recaps

My day to day got better for a stretch of time when I immersed myself in grinding startups for a few weeks. I visited my friend’s house in Vegas and hacked/worked 10+ hours a day, but, despite the mental fatigue, it felt good to be working towards something meaningful again. During quarantine, I had a phase where I was obsessed with learning how to be productive—this time period over break felt good because a lot of those pieces felt like they finaly clicked. I had a project that I was excited and intrinsically motivated to work on, and it was an interesting puzzle to figure out how to keep myself from burning out each day. I successfully did so, and I was really excited about applying my newfound success to the incoming quarter—I felt my feelings of feeling both unproductive and bored were finally going to be solved.

Reality hit me pretty hard when I was informed that the third guy on the team wasn’t going to be willing to split equity with me, which was a pretty big bummer for me. I hold no ill feelings towards anyone, I understand it’s just a tough overall situation/these sorts of things matter a lot to people, and it was partly my fault for not explicility solidifying terms before I committed so much time/effort towards the startup. It is a rather unfortunate situation for me and to be honest, I do wish things were different. But they aren’t, and I’m glad I figured it out relatively early before I committed even more time into this project. I think what bummed me out the most was not the fact that I got cut out after working so much, but rather that I was kind of back to square one in terms of having fulfilling day-to-day’s. I learned a lot of lessons from this whole experience, and it made me appreciate my current startup team even more.

vegas

Spent a few days on the strip staying at my friend’s hotel room, which was nice but also less fun than I’d hoped. I think I quickly realized two things: 1) the strip is designed such that the only fun thing to do is gambling, 2) I’m not a big fan of gambling. After losing my stack on jamming aces pre-flop, I decided that poker wasn’t really that fun for me anymore and chilled for the rest of the trip. It does bring up interesting implications regarding how I’ll handle trading (supposed to be similarly stressful/require similar temperaments), but I think it’s a good thing that I’m not a gambling addict.

Vegas

happiness

While I’m in this limbo between student and adult life, the pressure/realizations of what a typical 9-5 adult life looks like is increasing fast. It seems to be a common realization among peers in my year, and interacting with grad students (who are immersed in adult life/pursuing what they want) makes this sort of reality even more apparent. I think I used to believe that a clear delineation between picking startups and quant used to be about positively impacting the world, but now I realize that it’s a very different, universal problem. Optimizing for personal happiness is hard enough for basically everyone, and these grand ideals of benefitting the world don’t really matter (at least to me) if one isn’t happy. I think grinding might feel worse in the moment than say, entertainment specfically designed to be fun, but in the long term, feeling like you’re doing stuff that matters will be a lot more fulfilling (and it’s not like there’s never opportunity to mix throughout your day interesting things to do for fun). It’s interesting that I wasn’t really able to realize this before spending a chunk of time feeling like I was spending time on unfulfilling things, but changing my perspective to think about optimizing for happiness has really helped clarify what I should be looking for in my pursuit to determine what I want to do in life.

next steps

My goal is to start grinding startups with my old team again for the upcoming year and a half, but it is definitely easier said than done. I have a plan for what my daily schedule is going to look like once I get back to school—I’m envisioning just ironing out really solid habits for morning routines, daily work schedules, and working out. I’m finally feeling motivated enough to grind every day, but motivation only lasts for so long before habit is demanded to sustain that level of work. But all of this doesn’t really matter without something to work on/towards, so my first order of business is to find a startup idea that everyone is excited about and willing to grind on over the next two years.

To that end, my goal is to write a short essay on an interesting idea/possible startup every day, which I’ll most likely post on here (any feedback/comments are always more than welcome). It’ll give me some objective to grind towards every day, as well as help further along my aforementioned goals. I think a lot of the time, my cofounders and I get stuck in this state of limbo because we have no idea, but we’ve also never really treated finding an idea like a serious, full-time job. It’s becoming extremely apparent that this sort of thing is going to be our livelihood, at least for the next year or so, and I think it is time to start treating it like one.

I’ll be curious to see how my time/schedule works out, but hopefully with my motivations a lot more clearly defined for me, developing these habits/grinding every day should happen, albeit with a lot of careful planning/work. I’ll start posting these ideas/daily recaps every day at either the end of a work session (so I can recap what I’ve done for the day while it’s fresh in my mind), or maybe at the start of the day (where I have the most energy/motivation for creative stuff, thus making this habit more enjoyable/sustainable). In any case, it’ll be interesting to see if I have enough to blog about, which in itself, should force myself to fill my life with personally interesting/fulfilling things, which is a welcome change.