for tomorrow

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Aura is All You Need

After visiting both MIT and Stanford this last month, one thing I noticed from these talent-dense communities is that the unquantifiable quality of having ‘aura’ is one of the most important character traits there is. In these environments, raw intelligence alone is not enough. The ability to communicate competence coexists with the competence itself, and neither flourishes without the other. Aura is easy to recognize but hard to explain. It’s not difficult to see who people respect, but the reason for this respect is more challenging to pinpoint. I think there are two types of aura: intellectual aura and rhetorical aura. The former is literally how smart you are, based on objective measures. These are people that you genuinely know are smart when you are around them. They have good ideas in conversations, and have accomplished respectable things. Most people are able to respect people with intellectual aura pretty easily, mainly because the ways we prove intelligence are difficul...

Pain and Discomfort

Pain biologically serves as a deterrent from things against our best interests. It's usually a signal that something is wrong, like a headache or a sore throat when we’re sick. But then there’s saying “no pain, no gain.” Working out is inherently painful . The entire process of building muscle is by tearing them down for them to build back stronger. That pain doesn’t seem to be a signal that something is wrong. And this is a metaphor for almost everything—but its simultaneously a paradox. Pain is usually a signal to stop, but it's also sometimes a signal to keep going. Perhaps this is where the distinction between discomfort and pain is important. Doing something difficult, even if you like it, is usually uncomfortable—hence a feeling of discomfort. But pain is different, even for nonphysical things. Studying for olympiads has always made me feel discomfort, but it was only painful when I was burnt out. The way I’ve described discomfort seems like I just cherry-picked all the ...

There's Usually Enough Time

It’s crazy to say, but I feel like I’m running out of time in the second semester of my senior year. Between school and work almost every day, I’m left with far less time to pursue side quests or hang out with my friends than I had planned for. Don’t get me wrong—working is super fun—but the scarcity of time has never felt more real to me. And this is surprising to me. I used to feel like saying you have “no time” was just an excuse that means you didn’t care enough about something, which it probably is. If I really cared, I would’ve spent an extra hour on that project instead of listening to music. And most of the time, I trust myself to make this value judgement correctly. But when I’m tired, the bar for motivation rises exponentially, and something I could’ve done a few hours ago is almost impossible to do now. I almost always have enough time, just not enough motivation. The most obvious solution to this is removing “agentic” choices from these things, partially outsourcing this m...

At the End of the Day, it's 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...