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

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

"The most poignant way to live life is to anticipate that emptiness before it comes and have that fold back in on itself and treasure it while it's happening. Realize you're in the good old days while you're living them."[^moments]

Upper Management of *The Phillipian* CXLIII sent out their farewell emails last night. The ritual felt too soon when I was doing it last year, and this year it feels even more so, my removed perspective compounded with the shortening effects of quarantine. The experiences of UM CXLIII were very different from those of UM CXLII on many levels, but one sense of awe is the same: that of not only a tenure, but an entire scholastic journalistic and community service career, an integral part of one's identity, passing by just like that.

I was looking at my Spotify Favorites Fall/Winter 2020/21 playlist. I didn't make a new one in winter because the time felt continuous. But now, looking at the songs on the list...they're not the songs of the present. They're the songs of a time that has passed by. Fall/Winter 2020/21 has passed by.

It's now spring. Spring. Time of renewal, healing, fresh starts, a breath of warmth sweeping through to lift the world up from its pristine and crystallized winter.

Spring will mark a full year for me away from Andover's campus. For all [I thought my connection with Andover was severed](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/06/07/a-love-letter-to-the-non-library-andover-commencement-commentary.html), I realize I still depend on it a lot in terms of my identity. There is no other environment, community, even physical place that I feel is my home in the same way.

I've spent a lot of my energy in the present. Pushing myself to [be a builder](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hZr6BvC1Z0), to relentlessly prioritize, to cut out everything that doesn't matter to me. The [huge amounts of change and turnover](https://preview.mailerlite.com/v1x0k0) of all sorts happening around me has contributed to this state of being very much in the present.

But now things are just stable enough, and just enough of the past is resurfacing,[^past] to balance the present out and put things in equilibrium, or maybe limbo.

I miss the past but I don't long for it. I'm excited for the future but I don't feel compelled to rush into it.

These moments aren't particularly memorable. They don't grow roots like low points do or sprout flowering branches like high points.

But in the moment, it's quite nice.

[^moments]: Capturing these moments is the intention of posts tagged [#moments](https://www.samsonzhang.com/blog/moments) on my blog.

[^past]: an hour ago, a few bags of Chinese groceries unexpectedly arrived at my Community House in Utah, ordered by my mom. Yesterday I spent an hour in a critical theory book club, listening to the connections drawn to International Relations classes and random other readings, a familiar trickling of the atmosphere I so enjoyed at Andover...

present

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

*a journal entry I wrote on NYE*[^rough]

A few minutes ago, as I sat at my desk scribbling away on the tablet in front of me, I heard the countdown from a group of people somewhere in the vicinity: "five, four, three, two, one. Happy new year!" Fireworks cracked and rumble in the distance. They're still going now.

It feels a little surreal. It's 2021 now, 1/1/21. Arbitrary marker, but meaning is often formed from the arbitrary. I think the feeling is the bittersweet one of time irreversibly passing, one that I remember well from CSS end-of-years and Andover finals and breaks.[^melancholy] For me, away from campus and then away from any school structure at all, time had become a sort of continuum. There weren't breaks or demarcated periods of time to feel the irreversible passage of. Months and seasons seemed seamless and unremarkable, convenient measurement tools and not much more.

I guess I thought the new year would be no different. I planned to sleep at 11:30, after an hour playing cards with my family. I'm behind on work and not feeling too good about myself; just want to sleep, wake up tomorrow, and resume the grind.

Now that I'm writing this entry, though, I'm thinking about last year. Did I write any new year reflection them? It was UM app season, and college app season. I remember winter was "chaotic" and truly transformative for me, though in the chaos that followed I never got around to writing a full reflection piece. My writing really is sporadic rather than disciplined in any way.

We remember the beginnings and ends of things best. The meaning I was compelled by to write in this moment belongs to this moment, and not the year 2020, or its events. Yet, by bookending 2020, it becomes a disproportionately important part of it. That's nothing exceptional, just the strange way our brains construct memory and meaning, I suppose. Its like some senior friends' [discussion of missing senior spring](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/06/07/a-love-letter-to-the-non-library-andover-commencement-commentary.html): that bittersweet bliss often had a disproportionate impact on graduates' perceptions of Andover, and I would even go so far as to say, of themselves. Maybe I would have gone to Wesleyan if I had stayed at Andover during the spring.

Finding myself tied up by potential past choices, I'm reminded of a micro-framework I came up with at one point: success breeds options. Failure breeds closed doors and narrow paths back to stability. Having Wesleyan as a college choice, in retrospect, was a significant success. Yet I didn't view it as such in the moment. To be honest, if I went back now, I'm not entirely sure that I would choose differently. But it seems, now, that I'm solidly on a path of failure. Sure, I have options with startups and projects to work on, but they're not options for stability. They're stepping stones on which to propel myself towards meaning and meaningful opportunity. I don't care about tech at the end of the day, I feel like is a truth that emerges with thy deepest reflection. Its the path my dad pushed me on. I'm much more genuinely fulfilled by the humanities: the critical, the artistic, what have you. I would likely here been mine fulfilled at Wesleyan than GaTech.

Yet, I likely would not have fully faced this fact had I not done so deeply into tech, gone into software and entrepreneurship. Its a world that's endlessly *cool*, but it's like picking a partner who's familiar to me (i.e. similar to parents) rather than who is truly healthy or will spur my growth and fulfillment.

With UChicago shut out, though, its very unclear what my path back to humanities / liberal arts academia would look like. Brown? It's a long, long shot that I have no expectation of getting. Maybe some other LACs, too. Pomona? Williams? Whatever is still open in a few days.

I'll go now to meta-reflection. I found out just yesterday from Michael and Adara that there's something called a dopamine detox that is very similar to my reflective journal entries. Dopamine detoxes are more intentional and comprehensive, I think: no laptop, tech, even food for a day. Just meditate, write, and reflect. like my journal, though, they're done when the need arises. Taking a full day for this sounds amazing, and also a little infeasible, but maybe I just need to reframe: maybe I should organize the rest of my life to make this full-day detoxing feasible, because again, it sounds so good.

I think there's a larger desire there too. The desire to just chill and eliminate unnecessary anxiety from my life. Why do I stress myself out so much? why do I feel bad about my current situation so much? I don't think it even leads to growth or opportunity; that comes off you're performing and intentional, not emotionally burdened. In my case, for example: how amazing would it be to have a YC software engineering Job, or hop from job to job, making decent money, meeting cool people, building my own skills, etc.? Focus on my own content and enjoyment. Live for my own fulfillment rather than someone else's goals. Bringing back [Mark Marson's four stages of life](https://markmanson.net/four-stages-of-life): this would be moving from mimicry to self-discovery for the first time.

Maybe that thought is naïve and I'm still largely in a state of mimicry. But the possibility of breaking away feels a lot more real now, after getting my first few paychecks and job offers, than it did a year-or even a few months before. My mom has not yet let me go to really grow up. Maybe I'll look back and regret growing up too soon if I do let go, because it is not something that is easy, or perhaps possible, to get back.

We endlessly romanticize youth and childhood. Why is that? Maybe for the sense of unconditional belonging, of not questioning your existence and pain in the world. For all our ignorance and helplessness, when we are children we lack a deep desire that sets in later: the desire for meaning and purpose. Desire is the root of all suffering, as Buddhism puts it; or, [in a Kierkegaardian light](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/12/25/david-hume-the-radical-empiricist-who-knocked-on-existentialisms-door.html#beyond-hume-what-is-the-meaning-of-life), perhaps it's easier to never enter into despair in the first place, i.e. not have the ability to process despair, though Kierkegaard would counter that you don't really *exist* then. Romanticization of childhood is purely a fantasy at the end of the day: none of us actually want to return to childhood, we just want the irreplicable peace of soul that was one characteristic of it.

How to finish this journal entry? There is more to say. There is always more to say. But I feel like I've he said what I need to. I've de-toxed, and I'm ready to rest and continue living my life.

New year resolutions are a traditional thing. The more intentionality minded might simply call them monthly, quarterly, or annual goals. I've not set such goals for myself more or less since college decisions came out, because I've not had a sense of long-term direction. I rarely have before, I suppose. I long to have some one day, but my approach, as I've been rapidly learning about myself and the world around me, has been to rapidly iterate. Work, connect, reflect. If it feels good, keep doing it. If it doesn't, then ditch it. Done right, you'll constantly be learning and making progress, even if you're not doing what you enjoy. I have a lot of faith in this process, but perhaps more so in idealized conditions, i.e. without overbearing parents. There is a ton of value to people and environments who push you off-track — Nadeem pushing me in TKS, for example, or my Andover or Incandescent friends, But your ability to use these pushes constructively breaks down if they're coming from someone who also has significant authority over you and does not allow you to exercise and train your own judgement. I think that's how I ended up committing to Georgia Tech and on this gap year, for example, when I might otherwise be on a very different path right now.

So what lies ahead? [Edyfi](https://edyfi.co/) lies ahead. My revolutionary reading club lies ahead. My WPT research lies ahead. Sunsama lies ahead. Beyond that, the world of possibility that is one's 20s, and beyond that the vastness and depth of life that I do not pretend to understand.

My life goal that [I plugged into Terry Xu's "Priorities" app in the spring](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/05/02/what-do-you-truly-want-to-accomplish-before-you-die-mindful-suites-goals-app-some-self-reflection.html) was to find meaning and fulfillment in life. That's also the best goal I have for the next quarter and the next year, as far as I know. There will be specific sub goals, of course, and the hope is for these sub goals to get more and more meaningful and asymptotically approach that by goal of meaning and fulfillment. for now, then, I can only chase the small goals, and look for progressively bigger and better small goals.

I'll end, as Michael ends his dopamine detoxes, with notes of gratitude. I'm writing this reflection from a place of great privilege and security. I haven't really suffered any major harm from the pandemic. My resources, connections, and opportunities hare been plentiful, and continue to be. At a personal level, I have amazing friends from Andover and elsewhere, and an endlessly supportive and hardworking mother.

The future is uncertain, and I've experienced a lot of feeling lost and unsure about where I am and where I'm going. We can but trudge onwards, though. Happy new year. Here's to life.

[^rough]: "I have diverged from the realm of this journal entry being a brilliant, beautiful sequence of revelation. It has become just another rough capsule of time, to be stored now and hopefully revisited later." a quote from later in the entry

[^melancholy]: "What has irreversibly passed by, lost to the currents of time, residing now only in memory? ...the feeling of loss is strong, but it's a melancholy, not grief: I do not know how to untangle it, and it is buried and intertwined with too many layers of excitement and thought to be focused on and let untangle on its own." another quote from the entry

what has irreversibly passed by, lost to the currents of time, residing now only in memory

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

7 PM tonight was an important time for a friend of mine.

This was someone who was very college-oriented, but also straight up the smartest person who I'm close friends with, who I look up to or at least consider my equal in everything academic, STEM or humanities (her common app essay would have put winners of essay competitions to shame). Her college focus wasn't the kind of narrow-sighted focus so many kids waste away their lives and vitalities on. Hers had her do everything right, keep touch with reailty, find lots of fulfillment, pursue lots of hobbies and projects, and stay on a graceful, unbroken arc of joyful excellence.

A grade below me, last year she pestered me constantly about my college apps and decisions, the former of which were poorly done and the latter of which were accordingly lackluster. This year, going through things herself, her attitude was 100% changed. The kind of self-doubt and anxiety that affects any humble person heavily invested in this institutional path came into play as if she hadn't a thought that she was so good at everything she did.

And, in a wave of all of my other friends getting deferrals from EDs from less selective schools, at 7 PM tonight, she found out that she got into Harvard.

As a reject far from having accepted my rejection ("don’t mind me just trying to ignore my own pain of college rejections that happened just a year ago, ouch they still hurt," a friend in my grade sent in a group chat recently), I'll admit, there was some part of me that was rooting against her. Rooting against the belief that there was an optimized, systematic way to approach college apps, that more research or more effort would have netted me better results; rooting against the belief that my failure, and the failure of all my other friends, are ultimately our fault, regardless of whether or not it matters, regardless of whether or not we had the parental support, whether the time and effort made sense to put in -- we tried to hit a goal, and we failed, and it was our fault, because someone else was able to succeed with the same resources.

"Do you have faith in me?" my now Harvard-bound friend asked at one point. "I'll give you all the faith my cynical heart can summon," I replied, supposed cynicism a mask for my own insecurities that lay underneath.

When she excitedly told me her decision, a part of my ego definitely shattered. It was a sequence of happenings I had seen enough times to not be surprised by for more than a few moments. A friend described a similar reaction to her deferral just days ago -- at first, feeling fine about it, until a close friend of hers had a good result, at which point all came emotionally crashing down. The same happened to me last year when a best friend had good ED results, me crashing particularly strongly because I was at the peak of my passion projects at the time, and was suddenly made to question whether they -- my passions, my very sense of self and being -- were in fact sabotaging my life.

Same phenomena now. My friend's positive decision seemed a confirmation that all of my identified reasons for failure were excuses, and I had simply been sub-par as a person.

And whatever, discussions about false meritocracy and the value of higher ed and tying it to your own self worth can go on for days. I didn't write this blog post to talk about that.

I wrote this blog post, and I brought up all the conflict above because, a few hours later, something magical happened.

At 11 PM, I got around to watching a reaction video my Harvard-bound friend had recorded and sent me. I wasn't sure what to expect; my own reactions last year had been carefully stifled the whole way through, more and more so as time went on. This friend wasn't typically externally overreactive.

The reaction in her video, though, was anything but contained. The anticipation was expectedly high as she navigated to the portal, but the reaction caught me entirely off guard. It was explosive in its joy and excitement. In the cheers, the jumping, the unending laughter that rung through the air, there was an energy -- a life force -- that transcended all else. It filled my weighed-down mind and battered-up self-image and then wiped them away entirely, leaving nothing but a sheer happiness, a pure humanity, a mode of being one and the same with existence that was impossible to counter, impossible to think about, impossible to subconsciously drag down, only to live and to feel.

"A friend of mine had a good decision today," I sent to a group chat full of deferred friends.

> my first reaction was like ah shit my life is a wreck
>
> then they sent their reaction video and there was just so much sheer joy and happiness and a blinding light overcame the darkness of being lost in life and i was just happi

Settled down a little from the high -- its traces still lingering if I think to the memory -- a thought comes to my mind.

> just a random unexpected perspective
>
> remember and appreciate humanity
>
> in an application process that often so brutally destroys it
>
> love yourself and love life and seek joy

We're human. We're alive. We love and are loved. We feel happiness.

We abstract upon these core ideas endlessly, losing sight of them in 90% of our lives, but at the end of the day, they are the things that matter — and sometimes, the reminder that they do can come from the most unlikely of places.


coleg

Browsing through music in Spotify — unsatisfied by a racing Mendelssohn piano piece — I find my way to a playlist of Chinese EXO songs (inspired to search for by Riku having Jay Chou in his top songs of the year). My Chinese isn't good enough to understand the lyrics unaided, so I Google song lyrics quickly and follow along with occasional songs.

Quickly I find lines that thrill me: "走向谁都未知的那个明天" in El Dorado is one of them I sent to a group chat in excitement. It's the little flairs with language — "那个明天" — that are so exciting, at once familiar and new. The language is the one I grew up speaking, but it contains the lyricism and beauty of language that I've only associated with English, exposed only to the textbook and homey spoken Chinese that I was.

Other songs excite me in different ways. Tempo, the first Chinese EXO song I looked up the lyrics for, was just fun and exciting, mildly badass: "I said don’t mess up my tempo / 这是我偷心的武器 / 别乱了我节奏 独一无二的 One two three..."

Sing For You caught me off guard with a feeling not just of excitement, but also of nostalgia. At some point in our lives, our music taste is shaped more by nostalgia for what we grew up listening to rather than the thrill of new discoveries, a friend once told me. I had never heard this song before. The lyrics are comparatively straightforward and un-flowery. But its warmth and softness, the vulnerability in the lyrics...it's a flavor of Chinese I haven't experienced since early, early childhood, when Chinese was my only language and thus the capsule for the full extent of my self and emotion, before a rift opened between my family and the world around me, the past and the future, my heritage and my life. [^threebody]

[^threebody]: Some of my favorite books from last summer were Liu Cixin's *Three Body* trilogy, which I read in translated English. Multiple friends of mine — some international, one ABC like me — read it, and speak about it, in Chinese. It's a strange feeling being so close to Chinese culture — I'm much luckier than the countless ABCs who struggle to even speak in Chinese — and yet so far from being able to truly take it in or be a part of it. This is only exacerbated by my father being a published Chinese sci-fi author 😛 My relationship with my Chinese heritage and identity is one I've yet to really process and understand...

走向谁都末知的那个明天

How I achieved exponential growth (ft. mindsets, connections, high standards, and passion) and then burned out

"I follow tech like people follow sports," I told an admissions interviewer once in ninth grade. "I know what the best products are, what differentiates them, what each of the companies are up to."

I was a tech nerd as a kid. You know the type — if you've been a young boy recently it's likely you've even embodied this nerdery yourself. My favorite YouTube channel at one point was Dave2D, whom I admired for his comprehensive, stats-based, level-headed laptop reviews, like one might admire a particular sports analyst and honor their predictions. Of course I also watched the obligatory channels: LinusTechTips, MKBHD, Austin Evans, TechnoBuffalo, TLDToday, and a long list of others.

At any given moment, I could tell you what the *best* laptop on the market was. I could tell you what the best graphics cards, CPUs, even motherboards and computer *cases* were. Not the best laptop or product for you, or the one that you should buy, just this abstract, competitive sense of *good*. Again, like one might argue for a sports player or team out of passion rather than meaningful analysis.

Like any tech nerd, I was always thinking about my dream setup. I put together Amazon wish lists with the monitors, keyboards, mice, and speakers I would buy, and pieced together components for custom builds on PCPartPicker. Watching videos from a family ASUS laptop that was physically falling apart by the day (the hinge assembly had cracked) or an iPhone 4S with not a square inch not shattered, I dreamed of having the latest and greatest ultrabook or phone.

Well, eventually these dreams started to come true. Our family had to buy a new laptop at some point, and with my extensive knowledge I made the pick, ending up with a Dell XPS 13 as dazzling as if it came straight off of the CES showfloor. For my first non-hand-me-down phone, I convinced my mom to let me back the Nextbit Robin on Kickstarter. I loved Android, but the phone itself was terrible, with a crummy camera, overheating issues, and unpredictable battery life with random shutdowns. A hit and a miss.

At first, these gains only fueled my tech obsession. I convinced my mom to get a Nexus 6P, and my sister a Nexus 5X. After my Nextbit became unusable within the year, my mom got me an OG Pixel XL, which I traded up for a 2XL the next year (I still use the 2XL; my mom today also has a 2XL and my sister has a 2. My work turned us into a Pixel family haha). I published laptop reviews on my YouTube channel to viewer counts consistently in the tens of thousands. For Christmas one year, I was shocked and elated when my mom ok'd about $1500 of PC parts and peripherals to make my own desktop setup. Another year, I got my hands on an A6500 with a beautiful 35mm f/1.8 prime.

Four years ago I got into my dream school of Andover, a boarding school half an hour north of Boston. (In fact, that's what the interview mentioned at the beginning of this blog post was for). I remember, some time after moving my setup and other belongings over to my new dorm room, sitting in front of my monitor — maybe editing videos, maybe doing schoolwork, or just playing Rocket League — and having a pretty jarring thought: everything that I wished for two, three, four years ago had come true.

I was living on my own, at my dream school, taking dream classes. My childhood best friend was there (though he didn't want to be my best friend anymore). And in front of me was a 4K monitor, a mechanical keyboard, an MX Master, a custom built gaming-ish PC with more power than I could use, and a camera that shot at a higher quality than cinema cameras a decade ago (in only some respects, but you get the point).

I didn't know what to do with this thought. There was the revelation that, wow, wait, my parents are actually rich and super willing to spend money on me. For some reason, the hundred-dollar price differences I obsessed over like sports stats...didn't matter in the scope that my mom operated at, at least not in the same way as to me.

For the next few years, my sports-y outlook on tech didn't really change, but grew stagnant as I didn't know what to do with it. I had reached the pinnacle of my imagined ladder, but there was no prize or championship title.

It's only in the last few months that my outlook on tech products has changed, and I understood why my mom didn't care about the things I did, having her seemingly less-informed approach towards making purchasing decisions.

In retrospect, of course, it's obvious how silly the little-kid kind of tech obsession is. Tech products aren't players in some sport, they're meant to be marketed to and used by real people as just a small part of their real lives. And in the scheme of your life, it doesn't matter if a laptop that's $2000 is only 10% better than a laptop that's $1000, or that an i7 is totally overkill for PowerPoint and you could just close your tabs and everything will be okay. If you're a businessperson making million dollar deals through Word documents, emails, and phone calls, a 10% improvement in the tools you use daily, or not having to worry about too many tabs slowing down a simple but crucial task, is easily worth that $1000 and more.

I've realized this as a software engineer. I work in a shared office space in downtown New York. The guy in the office next to me has a computer that looks like this, beautifully displayed in the glass window to the hallway:

![](/blog/2020-12/rgb.jpg)

My computer, on the other hand, looks like this:

![](/blog/2020-12/sff.jpg)

To a tech nerd, my build might actually be cooler than his. His is a standard, boxy ATX build. Mine is a tiny, painstakingly-built mini-ITX PC that turned my old mATX PC into something I can fit in my backpack (or just a smaller suitcase, as it is). A video I made on this build has 20K views, steadily bringing in more views even two years later.

The thing is, I don't care anymore.

The video I made for the mini-ITX build was almost even accidental — I had recorded a timelapse of the build and wanted to provide some context, for my own documentations' sake. I didn't expect anyone else to care, let alone for it to accumulate thousands of views.

Friends who don't know much about PC building — and even some who do — have mistaken this PC for some sort of heater or other household appliance.

See those two jumper wires in the back? Touching them together is the equivalent of pressing the power button, because the real power button broke and I had to find some way to be able to turn my PC on and off.

Compared to the Threadripper and RTX 2060 in my officemate's build, my PC is a snail. Hell, there are laptops today that are cheaper and more powerful than my desktop, *and* as light as my laptop with better battery life. Three or four years ago, I would have been entranced by those kind of stats. Today, though, that Threadripper build is...just another build. Good for the guy next door to have it. I bet he doesn't care much for its intricacies, either, just using a conveniently powerful PC to run his construction surveying business.

My shoebox build is beautiful, humble, and still blazing fast for everything I need it for and more. It's not that I don't appreciate its performance and all the care I put into maximizing it, but I appreciate it in new ways. I appreciate that Jekyll builds my blog twice or three times as fast as my laptop. I appreciate that it can run monster Docker containers and power an entire local enterprise SaaS backend for me to develop on. I appreciate that I can load up Zoom or Gmail reliably at any moment rather than waiting the 15 seconds up to several minutes that it takes on my laptop.

My setup is gorgeous — again, everything I dreamed of a few years ago. But it's only that. I've been using that mechanical keyboard, without any backlighting or fanciness, since I got it four years ago. The monitor, too, has been around since the beginning, and the mic is the same model as the mic my dad bought for me when I was in elementary school. My MX Master — the nicest, techiest mouse in existence — I sold to a friend at school, and now I use a $10 gaming mouse my mom bought off of Amazon.

![](/blog/2020-12/setup.jpg)

Don't get me wrong, I know that this is a ludicrously nice setup. It came from my upper-middle-class family that was able to drop a couple thousand dollars on things that make my life easier. I'm only now starting to make my own money and purchases.

But there's a sort of stability here. My silly childhood tech obsessiveness is solidly anchored now by maturity, an early arc of my life come to an end, in anticipation of new ones to come. I realize now that it was a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality that overcame me when I walked by that RGB Threadripper build for the umpteenth time, compelling me to jot down this blog post.

There's no unique or profound point to make here, only a story of mine that's run its course and now exists only in memory, whether fading away in my brain or shared out in this blog post. I sometimes hear about the pursuits of younger siblings of friends — some who are impressed by my videos and setup, some who are far deeper in than I ever was — and I'm reminded of my own past.

To me, this naiive, childish, sometimes expensive obsession is beautiful — a rippling embodiment of childhood, growing up, and the passage of time.

my childhood tech obsession is beautiful

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

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how I should think and act to steer my life in a purposeful direction — "maximize the potential of your life," as TKS co-founder Nadeem Nathoo puts it.

Four months ago may have been the peak of my life so far in terms of feeling like I knew what I was doing. College apps had been turned in. My grueling 20-hours-a-week tenure as Executive Digital Editor of *The Phillipian* had come to a close, my two major initiatives — rebuilding the website and launching a live broadcast news show — carrying on strong under the new board's leadership. I had made it through all the required and perquisite classes, picking up a love for the humanities in the process, and thoroughly enjoyed the various electives I was taking. I embarked on an independent research project and was selected to present a TEDx talk. I gave up my phone for 72 hours for a philosophy class assignment, and didn't take it back until I left for break — I no longer needed anybody to tell me what to do.

As I wrote in [a blog post two months ago](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/05/02/what-do-you-truly-want-to-accomplish-before-you-die-mindful-suites-goals-app-some-self-reflection.html), I held that "the purpose of my life...is to continuously learn and think and seek out a larger meaning." Being on Andover's campus validated this, rewarding me for engaging indiscriminately with all disciplines and directions of classes, clubs, and people. I was a leader and changemaker within campus organizations and its community, but not beyond — there was so much to do and learn within the campus, there was no reason to really extend beyond it. If I had continued on the ideal trajectory, going on to an elite liberal arts institution, then grad school or management consulting or whatever after that, I could have continued to find fulfillment from this mindset, forever accumulating knowledge, intellect, ability to lead. Yale professor William Deresiewicz calls this the "paradox of potential" in his book *Excellent Sheep*, criticizing elite educational institutions for creating a culture of stifling original thought and seeking of individual purpose. I don't entirely agree with his judgement on the matter, but he identifies the same kind of semi-insulated, philomathean bubble that I was in at Andover, and didn't intend to leave behind.

This bubble began to thin away, however, when my college decisions came out. I had planned to double major in English and Computer Science, but ended up committing to Georgia Tech, a school that was amazing for CS but didn't offer an English major at all. Moving forward, seeking excellence (i.e. through CS projects and internships) would require specialization, not idealistic exploration. The course of my life suddenly felt deeply derailed, not because my specific prospects were changing all that much — I planned to major in CS wherever I went, after all — but because the value system on which I had built my understanding of myself was no longer viable, and I quickly began to compensate. "I had often looked forward to college being a confident fresh start, the continuing growth of my potential and self," I wrote in [my senior reflection piece](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/06/07/a-love-letter-to-the-non-library-andover-commencement-commentary.html). "[Instead], it seemed like it was once again time to humble myself, just put my head down and move forward through the uncertainty. I scrambled to apply to internships, programs, whatever I could find. I completely forgot the self that I had previously found." To Georgia Tech, I submitted an application for deferred admission after a gap year.

Faced with uncertainty, I fell back on the tools and frameworks I knew best. The first of these: "do to learn, not learn to do." This is one of my longest- and deepest-held principles, learned from my dad pushing me to learn outside of class as a kid, to found clubs and design my own experiments. As a middle schooler, I taught myself filmmaking and web development by running a tech YouTube channel and constantly iterating on my personal website, respectively. From project to project, iteration to iteration, I continuously added new techniques and used new tools, building my skills and polishing old ones. My ability to learn quickly and endless raw self-initiative helped me provide value wherever I went: as a graphic designer for a political campaign in ninth grade; the founder of my robotics team's media team; the Executive Digital Editor of *The Phillipian*, chosen with minimal prior experience, but abundant vision and drive. I was frequently validated for this trait, gaining leadership positions and success not by grinding the "traditional way," but by my own initiatives. Unsurprisingly, I began to rapidly build and learn after my more recent moment of crisis. I had attempted to learn d3.js multiple times before, but now I bashed out an entire [customizable charting library](https://wwsalmon.github.io/sota.js/) that was deployed on *The Phillipian*'s [State of the Academy project](https://sota.phillipian.net/). I had long been terrified of React, but blitzed through all of [serverless-stack.com](http://serverless-stack.com) in about a week and a half, starting work on a full-stack webapp right after.

My self-initiative was once my proudest trait, my slogan of "do to learn, not learn to do" plastered across my resume and website. By the time I got into Andover, though, I had began to lose faith in it. Sure, doing my own thing led to a good amount of learning and recognition, but I also missed out on a ton of opportunities — things like competitions, research, or even new clubs, that my "do to learn" framework deemed less valuable than working on my own projects within the track I was already on. At Andover, I attempted to contain my urge to create more than nurture it: piling on classes, prioritizing connections with the people around me, pushing myself to stop doing and talking and do more listening and learning. Indeed, in class discussions and late night conversations, I found a new sense of fulfillment and appreciation, which I then built my value system upon. hen the initial thrill from my recent surge of building faded, this same doubt soon found me. The things that I've been doing lack focus; no part feels truly meaningful, or like it's building directly towards something truly meaningful. I wasn't happy with how I was spending my energy; something was missing.

The feeling of needing to do more was further hammered in when I went to a talk by TKS alum Ben Nashman. Nashman is the 20 years old founder of a wearable biometrics company. He had entered TKS at 16, researching MRI technology and inventing a new MRI technique. When trying to implement this technique, Nashman found that the required hardware was infeasible; but in the process, he discovered a way to measure blood concentrations of glucose and other biomarkers, the technology that he eventually dropped out of college to pursue the development of. TKS co-founder Nadeem Nathoo asked him a question after his talk. "What is the vision behind your company? How will the world be completely changed because of your work?" Nashman answered that these measurements aren't usually taken until something goes wrong; the vision of his work is to make them beforehand with real-time monitoring, furthering a revolutionarily impactful shift towards preventative medicine. Even if the technology itself wasn't incredibly powerful or directly impactful, there was a huge vision behind it, and this is what struck me. Nashman was 16 when he entered TKS, starting a journey of just four years to where he is now. I'm 17 now, going into TKS, yet I don't even know what direction to look in for any semblance of a specific, impactful vision or purpose. How do I begin to find this direction and ensure that I move down it? How do I move from my unfocused, half-finished webapps to actually meaningful learning and building?

The first answer that I briefly came up with was the familiar idea that people and environment are everything. After passion, vision, and discipline, IndieHackers co-founder [Courtland Allen names "other people" as critical ingredients to "staying focused."](https://www.notion.so/Passion-vision-discipline-and-people-bd437690cdf547eda6a77b92dadee8af#49de8f9a45a74f6faece53b5901dbcee) I had joined a literary magazine as a staff writer before being promoted to Associate Editor and finally Executive Board; I'm on the Board of Directors of a food rescue organization, starting up a branch in New York as well. I pour time into meetings and work for these commitments not because I believed they would be directly impactful or meaningful, but because it allows me to work with people and leaders that I admire. Similarly, even though my CS projects feel like a slow drag, through them I've been able to connect with lots of other developers and entrepreneurs, including industry professionals who have offered lots of insights and advice. I reasoned that, just by virtue of being around purposeful and successful people, I would find my own way back to fulfilling work and existence.

This mindset would probably have gotten me where I wanted eventually — maybe just continuously building would have too; but success would either be one-time (give a man a fish...), or resulting from a further epiphany, as confronting and taking charge of myself in my new reality seemed to demand new, deeper ideas. I didn't have to wait long to stumble upon a hypothesis for what this new idea might be, though. In the same talk that had heightened my crisis, I was able to find one.

In his talk, Ben Nashman had emphasized the importance of being in an environment that nurtures your innate curiosity. At first, I had just brushed this off as, "oh yeah, environment and people are important, I've heard this before." It wasn't until a few days later that I processed the second part of what he had said. I read an amazing blog post by Laura Deming titled ["Advice for ambitious teenagers"](https://ldeming.posthaven.com/advice-for-ambitious-teenagers) that put it in a more dramatic way: "Question everything." She points to Isaac Newton's notebooks, in which he wrote questions like "what is heat?" and "what is light?" These seemingly oversimplistic, or unworthy to be pursued, questions, are what lead to Newton and other mathematicians' and scientists' greatest discoveries.

Reflecting on my own past year, I find that these kind of questions are at the root of my most fulfilling experiences. "Inside this box is the meaning of life," our Existentialism teacher told our class on the first day. "If you open it, what do you think you'll find?" This unanswerable question, "what is the meaning of life?", lead into the weighty and intricate of Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, and Sartre, that have shaped my understanding of existence and life ever since. Similarly, for an independent research project, my main question was: "what does it mean to be Asian American?" It's a terrible, terrible research question. It has no scope and reflects zero background research. Yet, fixating on it, reading without immediate aim about Asian American history, ethnic studies, and whatever else, was a revelatory experience, leading to me beginning to understand America in a totally new way, to understand what systemic racism and race itself actually mean at a much more meaningful level, knowledge that has proven itself incredibly important in the past few weeks.

My hypothesis, then, is that this innate curiosity is what drives human innovation and progress, or at least is one critical component of what does. I'm reminded of something I saw in an interview of Susan Cain I edited for my literary magazine just last night: reflecting on the performative nature of today's youth art/literature world, Cain encouraged artists to create something that they never want others to see. Art is about revealing deep truths, she said, and isolating yourself can be a way to better access them and bring them out. The kind of purpose, meaning, and eventually impact that I'm seeking is no less a form of art. Though external frameworks can help, the root source of accessing the deep truths that lead to meaning and progress is ultimately our purely internal and fundamentally human curiosity. There must be a question at the foundation of every meaningful endeavor, though it may only be found once it has been started. This explains why going into Ethnic Studies or sociology or some other form of humanities academia strongly appeals to me as a way to lead a meaningful life; it explains why, though I'm building and learning so much each day, I struggle to find fulfillment in my CS pursuits; or why, though I'm connecting with so many amazing people across the organizations I'm a part of, I find myself questioning if my time would be better spent elsewhere.

This framework doesn't lessen the importance of building, learning, and connecting; rather, it offers guidance on how to do so in the most meaningful way possible. Working off of questions that you care about provides you with vision and passion, half of Courtland Allen's aforementioned four key ingredients to focus. For a bad stupid question, either vision or passion may falter, but that's okay, you'll know when it happens and can move on. A good stupid question, on the other hand, will provide the strongest possible forms of vision and passion to drive your work. For building and learning, this framework tells us to do so in service of questions that we truly care about, that are stupid, naive questions coming from a place of internal curiosity, for this is how we find deep truths, original ideas, meaning, and progress. For connecting with others, I return to Laura Deming's blog post: "Find the best person in your field. Grill them relentlessly on which problems they find interesting." The way to get the most out of your peers and mentors is not by seeking partnership or advice in relation to your own trajectory; rather, it's to access their innate curiosity, what they care about most, the deep truths that they have spent their time and energy unearthing.

All said, am I going to re-evaluate everything I'm doing, purging everything that isn't rooted in worldview-challenging questions and relentlessly chasing the deepest ones I can summon in myself? Of course not. One complication is that I still don't know how to do this well; this framework is a value system, not an instruction manual. I'll keep following the principles that I now view as a little less fundamental, building and connecting my way forward. But innate curiosity is something I have a new appreciation for now, and will try to nurture deliberately: I've started a Notion page just for writing down questions, big or small. On my list right now: "How are quantum computers programmed?" "How do we prevent or alleviate causes and effects of climate change?" "How do we make meetings not a huge waste of time?"

I'm not sure if what I've written here is actually grounded or useful. Perhaps a year later I'll look back and find gaps and false assumptions. But that's okay! Life is complicated, and continuous learning is a crucial tool for getting through it. The purpose of this post is for me to document my journey and thoughts for myself, and to have something to share out for feedback and for others to better understand me. For now, then, I'll be attempting to question my way to meaning![^email]

[^email]: I tried to write this blog post as soon as I had this sequence of realizations. I spent the majority of two days with this as my priority task, and utterly failed to make progress on it, instead just getting behind on all my other writing and deadlines. This writing only came together accidentally, a rough draft accidentally emerging in an email to TKS New York director Hayley Caddes. I've been putting off some other work to do this, but oh well, it's done now and I'm really glad that it is.

Building, connecting, and questioning my way to meaning

“How are you feeling?” I asked a senior friend around this time last year. “Everything has an added weight to it,” he replied. “Heavy with the thought that everything I do might be the last time I do it.”

This is how I always imagined how I would be feeling now. The bittersweetness of a proper goodbye: the long hugs, the tears, the boxes, the surreality of your world emptying out around you, and then passing by outside the window. The weight of realizing that time has irreversibly passed, experiences, thoughts, and feelings lived once and never again, only remembered. My commencement commentary, I imagined, would be an embodiment of this. I was no stranger to sappy farewell addresses: to the paper, to friends, to each of the past eight terms, given in journal entries written on Amtrak trains speeding southwest. This last farewell would be the same, the biggest of them all, an outflow of memories and emotions that I would curate into a neat thousand-word portrait.

Instead, I find myself at a loss for what to say. I feel blocked off from who I was, who I am. I reflect on the past three years and I have no problem finding the brightest glowing pieces, putting them into words, and affirming their value to me, but I do so with a blank heart. I write without truly remembering.

I don’t remember fall days on the lawn, or in Snyder when EEE was the dominant pathological concern on our minds. I don’t remember the fresh air, the wisps of summer heat draining away, the softness of grass or crunch of gravel beneath my feet, the golden shafts of late afternoon shattering between the leaves and branches above. I don’t remember meeting the person who would become my best friend, who has been by my side for all three of these unremembered years, who flew out to Hong Kong when I was stranded there and then almost let me die of a high fever in a hotel in Shanghai.

I literally forgot about one of the proudest things I’ve ever made, the video that for a year was attached to my name: I forgot that John has a plan for me, that he only loves his million dollar squash courts, he’s sorry. I don’t remember Charlie Mayhew calling me and telling me to come to WPAA at 9:30 AM on a rainy Sunday morning. I don’t remember the rush of running tech on show night, seeing the columns of Samphil flash on to the screen. I don’t remember the audience laughing so loud at every line that I worried they’d miss the next (subtitles were a good call), roaring and applauding until the screen turned black and the spotlights came back on, four minutes that compete for the happiest in my life.

At this point I don’t even remember the Newsroom, the place that contained everything that I cared about for a year. I don’t remember the twinkle and glow of the string lights, the colorful paintings and signatures scrawled on every wall, ceiling tile, and surface, the commotion of three dozen people wading urgently through a small sea of half-broken chairs and backpacks to reach the rice krispies and capri suns spilling out of green Whole Foods bags. I don’t remember the joyful voices, the revelatory conversations, the cathartic screams that filled the cramped and poorly circulated air. I don’t remember the bottomless feeling that I didn’t and would never belong in that space, or the place that I eventually found for myself, the crushing pressure and unending sprint that is total responsibility, the boundless and radiant love for the people who I knew would be by my side no matter what.

At the end of winter term, I felt like I had finally carved out a place for myself and found some sense of who I was. I slept at 10 PM and woke up at 5:30 AM, chugging as much water as I could before jogging into the chilly morning air, summiting Boston Hill just as the pink cast of sunrise began to soak the hillside below. I lost and found myself in the thrill of revelatory conversations, the pride from a friend telling me “I appreciate you in discussions,” the awe and excitement of meaningful reading and research. I turned in my phone for Existentialism and didn’t take it back until I left for break — I didn’t need anything or anyone telling me what to do, what hoop to jump through next. I lived in the bliss of finally getting to just be an Andover student, just be a senior, just be me.

Now this too feels a world away. I had often looked forward to college being a confident fresh start, the continuing growth of my potential and self; instead, with spring warmth and longer days came the realization that I would be spending my next four years at an amazing school — that didn’t offer an English major. It seemed like it was once again time to humble myself, just put my head down and move forward through the uncertainty. I scrambled to apply to internships, programs, whatever I could find. I completely forgot the self that I had previously found. Later, when a call with someone in an entrepreneurship program turned into a two-hour-long discussion about trauma literature and existentialist philosophy, I rediscovered what it felt like to be me. 

But, separated from my Andover self, from the mythic bliss of senior spring and my own romantic conception of what my Andover farewell would look like, I don’t feel like I’ve come to any new clarity or understanding of my Andover experience. I write this commentary feeling simply lost, maybe more so than at any time in my life before. Reading my friends’ drafts, I’m wracked with guilt. Why do I struggle so much to find meaning, something cohesive to share? The situation is far from what I expected, but I pride myself in my ability to adapt to whatever hits me and keep going. Where was the new insight, the ever-steady continuation of the narrative? Was there even anything about my Andover journey worth sharing? I spent entire days putting everything else off to write, only to type gibberish totally disconnected from myself; time after time I all but decided to give up.

Yet, nine days past the submission deadline, I continue trying to bash out this article. I owe this to Tessa, who urged me to keep going and alleviated my guilt by being even further behind on her article than me; to Junah, who humbled me down into the ground with her endlessly confident, thoughtful article; and to Kelly, who guided my final realization: that it’s okay not to have a grand, profound revelation to share. It’s okay to accept my understanding of my Andover experience as what it’s become, to appreciate my three years here without feeling the need to unpack every bit of it. It’s okay to let myself have faith in myself, faith that I’ll eventually find myself again, that things will be okay.

Instead of the warmth, the loving sorrow, the bittersweet nostalgia I thought this article would contain, it ends up being a simple expression of gratitude — not for a unified whole, but for a patchwork of people, places, and memories that I don’t know how to fit together (Junah’s the puzzle master, after all). Maybe in a bit of time, after classes really, truly, finally, end, or while listening to commencement speeches on Zoom, or when the class of ’21 walks down the vista with a new Head of School that we first interviewed but who will never be ours; maybe then a greater semblance of Andover will come together. Maybe then the full force of three of the most transformative, meaningful years of my life so far will crash through the wall of separation and down onto me. But I’m not going to chase this. For now, I am grateful for the Andover that I have. I will hold these big blue fragments deep in my heart and cherish them in whatever shape they take, however much space they take up, whatever direction or lack thereof that they steer me in.[^org] [^title]

[^org]: Originally published in the [Commencement issue](http://pdf.phillipian.net/2020/06072020.pdf) of *[The Phillipian](https://phillipian.net/)* on June 7, 2020.

[^title]: About the title: during my upper (11th grade) year, the campus library was closed for renovations, scattering the large amount of students who normally worked there across temporary replacement locations across campus. So many of my memories, especially fleeting ones, were made in this non-library; this article is a love letter to these fleeting memories, a love letter to the non-library.

A Love Letter to the Non-Library (Andover Commencement Commentary)

Today, I opened the Google Play Store on my phone, searched for a goal-setting app I had found through IndieHackers, and installed it. I opened it and was greeted by a standard onboarding experience; panels that slid by, a Google sign up button. Then, without warning, I was greeted with the following question:


![](/blog/2020-05/northstar-question.png)


Now, normally I’m skeptical of any digital goal-setting tools. I’ve tried Todoist, Trello, all sorts of things before. Sometimes, they’re incredibly useful, like for keeping track of work for *The Phillipian*, which involved managing a dozen different teams and subprojects at once. Most of the time, though, for personal task tracking, I find that digital tools just get in my way. They’re too powerful, too easy to use, too easy to get rid of tasks or add new ones. Something physical that takes more effort to change around keeps me much more grounded. At school, I use a planner and a scrap notebook that I keep with me whenever I can; locked at home, I use a big 3ft x 2ft whiteboard to keep track of my week.

Today, the IndieHackers newsletter arrived in my inbox; I clicked open a few links and deleted the email. One of them was at the top of the frontpage: "[My answer to ‘Should you quit your full-time job to be an indie hacker?’ - after a year of being indie,](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/my-answer-to-should-you-quit-your-full-time-job-to-be-an-indie-hacker-after-a-year-of-being-indie-27917b8cc8)” by Terry Xu (“My answer is a definitive ‘Yes,’” in case you were wondering about his answer). It was a good read, with some cool insights (“Launching a startup full-time is already hard. Doing it part-time requires MORE discipline to become successful, not LESS. So launching a successful start-up part-time is actually an ‘ADVANCED’ mode, not the 'EASY’ mode as I thought,” touching on some ideas of focused work and commitment that I had read/heard about in other places), but I was curious about what his product actually was that made him so optimistic. So, I clicked into his profile.

To my initial disbelief, I saw that his project was a task-tracking app. To even more disbelief, I saw that it had been featured on ProductHunt. What? Seemingly the most oversaturated app market in the world and he had managed to carve out a spot. How? The ProductHunt tagline gave me the first part of the explanation: “Priorities - A todo app for today and tomorrow only.” I read a quick blog post, citing an essay on productivity by a Venture Capitalist. Strip down and build around a concrete, novel productivity philosophy. It was cool functionality, and I began to see the value of it. But I still wasn’t convinced. There are tons of apps out there meant to revolutionize some traditional functionality that ultimately don’t end up being helpful enough to justify having another app on your phone or another account to get emails for. This is popular only because of productivity and app junkies, I thought, chasing every new tool available. Once I was among this crowd, but if anything I lean the other way now: towards minimalism, using the least amount of external tools possible, finding something good and sticking to it. I’ve even basically ditched my phone. This app is not for me, I thought.

Until I saw the promo video.

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    ></iframe>
</div>

The simplicity of the app, how it enforced this today-and-tomorrow goal-setting pattern, the satisfaction of completing tasks, the joy and order it could bring to my life — it screamed at me, grabbed me through my monitor and the upbeat music in the background. I wanted this. I still refuse to use my phone for any regular functionality, so the Android and iOS apps were off the table. I couldn’t find a webapp, and considered messaging Terry and asking him to make one, or building my own clone. But, no, this is just getting caught up in the rush. I have my ways to keep track of my life, this is definitely not worth the effort. So I didn’t end up using the app; but I will now live in envy of not doing so.

Marketing is powerful, ha. I’m reminded of some of Peter Thiel’s writing about product and marketing in *Zero to One*. But I digress. After getting hooked on this app that I could not use, I returned to Terry Xu’s profile to check out his other product. *Another* goal setting/tracking app, this tmie for long-term goals and habits. Well. I was much less skeptical this time, as “Priorities” had convinced me that this man was committed to making things that were actually different and better than what existed. I was still skeptical of doing anything unnecessary on my phone, but hey, this was long term — less consistent usage. And while the other app’s promo material made clear its functionality, this time it seemed I would learn better by downloading the app and trying for myself. So, with high expectations and some enthusiasm, I did so.

That brings us now to the question that stared me down as described in the beginning of this blog post. For emphasis, here it is again.


![](/blog/2020-05/northstar-question.png)


Whatever I had ever expected from any app, this was not it. This was literally the onboarding process, the core value proposition for the entire usage of the app. And it wasn’t some surface level feature, some way to maximize productivity or health or even happiness. No. Essentially, “What is your purpose in life? What are your values: not only the ones that you live by, but the ones that you live for?”

Life is about values. Life is about choosing your struggles, not avoiding or minimizing it.[^manson] [Life is about the process, not the outcome](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/03/13/meaning-and-purpose-in-life-as-an-equilibrium-of-monkey-mechanisms-in-an-unmonkey-world-briefly-ft-coronavirus.html). Life is an infinite game, and must be played as such.[^sinek] “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”[^kalanithi] It’s been said a million times in a million different ways; it’s the understanding of meaning that I strive to make the basis of my life. Here was an app that did the same. My high expectations, demands of something different and novel, had been absolutely shattered, and a few more layers than that, too, getting to some of my deepest-held beliefs. I was in love.

“If you can only choose one thing, what do you truly want to accomplish before you die?” Faced with this question, I sat down on my couch. An external nudge pushing me to self reflect and consolidate my life and thoughts; an almost always welcome opportunity. 

My answer was somewhat less sharply soul-touching than the question.


![](/blog/2020-05/northstar-ans.png)


“That’s inspiring!” …if you say so, lol. It’s really vague, because this is as far as I feel my reading, thinking, and living has taken me. Manson’s *Subtle Art* established what values are and how they’re fundamental to any part of life, but as he writes on his blog, he doesn’t go beyond that — that’s for his second and much less favorably reviewed book, *Everything is F*cked*. Perhaps the unfavorability of this second book hints at Manson riding a wave of success and falling off in his writing, but perhaps it’s something bigger, about the idea of a universal framework for meaning itself. Existentialist philosophy — in particular that I’ve read, Kierkegaard and Sartre — define meaning in life almost by its absence: if there is a meaning to life, being trapped in our mortal subjectivities we may never know it, so the only meaning to life is what we create for ourselves. “Man is nothing but what he makes of himself.”[^sartre]

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t thinking out there that can help me on the right track; but the line between meaningful content of this topic building off of an existentialist or value-based starting point and regressing to focusing on outcome and forgetting about process is a hard one to see, differentiable perhaps only by the intuition of experience. We don’t go straight to meaning. Kalanithi pursued medicine because he sought the meaning of life, and he sought the meaning of life because his mother stuffed him with literature; at the end, he found being a surgeon, essentially, to be the meaning of his life, choosing to operate through his terminal diagnosis until he couldn’t anymore. There are [four stages to life](https://markmanson.net/four-stages-of-life), Manson writes: mimicry, self-discovery, commitment, and legacy. Kalanithi’s life fits neatly into this framework; I’m still working my way through mimicry and self-discovery, on my way to finding meaning to commit to.

What values do I want my life to be lived in service of? I don’t know right now. The purpose of my life right now is to continuously learn and think and seek out a larger meaning, so all I can say about where I hope to get in life is that I want it to be a “fulfilling, purposeful state of existence.” Maybe that means changing the world in some way, as a politician or an activist, an entrepreneur or CEO. Maybe it just means finding and surrounding myself with people that I love. On your deathbed, the scale of the world melts away; only your values are left.

Okay, that was the very first question of the onboarding. I’ve been reminded that I’m living a life, not an application process, not a school, not a career. What’s next?


![](/blog/2020-05/goal-question.png)


Okay, a much more down-to-earth question. Before I explain my answer, let me back up a bit.

A few months ago, I “launched” [YouTube Liberation](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/youtube-liberation). Really, it was just fixing a long-standing bug, creating some new promotional graphics, and putting it up on ProductHunt. But it was a realization of sorts that this was the crowd I wanted to be a part of: what ProductHunt calls “makers,” what IndieHackers calls “hackers.” I had always had vague ambitions of studying and working with computer science and entrepreneurship, with making things and starting side projects that a large amount of people would actually use. I had even lived the hacker mentality — “do to learn, not learn to do” — in my life and projects, be it learning filmmaking through my YouTube channel or WordPress by [redesigning a newspaper website getting tens of thousands of views a month](http://phillipian.net); but at other times it was a mentality I looked down on.

A parallel came up when working with/reading/thinking about journalism and accessible non-fiction vs. academic writing. On the one hand, journalism is incredibly powerful, alluring, and important. The path to get into the field is simply to start writing. Write for yourself, then get an internship at some publication and write for them, then jump from publication to publication higher and higher up, learning and making meaningful work along the way. “Don’t go to college for journalism,” nearly all of the journalists I’ve heard speak have said. It’s very reminiscent of the hacker entrepreneurial spirit. But journalism has its pitfalls; it’s easy to overlook things, to misrepresent things. It’s research from the top down rather than the bottom up, citing experts and more rigorous literature. For a research project, I ended up diving into some of this literature (Asian American studies), and fell in love with academia. It was knowledge creation in its truest form: not just setting out with energy, but also with the force and wisdom of as much of what has been done before as possible in the form of literature review, and adding on top of that a new framework to potentially push the entire field, and humanity’s entire understanding of itself, directly forward.

So I had the same nagging feeling that something was missing from indie software development, from entrepreneurship. All the talk about hustling, making money with side projects, building up skills — it seemed like it missed entirely the “why.” Why create? Why live? What was the alternative to this? Having known computer science as a very applied form of engineering in all the ways that I’ve interacted with it, rigorous computer science research feels like an oxymoron — but then again, engineering research is a thing, just one that I haven’t worked much with or understand.

On the other hand, more so than my other past ambitions of filmmaking or design, storytelling in the abstract, computer science just as a form of engineering felt like something comfortingly concrete and rigorous. Programming and development are things I’ve enjoyed a lot and have often been incredibly empowering. My own blog and website is a constant sandbox for learning and improvement. Tools like the aforementioned YouTube Liberation were things that just made my life, and the lives of my friends, better. Beyond this, engineering and development is a form of making things with real impact, not just for users but eventually driving forward technical boundaries, empowering humanity to do more and do better. This is not to dismiss creative work or civic work; certainly they can be just as necessary and impactful. I might go as far to say that, if I had the ability to do everything that I wanted, I would be driven to pursue these other paths equally as much. Perhaps the bias in my decisions and practical thoughts come down to conditioning by my parents, one a mechanical engineer and the other a software engineer.

For sure, this is an unresolved issue that I expect to understand with time. For now I just have to choose one direction and run with it, and the college application process has done just that for me. I’ll be studying computer science at Georgia Tech, which means I’ll be studying probably nothing but computer science for four years. Putting off its larger-scope value, I’m excited to dive in as rigorously as I can at one of the best computer science and engineering schools in the country. For the next few years, then, my development skills and computer science investment will probably be my greatest asset.

So, thinking about the various projects I’ve taken on, the ones I plan to take on, the blog posts I’ve been writing, internship opportunties, and preparing to get the most out of college, here’s what I answered as my goal:


![](/blog/2020-05/goal-ans.png)


“You already have everything you need to achieve this!” Haha, this is for sure true. Tons of amazing resources out there and project ideas lined up. Looking forward to pushing ahead.

There are two more questions.


![](/blog/2020-05/habit-question.png)


At the start of my spring break/forever Coronavirus break, I set out a bunch of nice, concrete habits to achieve. Run three times a week. Sleep at midnight and wake up at 8. Write four pieces of creative writing a week. Practice piano six hours a week. Some of these were ambitious goals, but I set them to hit as many of them as I could — running I enjoyed and was able to, with Central Park right across the street. I competed with a friend, calculating a score each week. 

Come lockdown, though, running went out the window. With the prospect of probably never seeing many of my friends in person again (not for any concrete barrier, but because relationships tend to fade with time, especially [the ones I tend to build](https://www.samsonzhang.com/2020/02/22/platonic-slut.html)), I indulged friends with much worse sleep habits late into the night, and my own sleep schedule collapsed. With half of my goals out the window, the rest followed suit.

These goals were something like plus goals from the beginning — not doing them didn’t mean I would regress, just that I wasn’t fully meeting my ambitions, and my value-oriented approach to life meant I kept them firmly in mind. My life hasn’t collapsed, but the value of these concrete goals did a little.

This didn’t mean that I didn’t have habits, or longer term characteristics, that I wanted to strive for. Here’s what I answered:


![](/blog/2020-05/habit-ans.png)


Not one that’s easily tracked, i.e. not based on time frequency; but I think it qualifies as a habit, and it’s certainly one that I’ve struggled with and would improve my life a lot if I fixed. Not doing things on time is one bad habit I had identified and had in mind from previous self-reflections. Another candidate was speaking clearly, loudly, without “ums.”

The last question is somewhat similar.


![](/blog/2020-05/mindset-question.png)


I’ll go straight to my answer:


![](/blog/2020-05/mindset-ans.png)


A very social-interaction-based type of mindset, but really, is that so different from an interaction-with-self mindset? What you think becomes what you say becomes what you do, and the other way around. Radical empathy — it’s a term I know has been written a lot about, that I haven’t read a lot about, but have appropriated it (for now) as a name for my own intuition and approach towards everything from personal relationships and managing team members to public advocacy and judging public figures. Understand the worst, but always assume the best of people;[^charisma] be radiantly positive and grateful, see opportunities out of problems. The bad doesn’t negate the good. At the same time, speak firmly. Be decisive and uncompromising at your core. The intersection of the two is a difficult place to find, but it’s where I want to be.

“We are so excited to be a part of your journey.”

As an app, “Goals” didn’t stay part of my life for much longer; after checking out the interface, my answers clipping out of UI elements because I really wasn’t supposed to write a three-line habit description, I deleted my account and the app. But the ideas embodied in the app, and the reflection session and meta reflection session in this blog post that it gave me, are for sure a part of my journey.

So, what can I say? Whatever my grander thoughts are, this world of makers and products is one that I plan to be a part of. Thank you, Terry Xu, for this app that I love but cannot use; but more than all of that, thank you for giving me an excuse to think and ramble about my life for a few thousand words 😛 

[^manson]: Mark Manson, *The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck*
[^sinek]: Simon Sinek, *The Infinite Game*
[^kalanithi]: Paul Kalanithi, *When Breath Becomes Air*
[^sartre]: Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism”
[^charisma]: Honestly I got this not from any book on management or value-based advice, but as a running theme in analyses of the YouTube channel [Charisma On Command](https://www.youtube.com/user/charismaoncommand).

“What do you truly want to accomplish before you die?” A goal-setting app that shares my life philosophy

Talking with a friend about how things are falling apart, how we might not be able to return to campus for the rest of the term; me realizing just how many opportunities are vanishing — again, me suffering the absolute least of it, everyone below really having their trajectories blown into turbulent chaos. It just feels bad now. Maybe even worse that I’m not the one taking the hit. I’ve escaped. Some of my friends have escaped. But many of them, most of them, the ones I maybe viscerally wanted to do better than me and do what I couldn’t, who I was invested in as someone attempting to be a mentor and who I looked to with awe and admiration, are the ones suffering most.

This realization came in two parts, both of which happened approximately today. The first part was just that, woah, this is a real, lasting problem. I realized that not having school is the default state of things, that we can’t take structure for granted, that external structure and society is conditional on a remarkable but ultimately frail stability to human life. At first, though, the tone was completely different:

> So I’m at home. I ran a 10K PR earlier, but then my sleep habits slipped and I haven’t run, or left the house, in a bit. I’ve cooked a few meals: learning how to make curry these last few days! Cauliflower has been the best so far. I’ve spent lots of the day staring at my laptop, or my desktop. Lots of texting people on Messenger; pretty much a constant handoff between that, and writing something, this reflection or my TEDx talk, or plucking at the keyboard next to me, or some snack that I shouldn’t be eating. My sense of lunch has died; I woke up at 11, had a trickle of food — strawberries, half a banana, a quarter of a bag of roasted cashews — until now, and I guess that’s my lunch. It’s a vibe shared by some others I talk to; “embrace your inner lazy,” says Irura.
> 
> ...
> 
> It’s a somewhat familiar vibe — lots of breaks go like this. But this is almost not a break; this is the uncertain, somewhat indefinite future. When class resume, I won’t get to escape this house; rather, the classes are just infused with my computer, the feverish, passive but incessant claustraphobia I am experiencing now.

Only later did I have the second part of the realization. A friend texted me as a conversation opener:

> What to do when you don't know what to do
> 
> Life feels kinda trapping rn

It seems like things have changed so much today. Earlier today I was excited to write, to reflect, to take my time and find myself and sail forwards into uncertainty, sure, but uncertainty that felt like it would ultimately be fine. But today has been that turning point, when I realize, maybe, that things won’t be fine, that I, and others far more than me, are going to suffer and lose things because of this.

I wrote at one point in my doc of musings:

> The city doesn’t start for you, and it doesn’t stop for you; it goes on, as urgent as ever, as cynical and dismissive of any threats as ever. This is the spirit I want in my own life. The world moves continually forward. You can hide from it, try to ignore it, but you will be falling behind. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Take it slow, spread out your interactions across a longer time period, take in less and live for yourself more. But for now, the city is nice. Churning forwards. Dangerous, sprinting down a tightrope above a pit of chaos, but resilient, never stopping, never doubting.

But maybe it can choke. Maybe we can fall off the tightrope, and have to climb back up. Stop for a second. Doubt a little. Maybe that’s where we’re at, or headed, now.

Brief Reflection on Coronavirus, or: Realizing The World Is (Slightly) Falling Apart

A label Tessa and Kelly came up with for me, because I have so many platonic one-night stands.[^def]

Sure enough, I had platonically “fucked,” without entering into a close social relationship with, half of the people in the room.

“We had a one night stand,” one friend realizes.

“I had mine over the summer,” adds another.

“Tessa is your platonic hookup,” says Kelly.

In the past few days, I realized just how many people this applied to. Teammates, dormmates, classmates, club members, friends of friends, anyone I could get to. People who I had spoken to once, who now say hi to me, but who aren't "friends." Former platonic hookups. Not that I wouldn't want to be friends, or talk more with them, just that I don't: once is easy. Consistency takes effort and circumstances lining up.

I enjoy good conversations with good people more than anything else, often setting aside work or sleep in pursuit of it. During Phillipian, I went on for hours every single night; over breaks and now without Phillipian, I rotate through friends old and new on Messenger. I flaunt my platonic promiscuity and always seek it, push every comment and conversation towards an earnest, meaningful, personal, vulnerable one. In group settings, in loud, shallow conversations, I am frustrated and seek more. I never get tired of it, I always hunger for more. Am I a platonic sex addict?

It feels weirdly validating, to have a label that people think about and then enthusiastically assign to me. Being a slut implies having power, however twistedly.[^caveat] I had really wanted to get better at reaching out to people, getting people to trust me. I wanted to be like Arno, the person everyone could go to for advice and support. At times I felt like I had done it — though for sure with plenty left to learn from his charisma and power to reassure — except Arno had had a rock solid, explosively vibrant friend group. I don’t. I’m just a platonic slut.[^arno]

“I’d be down to make it a two night stand,” a friend tells me.

Maybe being a platonic slut isn’t so bad.

[^def]: The root of this parallel is conflict of social expectation vs. what the actual intense part is/what is actually valued. In romance, we're traditionally pressured to enter long-term relationships, marry someone, and start a family.  Hookups avert all this and just go straight to sex/physical affection. Similarly, the social norm is to be part of a friend group, have best friends to confide everything in, etc. My method of just seeking connections with anyone skips all this and gets straight to emotional vulnerability and trust — thus, platonic hookups, and me often seeking these instead of normal social relationships making me a platonic slut.

[^arno]: Arno is like...healthy platonic polyamority with a main family?

[^caveat]: A friend pointed out that the label "slut," in addition to declaring prosmicuity, traditionally also connotes uncleanliness, immorality, etc., and is rooted in/perpetuates misogny. It's important to acknowledge that my friends came up with "platonic slut" as a label for me and I've been able to embrace it only because "slut" has been reclaimed from its derogatory nature by movements for sex positivity, women's empowerment, etc.

platonic slut

### 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: #personal