making the work you're meant to

ideas I'm chasing down

Illustration: Karlotta Freier

A few things in February: the dewiness of lunar new year, insomnia, poetry readings. The first week of March has given me the rare luxury of time to read and think. Here are some ideas I’m ruminating on that could (probably) be their own full length essays at some point. What are some good ideas you’re chasing down?

orienting toward fun

A nice realization I had the other day: I’ve been writing consistently for close to 3 years now and it’s felt relatively easy because I’ve just been having fun.

When I analyze why I lacked consistency in the past, it came down to forcing my writing to be high stakes all the time. Since I’ve relaxed into it more and started creating out of joyfulness and play, the writing comes more smoothly, and consequently gives me the confidence that I can pursue this craft for a very very long tine. I’m not afraid of my own voice anymore. I have more faith that proficiency follows from practice. All I have to do is keep practicing in a highly involved and attentive way.

J quotes that iconic line from Novak Djokovic: “I can carry on playing at this level because I like hitting the tennis ball.” He’s right. The best craft is the one you keep doing because you’re having fun. That doesn’t mean it isn’t grueling or difficult or you don’t have any bad days that make you want to throw in the towel, but fundamentally: you like the process. You enjoy the problem you’re solving. You have fun when you hit the ball. When you love something, repetition is a thing of beauty.

There’s a Lithub interview with Anne Carson and Robert Currie where Currie says: You know, people often ask what makes an artist, and I think it’s just the willingness to do the work without thinking in terms of the result. Anne gets up at eight in the morning and she writes, and then she goes swimming and then she writes, and then she comes back and writes and then she has dinner, she takes a walk, and she thinks and she writes. And Julian Schnabel makes a movie and when he’s done with the movie he goes to his studio and he paints.

That’s how I see it: I’m just writing, living, writing. Ideally, both can be a great deal of fun.

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taking advantage when a window opens

Sarah Tavel wrote this piece titled, taking advantage when a window opens for you centered on her insights joining Pinterest in 2012. She writes about the ‘sense of inevitability’ that happens when a startup hits its stride and becomes the tech darling of that particular place and time.

Trust me when I say this: the window will close, so do everything you can to maximize your moment.

…

The thing about jumping through your window when it opens is that it causes it to stay opened longer. Hiring great people raises the bar internally on execution. Growth sustains if not accelerates. Things start to compound more and more. A window that might be open for a few months can stay opened for several.

But eventually the window will close. This is not to say your business isn't still thriving, but the universe has just retracted its cosmic help, moving on to new younger startups whose stars are about align. You'll look back and miss that time when gravity loosened its grip. But hopefully you won't regret not acting on it.

Two important ideas here:

1. You can keep your windows of opportunity open longer by virtue of acting upon them decisively

2. You have to jump through the window that opens itself to you because it won’t last forever, given it’s the right window

There are a lot of analogies to draw between startups and relationships. Gravity loosens its grip, or the veil between you and an opportunity is thinned for a short moment. This applies to people too. Sometimes you meet someone at an opportune time for a deep friendship to form, sometimes they are receptive at just the right moment, much like a startup with market winds behind its sails.

Timing is consequential. J and I talk about often how our time living together in college was very formative. We met each other at a very special, volatile, time in our lives. That particular experience can’t be replicated. College or childhood friends have a certain resonance that can’t be simulated outside of that environment, though of course you make deep friendships in adulthood. Meeting someone in the first few months of being in a new city is also different than meeting them when you’ve made roots, you know all the good bars and gardens and restaurants. Catalyst environments vary, but momentum is very real in relationships, and the sense of inevitability is too. These days, I pay more attention when that feeling emerges.

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a cosmology of self

From Rebecca Solnit’s memoir:

I encountered my fellow San Franciscan Diane de Prima's work only later, which declared: you cannot write a single line without a cosmology.

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind. So underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to

I liked the central idea that echoes throughout the memoir: you cannot write a single line without a cosmology. A person's life is constantly one of becoming, as Solnit writes. We're born with some innate tendencies and then molded and charred and nurtured by events and encounters. This makes up our cosmology — our operating consciousness that informs our actions, determines our beliefs, and sets the horizons of possibilities for the personal journey of self. In turn, this informs what we can create and put out into the world.

Bushra shared a similar sentiment from Paul Graham a while back:

Even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source of. It works, but you don't know why.

A long row of experiences, like poles of light, line up before me up to a vanishing point of darkness. In revisiting the past, I’m able to see that each spell state had early roots, every moment of struggle was essential friction. Like an inward spiral, each brought me closer to my center. Even if I forget it now, it’s already become a part of me. Disentanglement is impossible. All of it developed the self who can make the work I’m meant to.

Last year when I needed space to think, I used to walk down to Aquatic Cove and sit carefully by the steps near Ghirardelli square. Then the route past Boudin Bakery, the In-and-Out sign a garish yellow amidst a deep, solemn, glossy night.

I thought of my bargains, the payouts I expected. The mysterious truth about bargains is you rarely realize the vital ones as you’re making them in real-time. The same goes with formative moments. You rarely recognize what will be important to you beforehand. Then it happens. Later, you’ll spend your life telling the story of how the map changed in that exact moment; when the roads shivered and split.

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PPS: I know I mentioned new sections coming soon — they are in progress I promise ;)