What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Something that I really detest about myself is that I have gotten much worse at being alone. I have also gotten a lot worse at untangling the balls of uncertainty within me. There was a quote from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running that really made me pause today:
Sixteen is an intensely troublesome age. You worry about little things, can’t pinpoint where you are in any objective way, become really proficient at strange, pointless skills, and are held in thrall by inexplicable complexes. As you get older, though, through trial and error you learn to get what you need, and throw out what should be discarded. And you start to recognize (or be resigned to the fact) that since your faults and deficiencies are well nigh infinite, you’d best figure out your good points and learn to get by with what you have.
I’m twenty-one now, but I still don’t think I have learned “through trial and error to get what [I] need, and throw out what should be discarded.”
I feel like I’m at a Rubicon of sorts in my life right now, and I don’t even know how I got there. I guess that when I chose Stanford at seventeen, I didn’t realize how much it would impact my value system and my career path. I was telling mom on the phone the other day that I really let VCs determine my sense of self-worth. Why is someone who codes well and maybe thinks mediocrely worth their investment, and not someone like me, who thinks well and codes mediocrely? I’ve felt so pained by their evaluation criteria that I’ve overhauled my college major multiple times: from computer science to classics to science, technology, and society, and now back to computer science. I can’t tell if I’m living my life in a way that aligns more with others’ expectations than my own, and honestly, I’ve felt this way for the past two years. I can’t tell if I’m throwing away everything I’m good at to chase this elusive goal of becoming better at engineering. Maybe I am.
But I can talk about some things that have brought me joy recently. I have felt joy going down rabbit holes on Curius. This week, I have been reading Ethan Kurzweil’s Developer Laws, looking at Oscar Dumlao’s portfolio (he’s the designer behind Marriage Pact, Ladder, Skiff - basically the only legit-ish startups that have emerged from Stanford’s student startup scene), various writing on dev tooling — Github, Netlify, Replit, Vercel, Mark Andreesen’s blogs from the early 2000s. I have felt joy playing with NextUI elements for my little VC/founder matching tool. I’m thinking about how you can only have intuition for a product (or anything, really) if you use it yourself.
What excites me?
I’m excited about how technology can help us think better, and together. Curius is a great example of this.
Every day, I feel inspired by what my peers are reading and thinking about. What if we have more social reading tools? What if something like Curius were integrated into iBooks and Kindle (Wechat Reading already does this, to some extent)? What if technology can help us unearth connections between our thoughts (and what we have read)? Sure, Omni is doing this, and Mem, Roam, and others are attempting to as well, but I haven’t found anything that feels joyful and intuitive to use. Is there a way to non-mechanically “port my brain,” some visual mind place that you can play with and edit?
I’m excited by reading. I enjoy thinking about the past and how it maps onto the future. I like reading about past financial crises, boom and bust cycles, legendary tech companies that changed how we live. I like thinking about risk and strategy — how do you mitigate risk? When do you walk away? How do you put yourself in the right place at the right time?
I’m excited by beautiful interfaces and experiences. I not only want to invest in those who are building them, but also build them myself, and build tools for the people who are building them. If any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, I want to become the magician’s apprentice.
I’m writing all of this down because there are a lot of days when I lose hope. My conviction in myself and what I love ebbs and flows, and writing is the best way for me to bottle those feelings. I remind myself that twenty-one is so young, that I really have the opportunity to learn whatever I want to if I put my heart to it. I remind myself that love can be learned, and that it can come gradually.
I’m proud of myself for not treating Stanford as a place where I must do what I excel at, but just as I would any other school. I’m here to learn, grow, nourish my curiosity. And I’m doing that right now.