Walks are OP

I’ve been taking walks every morning as a way to kick off my day with something easy/productive, and man, it’s OP. I get to sort through all my thoughts during the walk, without any of the distractions or resistances that I normally feel while sitting in my room. It reminds me a lot of the time before I owned a smartphone, especially during long car rides without even video games.

Motivation is a thing, not a feeling

I’m a little embarassed that this took so long for me to figure out. This whole time I’ve been operating under the assumption that motivation was some abstract feeling that one would just develop. And, yes, quantifiable things could help you find motivation, but, at the end of the day, motivation is just a feeling. And, if you know me, I’ve been searching for motivation ever since senior year of high school––I’ve been able to find small pockets of motivation to keep me thriving in school, but, in terms of overall growth, I’ve slowed down drastically since high school.

Motivation is a physical, quantifiable, object. In high school, it was scoring well on a math competition, it was getting into my dream college (RIP), it was becoming better than my peers, it was not getting absolutely destroyed by my mom for missing a single point on a homework assignment. I had many powerful motivations, and almost all of them were toxic to my mental health. But, on the flip side, they made me as good as I am today, and being “good”, whatever that means, makes me happy.

In college, all of a sudden, I lost all of the rigorously defined structures in my life. I started afresh, and with the knowledge that so many of my past motivations were toxic, after they were cast away, I had little motivation to bring them back. I shunned a lot of the toxic messages that comes from attending a competitive high school like Dougherty Valley, and I honestly haven’t really looked back. I don’t think this is a bad thing.

My current Motivations

I guess this ties into my post yesterday about what makes me happy, although this is slightly different.

  • Passion for STEM.
    • I actually really like the concepts in a general sense of the classes I study. Quantum Mechanics is a pretty good example––I really detest how the class is taught, but the subject is so fascinating to me that I’m still able to apply myself to the course.
    • It also helps me get really into research, although I’ve been slacking in that regard.
  • Unwillingness to be a bad student.
    • This is definitely ingrained in me from high school and from my parents. I finish all my psets, I study a decent amount for all my tests, and I generally care about getting good grades in my classes. I don’t really have a legit reason for doing this anymore as I doubt I’m shooting for grad school at this point. As pretty much all I do nowadays is solely school, this is probably my primary motivator.
  • Being notable among my peers.
    • I actually haven’t really felt this motivation a ton in my life since I don’t consider myself an ultra-competitive person––I don’t really care about what others are doing. I think what I mean by this is I care a lot about how well I’m doing compared to my potential. But going to a school like Columbia where there aren’t that many notable people in my grade has kinda stifled this motivation. I don’t feel as though I need to do very much to stay near the top of my class, and, aside from the occasional feeling down day, this motivation doesn’t pop up very much.
    • Ironically, knowing myself, this has the biggest potential to be my largest motivation, but it just isn’t at the moment. Again, motivation is a thing, not a feeling and I guess there’s no “thing” here at the moment.
    • It’s also pretty toxic, which is why I’ve worked on removing this motivation from my life.
  • I still care about what others think.
    • I think this is pretty impossible to remove from my life, and my hypothesis is that the vast majority of people have this in some sense. I think I care less about what others think than the vast majority of college students, but it still holds true for me regardless. Being “smart”/”good” in my friend’s eyes makes me happy, even though that’s not the most important thing to me.
    • The difference between this and the previous bullet point is that the former focuses on whether or not I deserve to be noted whereas the latter focuses on other people’s reactions to me.
  • Being happy/comfortable.
    • The greatest source of resistance to me being productive is more of human nature. Nobody really likes being uncomfortable, and, without stronger motivations in life, this is taking precedence in life. Once I procrastinate hard enough, this motivation will be overpowered by one of the others, but at the moment, I’ve been seeking this out a lot.
    • This is the least toxic of all my motivations, but I think it’s really important to develop other motivations to help balance this out, as it is also the source of my procrastination.
  • Improving myself :).
    • While writing this, I realized that I’m in such a flow right now. I’m also super happy that I feel no urge to procrastinate right now, and it must be linked to a source of motivation.
    • A while ago, I wrote a blog post about how my mentality must shift from a “git gud” to “improving myself” with the start of college, and I’m glad that I can finally add this to my list.

Matt D’Avella Exercise

I just subscribed to Matt D’Avella’s newsletter yesterday, and the email I got today magically coincides with exactly what I was thinking on my walk. The email is titled, “The Reason You Get Stuck,” and he writes:

Until you find a real purpose for the change you’ll be left scratching your head after each failed attempt.

which is precisely what I’ve been doing.

I’m going to list 10 reasons for something I want to accomplish and hopefully that’ll help me actually accomplish it. I might try to do this every day for something I want to do.

Quant Internship/Job/Interview Prep. Why?

  1. Career wise it’d be a safe bet to make a lot of money. This combination is pretty rare––normally to make a lot of money, you have to take some amount of risk. And in terms of jobs, being a quant trader is a really good one. One of the other career paths I’m considering is entrepreneurship, but the amount I’d have to sell a startup for just to make the same amount of guaranteed money I’d make as a quant is ridiculous. IDK, it could happen though.
  2. It’d satisfy my desire for prestige. Even though this, in my opinion, is a really bad reason, the reality is that I, along with most people, are influenced by the concept of prestige. I think my repulsion to this as a motivator is one of the biggest reasons why I cannot commit fully to pursuing quant, since I’m worried I’m just doing it for the the prestige. In any ways, being a quant at a quant hedge fund enters you in an elite group of some of the smartest people in the world, which I want in theory. I have yet to experience the actual workplace culture, so hopefully I don’t hate the type of people there (I really don’t like pseudo-smart people who care only about arbitrary things, which I have a feeling has a nonzero chance of occuring at quant firms).
  3. I’d be intellectually stimulated. Nobody can argue that a quant job isn’t quantitatively demanding, and I have a lot of fun solving quantitative problems. I’m sure I wouldn’t get bored of this job, as opposed to like being a data scientist or something.
  4. I’d be with my friends. A lot of my friends whom I respect are also going this direction, and I’d be reunited with all the Olympiad kids who I’ve been lowkey missing in my life. However, the flip side of this is that a lot of the people/friends I respect are people who are completely opposed to quant, and I am currently spending a lot more time with those friends rather than Olympiad/quant friends.
  5. I’d be respected/notable among my peers, somewhat. Argh this is also one of those that is both a reason to do it and also a reason to not do it. It would be kind of like, ah all I’m doing with my life is becoming a Jane Street Quant Trader? And then there are people who’d say, that’s super impressive, but I have dreams of becoming a entrepreneur. I have no clue though, because one is safe but I might regret taking the sure path whereas the other is extremely risky, but if it pays off, I’ll never look back. I once heard some advice that you should take all the risks that you can afford losing, but that’s still kind of eh. It’s not like I can’t eventually become an entrepreneur after I become a quant, but pivoting later in life is always much harder than just starting out in that initial direction. This’ll require some more reflection to figure out what I wanna do in life, and the decision should become easy.
  6. It would give me more time to figure out life while I amass a huge amount of personal wealth. Another reason why this is safe––once I become a quant, I’d be certified as a ultra-smart person, kind of what I would get from finishing a PhD program. The only difference is I won’t be called Doctor (sadly), I won’t have the knowledge I’d have from a PhD, but on the flip side, I’d have way more cash, my life would be much easier as a quant than as a PhD student, and I’d have a much bigger advantage in industry.
  7. It’s kinda what people expect of me. If you know me personally, you know that I hate doing mainstream things (for example, I picked bassoon since it was the most obscure instrument I could find). I also like being good at things though and learning new things. This is more of a reason why I don’t want to do it, but if people expect me to do this, then they must have a reason (they know it’s a good fit, and I know it too).
  8. I wouldn’t have let down my parents. My parents immigrated here to give me a better life, and taking the quant job way would mean that I’d be in the upper economic class, I would live a life of luxury, and my parents would be happy that they managed to make me a better life. And I’d be able to carry this onwards to future generations, and perhaps my kids can take the risks that I am apprehensive about right now (financial/career risk of going big on a startup and failing).
  9. Gives me a solid goal to work towards. Right now, I feel so split on different directions in life that having this as a goal to focus on would give me so much clarity in life. It’d make me happier, but right now, there’s a conflict inside of me whether or not I should commit to this. I had hoped that writing this list would help me give the clarity/motivation to focus solely on this goal, but it hasn’t really. My mindset is more or less the same, maybe a little clearer, but I’ve thought about this a lot already. I just don’t know if I want to ultimately be just a quant in life, but at the same time, maybe I’m getting greedy and hoping for too much out of life. No, I can’t think that way. AGH see my dilemma?
  10. Self-validation. Being able to work towards and accomplish a goal would help give me something concrete to hang onto. Ever since high school, I haven’t had any super big accomplishments in recent years that I can hang my hat on. Having this would prove to myself that I worked hard and accomplished something legit because there’d be no other way that I could’ve accomplished it.

I’m going to start working on this goal––hopefully I can chart my progress on this and have something to show for it by the end of next fall.