Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

My parents used to leave me at the public library for an hour. It was there I stared at a poster hung in the children’s section, showing what each hundred numbers meant. This was my introduction to the Dewey Decimal system. I was in awe at how every topic in life, the universe, and everything could fit within these 10 category brackets. But alas, they don’t. That was revealed when I asked, “Why are there books on suicide near language learning books?”. Much later, I discovered the field of library science, and I realized librarians curated non-fiction books to fit between 000 to 999.

I was fascinated with cataloging systems ever since. So it doesn’t come to anyone’s surprise at my obsession with the 358 page, encyclopedic catalog called “The Whole Seed Catalog from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.”

Each plant entry has a crips image, an item code, and a short description from the farmer on why you should grow this plant. Each image whispers in your ear, “this is what your garden can look like.” The curators determined the selection by the limited supply of Baker’s Creek, as well as compatibility with the North American climate. So even with the limited selection, it’s exhilarating to see what exotic or heirloom varietal lie with each page turn.

The catalog has a lot of character. There are photographs of strange vegetable sculptures and children that could be the poster child for “Future Farmers of America”. I love it when you have someone’s personality injected into these catalogs. Counter that with the department store’s 600+ page catalog of generic items.

This same elation came to me as I flipped through the Cool Tools Catalog. Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired, published this catalog and helps run the website by the same name along with and a slew of editors. Each page is full of interesting gems about topics I wouldn’t have thought about, like world traveling to cartoons that help you learn. For most items, the reviewer has used the item and shared what use they got out of it. For all other items, they are not vetted for, but the the reviewer describes why the item is cool and why they want to buy it at a future date.

The selection of oddities feel like the curators were scratching an informational rabbit hole. Why would I want books on beekeeping? Or tiny homes? Or astrology? Because alluring and voyeuristic, like looking through someone else’s grocery cart. It opens my curiosity and sometimes gets me to dig deeper.

Then there’s the catalog of mythic proportions to a machinist. The McMaster-Carr catalog. Every mechanical part you’d ever want appears in this tome. Over a thousand pages, this catalog has a limited print release. I found a copy at The Crucible in Oakland when I took a general machining class. Gears, nuts, bolts, screws, vinyl tubing, and much more. It has everything.

While that’s an incredible feat, McMaster-Carr has created an orderly website. While the website can’t show the catalog’s size and weight, it adds features to the website you can’t translate to a physical object. They share CAD files so you can integrate their products into your 3D models. They make ordering easy.

Instead of looking at an index in the back of a paper catalog, you can locate any item with the search bar. You lose the unintended discoveries if you were flipping through the catalog. Same same, but different. What you gain is order to their catalog without having to flip through unnecessary details of all possible selections of items you don’t care about.

I am concluding with Filmstruck, the new movie streaming service by TCM, in partnership with Criterion. One of Netflix’s challenges is providing the right content to an individual subscriber. Filmstruck’s solution is to catalog their films by curated themes, like “Classic Bollywood” and “A Smidgeon Of Religion”. And if those are not your flavor of curation, they also have typical genre categories. But you can spend more time viewing short movie descriptions than starting the movie, so let the cinephiles tell you what’s good.

Curation ties all of these catalogs together. Each catalog contextualizes and gives order to multitude of items. Thinking about this helps me think how to organize my work, from determining hierarchy in my code or organizing my thoughts in essays. Don’t think of catalogs are this passive thing we’re given. Think why they are being given to us.

Beyond the pagoda decorated with oriental lanterns and stone lions, is a center of Asian-American culture and identity. A common immigrant experience is to make the new home feel less foreign. For the Chinese and other Asian immigrants, that space is Chinatown.

Generations of Discrimination

My grandfather spent his early adulthood in San Francisco Chinatown. It was the 1930’s, and discrimination was rampant. My guess is he was assigned by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce his first job in San Francisco Chinatown. Or perhaps it was his father. Nevertheless, the chamber had their hand directly or indirectly because they helped find employment for most incoming immigrants. The Chamber acted as a gateway because new immigrants weren’t immersed in American culture or language, and during my grandfather’s time, there was rampant discrimination. 8 decades later, the Chamber remains to help. When founded, the Chamber was run by Chinese, for Chinese. Today, it’s expanded to more Asian communities.

While I’m hazy as to how my grandfather got his first job, I know his job was to help run a laundromat. He worked there until the war broke out. He did his duty and fought the Asian Pacific front. When he came back, he courted my grandmother and married her. With the help of the GI Bill, he was able to buy a house in Berkeley. They had four kids, all boys. One of them is my father. By all means, they made their American dream.

My dad and his siblings grew up in that Berkeley house. They grew up under the strict and regimented rule of my grandfather. My grandfather’s kids children weren’t quite keen on the rules. As children do, they rebelled, but not well. As much as my father wouldn’t want to be compared to his father’s flaws, I see this behavior passed on my dad. He gets anal about tiny details that I don’t think matter.

My dad still faced the discrimination in the 50’s and early 60’s. He recalled to me how the grocery store he stops at today didn’t allow him to enter when he was a kid. “No colors” a sign read marked at the front of the store. The tide changed in his early adulthood.

The dirty secret of immigrant communities is they discriminate. During my grandfather’s adulthood, the Chinese community discriminated against anyone who wasn’t Chinese. My grandfather rejected the idea he or any of his children would marry a Japanese woman. From the war, his discrimination grew larger. I’m sure he was livid when one of his sons married a Japanese woman. That was my parent’s generational divide with their parent’s generation. Today, my divide comes in other arenas, like sexual discrimination. I’m much more tolerant of the LGBT community than my parents. It’s not as harsh as my grandfather’s hatred towards the Japanese. Their discriminatory behavior comes from a lack of knowledge. And that becomes a learning opportunity when I speak to them about those things, if of course you can teach old people new tricks.

Chinese Yesterday, Muslims Today

Muslim communities are discriminated like the my grandfather’s Chinese community. Political tensions with China were high with the rise of Mao Zedong. Chinese restaurants were in the tank because the community marked them as a communist symbol. The community didn’t understand not all Chinese were communists. They failed to understand many of them were Nationals and pro-Capitalists. My grandfather was an anti-communist, and agreed with the economic beliefs of the community.Yet, like every other Chinese business, he was fighting to win the respect of his surrounding community.

Today, political tensions are high in the Middle East. In the Midwest, non-Muslim mothers are scared to have their kid play in a playground because they don’t trust the muslims in their community. It was a point of contention in a recent episode of This American Life. Trump caught wind of this and blew it out of proportion, calling for a temporary ban on all Muslim immigrants. Trump undermines the real point. The issue has more to do with the divide between communities.

My grandfather opened his own laundromats after the war. He was able to sustain customers by doing business with everyone, even the people who didn’t like Chinese people. Tensions came down when they saw my grandfather as the average Joe trying to make a living. They connected with him by talking to him on a regular basis. And he did a damn fine job with their laundry.

I have this itch that we, as a collective, no longer talk with one another. The communities with such rising tension do not connect on empathetic levels. The headlines flood us with asserting blame on the growing immigrant population when really, we never took the time to interact. My call of action is to interact with people you don’t agree with. Try to understand where they are coming from, and understand circumstances are different.

Coda

I’m writing to you from London/Gatwick airport returning from holiday. From the last few days I was here, I noticed good portion of service-oriented business is run by immigrants. After a few conversations with locals about Brexit, I noticed some alarming parallels. Some politicians have convinced the country immigration is the issue rather than pointing out the harder question of the economy. My guess is it’s easier to scapegoat immigrants and play off this sentiment with the citizens. Again, my belief is communication is key for dissuading this argument.

Conclusion

My grandfather passed away before my first birthday. I wish I knew him more. I really want to have a conversation with him. Maybe about being an immigrant. More importantly, how he was able to convince people around him he was an American, assimilated. How he could operate a business with customers judging his allegiance to capitalism. But that won’t happen, and I can merely speculate. So the best I could do was scrap this together through second hand accounts, photographs, and letters.

I know a conversation is a start, and let’s continue this from now on. Tell me your immigrant story. Change my view on how I look at other cultures. The advice is concrete because the issues span generations.

Film Revisited

Beginning this year, I steered in a film adventure. It started with Mark Cousin’s documentary series, “The Story of Film”. It’s a 15 hour spectacle taking you around the world to learn about film history. Though there are sections where the focus is on Hollywood, it doesn’t linger there too long. Cousins talks about film as a global language. Starting from the beginning of film with the Lumière brothers, Cousins works his way through the silent era but relates it to modern day cinema. As a viewer, you’re taken back and forth through films of different eras, understanding how one generation of film makers borrows from the film language of a previous era.

The series had a profound effect on me. Being able to see people make film from a hundred years ago and more tells me there are commonalities in human behavior and events that cross generation and millennia. I had a similar revelation when studying art history, though that was not as profound because the interpretations of the art were typically from secondary or tertiary sources. In film, there are primary sources from documentarians interviewing directors and cast members. For example, MoMA exhibits Van Gogh paintings, but its descriptions are written by the art curator. As an extra on the Blu-ray of Stagecoach, you can watch an interview with John Ford talking about directing his film.

Aging Film Stock

Thanks to recommendations from some readers, I checked out the Stanford Theatre. I don’t know why I hadn’t gone sooner. I watched “The Blue Angel” from 1930. The film shows its age with the crackles and pops from the audio and dust and scratches on the film. I couldn’t care less. I was invested in the eventual downfall of the professor. I was taken aback by of Lola’s song as a harbinger. I witnessed a screening uncommon for today.

While the majority of this year has been watching restorations, original prints or something close to it is just as important. The Stanford Theatre showed me the value of old film. It’s the living print that has been stored for decades before and will continue to be our go-to until we can restore prints to the highest quality. That definition might be the highest pixel density you can get before there is no discernible detail in the film grain.

Thank goodness there are film preservationist keeping these films alive. Preserving the reels is a tough job. This is worse for film with ammonium nitrate that’s highly combustible, prevalent in film before the 1940s. Some films are lost forever because of neglect from the studios, archive fires, and other damage.

What’s Next for Film?

Despite digital taking over, film still has a place in our world. The latest Star Wars film was shot partially on film to give it the aesthetic of the original trilogy. Tarantino swears by it because he believes it gives that bit of authenticity to movies. Is it enough to keep this medium alive? I wouldn’t know. I’m not in that industry. But I will appreciate film for what it’s worth, if it means going to events at Stanford Theatre, SF MoMA, and Berkeley Art Music and Pacific Film Archive. I love this experience of film and would love if everyone could go watch.

The Short Version

I am coming forward; I glance at my phone during dinner conversations. I glance at my phone to check for notifications. I glance at my phone to check the time. I glance at my phone to preview a text.

Is it rude? Yes. However, I can argue that it depends on circumstance. If there’s a matter more pressing or urgent, the action is warranted. But try to be mindful by letting others know. I make the matter its own event and leave the conversation, i.e. a context switch. I don’t want someone to see me disconnected or disengaged in our conversation. An in-person conversation is dialog that belongs to the participants, not to the outside triggers of life.

I have been experimenting with myself by leaving my phone away from reach when I’m talking to someone. If I’m having a coffee shop chatting with a friend, I’ll leave the phone in my bag. If I have friends over for dinner, I leave it on a counter top where I won’t check it.

The exception is when the phone is the conversational centerpiece. If you want to show something on your phone, then it’s not rude.

The Longer Version

I have a tough time reflecting on ideas that I’ve read. It’s easy for me to read things to learn, but if I were to take a step further and apply what I’ve learned, I become stuck. That’s why this is the fifth time I started writing an essay about Sherry Turkle’s new book, “Reclaiming Compassion”. Each past reflection was a step closer to finding out how Mrs. Turkle’s book applied to my life. I identified the book applies to three areas of my life — my work, my relationships, and my personal life through notifications.

Let’s take a step back. Turkle’s book discusses the shortcomings of communication with our new technology. These shortcomings focus around modifying our behavior that ends up distancing us. The book uses case studies and interviews to demonstrate the main points.

Work

One case reviews new paralegals using email as a primary mode of communication. These employees prefer email over face to face interaction to their boss and the firm’s clients. Before, paralegals booked face-to-face meetings and talk about their client’s cases in person. After reviewing work performance of some NY firms, there were lots more miscommunication between firm and client. (need to review the effects). A few firms recognized this and forced their paralegals to make contact in person. Within a few months, these firms noticed an uptick with client satisfaction.

Thinking about my company, we use an IM service for work. I have found it far easier to IM my boss than to walk over to him and ask a question. The relationship was established prior that he can be asked questions in person, but for the first few months of my job, I preferred to ping him my questions. Then I realized there’s more to learn through a face-to-face interaction, so I’ve asked him more questions. When he’s busy on something else, he’ll let me know he needs a minute.

Further than that, if there are logistic issues between my co-worker and I, I will initiate a conversation in person or a video chat over resolving the issue over chat. When I’ve applied the latter, more effort is used to re-explain many times my point of view. If there’s a highly technical logical issue I know would be better through text, or more likely, images, then I’ll do that. Emails get flooded and many times, it’s hard to respond to everything. But more on that later.

Relationships

The book also examines texting in romantic relationships. Mrs. Turkle talks to a teenage boy about his first relationship. The teen wanted the appearance the relationship mattered, so when she texted him, he made sure he responded immediately. More than that, he would stare at his response for a while to make sure it sounded right. He took advantage of the editing capability of texting. However, when he met with her in real life, he was scared he might say the wrong thing. Sometimes, the girlfriend didn’t want to remarks of her admirable abilities the boy kept making. Because it’s hard to convey annoyance by texting, the girlfriend would respond negatively. This would devastate the teen, so he would text her non-stop trying to re-write his wrong. In the end, the relationship didn’t work. The teen was confused and hurt, unsure what he had done wrong. After examining this with Mrs. Turkle, he starts to see his errors, but he’s unsure if he can escape the anxiety of each texts on the next partner.

I can relate to this teenager. I have found myself editing my texts to my past partners to sound better than something I can come up with on the spot. I don’t have problems in conversation. I have an issue with flirting through texts than expending energy to quality time, the need I have the most in terms of the Five Love Languages. [1] My aim with my partner is to focus on that need and spend less time focusing on making myself sound more interesting through texts. Besides, I love flirting.

Notifications

Notifications pierce through our attention span and jump to the front of our todo list. Turkle’s book examines the consequences of constantly being bombarded by alerts. Her findings don’t look so good. When we get a text message, many of us will drop what we’re doing and read it. Of the many, the majority will respond to that text right away, even in midst of doing a different task. In other words, when we are talking to someone and receive a text message, few of us will stop that conversation and glance at our phone. Even fewer of us will respond to that text message than to continue to carry the conversation we are already having.

I get bombarded by emails, texts, and other phone notifications. Desktop notifications have slowly crept up too. I am okay with not responding to a notification at ping time, but I have a hard time forgetting about it when I’m notified. My solution is to silent those notifications, if not removing them entirely. I removed most of my app’s notifications except for texts. I will silence my texts during work hours and leave my phone away from me once I get home. I know for the rare chance there’s an emergency, there will be a phone call rather than a text. As for when I respond to texts, it’s whenever I have time to dedicate during the day to do it. Typically, that will be when I run out of steam at work and need a break, which is around 3pm. At home, I can check it after dinner. I have found I don’t sleep well if I text right before bed.

Attention

Turkle talks about this case between parent and child. A mother might be worried about how much time her daughter is spending on the phone. However, the mother takes emails and texts during dinner time, and the daughter tells the mother to get off her phone. Children emulate the behavior parents display. If parents don’t change their behavior, it’s hard to imagine this mother changing her daughter’s behavior.

I don’t have children, but I make it a point when I’m out with my friends to check my phone as little as possible. I recognize the moment I see the phone in sight, I have an uneasy feeling I am battling for their attention. Also, I recognize when I don’t know something that comes up during conversation, I should ask others and not try to check my phone. If all participants don’t know the answer, I still should not find the answer because I know I can’t control myself to continue to browse the Internet after I have found the answer. And I know the other person or persons in the conversation will feel left out, per the point I made in the beginning of this paragraph. Closing thoughts This week, I crossed my 50 day mark of meditation.[1] It isn’t 50 consecutive days, but I still see the effects it had on me. I feel closer to my body than I have before and I’ve reduced my general anxiety. One of the things therapy helped with in my past is recognizing when my body tenses u during stressful situations. I have not been practicing that behavior as much until I started meditating again, and now I recognize the internal battle I’ve been struggling with everyday. Mrs. Turkle’s book shined light on some other areas that weren’t apparent to me I might also be struggling with. Not every case she wrote about applies to my life, but of the number that did and wrote about here, I have some action steps I’d like to try out. I know I might not be successful with some of my initiatives, and that’s okay. If I didn’t try, that would result in how I’ve approached self-help books in the past. The advice is sound, but because I have no action in place to change my behavior, I continue to fall into my own traps.

[1] Since writing this piece, I have stopped meditating. I crossed 60 days and stopped when I went on my trip to Thailand.

People who run marathons are sadistic. The feet wear down after a dozen or two dozen miles. Full recovery takes a days. Mental capacity gets beat up. Hunger sets in. To say at the very least, this was my state on Sunday. And I’m saying I’m sadistic.

You think after my first marathon, I wouldn’t run again. Despite the critics, I threw myself back in the pool.

Critic: “Why would you pay to run?” The event is an incentive to get in shape. I dragged myself on extended runs because paid to participate.

Critic: “But why? You could run on your own?” I guess so, but I like running in large groups. Plus, I like being catered to by marathon volunteers. In this event, that includes the police.

After the run, I love getting small ego boosts when I tell someone I ran the San Francisco marathon. I get an extra boost when they told me how much of an accomplishment that is. I admit, I’m shallow.

Critic: “Are you crazy?” You should have asked me that the first time around.

The SF marathon is held annually. This year, 27,000 runners took the marathon challenge. I feel proud to have finished under the time limit. But I feel like crap that I made some rookie mistakes. Please don’t make these mistakes.

• Run faster than your training pace. I thought my pace was 11
  min per miles. It’s not. I found out my Fitbit can’t measure distance when my strike width is smaller than normal. That difference meant my time was longer than 11
  min per mile. Of course, if I only use my Fitbit to pace, that doesn’t matter because the references would be the same. But here’s the kicker; I was still running faster than my “training pace”. I screwed up big time and felt miserable by mile 11. Also, I was surprised I was only at mile 11 when I got to that mile marker.
• Run together, alone. Initially, I ran with my earbuds. For 13 miles, I thought I could drown the pain out with music. Not the case at all. I stopped more often with my earbuds in than without. After mile 15, I was about to find at least one chatting partner until the end of the race. I feel grateful to run into chatty folks. They helped me keep a running pace. Also, after I took off the earbuds, I heard a ringing in my ears after. Don’t listen to music too loud!
• Train on an irregular schedule. In addition to running, I was also doing gymnastics strength training. Instead of focusing on running a few miles a day, I took more time contorting myself in strange positions. I couldn’t keep a good routine going during my 2 and a half months of training. My legs paid the price.
• Run with worn out shoes. I used the same shoes from my first race. 8 months ago. Please don’t do that. My feet hurt unevenly. The right foot hurt more than the left. The traction was all gone. The padding was worn in. For a short distance, that’s fine. For a long distance, it can lead to terrible injuries.
• Don’t pack snacks. I needed an extra snack after my stomach gave way. I left an extra Clif bar in my car and completely regret it at the halfway point. The tail-gaters parked close to the finish line were terrible people. I could have slugged one of them in the face if I had the energy to do it. Take many caffeine shots. The gel packs are a great boost, but use them sparingly. It turns out they give me cramps. That’s extremely unforgiving when I need to sustain a steady pace. I had a really bad muscle cramp towards the 3rd quarter that I shook it off by running more. It came back in the end when I tried to sprint through the last 0.2 miles.

Now that it’s all said and done, I’m glad I ran again. I got to meet people from all over. I got to suffer with people from all over. I got a lot of cheers from all over.

Someone in the race told me, “Not everyone can do this, you know.” She’s right. Not everyone can run a full marathon. But, you’ll never know if you don’t try. I put myself in the arena, and I hope this is your invocation to begin.

Bride Never Be

The dark masks a new moon as we continue down the streets of Charleston. The tour guide walks us to the entrance of an alleyway. The iron-rot entrance gate is shut and pad-locked.

“Behind this gate is a narrow alleyway leading to the Utilitarian Church’s cemetery,” said the tour guide. “The church locks the gates in the evening to keep out trespassers. I’ll tell you why when we circle around the corner.”

We follow the guide to a small parking lot past an antiques store.

“Just over these walls is the aforementioned cemetery.” The guide points at the 8 foot high cobblestone wall. “Years ago, that gate was not locked and was opened to the public at all hours. That is, until the antiques dealer stumbled through it late one night. You see, he was working late, passed midnight. He didn’t notice the time pass, baffled when he locked at his watch. He gathered his things and decided the alleyway would be a faster route to his car. He had never walked in the alleyway this late at night before.

He locks up his shop and walks down this alleyway. About halfway, he notices a grave mistake. There are no lights; it’s pitch dark.”

The group looks around. There are street lights all around us illuminating the area.

“These lights you see today were installed a few years ago,” the guide continued. “This incident occurred two and a half decades ago. Folks, I assure you, the path was dark.

Not too sure where the dealer was going, he stumbled on a few headstones. Suddenly, he saw a lady in a wedding dress.

‘Excuse me,’ he says, ‘do you know a way out of here?’.

The lady gestures to follow her. Without giving it much thought, the dealer obliges. He thought this woman was peculiar with this eerie glowing presence. She walked into a tree and disappears. The dealer is in shock and runs back the way he came. He runs out of the gate and takes the longer route to his car, swearing never to go through the cemetery again.

The next day, he tells his friends about the encounter. Some people are intrigued by the ghost and try to retrace his steps in finding the woman in the wedding dress. After one too many trespassers, the church got annoyed by the attraction, so they decided to lock the gate. This barred people from entering. As you can see here, no one was going to go around and climb the 8 foot high cobblestone walls.

On one particular night, for whatever reason, the church forgets to lock the doors. A pedestrian decides to see what’s beyond the gate and discovers the woman in the white dress. He calls out to her, but she doesn’t respond. Like the antiques dealer, he sees her disappear into the tree.

The next morning, the man returned to the cemetery but found no grave near this tree. From the description these two men gave, we don’t think this is the ghost of the serial killer. We believe this was Miss Annabel Lee.

It’s the 1820’s. Annabel was a frail young woman who fell in love with a sailor. Because the parents disapproved of this courtship, they would meet every night in the cemetery under this tree. Before the sailor was sent off to duty, he promised he would marry her when he returned. Sadly, Annabel died of yellow fever. On her deathbed, she asked her parents to be buried in a wedding dress. They obliged and buried her somewhere. The area she was buried was never marked, so we don’t know where the grave is. It would take a few months later for the sailor to find out, and he was totally devastated.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote about Annabel in his last poem. He named it after her, “Annabel Lee”. A few months after publishing the poem, he died.”

Then, the guide tells us something unbelievable.

“The reason I think Edgar Allen Poe wrote about Annabel is he was the sailor. The timing checks out. He spent time in Charleston in the 1820’s. He was in the navy before he was married. And most evident was how grim he looked after his time in the Navy. Check out his before and after picture.”

The tour guide holds up his iPad and shows a side by side comparison of Edgar Allan Poe as a sailor and much later after becoming famous.

We left that spot and continued the tour, but I was left wondering if the legend is true. I did an Internet search last week with very inconclusive results. I don’t think the truth matters though. It got me to think about fabricating reason to the supernatural, and how it tells a compelling story. If the truth were uncovered, I think the story would be mundane and boring. At least this way, we can put a reason to Edgar Allan Poe’s grim face.

Alas, I’ll stop it with the ghost stories. If you enjoyed this, go check out Charleston or Savannah for yourself. Take the ghost tour and decide if the ghosts are real. Or just listen to some great stories about these city’s pasts. They have some great storytellers.

I went on a ghost tour in downtown Charleston where the tour guide told us real ghost stories. His stories were enlivened because we would bear witness to the sighting locations.

First, the tour guide introduced us to the ghost in the jail house. Over a century ago, a confederate prisoner occupied a prison cell in this jail house. One night, he heard footsteps down the hall. It was late so the prisoner thought it was a guard. When he looked up, he saw a woman in a white dress. He felt a chill as she walked passed his cell, laughing hysterically. Years later, the prisoner writes the experience was more horrifying than the dead bothers lost in battles.

The jail closed down and was abandoned for decades. In the early 90’s, a tour guide stumbled into the space and decided he should tell ghosts stories there. He started a ghost tour service and saw business boom. One late night, after telling his ghost story, he broke horror movie rule number 1: Don’t wander off alone. He walked down a long corridor saw a women in a white dress. He shined a light at her asking if she was lost. She smiled at him and walked into the wall. He was taken back and ran off. The next day he resigned from his tour business.

Who was this lady? The tour guide believes she was a serial killer from the colonial days. Her husband and she killed over 30 people. They were captured and sentenced to death. After the beheadings, her body mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps she’s haunting the jail house because no one knows where her body is.

In my quest in developing my data visualization skills, I’m finding validation to be a common interdisciplinary concept. For example, in music, you validate hitting the right notes, keeping beat, and listening to your pitch. In engineering problems, you validate theoretical calculations with empirical data. In business, you validate the business needs with return of investment calculations and customer satisfaction with surveys or field studies. In relationships, we’re validating our perception of the other person. Along the way, when we forget to validate our performance, assumptions, or perceptions, we falter. We play a terrible piano recital. We cause downstream problems in the production line. We take a loss in next quarter’s revenue. We begin to distance ourselves from who we love.

We can classify validation as passive and active. Passive validation is when we gain validation without expecting it. A core essential of validation is feedback loops. Feedback loops are outcomes of validations that when triggered, feed back to the process. Test driven development embraces this by having the developer write tests before code. The rule of thumb is “red, green, refactor”. Red refers to running the test and seeing it fail. Typically, when tests fail, the printed output is red. Green means to write code and see if the tests pass. Typically, passing tests are printed green. Refactor means trying to make that code you just wrote more robust. “Could this piece of code be written better.” Because you already wrote the test, and the code you wrote works, refactoring does not harm. In fact, if your refactored code does not work, the test will give you feedback, invalidating your new code. At that point, you can revert back to the old code.

Active validation requires an effort to test our perceptions. In my data visualization journey, I’m learning how validation works at each level of the process. At the top level, a visual designer asserts the problems of a target user and determines if this problem is best supported with a visualization tool. As a developer, I find myself missing this step of domain validation. Jumping straight to code before thinking about the end user is a smell of disaster. You may be solving the wrong problem or generating a new problem for the user. The old adage that more technology is better is not true. It reminds me of the film, “This Is Spinal Tap” where one of the band members shows the documentarian that his amp goes to 11. The documentarian asks, “Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?” The band member replies, “These go to eleven.” Building tools for the tool’s sake is missing the mark.

I hate to admit it, but I find myself relying on intuition rather than verification. It takes energy to validate your intuition. But while this may be a short-term loss, it’s a long-term gain, and humans find it hard to perceive long-term gains. This is where awareness can come in handy. Without awareness, we can let confirmation bias get the better of us. Confirmation bias is the fallacy of using purely coincidental evidence to confirm our intuition. With a heightened awareness, we force ourselves to realize we’re making a confirmation bias, and we must validate what we are thinking. Here’s an example. Why do some voters want Trump to be the next president of the US? I find this question really difficult to answer. I’m not a Trump supporter, so I made my own hypotheses. But, I haven’t talked to a single Trump supporter, so my hypotheses will not get validated. Having awareness means while I think I know what’s going on, I don’t have the slightest clue, and I’m painfully aware of that fact. If I wanted to know, I’d go to a Trump rally, interview some of the supporters, look at polls and surveys on the demographics of the voters, and ask experts.

Validation applies to teams. In a production line, you want to decrease your batch size and intervals of work. At each stage, there are feedback loops that validate whether each batch is valid. The result is an increase flow in production. When I was manufacturing stents, each batch size was small enough where we would only sample 5 to 10 parts per each stage of the process. Of course, final quality assurance checks 100% at the very end. If the parts were invalid at a stage, the batch would be removed from the production line and another batch would be added to the production line. The outcome was a faster output and better worker satisfaction. When you don’t have checks at each stage, errors get downstream, meaning a bad batch would waste time in production because you wouldn’t find out until the final quality assurance checkpoint.

Here’s an action to takeaway. Find one problem you’re repeatedly doing. Propose a solution to that problem. Purposely try to make that problem happen again. If it doesn’t happen, you’ve properly validated your solution. If not, propose another solution and try again.

Footnotes

1. The Pragmatic Programmer is full of tips like “Coding ain’t done until all the tests run”. “Red, Green, Refactor” is a corollary to this.
2. Although I only brushed over the top level, there are three other levels. Tamara Munzner writes in her textbook, Visual Analysis and Design, about the four types of validation. They are domain validation, abstraction validation, idiom validation, and algorithm validation. Abstraction validation is testing the translation between domain terms and visual data terms. Idiom validation is testing the right tool for the right job. Algorithm validation is benchmarking the algorithms and determining if they’re performant.
3. The production line example is loosely taken from the three ways described in the book, “The Phoenix Project”, which describes software and dev-ops as a production line. It’s worth a read if you’re in software and you’re having issues in your team’s pipeline.

I repeat the same pattern every few months. I’ll stop being productive on personal projects. I’ll replace it with an obsession, and it takes over my life for the next few weeks. It’s great if the obsession promotes healthy living, like marathon training or yoga. But this past month, it was an obsession with film.

And I mixed this obsession with the feeling of guilt. Every week, I see the task of writing this newsletter. And every week, I follow the same routine. Monday comes and Monday goes. Tuesday morning, I feel guilty I let my readers down. Rinse and repeat the next week.

The obsession began when I started watching a documentary series called “The Story of Film: An Odyssey”. It was a 15 hour series chronicling world cinema since its inception to the early 2000s. About halfway through, I wanted to watch many of the films mentioned. That’s when I found the Criterion Collection. Or rather, re-discovered. I knew about Criterion through their collaboration with Hulu. I thought they were a collection of American films. But it’s much, much more. The Criterion Collection includes films from around the world that cover nearly all decades of film. I was determined to watch some of them and own a few.

On my little journey, I learned most physical Criterion discs include supplemental material, booklets, and books. I also learned about their restoration process for old films, learning there’s an art in film preservation and that we’ve lost many great films over the years. I also learned of their custom artwork for their covers. What I’m trying to say is, I learned about Criterion’s brand. I feel in love with their brand because of this attention to detail. Loyal fans of criterion will speak highly of these things. It almost feels like an Apple cult-like level. I was determined to buy one to see what the big hype was.

Not wanting to pay for such expensive media, I found my local used records and movie store. I hadn’t been there before. When I stepped in, I remembered why I like these stores. I lost myself in the sea of aisles scanning through albums I’ll never listen to. I get excited wondering why someone purchased this record in the first place. Nested behind the soundtracks were an entire section dedicated to Criterions. I was amazed at the selection. I walked away with “Spartacus” and “High and Low”, a Kubrick film and a Kurosawa film. I was not disappointed.

For the next few weeks, I found myself pouring through the collection, either renting some of the films from the library, watching them on Hulu, or binging on the sale from late last month. I found myself collecting films I wouldn’t have watched a few months ago. Silent films? Yes. Foreign Italian films from the neorealist era? Check. I now feel more adept at hearing film director’s names and reciting one of their films.

Tonight, I’m watching Persona from Bergman. 7 minutes in and I know I’m in for a treat. But I must still make time for writing. Writing grounds me not to stray too far away in this little obsessions of mine. The time I spend writing this newsletter has paid back in helping me understand myself better. Today, I feel more confident about writing again. The truth is I felt like I lost my way with writing during the end of January. I sunk myself in film, and now I feel refreshed, ready to talk about some pending items I have in store. In a way, film restored my writing. Watching these directors at the height of their craft really inspires me to lose myself in creativity. So, let us begin another few months of newsletter goodness. I know I’ll enjoy it.

Tonight was the end of my dodgeball season. Here’s a quick list of lessons learned. Some lessons translate to business. Some translate to personal progress.

1. It’s not about the individual effort, it’s about the team effort.
2. When you’re the lone dodger out there, you’re team will still be yelling at you.
3. The captain’s job is guide you, not manage you.
4. Speak up.
5. Bug your teammates about strategy.
6. Ask your teammates who they’re targeting.
7. Hold back when your teammate’s tell you to.
8. Go for it when your teammate’s tell you to.
9. Give it 100%. Don’t half-ass dodging.
10. Dodge, Dive, Dip, Duck and Dodge.

Stay warm!

Everybody gets critiqued. Great composers like Beethoven have been critiqued. In this review of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the London Symphony picked up this quote from a Rhode Island newspaper.

The whole orchestral part of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony I found very wearying indeed. Several times I had great difficulty in keeping awake … . It was a great relief when the choral part was arrived at, of which I had great expectations. It opened with eight bars of a common-place theme, very much like Yankee Doodle … . As for this part of the famous Symphony, I regret to say that it appeared to be made up of the strange, the ludicrous, the abrupt, the ferocious, and the screechy, with the slightest possible admixture, here and there, of an intelligible melody. As for following the words printed in the program, it was quite out of the question, and what all the noise was about, it was hard to form any idea. The general impression it left on me is that of a concert made up of Indian warwhoops and angry wildcats.

Some phrases pop out at me here.

• great relief
• made up of the strange, the ludicrous, the abrupt, the ferocious, and the screechy
• it was hard to form any idea
• Indian warwhoops and angry wildcats

What amazes me is easy it was for this critic to put down the famous symphony. The descriptions paint a very bleak picture of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, painting the part the critic can recognize, the choral part, as a great relief. Yet, the adjectives used for the rest of the piece draws the critic’s point overboard.

For this critic, Beethoven’s music did not try to copy his classical contemporaries like Mozart or Haydn. Instead, Beethoven injected his character in his music, heralding the sense of individualism felt amongst the contemporary thinkers of the time. It was the time of American and French revolution. It was the time of change. It was the time of new ideas and the tearing down of the old. Part of Beethoven’s character are the strange, the ferocious and the screechy. That’s what makes a Beethoven unique. This is the critic’s failings in understanding Beethoven’s music.

Portrait of Ludwig Van

When I’ve listened to the 9th Symphony, I think it’s a masterpiece. Indian warwhoops and angry wildcats do not come to mind. The good news is, the critic’s words haven’t carried over to this century. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is still played around the world today. Negative criticism for the sake of bitching and moaning from purely subjective responses rarely get carried over as time passes.

If you though Beethoven’s criticism was bad, wait to you hear what this critic says about Anton Bruckner, a Austrian composer from the 19th century. This voiced his opinion to the public, hailing Bruckner as “the greatest living musical peril, a sort of tonal Anti-Christ.” Here’s his argument.

The violent nature of the man is not written on his face—for his expression indicates at most the small soul of the every-day Kapellmeister. Yet he composes nothing but high treason, revolution, and murder. His work is absolutely devoid of art or reason. Perhaps, some day, a devil and an angel will fight for his soul. His music has the fragrance of heavenly roses, but it is poisonous with the sulphurs of hell.

Holy christ! If you give Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 a listen, you wouldn’t think malice towards to composer who wrote this music. You’d probably shake his hand. Allowing time to pass, we see this critic for who he really is, a hater. It doesn’t matter which century you live in, these haters exist. The critic didn’t recognize the Romantic styling of that century. The sweeping melodies. The dramatic accents and motifs carried over by Beethoven. To Bruckner’s credit, he composed two more symphonies, the ninth unfinished, as well as a smaller pieces for another decade. Like Beethoven, Bruckner is still played today.

A picture of Anton Bruckner

As a side note, you may have already realized it. These two pieces were admired by Hitler. This was not intentional, and I would have missed this reference if it was not for Wikipedia. So, to leave this on a high note, Wikipedia says the adagio from Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 was played on the official radio announcement of the German defeat at Stalingrad on the 31st of January, 1943. Karma, I guess.

Lastly, if you want a kick of more bad criticism, I would like to refer you to a book entitled “Lexicon of Music Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time.” It gave me inspiration to write about critics and how terrible wrong they can be after reading them again a century or two later.

The Event List

So I ran to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I’d run to the end of the town…
— Forrest Gump

• I ran across the Golden Gate Bridge, a half marathon, and a full marathon.
• Wrote 43 newsletters. Also, I have every one of you to thank to being readers, from the early readers or new subscribers.
• According to my calendar, I’ve had dinner with a new stranger, many turned friends, each week from January to June, on average. That means some weeks may be 2 while other weeks may be 0.
• Watched 29 movies I had not seen before. This is my lowest number in the last decade. Recommendations: Whiplash, Wolfpack, The Search for General Tso
• Read 45 books. See recommendations below.
• Went to a number of Maptime meetups and got my intro to map making. I took on my first freelance gig as a result.
• My friend took me on my first backpacking trip up in Castle Rock.
• Implemented inbox zero.
• A former friend broke up with me. Can’t be all shine in 2015.
• Counter to that, I made up with old friends. Yes, plural.
• Participated in a number hackathons. The exact number eludes me. Didn’t win any of them.
• As I flip through my journal, I’m reminded the first few months of 2015 were riddled with Caltrain suicides. I wrote a newsletter about it, and the death count doubled by the end of the year. Very, very sad.
• Went to Atlanta for the first time.
• My job survived an acquisition.
• A friend and I helped my trans friend through facial feminization surgery. In Chicago!
• Got to watch some excellent speakers. Highlights: Dr. Silvia Earle, Gavin Aung Than, Gretchen Rubin, Elizabeth Holmes, Nancy Duarte, & John Resig. Note to self: Reflection write-ups would be great journal entries.
• Wrote PHP code, released a Wordpress plugin.
• Really got into board games. Recommendations: Viceroy, Exploding Kittens, Sushi Go!
• Visited a few national parks. First time in Joshua Tree and Zion National Park. Obligatory photo at the end of the post.
• Toured the Pier 9 space Finished 3 large paintings, divided them up to 90 recipients, and included typed letters as Christmas cards

The Book List

• The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Thanks to Helin for the recommendation. Each chapter goes through a different aspect of gift giving, leading up to analysis on the poetry of Walt Whitman and Erza Pound. Perked my interests especially after writing the newsletter post on Nerina Pallot and creativity.
• The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion. An extension of Elle Luna’s Medium post. Mixed with her drawings, it really inspires you to find your “must”. This was my first giveaway from the short-lived giveaways I was giving to the subscribers of this newsletter.
• 40 Days of Dating. I read through the blog. I still picked up this book. On my first read through, I realize this is why I love books. The detail in this book is stunning and it reminds me books are a different medium than the web. Plus, the experiment just draws you in. Two friends who decide to date for 40 days. You can’t stop wondering if they’ll make it past 40 days.
• Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA. Honestly, this isn’t fair to put this on my list. The print copy hasn’t come out in the US yet, so I read it through Audible. I’m a sucker for the history of science. I had no grounding for the pre-cursors to NASA, so this overview made me giddy.

The “Goal”

Last year, I wrote up a list called the “Fuck-it” list. It recognized all the things I didn’t want to do or care about. Instead of a list, I’m going to give myself one goal. Finish research and start writing a novel.

I gave myself this goal 6 years ago, and I accomplished my first novel in 2012. It was about 200 pages and will never see the light of day because of how bad it is. This novel I’m going to write should be publish-able. I’m staying hush-hush about what it will be about. Can’t spoil it for everyone this early on.

Errata

Enjoy this picture I took somewhere between Northern Arizona and Southern Utah.

A few years ago, Radiolab ran an episode called “Finding Emilie”. Emilie Gossiaux and her boyfriend, Alan, were art students in New York City and the story chronicles Emilie’s fatal accident and recovery, where her mother and Alan almost pulled the plug when all hope seemed lost for finding Emilie.

One tragic day, Emilie was hit by a vehicle and was rushed to a hospital. The doctors stabilized her condition, except there was too much damage to her optic nerve where even if she recovered, she would no longer be able to see. When her mother and boyfriend, Alan, made it to the hospital, Emilie was in a coma.

Emilie was partially deaf and had hearing aids. After the accident, the doctors didn’t put her hearing aids back, so for days, the doctors tried to talk to Emilie to see if she was out of her coma, but she did not respond. They did not know Emilie needed hearing aids, and because of this, the doctors thought there was no hope for Emilie. Needless to say, the doctors were wrong, and I won’t spoil the rest of the episode. I’ve placed the link conveniently at the end so you can go listen to it after reading the rest of this letter.

Back in October, Emilie had an art exhibit at the StoreFrontLab in San Francisco. The exhibit was part of a larger series celebrating the life and work of Oliver Sacks. Emilie hosted a spaghetti night where she served spaghetti on a ceramic bowl that wasn’t glazed, and gave out laser cut forks for everyone to twirl and eat their spaghetti with.

The sauce stained the bowl, placing a permanent mark that says, “someone ate spaghetti in me”. The permanent markings of the spaghetti stains reminds Emilie of her childhood. Taking a part of this experience forced me to think of the creativity of blind artists trying to represent what matters to them in a medium besides visuals. The feel of the bowl was raw and unfinished, much like the texture of stone. You can hear the spaghetti splash around as you dig into it. You can smell the generic Preggo sauce and all of its familiarity, even after the local season of tomatoes were on their way out.

The meal was frustrating. The fork was oddly shaped, and you could twirl the spaghetti with ease. And I imagine that’s the point. Stripped of your sense of sight, what are you left with? I’ll say it again, frustration. Yet, it exposes me another point of reflection about other’s experiences that I would otherwise not have experienced on my own. It showed me another layer of appreciating art, that it can expand beyond the visual aesthetic.

Radiolab Episode: “Finding Emilie”.

Have you ever felt like you’ve stalled in improving your skills? You reach 20,000 miles driving your car, and you think, “yeah, there’s nothing more I can do to improve my driving skills.” You feel comfortable clocking in at work, mindlessly going through the actions because you’ve done this work a thousand times before, and there’s absolutely nothing that will shock you. I’m not critiquing the boredom one could face droning through work. I’m making an observation that you don’t even notice when you’ve reached a peak in growth.

At First, How Much

This week, I read Scott H. Young’s article, “Failures of Intensity”. In the article, Scott argues for skill acquisition advice to be geared towards how much you should do rather than what you should do. Scott mentions there is lack of information about how much time it takes learning a new skill as well as frequency. Almost all advice columns out there are about what to do to learn a new skill.

If I open the top stories on Medium, you’ll find posts titled “These 12 Habits Are Killing Your Productivity”, “Building your design portfolio? Here are 8 things I wish I’d known”, and “How to be like Steve Ballmer”. The last article, it started with the word, “how”, but when you get to the meat of the article, you find out its telling you the “what”, as in “what do you need to do in order to achieve success like Steve Ballmer.” I’m not trashing these articles. I’m sure they’re all a perfectly good read, but Scott was right. They’re focused on telling people the “what” and not of “how much” and “how frequent”.

How much is enough to learn a skill? Last year, I read Josh Kaufman’s book, “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything … Fast!” Like most books, Josh first breaks down the question of what. For this book, it’s the what of of skill acquisition. But unlike other books, the second half is Josh chronicling the first twenty hours of learning a new skill. He breaks down the first twenty hours of learning yoga, programming, touch typing, the game go, the ukulele, and windsurfing. He learned it wasn’t worth pursuing touch typing after twenty hours, but it was worth pursuing programming a bit further.

What we can learn from Josh is to give new skills a shot. Give yourself a goal or milestone to reach by twenty hours. At the end of the twenty hours, you take a moment of reflection. Do you continue to put more effort in this skill or let it go?

Reflection Points

If you decide to continue with your skill, place checkpoints to review the progress. All too often, we don’t reflect on where we are. If you check in with yourself at fixed time intervals, like every week or every month, you can review the progress you’ve made. Then, you can adjust the frequency of how much more practice you’ll need.

When you don’t have checkpoints for reflecting, you could be comfortable with mediocre skills and stop working on growth. This is especially harmful if you wish to continue growing. I have made this mistake repeatedly. Years into my piano lessons, I’d practice with an automated mind, letting myself play the music without thinking about timing, about playing the correct notes or keeping good form. Bad habits such as finger slip mistakes creeped in and stuck, in other words, I learned to adapt to hearing the bad note. Before I knew it, I wasted a good 100 hours practicing music that didn’t sound great. I stalled on my skills and wasn’t going to improve them with more time spent on practice. I had fallen pray to my autopilot mind.

Flow is the balance between doing a task that is challenging while having a high skill level in that task. Deliberate practice is being in that flow state. Regular practice regards all practice, whether deliberate or not. I won’t talk much about flow, as that was the topic of a previous post. If you find yourself in that stalled funk, here are a few tips to help you get out.

Work on something new. In piano practice, this is as easy as playing a new song in a new genre. Last month, I found my fingers tired and sore trying to play improv salsa. It was a genre I hadn’t tackled before, and by the end of my practice, I remembered what a beginner felt like.

Write about the process. This past week, I started using Vim as a text editor. After a year of using Sublime and Atom, I put those aside and took two hours to go through a tutorial called vimtutor. The tutorial taught me the basics of how to use Vim. At the end of the tutorial, I wrote up a piece about my experience with the tutorial, mainly to help myself with what I learned, but with a bonus side effect that it may help someone else just starting out with Vim.

Reflect with a teacher. Whenever I feel I’m not challenged enough, I talk to a teacher, a boss, or a mentor who has a higher skill level. Talking to someone with a higher skill level, you may be able to extract what you could do next. I was at a data visualization unconference two weekends ago and people I talked to pointed me to bunch of new programs to sharpen my toolset.

Be the teacher. If you know the skill well enough, you should be able to teach it to others. A lot of times, you won’t know there’s gaps in your knowledge or skill until you have to teach it to someone else. It makes you reflect on being the beginner again. During Thanksgiving, I tried to teach my 8 year old cousin how to play a 14 and up card game. When I was explaining the rules to my cousin, I used large words he couldn’t understand. Looking at my cousin’s dumbfounded face, I realized I’m still terrible throwing away large words in favor of shorter ones a 8 year old could understand. Reflecting on this situation, I need to work on communicating more clearly to children.

While I’ve recommended this book in the past, it’s a great book to recommend again. “Pragmatic Thinking & Learning. Refactor Your Wetware” by Andy Hunt has more tips about getting out of the rut.

Remember skill acquisition takes time, and you should focus on the journey rather than the destination. Perhaps twenty hours utilizing one of these tips might just be what you need to grow into the master you wish to become.

Dear Reader,

Let’s keep this a bit informal. I’m thankful for a year of newsletters, thankful for all of you reading, and thankful for all of the support y’all have given me. Without your support, I don’t know if I’d be writing essays every week. This weekly piece of writing is a way to bring together as well as synthesize what I’ve learned throughout the week. Now that it’s been a year, I wanted to look back at what I wrote and take a look at the journey.

The Numbers

Since last year, I’ve sent 45 letters. That tells me I’ve missed 8 letters. Back in October, I announced I would cut back on my load of work by publishing an essay once every other week. However, I want to challenge myself in the month of December to bring to you all original essays once a week again.

When I started, I had six subscribers. Today, as of November 29th at 8

Combined, the total word count for my letters is 48,476. Keep in mind I love to lift quotes, passages, and re-post other stories my friends have written. That’s pretty close to the NaNoWriMo goal of their 50k word count. To give some perspective, “The Great Gatsby” has a word count of 47,094. “Slaughterhouse-Five” has a word count of 49,4459. You can check out Commonplace Book’s website for more novel word counts.

Reflections

Between December to June, I was releasing these letters on Medium. I stopped posting in June because I wasn’t getting much readership on Medium. When I published on Medium, I hoped more strangers would read what I posted. I tried advertising on social media, but did not have much luck besides two posts, one in which was recommended by Dave Hoover and another which was following the Caltrain suicide news circus. With Tinyletter, it’s guaranteed these emails will reach my particular audience. I will only post to Medium today if I think the post has a clear message and should reach a wider audience. Most of my posts on Medium have on average 5 reads. It should be noted a read is when a user scrolls through the article from top to bottom counter to a page view which could also include a bounce behavior, i.e. a user clicks on the article and immediately goes to a different website or closes the tab or window of the browser.

And it should be noted I’m not trying to write for an unknown audience. I’m writing for my friends and whoever wants to join in on my essays. I’ve stated on the Tinyletter landing page that I’m not going to social media to post a longform essay, because no one will read it there either. On Facebook, we are inundated by the endless scrolling content where a wall of text would not appeal to anyone’s eyes. That post would be surrounded by an environment of short, multimedia content that shouts, click on me, and has a shelf life of two seconds.

The last thing I will say about writing this piece every week is I really enjoy the writing process. I’m selecting my words carefully, trying not to use too many adverbs and quips that add no value to the writing. One of my friend’s pet peeves is the world albeit. “We can go to the store, albeit by the time I get there, I may have to use the restroom.” In this context, albeit was not necessary to get the point across. On that same thought, I try not to use words like “just”, “finally”, and “definitely”, which are overused in my writing.

Again, thanks for all of you for reading my posts. One year goes by so fast, I forget easily how much I’ve written. I hope you continue to join me for the next year as I have more to share with y’all.

Best,

Jeremy Wong

“Impostor syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.”

— Taken from Caltech Counseling Center

It’s easy to latch on to a concept to answer the question, “What’s wrong with me?” I asked that question about a year into my last job. I knew the ins and outs of laser cutting metal rods. I knew the basics in making jigs and fixtures for manufacturing custom parts. I knew how to break down problems using the scientific method. But my work project was ten weeks late, and I was feeling quite defeated that I wasn’t the right person to do this job, which was a slippery slope in thinking I wasn’t cut out to be in this line of work. I didn’t know it at the time, but I thought what was wrong with me was I had imposter syndrome.

To add insult to injury, it was revealed in my performance review that my boss had given me low marks on competence. Their feedback was unhelpful in giving actionable steps in how to perform better, and I was left with low self-esteem. I thought I didn’t have what it takes to be an engineer, that I was a fraud, and at some point I was going to be fired. It was at that point where I started to really slip up, not making any progress on the project I was working on. My boss, sensing my discomfort, pulled me in a meeting with the CEO and a co-worker and told me to pair up on this project, because two heads are better than one.

But the plan backfired. Three more weeks past by, and neither my co-worker nor I could figure out how to complete the project. Initially on the project, I didn’t ask for much help, so we decided it might be best to get the CTO to help us. But his practice of teaching us in a yoga-like manner did not help either of us in creating a viable solution. We had many false breakthroughs, eventually resulting in my resignation. It would take the company the next year and different engineers to complete the project.

Reflecting back on it, I realized that it wasn’t just my mental performance that was bleak, but also the fact that it really was an incredibly difficult project. This experience wasn’t an attack on my competence, nor is it a tale of imposter syndrome. It is an example of believing self-doubt was a bad attribute to have. This week, I read Alicia Liu’s post on “Imposter Syndrome Is Not Just A Confidence Problem”, which I took away that I need a healthy dose of self-doubt. I’m unable to know everything, so not knowing something is a gut feeling that I should pursue other avenues of exploration rather than just seek within. This could be asking for help, doing research on what other’s have done in the past, or talking to a rubber duck to re-access the problem. And it turns out, experts and masters of their own field can have moments or large lapses of time of self-doubt. That’s when you’re supposed to put on the kettle and think.

For nearly three months, there has been talk about when the rain will come in California. We have started to treat El Niño as the second coming of Christ where nature will save us all. I know those conversations are in the context of the drought, but taking a step back, they sound spiritual, as if nature is our savior. And yet, we don’t know this to be the case. We’re unable to predict the future, especially since nature tends to work in mysterious ways. We call our models predictive because they’re just that, a prediction.

This morning, it started raining for what seems like the first time in a very long time. It rained earlier this year with the same intensity, but it felt like eons ago. I woke up early since I have a hard time adjusting to Daylight Savings Time, and it was dark all around me. I could hear the pitter patter of the raindrops on the roof, and I was shaken up, unable to get a good night’s rest. I find it peculiar yet fascinating how my body can forget how to sleep in a loud environment.

I’m not going to hail this as, “El Niño is here! Let’s praise nature our drought is over!” One downpour can not make up for years of no downpour. Perhaps I’m being a pessimist because I don’t want to believe in one grand event solving everything, a deus ex machina. I guess this is to say I have optimism from the success of small wins rather than one large miracle. You decide what this rain means.

However, I’ll embrace this event. It’s a good shake up to the monotonous routine and the banalities of everyday life. At least, that’s the feeling I got when I woke up today.

I was turned on to audiobooks by accident. I had a free half hour of commuting and didn’t want to waste it staring out the window or listening to the same people on podcasts. I was commuting to and from school at the time, and I kept hearing the same Audible ads on TWiT, a weekly podcast about tech. I decided to give the free subscription a try on Audible and give an audiobook a chance. While the first book I read didn’t change my life, I understood the medium a lot better. I could commute and listen to an audiobook and be excited to continue a story I had left off the day before. It’s a lot like a TV show, and the format is different than what you would find on a podcast, e.g. interviews, round table discussions, and reporter segments.

Some 100 audiobooks later, I owe it to audiobooks to introducing me to authors I now adore and giving me an opportunity to learn something new. On my road trip last year from Dallas to San Jose, I finished reading “The Goldfinch”. I’m in the camp of people who didn’t care too much about the second act of the book as I felt it could’ve been trimmed down from it’s mostly mundane descriptions that parallels a Dickinson novel. During these long and arduous reads, I was glad someone else was reading them to me as I was yelling expletives in the car at how much the main character was an idiot. But that’s the beauty of audiobooks. The reader keeps reading through the audiobook even if you’re excited, in tears, or just plain bored. If it wasn’t for the audiobook version of “A Storm of Swords”, the third book of “A Song of Ice and Fire”, I don’t know how I could’ve mustered to read through the red wedding.

When I talk to a non-audiobook reader, they have a hard time understanding the value of an audiobook. When someone tells me listening to an audiobook is not reading, I ask them whether they used to listen to their teacher read to them, or their parents, or whether they read to their kids. Many famous works came from oral tradition, like the Greek epics “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” was a radio program before it was in print form. When someone tells me they couldn’t sit an hour listening to a book, I ask them how long they commute for or how long a day they sit at a desk. When someone tells me they can’t bear the narrator’s voice, I ask them to try another audiobook. Stephen Fry does great narration in the Harry Potter series, giving each character a unique voice. Granted, non-fiction can be very dry if the narrator’s voice is dry and not vivacious.

When I talk to an audiobook reader, we tend to hit it off about what we enjoy reading, who’s our favorite narrator, what we’re looking forward to read next. If nothing else, you should listen to audiobooks too as a conversation piece at your next dinner party. Entertain your guests with the lore of “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Tell them about your foray into the bibliography of Einstein. Recite what you learned about empathy from Brené Brown. And, if audiobooks don’t work, why not pick up a book?

This past Saturday, I finished my first marathon. To add difficulty to my challenge, it was a trail run marathon. I didn’t realize this detail when I registered. But coming in faster than expected blew me away. I’d like to acknowledge the people that helped me and try to point out it wasn’t a journey done on my own.

Thanks to Megan who started me on a regimented running routine earlier last year. By motivating me to help her running journey by doing couch to 5k, I learned the value in pacing and intervals.

Thanks to Simon for repeated using the phrase, “The Obstacle is the Way.” I chanted that mantra throughout the run, and it helped my inner game by focusing on the run rather than the finish. Conveniently, I read Ryan Holiday’s book by the same name earlier this year. If you want a taste of stoic philosophy, I’d recommend the book.

Thanks to Christin for introducing me to trail running. I found out I get an adrenaline rush running up and down mountains. She also helped pick me up from my half marathon, which I completed earlier this year.

Thanks to Carlos for letting me know about this marathon. He didn’t participate, but is egging me on to do the LA marathon next year. I haven’t made up my mind about that one yet.

Thanks to Victor for helping me train in Arizona. Nothing can capture those four days of wild and crazy trail runs through different terrain.

Thanks to Teagan for taking me to my marathon. Thanks to my dad for picking me up.

And lastly, thanks to the countless people who have given me support on my journey. I really couldn’t have made it without you.

I’m still exhausted and stiff from my run, and I hope to come up with a longer, more cohesive essay next week.

Keeping Traditions

Before I started sending Christmas Cards, I didn’t get the point of sending cards. The only times I sent cards were if I found them funny or I was told to send one. In late 2011, my roommate Teagan asked if I could help her make a Christmas Card to send to her family and close friends. She wanted to show her parents the friends that she lived with. I accepted her task, which started the Christmas Card tradition.

Teagan grew up with them. She told me her parents got all six siblings and her together for one shot. She missed that tradition, being away from family for the four years she had been in college, and really wanted to participate in her family’s tradition. I didn’t grow up with them. My family had a one-way gift exchange, receiving a card from other family or friends.

Teagan and I decided to mock the generic format of the Christmas Card. The card had individual pictures of each roommate in the background followed by a center picture of everyone together. The generic heading, “Merry Christmas”, curved it’s way in on the bottom. I was glad our roommates participated in our absurd card, and I printed enough for each roommate to distribute 6 copies of the card. When I gave it to my family, there had a hoot. I remember they laughed so hard, and I wanted to cherish that moment. However, I was disappointed I didn’t have more to give.

The next year, I wanted to continue this gift. I decided this should be a running tradition. I created another card of just myself. On it, there are three panels. In the first panel, I dressed up like Santa Claus, the next panel, I was taking off the costume, and the third panel, I made a “ta-da” pose. Laughing at it for a minute, I thought this would be perfect. With the disappointment of having only 6 cards to distribute last year, I preemptively ordered a hundred copies. To my dismay, only 30 people replied, leaving me with 70 unusable Christmas Cards. But, I shouldn’t say it wasn’t worth it because those who were sent the card gave me their gratitude.

Instead of keeping to the same format year after year, the following year, I went all out. Recognizing I probably wouldn’t need to send too many out, I sent out invitations telling everyone I would send pictures of us together on the postcard. By making this simple change, my number of recipients grew by over two-fold. This time, everyone was elated when they received my card and saw their own face on it. I learned personalization is key to making a better Christmas Card with greater emotional weight.

Last year was quite wonderful. I changed it up again, creating hand-drawn card of something that reminded me of them. For one of my friends, I drew a rock climber because I knew that’s an activity she enjoyed. On another card was a petri dish because my friend worked in a lab at UCSF. However, I was worn out when I found out I had to create 140 of these cards. I had just graduated from Dev Bootcamp and wanted to keep in touch with everyone I had met.

Despite feeling worn out, this has been a high point each year. Being able to reach out to people I haven’t talked to in a year and making something meaningful for them. It’s a great feeling, and I wish everyone had the time to do this. I’ve changed my position about gift-giving, and I really want the people I know I am thinking about them.

The Idea

This holiday season, I want to do something new and fresh. Different ideas floated around my head, and I settled on an idea that I think will be really fun and therapeutic. I would like to give every a piece of a large art piece and type-written letters from an old typewriter.

I started water coloring this year, and think it would be really neat to do a few large canvases. I’ll take those canvases and cut them up in card sized squares. The idea is the gift recipient gets a part of a larger masterpiece. I stole the idea from Nerina Pallot who did this as prizes for supporting her new album.

Last year, I learned hand writing 140 letters may result in minor forearm muscle cramps. Instead of hand writing, I wanted some way of showing I wrote the letter with meaningful though. Enter a typewriter. I’m using an Olivetti Praxis 48, an electric typewriter from the late 1960’s. Some of the relic’s buttons don’t function. I’m looking at you, letter z, 2 and shift key! I’ve chosen to use plain dot matrix printer paper with the side perforations. These two items pair well as it shows a world we’ve left behind.

Now I know I could send this all digitally. But, there’s something about the physical medium that changes the perception of a gift. An email can whiz by you without a moment’s notice. A physical card is something you must take the time and look at. Instead of that 6 second email interaction, you may take up to a few minutes looking at my Christmas Card. Some websites have caught on to this, such as Reddit Gifts or Metafilter’s CD swap.

Some of you may be wondering why am I starting in October? To be honest, I’m lazy. The administrative tasks, such as asking everyone for their mailing address, filling out each envelope, putting the stamps on it, going to the post office, obtain postage for international letters, and physically mailing them, are boring. Plus, last year, I was late, so I’m hoping that proverb, “The early bird gets the worm,” actually works as implied.

The Value of a Gift

On my friend, Helin, recommendation, I read a book called “The Gift” a few months back. The book has this sector about monetary gifts versus gifts with no inherent price tag. A takeaway I learned was how I should continue this gift giving process without thought about receiving something back. There’s an implicit value that is reciprocated that may not take the form of a tangible gift, like writing a letter of recommendation when asked. The moment the gift has a price tag, the monetary value distracts from the emotional pull of a gift, and the gift recipient use the monetary value of the gift as an indication of the value of the relationship, e.g. a cheap gift means a poor relationship.

In addition to the benefits to the gift recipient, the cards have a major benefit to the gift giver. These Christmas cards are a gift for me to initiate a conversation to my contacts. It’s my lazy excuse to talk to someone I may have not reached out to for a year. It bugs me that people enter and exit your life, while the only thing keeping you from reaching out with a simple phone call, text, or email. I’m reminded of the poem by writer Charles Hanson Towne.

Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end;
Yet the days go by, and weeks rush on,
And before I know it a year is gone,
And I never see my old friend’s face,
For Life is a swift and terrible race.
He knows I like him just as well,
As in the days when I rang his bell,
And he rang mine. We were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men:
Tired with playing a foolish game,
Tired with trying to make a name.
”To-morrow,” I say, “I will call on Jim
”Just to show that I’m thinking of him.”
But to-morrow comes — and to-morrow goes,
And distance between us grows and grows.
Around the corner — yet miles away,…
”Here’s a telegram sir,…"
"Jim died today.”
And that’s what we get, and deserve in the end:
Around the corner, a vanished friend.
— Charles Hanson Towne

I never expected this ritual to occupy so much time. But I think of the benefits make it worthwhile, of catching up with old friends, of being able to go beyond normal gifts, of being creative. I absolutely love doing this, too much to the point this is what I think about on my free time.

“Thats morbid,” everyone responded when I tell them I’ve been reading the New York Times collection of obituaries. I disagree. I read an obituary a day to test a practice I read about from Austin Kleon from his book, “Show Your Work.” Mr. Kleon states it simulates the feeling about being hit with a life altering event. My expectation was I would be grounded in the reality, being reminded of my inevitable death if I read them. This is to simulate the feeling that you know your end will come some day without having to go through a life altering event. At least, that’s the theory.

The sum of every obituary is how heroic people are, and how noble.
— Maira Kalman

A few years back, I read Gretchen Rubin’s “The Happiness Project” where she concluded she had a deeper contemplation of life after reading memoirs with catastrophe. I’m reminded of similar consensus of feeling uplifted and reflective after I read Victor Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” and Primo Levi’s “If This Is A Man”. Both are about the concentration camps and neither dwell on the gross detail nor have a negative outlook on life.

The obituaries writers spotlight the recently deceased accomplishments, major struggles, and the family survivors. There’s some vesiage of their personality with a mixture of their accounts through a one liner quote with several second or third person views of how they made then feel. For example, Patricia O’Neal’s obituary included an annodote from people who worked with her on set. However, there are major shortcomings of an obituary as it does not capture the small moments, the cumulative effect they had to the community, all the short stories of their experiences. It’s highly condensed writing to laud their efforts in life. And that’s okay, because that’s the format of an obituary. This is unlike biographies like that of Peter Barton, Steve Jobs, and Oliver Sacks. Those have little gems of knowledge that one can use in their everyday lives. Obituaries try to tie things up with a knot of someone’s passing.

After reading one a day for the past two weeks, I don’t feel life altering different. I’m a little more aware of myself, of the small things I do that I can change like being gratuitous to friends, family, and strangers, going out of my way to put that extra effort in my work, and learning to slow down. Actually, that last one is something I struggle with on a daily basis, but more of that in a future post. If that’s the kind of kick you want in your daily routine, open a newspaper or buy a collection of obituaries and read one a day. And don’t let anyone tell you that’s morbid because the effect is quite the contrary; obituaries celebrate life.

Obituaries are like near-death experiences for cowards. Reading them is a way for me to think about death while also keeping it at arm’s length. Obituaries aren’t really about death; they’re about life… . Reading about people who are dead now and did things with their lives makes me want to get up and do something decent with mine. Thinking about death every morning makes me want to live.
— Austin Kleon

Annotations

1. The collection of obituaries is called The Obits: The New York Times Annual 2012.

   Sometimes the best part of a show is the curtain call, when the job is done and the actors bask in their well-deserved accolades. Here is a wonderful book filled with curtain calls. Count me among those on my feet and applauding like mad. —Stephen King

2. Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work, references the practice of reading obituaries in Chapter 1, “You Don’t Have To Be A Genius”. He also writes about this in a blog post after being inspired by Maira Kalman.
3. Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, read memoirs with catastrophes in Chapter 8, “August”
4. If you haven’t read Victor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, it has sound advice even though it’s over a half century old. Same with Primo Levi’s book, If This Is A Man.
5. I wrote about Peter Barton a while ago. His memoir is called Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived. The Steve Jobs biography I refer to is by Walter Isaacson under the same name. I also wrote about Oliver Sacks last month about his biography, On The Move: A Life. Dr. Sacks died last month. Yes, you bet I read his obituary.
6. I have two Ted Talks that share the same vein as this essay. One is by Ric Elias about how he thought he was going to die on a plane during the Hudson River plane landing incident, and what he changed in his life after. The other is by Sam Berns, who proves he can do anything even with his genetic disorder, progeria. He died in early 2014.

Cross Mentions

You can find this piece on Medium and Buttondown.

On the fourth day of my trail running adventure last week, I was a torn mess. My left calf was aching, my joints were abused, my willpower depleted. And yet, I continued, with the sun beating down at 104 degree Fahrenheit weather. I rab on the golf concourse in the middle of Death Valley, possible the lowest point of the world. The concourse was covered with salt, reflecting the sun’s radiant light and adding an extra source of irritation.

At this particular point of my journey, I was slowly losing the inner game. My conscious self got defensive, shouting “you’ll pass out before you get to the finish line.” I felt faint for being outside for a half an hour, and water was a short lived refresher. It’s the last quarter-mile stretch, and all I wanted was an ice tea by a cool, ocean breeze.

This happened the first day too. It was at Joshua Tree, and I had a low reserve of willpower from a lack of sleep the night before. I wanted to stop running; my mind was the greatest obstacle. I tried the strategies I picked up from marathon training to stop thinking by placing focus on breathe. In the back of my head, Simon was telling me “the obstacle is the way.” My travel campanion was running beside me shouting words of encouragement. I try to listen and not let my mind get the better of me.

Death Valley in the summer is miserable as people say. It’s dry, you can faint by heat stroke, and you can’t imagine how there’s life in the desert. But glancing around, there were bushes, ants and other inserts around. I’m unsure if life was giving me a sign, but I was going to make it. At least, that’s the mantra I decided to use.

At the finish line, I panted heavily. “I made it,” I thought, but it was a large mental struggle. I found it hard to explain this to my travel friend as we packed up out gear to leave. My head throbbed from the lack of proper sleep. I wanted to leave the desert, go to a cooler place. I wanted to let my aching left calf rest.

That’s the inner game. An internal struggle to bypass the thoughts of quitting, of giving into the temptation that what you’re doing is not worth it, of letting your body do the last 10%. I look back at the situation now and realize those efforts were crucial. We may not understand why, but we need to rely on our gut feeling and stop listening to our head.

I came across this sentence when I was reading through the book, “40 Days of Dating”. “I think whatever you do, just make sure you’re responding and not reacting. It’s easy to get comfortable. Take your time, please.” Timothy Goodman, graphic designer and one half of the “40 Days of Dating” project, was responding to a fan of the project on Facebook, and he decided to give the fan some advice about failed relationships. He is trying to tell this fan to be more mindful in her relationships by sliding back into an abusive relationship. Reacting is allowing the emotions to come out. Responding is allowing the mind to analyze the consequences of what those emotions will produce. “I don’t want to be one of those people who just gets sucked back into a relationship because it’s more comfortable than having to start over,” says the fan.

I’ve written about feeling uncomfortable in the past, and it has an questionable counterpart, comfort. I remember I had this habit of venting to my co-worker on how terrible my life was when she asked me how my day was. She would feed off of that energy and tell me everything that was wrong with her. It was doing me harm because it would leave a bad aftertaste for the rest of my day. Instead of thinking about what my words meant, I allowed my mind to react to this moment as a time to unload all of my problems. It would have been better to avoid those conversations and talk about those things that were bothering me in a safe place.

It’s not enough to identify this problem areas once. Dealing with uncomfortable situations should be a daily habit. There are plenty of moments throughout my day to practice responding to situations rather than reacting. I was on the road earlier today and someone cut me off. Instead of acting out and honking my horn, I listened to my body’s emotional reaction and let it go. The process of letting go is different for person to person. I try to find my non-judgement headspace. If that doesn’t work, I try to take a stab at rational thought, like “I have the ability to control my behavior, and honking the horn doesn’t solve the problem.”

I absolutely love this story by Maurice Rabb, instructor at Dev Bootcamp, that he shared on Facebook.

I had an odd experience today. This morning I was hurrying to meet Audrey and Ella in the Loop. I hate paying for downtown parking, so I was doing my usual trick of parking south of 16th St and riding my folding bike north to the Loop. As I was preparing to pull into a small spot, I noticed that there was someone in the driver’s seat of the car in front of the space. I pulled up and asked > the woman, Excuse me, are you leaving?”

Lady: “No.”

Me (Seeing that no one was parked ahead of her): “Can you give me a foot?”

Lady: “Huh?” Turning towards me looking confused and annoyed.

Me: “Can you move up a bit so that I can get in the spot?”

Lady (Turning fully towards me and glaring.): “If you can’t get that little car > in there, YOU DON”T DESERVE THE SPACE!”

Me (taken aback and shocked by her profound stanktitudes): “Do you need to be > so FUCKING RUDE?!?”

I slid into the spot in one fell swoop. (In your face, asshole!) I hop out of the car and made my way around to the back. As I’m unloading my bike, I hear muffled Charlie Brown teacher style chatter from the woman - she’s unintelligibly and angrily loud talking me from her car. I immediately regret cursing at her and escalating the situation. As mean and ignorant as her > comment was, I’m concerned she might key my car when I leave.

As a defensive move, I take a picture of her car to capture her license plate. As I’m unfolding my bike, she gets out her car yelling at me. She’s a > 60/70-something black woman. She’s now taking photos of my car.

Lady: “Look at all these scratches on your bumper. You obviously don’t know how > to park!”

I ignore her. (Dummy, didn’t you just see that pro valet parking attendant move > I just pulled? You better recognize, fool!)

She walks closer: “Look at all these scratches on the side of you car. You > clearly don’t know how to drive!”

I glare at her. Now she’s taking pictures of me. Now I’m livid. I step to her. > I’m right in her face, eye to eye.

Me: “You are rude!!” (Barely containing all the foul stuff I wanted to spit in > her face.)

Lady: “Don’t touch me! Don’t you think of touching me!!”

Me: “I’m not going to touch you!”

Lady: “You’re rude for cursing at me! I didn’t curse at you. Not all black > people are like that.”

Me: “You know. You are right!” (Still in angry yelling mode.)

“I shouldn’t have used profanity at you. I’m sorry.” (My face softening but > cheeks still tight.)

She takes two quick steps back in retreat. Her mouth opens to say something but > nothing comes out. She looks stunned. Finally, she speaks.

Lady: “I’m sorry, too.”

Awkward silence.

Me: “I’m sorry I lost my temper.”

I extend my hand. We shake hands.

Lady: “I’m glad we resolved this this way.”

Me: “Me too.”

We both smile a barely detectable smile.

Me: “I hope you have an easier day.”

Lady: “You too.”

I hopped on my bike.

Me: “Again, I’m sorry for losing my temper.”

She nods.

When I returned hours later, her car was gone. My car was unmolested. I wonder > what story (if any) she tells tonight.

I love this story so much because there’s mutual understanding between both parties responding in rational behavior, not allowing their heavy-handed emotional side get the better of them. It shows that even when we are at fault for our words, we can still act with dignity and respect if we look inward and reflect.

I will close with this. Identify one thing a day where you find yourself reacting instead of responding. When you’re in that situation again, stop for a second, it could go longer, and think about the consequences before you proceed with that action. You may be surprised by your behavior.

Last October, Carlos Bueno gave a lightning talk called “Science Education: Refactoring Computer Science.” In that talk, he talked about writing “Lauren Ipsum” and how it was easier to teach children about recursion than binary numbers. Recursion is the event when a function calls itself, creating a new stack. Binary numbers are a base two number system, primarily used by computers by way of electrical signals between relays and switches. Recursion is easier to explain to children because the concept of stacks are a lot easier to comprehend than the abstract world of counting by base two. As adults, it feels like it is easier to learn the binary number system because the idea of counting is relatively easy. When Bueno explained this to us, I was pleasantly surprised and it started me thinking about how we can teach the next generation about other ideas.

When I read Oliver Sack’s new autobiography, “On The Move: A Life”, that idea came back to me. Somewhere in the book, I really wish I could find the quote, Sacks writes about a colleague who died young and had a profound effect on Sacks that he must continue his life by writing about his work. I realized we continue to work through what others had to leave behind under unfortunate circumstance, whether it be circumstance or death. It is our duty to teach the next generation the ideas and worldview of the world so that they could carry them on and continue to improve them. Also, we don’t want the next generation to make the same mistakes as we do.

“When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” — Oliver Sacks, op-ed in The New York Times on learning he has terminal cancer

When I read this quote, I think of what the holes mean. The holes are the missing pieces, the partial pictures, a sliver of the what the dead thought. I believe poetry is a fitting analogy for what is left behind. Poetry is open-ended, goes into much interpretation, yet it is condensed and full of meaning. Homer, and perhaps those before him, distilled down the Trojan War epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey into lyrical language. I believe the descriptors of the characters was to help abide the memories of the audience so they can pass these stories down orally. We see this in other literature and famous folks with King Arthur of Camelot, Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc and countless others.

Two weeks ago, I met someone who was heavily influenced by Buckminster Fuller. He met Fuller when he was a kid and wished he could ask him a question about his work. But as he was too young, he didn’t get to read about Fuller’s concepts and ideas until he was a teenager, after Fuller’s death. Even with a partial understanding of Fuller’s ideas, he took them to heart and worked in the forestry department. He tells me he tries to apply Fuller’s ideas about nature to his everyday work. I love this story because it is metaphorically passing the torch. It should be noted that there’s a book about Buckminster Fuller entitled “Fuller’s Earth: A Day With Buckminster Fuller and the Kids” where Fuller literally gives children his philosophy in words the children can understand.

I’ll leave you with this. Uncork your mind from its secrets and spill out the good ideas. Help people around you, and those after you, understand why you made certain decisions, your struggles and forays into problems, and help us all collectively understand the world a little more.

I’ve been journaling more four years, one entry a day. I’ve skipped a few days here or there, but I go back and fill them in. The entries capture my daily mood, or current obsession, or the thing that’s been worrying me. Sometimes, I go back to some old entries and reflect upon myself of where I was a year ago, two years ago, or perhaps just last week. That window is a primary source of information, and not jumbled by my own bias of how I want to reconstruct the past. I’ve surprised myself many times before when I read these entries because I’ve reconstructed my memories of how I’ve felt, like we all do, glamorizing the pleasurable moments and hiding from our darkness.

These entries were always free form, sometimes filled with art, or rants about politics, or quotes I really like from a book I’m reading. Two weeks ago, I decided to take a break from this free form method and experiment with a Q&A format where I would ask myself a series of questions, like “What are you grateful for?”, “What would you do differently?”, and “What do you anticipate for today?”. Here’s a glimpse into some of those entries.

July 27th, 2015

What am I grateful for?

I’m grateful I was able to exercise this morning and that I remembered, even though I was late, to text my cousin “Happy Birthday”.

For those who really matter to me in life, I’ve tried to reach out to them on their birthday. It’s these little things in life that I cherish the most.

July 30th, 2015

Anything you’d do differently?

Don’t drunk order chicken wings at my local pizza restaurant — terrible wings. Also, don’t hesitate to go to the waiter and ask where your order is.

First, don’t get drunk on a Wednesday night. I was working the next day and had regrets the next morning. Secondly, the drunk mindset makes things up, like thinking the the food staff takes thirty minutes to make six chicken wings when in fact, the order was up and I just didn’t pester the waiter about where my food was.

August 6th, 2015

What could you take what you learned this week and apply it to the next week?

Start writing earlier and not be so hung up by the menial things. The little concerns I have throughout the day doesn’t mean much, so I should take the time to practice mindfulness.

That’s well said. Although contrary to the initial piece of advice, I’m writing this after work on Monday night when I should have finished this piece of writing the night before. But, as the second sentence says, I’m not sweating it.

Looking back at these entries, they’re more legible and start to tell a story about the day and sets the mood for what I was feeling. Over the years, I’ve learned that’s what I gain from writing everyday, an insight into my past behaviors, connecting dots of how the larger picture looks.

Do you keep a journal? Do you write everyday? Do you ever go back and read what you wrote?

The Solano Stroll in Berkeley is an annual event where the entire stretch of Solano Street is closed. Local businesses and residents would participate in turning the street into a street festival. The firefighter departments of Berkeley and Albany would come with a fire truck where kids could sit in the driver seat and understand what it could feel like to be the firefighter driver. Restaurants would bring out their grills and serve some street food. Clothing stores would try to give discounts for their end of season sales.

It was there, over fifteen years ago, where I started a collection of business cards. At the stroll, the street is littered with booths from local businesses, artists, specialists, and because it’s Berkeley, radicals. Each one of these booths had business cards there for the taking, so I ran up and down the two and half mile stretch to collect them all. Besides the booths, there were people on the streets handing out their own personal business cards next to their signs. One guy in particular was an artist trying to sell his ceramic pieces and made custom jewelry.

A normal response when someone receives a business card would be to commit to an action to it or, more likely, throw it away in the trash. I decided to keep the cards in a box, serving as a container for the Solano Stroll experience. But it expanded beyond the event. I found myself taking business cards from restaurants, gift shops, travel agencies, community boards, and other businesses. I collected the punch cards you would receive at sandwich shops. I collected the strange, square shaped ones. I collected the last one on the business card tray. One time, I entered a photo store, and as I was taking a card next to the register, the store clerk looked at me sternly and asked, “Why are you taking a business card?” Flustered, I scurried off, clenching the business card in hand.

On family vacations, I would fill the pocket of my suitcases with business cards from the various places we went. The cards transformed from words with contact information to personal stored memories. I have this particularly strange one from Taiwan that introduced me to their calendar system. 93? Whoa! Sometimes other paraphernalia would find its way into my collection, like tickets from the movies, plane rides, and the theater. One in particular comes in recent memory. I have this ticket stub from the Alcazar, a theater in Pattaya, Thailand that ran shows every night of their most beautiful lady boys.

Over the years, I’ve asked the central question to this collection. Why keep this up? As I said, most sane people would throw them away. A day before the planes hit 9/11, my grandmother visited the World Trade Center. She bought a bouncy ball from the gift shop that glowed after impact. When she came home, she gave this to me as a gift. I couldn’t see the ball more than just a reminder of the tragedy that hit this nation. A month or two after she gave me the gift, I lost it as I threw it on the school grounds. It rolled underneath the bungalow of my classroom and I felt devastated. The ball had this history I only knew about. That’s what these cards mean to me now, memories that remind me of specific moments of my life.

At a recent meet-up I attended, I was introduced to the concept of perceived distance. Perceived distance is the mind’s perception of how far you have traveled while absolute distance is the distance actually traveled. Obstacles could increase the perceived distance, like road blocks, traffic, rough terrain, and changes in elevation. At the meet-up, the speaker used the example of bicycling on the same lane as fast driving cars. Here in Silicon Valley, we have expressways connecting different cities where cars could drive easily 50 to 60 mph (that’s roughly 80 to 96 km/h for you non-Americans). When a bike has to share that same road, the biker will perceived the distance to be longer because of the stress of getting hit by a car.

This made me think about how similar the concept of perceived distance is to perceived difficulty. Sometimes I can be quite stubborn and refuse to do something because the initial action is cumbersome. I held off on writing an email for a whole month because I thought the writing would take an hour. In my mind, I place a 1 to 1 ratio between time and difficulty, meaning the more time it takes, the more difficult it becomes. In reality, the email took me 5 minutes to write and one click to send.

David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done”, talks about how to get incoming work done. If the activity takes two minutes or less, do it now. If it doesn’t, figure out the next action that must be taken, whether that is blocking off a part of your schedule to do it, defer it to someone else, or figure out an action at a later date. However, in my implementation of his system, that last part about taking the action at a later date never comes. I’ll have my inbox stack up and be left with an overwhelming number of 10, 20, or 30 minute activities.

When I read Kelly McGonigal’s book, “The Willpower Instinct”, I learned about willpower depletion and how easily we can be susceptible to wasting our time when in that state. To diverge from this path, I’ve been reduced to doing things while I have the self-control and drive to do them. But with a large stack of todo items that take longer than 2 minutes, there’s no possible way I can do that in the allotted time when I have the willpower to do them. This leads me to an unfortunate conclusion; I don’t know how to lower the perceived difficulty and stop overloading my schedule. I would actually like to hear how others deal with perceived difficulty and getting things done. What are some techniques you use to get things done?

Before I went to Iowa, fireflies were meaningless to me. Early last spring, my roommate bought a string of solar green LED lights and hung them on a tree. At night, they would glow in and out, simulating the fireflies lights. Living in Northern California for most of my life, it was easy for me to overlook this as a cheap gimmick. When my roommate installed them, I had a hard time finding the emotional pull they had for my roommate.

On my cross-country road trip last summer, I stopped for the night in Omaha. One of the locals invited me to a weekly Taco Tuesday event. The major difference in this event than others I’ve been to is the locals really make you work for the tacos. Locals ride their bikes on an old railroad tracks path paved into a bike path for ten miles ending in a outdoor seating restaurant that served cheap tacos. Luckily, at the half way point, there’s an oasis of booze called Margaritaville where you can stop, talk, and drink. I drove across the Mississippi River to Iowa stateside in awe of the flat landscape. By the time I got to the trail head, the sun was just starting to set and I was a bit worried I was going to have to ride in the dark. Much to my chagrin, the path was illuminated by fireflies. I gazed at the bugs, awed by their bright glow of hope. They seem to say, “winter has past, you can come out now”. Their presence allowed me to finally understand what many writers were talking about in those children books — a glow of summer.

I thought back to my roommate’s fake firefly lights hanging in our backyard tree. It was a representation of this kind of emotion where he would be taken back to his summers in Boston trying to catch them. I stopped my bike and tried to catch one. Although I didn’t have much success, I felt like a kid. I realized adults can have the empathy and nostalgia for a past childhood they never had.

And yet, I don’t understand how something as simple as a glowing green light could make me feel so happy. It set the setting, and for the rest of that night; they were the entertainment. It was more entertainment than any manufactured, designed, or advertised piece of media humans had developed. It felt pure, and in a way, the path I was taking was this magical journey down the rabbit hole. And appreciating these tiny things are why we live life, right?

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.”
― Robert Frost

With over half a year of writing these letters, I am taking the time to review the differences in my writing between the past and present. I haven’t noticed a difference in writing quality, to my dismay, but I’ve learned something much more valuable. I’ve learned the value of editing. Before, I thought editing was a cumbersome and not necessary. “Shouldn’t everyone understand my stream of consciousness?” It turns out, no, the reader cannot. When I went back to re-read my writing, I realized I couldn’t read it. I had to think of the context in which I wrote it in to determine what I was trying to say.

Programming helped build part of this muscle. For over a year, I’ve been reading and reviewing my code, and I’ve noticed holes everywhere. As I learn how to become a pragmatic developer, I notice the code I wrote in the past just isn’t up to my standards today. And the code I write today won’t be at the standards that I hope for tomorrow. With writing, I strive for the same things. I want it to be legible for the intended audience with hopes that they will understand my point of view.

It felt embarrassing having my audience read such verbose verbiage. For the past month, I’ve tried to cut back on using adverbs and other modifiers. I’ve scrutinized words such as “only”, “very”, and “just” and tried to cut them out. Now when I read through my writing, I immediately cut those things out as soon as I can.

I pass my essays through the Hemingway App to detect awkward sentences. For example, the app can detect passive voice and difficult to read sentences. In grade school, most of us learned to avoid these techniques. I didn’t comprehend these things until I started recognizing them as mistakes. When I had a friend edit my writing, I learned that it’s hard to recognize these things on your own. Speaking of editors, if you would like to help edit these in the future, reach out to me.

When I read writing from some of my favorite authors, I’m awed by their clarity and narration. I aim myself for that target, but I’m not quite there yet. I will need to deliberately practice more, but I recognize that I’m making progress. Also, I still loads to say, so I’m not going to quit writing anytime soon.

I’ve been experiencing heavy burnout over the past few weeks. I didn’t spare myself much time besides work, scheduled play, travel, and sleep. I’ve even deferred to eating out rather than cooking. The lifestyle, quite an unsustainable one, started to take a toll on my health. I took a run through Big Basin last weekend and was almost wiped out. I looked in the mirror at my pecks two days ago and saw sagging breasts and a round, bulging stomach. It was a pitiful sight since I use one visual metric as an indicator if I’m healthy, that of looking good naked. Some of those armpit wrinkles had their own wrinkles.

I took this time and started to reflect what was stressing me out. I stayed up later on nights where I should have gone to sleep earlier. I stopped exercising as much since late-April after coming back from Chicago, using travel as an excuse that threw off my exercise regime. I’ve been eating out when I have been used to home cooked meals. All of this sums up to looking at myself in the fitting room mirror at the mall staring at my own man boobs.

While a funny recollection, it scared the crap out of my. I have insecurities with my body shape, wearing loose clothing to hide some of those imperfections, and not doing anything about it. I know I could make the time, but with burnout, it is hard to feel elated to go for a run after work. I’m going back to basics, some may call it common sense, and work on the fundamentals again.

Don’t overload yourself

I switched over to the Todoist app, that worked quite well for a few months, but slowly piled up into ten daily tasks. I’m scrapping that out and re-doing my schedule to only handle one important task per day. Anything more that I accomplish will be a fun for the future.

The other thing is I’ve been overloaded with going back and forth between San Francisco and Palo Alto to go to events. I have to have a better, clear mission to do those things and know what events I can skip and which ones I should actually go to. It got bad over the past few weeks when I was going to an event every work day, which means more travel time.

Health Comes Primarily From Diet

In college, my big revelation was diet, not exercise, makes up most of the work needed to stay healthy. To stay fit, that’s where you introduce exercise. When I cut most sugar out of my diet, meaning no soda or juice, I saw results in my body. There were some side-effects, like getting these strange headaches along with sugar cravings, but after pushing through that hump, I have no regrets about that decision.

However, in most recent years, I’ve replaced those things with wine, which is a lot worse, especially when not in moderation. I will enact a limit of one glass if I do drink.

Listen To Your Body

Your body is quite acute to stress if you listen to it. I’ve had an issue with going to lunch, making terrible decisions listening to my body’s hunger pains. Instead, I’ll try to continue working, but my productivity has tanked. When I get lunch, I’ll buy too much food, get stuffed, and collapse with a food coma, ruining more work productivity. If I actually listened to my body initially, I would have had some willpower to tell myself to get a small salad and to stop eating when I feel full.

Caffeine, Or Your Drug of Choice, Is Not A Panacea

Last week, without much sleep the night before, I thought it would be a good idea to buy cup of coffee to get me through the day. If you don’t know me well, you’ll find out I rarely have caffeine. A cup of coffee for me it’s like crack, used sparingly for those rare, tired occasions. One this particular day, I was a bit hungover. I finished my coffee, and within minutes, felt that body ache.

I’m not giving caffeine a bad name, but I understand people hold on to it as a crutch, because it’s become their addiction. They can’t function without it, as witnessed through my roommates. When I use it as a quick solution, it’s never full proof and there’s always side-effects.

All of these things are measures and habits that I used to use as a basis for a clean, healthy way of living. It’s been hard to maintain balance, but there needs to be recognition that I’m going through this along with some reflection about how to take counter measures. And by relaxing this weekend and taking the time to write this out, I feel one step closer to that goal.

Last night, I celebrated Father’s Day by taking my father out to the restaurant of his choice. He decided to go to Tomei’s, a Japanese/Chinese open buffet serving a wide spread of options. I don’t typically eat at places like this because I know they will be packed, the quality of food will be subpar, and I come out stuffed because I don’t have a gauge of how much food I actually ate. But being a good son, I obliged to take him out there.

When we were seated, I looked around at the crowd. There were tables and seats packed in a large, dimly lit room full of families. The buffet line was barely tolerable with long waits and impatient people who cut in line in order to satisfy their cravings rather than abide to the unspoken rule of lines. It’s as if respect were thrown out the door and indecency was invited in.

I finished my third half-plate of food and stopped myself from eating more. There was no point in over-stuffing myself with previously frozen crab legs, under appreciated sea urchin, or under ripe watermelon. What’s the use of trying to stuff myself to the brim? I try to stick with the 60% rule of eating to 60% satiety, or at least the perception of it. I look at those around me, and I see they’ve lost control, allowing their cravings to dictate their actions. Thoughtless actions lead to lower empathy with the people around us. I remember a buffet I was at in Thailand, most of the customers went over to the buffet serving station with no care about shoving other people out of the way to fill their plate. It was rude and disheartening because I felt like I was being treated as an obstacle in their way.

Service workers are also have less empathy to those around them. Since the customers don’t serve as good examples of how to behave, it affects how the service workers behaves, and vice versa. This can be reflected in the care and attention given to the food. At Tomei’s, I thought the quality could have been better. And that’s not saying I want something top-class; I want the people preparing and cooking my food to have the care and attention they would give feeding their own children. I tip a barista something large when they take the time and actually brew a nice cup of tea or coffee. One of my favorite restaurants from the past year is a Guatemalan restaurant that serves hand-made tortillas, and you can buy them at an affordable price, i.e one dollar sign on Yelp. They knew quality, and their customers respected that. Couldn’t Tomei’s have that?

Let’s be clear. I’m not chastising buffets. I think there are some great buffets out there. I live by an extraordinary Indian lunch buffet that serves some of the best tandoori I’ve ever had. The cooks stick with the few dishes they know how to make best and make a lot of it. You can tell the cashier genuinely cares about your experience at the restaurant. At Tomei’s, I found myself rejecting most of the food because I knew it wasn’t going to be worth it. How could you mix dim sum with sushi? They just don’t go together and they’re two different disciplines.

Maybe I’m tooting my own horn because I have these cuisines on separate occasions and maybe I’m the wrong audience for this place. And if that’s the case, that’s fine. This buffet doesn’t need my business in order to survive. Last month, on Mother’s day, they had a three hour wait for those arriving ten minutes after opening time. I’d like to think that buffets like this are a gateway drug, and eventually the customers find something they really like and go out to find a restaurant that specializes in that thing. To those people, I am delighted to open up my own culture’s food to them. But I draw the line in the inexcusable behavior of thoughtless actions that negatively effect the experience of other customers. What’s the point when you’re trying to eat your food while being angry at the person seated next to you?

Fireflies are the signs of summer. They are this bright glow of hope. They seem to say, “winter has past, you can come out now”. Their green ominous glow like magic as you walk down the road. At least, this is what I would tell you if I hadn’t grown up in California. As a Californian, I can tell you there were no fireflies, no glimmer signaling the start of summer. When I read about fireflies in grade school, I would wonder what was so special about them. They were the mythical unicorns of my childhood.

It wasn’t until an adult when I first encountered a firefly. It was in the midwest, Iowa, biking through the woods. The sun was hanging low and there they were. Glowing in short spurts luminance, shining the path for my bike to head towards. They made me smile, and I wondered if I should be a kid at that moment, drop my bike, and try to catch them. Their presence allowed me to finally understand what many writers were talking about in those children books - a glow to the summer.

I don’t understand how something as simple as a glowing green light could make me feel so happy. It set the setting, and for the rest of that night, they were the entertainment. It was more entertainment than any manufactured, designed, or advertised piece of media humans had developed, at least for my tastes. It felt pure, and in a way, the path I was taking was this magical journey down the rabbit hole. And appreciating these tiny things are why we live life, right?

I’ve found the answer I’ve been looking for. I already found the answer years ago, but I’ve got to dig it up every now and again. The question: What’s the meaning of life? The answer: It’s different for everyone, so you’ve got to figure it out. This time, I’m revisiting it in a different context. I’m reading “Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived” by Peter Barton & Laurence Shames and I’ve been tying it with conversations I’ve had with my roommates about a recent death of a former co-worker. In “Not Fade Away”, Peter, who had terminal cancer, writes about coming to terms with his impending death and trying to help everyone’s struggle with their eventual end. In this short excerpt, Peter is suffering through the side-effects of chemotherapy, and he’s complaining to his wife.

One day, when my body was wracked and my head ached and my spirits were at their lowest, I said to my wife: “I just don’t see the point.”

Now, my wife Laura is as supportive and kind as a person could possibly be. I’m in awe of her gentleness. But in that moment she was something other than tender; she was absolutely fierce.

Fierce on my behalf — and, I think, on her own. She still had the determination that I was having such a hard time mustering. She still saw value in the struggle. She wasn’t about to let me wallow. She already had enough burdens; she didn’t want to cater to someone who had given up.

“So find one!” she declared.

I was so surprised by her vehemence that I lost my train of thought. I said, “Huh?”

“You don’t see the point?” she said. “Find a point!”

Looking back, I realize just how important that brief but intense conversation was.

— Peter Barton, Not Fade Away, pages 83 - 84

Peter’s revelation after this incident was there is a separation of the body and mind, something he eventually considers the soul. The body is the physical attachment, one bound by nature to decay and fall apart. The mind can take the role of the body and do the same. However, if we have control over our mind, we don’t have to allow it to decay and rot. We have the ability to not allow it to taint everyone else.

My roommate Mark keeps asking the question, “What’s the point?” while we were all sitting around the backyard fire pit. He follows up with his explanation for why the elderly tend to be mean and grumpy. “They’re in pain all of the time.” While true, the bodies of many elderly people are in pain, many of them allow the pain to get the better of them. When we don’t make this separation of mind and body, we can get terribly depressed.

The best counter example I know of for someone who didn’t let their body’s pain get to their mind was Stuart Scott, ESPN anchor. In the following video, Scott talks about his struggle with cancer and shows us what’s possible when faced with death.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but well up and cry, get depressed, get overwhelmed by the emotions Peter was going through. And then, it’s followed by hope, knowing that I can make the most out of life. My biggest take-away is not to let this moment slip again and really determine what my own purpose is for my life.

I wrote two separate pieces that I thought would become this week’s letter, but I scrapped them before I was finished. Each of these pieces devolved into a rant about what was going wrong with a painful decision point I had at the beginning of the week. This frustration became my creative rut. It’s a series of second guesses given by a very harsh, inner voice.

I started writing the first paragraph of the first draft, and really hated it. I deleted the paragraph and started over, but the writing sounded worse. The thing I’ve come to compromise about longer format writing in the past few months is that deleting a whole paragraph, paragraphs, or almost the entire piece is okay. In fact, I encourage it because it allows you to go back, read the piece with the deleted text and recognize what’s missing from it. Also, since you’re not looking at that bad paragraph, you’re not going to use that as a reference. As the saying goes, out of sight, out of mind.

I learned from this first draft that I shouldn’t try and shape writing around a quote. I included a stanza from a song and tried to tie it together. But I re-read the quote and I re-read the subsequent paragraph; they were not saying the same things. That made me feel like the core idea was jumbled and I really don’t know what I’m supposed to say.

The placeholder title didn’t help either. In school, they teach you how to write a generic thesis before your write your essay. However, in practice, my thesis usually emerges after writing for a bit and trying to recognize what my piece is about. For example, in this piece, the thesis is trying to dissect what is so difficult about writing. In my first draft, it started as how to tear down barriers, and slowly turned into a piece about how to come to grips that one day, you’re going to die, so you should use that to stop fearing things you have no control over. Eventually, the piece started ranting about the issues in my personal life, and I know how no one wants to hear someone bitch in a longford essay. That’s when I decided to scrap it and start over.

I know I’ve written about this before, but I love revisiting this concept of shitty first drafts. Anne Lamott introduced it in her book, “Bird by Bird”, an excellent guide to writing that I’ve read at least twice. The problem that I encountered with this first draft was sheer frustration that I wanted to write something meaningful and beautiful, but turds kept coming out no matter how I tried to edit the piece. The second draft was getting better. Initially, it sounded great. I trudged along, knowing my writing was a work in progress and would need severe editing, but it didn’t matter because I was churning paragraph after paragraph. When I would finish the piece, I would go back and edit those sections. And then, nearly finished with the piece, I start ranting about the discomfort of this week’s events again. It was supposed to be about networking, which quickly turned into how to build meaningful relationships, which quickly turned into why a personal relationship of mine went south.

In hindsight, prep work may have helped with these pieces. However, I recognize if I put too much time in prepping a piece, like making outlines or brainstorming ideas, the less I would actually want to write about that topic. I start drafts because I know they would at least give me a prototype of what the piece could be. In Robin Sloan’s last newsletter, “Primes”, in late March, he showed a screenshot of all the drafts that he had for that piece. His Gmail inbox, shown below, has at least 20 ideas for the drafts or things he wanted to share, but didn’t make the cut. When I saw that, I was amazed that I’m not the only one who has a troubled time sticking to one topic. The drafts aren’t all bad news or failed starts. They also have some idea that I cannot yet figure out, and when I do, it will be addressed in a later letter.

I write all of my letters in Evernote which has this feature to look at past revisions of a note. If I ever wanted to, I can re-read a draft and see all of my deleted sentences and paragraphs. All of this data is saved upon future investigation on the topic.

Looking at my the sidebar where all the notes live in my “Drafts” folder, and there are at least half of the notes that will never see the light of day. They’re a constant reminder to tell me writing drafts and crafting ideas don’t get much easier. In a way, I want it to be like that because if it was easy, I wouldn’t really enjoy the activity. It calms my mind knowing frustration is part of the process because I know there’s always something I need to improve.

“How come it’s easier to make friends as a kid than it is as an adult?” asked several acquaintances of mine.

I think the more relevant question is, how does one go about making friends? How about going on friend-dates?

No, no, no. It’s not like going on online dating services like Okcupid and trying to message women in an attempt at being impressive enough to go on a date. And it’s not like Tinder where you determine a friendship by the way they look (swipe right to ignore).

During the activities you do outside of work, take the time to get to know the people around you. Perhaps ask one of them to coffee, lunch or dinner. If you feel too vulnerable about asking someone to go on a friend-date, take the advice from Kelly Williams Brown, author of “Adulting”.

“Anytime you say to someone, even in a very veiled way, I care about you. Do you care about me? it’s scary.

But almost everyone will be pleased that you took the initiative. And if they’re not delighted by your straightforward friendliness, there you go! That is a bad friend candidate, and it’s good you won’t be wasting any more time.”

— Kelly Williams Brown, “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps”

Be personable and presentable to your new fellow friend. Just like dates, the best way I’ve found to get the ball rolling is to talk about something you’re passionate about. For me, it’s traveling. I go to weekly meet-ups with other like-minded world travelers. We talk about the adventure, the excitement, and the places we’re going to go next.

To finish off the friend date, remember to follow-up. When I get a follow-up email, phone call, or a physical card from someone else, it really shows that they care. Congratulations on your first successful friend-date!

I had a profound thought to myself this past weekend while watching the new Avengers movie. There were a series of scenes in which the superheroes were shown what they were most afraid of. In the middle of watching this, I had an nasty thought that came back, one that should’ve been settled years ago. It was the thought of living to the fullest and being able to express myself fully, something I struggle with on a consistent basis and it came back to haunt me sitting there in the theater.

After the movie ended, walking down the long corridor of the movie theater, I was lost in thought. I tried to brush it off. I hate confronting this issue in me. My usual reaction is to let it subside and move on with my life. But it followed me over the next few days.

I was listening to the Design Matters podcast where Debbie Millman interviewed Elle Luna. Elle wrote this piece on Medium called “The Crossroads of Should and Must”, which summarizes a portion of the interview when she’s describing the dream she had. In her recurring dream, Elle is standing in front of a white room with a concrete floor and high windows. She decided to go out and look for it in real life. After searching for days or weeks on Craigslist, she found it.

Dusk was falling as I arrived at the white room from my dreams. It was stark, absolute, white, and a symbol of something new, of beginnings. As I looked around, I thought, “What on earth have I done? Why am I here?” And as clear as day, I heard a voice say, “It’s time to paint.”
— Elle Luna, “The Crossroads of Should and Must”

Elle calls this her calling, and a decision she must do. She quit her job and started painting for the first time in ten years. She was able to express herself, or be true to herself, in a way she wasn’t able to do before as a designer.

The story shook me. I know there are some fears I pretend to not be ready to face. Thinking about the fear in the theater, I asked myself the question, “Am I lying to myself? Am I living the way I want to, being true to myself?”

In my career, I haven’t made the best decisions, and I’m not totally committed in the job I’m currently in. The crossroads of should and must are blurred, and I can’t think if I’m working in the industry I’m in because I should do it or I must do it.

In the process of thinking about this, I broke down my worries to some actionable steps. The first is to recognize myself. In the middle of Elle’s article, she asks the reader to make a list of top ten things I’m most afraid of. This is what I came up with in an allotted ten minutes:

I’m afraid…

1. Of being able to dance in front of strangers in public transportation. One stupid question that I ask myself is, is it illegal to do street performance on a moving train?
2. Of eavesdropping and joining in on the conversation.
3. Of starting a conversation with a complete stranger on the train. Especially of the opposite gender. My brain goes into overdrive and analyzes angles of how I would end up being a creeper or realize I may not have good social skills. I don’t think I have bad social skills in other settings.
4. I don’t have what it takes to take a leap of faith without sliding back into old routines right after. Elle Luna talks about choosing “Must” isn’t a one time decision. It’s a continual decision you have to keep on making daily to yourself.
5. Of the guy in the head. The one that tells you how much of a piece of shit you are. I used to have severe imposter syndrome, and still beat myself up for making bad choices and decisions.
6. Of being penniless and broke. That I have no solid financial plan. Of talking financials with others.
7. Of having no one to talk to and that I’m cooped up in my room or brain too long. I’m doing better at this, now that I rotate between different friends during different times of the week or month.
8. I will be alone. Like the last one, but in terms of a personal relationship. I felt bad when I abandoned all hope while working late nights because it felt impossible to put myself out there.
9. I will make the people around me feel bad. I don’t like being the bearer of bad news, and I hate shaking up the pot. I’ve been relatively non-confrontational my whole life, but I’m working on this.
10. Of dying and having an obituary I wouldn’t want to read.

What are you afraid of? Are there things in your life that are blocking you from doing what you want to do? Take 10 minutes and write your own list.

On top of reading Elle’s article this week, I finished listening to a recent episode of Triangulation with Luria Petrucci, AKA Cali Lewis, who opened up about her past failures and being able to be true to yourself and to the rest of the world. It hit more emotional strings to the same tune of taking the reins of your life and live it to the full extent.

I’ve made my list, and now I can slowly tackle them, one day at a time. And I’m more aware that I have the choice to work on it or not, of asking “should I do it” to taking action and saying “I must do it”.

And that the battle is never won; the crossroads of should and must are always there, continuously testing us. Figuring out how to stay strong and fighting for what you believe in is the harder part. Updates later once I’ve figured that out. There’s work to be done.

Side Note:
Elle Luna wrote a book after her Medium article went viral. I bought her book and am in the middle of devouring its contents. I’ll give a short update later of what I think about it.

Kids and Boredom

The other day, during dinner with my friend Jon, we were discussing what is the most negative thing brought about by technology today. Hands down, I said the use of technology in conditioning our children to form bad habits. Coincidentally, after dinner, we were walking to the car and saw a mother and a child. The child, maybe 5 years old, was whining and crying in public. The mother reached into her bag, pulled out an iPad, and gave it to her child. Immediately, he shut up and was mesmerized by the screen in front of him. I said, “Darn it, I wish that didn’t just happen.”

I’m not going to decree that technology is the problem here. You can see through history about the negativity we assign to technology, like John Philip Sousa talking about “a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue – or rather by vice – of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.” He was referring to the gramophone. Every recent generation has something new to distract their attention, from radio to televisions to computers to tablet and phone devices. It’s more important to remember technology is just a tool, and we determine how we use this tool.

In my dinner discussion with Jon, he remarked how kids don’t know how to feel bored anymore. The wonders of using Lego’s or playing with physical objects, or just having absolutely nothing to play with makes the mind wander. Perhaps we are stripping children of this ability by being wired 24/7. Being wired has this loss of sense of self. Taking television as an example, we’re being sponges absorbing what comes at us in a one-way communication channel. And when we think we’re learning, we only grasp the moments most memorable by design. By writers and advertisers who are seeking your attention in this attention economy. Our brains are looking for something to stimulate our brains. We forget being bored forces our brain to find an external stimuli in other places, perhaps in the depths of our creativity or a sense of mindfulness.

Present Mind

Mundane tasks like cooking, showering, or driving can stimulate day dreaming. And the state of day dreaming may be more beneficial than conventional wisdom. From an article from WIRED, the author describes one study in which mind wandering has shown to exhibit executive and default regions working in conjunction with one another. This means the mind wandering state may not be as mindless as we all think it is.

Imagine a scenario where we are waiting for our triple shot expresso to be made at Starbucks. The barista is having complications with the espresso machine and you’re waiting there for ten minutes. And in this ten minutes, you do something profound; you do nothing. With that nothing, the brain wanders, wondering about the tiles on the floor, how many chores you have when you go home. The void of empty is filled by a stream of consciousness. But the moment you grab your phone turn it on, you’re sucked into a different world, one that has intended designs and patterns of habit.

And that’s what we do; we condition ourselves to lose the present mind. We have the decision whether to wait there staring at the barista or reach into your pocket or purse for your phone and divert your attention from the situation to something more productive, like Candy Crush. Hanging out with a friend the other day, we went out for some tapioca drinks, and while waiting for my order, she sat down at a table and whipped out her phone and started to play a game. This annoyed me, because I thought we were two very present people, but at the moment of pure boredom, she resorted to a quick, cheap attention grabber. I’m not against phone games, but there’s a disconnect when you’re hanging out with someone and one or both of your escape to the virtual world instead of sharing what you have in the present. I try my best not to use my phone as I’m hanging out with someone else. I’ll admit I whip out my phone from time to time, but I recognize how that affects the other party.

Boredom in Cooking

In an interview with Jon Favreau, he talks about mundane tasks while training with a chef for researching his movie, “Chef”. He mentions that during the mundane chore of chopping mis en place, he had a disconnect in chefs doing this laborious work when it could be done by the line cooks. But after all of the prep, using the prepped ingredients for cooking made him much more self aware of the process. He had a deeper appreciation for the food that comes out and about the story of the meal rather than be the passive participant.

When I’m cooking, I find myself in an elated state of mind, functioning almost seamlessly, handling multiple tasks with relative ease. Typically, this is in the form of going from chopping vegetables, heating the pan, and cleaning my dishes. I know exactly where I left off from one activity to another, and the brain feels very mindless. But this sparks immense creativity. If I’m missing or don’t have enough of an ingredient, I’ll improvise, figuring out alternatives. I take a holistic view of what I’m cooking and try to find a substitute ingredient to accomplish the same thing, like using lime juice instead of fresh lemon, or paprika instead of cayenne pepper. I get fairly bored following recipes because I was to push myself outside of the box and add or remove ingredients, or try some other form of heating instead of the method provided. It’s cooking sessions like this where I wonder why more people aren’t cooking.

Mindfulness in Jazz

In the 9th grade, I joined the school’s jazz band. It was my first jazz class, and I was failing to grasp the concept of improvisation. My area of expertise was conservatory classical music, and I simply looked at the sheet music as scripture. When I looked at the dashed out measures with a scale key on the top, I was afraid. I didn’t know all of these scales by heart, let alone follow it with no notes. I was dumbfounded and kept to myself, pretending to know what the lines of music meant. The jazz instructor came in, and we played Take Five right off the bat. I was introduced to strange sounds all around me, listening to students improvise sound during the solo section, and I thought it was pure magic. I tried to mimic their sounds after class, but it sounded like rubbish. My band teacher instructed us to listen to the greats. Other students informed me to follow the scales as reference points, use existing bits of the rhythm, and combine a bunch of riffs together. Climbing up and down octaves gives more variety, and don’t worry too much about playing fast.

For some of my off time, I was attempting to learn about music theory and why a combination of notes or in sequence could have a consonance or dissonance sound, i.e. sound pleasing or destructive. I obsessed with figuring out how to improvise with an analytical mind. But reading through snippets of autobiographies of Miles Davis and John Coltrain, it painted a different picture. The analytical mind shuts down and brings about this sense of mindlessness. It become music played through feeling or emotion rather than thinking of what note to press next. The musician will think of things in sounds rather than the notes in letters, i.e. play “A” next.

In the band’s end-of-year performance, I was informed that I would get to improvise. I was nervous as hell during the practices leading up to the performance. It was about a one and a half minutes, attempting to solo during Miles Davis’ “Freddy Freeloader”. I spent time memorizing the F scale, thinking less about the notes and more about the sound. During the performance, you could hear my solo had elements of the main melody with traversals on the blues scale. I failed at utilizing more than one octave, but it didn’t matter. The nervousness subsided midway during the solo and I entered a mindful state. I stopped thinking about psyching myself out and corrected any dissonance I heard. After the solo, a second sense of relief overcame me and I looked at the crowd. I received applause and I probably could’ve cried at that point.

Today, I’ll occasionally listen to “Kind of Blue” for the 50th time, and just become so entranced by Davis’ solos. I often think of what must be going through Davis’ mind as he’s playing the music. And then I’ll listen to one of his acid jazz works, and become overwhelmed by the insanity of the sound. The pick-up in speed, the downbeats, the intricacies of melody that seem to come from randomness, Davis’ improvisation skills sound like no one else in the world. And he does one-take, live in front of an audience. One has to wonder if this was his nirvana.

Take-aways

I feel the toll constant attention takes. I have lower desires to reach out to others, feel awkward trying to talk with people when I do, and create dark places for myself if I’m alone. When I come up for air, letting nothing happen around me, meditate, or find a space to be mindful of my breathing, all of the prior described situations are flipped. I’m eager to talk with others, I feel less awkward in talking, and I create a happy place when I’m alone. Next time you find yourself impulsively rushing for your phone, don’t satisfy the impulse and give boredom a chance. You may find rewarding outcomes.

When Tech TV when bankrupt in 2004, Leo Laporte and the crew of the cable network were out of jobs. Some were offered to work for G4TV, who took over Tech TV’s assets, while others were laid off. The team who worked for this channel had immense creative control over the content of the channel and didn’t try to dumb down for their audience. With Tech TV’s end, Mr. Laporte was a bit lost, confused, and unsure what to do next. Although he picked up a radio gig a few weeks prior, he had a lot more free time. He invited a bunch of his ex-co-workers to a roundtable discussion at a bar where he recorded their conversation. He put up the conversation online for his fans. The fans loved it so much, they wanted to hear more episodes. Mr. Laporte decided to try to make it into a weekly show, eventually called This Week in Tech (or TWiT). Very quickly, the operations cost were starting to cut into Mr. Laporte’s expenses, so he asked for donations. The fans donated money and Mr. Laporte was allowed to pay for staff like editors and web masters. Eventually, TWiT became a business, creating high quality “netcasts” he thought people would listen to. Using the same tactic he had at Tech TV, not allowing the content to be dumbed down for the general masses, the shows had a niche following. For example, there’s Security Now, a netcast tailored for security professionals, cohosted by Steve Gibson.

Today, the TWiT podcast remains one of the most popular on the iTunes store with over 500 episodes. These “netcasts” are all filmed live where you can stream it on their channel, at twit.tv. I started listening, and then viewing, non-stop for years. It got me very interested in the technology scene, and although I don’t listen to that show as much today, I still listen to one of their other shows, Triangulation, a show where the TWiT network brings in someone from technology (or just someone really cool) to interview for an hour.

Looking back at the ending of Tech TV, there was a need to continue doing the work in other forms. Just because the cable channel died doesn’t mean the content had to either. The cable model didn’t fit the bill anyways. TWiT thrived on Tech TV’s fans who still wanted content like the Tech TV shows, and not a dumbed down version on G4 TV’s programming. Mr. Laporte gave the fans what they wanted and were very supportive of his endeavors. And it paid off. Today, TWiT is very profitable, supported by fans and advertisers, and still delivers quality programming. TWiT went from Mr. Laporte’s home office, to a nice cottage, to a large building in downtown Petaluma, California. I should know because I’ve been both to the cottage and “brick house”.

Leo didn’t know that this beginning was going to be a good beginning at all. In fact, he was a bit neutral about it until he saw the fans were receptive to his podcast. In my own ending and beginning story, I had a false start, making choices where clearly I was going to head down the wrong path. After seeing some hazardous signs, I was able to make some better, smart decisions and creating a better beginning.

Last year, after the chaos of going through Dev Bootcamp and subsequent traveling, my life went from 80 mph to a screeching halt. I was finally home a month after my bootcamp graduation and had to start looking for a job. Except, for three weeks, I didn’t do anything. I was burnt out and reverted to lazy behavior, showering less, not exercising, and watching TV. I was supposed to do a bunch of job searching, but I found excuses to do other things to pass the time. After those three weeks, I stopped making excuses and started actively looking for a job. I used the skills I learned to reach out to potential employers, to employees of the companies of interest, and eventually landed my first interviews. I had to accept that this was a new game I was playing, and the familiarity of being somewhere different everyday was gone. In a way, I realized that there’s this transitionary phase between ending and beginning everyone goes through. Mine lasted much longer than it should have, but it is a necessary component in the journey.

This week, being in Chicago, I got to watch another cohort from Dev Bootcamp graduate. All of the fears of job hunting and the confusion of where you stand after graduation came back to me. Except in the 8 months since I graduated, I have a lot more insight into what all of that meant. It meant having a deep realization of that ending, and a contemplation period during that transitionary phase. It meant having my life change once again, but this time, something was slightly different. I knew how to program, albeit not very well, but enough to prototype and hack at making software work as intended.

Today, I work at a small start-up that teaches me so much about programming, soft skills, and business. I’m financially independent and absolutely love having spare time to work on side projects. I wouldn’t have expected to be in this place of my life a year ago, and it shows we aren’t great predictors of our futures. I had a goal though to be at a point like where I am today, and I realize it’s a continuous journey. Even if my job would end tomorrow, it would be a new beginning. And I can shape that beginning however I would like, because I recognize I have the choice to change it.

I’ve been fascinated by cryptography ever since I was a kid. I remember briefly when my parents got a free subscription to the SF Chronicle and skipping straight to the comics and puzzles. One puzzle in particular, the cryptogram puzzles, got me to take my pen out and try to decode the message. It’s a simple monoalphabetic cipher where one letter maps to another letter, but the letter can never map to itself.

The simplest monoalphabetic cipher is called a Caesar Cipher, where you simply shift the alphabet by a certain amount. If you and the key party you are trying to encrypt the message to knows the shift amount, you can easily decode the message. So if we shifted the alphabet by 10 letters, letting “K” represent “A”, we could decode the word “JUMP” as “TEWZ”. The limitation of the Caesar shift is that there are only 26 configurations, so one could easily go through each letter until they figure out what the encoded message says.

Message Alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Encoded Alphabet: KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJ

A slightly strong encryption is one where each letter maps to another letter in a random order. For example, if you had the word “JEAR BEAR”, it could be substituted as “FIPH DIPH” given the following key map.

Key Map:

F -> J
I -> E
P -> A
H -> R
D -> B

Both parties would have to agree to a certain key map. The biggest flaw of this monoalphabetic cipher is the frequency to which we use the letters. For example, the letter “E” is the most common letter found in writing versus the letter “Q”. The Arabs back in the 9th century were the first to figure this out and developed this practice we know now as frequency analysis. For the Chronicle’s puzzles, you could tell there were going to to be certain repeated words, like single letter words like “a” and “I” are bound to be in the puzzle, so you can fill those out first. Also, “the” and “and” are two most frequently used three-letter words, so you can start filling those out too, and figure out the message by trial and error. Of course, you could just send the text in one long string, like this, “Afellowofficerlosthislifeinthelineofduty”.

Frequency analysis allows us to break down how often each letter is used and map it to a known frequency index, like looking at all english words and breaking down how often each letter is used, and figure out with high accuracy which letters map to which encrypted letter. Frequency analysis gets stronger the longer the message is. If it helps, you can think of the ratios for frequency analysis with Scrabble letter points. The lower the score, the higher the frequency.

In looking for a stronger encryption, polyalphabetic ciphers were created to make sure letters would be encoded with different letters each time. One form, called the Vigenère cipher, utilizes different monoalphabetic ciphers to encode a message. Each letter would map to a different shifted alphabet based on a key, and the key itself would map to different shifted alphabets. Let’s give an example. If we used the word “KING” as a key, and we wanted to decode the message, “A little boy and his fox,” we would first go to the letter “A” and map it to where “A” is in the shifted alphabet where “K”, from the key “KING”, is the first letter of the alphabet. In this case, it is easy. “A” maps to “K”.

Message Alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Encoded Alphabet: KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJ

The next letter from the text, “L”, would map to the shifted alphabet where “I” is the first letter, where “I” is the next letter in the key, “KING”. In this case, we would encode “L” with “S”.

Message Alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Encoded Alphabet: IJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGH

We continue to encode the next letter with the shifted alphabet starting with “N”, and then the next letter after that with the shifted alphabet starting with “G”, and then we repeat the key and start again with the shifted alphabet starting with “K” for the next letter of the text, and repeat for the entire sequence until the entire message is encoded. In its entirety, the message reads “KTVZDTRHYGNTNPVYPWK”. You will notice that the fourth and fifth letter from the text are the same, “TT”, but in the encoded text, they are different letters, “ZD”. Now each letter does not necessarily map to each letter. For hundreds of years, it appeared that this encryption was impossible to break and was known as “Le Chiffre Indèchiffrable”, French for the indecipherable cipher.

In the mid-1800’s, Charles Babbage was the first person to figure out how to decipher the Vigenère cipher decryption technique without prior knowledge of the key. There had been others who deciphered messages before, but Babbage’s technique ensured repeatability. Babbage never went public with this discovery, and for quite some time, the discovery went to a French codebreaker Friedrich Kasiski, who published a paper on breaking the cipher. What they found was a flaw in the cipher. The flaw in this case is the repeatability of the key. If the shared key is short enough, like “KING”, and if the text is long enough, you’ll start to see repeated patterns. For example, the word “and” could appear in 4 different ways using “KING” as a key. You could look for those exact phrases to piece together where you see repeated instances of the word. By process of elimination, you could look through the text and start to piece together what the key might be. Like in the cryptogram puzzles, you start figuring out what the message of the text. With these and possibly other letters decoded, you can work backwards and figure out what the shifted alphabet was that was used, grab the first letter in that alphabet, and determine what the key could be.

This was a huge blow to people creating encryptions. Suddenly, Le Chiffre Indèchiffrable became vulnerable. Cryptographers up to the early 1920’s were creating encryptions in the variation of the Vigenère cipher. In WWI, the British intercepted German messages and decrypted them with relative “ease”. This was a heavy advantage for the British and Allied forces, and was a major factor in helping them win the war. Come WWII, the Germans had a much more powerful encryption machine that helped power an effort to decrypt its messages.

I watched “The Imitation Game” a few weeks ago, and was fascinated to known how they would depict the Enigma machine, the German encryption machine. The Enigma machine is a mechanized way of encoding and decoding messages utilizing polyalphabetic ciphers. I won’t go over the intricacy of the machine as you could read many articles about it on Wikipedia, watch the film, or read “The Code Book,” where I gathered most of the information about mono- and polyalphabetic ciphers. The British set up grounds at Bletchley Park dedicated to decoding German messages during WWII. I want to shift focus of this essay to explore the differences between the movie and reality.

First, I really wanted to know what Alan Turing’s role was in creating “Christopher”. In the film, “Christopher” was the codename for the machine Turing built in order to decode Enigma’s messages. But I couldn’t find out if Turing ever called it “Christopher. In reality, the machines were called bombes, machines that would loop through every combination that would short circuit if the right combination was found. Understanding from some decoded messages that there were common words in almost every message, like “weather” in the first message at 6 in the morning, or “hail hitler” at the end of the message, cryptographers would try to find a chain of encrypted letters that would loop back to itself. The German word for “weather”, “witter”, would be mapped to the first 6 letters of the message. With those letters, and perhaps other common German words known to exist in the text, the cryptographers would try to find specific patterns, or instructions, to give the bombe. There was a great amount of human error that could have happened before telling the bombe what to look for in order to short circuit the machine. Multiple bombes were used in order to test all of their theories. 19 were used in its first year of development.

The bombe itself was a Polish creation when Poland was trying to decipher the Enigma machine during the 1930’s. There’s an entire neglected story there that is understandable the film glossed over. The Polish, paranoid of the growing power of Germany, obtained one of these Enigma machines. It was later smuggled to Bletchley Park, mentioned briefly in the movie’s beginning when Commander Denniston shows Turing the Enigma machine for the first time. Also untold is the story of the Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski and his decade of work trying to find weaknesses within Enigma. The Polish, knowing that their research might help the Allies in breaking Enigma, gave the intelligence to the British. Turing built on top of Rejewski’s work when he started building the bombes. The film poorly looks at the past achievements and puts Turing on a pedestal of being the radical of making a machine that could decode the key. In the film, almost everyone he’s working with doesn’t take his idea serious enough and Turing goes out of his way to convince Churchill to put him in charge. It is true the British funded around £100,000 to help build the bombes, but the drama surrounding the shutdown of these machines were not really mentioned in any literature I could find.

The Germans upgraded the number of combinations possible for their Enigma machine later in the war. More bombes were created in order to cut down the time to find the combinations. Plus, Enigma was not the only machine used to encrypt messages. For example, between Hitler and his main generals, they used an even larger encoding device with much more complexity. The film failed to mention Colossus, the machine that tried to decrypt this machine, that built off of the mechanisms in Turing’s bombes. Some proclaim Colossus was the first programmable computer even though it had to be dismantled after the war.

The film disturbed me in how easily it looked for Turing’s machine to decode the key. Knowing what I know now of what Turing’s machines actually did, the whole plot after of trying to determine what was statistically significant in delivering information after it was obtained did not seem to solely rest upon the cryptographers, in my opinion. It was the film’s opportunity to utilize a Machiavellian perspective of warfare, of which we saw very little of.

All that I’ve said though doesn’t mean I didn’t like the film. I actually thought it was an enjoyable movie with questionable drama, like the marriage subplot between Turing and Kiera Knightley’s character. I really liked how the film portrayed Turing’s eventual downfall after the war and the injustice brought to him because he was gay. But at the same time, I write this because I have a love for cryptography, and I needed to scratch this itchy spot of curiosity.

We shouldn’t be using weight as a metric for healthiness. Weight measures primarily subcutaneous fat, visceral fat, water and muscle weight (yes, we’re composed of more things). The weight value can not tell the composition make-up of that person. For example, someone could have a large build, but sound overweight according to their BMI, yet just have most of their weight in muscle. Or, someone could be petite, yet have a lot of visceral fat. There’s no inherent evil in any single factor. You need each of these things to survive, and there are trade-offs to having too little or too much of any single thing.

Working Out

If you start working out for the first time in a long time, you’ll see a net gain in weight because you’ll start gaining muscle before you see an equal loss in fat. That’s why some people get discouraged from working out for the first week because they think it’s not working.

My roommate’s friend was aiming for a target weight to fit her wedding gown and set out a weekly target weight to aim for. She decided to start working out everyday. To her dismay, she gained 3 lbs (or 1.4 kg) after the first week. When she told me about this, I gave her a quick primer about weight. The change in fat loss is much smaller than the change in muscle gain. For her overall health, this was a great with long-term benefits like increased cardiac output (CO). I also told her the biggest changes you can make for immediate effect of weight is change in eating habits.

Looks Naked

I don’t use the weight metric for myself. I believe the underlying desire we want from the weight is the indication that we look good. Because I understand this superficial ideal, I’ve adopted a concept from Darya Pino Rose’s book, “Foodist.” “Do I look good naked?” If the answer is yes, I’ll continue to maintain my lifestyle. If not, I’ll have to make some intervening habits. When we find ourselves in vain about our looks, it’s almost always the subcutaneous, or visible, fat.

Target Weight

With the same explanation of what weight is, target weight is a complete farce. The true answer to the question, “What is my target weight” should really be rephrased as “What is the most impactful thing I can do for my health?” Because weight tells nothing about composition, we’re terrible at guessing the best target weight for being healthiest. The truth is, there is no target weight we know of that is healthiest. Mrs. Rose talks in “Foodist” that she had a target weight to aim for, but when she took her focus away from the scale and onto food, she found out she felt better 20 lbs heavier than her target weight.

Be wary of your individual BMI score. BMI data is great for population statistics, but terrible for an individual. BMI is equal to your height squared divided by weight (h^2 / w). The score is basically meaningless because it scores the large-build, muscular person as overweight weight, or a skinny-fat sedentary person as underweight. Neither are good indications, as an individual, that they are leading healthy lifestyles. And on top of that, doctors and nurses use BMI to rank us with our peers if we should gain or lose weight. My most recent trip to the doctors alarmed me when they told me they used BMI. Even though they told me I’m at prime weight and I shouldn’t lose or gain weight, I was befuddled they would use such an archaic scale.

Obesity

Yes, if you’re morbidly obese crowd, or the high percentile of the population in terms of weight, weight will indicate with higher accuracy the longevity of your life. Sorry.

Other Points of Interest

I’ve mentioned the naked thing, but I know that’s not the best strategy for everyone. Here’s a list of other things to consider:

• Mood
• Body Fat Percentage
• Breathing Rate
• Breathing Volume
• Resting Heart Rate

It is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a start. Sometime in the near future, I’ll write-up part two about food because that’s the key in weight loss and general fitness.

I read this delightful children’s book called “Lauren Ipsum” by Carlos Bueno and Ytaelena López about a girl named Lauren who journeys through Userland trying to find her way back home. It utilizes Computer Science topics weaved into Lauren’s story. One of the delightful characters she meets is Eponymous Bach, a woman who composes ideas and puts her name on them. “Eponymous” is an actual word that means giving a name to things. For a name to be eponymous, it must use someone’s name behind the thing or idea. The Eponymous Bach character made me think about the power of names.

You can go on Wikipedia and find an article about Eponymous laws. These are laws named after people, like Moore’s law, the observation that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 2 years, or my personal favorite, Murphy’s law, which states anything that can go wrong will go wrong. To fall into the Wikipedia trap, you can search for Eponym to find a whole list of other eponymous things.

Names allow us to put into words complex ideas. I’ve been coding on a daily basis for a little over a year now, and I’ve started to recognize design anti-patterns, or the ways not to design a piece of code. For example, when a piece of code becomes too long to do what you thought was a simple task, we call that a “code smell”. Typically, if that occurs, you scrap that piece of code and start over because the resulting code become hard to maintain in the future.

Another anti-pattern, called the “Big Ball of Mud”, is when a software project is strung together with little or no architecture. This results in code that is sloppy, duct-taped, and difficult to maintain. This is common when there are poor business practices, huge developer turnover, and code entropy. A friend who works at a large, public company told me the engineers who initially wrote the code for their product took many shortcuts to meet release dates, which was in conjunction with their IPO. After becoming public, many of these engineers sold their stock and left the company, leaving code that was hard to maintain and close to being useless. The result is a system that may be prone to errors and difficult to scale up and add more features.

Giving names to ideas makes those ideas more comprehensible and cohesive or “sticky”. For example, my roommate uses the horoscope as a heuristic to quickly judge someone’s character. The horoscope provides a quick framework for personality types. It plays off the elements, earth, wind, fire and water, and uses it to describe behavior and traits. For example, Capricorns, who are Earth signs, are more grounded and set in their ways. She will use that to categorize the Capricorns she meets. Of course, we may not really fall into these buckets or groups, and my roommate takes this with a grain of salt, but it’s just a guide to aid with understanding personality. The same goes for the different Myer-Brigg’s types.

Names act as a heuristic, or shortcuts, for our brains. As an example, if we know people with the same name, in my case, I know a few people with the name Michael, Nick, and Chris, I’ll give each one a nickname. And my friends will typically give me a nickname back. In fact, the name of this newsletter is the “Jear-Bear Letters” because some fine folk over the past summer started calling me “Jer-Bear”.

In olden times, names would include titles. Alexander the Great, Pliney the Elder, Joan of Arc. These would help with passing down stories through oral tradition. Saying Alexander doesn’t have the same ring as Alexander the Great. If you’re going to tell someone a story by word of mouth, their more likely to remember it if you put a descriptor title to it. If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, or A Song of Ice and Fire (the book series for the TV Show, Game of Thrones), you will recognize your character immediately given the character’s title.

Sometimes, in fantasy tales, names have a literal power. For example, in “The Name of the Wind”, by Patrick Rothfuss, you can summon the wind by bellowing its name. In the Harry Potter series, Lord Voldemort is the household name everyone fears to the point where not many will utter his name. The words we use to call each other or ideas have a profound effect. When you become a household name, people will stick your name to your face, your brand, and your life’s work. Take Madonna for example. When you bring her up in conversation, we are ignited with thoughts about Material Girl, Evita, or that recent song “4 Minutes” whom she has a duet with Justin Timberlake.

When you can put a name to an acronym, you make it into a mnemonic acronyms in which you can use to your advantage in everyday work. For example, I’ve been designing websites, and I use Robin Williams’ graphic design principles in her book, “The Non-Designer’s Design Book”, known as “CRAP” (Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity). When I’m coding, I use the SOLID principles for good practices in object-oriented design.

Next time you start learning something new, learn the concepts by associating them with names. If they don’t have names, give them one. If you don’t have a name, give yourself one.

On International Women’s Day, my former hack-mate from Science Hack Day tweeted out female scientists that are inspiring to her. You can read her full article here. In that spirit, I wanted to talk about meeting someone who inspired me.

Ze Frank

Ze Frank is an Internet sensation primarily known for his Internet show back in 2006 entitled “The Show”. In 2012, he released a new show with the help of Kickstarter backers called “A Show”. It also became a hit for its run during its first year.

If you haven’t watched any of his videos, you should begin with “An Invocation for Beginnings,” his first episode for “A Show”. He talks about the fear of beginning and calls out people to join him in beginning something.

This is an invocation for anyone who hasn’t begun! Who’s stuck in a terrible place between zero and one.

— Ze Frank, “An Invocation for Beginnings”

Or this video on “Crushing Words,” where Ze just talks about words that have had a crushing impact on his life. Ze is able to present his vulnerabilities, creating an atmosphere of authenticity, human emotion, fun and play in his videos. In a lot of ways, these essays echo what his videos convey, a place where we can actually talk about insecurities and vulnerabilities.

The Exhibition & Showcase

In “A Show”, Ze held a bunch of different “missions” where artists and fans would collaborate to create pieces of art, like a jacket made of pages from diary entries submitted by the fans. In 2013, Ze created an art exhibition using the pieces created in the missions. The exhibition was held at The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History where the public was invited to come to the exhibition and participate in the workshops. At the end of the exhibition, the public could watch Ze and Stefan Bucher present their work in an interactive showcase. Being a fan, I was a bit giddy to finally meet him in person, so I drove down to go see this exhibit.

Nina Simon, the museum’s curator, spent years creating this museum interactive space where each exhibit is a participatory art piece. It was no coincidence Ze chose this museum. Within Ze’s exhibition were different workshops where you can make your own finishing stamp, look at some of the projects made by the artists on his show, and write comforting messages to stuff into a teddy bear, known as the “Comfort Bear.”

Before the showcase began, Ze addressed the crowd who was lined up to go into the auditorium. He asked everyone to disperse and talk to strangers you’ve never met. It was the first in a string of social experiments he asked us to participate in. I walked around the room meeting people of different backgrounds, like students at UC Santa Cruz, NASA Ames employees, and Youtube Stars from the UK. After a few minutes, he told us to gather back together and asked us to make a laughing circle. To create a laughing circle, you have someone would lay down and start laughing. Another person would lay down, rest their head on the first person’s belly, and then commence laughing. This would repeat until a circle is formed. A few people participated in this activity, including myself.

Our superego holds us back from saying things that might be too offensive, too brazen, or too radical. It may stop us from participating in activities that might make us embarrassed. But this activity of resting our heads on someone’s laughing belly tricks our superego from telling us this is an awkward situation because it’s never encountered such action before. As my head was bouncing up and down, my mind stopped rationalizing what was going on. I just laid there laughing at the absurdity that was unfolding. Heads around me in similar bouncing fashion, bobbing up and down laughing.

Other activities followed along the same thread as thing one. Feeling oddly elated, we all sat down in the auditorium. I had this sense of play and joy, as I listened to him talk about the process of creation and how participatory activities brings about conversations. He made me think about, and eventually write about, how to get others to interact with me on an empathetic level. It goes past the level of acquaintance and to a level of real human emotional feelings. We take off this mask and actually show ourselves raw.

The physical realm is full of strange and awkward emotions because we have to deal with each other. The internet masks us with anonymity. So how do we get to the important conversations?

— My journal entry from that day in reflection to the talk

Continuing The Dialogue

After the talk, I lined with with the rest of the fans to meet Ze. Watching his videos is an intimate one-on-one experience. You open your laptop, go to his website, and click play to start watching his latest video. He talks about something to a camera, and you view the final, edited version. And a lot of times, you watch it alone.

Here was a chance to finally bridge that digital experience into the physical world. Except, the exhibition, the silly activities, and his talk made me realize I’m not the only one who has this experience. I get to share it with the fans. We get to continue this conversation, through the medium of video comments, the missions, or this live event. And through this live event, I was finally able to talk to people about the important things, like how to be yourself, how to deal with bad news from the doctor’s office, and how to determine who is a friend versus an acquaintance.

When it was my turn, I thanked him for the participatory experiences of the event. He signed my poster and probably doesn’t remember this brief encounter. And to be honest, I don’t really either. He brought himself to the level of the fans, not as an apotheosis. He was the instigator, the person who started the ball rolling. The fans are there to continue to roll the ball and perhaps crack it open to find something magical inside, like raw emotion, solutions to our everyday problems, or how to cope. Ze was make the event more than just himself. In true spirit to his attitude in his videos, he made this event about the fans.

Ze opened my mind to think about how to live and cope with awkward emotions. They’re of human construct, and the only way to really deal with it is to open a dialogue. It’s not to comment on a video, give our ten cents, and leave it at that. It’s to draw out someone else who shares similar perspective and figure out what makes us human.

My friend, Miss Keegan, is the bravest person I know. She’s my best friend and someone I truly care about, sometimes even more than family. Two years ago, she wrote me a very long letter. It took her months of writing and re-writing to ultimately tell me she was transgender. Deep down, she was asking for acceptance. She was also worried that if she sent this letter, there would be a slim chance that I wasn’t going to accept her for who she is. Despite being risk-averse, she took that leap of faith, risking our friendship. When I received the letter, I took some time to really read it, then called her. I told her I accepted her for who she is and there would be no way in hell I was going to react negatively.

We had been friends since our freshman year of college. We met at this club event right outside of the university our first weekend before classes started. However, it was only brief, and all we did was introduce ourselves with a handshake. The second time I met her, I stumbled into her dorm room drunk while she was trying to have a good time hanging out with her friends from back home. She held no angst towards me, but showed me out of the room. Despite my rude behavior, she was drawn to me and we started hanging out more often. Eventually, she became one of my first true friends in college.

One of the things we wanted to do was travel up the west coast to Canada. In my car, we drove a thousand miles up and down the coast seeing the beautiful and gorgeous Pacific Ocean. But we also had a lot of time on our hands. We each created a playlist that we thought would reflect our lives. That’s where I learned Miss Keegan was into scream-o music once upon a time ago. Eventually, we ran out of music, and we talked for a long time. I felt comfortable enough talking about myself. I told her about an old High School crush I never got over, of parental expectations, of where I thought my life was headed. She drove, listening to my stories, soaking it in. Miss Keegan only talked briefly about her past, and I could tell she was holding something back. Something deep and dark, and I was worried she didn’t trust me. I didn’t press her on it and felt that if she was ready to tell me, she would.

We took a class together in our junior year on LGBT media studies. In that class, we discussed topical LGBT issues and read one or two books a week. Because of high textbook costs, we decided to split the cost of the books. However, one of the books I bought was incorrect. I bought Kate Bernstein’s “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation” when I was supposed to buy her first book, “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us.” Miss Keegan bought the book off my hands and read it religiously for a week.

I didn’t feel surprised when she wrote to me she was transgender. I received the letter on my birthday the year after I graduated college. In addition to coming out, she also told me for the past year, she was taking hormones without prescription. She talked of depression and of finding herself lost and confused, crying in her room. Reading that reminded me of specific incidents where she would just disappear during social events.

Miss Keegan and I were at a party held by a mutual friend about a half a year before I received the letter. She left the party after feeling dismayed because some of the guests talked about gender binary norms. She had taken a walk without telling anyone, and no one noticed until I was finally ready to leave the party. We had drove together, and since we lived together, I assumed I was also driving her home, but Miss Keegan was no where to be found. Another friend accompanied me as I drove around looking for her. After a half an hour without finding her, we decided to swing around my place hoping she found her way back with someone else. I got back and she wasn’t there. I asked my roommates if they had seen her, but they didn’t know. Before I called the police, she came back, safely. She was dumbfounded by my distress and told me she just needed to take a walk to clear her thoughts. I sighed a huge relief, but was worried by Miss Keegan’s need to clear her thoughts.

Shortly after I received the letter, I called her and told her I was totally supportive of her and willing to help her if she ever needed it. I also asked if this was why she had left the party I mentioned in the previous paragraph. She said it was distressing that nobody understood her perspective and scared that if she brought it up, she would be rejected. She felt like she was in a hopeless place, trapped in a dark room when people make such off-handed comments.

One of the first things I did right after college was write to Miss Keegan letters. Snail mail, not email. It was refreshing. I was able to write these longform essays, much like what you’re reading now. Sometimes she would respond. Sometimes she didn’t. It didn’t matter. I was able to get something off my chest because I knew she could read the things that were hard to talk about. After I received her long coming-out letter, the letters meant even more because she was also willing to talk about the hard things as well. When I received one of her letters, I knew they were precious because there is limited space on paper. You have to be extremely thoughtful of what you’re going to put in that space.

Writing these letters reminds me of that time I was writing letters to Miss Keegan. I’m writing about the hard things to talk about, except now, there are more people reading. I feel very vulnerable, scared I’m going to be judged by every set of eyes that read this. But what really helps is when I get responses back. They’re not like a reply on a Youtube video, they’re replies of empathy. I get really cheery when someone responds back with, “I felt the same way” or “This really touched me.” It makes me feel less alone and lights up that dark room within me. I don’t have an intention to write these letters in hopes they will make me famous, because they will certainly not. I write these because it’s the thing keeping me sane and happiest. I love you Miss Keegan. Thanks for being there.

Losing The Soccer Game

There’s this story I heard where parents convinced a pee-wee soccer referee not to count points for their kids’ game. This pee-wee soccer game would have no winners or losers and the parents wouldn’t have to worry that their kids would be devastated if they lost. However, what I believe that does is the kid will lose out on essential character building. As Calvin’s dad says in the comic strip, “Calvin and Hobbes”, everything not worth doing is an experience to build character. This trait goes by other words, perseverance and grit, and it’s one of the most important life lessons. Things may not go our way, but we have the choice to continue to push on or fail to recover. The reassuring thing about the pee-wee soccer match was the referee noticed the kids were keeping track of the score in their heads, so at the end of the game, they knew who won and who lost.

Trading Spaces

In the film, “Trading Spaces”, Dan Aykroyd’s character is this rich stock broker who has everything going for him — a good career, a smoking hot fiancée, and a large home with his own butler. Being white and privileged, he had never faced much hardship in life. He went to an Ivy League college, has a group of posh friends, and never had to beg. The word “suffer” doesn’t seem to be in his vocabulary.

His counterpart, played by Eddie Murphy, is at the absolute bottom. He’s poor, had to fight his way in the hood, and a scam artist. At the beginning of the movie, he pretends to be a war veteran with no legs panhandling. The difference between these two characters is Eddie Murphy’s character has faced a lot of rejection in his life and had to live with it. Dan Aykroyd’s character didn’t.

As the movie progresses, Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy swap places and Aykroyd finds himself at the bottom. Everything is taken from him — his job, his fiancée, and his home. When he finds out that none of those thing will come back to him, he hits rock bottom.

This film might be the worst case scenario of losing everything, but it provides a wonderful lesson. Despite hardship, we can choose to process through that and work past it. Dan Aykroyd almost that rejection overcome him, nearly meeting his end from a suicide attempt. Throughout this portion of the movie, I was thinking, “pull yourself together. You can get through this.” But I understand his behavior. It’s that resistance we have built up because we can’t process the rejection. In the end, he did pull through and eventually getting even with the people who wronged him.

The Break-up

Take a recent break-up from a close friend as an example for the denial of recognizing rejection. In this break-up, my close friend delivered the blow to her boyfriend for the fourth and final time. A few hours after, the boyfriend reached out to me to meet up with him later that week. I was hesitant at first, but eventually agreed, despite knowing he doesn’t like me. I had been talking to my close friend about her relationship more deeply than he was, and it angered him.

We met up at a local library where he showed up drunk. He was stammering through some of his sentences as he spoke. At first, he tried to ask me what he needed to do to get his life on track. I tried to give him some sort of advice, but he ended up taking over the conversation. He rambled for a good hour about his problems, where he thought the relationship went wrong, and how he planned to win her back. I tried to give him the bad news; he needed to take care of himself first. He was a mess, and despite how much we want to help with someone else’s life, we have to be selfish and take care of ourselves first.

One of the reasons the relationship went sour was the boyfriend was trying to accommodate for his partner by trying to provide her with rich, material goods. But the thing he couldn’t provide her with, the thing that mattered more, was the ability to socialize with her. When she asked him how his day was, he would give a one word answer. When she pressed him for an opinion, he gave her nothing. When they were hanging out, he would rather be on his phone playing games instead of being present with her. When things went south for him, like losing his job and facing family crises, he let that overwhelm his life. He blamed her for a lot of the downturns, even to go as far as saying she was the reason he lost his job. He resorted to cursing at her when she did made a mistake. He couldn’t blame himself for these actions until it was too late, after they were broken up.

After the end of our conversation, I thought about what he said, and I realized he didn’t get it. He was in complete denial and didn’t admit that she was not coming back. During the conversation, he talked about scenarios in which she would get back with him if he won her back. He did try to fathom she would never get back with him, exclaiming, “I’ll be happy as long as she’s happy.” However, that was followed with, “I will never love anyone else except her.” It made me think about my abysmal dating life, and how much rejection I’ve faced over the past few years. My difference is, when someone tells me they don’t want to see me anymore, I respect that and try to live on without them in my life. Of course, there’s a lot of sulking, ice cream, and hours of mindless reality television, but after that phase, I bounced back and put myself back out there.

Before we parted, he asked me if I could be his friend. I said, “it depends.” I place a no tolerance rule in my friend group for people who have to spotlight their baggage. They go into my “acquaintance” bucket. My roommate calls them the “woe is me” people. They’re like a vampire trying to leech you of all your positive energy, and when you’re done talking to them, you feel overwhelmed and can’t do much else. In the past, those friends take my advice, but never give any back. As soon as I bring up my own issues, they’re not willing to help. When I invite them to group events, they tend to bring the whole group down. I quietly ignore their pleas to grab my attention until they stop reaching out. My life is typically a lot quieter and goes back to emotional equilibrium.

Since our meet-up, he’s reached out to me a few times. Each time, he has tried to ask the world of me where he tries to force me to sympathize for his baggage. He’s going into the acquaintance bucket.

“Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.”

— Steven Pressfield, “The War of Art”

Originally from SFGate. Photo: Courtesy / Lauren Colman

Crossing the River Styx

Around 5pm this past Monday, Caltrain hit a car that was stopped on the tracks. Tragically, a female driver who remained in this car during the collision died. This and subsequent trains were stalled for hours as the police and train operators ran through, sadly, a very common procedure. As if that wasn’t enough, a few hours later that night, there was another fatality. Caltrain had hit a pedestrian.

I was rather deterred from writing about these fatalities the last time it happened a month ago. It seemed a bit morbid to write about because of their recency. But because they seem to happen at least once a month, I think it’s time to re-think the way we think about these events.

I wrote an essay earlier last month about my personal journey through anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. I feel like I can relate a little to the mindset of what may be running through the mind of a person who is on the train tracks, crossing the river styx from life to death. While life may be in a cloud of uncertainty for the suicidal person, knowing there is certainty of death from a head-on train collision could be solace. There’s no claim that either of these two incidents were successful suicide attempts, but I’ll still take this as an opportunity to think about suicide prevention.

“In the last five years, there has been an average of 14 fatalities a year on the Caltrain right of way. Of these, 90 percent were caused by suicide.”

— Official Caltrain PR

An Invocation For Awareness

In the past, I felt insensitive to these events; conditioned to think this is commonplace. There’s an awful joke that I seem to hear myself saying, “Why couldn’t they do it on off hours when I’m not on the train?”. My brain used to filter these stories into soundbites, forgetting that each one of these people had life-long stories with a tragic ending. It doesn’t help that the media reporting these stories only give us soundbites of the reaction from close friends and family spliced in between the press conference from the Palo Alto Police Department and Caltrain officials. There’s much heart in the souls that were lost. I’m reminded of prison inmates who wear numbers, who have lost their identity to this boundless, intangible symbol.

Perhaps I should construct an identity to this woman and all other fatalities. The gravity and weight would be better felt. It’s a thought exercise to remember if I encounter someone displaying suicidal patterns, I should intervene.

The Proactive Good Samaritan

With mental disorders, depression, and people on the verge of suicide on the minds of most Americans, we forget how to intervene when given the opportunity. And suicide prevention isn’t something you’re supposed to learn and shelf. This is a constant reminder there is more than can be done for those still around. Perhaps you know there’s a person behind a mask ready to give up. You have a voice and the power of presence. I may not know this woman, but I sure know that she’s a reminder that I will act more aware of these situations if they should arise amongst my friends. The experience brings back our awareness and we need it most when we have our guards down. Armor up and become the proactive good samaritan.

National Suicide Prevention Hotline: (800) 273–8255

National Suicide Prevention Website

Update: 3/20/2015

Caltrain has come out with a response to the recent suicides. You can read it here. I’m going to quote two points that I agree with Caltrain’s proposal for truly making an impact to these tragic events. Thanks to @MarkSimon24 for writing a response I’ve been waiting to read.

Point 4

Engage in a community-wide effort to address underlying mental health issues, suicide prevention and lifting the stigma of seeking help. This is the long solution — it can take decades to change community attitudes about mental health to the point where a troubled individual can openly admit that he or she needs help. And even if, together, we did everything we could and transformed our community, there is no guarantee it will work. Some of the recent cases have involved people who had sought help and had been identified as struggling with mental health issues. To the credit of our community, this mental health/suicide prevention effort is underway and has been for years. There are a number of government-, community-, and school-based organizations throughout San Mateo and Santa Clara counties that are working hard to improve the availability of services and to help guide all of us on how we can work together to reduce the risk and to reach out to one another. That is commendable and we need to consider how we can redouble our efforts, together.

Point 5

Reduce the harmful news media attention to these deaths. There is ample science to establish that giving high profile coverage to these incidents makes the problem worse. There are many professional journalism organizations that actively assert coverage of suicides should be minimal and non-sensational. Every leading suicide-prevention organization issues media guidelines that beg news organizations not to describe the means of the suicides in detail. And yet, as recently as Tuesday’s tragedy, every news story described exactly how the death occurred. The news media has to take some responsibility for the story it is creating, not just covering. This makes some journalists angry. A recent social media assertion along these lines provoked a very angry response from one local news organization. They defend their coverage as newsworthy because of the disruption to the daily commute. Or because the deaths themselves have become newsworthy. But this is something that can be done right now and, evidence suggests, can have a positive impact.

Update: 5/20/2015

KQED wrote an article about suicide prevention on Caltrain Tracks.

Stephanie Weisner runs Wellness and Recovery Services at StarVista, a San Mateo County nonprofit. Weisner credits Caltrain with sending its employees into the community to participate on boards and committees focused on suicide intervention.

“We have monthly meetings,” Weisner explains, “where we all sit around and brainstorm, and we work closely with other counties, including Santa Clara County.”

Does she want more fencing and security cameras? Yes, she says. But she adds that none of that frees the rest of us from having to pay more attention to the people around us: in school, at work, at home.

Weisner says, “People often give out signs that they’re thinking of really hurting themselves, or taking their lives, and there’s things that we can do — reducing the stigma around getting mental health services, and encouraging people to reach out for that.”

I’m not smart enough.
I know those watching me
With vindictive eyes
Are judging my wits.

I’ll stumble on something I don’t know
Stuck in an inner maelstrom.
Do I try to figure this out,
Or blame my lack of knowing?

I’m not pretty enough.
My mom told me that.
She believed it,
And it hurt when I believed it

I shy away from woman,
Thinking I’m the beast outside.
But then a compliment.
Am I really ugly?

I’m not rich enough.
I couldn’t buy the next must have.
Wishing I owned more
Wondering the price tag of a new life.

Old Joe’s living paycheck by paycheck
And I’ve got more.
Would it be crazy
To give him a helping hand?

I’m not social enough.
I put on an armor against being vulnerable
And I’m left to my own devices,
But I can’t bare to listen to myself.

Then I wonder why no one will talk to me
Initiate a conversation
Counsel me when I need them the most.
I am alone.

I’m not good enough.
I never was good enough.
This voice inside my head
told me I’m not good enough.

I’m afraid everything given to me
Will be taken away in a heartbeat
And I would’ve wished I could’ve appreciated it
When I still had it.

I’m not available enough.
Family and friends wonder
If I’ll ever make it out.
I wonder too.

I can’t bare to make the time
Because there’s always fires around.
There’s always drama
And there’s just no way I can move things around.

I’m not fit enough.
My belly is too big,
I run out of energy too soon,
And the gym is intimidating.

How could I muster
Bringing myself on the treadmill?
Exercise wasn’t made for me
I’m fat because of genetics.

I’m not happy enough.
All the world is suffering,
So I must also suffer,
Because it’s the proper thing to do.

Satisfaction is for losers
Who don’t know the doom that’s coming.
Woe is me,
Why can’t I just be happy?

I’m not enough.
Given my circumstances,
You can see I’m not enough
You can feel I’m not enough.

I’m told I’m wrong.
How can I believe that
When I can’t feel it inside?
Just believe?

I’m enough

I have enough time
To sit and chat with a dear old friend
Reminiscing about the good old days
And talking optimistically about the future.

I created a space
Where people can come in and out of my life
Whom I can be genuine with
And be amiable.

I am happy enough.
I’ve given myself enough time in the day to meditate,
Joke around with the people I work with,
And I don’t get angry over the little things.

I’ve made peace with God.
There’s a spot for spirituality
And for wholeheartedness
And soft-serve.

I’m content enough with my wisdom.
I know there’s so much I will never understand in the world
And I know there will be those who carve a very selective niche
To study those things.

What matters more is the people
You can share your experiences with
And pass down
From one generation to the next.

I’m rich enough.
In fact, I give back most of what I earned.
Because what’s more important than money or things
Are the experiences we have on this Earth.

I am delighted to have the things in my life
That can draw me closer to those I can’t see everyday.
But I don’t hold on to items like a crutch
Because they are only tools.

I’m healthy enough.
A wise man once said
”What the point of being ultra-healthy
When you can’t even enjoy the time you have here?”

There is no excuse to find time for exercise
When you’ve already incorporated it into your life.
Habits are the foundation
To creating a worry-free life.

I’m pretty enough.
I don’t need to look like a million dollars
And then some
Because I can stare at myself naked in the mirror.

I feel great in this skin
And all of the blemishes it has.
All those blemishes have stories
That I get to share.

I’m enough.
I’ve surrounded my life with family and friends,
Who all encourage me in my endeavors
And make my life rich.

Enough is the baseline
Not a static comfortable point.
We have accepted who we are
And are not afraid to change.

I’ve writing down what I’m grateful for
My life, my health, my family and friends,
The abundance, the emotions, the creativity
And a chance to share it all with the world.

“You never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice.” >

— Bob Marley

A few years ago, I binged through several episodes of “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” Towards the end of each episode, the host James Lipton asks a lightning round of questions to his guest. I’m always intrigued by the answer the actor or actress gives to the question “What is your least favorite word?” Many actors and actresses have the same answer — “no.” As being the greats and the top performers in their field, my interests were perked. “Could I also stand up to someone telling me, “no?”. The answer is prevalent in our everyday lives. “No.” When faced with adversity, shame, and humility, the greats do not take “no” as an answer.

And yet, years later, I would say “no”. I said “no” to quitting a horrible job. I made a conscious decision every day for two months leading up to my voluntary termination that I wasn’t ready to quit my job. I had put in over a year’s experience at this job, I was burnt out and ready to leave, but I was conflicted. I thought there was some saving grace of staying and working.

On one hand, I got to work with devices that could potentially save someone’s life. And I got to work with fun, yet difficult design challenges. But the payoff felt so minimal because as soon as I finished one project, another one would follow suit. I had no satisfying feeling of having a job well done. I remember after completing a huge project, I went to the break room to take a rest. Management came in to tell me I had another big project due tomorrow. It felt defeating because this was the fourth or fifth time this happened that quarter, and I had the feeling this would never end.

On top of that, the job wasn’t getting easier. I spent each morning pressing the snooze button on my alarm hoping to have just another hour of rest from hell. I rarely made dinner after work because I worked 12+ hours a day. I hated how disorganized the work space was, spending an hour or more sometimes trying to find a tool. Upper management had a passive-aggressive management style, creating a workers who read between the lines on how their work performance was like, but never truly knowing. One of the other engineers was paranoid he would be fired a month before he was axed. Operations had a reactive rather than proactive stance, deciding to go making mistakes today and fixing them tomorrow.

I knew none of this was going to slow down. I let the stress affect my self-worth and self-esteem to the stage where I woke up every morning and thought, “I hate my life.” I would try to shake the thought, and by the time I arrived at work, my line of thinking was, “let’s put on a good attitude, because I don’t want to spill my shitty feelings onto anyone else.” I was emotionally uncomfortable with myself.

Yet still, I thought, “no, it’s not time to quit yet.” We oftentimes belittle ourselves into being our own worst critic. Our superego takes over and becomes a loud speaker. “You’re making a stable income. There’s nothing to worry about here.” I was shouting at me and I couldn’t dodge it. Sometimes, the superego was wildly irrational. “You’re letting your parents down if you leave this job. No one will support you if you leave.” This made is all the harder to overcome that pestering “no”.

Feeling a bit lost and overwhelmed, I reached out to a family friend and an old boss of mine for an opportunity to teach. To my surprise, they offered me a deal to do some substitute teaching. Taking it as a sign, I went home to discuss it with my roommates. After a glass or two of wine, they were convinced that I needed to quit now. I told them about my hesitation and a list of non-reasons why I shouldn’t quit. The job didn’t pay well, it would only be for a few months, and I would have a long commute. But I thought back to the adverse effects of saying “no”. I reflected on all the shitty mornings and thoughts of hatred towards my life that I stopped talking excuses and asked for help. I finally had convinced myself I needed to take action to quit. My roommates helped me craft a resignation letter, and after an hour, I had a pretty good final draft for a resignation letter where the tone didn’t sound like I was going to burn my bridges. And then the moment of truth. I had the resignation email prepped and ready to send. But I hesitated in pressing the “send” button. Everything in my brain tried to reason that this was not the right decision to make. That’s when I decided that I would send the email right before I was going to pass out. That way, I reasoned, I couldn’t think about the worst case devastation.

The next morning, I breathed deeply as I checked my email before going to work. There was no reply from my boss or the head of the company. “Maybe the email didn’t go through,” I thought. When I got into work, my boss grabbed me aside and congratulated me on my career move. I had thoughts all morning that I was going to be reprimanded. It was a huge sigh of relief, and thinking back at it now, I wonder why I had taken so long to take action on the stress that had caused me anxiety and depression for a few months. Upon further reflection I believe I limit myself and my ability, being fearful of opening up and being vulnerable for a difficult conversation I would have to have with my superiors. I think I over-complicated the matter and focused on the wrong consequences which makes me feel trapped and helpless. Out of the helplessness, I felt alone with no one to really turn to.

I learned months later that the voices in my head would never truly go away for me. My therapist explained to me there are a few ways therapy tries to cope with a loud superego. One way is to try to remove it through mental conditioning. Another way, the one I prefer, is to turn down the volume of the superego through mindful practices. When I’m feeling stressed and there’s this loud voice in my head telling me “no” with phrases that make me feel unworthy, shameful, and anxious. At this point, I stop what I’m doing and try to find that mindful state, and imagine I’m looking at myself with a nonjudgmental gaze. I feel the emotion sweep through me and instead of trying to reason with it, I let it pass. I don’t try to suppress the superego; I just let it talk. When I’m done with this exercise, I resume what I am doing without the stressed feeling as before. Everything becomes clearer, like the irrational conclusions the superego was making.

Along with this, I prepped myself with trying to build a solid foundation for my emotions. I didn’t want to say “no” anymore, so I picked up habits that I now use as a defense when I am stressed out. After listening to Brené Brown’s TED talk, I bought her book, “Daring Greatly,” and one of her recorded seminars, “The Power of Vulnerability.” It is from her teachings that I learned about building empathy and exposing my vulnerability to trustworthy people. I found solace in a friend who will always listen to what I’m saying and not judge me for who I am. She never tells me “no,” that I’m not enough. And she expects I do the same, even when she doesn’t tell me that. I don’t try to tell her “no”, because “no” means you’ve made a decision to believe there is no possibility.

When I find myself saying “no” to going to do something new, I stop myself and wonder, is it because I’m afraid of the shortcomings that may occur? That usually changes my “no” response to a “yes”. Last week, I did exactly that. I was saying “no” to going to a house concert, but after realizing I had no fears of going and the resistance was just built up from general work stress, I said “yes” to the RSVP. I had a blast and couldn’t fathom after the experience how I was ever resisting this meet-up. These kind of conversations happen on a weekly basis. Sometimes it’s about hesitation in doing something new at work. Sometimes, it’s working up the courage to ask someone a favor. Nonetheless, I have taken these opportunities to test my emotions because I know they can be a fickle bitch.

This past Friday, I went to a funeral for my dad’s uncle, my great uncle. Still mulling some thoughts about his recent passing, I want to share some insight on the funeral service and celebration of life.

We are still living after we are dead.

The people who gather for the funeral service have some memory or recollection of this person. The person who’s past still lives on in us as long as we continue to remember them, their stories, how they made us feel, and how much we can imprint onto others how they made us feel. I recently learned that my dad was influenced by his uncle on retiring early and really enjoying what life offers us. I didn’t know that before my dad gave a speech in front of congregation. It made me feel differently about my dad.

I’m reminded of “American Gods”, by Neil Gaiman, of the concept of the forgotten god. They disappear from our society when we no longer give the god some importance in our lives, like ceasing the worship to them. But we make the gods stronger by influencing their reach onto others, spreading their words and worship.

Funeral services are well prepared.

As I sat down on the pew, I noticed the nice gesture of having a tissue box in every row. It’s the little small things that make this ceremony go smoothly. It was raining during the service, so the cemetery groundsman informed us a Hearst will drive the coffin to the grave site, relieving the pallbearers of lifting the coffin in the mud. I must have been grieving too much to recognize this during the past few funerals I’ve gone to.

I accept the faith of others, even as an agnostic.

We had a pastor recite a passage in Psalms. It was pretty lengthy, and it had to do with passing from this life to the next. I clasped my hands in prayer, but I wasn’t praying. I was tolerant of the faith of my family even though I don’t care for it myself. I find too many atheists and agnostics have an issue with having religion being shoved in their faces and will try to make their point by not participating in such events. However, I wanted to be there for my family, and it’s a really hard line to cross to shove my personal beliefs onto others.

Priorities are reset.

For our own fears of death, we take this time to realign our priorities. Perhaps we don’t understand what we’re doing in life, dick around, and pretend we have eternity to do anything. Perhaps there’s something nagging we wanted to do, but we feel it’s too late to do it. Perhaps there’s a goal you want to accomplish, but you keep putting it off. The death echoes our fears and tells us we need to take action with these priorities we’ve left to the waist side and we pick them up. Of course, this newfound energy is ephemeral and we forget all over again only to return to this cycle after the next funeral.

Funerals are this funny time. We’re emotionally distraught. We get overwhelmed by the amount of grieving around us. Then we return to a normal life, supposedly, like it didn’t happen and we get back to work. But we have the choice to figure out what to do with this raw, human emotion.

This week, a friend asked me, “Will you find me a good but not crazy or preachy “learn to like yourself more” book please??” I gifted some books and followed up with a lengthy email for why I selected those books. I decided to blog about it and share my recommendations.

‘Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well’ - Douglas Stone

A group from the Harvard Business School came out over a decade ago with their seminal work about office relationships and communication called “Difficult Conversations” in which the team tried to understand what it is that makes us avoid having tough conversations with co-workers, family and friends. They turned that study into a book called “Difficult Conversations” on how to initiate these conversations. This book, “Thanks for the Feedback” explores the next step, which is someone has posed a difficult conversation to you, and explains how you should respond. You don’t have to read “Difficult Conversations” to understand this book at all, and it’s practical from the very beginning. I really wish I had read this when I did my senior project and had to manage a group of 5 people.

‘Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead’ - Brene Brown

This book is almost a must for anyone who feels shame, guilt and vulnerability, which is to say, everyone. The book chronicles how to deal with vulnerability and how to expose yourself to being vulnerable. This has been Mrs. Brown’s work for over a decade as she takes her qualitative research and distills it down to some simple principles that can relieve us of anxiety in the future. Her TED Talk is the most viewed talk on the TED website.

‘The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It’ - Kelly McGonigal Ph.D.

A week-by-week manual on how to improve your goals. This book is taken from Dr. McGonigal’s class at Stanford and goes through exercises to build habits. This was a sacrifice over “The Power of Habit”, which also details willpower, but I think this one is more practical and that you can use the moment you start reading. One of the things it taught me was a keystone habit, in which one habit may actually bring about multiple good habits.

‘The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom’ - Jonathan Haidt

You’ve read this guy’s other book, “The Righteous Mind”. Before he wrote that, he wrote this book about what advice the ancients had and how to find a way to live in modern life given those set of principles. From this, I learned the concept of proper balance, between removing oneself away from materialism versus being fully immersed in it. The author really tries to distill the decades of work he has found in old, philosophical texts as he’s a professor of Philosophy.

‘Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking’ - Susan Cain

This book was a struggle to keep on the list, but after thinking about the impact it had on me, I had to keep it on. Susan Cain talks about how one mode of thinking is not great across the entire spectrum of introverts / extroverts. In fact, most of the commonplace attitudes to think about how to collaborate, how to think, how to work are based off of the ideas of extroverts. What may work for you may not work for someone else who’s an introvert. Also, she details that most people lie on a spectrum, and not actual opposite ends. This is where I found out I’m actually an ambivert, someone who lies in the middle of the introvert / extrovert spectrum.

‘The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now’ - Meg Jay

My cousin shared her TED talk, and I ended up buying and reading her book. Dr. Jay is a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia who counsels students and patients in their 20’s and 30’s. Her hypothesis is the habits and foundations we build in our 20’s will help define and shape who we become for the rest of our life. This was a revelation to me because I was compromising too much of my life and deferring many important matters and questions to an indeterminate future date. In fact, after reading the book, I starting focusing on the things that I am most uncomfortable with, relationships, emotions and mental health, religion and spirituality, and my career. Many of her claims challenge conventional wisdom, like her claim about early cohabitation in a relationship, and how it harms relationships in the long run.

‘The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts’ - Gary D Chapman

A fairly short book about building relationships in the long run. This was recommended by my roommate and many people on the Internet. Most relationships break down because of communication, specifically each partner does not know how to speak or listen to each other’s love languages. When you learn about each one, you can start to notice your past relationships and see where things started to break down. Dr. Chapman has been in his field for over two decades counseling marriages when he wrote this book, and it’s a culmination of distilling into 5 simple points of how couples speak to each other. Ignore the fact he’s religious because there’s practical value here, and he tries to be fairly secular.

‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success’ - Carol Dweck

At a school development meeting at my job at the Prep School, this book was highly praised. Dr. Dweck is a researcher at Stanford who studied kids and success, and came up with the concepts of growth mindset and fixed mindset. I took two days to sit down and read this book, and came to thinking differently about my own learning and career. I learned to ask questions and not to put up walls when I find something difficult to do. Most of the claims Dr. Dweck makes is based on her studies she’s run for over two decades.

Here’s an additional list of books that I wanted to send to my friend, but I was over-budget.

‘The Art Of Asking’ By Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer is a musician, known for her work in the Dresden Dolls as well as her own solo work. She raised over a million dollars on Kickstarter for her latest album, which I’m a backer of, gave this excellent TED talk, and this book is a part memoir, part practical advice on asking for help. The audiobook, which I purchased, also contains songs between chapters.

‘A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy’ by William B. Irvine

I choose ‘The Happy Hypothesis’ over this book because this book only focuses on the stoic teachings, and not the entire spectrum of philosophy. However, that said, there’s plenty to learn about controlling emotion and minimalism from the stoics. If meditation doesn’t work and you must reason your way through stress, this book shows you exercises on how to cope.

‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’ by Cal Newport

I’ve followed Mr. Newport’s blog for quite some time and read his other book, “How to Be a High School Superstar”, because I wanted to know if it was good to give my sister a few years back when she asked me what she should do in High School. To me, this is thecareer book. It begins by telling you that the pursuit to do something your passionate about is a myth. In fact, Mr. Newport claims that it’s the job and career that guides you to your passion. You have to build your own career up, and it’s going to have lots of twists and turns before you truly know what you’re going to do. I’ve gifted this to my cousin and she has taken this advice and went back to graduate school because she wants to build up the skill to do more in graphic communication. I didn’t consider this book to give to you because I thought about self-help before career advice, so maybe you should ask me nicely for your birthday next year (but in all seriousness, purchase this book if you can. It really is worth it).

‘Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps’ by Kelly Williams Brown

It was a toss-up between this book and the Dr. Meg Jay book. This is a very actionable book for twenty-somethings. It goes through a lot of different aspect of tuning up your life. I’ve only read sections of this, and I’ve found it useful for tips on what friends to keep, how to declutter, and how to maintain work relationships. It’s a rather fun book that was started as a blog.

‘Don’t Go Back To School’ by Kio Stark

Kio Stark is a professor at NYU’s ITP program (Interactive Telecommunications Program), a writer, and a graduate student dropout. Before I even heard of ITP, I heard about this project from Kickstarter. I was a week too late to back the project, but I really wanted to be included. I signed up on the mailing list to be told when this book is going to come out. I wasn’t disappointed. This is a book about a series of interviews with accomplished people who did not decide to go to graduate school and let their careers guide them through figuring out what they wanted to do. Mrs. Stark also talks about her own experiences, and then gives a great follow-up companion on how to start learning things on your own that don’t require graduate school. Definitely a good read if you’re thinking about going down the graduate school route.

Side Note: I went to New York last year to check out ITP because I was thinking about applying.

The Miracle of Mindfulness’ by Thich Nhat Hanh

This book is the entry book to practicing meditation without all of the spiritual fluff that’s usually included with most zen meditation practices. Perhaps anything else, this book taught me the importance of awareness and that meditation should be an extension of that awareness, not an escape from reality. Also recommended is “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” by Shunryu Suzuki, which introduces the concept of proper meditation. Here is a great talk (or rather meditation session) he did @Google.

‘Stumbling on Happiness’ by Dr. Daniel Gilbert

Despite being a book about happiness, this isn’t a self-help book about how to become happy. It’s actually Dr. Gilbert’s research into perception and cognitive biases and how our imagination deceives us. The book is profound with it’s findings, but I didn’t think it has much value in immediate changes. You have to think about it for a while and be aware of how our mind deceives us. Obligatory TED Talk.

‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ by Dr. Daniel Kahneman

I’ll call him the Godfather of modern pop psychology because he work brought about a slew of other psychologists you hear at the top of their field. This book cleared up the concept of loss aversion, anchoring, and our two modes of thinking. I find myself going back to this book again and again to clear up some very core concepts in rational and irrational thinking. In the appendix of the book is Kahneman and his collaborator’s (Amos Tversky) seminal paper on prospect theory that won them the nobel memorial prize in Economics.

‘My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey’ by Jill Bolte Taylor

This book was a lot shorter than I imagined. It’s about a scientist who studies strokes and finds herself having one early in life (in her mid-30’s). She talks about the journey into her mind as she’s having the stroke and the path to recovery. I watched her TED Talk before reading her book, and I must say I am amazed at how much I didn’t know about strokes, especially at the rates that it’s afflicted people. I could relate to stroke victims because that’s what killed my grandfather a few years ago.

‘The Power of Habit’ by Charles Duhigg

As I mentioned, this was my second choice. I think this book is great in its research on habits and the author’s journey changing one of his habits that resulted in weight loss. But don’t take his weight loss story as motivation to read this book. It’s more about the power good habits can bring to your life and how bad habits are hard to unlearn. However, by the end of the book, Duhigg breaks down habit formation in easy steps and you can follow it too. There’s also this great infographic about the steps online.

Honorable Mentions

You’ll often find Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” on many people’s list of top self-help books. Published in the ’30s, Carnegie tells some simple ways to talk and interact with people. It tells you to be kind and listen to others. To me, it was a bunch of common sense, but at the same time, it’s worth a quick flip through. If you actually read the book, you’ll hear about Carnegie’s fascination with Lincoln and a ton of parables to back what he’s saying.

Also, Stephen Covey’s “7 Habit’s of Highly Effective People” is also rudimentary for common sense. It’s read widely by Cal Poly’s Business 101 course, and I pulled a few things out of that, like the basics of negotiation. Honestly, I don’t remember the fine points of this book, like the actual 7 points, after reading Covey was a Mormon. After I shook off the religious bit, I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying anymore, which sounds really shallow of me. I had the opposite reaction to Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird By Bird” after reading she was a Christian.

When I was a student at Cal Poly, I met this stranger in a park. She was a tall Russian American with a thick accent and probably in her early to mid-20’s. She was this lively character who was full of life. I initially thought she was part of Cal Poly’s QL+ club’s barbecue meet-up because she was hanging around with some of the club members I recognized (QL+ stands for quality of life plus, which focuses on bettering the lives of veterans , providing engineering solutions. Cal Poly has a dedicated space for this organization and I highly recommend you check it out). It took me over 30 minutes of talking and hanging out with her to realize she wasn’t a student at all. She was a vagabond.

She was on a trip from South America, hitchhiking and drifting about. Her plan for the upcoming winter was to eventually go back home to Portland, Oregon so that she could be with family for the holidays. Her travels led her places all over the world with ambitions to go to Southeast Asia. Her budget was limited, and she would take up odd jobs wherever she went.

As I listened to her stories, I reflected on my own life goals and where I was headed. I tried to dream big, yet I felt encapsulated, pretended the life I wanted was to have a stable job, playing it safe with risks, and only experience vacations by tour bus. But she was this beacon of inspiration of wild and unknown.

And in a way, I had this spirit to travel before. I had just joined Couchsurfing a few months prior, surfing for the first time in the Pacific Northwest. I was in the midst of planning a summer semester studying abroad. I had read the Four Hour Work Week, inspired by Tim’s trip to Argentina. I had just purchased Rolf Pott’s book Vagabonding. I read Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Non-Conformity blog. I felt mentally prepped and was nurturing a mind ready for traveling unconventionally.

I asked her if she was afraid of the dangers that a solo traveler may face when traveling on foreign lands, like being scammed, kidnapped or raped. I remembered she had this cavalier way talking about it, like in a happy-go-lucky charm. She replied that everyone has been genuinely nice and wants to help out. Even the crazy truck driver in Ecuador who may have been suggesting sexual favors. In the end, all of them wanted to help her.

I was conflicted by her words because I have always been taught otherwise. Growing up, my aunt who lived with us used to scare us children into thinking someone was outside the house ready to kidnap us if we walked outside at night unattended. Additionally, I had scared myself by watching “America’s Most Wanted” alone, thinking there was a murderer watching me through the window. Always following that thought would be my paranoia with windows, promptly closing the curtains and hiding as far away from them as possible. And yet, this was the opposite advice, and for once, I stopped to think logically. Eventually, I would come around to realize I should throw away my paranoia.

It got late and everyone had their fill of BBQ, this stranger and I parted ways. She didn’t want to ride home in the darkness after sunset. Plus, she didn’t want to be late helping out with supper at the rehabilitation center where she volunteered. She got on her bike and was gone.

The encounter has stuck with me. I still hear those words in my head like a mantra. “People are genuinely nice.” Those words had planted a seed I was going to bloom.

A few revelations have come to light since this encounter. For example, months after the exchange, I took road trips around the west coast and Canada. I made sure on these trips that I would intentionally get lost. And after a while, I too was not afraid of safety as much. Sure, there are plenty of things you could be worried about, but you can find many of those dangers here in the states (I won’t be revisiting west Philadelphia anytime soon).

People around the world are nice, even here near home. In my most recent trip, road tripping around the U.S., I drove through the mid-west and the southern states and met some of the nicest, most humble and giving people. I got to really enjoy genuine southern hospitality that I have heard so much about. “Please” and “thank you” are phrases that actually have meaning. The experience opened my mind to the diversity of our nation, and it made me realize there’s so much that I haven’t explored.

I give people advice about how to tackle the fears of traveling. When I talk to women who tout it’s too dangerous, I tell them about this person I met and of the misconceptions they have of the world. I challenge them to take a journey and tell me that the people in the world are generally putrid and vile. I understand I’m a man in a mostly matriarchal society with privileges that exceeds women in many parts of the world, but I also understand you don’t let that get in your way if that’s your dream or passion.

Traveling doesn’t have to be just a dream. It can be a world that opens up many surprises around you. On my wall, I have a poster of a comic drawn by Zen Pencil’s artist of a quote from Mark Twain.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

— Mark Twain

I have thought about trying to find this woman and thank her for being this life changing moment that had helped me realize that I can take the risks of travel. But at the same time, I don’t know if it would be worth the pursuit. I don’t know her full name (I recalled it might have been Natalia a year after the experience), don’t know any of her contact information, and the only connection I could try is a hundred miles away (At the time, she was staying at Sunny Acres in San Luis Obispo. As a trade for volunteering there, she got room and board). Although, this could make for another interesting story.

How living with cats for the past two years turned me from a non-cat person to a baby talking, crazed cat person.

Let’s face it. Cat’s are egotistic, maniacal, cranky, yet lovely animals. Cats were around my parent’s neighborhood. There were packs of strays, the string of outdoor pets who had owners, and the occasional predator. They would amble into the yard scrounging around for food and catnip. My parent’s yard had holes in the fences where cats could slip in and out. I never cared for them; these cats were skiddish and I never put in the time to get to know them.

There was the first cat that I got to live with. Her name was Reyna. She was old, losing her hearing, and yet, would be social around people. She was my roommate’s cat, and had her own old lady personality. At times when she would be home alone, she would yell. At times when she thought she was alone, she would yell. She died a few months ago.

And it’s strange to still hear her shrill voice. She was nineteen, which is old for a kitty. And yes, I’ve resigned myself to call all cats ‘kitties’ for the sole reason that it’s just cute. Also, my roommate shoved that vocabulary in me. I guess there’s some sort of maternal instinct there, like “this is my child. Of course I’ll call her my kitty.”

There’s the outdoor cat. Her name is Ruby. She was abandoned by her owners over a year ago and was hooked in our backyard because we were growing catnip. My roommate isn’t the kind of person to just let an animal suffer, so our home has become her safe haven. We’ve gone out of our way to feed her every morning, and now she’s conditioned. Whenever I walk out of the door, I hear this incessant meow, although I’m resigned to call it a growl. When I hear it, I hear “Feed me. Feed me. Goddamn it, you must have not heard me. Feed me.”

She’s also painfully needy. She’ll call for my attention. I’ll let her climb up on my lap. I pet her for a bit and she’ll purr. And then dig her nails into my leg. And I’ll yell.

Lastly, there’s Reyna’s replacement, Jackson. My roommate got a male cat, which brings its own sets of new challenges. Jackson didn’t get out of the motherly feeding phase when we got him, so he bites everything and everyone. I’ve had to warn my friends that he may bite them, and ultimately, he does. I have a few battle scars on my hand.

But he’s also adorable. I’ll use baby talk around him because he really is a baby, although he’s looking more and more like a grown kitty. They grow up so fast.

When I was reading this book last week, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, written by Caroline Paul and illustrated by Wendy McNaughton, I could totally relate to how Miss Paul writes about her attachment to her cats. She explains it as though she’s a crazed cat lady. But I also understand what’s going on in the cat lady’s mind, and that insight makes me empathize more with them.

“We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you.”

― Dirk Wittenborn, Fierce People

I’m turning 25 next week, and I’m going through this phase of my life I’m calling “The Friendship Re-evaluation Phase.” I’m taking the time to think about who my friends are, and who aren’t. This thought exercise made me ask some fundamental questions. What is a friend? What is the concept of un-friending? How do I make the investment in new friends? Over the past few weeks of mulling around and trying to answer these questions, I’ve decided to write about it to bring clarity of what actually matters. I understand friendships matter, but no one really told me why.

Bad Relationships

To really get a grasp a great friendships, I’m going to start by analyzing bad relationships.

I remember in High School, there was this classmate of mine who thought we were friends. He would try to impress me with everything he had while I just wasn’t interested. The cues were all there, but I never forcefully said, “Matt, you can’t be my friend.” But, because my classmate never understood my cues, he continued to pursue me for all four years of my High School experience. I’ll call this the false friendship where the pursuer gives while the other party takes. I took my classmate’s recognition of friendship and I never responded back. Years later, I saw him working as waiter at a restaurant. I didn’t recognize him at first, and he gave me a shout out. Taken by surprised, I treated him with the same respect that I would give anyone else. But that’s where the relationship stayed, as acquaintances. This relationship was never to happen.

Then there are assholes. People who take, and know they are taking, but return little to nothing in return. In fact, if a situation comes up where they are given the option to stab you in the back in order for personal gain, they will gladly do it. TvTropes calls this person a jerkass. But sometimes this person masks this with their words or behaviors. They may seem genuine, but it’s a facade, and you could pay for it later.

My mother is a very gullible person. She has some of the worst friends I’ve ever met. One of most recent friends take advantage of her willingness to follow that she gets scammed into network marketing schemes more often than not. [1] Needless to say, her friends take advantage of her by asking her for favors, coming over for dinner and freeloading, and inviting her to risky activities. In one recent conversation with my mom, she tried to convince me to give her my email password because it was going to make me thousands of dollars. No, I didn’t give her my password, but I had to help my dad change his because he obliged. I have my mom’s friend to thank for that one.

It seems the patterns of bad friendships are major flaws in personalities. For example, one kind of friend we are all aware of is the blamer. The blamer will blame others for their misfortune when in fact that should be pointing that finger right back at themselves. “The world hates me.” “People don’t get me.” “If they just heard my side of the story…” They have some inherent flaw that they can’t fix because they don’t point the finger back at themselves. “Perhaps I hate myself.” “I need others’ affirmation of my self-worth to feel better.” “Maybe I should listen to the other person.”

Last week, I shared a animated video dubbed by a lecture from Brene Brown. She mentions that a sympathizer will try to help someone by beginning with the words, “Well, at least you’re not…” They don’t really help anyone and try to mitigate the situation at hand than to get to the root cause. Because of this trait, it’s hard to really understand if this friend will feel for you or feel with you.

A frenemy is an enemy disguised as a friend. Kelly Williams Brown writes in her book, “Adulting”, about the different types of frenemies.

The Seven Dwarfs of frienemies:

• Flaky: Do you two have plans? How about now? Flirty (to your significant other): This girl needs you to accept the fact that she playfully jostles your boyfriend every few minutes because that’s just who she is! She’s just friendly! Oh my God, it doesn’t even mean anything! You’re not mad, are you?
• Boasty: This frienemy says something boastful but phrases it as a complaint about themselves so you’re forced to comfort her, even though both of you know damn well that she isn’t upset about looking too thin.
• Crabby: This frienemy can never, ever enjoy a single thing, but instead keeps up a monologue of misery and disdain. Never bring this person to a fun dance party, or a goofy movie, or to meet your new significant other. Spoiler alert: She won’t like them. Because she doesn’t like anything.
• Backstabby: This friend loves you soooooooo much! Except when you are between her and something she wants, in which case, fuck you!
• Underminey: No, that dress you bought looks … great! So you! It’s awesome that you feel so comfortable with your body!
• Doc: This frienemy knows exactly what you’re going through, and has all kinds of advice. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re actually going through this, because Doc has diagnosed so, so many things wrong with you. She’s only trying to help. She’s just doing this because she cares.

— Kelly Williams Brown, “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps” [2]

Learning how to distinguish the different types hacks your brain into creating a quick heuristic when taking a look at your friends. Does this friend seem to have this type of quality? And a lot of it? Perhaps that have more than one of these traits. It’s really time to start thinking about the quality of this friend. And also, it may be time to evaluate yourself. Do you find yourself in any of these roles? i might complain about flakey people, but I feel super awful when it’s the third time I do it to someone else.

By the way, every type of person I’m mentioning doesn’t just apply to friends. It also applies to relationships. If your partner is a toxic fit, it’s time to really re-evaluate your relationship. Which brings me to a piece of advice that I’ve been having trouble with these past few years.

Don’t wait for others to change.

Contrary to your good intentions, you can’t change someone. You can give them advice and offer them a different attitude on how to deal with problems, but at the end of the day, you’re not going to change them. That’s going to be a personal transformation, and one you’re most likely going to waste your time with. The investment you put into someone that has little to return should have little importance to you. Of course, how you define friendship value is your choice.

For a really close friend of mine, she’s distanced herself and it’s really hard to get a hold of her. Every time I try to reach out to her, she pulls back two steps. And it’s gotten to the point where I have considered ceasing my efforts to reach out and wait for her to respond. It is time to learn that I just can’t wait for her since she’s not willing to make the same investment for me.

Yes, I have the Black Eyed Peas stuck in my head. So will you.

Unfriend

I’m experimenting with different approaches to end these relationships. One way to deal with ending a relationship is to give them the silent treatment, dodging their phone calls and emails, being that person that doesn’t say anything back when we hang out. Of course, the other person might be confused in why you’ve been so shifty and may not get the message that you don’t want any part of them anymore.

You could politely tell the other party you two aren’t friends anymore, and not engage with them after. In a way, I like this approach because you’re being direct and honest while not burning your bridges. But it doesn’t work for everyone, especially those who don’t take direct advice well.

In Gavin De Becker’s book, “The Gift of Fear,” he talks about a business owner who gets pestered by a man who wants to work for him. After each exchange, the business owner engages with this man, first politely, then aggressively. By the end, these two men had a hostile and toxic relationship. When the business owner finally stopped engaging with the man, their exchanges diminished. The moral of the story is that provoking drama creates drama.

What’s hard about breaking up relationships is the investments you’ve made to it. You feel locked-in to it and can’t exit. But this is also a practice in confidence. Take the time to prepare what you’re going to say before you go with this action of un-friending. If you know the other person well, you can tailor it for them. Don’t make it into some elaborate plan and going extremely out of your way to make it known though. Be tactful.

Good Relationships

Broken up with those bad friends, what are we looking for with new friends? I don’t have many true friends. True friends are friends are people that could save me from a pinch, or can be relied on to help when I’m at my lowest point, or can be reached out to for help because there is an enormous amount of trust in this relationship. They are people who I could call my family. They are people I know I will grow old with, that even if we have a severed communication line for years, when we reunite, it will be like nothing had happened between us.

Good friends have integrity, trust, and companionship. They are able to make tough calls, able to empathize, able to listen, able to meet halfway. There’s a good blend of giving and taking. They don’t have to necessarily have the same personality, but if they help me grow, and vice versa, I know I can benefit from the relationship.

I don’t have time to understand everything. I allow other people to spend their time studying something very narrow and leverage on their knowledge. I invest in people. And it’s not a question of whether they are smart. It’s a question of whether I can spend my time with that person. Will this other person be able to listen to me? Can I take the time to listen to this person? Are they continuously growing? Are they helping me grow? Can I help then grow?

Take Some Time to Invest in People

A recent friend of mine told me over lunch that we don’t have the power to change our current friends. Maybe we don’t necessarily need to un-friend them. What we can is choose who to hang out with. He brought up something that hasn’t occurred to me often enough — you can always make new friends. By scoping out new friends, you increase your chances of finding true friends. Your old friends, the ones that you make plans with but they repeatedly cancel on you, can be displaced by these new friends. And new friends may involve going to a meet-up or event, talking to strangers, and following up to make plans to do something later.

With everything, making new friends or being maintaining good friendships takes practice. I’m taking the time each week to give exclusively to friends. Even if it’s a little bit of time, every amount of time counts. There was a time when I didn’t invest any time with friends. For the last year of my previous job, I isolated myself. I was working evening shifts and I would make the excuse that I couldn’t meet people.

I was convinced that I had to sacrifice friends in order to keep the job I had. I worked my ass off and didn’t see much financial reward. Burnt out most weekends, I didn’t make any effort to reach out to anyone.

I was alone with no one to really talk to. I was miserable. There were no pending texts. Nothing in the inbox. No one was making an effort to reach out to me. It was a dark time, and when I finally quit my previous job, I understood it’s not a flaw in others but a flaw within myself. Since then, I’ve been slowly reaching out again.

It was tough at first. I was scared of sending off emails to people I hadn’t talked to in years. But after the first outreach message, the subsequent emails were easier. Now, I’m not scared to ask strangers for emails and follow-up with them. I might sound bizarre, but try isolating yourself for a year. But it can’t be that bizarre, because as I mentioned in my ‘thankfulness’ essay two months back, I mentioned that most people suck at following up.

“The people you surround yourself with need to lift you up. I’m not just talking professionally, but personally as well. Who fascinates you? Who challenges you? Who makes you excited to get started every day? Treat them well, provide them with value, show them why you’re worth keeping around, and you’ll get tremendous return. Invest in people. It may be the most important business investment of your life.” — Gary Vaynerchuck, The Most Important Thing You Don’t Have on Your Bucket List

The benefits are enormous. Perhaps though, you don’t want to have a huge group of friends. That’s the most important thing about investing in friends — understanding your needs and wants. We are all selfish, but we have to be to some extent because we need to take care of ourselves. One way we take care of ourselves is knowing what we want in relationships with others. Again, Kelly Williams Brown writes in her book “Adulting” the following.

“..Assess honestly your own friendship needs and wants.

Some people have the time, energy, and boundless affection to have thirty-seven really close friends. Some people want two close friends, and fifteen people they can call to go out dancing with on a random Friday. Some people want one really tight-knit group. All of these are 100 percent reasonable social needs.

Our model for someone who does well in friendship is someone with a zillion friends, who is never alone, who can conjure twenty people at a bar with nothing more than a mass text. For some, this is indeed what they want. But it’s okay if that’s not what you want — if you’re a quieter, shyer person who would rather have a small handful of people you’re genuinely close with.”

— Kelly Williams Brown, “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps”

I’m the type of person who wants enough friends around me to tell me I’m a bit crazy. I don’t care for the zillion of friends. What I care about are friends who are there for me. There isn’t much to this world more than living it with good friends.

[1] If you’re interested in learning more about network marketing and multi-level marketing, listen to this episode of This American Life. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/543/wake-up-now

[2] I can’t help recommending this book if you’re in your twenty-somethings. It has a lot of great advice for young people who are in this transitionary phase of being a college student to being a working adult.

Dear Best Friend,

You’ve run yourself into the gutter, broken down like a rusty old pick-up truck. Before, we used to be able to call each other without hesitation, talking about what woes us, what bores us, what excites us. Now, I get this nagging feeling you want to call me and talk about your issues, but you probably find it easier to shut up, go about your day, and live with that feeling until it takes a turn for the worst.

But here’s the thing. We’ve all been there. Years ago, I found myself hiding from my friends and family, laying down still on my bed. And just like so many others, how I ultimately got out was the help of my family and friends. It wasn’t what they said. It was how they acted.

Back in High School, I fell in a deep depression. I wasn’t eating much. Food felt like a odorless substance passing through my esophagus. At the dinner table, my mother inquired if I felt alright. She examined my complexion and followed up with a comment about my weight and how thin and pale I looked. Annoyed that she didn’t comprehend, I got up and left the dinner table. I couldn’t tell her the awful truth that I was painfully depressed. I went to the restroom to wash my face. The water was cold, but I didn’t feel it. I was numb.

I went to my room and looked at a recent gift my dad gave me for my birthday. It was this dual cassette and cd player that could also connect to the radio. I really didn’t want it, but my dad insisted I should have it. I remember laying down on my bed and looking at it. I thought, “here’s an item that no one will remember in years, just like years after I die. It’s an afterthought. No one will care about this hunk of metal. Why did it have to even exist? Why do I have to exist?”

The depression was hard to get out of. The core of the depression lie in a deep-rooted fear of dying. Or rather the thought of not being around anymore. My existential crisis made me contemplate suicide. I wasn’t thinking of an elaborate way of killing myself. I imagined what it felt to be dead. But dead is dead, and I supposed there isn’t anything there — nothing to feel. I tried to think of all of the dead, both famous and infamous, and how they must feel being dead. I thought of my grandfather who had died when I was young. I thought of how it must feel when my parents die. I trapped myself into this line of thinking for nights, perhaps weeks.

And I think I needed a friend to be there. You. You were supposed to be there to help me, get me out of this peril. But you were caught up in a love affair with another boy who complicated everything. And he broke your heart eventually. Instead, I got help from playing tennis every weekend. I got help from other friends who invited me to go do other things. I was pulled from my demise by distracting myself from my cloudy thoughts. And eventually, when you wanted to hang out with your best friend again, pulled me out to go biking. And I stopped thinking about it, and the depression slowly withered into a tiny voice in my head. A voice that still bellows once in a while, but doesn’t bother me as much.

Eventually, therapy helped me open up and realize that voice never goes away, and I have found ways to cope with it. I don’t feel like the vicious circle will return. I’ve changed my mind on how to think about suffering. Victor Frankl wrote in “Mans Search for Meaning” that there needs to be thought of the future in order to survive the perils of today. I have found meaning in work and an endless search for perfection that I’m sure can keep me occupied well into the future.

And now, you’re going through a similar experience, except circumstances are much different. No one can just pull you away from what you’re doing because you’re making ends meet. You’re anxious all of the time, hurting yourself by having ulcer-like pains from the stress. I understand the doctor’s prescribed you medication and you’ve started taking measures to take care of yourself, but I know from experience that’s not enough. Drugs aren’t the ultimate answer, just a momentary calm before you have to wake up and face it all again. You can’t fight this alone; you need the support of others.

Please know you can call, text, or reach out to me anytime. Know that when you contact me, I will not judge or hurt you. I will be there to listen, even if you can’t say a word. Maybe you won’t want to use words. Tears are also appropriate. Again, I won’t judge. I won’t make faces at you, bring up your anxiety, make you feel worthless or pitiful. I won’t give up hope on you. If that means I have to spend more time with you, that’s fine. If that means you can’t give back at this moment in time, that’s fine.

Over this summer at Dev Bootcamp, one of our Engineering Empathy sessions was led by Greg Baugues. He talked about his experience dealing with ADHD and his journey that led him to find out he was also Bipolar. In one of his stories, he told us about his mood cycles. He would go through lengthy periods of highs followed by similar periods of lows. During his low in a different era of his life, he would stop being productive to the point where he would skip work and eventually be fired.

On one particular occasion, his low was so bad, he was scared to leave his house. His co-worker who really cared about him came over to his house. His co-worker didn’t have to, but he went the extra mile to help a fellow friend out. At the time, Greg didn’t lock his doors to his place, so his co-worker arrived at his place and knocked on the door before letting himself in. Greg hid between an area between the bed and the wall and covered himself in blankets, evading his co-worker. And it really hurt Greg, not being to come out to the one guy who went out of his way to help him. I really felt him, both being Greg and being the co-worker.

If you will disappear in the dark abyss for weeks, I will come and try to find you, just like Greg’s co-worker. You don’t have to be alone. You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to feel like I’m trying to treat you. I’m your friend and I won’t judge you. You know that time you were so frozen, you hid yourself in the closet? I will be the friend who takes you out.

When I say I want to help you, I mean I want to be where you are. I can be the bear in this video. I won’t blame you for what you’re going through. I will be the one to connect with you and be empathic. Because I’ve been there, and I was hurting too.

Next time we see each other, I’ll give you a huge hug. Hell, here’s a virtual hug.

That felt good, right?

I can’t help but recommend these two posts: Depression Part 1, Depression part 2. Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half wrote these two stories about her ongoing struggle with depression. I found myself relating to them, both laughing and crying.

It takes a serious dark tone and tries to vocalize how a depressive person feels. This panel above hit home because I imagined if I tried to tell my mother when I was depressed that I just wanted to be dead, she would bereave and I couldn’t live myself. In an interview with NPR, she opens up about her suicide attempt on the radio, something she didn’t tell in detail to her husband. She breaks down a little, and I feel its gravity and weight. I wept. Hearing that, I could relate with my own experiences, and that really hit deep. Maybe it may hit deep with you.

If you ever feel like ending your life, make it a priority to tell me first, and I will help you out of it. I’m here to listen. I understand that one of the biggest side-effects of severe anxiety and panic attacks is to attempt suicide.I don’t feel like we have enough resources out there to help us through these times, and we all too often forget we have others to talk to. I’m telling you now. Talk to me. I will be as silent as a ninja, listening with attentive ears. Again, I won’t judge you. Only after you have spoken will I speak. Only after you have spoken will I embrace. Only after you have spoken will we both breathe.

I implore you to reach out to me today. Right now if you can. Please, don’t be shy. Pick up the phone and call me. I’ll be here. Waiting.

Sincerely,

Jeremy

If you have a friend who needs some help with anxiety and depression, here are some resources to get you started, taken from the subreddit /r/SWResources.

• “Contemplating Suicide: No Way to Understand Unless You’ve Been There’ Blog post at PsychologyToday.com from “Gerri Luce” who’s been both a therapist and patient in suicide intervention.
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s “Get Help” page gives information about many ways to get help. US-based resource.
• Helping Yourself When You are Feeling Suicidal Practical, comforting tips from SCBS Australia.
• “If you are thinking of suicide…” from rethink.org. Coping strategies and options for help. UK-based resource.
• “Coping with Suicidal Thoughts” from Simon Fraser University. Downloadable PDF workbook with strategies and exercises.
• Worldwide Crisis Centre Directory from the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
• Personal Experiences of Contacting Samaritans. The Samaritans are a UK-based telephone crisis counselling service. Stories and video from actual clients.
• What Happens Now - American Association of Suicidology. Blog by and about suicide attempt survivors.
• Suicide Attempt Survivors - Waking Up Alive Support, stories, and recommended books.
• “Ways To Help Yourself When You’re Feeling Suicidal” from mixednuts.net - depression and bipolar information and chat.
• Suggested Reading List from save.org, comprehensive list of books on suicide and related topics.
• Recovery Strategies from J.D. Schramm at TED.com A practical follow-up to Schramm’s talk, “Break the Silence for Suicide Attempt Survivors”.
• “Suicide: Read This First” from metanoia.org. Probably the most famous suicide prevention text on the internet.

Some of my own resources on anxiety and depression:

• Tips to Manage Anxiety and Stress from the ADAA
• 12 Tips for Friends and Family of Those With Anxiety - It’s highly important we understand how to cope as well as help those with anxiety and depression.
• If you’re friend is suicidal, please reach out to professionals immediately. (For the US only. For other countries, check this /r/SWResources thread.
• 1-800-784-2433 (1-800-SUICIDE)
• Texting: Text ANSWER to 839863
• Spanish: 1-800-SUICIDA
• Veterans: 1-800-273-8255, Veterans Press 1
• www.suicide.org/suicide-hotlines.html
• www.crisiscallcenter.org//crisisservices.html

Lessons taken from Nerina Pallot’s Year of EPs

For every month of 2014, Nerina Pallot has released an EP. Each EP contains five new songs. Nerina is a British musician whose past works include her own releases as well as writing and producing songs for Kylie Minogue and Diana Vickers. I’ve had her new music on repeat and it excites me she took on such a challenge. It’s a huge commitment to release something every month, trying to break free of that creative struggle we all face. We begin to create something, begin crafting, grow bored, and move on to a different project. In her explanation video, she says she has started more albums than finishing them for this reason. Out of my own fears of reaching a plateau stage of my skills and projects, I want to examine where one stalls with creative work, what it means to make a commitment, and what kind of sacrifices and risks there are.

We are nearly there, friends… It’s due in no small part to your encouragement, benign disbelief that it would actually happen and wonderful feedback. You are all always in the back of my mind when I sit down at a piano to write and when I’m wondering whether I’m going slowly mad and if anybody’s listening anyway. You keep reminding me that you are, so please keep willing me on in the home straight. I promise not to let you down.

— Nerina Pallot’s Newsletter, November 9th

Nerina has met her goal every month. I bought at her EPs every month and have been following her progress along the way by listening to her music, checking her twitter page and reading her newsletters. Her hope with the project is it will help her grow as an artist. In her past, she has started a song, works on it, can’t come to call it complete, and gets excited about another song while leaving her current one in limbo. It’s a curse of perfection, and I can relate in my writing when I leave something written for weeks untouched and realize I don’t want to write on this topic anymore. For example, last week’s letter on a year in review started as an excellent idea until I started writing it. I grew to hate it after realizing I’m just copying others’ year in review. I re-wrote it on the day I was to release it and now it’s relatively acceptable, but by far not my favorite letter.

When you feel like you’ve learned whatever there is to learn from what you’re doing, it’s time to change course and find something new to learn so that you can move forward. You can’t be content with mastery; you have to push yourself to become a student again. ‘Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough,’ writes author Alain de Botton.

— Austin Kleon, from the book “Show Your Work”

Mr. Kleon addresses everything I fear in creative work — reaching the plateau phase. At some point, you realize you aren’t moving forward anymore, and you wonder why the work you’re doing doesn’t make you think. Maybe it’s your job, your relationship, the conversations you have with others. No matter, we don’t grow, and we find ourselves saying fairly arrogant things, like “that’s the why it just is” when we’re asked why we aren’t improving. This is a mental game, and there are strategies to move away from this slump. I talked in the past about being uncomfortable, but how does one push themselves to that state? Nerina forced herself to reach that level by announcing her ‘Year of EPs’ goal.

It’s difficult to do one-up yourself. The fact is we try so hard to make everything better that we forget that it’s the crafting in which we got into this business, not the fame and fortune. I’ve heard time and again if you’re in it for the money, you’re in the wrong line of business. Creative endeavors involve a lot of time and effort for something someone will notice as such little output. But that’s the true magic of creative work, and what happens behind the scenes is just as fascinating as what is the outcome.

NPR did this series called Project Song a while back where the producers would invite a musician to come to a recording studio and spend 48 hours creating a new song following a given theme. In one episode, the producers invited Moby to create a song about a specific picture given to him, and he took his time coming up with the lyrics, composing the harmonies and melodies, and had a singer come in and do the vocals. He mixed everything together and created a song that my friend and I played on repeat for a road trip to Portland, Oregon. I was astounded of the raw commitment to the deadline and sacrifices one makes when making something out of thin air in a short amount of time.

Nerina has more than 48 hours to create her songs but the constraint still makes it hard to keep with the commitment. In the video, she says there isn’t all day to record a hundred takes and choose the best one. Maybe at most, she gets 3 or 4 takes because of the limited time with the studio and access to other musicians. She must prep well beforehand to really get the songs right. And if it doesn’t come to par with what she would like it to be, so be it. At least she finished the song. Out of these sacrifices, she has somehow made music that I really want to hear every month. Sure, not every song has been a hit, but there have been enough where my interests have been perked each time. And fans like myself are what help drive her to create more. Knowing there are loyal fans who will back your endeavors is huge motivation to get the EP done. Knowing there are readers that are appreciative and will give me feedback is a huge motivation for me to write.

Contrast this short burst of creativity to the anal perfectionist style of creativity. An example that comes to mind is the attention to detail Jackie Chan gives to his movies. In his Hong Kong work, Jackie Chan will take hundreds of shots to get his fight scenes perfectly right. He wants the fight scenes to be as real as possible where the audience can see the blows, feel the pain, and still be able to follow the rhythm. In most modern day fight scenes, most shots cut too fat to show the blow, usually to cover up the fact the main actors don’t know how to fight. But modern cinema could get the right shots, but it would just take too much time. In one movie, Jackie took 2,900 takes for a ten minute scene. It eats into his budget, but because he knows what his audience wants, he’ll go the extra mile.

Being the perfectionist and waiting until you get the perfect take is one way of recording music. Nerina has done this before if you’ve listened to her other albums. In one of her video diaries for her album, “The Graduate”, she shows you she can play all of the back-up instruments and can mix them all together into one performance. With over a decade of record producing, she distills her knowledge and forces herself in limiting her options of creating the perfect. Instead, she has to make the best take in one or two studio visits, which pushes her in her discomfort zone and she must exert a lot of time and devotion to the preparation. The big truth behind creative work is it’s actually really boring. If you watch me practice piano, I will often play the same part over and over for a few minutes. By the time I’m about to move on to the next part, you’ll get up and leave. Sure, you can take shortcuts in music making. You can slap together some lyrics, bad vocals, and editing it like crazy with auto tune. Yes, it will sound decent, but not different. It takes the years of deliberate practice and a devotion for crafting the sound you want to hear as soon as you can before it fades away.

Nerina found a different way of approaching music making where the stakes are low enough where failure is alright. But failure isn’t a bad thing. It teaches you what you can’t do and forces you to think in other ways. The audience might not like her most recent EP, and that feedback drives directly back to her next piece of work. Musicians aren’t perfect, and sometimes they don’t get it right every time. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love”, gave an excellent TED talk about failing after success. She talks about stalling the difficulty mentally to write more because she saw that others expected her to write another hit. But she knew it was a damn near impossibility to strike lightning twice. But after a change in mindset on how it was never about the success and the fear of irrelevancy is a mental game, she carried on and wrote another book. That book flopped, but it was the failure that allowed her to carry on. Regardless of outcome, Mrs. Gilbert saw that it was never about writing hits but about writing something she wanted to write. Whether or not the book was going to be a wide success is something beyond her control. What she controls is her creative endeavors. Everything else is just icing on the cake. And in the end, the really devoted Elizabeth Gilbert fans really supported her while other people who were on the “Eat, Pray, Love” hype train jumped off the boat. Mrs. Pallot has the same drive. I thought some songs could use a bit of polishing, but I love this imperfection and the feeling that there is room for an artist to improve. I am a super fan, and will support her future endeavors because I just love the work she produces.

On top of her limited time to write, produce and record her EPs, Nerina has been playing live shows. During the home straight, she played 20 live shows all around the UK. One of her EPs, number 11, contains five songs from her live show in Union Chapel back in October. She is no slouch; she’s knows she has to hustle. Her tenacity for delivering goes above and beyond, and that’s the type of artist I want to listen to.

You might be thinking, “now what?” She’s made the goal, but will her creative juices stop flowing and she will go through a slump? Her latest newsletter assures otherwise as there are more surprises in 2015. I was with an experienced runner this New Year’s Day trail running though the mountains. She told me she almost have up running last year after she meet her distance goal of finishing a marathon. She asked herself, “what now?” and took a hiatus from running and subbed it with cycling. She recently rediscovered trail running, and that’s gives a different running high. Like Nerina’s project, it took a different approach to understand why we do what we do.

I’m not worried for Nerina either, because this was her journey of rediscovery. This project has been an absolute inspiration for me because it helps me put what I do in perspective. It’s also a repeated reminder that it’s always possible to commit yourself to a project like this, but you must be aware of the sacrifices.

In closing, you should check out the entire EP collection from this past year. If you want the highlights, you must check out the following songs. I’ve also made a Spotify playlist if that’s your thing.

• “The Hold Tight” from “The Hold Tight” EP
• “Ain’t Got Anything Left” from “When the Morning Stars Sang Together” EP
• “Million To One” from “Little Bull” EP
• “Rousseau” from “Rousseau” EP
• “Simple Life” from “When I Grow Up” EP

I used to do “A Year in Review” back at my old blog. The last one I posted was back in 2011, and it was more of a chore than anything else, re-posting pictures I thought were cool from each month. In a way, I’ve gone away from posting on Tumblr, which is about posting pictures and re-posting other people’s work.

Touting how I’ve changed this year, this is a good time to log a snapshot of where I am today to evaluate myself in the future. Taking a lesson from someone else’s reflection on the past year, as well as another list, I’m going to bullet point what I’ve learned this year.

The Good From 2014:

• I quit my job back in March. Haven’t looked back, haven’t been back.
• I regained my health and happiness. I started the year with serious depression and was nowhere near fit. I had an unused gym membership for over a year that I was dumping money into. Today, I run three days a week and do yoga two days a week.
• I learned the basics of Ruby to pass the entry test for Dev Bootcamp, which I attended this summer. I learned how to program, but more importantly learned how to learn. I wept at the end after parting with some unforgettable new friends.
• I got a job as a UI Developer. This job pays more, has fewer hours, and I have an awesome mentor.
• I started writing weekly letters, this very series you’re reading in fact!
• I’ve continued journaling this year. I’m six books in for a total of 3.75 years of consecutive writing
• I drove across the country and back, totaling over 9,000 miles driven. 18 of those states I drove through was my first time there (Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, and New Mexico).
• After the road trip, I hopped on a plane to South Korea. It was the first time I had ever been. I stayed for over a week helping a friend recovery from surgery.
• I ran a coding club for four months after Dev Bootcamp ended. Plans to continue this are tentative next year.
• I attended my first hackathon this year. I had such a great experience, I attended two more.

Top Books I’ve Finished This Year:

• Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us - This helped me put a persona to big food companies. I always knew the amount of salt, sugar and fat were increasing with processed food, but now I understand the driving force behind that, and the science they use to justify such actions.
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed - This is an old book that looks at adult education in different manner, beginning with the premise that we oppress rather than liberate.
• Show Your Work - Austin Kleon’s follow-up to his first book, “Steal Like An Artist” about getting feedback and how to handle it for creative work. Quick read.
• East of Eden - I hadn’t read this classic before, and after starting a short book club this year, became one of my instant favorite classics. A fictional story that spans decades that resonates the biblical allegory of Cain and Abel.
• Kern and Burns - This is a collection of interviews from design entrepreneurs. It opened my eyes to design in the workplace and how companies are shaped from it.

Top Films I’ve Seen This Year:

• 12 Years a Slave
• The Wind Rises
• Chef
• Boyhood

I want to start a new list for the upcoming year that doesn’t involve resolutions. I have made resolutions in the past, and I have not been very involved in making them happen because circumstances change, or the goal wasn’t specific enough, or I just don’t like the goal anymore. Instead, I’m making a “I don’t give a fuck” list to live by for the next year.

The Fuck-It List of 2015:

• Being nice. Throw that out. Be kind and be able to confront others by telling them what’s right, not cater to what they want to hear. But don’t be a dick about it.
• Being a liar. Seriously, honest is the best choice.
• Spilling the whole can of beans. As a corollary to the above, I to be succinct. Entice others with a small amount of information first. Then see if they’re interested in learning more.
• Pleasing everyone, or living up to anyone else’s expectations other than my own. Why should I fantasize about making other people happy when they don’t always have my best interest? I am the sole person responsible for myself, and I should never forget that.
• Haters. Period.
• Fitting in to a mold. I don’t need a label nor social circle to define me.
• Guilt. I have felt this weight long enough, and its time to stop dwelling on this one.

This list was inspired by these two lists, both from the same author. This list item from one of the list rings so true to me:

#14. Falling in Love

If I learned anything in 2013, it’s that love — the overwhelming, this-is-the-one kind, the love that makes you weak in the knees, if not slightly duller in the head — isn’t real. It exists outside of reality, in a world devoid of calories and Kardashians. The fall is fun, for a while. But big love is just that… oversized and oversold. Overstated and filled with impossible expectations. I don’t want to fall into that kind of love again. It lacks substance. I prefer the little loves. My best friend’s daughter running around the kitchen chanting, “It’s all rainbows,” over and over again. The wag of a dog’s tail when you scratch the sweet spot behind her ear. Neglected nuances, subtle sincerity — that’s where love lives. Lost in a pile of unmatched socks, it sits and waits for you, overlooked and underappreciated. Flawed but sturdy; frustrating but frank. A beautiful mess of sadness and hope. Fuck engagement rings and moonlit walks on the beach. Love hurts because that’s the only way to tell that it’s real.
— Chantielle MacFarlane

Everyone, have a Happy New Year!

With the past few weeks of heavy and light downpour here in California, I’ve been hearing repeated conversations. There’s been talk about how the drought is ending, how bad the streets are flooding, how heavy the rain can get, how bad the traffic is and how bad the drivers are during the storm. People demonstrate how out of touch they are with mother nature and how fast they can bring it back into focus. Typically before the storm, we have this feeling that as long as we keep doing what we’re doing, I don’t have to worry about how bad mother nature can turn against us.

As a prime example, the rain has delayed construction of a brick pathway to the house I’m renting. My landlord could not foresee the bad weather. When the rain started, there was little concern it would last. But weeks past, and the halt proved more worrisome. We would like to continue next week but now we understand how unpredictable the weather is and we can’t be certain. We aren’t complaining heavily since it’s something we have absolutely no control over, but we’re all anxious because the construction blocks our driveway, and there’s the unsettling feeling of being incomplete every time I get home from work.

I’ve tried something new this week. I stop myself from fueling the fire to complain about the bad weather and think about the teachings of the Stoics. Seneca once practiced the art of thinking about the worst so he can brace himself if something bad happened. Instead of freezing up, Seneca would be able to face the perils because he’s already primed himself with it. Someone who doesn’t prepare mentally is more prone to be shocked and find themselves blocked. As an example, last week, my friend asked me, “What is there really to do on a rainy day? Nothing!”

As I sit at a cafe, sipping my hot cocoa by the fireplace, I think back to some memories of rainy days. I remember gray skies drooped over Berkeley on any typical week day. It felt morbid and unsettling because you were in transition between sunlight and rain. In elementary school, this weather had no effect for the children playing in the yard during recess. We got used to this slumber weather, and that became the norm. On those rainy days, we had a sigh of relief because it finally felt like the weather wasn’t fooling us with that gray drape. But that limited outdoor play and we would have to stay indoors and play adult supervised games. For the first few times, it would be great playing board games, heads-up 7-up, or some other interactive game. But there wasn’t much variety to the selection of games, so some kids would get bored. And a bored mind tends to produce unsettling behavior, like screaming, whining, or pacing about the room. As kids, we’re expected to have the ability to run amuck and transfer that gulp of energy into physical activity. But when it rains, and there’s nothing else to do, we’ll exhibit the same behavior in closed quarters. We woke up with the expectation on this day to be able to have our outside time, and now the rules are changed on us.

Santa Cruz has this tradition called first rain. Many call it the naked run, and when it rains for the first time during the autumn season, students would rush out and streak. The first instance of first rain began in the fall of 1989, weeks after the Loma Prieta earthquake. Students were afraid to stay in the dorms at Porter College, not to far away from the UC Santa Cruz campus, and slept outside. On some dares, a few students ran around naked, and thus began the tradition. Over the years, the naked run, as it was called, happened spontaneously during the first heavy rain. But people wanted to create structure for the chaos, and meetings were held to discuss the rules of first rain. Something as unpredictable as when the first heavy rainstorm has been transformed into its own spontaneous social event.

I studied abroad in Germany a few years ago for a summer. I hadn’t packed an umbrella or rain gear and was completely helpless to the flash rains that would pour for a few hours at a time. The first time it happened, I got soaked while carrying my camera. Needless to say, the camera broke and I had to purchase a new one. With this new camera, I was able to photograph another incident where it was raining and a group of my friends wanted to take a photo in front of a fountain. We stood there looking very soaked and a group of tourists joined in on our fun. It was laughable at first, but more and more strangers were rushing in to the photo. For the next three minutes, I was confused by the crowd, but also invigorated by the enthusiasm of everyone around me. Suddenly, I forgot where I was, and the rain didn’t matter.

Sometimes, we forget the destructive power of the rain. On a family vacation in Florida, my father drove us on a day trip through Key West. The weather report that day said there would be a storm that night and that we should expect high winds. We limited our time we there and left by mid-afternoon. But the weather report was wrong, and it began storming an hour after we left. We sped through the two-lane highway and my father made some risky decisions passing up drivers with our rented all-wheel drive SUV. The palm trees were blowing fiercely, and I was worried they may fall on the road. Visibility was terribly low, and it felt as if this was it. But my father got us through it, and we made it back in one piece without crashing into a ditch.

This summer, after a long road trip from San Francisco to Chicago, I was ready to meet my roommate at a place I subleased. As I would find out at the apartment building, this rental was a scam. This roommate had their identity stolen and I wired money to the scam artist. Having felt the rug pulled under my feet as I thought about what to do while eating at a Panera Bread, it started raining hard. Someone mentioned to me this rain would last all night. Unprepared, I went across the street to a drug store to purchase an umbrella. I panicked; I had no idea where I was going to sleep and I was going to get severely wet. I didn’t know how to handle these changes, and it felt like my world was crumbling. But a friend of mine came through; I stayed with a friend of a friend to recuperate. When I got there, I took my wet clothes off and stared out of the window to the lake and felt a calming sensation. “It’s not so bad,” I thought. “I’ll figure this out just as I’ve worked other things out.” I found another apartment the next day and was able to make it to my first day at Dev Bootcamp.

A few months later near the end of my Chicago experience, I thought it would be great to go to Hot Dougs before it closed for good. I enlisted a friend to wait in line with me, and all seemed good. There was a two hour wait and it was just blistering hot. About the hour and a half point, the skies turn to a shade of gray. The storm was coming, and it was going to be huge. There was a choice to make: wait it out for another thirty minutes and get soaked, or forfeit and get something else to eat. Choosing to wait, my friend and I were soaked from top to bottom wearing a shirt and shorts. My wallet and phone made it through, but everything else was miserable. We were shivering, my shirt had shrunk, and my socks were mushy. I got into the store taking in the warm, sausage ladened air and thought, “this better be worth it.”

The rain doesn’t have emotions, doesn’t care whether its going to rain hard or lightly. We have no way of bending the rain or nature to our will. And inevitably, the rain passes, and we are left with this faint odor. Scientists call it petrichor; I like to call it hope.

At a former job, I was faced with a dilemma on a project I was leading; I didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like an imposter and didn’t feel I belonged with the other engineers. Psychologists coincidentally call it imposter syndrome, and it affected my work performance. I knew what the end product was supposed to look like, but after many failed starts, I was losing hope I could finish this project. Instead of asking for help, I mocked a plan and tried to go with that. By the end of the week, my boss came up to me to see what kind of progress I was making. I told her everything was going well when really, I had a hard time conceiving a solution. I talked her away by telling her I was working on process A, B, and C, but really I had no idea what I was doing. The excuses I made felt like plausible deniability if it came up in my performance review.

Inevitably, the project fell apart. My inability to ask for help cost the company a business deal and bonus upwards of thousands of dollars. Looking in hindsight, I was afraid and didn’t want to appear inferior to my supervisors or engineering peers. I wanted to blame the company. I wanted to blame the other engineers. But in the end, I could only blame myself; I was unable to expose my ignorance.

At some point, we may lie to ourselves and think we already know everything. In my early twenties, I was very arrogant and had a hard time letting others teach me anything new. When someone took the time to explain something to me, I would only grasp about 10% of it and nodded my head in agreement, pretending to absorb everything they just said like a sponge. When someone asked me if I knew about something I didn’t know, I would say, “Yeah, I know what that is” so I wouldn’t be seen as a fool. But I was a fool. I practiced appearing smart and I missed out of great learning opportunities.

Possibly from old wise tales, common sense, or some other form of “modern thinking,” men are supposed to just know how to do something. If you talk to my dad, he will proudly wear this ignorant-free badge with honor. He hated it when others didn’t know what he was talking about and would yell at you if you spoke up that you had no clue what he was talking about. Growing up, I remember he yelled at me when I couldn’t tie my shoes after showing me for the third or fourth time. An accumulation of those experiences led me to stop asking questions, nod, and affirm I knew things I didn’t know. This behavior spilled over to my interaction with friends and schoolmates. One of my best friend in elementary school recalls back in the first grade asking if I knew what a condom was. Having absolutely no idea, I told her I thought it was an animal. Honestly, I don’t remember saying those words, but my friend won’t forget because she found it to be the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard.

Of course, that’s not to say the feeling of linking shame and ignorance is solely for males. It’s a common feeling amongst everyone, man and women and people not on the binary spectrum of gender. There are those like me who were shamed into thinking ignorance was bad. Then there are those like my father who would get angry if someone exposed their ignorance. But what can we do if we find ourselves in this predicament?

During this past summer at Dev Bootcamp, I practiced exposing my ignorance. Being a beginner in Computer Science, I had to figure out the things I didn’t know, and one of the best ways to do that was to ask stupid questions to experts. We had plenty of teachers who we could approach and ask these stupid questions. Slowly, I built a muscle on asking stupid questions, and I learned better questions can come out of those stupid questions. Once I got over the hump of looking like a fool, I finally felt I had permission to be ignorant. I showed myself I could understand something a lot better with these interactions rather than figuring it out by myself.

As a family therapist I was taught to throw off the notion that I had expert knowledge about other peoples’ lives. To approach people with a “not knowing” stance. This is a hard pill to swallow, whether you’re a newbie therapist or newbie programmer. Your instincts tell you to hide your ignorance, to feign expert knowledge, but this only stunts your growth and inhibits the work you are trying to accomplish. Taking this lesson with me from one career into another has served me well. I’ve actually grown attached to feeling ignorant on a daily basis, it lets me know I’m in the right place. I’m growing.

Dave Hoover, co-founder of Dev Bootcamp

Indeed, we cower from ignorance because it makes us feel inferior and uncomfortable. But let us suppose you try this out. What’s the worse that could happen? Someone else thinks you’re a fool. Or that same person might take the time to teach you something. And if they do, you need to really listen. Once they’re done talking, you need to repeat what you heard to find holes in your comprehension. You may annoy some people along the way, but working off of assumptions of what you heard produces shoddy work.

When I was talking to my dad a few months ago, my dad asked if I knew about this specific type of clamp. Instead of telling him I knew what he was talking about, I said, “I don’t know, can you explain that to me?”. He was frustrated at first, and then in a pissed manner explained it to me. I felt a bit of victory and pride when I said that to him.

Sometimes we are blind to our ignorance. But as Dave Hoover says above, take that “not-knowing” stance and you will find holes in your knowledge. Make that a daily practice. It prepares you to ask for help when you need it the most. Join me on this journey, because chances are, you may also have no clue what you’re doing.

When I pick up a new piece of music, I break it down into sizable chunks. What kind of structure does it have and can I break it down into something simple like an ‘ABACA’ pattern? If it does, I would learn that ‘A’ part first. Are there complicated rhythms or strange fingerings? Break it down even further. I only start playing when the piece is in manageable chunks.

Do I feel satisfied I can play this chunk? Yes? Then I would move on to the next chunk. After learning a few chunks, I would combine these chunks and try to merge them together in one take. The take will probably be terrible, so I go back and work on the areas I have the most trouble with. This is the process of jumping in between low and high level of learning something new. I can not play the composition well enough until I have dived deep in this form of practice.

At first glance, I see the composition as a whole and I think I could never play this piece. I’m usually at a high level of discomfort. “The wall is too high to climb,” I think. But when I give a second glance, I start thinking strategy. How could I break it down to manageable components. When I’m through, I’m at a lower level of discomfort and have many small challenges that’s a lot more manageable. The hours of practice don’t matter. You have practiced enough when you feel very comfortable with the piece.

I’ve been told many times in the past to get out of your comfort zone. But when I apply this advice, I wonder, how far out of your comfort zone should you go? I say, go as far as you can before you feel that feeling you want to quit. This is part of a bigger concept called flow, developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of psychology at Claremont College.^[1] Flow is the state of being fully immersed and involved when one performs at an activity. It’s a balancing point and you will inevitably feel it when you are so involved with the activity, you lose track of the time. I attempt to strike that right balance by taking an educated guess on my complexity threshold. More likely than not, I will estimate incorrectly, and that’s when I will adjust myself.

Here’s a fun example of how you can follow this pattern with a trivial activity. This past Wednesday night, I spent 30 minutes solving logic puzzles online. Once I completed the logic puzzle, the page would redirect and show a summary of my results. This includes graph showing a normal distribution graph of complexity of the puzzle and the time to complete it. There was a star to indicate where you compare to other logic puzzlers. During my first puzzle, it took me over 5 minutes to solve the puzzle. My star was in the right tail end of the percentile on the graph. By the end of the 30 minutes, my star was on the middle, meaning around the 50 percentile, i.e. average. I proved to myself I can get better at solving logic puzzles. If I go back and do more puzzles, I would move up the difficulty to medium, but I know I’m doomed to be on the tail end of the medium puzzles when I first begin.

Another case: this letter. One of my biggest faults as a writer is my inability to edit what I’ve written. After typing my stream of consciousness, I think the first draft must be the best draft. However, the harsh reality is I don’t want to read my own writing because I’m afraid that it’s all shit. Hell, I will admit it now. The first draft I wrote for this letter was a piece of shit. It’s as Anne Lamott says in her book, “Bird by Bird”. “All good writers write [shitty first drafts]. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts.” The second reading through my letter, I started to notice grammatical, sentence structure and diction mistakes. The third read through I noticed the problems of how the letter flowed.

I’ve been writing for myself over three years non-stop. I have a daily deadline to write in my journal, and I haven’t missed a day since March 13th, 2011.^[2] It’s all been stream of conscious writing though, so there’s not much afterthought in what I write. In an interview with Current a few years ago, Ira Glass talks about beginners and the phase of crap. When your starting out in a creative profession, nearly everything you make is awful. The distinguishing factor you have going for you is that you know you have good tastes. I’m in that awful phase with my writing. The big difference between when I started writing and today is I’m finally sharing my work and getting feedback on what to improve. By applying the feedback, I can discard what makes a piece a failure and focus on the elements that make great writing. If you really want to learn from mistakes, Jason Fried of Basecamp (formerly 37Signals) writes what failure really teaches us is what not to do while success teaches us what to do. I’m striving to reach a point where my writing is more than just crap, and that it adds meaning and value to my readers.

The feeling of discomfort pairs well with the feeling of flourishing. And the opposite seems to be true; the feeling of comfort pairs well with the feeling of being stagnant. One of the ways to combat the plateau phase is to embrace discomfort. In “Infinite Jest”, David Foster Wallace describes this type of activity for a complacent type playing tennis.

Then [there’s] maybe the worst type, because it can cunningly masquerade as patience and humble frustration. You’ve got the Complacent type, who improves radically until he hits a plateau, and is content with the radical improvement he’s made to get to the plateau, and doesn’t mind staying at the plateau because it’s comfortable and familiar, and he doesn’t worry about getting off it, and pretty soon you find he’s designed a whole game around compensating for the weaknesses and chinks in the armor the given plateau represents in his game, still—his whole game is based on this plateau now.

And little by little, guys he used to beat start beating him, locating the chinks of the plateau, and his rank starts to slide, but he’ll say he doesn’t care, he says he’s in it for the love of the game, and he always smiles but there gets to be something sort of tight and hangdog about his smile, and he always smiles and is real nice to everybody and real good to have around but he keeps staying where he is while other guys hop plateaux, and he gets beat more and more, but he’s content.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Although I am saving the plateau phase for another letter, I wanted to touch on it briefly. David Foster Wallace understands the comfortable feeling and how it can stall their growth. Instead of trying to focus on how to better themselves, they may lose their matches and don’t let failures teach them something. The person has a good attitude about losing and doesn’t pass judgment, but he or she has no vision to desire a better outcome^[3] Take it from chess world champion Emmanuel Lasker. “A bad plan is better than no plan at all.”

To conclude, I want to leave you with questions to ponder about. Do you recognize this discomfort in your life? Are you passing non-judgment to the feedback you get? How can you improve your current skills?

Footnotes

[1] His Ted Talk is spectacular. His book is a reinforcement of his ideas with more examples and clarity on the general concepts that flow includes. I wouldn’t recommend it cover to cover, more of a book to skim and find sections to hone in on.

[2] White lie. I have written entries the day after I was supposed to. Also, when I’m traveling overseas, I’ll be too confused by the timezone and may crap out on what day it is exactly.

[3] I adapted this concept from Tim Gallewey’s book, The Inner Game of Tennis

For the past few years, I have often neglected people close to me in the pursuit of my own endeavors. For example, my family rarely gets to see or hear from me, maybe once a month. It takes the occasional gatherings, such as this past Thanksgiving holiday, to really spend some quality time with them. I know I should make an effort to be around them often, or at least call, but I’ll make up some excuse or forget to do it entirely. I’m not a thoughtless person; I think of it in hindsight, but I am at fault. You don’t even want to hear about how I’ve neglected friends.

This last year, out of practicality, necessity, and taking a really hard look at myself, I made a few changes that has had a tremendous impact. One of these changes was to spend meaningful time with friends, even if its just for an hour. A few years back, there was this segment from The Daily Show about true friendship versus Myspace friends. The professor interviewed made a good point there was not enough time to keep up with 9000 online friends. Knowing there’s a finite amount of time, instead of spending a mindless weekend playing video games or watching the same Youtube clip over again, I chose to cut that out and try to schedule time to spend with those who have touched me in some significant way.

Note: the video may take a minute to load

It wasn’t easy to start. There was an internal struggle undermining my efforts, a resistance if you may. This resistance questioned all of my actions. “Do you think they will even answer you? You’ve neglected them for so long.” That resistance subsided the more people I reached out to when I got replies back. Some other factors were scheduling issues and lack of contact information. But as I slowly trudged along, calling up friends that I cared about, I started to realize this was a possible endeavor, even if the circumstances to meet up are difficult.

I owe a lot of thanks to my friends and family who put up with my silence. When I started talking to my friends about reaching out to people close to them, I was surprised at how many of them said the same thing. “I suck at reaching out to people.” Usually, I would get some follow-up. “How do you do it?” Honestly, I have been struggling with how to answer that question. Not practicing the skill of reaching out for so long, I had to re-learn some things that we all think are common sense. Here’s some tips though.

Work on their schedule. When you make it easier on them, they don’t have to put as much effort. If you want, go the extra step and make it close to them as well. The more you cater to their needs, the more they just can’t say no. Of course, I say this with a bit of precaution. Don’t over-do yourself with a relationship that takes but never gives back.

It’s not all about you. I think the number one thing turn-off is someone’s lack of empathy. The act of listening is as important if not more than the act of talking. When we feel listened to, we feel more appreciated.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

Short messages do not constitute a genuine connection. Sherry Turkle, teacher at MIT, remarked at her Ted Talk that all those little tweet-sized messages do not amount to one real conversation. Texting back and forth may be okay for some quick Q&A, but it does not substitute for real conversations and connections. Online dating is nothing but messaging back and forth until that first date. It’s only then when you start to see if there’s real connection.

Don’t forget to thank them. If you really value their time and if you really enjoy hanging out with them, don’t forget to thank them.

Don’t put off following up. After the initial meet-up, be the better person and follow-up. I don’t think I ever had this right growing up. My family never made thank-you letters for gifts they would receive. I would receive thank you letters and I felt like an asshole because it was one-sided, like I was not gratuitous in this exchange. I was the taker in this relationship. Of course, I did say thank you when I received presents, but the letters meant something else. This person took the extra step to really say thank you and somehow, that means more than simply saying thank you. I took that feeling and I started my annual Christmas Card tradition two years ago, and I haven’t looked back.

Last week, I attended TedxSanJoseStateUniversity and was really moved by Chi-Wen Chang’s talk. He was inspirational because for all of his short-comings, he was able to still add value to other’s lives, as a father, teacher, and phenomenal speaker (he sang at the end of his talk and it was very endearing). He said for over a decade, he would call up and sing happy birthday to people he kept in touch with. My god, the effort. Taking that advice in and seeing what I’m doing, I know I can do more, and I strive to try to also add value to the people I care about. Saying thanks is one of the first steps, and keeping in touch are the next steps.

Chi-Wen Chang, shown above at the Tedx event at San Jose State University.