Accountability

You can probably tell that there’s been a large gap in posts (last post was 8-25). In the beginning, it was because I wanted to focus on my Jane Street interview preparations. At the time, it was kind of necessary, but foreshadowed what would happen once things got hectic. And things got hectic.

I spent the past week or so moving into college, and since I took a red eye, I did not get much time to blog on the flight and was constantly catching up on packing, socializing, and working. There were times where I could’ve blogged, but I either procrastinated or felt the need to work on other stuff. This is starting to become a problem because, with lots of new responsibilities, the question of what I should prioritize arises. Yes, I can technically blog every day, but time is no longer limitless–it never really was, but the summer is as close as it gets.

Perhaps I should still try to stick to daily blogging, but either only have really short “productive thinking” sections or just focus on having the accountability section every day and write up the “productive thinking” once in a while whenever I have time. It’ll definitely be much more sustainable, and I write enough in these accountability sections.

However, what I’m scared of is that I’ll lose the essence of this blog. I was trying to force myself outside my comfort zone by thinking/writing every day and dedicating a large part of my academic time to something non-STEM related. If I switch to only accountability posting, I worry that I’m simply taking the easy way out.

But, the other point of this blog was to keep me accountable, and it doesn’t make sense to sacrifice both aspects of this blog in a futile attempt to keep what it once was. A happy compromise might just be to have crappy posts every day, with some combo of accountability and a really short blurb on productive thinking. Maybe add a quick thought that I can elaborate upon in a future post.

For now, that’s what I’ll attempt. We’ll have three types of posts: 1) my usual post (productive thinking), 2) something similar to my usual post but only a quick sentence or two jotting down what I’ve been thinking (productive thought), 3) a very bland, accountability post that’ll have no title so people won’t have to waste their time reading it. I figure that if I have time to quickly note what I’ve done in that day within the accountability section, I probably have enough time to try to recall some interesting thought I had that day.

As for a quick recap on my life, I’ve been trying to use Habitica more religiously now–I think it’s doing some good althought procrastination still looms (as you can tell from my lack of posts). Another HUGE development is that I did in fact leave my gaming laptop at home for at least this semester–so far, no withdrawals, and hopefully a league-less semester will be good!

I will be at PennApps this weekend and HackMIT the following weekend, so it’ll be interesting to see how everything, along with schoolwork, will fall together as the first couple weeks of the school year progresses.

Productive Thinking

This has actually been a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while now, but every time I remembered it, I forgot it before I managed to jot it down. And I finally have jotted it down, and I finally have time to write it.

If you’ve grown up in the Bay Area, gone to school, or generally live somewhere aboveground, you’ve know several billionaires by name and maybe even by face: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Elon Musk, Larry Page are some of the more famous ones (or infamous depending on your opinion).

The funny thing is, whenever these billionaires are brought up in conversation, I always find myself saying, “so and so is highkey crazy.” Half of them dropped out of top schools to pursue their random company when they were still teenagers, I can’t even think of one specific crazy thing to use as an example for Elon Musk since that man’s actually insane, and Jack Ma created an internet company in a country where internet wasn’t even going to really exist for around a decade (that’s like starting a real estate company right now for Mars). The peculiar thing to me, however, is that I was using the word “crazy,” usually reserved to describe individuals in a negative context, to, in contrast, describe individuals of nearly mythical status.

And as with all things that confuse me, I first turned to Google (thanks Larry Page).

crazy (adj.)

1) mentally deranged, especially as manifested in a wild or aggressive way

2) extremely enthusiastic

Not particularly illuminating to be honest.

So, actually when is something “crazy?”

We perceive something as crazy when it breaks the societal norm in some radical way–we all have different standards, and the greater the break, the crazier the thing. Of course, this is not the formal definition of the word, but it captures the colloquial use of the term in modern society (I was surprised that the official definitions did not seem to touch upon it). For example, you might describe a wild late-night adventure as “crazy”–it was so different from what you would normally expect that perhaps you had to be a touch insane in order to do it. Maybe you did a different crazy thing, like run across the highway or yell in a library based on a dare or fill a water cup with Sprite at a fast food joint. They are all crazy because we’ve all been raised a certain way by society, and anything to stretches far beyond this predefined map is almost unthinkable.

The other day, I attended a talk by Josh Kopelman, the founder of First Round Capital. He touches upon this very idea–the American education system has developed and is developing into a more and more improved mold for society. It is very structured, and there’s more or less a formula for success. You do well in grade school, you get into a good college, you have good extracurriculars, you get a good job, and you set up life for your kids to do the same. I’m most definitely guilty for falling into this–it is very uncomfortable to go against the grain and venture off the beaten track. The unknown is inherently terrifying.

Of course, I would love to be able to just say: “I’m so good that I can rise above it all. We live in a system! I make my own life! I reject the American education system!” I personally try to pursue that direction, but sometimes I want to keep one foot on the well-worn path, just in case I get lost in the woods of exploration. That makes sense, right? On the other hand, it makes no sense to give up a surefire, fast lane career to the upper upper-middle class for the sake of my ego and a desire to “rise above it all.” In fact, giving up my privilege of an Ivy League education and years of industry/STEM foundations is foolhardy–it’s akin to the analogy to “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” One could almost argue that it’s crazy to do so.

Yet, if you look at the timeline of almost any billionaire (not you Mark Cuban) or even millinaire entrepreneurs, that’s exactly what they did. There is no way to generate that much wealth, especially in the modern world, by not being crazy. By definition, something is crazy because it’s so far away from society’s common track that nobody will even think of it let alone attempt and complete it. And also by definition, there can only be a few select individuals who are billionaires. If one could be a billionaire without being crazy, that would mean that whatever they did could’ve and would’ve been done by thousands of other people as well.

I could continue delving into the pros and cons of all the possible career paths and outlooks, but those most definitely require their own posts. Also, it probably doesn’t help that I’m still figuring it all out myself and my opinions on this matter change faster than Ryze reworks. But, if there’s anything I do take away from this is: perhaps the only way for me to be truly unique is to be a little crazy sometimes.