This is a statement to myself, but I hope it can be inspiring to you as well. However, beware the law of equal and opposite advice. This mostly applies to students and others with relative freedom to do what they want. Definitely ignore this advice if you currently struggle with time management issues.
Stuck in a rut
For the last two months, I’ve been feeling stuck. There’s been a constant tension between breadth vs. depth/generalist vs. specialist and learning vs. doing/consuming vs. making.
There was just too much cool stuff that I could’ve been doing or learning or thinking about, and I decided to try to do everything. I had this weird idea that not doing everything would be unambitious and even unagentic.
So, I chopped myself into 30-minute blocks and tried to do everything every day.
But this made it worse.
I began to feel like a husk moving through the stream. Continuously switching through tasks meant that I was often forcing myself to do things because I “should”, which sucked the joy out of some of my favorite things. It was hard to truly go deep because no matter what I did, I always had this nagging feeling that I could’ve been doing something else instead.
I no longer felt that glow of accomplishment that solving a competitive programming problem used to bring, writing felt more difficult than it used to be, and it became weirdly hard to find happiness in the guitar.
Getting out
It took my primed brain 5 chance triggers to get me out of that rut and, so far, I’ve felt more fulfilled than I have in months.
I’ve been listening along to the Replacing Guilt Audiobook for the past few weeks and heard Not Because You “Should” on Saturday morning, which was something I continued to ponder for the rest of the weekend (and something I would highly recommend reading if you want to make sense of the rest of this).
My sister then forced me to watch TV Sunday night for the first time in months, and the two movies we watched happened to be The Greatest Showman and Camp Rock.
They both ended up being deeply transformative despite neither being particularly “good” to watch.
The Greatest Showman’s contribution came in the form of Come Alive. The entire first minute of that song is a near-perfect description of how I had been feeling. In turn, a major subplot of Camp Rock is a famous guitarist throwing off his shoulds and finding his music again.
This combination of triggers inspired me to finally take a hard look at my situation.1 My journal that night was full of musings that diagnosed my problem but still couldn’t arrive at a concrete solution (how do I deal with all of this exciting stuff without spreading myself thin).
I fell asleep thinking about all of this and woke up to a recommendation to check out this Jacob Collier song and this reaction to it.
I love the song on its own merits, but it was beautiful watching Jacob and the choir clearly having a deeply magical experience.2 This was the magic that I had been splitting myself up to find, but that I’d lost in the process.
Now, I had yet more food for thought throughout the school day, and I was almost to my breakthrough.
While I was absent-mindedly going through my Anki during lunch, I finally got around to reading Paul Graham’s essay on great work that I’d saved in Anki for weeks. There was tons of good stuff in there overall, but the final puzzle piece clicked for me when I came across this quote:
“What should your projects be? Whatever seems to you excitingly ambitious.” [emphasis mine]
It’s so obvious in hindsight. But now it’s my philosophy.
Every morning, I want to wake up and do whatever is most excitingly ambitious.
Come alive
Talking to a couple of friends has helped me realize that my situation is actually surprisingly common among “intellectually curious” teens.
Here are my words for you if you’re in that boat.
Throw off your shoulds. Stop spreading yourself thin by self-assigning a million things and feeling guilty when you can’t do all of them. We are not yet gods. Understand that you can’t do everything and make peace with it.
Then, go ahead and wake up every day to do what’s excitingly ambitious. Excitingly ambitious will change constantly, and that’s fine. It’s a feature, not a bug.3
Finally, and most importantly, come alive.
Seek out the magic in your life. If you’re like most people,4 it’s probably missing.5 If you can find a way to experience one moment like Jacob and the choir experienced in that song every year, you’re doing something right.
Hopefully, this will be my last productivity/self-help post. Recently, I’ve been trying to move towards writing essays (link 2), where I choose an interesting question and try to explore answers through writing. I have a bunch of rough drafts sitting around, and hopefully, I’ll be able to batch through them during spring break.
It’s weird to me that it took 3 chance triggers to finally force me to question how to get out of a two-month-long rut. I journal almost every day, and ideally, something like this should’ve been confronted as early as possible. This probably says something about the human desire to avoid confrontation and acknowledge mistakes, but I’m interested in the idea of further scientific exploration in the field of journaling. I feel like most advice is to “journal the way that feels right to you”, but I think this might just be because there’s so many different goals for journaling (reflection, gratitude, ideation, creativity, etc). Maybe some concrete results for different broad types of journaling would be useful. (Or maybe they exist and I just haven’t looked hard enough.)
This experience has helped me take emotion a lot more seriously in my current quest to develop tools that can augment cognition.
Following the same philosophy for three days in a row has led to three completely different-looking days. Excitingly ambitious on Monday was writing my first song on the guitar in a while and trying to solve a gold USACO problem. On Tuesday, it was diving unreasonably deep into how search engines work. Today, it was continuing that deep dive, deciding to create a search engine from scratch as my next programming project, and then staying up late to bang out this blog post.
If you’re wondering, that note is intentionally blank (for now). I’ll fill it up as I find the magic in the world around me.
yes. this is it. much needed 🙌