for tomorrow

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At the End of the Day, its the End of the Day

Outside of playing video games, most of what I did in middle school was write code and do competition math. And I was happy in this reality. But as I entered high school, I looked at the skills I had, and regretted not having many outside the technical world. I couldn’t play an instrument, and could barely name a few fun facts about myself during the first day of school introductions. So I asked myself why. Well, I thought it was because I was never forced to do anything for most of my life , so I just stuck to those technical-esq things. And I did feel slightly bad about it, but it simultaneously felt out of my control. I took that feeling of inadequacy, a gap between the person I was and wanted to be, and attributed it to something that wasn’t me. This is the epitome of cope. Cope, fundamentally, is the way that we keep living with ourselves, and it's not necessarily bad. But, sometimes, cope becomes a fancy way of feeling sorry for yourself. I don’t mean to demeaning or pessimis...

Momentum is Not Usually Conserved

During a long bus ride, I asked one of my most cracked coding friends how he practiced for upwards of 6 hours a day without getting demotivated or feeling unproductive. His response was quite simple, “whenever you feel terrible, just take a shower.” To that I replied, “you can’t shower 5 times a day.” The small group listening in all laughed, and while I smiled at the joke, it masked the reality that I actually meant what I said. See, whenever I practiced competitive programming, or did anything for that matter, I would expect a decent level of progress. So if I spent an hour on a problem just to find the solution to be simple, or “wasted” time debugging a single line, it would kill any motivation I had. And unfortunately, the inverse doesn't hold. The feeling of gratitude from every hard problem I solved quickly, or a cool concept I learned, was disproportionately short-lived. In general, I think it's a lot harder to lose than to gain momentum. And while this seemed unfair to...

Earn Respect, But Don't Force It

At some level, almost everyone values being respected, but what does that actually mean? Respect is a complicated idea, and I don’t think the dictionary definition of “deep admiration” does it much justice. Respecting someone is positively acknowledging something that they have done, and continue to do. You can respect your boss for being dedicated to his work, just as you can respect your friends for being there for you. But the core idea here is that this respect is earned, not taken for granted. And this is the most clear when talking about self-respect. In my experience, the person whose respect it is the hardest to earn is your own. This is not to say most people don’t respect themselves— we inherently have to, otherwise life would be pretty miserable. But the problem is that in earning that respect, it's really easy to lie to ourselves. Now, this complacency is obviously good at times, like I said, we have to live with ourselves. But it can go too far when we start needing ...

Don’t Follow Your Dreams...?

One of the most cliché pieces of advice is to focus on what you’re passionate about. I’ve taken this advice to heart for most of my life. Honestly, I was never forced to do anything I didn’t actually enjoy. I quit piano lessons because I didn’t like them. I enjoyed solving Rubik’s Cubes, so I grinded towards that. Programming was fun, so I wrote code. And this seems like such an ideal childhood, but it's a double-edged sword. There were inevitably times where I had to do things I didn’t enjoy, like study for a history test or memorize Spanish vocabulary. And in general, you’ll eventually have to do things that feel more like means to an end instead of intrinsically fulfilling. I associate things that you are forced to do, but don’t enjoy, with having an end goal. Let’s say you want to become a doctor—you have to take so many different science courses, and it’s extremely unlikely that you like all of them. But these are almost necessary evils, things you have to push through in ord...

Chase Dubs Not Dreams

This blog aims to tackle the difficult question of why we are motivated to do things, and how we can maximize this motivation. Whenever we start something new, we are either inspired to, or forced to. Both are completely valid reasons for doing something, and life will definitely hit us with both constantly. But after the impetus, maintaining the desire to continue doing something is much harder. Here we come to the idea of dubs, which is short for W (double-u), which is then short for Win, or the term I prefer more: Victory. Victories are times when we accomplish something hard, like doing a new skateboarding trick or solving a hard math problem. But the most important part about a Victory is that it should be repeatable ( otherwise it becomes a dream ). A repeatable victory is something you can incrementally improve on, like a progression of skateboarding tricks or finishing a math problemset. Having small victories you can that you can repeat keeps motivation running for a lot ...

On AI Taking Jobs (and the World)

AI is good at a lot of things, and most of them are well-defined problems. These models are great at acing math olympiads and some of them have a higher codeforces ratings than me. But their performance stops at those well-defined tasks. One of the reasons for this is that it's hard to evaluate what isn’t well-defined. But by the same reasoning, it's also hard to optimize for it. I agree that AI is great at solving problems, but it isn’t great at figuring out what problems to solve and reiterating on the problem itself. Humans are really good at both of these things. We think of hacky ways around challenges and act on problems we see in our communities. “Thinking outside the box,” so to speak. Humans are good at this because we have been conditioned on a lifetime of experience doing cool stuff in weird ways. All while the best AI is trained to solve hard, but well-defined, IOI problems. I’ve talked to a few people deeply about my perspective, and a common response I get is abou...

Prioritize Risks

Everyone is prioritizing at every moment, it's impossible not to. On paper, we prioritize by taking into account a variety of factors to aggregate the “expected value” of doing something, and then naturally just choose what gives us the “most bang for our buck.” But in reality, prioritization is really, really hard. Most of my life, I avoided the difficulties of prioritization by doing things which have clear reward pathways, like olympiads or research in high school. This is not to say that I didn’t take risks, doing olympiads is a massive risk, most people don’t make it far. But, the decisions I took were calculated, and the time I spent doing different things was carefully measured. This only worked because there was a clear reward. Fast forward to this blog post . I’d achieved almost everything I’ve wanted to do with olympiads, and was trying to find the passion and motivation to move forward. This was just a problem of prioritization. Outside the contained world of high schoo...