for tomorrow

I was recently at MIT Campus Preview Week and Stanford’s Admit Weekend, and the one thing you notice by being in these talent-dense communities is that the unquantifiable quality of having ‘aura’ is the most important character trait there is. Aura is easy to measure. It’s not difficult to see who people respect, but the reason why is more challenging. 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 people are the ones that when you’re around them, you genuinely know that they’re smart. They have good ideas in conversations, and have accomplished respectable things. Overall, they earn respect by being somewhat arrogant but having the intellect to back it up. Most people are able to respect people with intellectual aura pretty easily.  Now the latter: rhetorical aura. The effectiveness of this type of aura is more variable, and a lot of the time it's synonymous with being ...

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 ...

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...

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...