventually, I switched to another platform and played around with templates there, getting a sense of templating languages. With each iteration I learned a few new things and polished a few old skills: adding an image slider with JQuery. Using CSS pseudo-classes. Generating my site and hosting it on Netlify with Jekyll. Compounded over five years, these 4% steps got me to the point of being as competent of an engineer as most new CS grads.

Similarly, any large idea or project needs to be broken down into smaller 4% pieces to be understood and executed.

Learning is effectively a dialogue between yourself and your learning materials, while solving a problem is a dialogue between yourself and the problem at hand. Working backwards, the 4% principle applies quite well to literal conversations. The best conversations introduce new connections in iterative ways, not completely new ones.

## Applications of this framework

### Writing as a conversation with a persistent version of yourself

After reading some of my blog posts, an old friend messaged me asking how I come up with so many reflections and insights about my life experiences. "It's so hard for me to find meaning about things from myself," she says. "I need people to have opinions first before I can build up my own."

To me, that last point is not a shortcoming, but a truth about the process of thought synthesis. As I've written above, thoughts are not created out of nothing, but created out of connections between existing ideas. Self-reflection and writing is not an exception to this rule, but rather a nuanced example of it.

I've long compared journaling to having a conversation with myself. I journal to unpack the sources of stress and unhappiness in my life, as well as things I'm grateful for, and lay out steps to move forwards or larger ideas that emerge.

At first glance, there doesn't seem to be more than one participant in this conversation; but I would argue that there is.

The self that you constantly experience is fundamentally transient: it only exists in the current moment. As soon as the moment passes by, that self is gone, replaced by a self with infinitesimally updated experiences and thoughts.

This transient nature is why it's hard to sustain meaningful dialogues with yourself through thought alone. Ideas may persist or fade away at a moment's notice, and there is no source of externality or feedback other than your own momentary thoughts.

When you write down thoughts on a page or document, on the other hand, you're creating a version of you that persists through time, one that is no longer confined to the moment. Now, from the momentary solidarity of your mind, you've created an externality that you can interact and converse with.

This externality is what makes journaling and writing so powerful, so much more so than simply thinking to yourself.

When I examine the mechanism behind my relatively prolific blogging over the past few weeks, the best understanding I've come up with is that I've developed a conversational rapport with myself, or the persistent projection of myself found in the words I write. It's like having a friend I enjoy talking to: when I have an interesting experience or idea, I automatically turn to the best conversation buddy available to share it, which a few times a week may be myself, resulting in a piece of writing.

### Compelling talks and content as a maximized iterative connection between ideas

On Monday night, applications for the second round of TKS Community Talks closed with 31 submissions. Out of these submissions, a team of three other TKS students and I selected eight talks ot be prepared over the next two weeks and presented to the community.

In the course of this selection, and providing mentorship to speakers before and after they submitted their applications, I developed a basic framework for what makes a great talk. There are two ingredients, I proposed, unique insight and personal connection. A unique insight is the core message of the talk, one that will stay in audience members' minds and expand their worldviews. A personal connection is a method of delivering that core message in a compelling way, i.e. by tying an abstract mental model to one's personal journey, or developments in a field to research to a researcher or research group's progress.

Upon further examination, these two ingredients match up exactly with the two principles for good dialogues laid out in this blog post. A unique insight represents a sync gap between the speaker and the audience. The idea that the insight changes the audience member's worldview makes this clear: a compelling message necessarily crosses a gap in knowledge. But, in accordance with the second principle of good dialogues, the existence of the gap itself is not enough: it must also be crossed effectively. This is the purpose of bringing in a personal connection or story of some sort: only once listeners latch in and make available their side of the chasm can a bridge be built between the speaker's idea and the listener's mind.

## Conclusion

This blog post is the latest in my continuous meta-reflections about learning and building.

"How do we think for ourselves?" I asked myself before, in response to realizing just how much of what we think and claim is simply a regurgitation of ideas that have come up before. Asking "bad" questions and appealing to innate human curiosity is the answer I eventually came up with.

This framework of new thoughts arising from connections takes a different direction, attempting to break down the mechanisms by which ideas seem to be regurgitated in the first place.

Frameworks are inherently reduced, fluid representations of the underlying wisdom. This framework captures only one dimension of the operations of thought synthesis and exchange, and in meta-application speaks to its own limitations and fluidity. Yet, it's a framework that I find immensely useful in application to such things as conversations, writing, public speaking, and learning in general, which are pwoerful mechanisms of self-growth, connection-building, and impact-making

The Sync Gap: How to Be Creative in Conversation, Writing, and Work

Brennan struggles to turn his beautiful tangles of thoughts into writing. Why? we inquire.

Brennan expresses his admiration for my drive to just *do* -- I had written an article about his vision for education reform before he even had -- and a connection suddenly comes to mind: the analysis of confidence and action in *The Confidence Code*. An inhibition from action comes from a fear of action. Brennan struggles to write because he is afraid of the consequences and accountability of writing. He is afraid that he will lose his beautiful tangles of thoughts.

The key to overcoming this fear and establishing confidence is **action**. This is the thesis of the self-help part of *The Confidence Code*. If you're afraid of doing something, and you act upon it, and no harm comes to you, your fear erodes a little bit. Do it repeatedly, and it fades away completely, and you can move on to the next, bigger thing that you are afraid of. Tackling a fear of public speaking can start with simply greeting people you wouldn't have otherwise. You'll see that this isn't so scary; you'll grow comfortable with saying hi to people, and now you can move on to striking up conversations you wouldn't otherwise. Then, conversations with strangers. Then, giving speeches to audiences.

How does one establish comfort with writing, or build a habit of it? There are internal and external motivations.

I believe that internal motivations created through incentives (I will reward myself if I succeed) or forcing functions (I will punish myself if I fail) are bound to fail. The only kind of sustainable internal motivation is the belief that the habit is worth pursuing in and of itself. I've disliked the idea of tricking yourself into good habits for a while -- they never worked for me, and felt fundamentally wrong -- but the positive alternative has only recently been clarified to me by a talk Satvik Agnihotri gave at TKS Community Talks.

Satvik abstained from masturbation for three months, and continues to do so indefinitely. When he offered his advice for how to achieve such a feat of willpower, there was no mention of incentives or classic habit-forming tricks. Instead: "do it for two weeks, then relapse. You'll feel the benefits, and you'll keep going."

Forcing functions themselves are not sustainable, and therefore only valuable for building long-term habits if they lead to the discovery of this sustainable internal motivation. For Brennan, for example, forcing himself to write an essay per day is not valuable on its own, but would be if it erodes his fear of losing his beautiful tangle of thoughts. It would be valuable if, day after day, Brennan found that instead of losing his free thinking capacity, tying thoughts to writing in fact cleared the way for more beautiful thoughts to add themselves to the tangle. Then, even after he stops forcing himself to write an essay per day, he will retain the comfort and habit of writing.

Brennan pushed back on this point, though. "I've written consistently before, and when I stopped I felt horrible, but that didn't make me start writing again." That's because internal motivation never operates alone. I appeal to my idea of memory as an array of locked doors, what you bring to the present a reflection of your keys in the moment rather than the events of the past themselves. Brennan gives an even better analysis.

There are two steps to doing something: starting, and not stopping, Brennan says. He brings up the analogy of static and dynamic friction. It takes some amount of force to get an object from rest to a nonzero velocity, but once it does it takes less force to keep it moving, as the coefficient of dynamic friction is lower. When we stop moving, the coefficient of friction suddenly increases to that of static friction: it takes more force to get moving again than it did to move before. So it goes that one might get into a brilliant sequence of writing -- Brennan when an application he worked on led to essay idea after essay idea, for example -- but then, once it's over, not be able to start off again.

Suddenly another connection comes to mind, a number of people I know who write continuously and fearlessly: high school creative writers. How do they write so much?

Simply by starting and never stopping. To us, writing is, on some level, a distraction. We're not building. We're not making things happen. We're putting words on a page, and we feel some guilt about doing it. To those who label themselves writers, on the other hand, writing is natural. Even if writing is paused for a bit, the practice of writing is never halted completely: an auxiliary force pushes it along, so that when the writer returns to continue working, they will have to put in force to accelerate their writing back up to pace, but the force required to achieve motion will be no more than what they were putting in before. They do not have to overcome static friction anew.

This analysis works well flipped around, too. At Edyfi, we find it exceedingly easy to talk about and pursue our startup ideas. We're not the only one having these ideas. There's no reason education reform is tied to tech; in fact, it belongs more so to other domains. Far more non-techies have thought about education reform than techies, and many have likely dreamed about starting their own company to pursue their vision. They may act on this dream if, on a certain night, a person they meet or a piece of content they consume allows them to overcome static friction and make progress. They may even look up relevant VCs and come up with an action plan. But when they drop it to go to work the next day, then come back to resume work, they have to overcome static friction anew, and chances are there's not another person or another revelatory piece of content to push them along. So, the idea dies. On the other hand, a techie never falls out of motion. If they come up with an idea and revisit it days later, in the time that elapsed, the auxiliary force of *being a techie* has kept the possibility of working on it moving, so they only need to put in force to accelerate against dynamic friction, that is much more easily overcome. That's why Brennan has been able to connect with technical leads at Astra Nova while not even having published a written piece about his education reforum vision yet.

When I say this, Mattea lights up and tells me how much the startup analogy resonates with her. She's had ideas for startups before, but they've always floundered, because she didn't have the auxiliary forces to keep her going. That's why she came to Edyfi, to be around people who could supply such forces. Brennan shares a similar story of a startup he tried to start earlier after dropping out of college, that he gave up on after spending 8 hours on a logo. That never would have happened if he did it at Edyfi, he reflects; he would have felt shame from sharing with us his surrender when we were all pushing forwards.

I have my own example in the positive. In the spring, I joined the literary magazine *The Incandescent Review*. I found myself a writer among, and then an editor and director among those who billed themselves creative writers, many of whom had won prestigious awards. When it came to introducing ourselves, it was assumed that we were all creative writers. "What kind of writing do you do?" "Poetry and fiction," one might say. "Essays and YA novels," says another. "Journalistic writing and short fiction," I come up with, the former a slight overstatement and the latter more or less a construction on the whimsical pieces of creative writing I had done. Yet, as soon as I called myself a creative writer, someone who wrote "short fiction," no less, a mental block melted away. I suddenly found myself turning musings into poetry and...short fiction, when I would have left them simply musings before.

To get back to internal and external motivations: my assertion is that this auxiliary force is the only kind of sustainable external motivation. These auxiliary forces come precisely from what we call "culture."

Just like internal (individual) forcing functions are only valuable if they lead to sustainable internal motivation, external (group/managerial) forcing functions are only valuable if they lead to sustainable external motivation, i.e. culture.

For example, TKS kids started writing daily updates because their Directors required them to. However, a significant number kept writing them after their Directors stopped pushing them to. In some cases, this is because individuals found real internal benefits, i.e. a sustainable internal motivation as mentioned earlier. In almost all cases, though, culture played a role. A critical mass of students wrote daily updates, such that a culture was created around it: an auxiliary force that made it so that, if one stopped writing daily updates, they wouldn't have to overcome static friction to get back into it, but rather only have to pick up where they left off with dynamic friction.

"If you want to do something, surround yourself with other people who do it," says Saurav. "That's the biggest hack."

In summary: culture is powerful because it provides an auxiliary force that keeps you in motion, working against dynamic rather than static friction. Staying in motion and *acting* is how you overcome internal inhibitions and find sustainable internal motivations for the things you want to do.

Culture Is the Key to Sustainable Motivation

I didn't understand mental health until this year.

My parents didn't teach me about mental health. I haven't thought too much about the roots of their parenting philosophies and whatnot; but my mom doesn't have much faith in therapy, for example. She's a fan of self-reliance, of suppressing destructive things in your mindspace and finding new replacements, rather than spending time on it directly.

I think there is virtue to this. Tech culture loves stoicism, for example. Practice gratitude and perspective, too; tell yourself that there's nothing wrong, that things are okay, that you'll get through it. The end goal is the same as any other mental health technique, I suppose: find people to support you. Find a purpose to rally yourself behind.

There are limitations, though, and I think there's a lot of overlooked value to being aware of them. Thinking about mental health as mental **health** and drawing parallels to physical health provides valuable illustrations.

To me, heads-down stoicism is like improving your physical health through training for a sport. You're not primarily worried about how *healthy* you are, you're worried about how well you're performing, and they just happen to be aligned. This kind of physical health care is awesome, because you're doing things that feel good and productive, and you also don't have to waste any time purely thinking about or maintaining your *health*.

Sometimes, though, exercise isn't enough, or can even get destructive. If you injure yourself, if you're ill, or if you have a chronic condition you can't just push through: in these situations, it'd be foolish to think only of continuing to train. You should seek expert consultation, get medical treatment, and take time to rest and recover.

The same goes for mental health. Most of the time, the best way to take care of your mental health is to not think about it directly. If we have sufficient social support around us, and make progress towards our goals in life, our mental health may be effectively maintained. Given the right circumstances, many people can make it through large chunks of life without ever thinking specifically about their mental health. They may even be able to recover from trauma or dips in mental health only through this passive care.

The danger that comes from this is being unaware of how to assess and take care of your mental health when this passive care isn't enough. If you're going through stretches of depression or anxiety, or dealing with trauma, sometimes your normal stoicism and gratitude doesn't do the trick. Maybe your condition doesn't worsen, but it's not improving, either. Maybe you can "think your way out of it," but that's like managing a serious infection through diet rather than professional diagnosis and medication. If your condition is genetic or chronic, it'd be like trying to cure cancer purely through diet.

In these cases, just like visiting a doctor early when symptoms arise, being aware of your mental health and seeking help -- from your own resources, or a therapist or other professional -- can save lives, and be crucial to long-term health. Mental health education trains us to take our own, and others', symptoms seriously rather than brushing them under the rug; or to know to take time and energy to prioritize yourself and heal, and not feel guilty about it. It may not seem valuable to you now, but these things could make the difference if you or someone in your life runs into serious mental health problems.

I'm writing this as someone currently setting aside time and energy to take care of my mental health. Mental health education initiatives have made a lot of progress in normalizing mental health awareness and care. At least to me, though, there's still a palpable stigma that hovers around openly prioritizing my mental wellbeing, or seeking professional help and treatment for it. This stigma is present in my upbringing, in the tech culture I've immersed myself in, and in society at large. Fortunately, with the help of some amazing friends, it's a stigma that hasn't prevented me from getting the help I've needed, if a little late. That's not true in many cases, though.

Some of you likely didn't experience any relevations reading this post. Others probably still don't see the value in dedicated mental health care. That's okay -- with all the messaging that I got about mental health, I didn't understand what issues that warranted seeking help were like until I encountered them myself. Maybe one day mental health awareness will be de-stigmatized enough for this recognition to come sooner.

For now, I'm immensely grateful for the friends who have supported me and shared their experiences, urging me to seek care for myself; and for being lucky enough to have access to appropriate care. Where I can, I hope to be that supportive friend for others. And to all the readers of this post, I hope it will urge you to prioritize yourself, take care, and seek help if the situation calls for it.

mental health

David Hume, the radical empiricist who knocked on Existentialism's door

What Does It Mean to Be Good at Something? A Framework for Excellence, Ft. Jeff Bezos and Ira Glass

![Thumbnail for post](/blog/2020-06/s4f-thumb.jpg)

This post's claim: **client research is the most important step to take when designing a website**. You should do it every time, before you make a single sketch or mockup, before you touch a single line of code. Your clients will be happier, your designs will be prettier, you'll become a better designer.

That's the actionable, practical form of the advice that I'm attempting to give. The underlying idea is the importance of design thinking. More than building pretty websites or graphics, design is about knowing as well as you can the problem that you want to solve or the message that you want to communicate. Only knowing this can your hands-on skills in Illustrator or CSS really come into use, producing valuable and ultimately visually appealing designs.

This was a realization I've come to with a few recent web design/development projects, notably redesigning and rebuilding *The Phillipian*'s website, [phillipian.net](https://phillipian.net/); in this post, I'll be using the simple website I built for food-rescue non-profit [Stem4Free](http://stem4free.org/) as an example.

## Doing it wrong

A couple of my friends started Stem4Free in April. The organization worked to rescue food from restaurants and businesses that would otherwise go to waste, donating them instead to food pantries, homeless shelters, nursing homes, hospitals, etc.

I joined Stem4Free as what else but the website design team manager, except there wasn't anyone to manage, so it was just me working on the website. The WordPress website that one of the founders had put together used Elementor and a ton of other plugins. My job was to make it...better. I determined that a complete overhaul was in order, getting rid of Elementor and building a template from scratch. (After phillipian.net, this was a familiar task...)

So I got to work, playing around with the existing logo, pulling colors and trying font combinations:

![Brand explorations for Stem4Free](/blog/2020-06/brand.png)

For the website, I interpreted my task as making the website, well, look nicer. I looked through a bunch of other nonprofits' websites, looked over the copy on the existing website, and threw together a mockup in Illustrator:

![Mockup of v1 of website](/blog/2020-06/v1mockup.jpg)

This was, more or less, the website that I built:

![Live v1 of website](/blog/2020-06/v1live.jpg)

Alright, my WordPress/frontend skills are still pretty solid. Those blocks on the front page even use some lightly-styled Gutenberg blocks with a Custom Post Type to make them easy to update!

My design thinking, on the other hand, was taking a deep nap. Everything about this website, from the design process to the mockups, should have set off alarm bells. The visual hierarchy is hopelessly confused. There are long chunks of text with no clear purpose and multiple evenly-weighted buttons that leaves visitors with no idea what they should do.

This bad design soon began to cost me. The board requested changes each week. Some were easy to implement; others seemed to be asking for a redesign of the whole site — so eventually, that's exactly what I decided to do, doing it right this time.

## Doing it right/the most important step: Client Research

The superweapon to doing design right is simple — do client research. Do it before you make a single mockup, write a single line of code.

What should you accomplish with client research? Get to actually know your client. Know their story, their purpose statement, the people they interact with, the impression they want to give off.

![Interview questions screenshot 1](/blog/2020-06/interview1.png)

some questions

![Interview questions screenshot 2](/blog/2020-06/interview2.png)

some answers

Immediately, this gives you a picture of what's actually important to communicate in the website. Walls of text elucidate into highlighted numbers and sentences. Knowing who you're communicating to tells you what was wrong before, what was missing or broken about the design.

The client usually isn't clear on every part of what they want to communicate — that's why they got you to help. The client research process, then, becomes a shared journey of discovering the client brand: you guiding them along with questions, both arriving together at a better understanding.

As an illustration of this, a powerful question is to ask for adjectives that *do* and *don't* (this is often where the real clarity come from) describe the client's brand. Vague ideas clarify into distinct characteristics:

![Interview questions screenshot 3](/blog/2020-06/interview3.png)

Asking about competition, too, identifies how to strengthen messaging:

![Interview questions screenshot 4](/blog/2020-06/interview4.png)

Now we know what's important. We know what we want to say. Only now are you ready to do the rest of your job, building the way to say it.

## Doing it right: Keep It Simple, Stupid

Forget the colors. Forget the fancy offset boxes. Forget the hero images.

Only put in what matters. Build a clear hierarchy. Visitors should know exactly where they should be looking, what they should be thinking.

Here's the homepage that I designed the second time around, live at stem4free.org:

![Website v2 homepage](/blog/2020-06/v2home.jpg)

Bam, number to the face. We have a real impact. Above, a straightforward introduction. Below, live stats on donations, because we want to communicate that we're active and reputable. Below that, our clear main call to action — join as a volunteer! If you're a business, join as a partner! And then updates and blog posts, because again, we're active and reputable. The messaging is focused and clear.

There's no hero image. Why would you want a hero image? We don't have any good ones, our media comes from high schoolers taking pictures of donations with their phones, so that's what we put in a grid below. That's the good stuff, where the impact isn't in attention-grabbing quality, it's in quantity. We're active and reputable.

It's literally monochrome. Could colors have been tactfully used to make this website just a little better, the brand more distinctive and memorable? Yeah, for sure — but its absence really isn't significant, affirming that colors really wouldn't have been communicating that much in the first place. We avoid this complexity and focus on what matters: the copy, the typography, the layout.

Obviously these aren't generalized rules. Hero images and graphics can be really effective; colors are often critical to a brand or design. The important thing is to design not with arbitrary rules (or shiny Awwwards sites) as the starting point, but with understanding your client, figuring out what's actually meaningful and important to design around.

Aside from the homepage, branch pages were an important feature of the redesign:

![Website v2 branch page](/blog/2020-06/v2branch.jpg)

They're really simple, but they contain the information that matters. The idea came from the client research, of course — give prospective volunteers and businesses a centralized branch info page. See the localized stats, see the directors' faces and contact info.

## Conclusion

When I made the first version of the Stem4Free website, I wondered why it was so *ugly*. I attributed it to lack of time put into it — I didn't even make a mobile mockup before bashing out the WordPress template — or just my design skills being rusty.

When I made the second version of the website, I was really happy with how pretty and cohesive it looked. I wasn't trying to make it pretty, I was just trying to communicate. As I mentioned earlier, there weren't even colors or a hero image to the site; but when the core design and messaging of a website is clear, everything comes together around it. Your intuition can get to work without obstacles throwing it off at every step; small improvements add up into something bigger rather than going in a million different directions.

Requests for changes didn't stop, of course. This is a growing, changing student organization, and I'm one of their staff (a director, even); I didn't aim to make a thorough, for-forever package. What I did build, though, was a design with solid, well-researched foundations. The changes being requested now are minor corrections or iterative changes — they make sense, and extend the original design rather than compromising or diverging from it.

What allowed this to happen — as promised, making the second version of the website prettier, the client more happy, and me more sane — was that client research in the middle. That's because good design isn't about being able to make the prettiest things by magic; it's about making well-thought out things, asking the right questions and doing the work to get there. Design processes can get much more involved beyond client research: rounds of workshops and design sprints, for example. If you're a seasoned designer or developer who has worked with tons of clients, you already know these truths, but if you're just getting started or still figuring things out, it's never too early to strive to put design thinking at the center of your process.[^ref]

[^ref]: This post was also posted on [DEV.to](https://dev.to/wwsalmon/the-most-important-step-in-web-design-happens-before-you-push-a-single-pixel-575p).

The most important step in web design happens before you push a single pixel

I’ve been working through the [serverless-stack.com](https://serverless-stack.com/) tutorial. It’s awesome, teaching you how to set up an AWS backend, React front-end, and now is going through CI/CD through [Seed](https://seed.run/). Like most tutorials, it does feel like I’m just going through the process, not copy-pasting but reading and re-writing code without being too sure of what it all does and why I’m using it; really in-depth learning only comes with time and experience: building your own project from scratch, dealing with all the considerations, use cases, and bugs that come with that. The usage of Seed instead of CircleCI or TravisCI like I see on almost every repo is also a reminder of the dizzying amount of options out there. I had briefly made a foray into learning MongoDB and Express before this current serverless endeavor, and it seems to be something many recruiters want to see; and there are a million alternatives to the React frontend, from other JS frameworks like Angular and Vue to ditching this totally and just writing straight JS.

The Seed website seemed to use the same AWS and React Bootstrap components that the Serverless tutorial was teaching, so somehow I went into a slight rabbithole and ended up on the [website of Mark Otto](https://markdotto.com/projects/), the creator of Bootstrap, also the top designer at GitHub and Twitter before that (it suddenly made sense why GitHub uses Bootstrap). Scrolling through his projects, I saw a bunch of really cool resources and minisites. A [“code guide”](https://codeguide.co/) with HTML/CSS quality standards and conventions; a [concept for HTML elements](https://mdo.github.io/mdoml/) redesigned for more modern use cases; and “A [curated list](http://wtfhtmlcss.com/) of commonly frustrating HTML and CSS quandaries, miscues, and dilemmas.”

Reading through these pages, I was struck by a sense of nostalgia. At the bottom of the HTML section of the Code Guide, just a two-sentence sidenote, was: “Writing markup in a JavaScript file makes the content harder to find, harder to edit, and less performant. Avoid it whenever possible.” The assertion “JS bad” seems to come up at every conference and on every blog. JS slow, JS inaccessible, JS bad for SEO, JS bad for mobile. And the counterargument — you’re ignoring the developer experience, JS frameworks make it 20x easier and faster to build a powerful web app, build and optimize from there. Ship ship ship. Done is better than perfect. But Mark Otto’s two line snippet didn’t seem to be referring to this, the mess of frameworks and CSS-in-JS and everything else that we’ve found ourselves in. It seems to be speaking of a simpler time, when JS meant scripts adding functionality to a website, not the backbone of the website itself. When being a front-end web developer meant writing nicely organized HTML and perfectly cascading CSS — almost the opposite of what I was invested so heavily in learning now.

To be sure, if you haven’t been able to tell yet, I don’t claim to be anything near a professional web developer. All this fancy JS stuff, backend stuff, most of really high-value web development skills today I’m just getting into. Even for static websites, I’ve never worked with huge codebases and design systems, tested across every browser and device and connection speed, squeezed out every byte and millisecond of loading time from a website. But I’ve read about these things obsessively, and when it comes out to just bashing out a website, I’m confident that I can do it well. At this point, CSS feels like a native language to me. Sure, maybe I don’t memorize all the ins and outs of the grammar, but I grew up with it and so know it comprehensively by experience: all the ways to say something, what “sounds” right and what works but “sounds” wrong, what is good or bad practice not by memorization but by experience. Often I feel faster and more creative designing by bashing out code than in Illustrator. Alternatively, give me a mockup and I can implement it with five completely different sets of CSS.

Recently, I came across something like the following in a friend’s project:

```
    body{
      display: flex;
      justify-content: center;
    }
    
    div{
      display: flex;
    }
    
    container{
      width: 1200px;
    }
```

What on earth? I asked him what his thinking was. “The program where I learned CSS said to use flexbox on everything,” he told me.

Just to center a top level container! Whatever happened to `margin: 0 auto`? Oh, man. Maybe I was just lagging behind the times — was this really best practice now? I remember when flexbox was the dreamlike new thing on the scene, the solution to all of our CSS alignment problems, the end of floats and clearfixes and *tables* (my friend will never know of these dark ages, I guess). Browser support was barely existent, and “[A Complete Guide to Flexbox](https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/)” had just been published on the CSS-Tricks frontpage. Sparingly, I began integrating it into my own projects. Today, it’s a crucial part of my toolkit, but one I chose to take out when needed, not anything like a default. Now we’ve got Grid, too. New CSS developers these days are spoiled.

And CSS frameworks! Bootstrap was heavy, I had always heard. Makes sense for huge web apps, but way overkill for my tiny little websites. And it was just cleaner and easier to get exactly what I wanted with my own from-scratch code. But now, what do we have? Developers aren’t even writing straight CSS anymore. Atomic frameworks like the currently hugely popular Tailwind CSS are the default. Instead of applying classes in HTML and carefully putting together a harmonious stylesheet, you just apply `w-16`, `h-16`, `mx-auto` classes to your markup, and bam — `width: 16px`, `height: 16px`, `margin: 0 auto`.

My gut reaction to this is, nononononono. I want to keep writing the CSS I know and love. It’s elegant, it’s beautiful, it’s my craft. CSS is almost a part of my identity at this point: my artistry, my outlet of creative expression, my value proposition as a part of society. These new frameworks, not to mention ideas like CSS-in-JS and pre-styled React component libraries, seem to be ripping CSS as I know it away from me, threatening to rip a chunk of my very being away from me. And I’m not alone in this — Chris Hawkes, for example, pretty much voices the same sentiment in his video “[Why I Don’t Like Tailwind CSS](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qECXE-retvk)” (though I disagree with him that SASS is similar — SASS is still cascading, is still CSS properties, is still what makes CSS CSS in my heart; I love it and use it extensively). 

Yet, resisting means risking straggling behind the unstopping forward-marching standard of “this is the way that things are done.” There are far more advocates than detractors for atomic frameworks. Hawke’s video has 205 dislikes to 241 likes, for example. And these frameworks don’t just throw away CSS — they are built upon the deepest understanding of and experience with it, not just in technical aspects but in core design philosophy. A comment by a Tailwind CSS community manager on Hawke’s video links to a few essays dating back all the way to 2012 diving into HTML and CSS semantics and scalability. They make a compelling argument of the inherent difficulty of writing and maintaining large CSS codebases by virtue of its cascading nature, the proposed solution being using utility classes. This is exactly the solution that utility-focused atomic frameworks provide.

These frameworks being thoroughly thought-out and considered, however, doesn't mean that their users are inheriting this CSS knowledge and understanding. The most common developer-perspective argument I’ve heard for using CSS frameworks is rooted in the “ship ship ship” rapid iteration mindset that seems to be the foundation of the software development and tech industries. Frameworks allow developers to stop worrying about carefully maintaining CSS and instead focus on building and improving their product. CSS, then, is no longer a language to learn by immersion, by painstaking honing of understanding and technique through time and experience, but rather an ugly back layer, a necessary evil, to hide away behind conveniently designed frameworks and component libraries. The understanding of CSS as a fundamental and artistic skill, like sketching with pencil on paper for painters and digital artists, necessary to learn first, learn well, and continuously practice, is dying, maybe dead.

Maybe this is overly drastic or simplistic. [W3C](https://www.w3.org/) certainly isn’t stopping their work tirelessly assessing and improving CSS. Web development is a huge field and industry; not every website is a JS-based webapp that can ditch CSS, and most jobs will still require direct hands-on CSS work. Using frameworks doesn’t allow you to forego CSS knowledge entirely, either. Utility classes correspond to CSS properties; understanding CSS patterns and behavior is crucial to using them well, as I was reminded of while [watching Tailwind CSS developer Adam Wathan](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gX_ApBeSpQ) work through different combinations of flexbox and margin classes to get part of a Coinbase clone looking right. And if nothing else, developers specializing in CSS will be needed to maintain and build frameworks and libraries.

Yet, the state of and most useful skills in web development will continue to ever evolve, and the practice of artistic, intricate, unmaintainable CSS seems to be taking more and more of a backseat. The starkest difference might be in new developers. Sure, intro courses will still start with the basics of HTML and CSS; but moving into any sort of bigger project, frameworks will be much easier to use and in most ways much more effective than slowly mastering raw CSS with time. More developers will be like my friend, setting `display: flex` on everything, struggling with more complex layouts. And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe it’s even for the better. For me, leaving CSS behind is certainly a bigger step forward: moving beyond static web dev, towards JS, towards full-stack, to more powerful frameworks, to bigger and better things. In some ways, particularly with regards to CSS, my perspective is that of a teacher, someone who has been around and knows what I’m doing. Zooming out a bit, though, I’m still very much a student, early in my learning process. From this perspective, I have one last analogy to offer.

CSS is like arithmetic. It’s at the very base layer of the web, what browser engines process to spit out what’s on the screen. Here are the axioms that just *are*, by very definition of the system. CSS frameworks, then, are like algebra. The problems they solve are essentially arithmetic problems, but abstracted a layer. After a while, any arithmetic that you do only passes by in the back of your mind; you think instead in terms of variables, functions, and roots, like utility classes and components to CSS properties. Even higher level JS frameworks and CSS-in-JS, then, are like calculus, abstracting on algebra, providing a whole new pattern for how websites are defined and built. (SASS is like arithmetic tricks, like learning factoring or divisibility rules that provide you shortcuts without actually learning the algebra that makes them work.) As a student, then, maybe my bemoaning the death of CSS as an art is simply that of a student growing out of his comfort zone.

But CSS, in its beautiful, raw, sometimes badly-written form, will forever (probably…?) remain at the core of the web as we know it. Maybe the whole field is moving forward, abstracting on top of it, so new developers can make use of it faster and better; but I’m glad that I started learning web development before atomic frameworks blew up, before grid, before flexbox, when avoiding Javascript for front-end development was a valuable and feasible thing, when CSS was an art and a language I immersed myself in. Now I’m in time to move along with the field, my knowledge of what once was allowing me to especially appreciate what now is and what’s to come.[^ref]

[^ref]: This article was also published on [DEV.to](https://dev.to/wwsalmon/the-artistry-of-css-and-its-death-a-reflection-about-css-and-js-frameworks-and-the-evolution-of-css-1npg) and [IndieHackers](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-is-an-art-and-its-dying-a-reflection-on-css-and-js-frameworks-and-the-evolution-of-css-b9187b02f4), where there has been some good discussion!

CSS is an art, and it's dying. A reflection on CSS and JS frameworks and the evolution of CSS

or, How To Break Through And Create Amazing Graphics / or, intuition derived from my jank design journey that many designer friends don’t have / or, Gesalt Principles, Purpose-Based Design, or Function over Form

<hr/>

[X] is an amazing graphic designer. He can whisk beautiful icons, illustrations, and patterns out of thin air, take an assignment and turn it into beautiful eye candy to use as a logo or printed on a t-shirt. [Z], too; beyond her beautiful graphics for our paper, her spotify playlist covers have a pristine aesthetic. Yet, when it comes to info-heavy graphics, websites, posters, and more advanced layouts, they struggle. The graphic-y parts are gorgeous as always, but something about the spacing, the fonts, the composition, just feels tacky and amateurish, deft and experienced as the designers are.

![](/blog/2020-04/b-graphics.png)

I’m not the greatest at the free-flowing, artistic side of graphic design. At best, I spend way too much time tracing and refining a sketch, or ask a friend to help. I first learned design by making interface mockups, concept redesigns of popular programs, websites, operating system UIs. Like artists who diligently consume the work of other artists, learn from the greats and read up on theory, I learned from software designers and UI/UX researchers. As I moved into branding, editorial design, advertisements, posters, social media graphics, you name it (just for small projects and clients — I claim no real professional education or experience), I brought a completely different intuition. With a pen tool in Illustrator, I struggle a little; but that gap in presentation, that off-putting tackiness, is exactly what I knew how to address.

What is this intuition?

I don’t have exactly specific wording for it (admittedly, I'm not at all rigorously well read on design), but something I’ve found that feels like it gets close is something called Gestalt Principles. What are Gestalt Principles? Here’s what [Smashing Magazine](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/03/design-principles-visual-perception-and-the-principles-of-gestalt/) has to say:

> “The whole is other than the sum of the parts.” — Kurt Koffka
> 
> The quote above is gestalt in a nutshell. When human beings see a group of objects, we perceive their entirety before we see the individual objects. We see the whole as more than the sum of the parts, and even when the parts are entirely separate entities, we’ll look to group them as some whole.

Essentially, Gestalt principles are a set of ideas from psychology about how the mind pieces together an arrangement of things: perceiving elements as grouped together, standing out, or continuous. Some of these rules have fancy applications, like the rules of closure and figure/ground; others are incredibly intuitive and straightforward, like proximity and similarity.

Gestalt principles are most powerful not when used in isolation to achieve a specific effect, but when you can understand them and bake them into your intuition. More accurately, these understandings are already in your brain; that’s how they were identified in the first place. The use of these fancy names and theories is to bring these understandings up to the consciousness, and apply them to your designs, to make them feel “right.” When you do that, they become prettier, more readable, and more engaging. This is the connection that I’ve observed tons of new designers missing; it’s hard to realize and hone without it being pointed out to you, so that’s what I hope this blog post and any further readings will do for anybody reading.

How do you apply these principles? Let my examples for *The Phillipian*’s Graphic Style Guide demonstrate:

![](/blog/2020-04/gestalt1.png)

![](/blog/2020-04/gestalt2.png)

![](/blog/2020-04/gestalt3.png)

In the realm of a contained illustration, logo, or simple social media graphic, you can rely on artistic intuition to deliver you to something that looks good and is effective. But across a larger poster, magazine cover, infographic, or website, with tons of elements that need to be carefully placed, balanced, and adjusted, it’s critical to think through your design decisions and know what they’re doing.

Gestalt is not a free ticket to well-done designs. The above examples talk about spacing and typography, topics with whole worlds of nuance and theory to dive into. But Gestalt can be a good starting point, a framework to check your own thinking against, ideas to hone your design intuition with. Gestalt, and not just Gestalt but clear thinking and continuous learning about design, is how you expand your capabilities, break through the wall of tackiness, and create complex designs you can be proud of.

The Only Thing A Graphic Designer Needs to Know

### I: Ben Platt

Yesterday, I read [this New York Times feature on "Dear Evan Hansen" star Ben Platt](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/theater/how-ben-platt-beame-the-toast-of-broadway-dear-evan-hansen-tony-awards.html). It discusses Platt’s background immersed in musical theater, growing up in Beverly Hills as the son of Marc Platt, the producer of "Wicked" and "La La Land." It describes his incredible excellence in performance, with "Dear Evan Hansen" playwright Steven Levenson quoted as saying, “I’ve never met an actor who has such emotional access…He’s technically perfect, every time. I find it a mystery. He really is a unicorn.” It tells of his warmth, friendliness, and humility. But what struck me the most was Platt's focus and attitude towards his job:

> “But I feel as long as I’m doing this role, everything I do has to be in the service of that. I don’t want there to be a single performance where people leave feeling like they didn’t get the best I could offer. If that means denying myself some things, that’s O.K. I don’t think anything can be genuinely fulfilling or powerful if it’s not taking some kind of a toll. For now, I’m definitely willing to let that toll be taken.”

And the toll? Beyond “[losing] 30 pounds to more convincingly play the part of an anxiety-crippled 17-year-old (he’s 23),” the article reports:

> On the purely physical, he sleeps nine or 10 hours a night, eats no gluten or dairy and goes for long stretches each day in silence to rest his voice. He takes zinc and oregano supplements and constantly hydrates. He has two physical therapy sessions a week, “to make sure I don’t develop tree-trunk neck and to keep my posture from becoming too much like Evan’s.” He adds: “It’s a losing battle, though. My posture’s horrible now.” (He also bites his nails and cracks his knuckles obsessively, in a way he never did before, he said.)

The physical and emotional intensity of the performance itself is incredible:

> It’s a gesture you see him repeat in the show, most notably in the second-act aria, “Words Fail,” in which he confesses to the Murphys that everything he’s told them is a lie. He’s standing before them, hunched and sobbing. It seems an impossible posture from which to project a song, but he’s incorporated the leg-lifting into his character so that it reads to the audience like a bodily expression of intolerable emotion. “There are all these other little places where I lean back and fill my diaphragm, and then go back into it,” he said. “Or, because I’m crying so hard, spaces where I know I can swallow the mucus that’s coming down. We put all these little things in place, and now they’re just there, they’re second nature, so I can just let it fly.”

I had listened to Dear Evan Hansen at the peak of its popularity[^1] and enjoyed it, but this article, coupled with a greater appreciation for emotional complexity and intensity in storytelling[^emotionnote], gave me a new appreciation for the show.

More impactfully, though, I was left in awe at Ben Platt. Upon reading his story, I experienced an element of “this man is a god among men,” like the feeling evoked when watching Olympic athletes. But perhaps due to the relatability of Platt’s character, or the description of him living in New York, or his humble demeanor, brought his image down to earth and closer to me in a powerful way. Platt’s dedication to the show, putting aside everything else in his life to play his part as well as he can, is more admirable to me than anything else. It’s what I seek in life, to find something this meaningful and fulfilling, and approach Platt’s level of pure focus and self-described “monkishness.” “This is who I want to be,” I thought.

I was reminded of a quote from Paul Kalanithi’s *When Breath Becomes Air*: “You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” The book tells of another story that exemplifies dedication, purpose, willpower, and sacrifice. On the way to focus and passion, however, there is this idea of excellence and perfection, implicit in Platt’s casting and performance and explicit in Kalanithi’s reflections on his work and life. At their most meaningful, excellence and perfection  are determined by each individual for themselves, but inevitably informed by externalities: a person is most excellent if they are better than any other, perfect if there are no flaws that others can discern.

### II: Excellence

In a discussion with a friend recently, I reflected on my own experiences with excellence, or the lack thereof. “I’ve never really been good at anything,” I said. There were many things that I am passionate about and invested in: I had played piano since childhood and once competed in competitions; today I enjoy the musicality, the expressiveness, the virtuosity, but I haven’t performed a piece without a major mistake in years, not even a Concerto movement I spent an entire summer practicing as rigorously as I could. Filmmaking was something I fell in love with, how indie filmmakers crafted intricate stories and worlds with minimal resources. I watched, I learned, I tried, but I could never replicate this artistry in my own work, never produced anything I could take seriously. Competitive math, too, I spent my childhood preparing for, doing problems, attending programs, but I didn’t score well on the AMC or even make my middle school’s Mathcounts team. These efforts had their payouts, for sure: my filmmaking experience led me to *The Phillipian*, where I discovered journalism and a whole new purpose and community. My math training is what allows me to excel in STEM classes and standardized tests. But it felt like there was always something wrong with how I did things, almost from the moment I picked up my pencil: I remember comparing my drawings to my best friend’s in middle school, noting how with minimal effort his pencil lines were crisp and clean, as if by default, while mine were rough, wavering, and uncertain.

“Imposter syndrome?” my friend questioned. While definitely something I’ve experienced, I don’t think that was it. All of the failures I listed above resulted from a combination of factors. Had my parents pushed me harder, had I had a better curriculum to follow, had I focused more and stuck with it, maybe I would have crested the hill of achievement and reached excellence. Pushing back against this, however, is the thought that so many people did more with less: filmmakers with nothing but a phone, artists and writers with nothing but a pencil and their school notebook.

Regardless of the causes, my lack of excellence is the way it was, and I’ve been able to reconcile myself with it: there’s nothing I can do but keep trying, keep striving to do the best I can, then do better, and perhaps one day reach excellence. I’m reminded of an old classmate’s advice about the skill plateau, how the only way to move past your self-perceived failures is by continuing to practice and attempt to improve:

![Time-Skill Curve, as showed to me by a friend many years ago](/blog/2020-02/timeskill-curve.png)

I’m reminded also of a well-known Ira Glass quote about improving as a creative:

> Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean?
> 
> A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have.
> 
> And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal.
> 
> And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

I'm extending this framework beyond creative work, almost to all of life, where in some ways it begins to break down, but I still find it to be a helpful framework. I’m disappointed in myself because I have high standards for myself. To hit those high standards, there’s nothing I can do but keep pushing myself towards them, to embrace my failures and perceived shortcomings and just keep going.

### III: Running

In the course of my discussion, I realized that there was one thing in which I felt I had achieved some level of excellence: running. When I joined my old school’s Cross Country team in 9th grade and Andover’s in 10th grade, it was another thing that I wasn’t even good at, with a 24 minute 5K PR. In my junior year, I dropped twenty pounds and three minutes off of my PR. The cutoff for JV was around 19 minutes, a target I mostly dismissed as beyond me, but another goal appeared to be within reach, that of running a half-marathon before I finished high school. I googled half-marathon training plans and adapted them for my own use, finding routes through the streets of Hong Kong, Ningbo, and Xuxhang, getting up at or before sunrise to beat the Chinese heat or the lethargy of the day in New York. I ramped up the mileage week after week, one day a week also running a 10K (one full loop of Central Park) as fast as I could, using this as a metric of my fitness. In August, I did it, completing two loops of Central Park and hitting the 13.1 mile mark in less than an hour and 45 minutes.

It turns out that nothing improves 5K times like mileage. My 10K pace dropped beneath my previous 5K PR. My senior season back on the team, I PR’d at just about 18 flat, consistently finishing as our second or third JV runner. At an early season invitational, I finished third out of the entire JV race, winning a pumpkin; at the championships, I finished in the top twenty of all the league’s JV runners.

![Right: pumpkins won at NMH invitational, Left: pumpkins reunited at season championship](/blog/2020-02/xc.jpg)

Something felt so right about running: the fact that I could throw my entire body into it, my entire being into it; the purity, the competition, the comrardrie, the physical intensity. On a college application, I wrote:

> For the past three years I’ve been a member of Andover’s Cross Country team. Every day after classes in the fall I put on running shoes and joined the team on the lawn to warm up for the day’s workout. Whether it’s a hard track workout in the pouring rain, a pre-sunrise long run on a summer day, or fueled by adrenaline, charging off the line at the crack of a gunshot, when I run I feel liberated: empowering and empowered by the teammates by my side, pushing ourselves to our limits and setting them ever higher.

Ironically, I feel most liberated and empowered when I’m charging down a set path, ultimately going in a circle, with no goal other than to end up exactly where I started in as little time as possible. But this liberation, I believe, is the closest I’ve ever gotten to Ben Platt’s dedication, to Paul Kalanithi’s perfection, to what I desire in all my other pursuits and eventually in life: a sense of extreme focus, purpose, and excellence.  I got here not from any special talent, or advice, or program, but just from my own perseverance; in fact, it came from forgetting about excellence (5K time) entirely and just focusing on mileage, improving through volume and repetition as Ira Glass says, refusing to stop plodding down the time-skill curve plateau until I reach the next rise. I don't know what lies ahead or how I'll get there, but I believe that the road goes on, and I just have to keep journeying, fighting through the plateaus or even regressions until I can eventually enjoy the next rise, the next high, the next view.

This post started as an appreciation post for Ben Platt. It turned into an appreciation for excellence and all that it means, and then for running as a personally poignant experience. It’s a hodgepodge survey of the questions that matter the most to me — how do I find meaning and purpose in life? what do I consider excellence or success? — jumping off of a particularly impactful New York Times article and drawing on a conversation and a meaningful quote. It’s my first big personal blog post, and I hope to explore these ideas and their sources in more posts to come.

[^1]: Google Play Music records me as having listened through the entire album 5 times, 6 after writing this article.

[^emotionnote]: from personal experience and from books like J. M. Coeztee’s *Waiting for the Barbarians*, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s *Purple Hibiscus*, and Ocean Vuong’s *On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous*.

Tag: #essay