Generick Ideas

Whether or not I had realized it before now, I think that the creation of a space for my ideas has been in the making for a long time.

I spent the first two years of college basically satisfied with myself for having achieved my first long-term goal of getting into Stanford and focused almost exclusively on learning to navigate the new freedoms and responsibilities of college life without much thought of directionality.

Up through the end of our school years, the status quo had clearly defined each next milestone for us, so the world didn't demand that we take long-term questions seriously; I could only see a couple of years ahead of myself at a time, and that was enough.

Until then, I had been guided by the singular, sensible, and overarching goal of graduating college in order to launch the rest of my life. I paid little attention to the fact that I still had to contend with the “rest of my life” part of that sentence. While the existence of a "rest of my life" has always been a truism, I've come to learn that there's some distance between what we know and what we truly understand.

Knowing is the passive process of accepting what you've been told to be true about the world. Understanding requires us to spend time in the trenches of life-making mistakes and breaking hearts and ignoring what we eventually come to realize was actually sage advice all along. I believe that deploying (or failing to deploy) knowledge is the only way to turn it into wisdom.

Eventually, the time came to deploy the knowledge. After two years of mostly aimless exploration, I finally took a serious look at the road ahead and began asking critical questions about where I would want to be in the next 5–10 years and how I should adjust my trajectory to get there, which led to further questions about personal goals, values, interests, motivations, and identity.

When the pandemic forced the world into a corner, I doubled down on reading and learning as a means of self-exploration. I spent the entirety of the pandemic working towards the discovery of my personal interests, values, and strengths. I began prioritizing my growth, health, and longevity, human connection and empathy, quantitative reasoning and radical introspection, authenticity, and, above all, my curiosity.

I gained a reinvigorating sense of direction and purpose that's enabled and encouraged me to bring my whole, integrated self everywhere I go. I am able to more fully embrace my work, more wholly give myself over to my hobbies and interests, and more thoroughly question existing structures and assumptions as I continue to question how I might fit into them or as I reimagine them altogether. All the while, I have found myself repeatedly wishing I had documented the lessons I learned on this journey so that I could reflect on them (and share them) as I navigate each new season of my life.

My hope is that this blog serves as an exercise to gain the confidence and vulnerability to share my thoughts with others while developing my writing and communication skills by creating a paper trail for my life. By creating a repository for my thoughts and learnings, I believe I can better integrate my lessons into my mental models while making it possible for others to “listen in” on my thoughts as well. If anyone else learns something along the way, I can call this whole thing a win.

In the long run, I hope that this blog can intersect with my passion for education by helping me build communities around math, technology, productivity, personal growth, wellness, and whatever other topics I decide to dive into. Let me know which of these topics you're interested in and I'll do my best to prioritize those topics.

Bonus:

Since this is my first post, I wanted to include a list of random topics and ideas I hope to write about so that I can give people a taste of what's coming, even if I don't get to it by the time they read this. I expect that this post will be on the more introspective end of pieces I write to the world. Here are some other topics I hope to write about.

• College/Career: What it was like moving through college, getting internships, choosing careers, and pursuing side-projects and other work opportunities.

• Fitness/Wellness/Lifestyle: Before we can do well in school, in work, or even in my relationships, we have to take care of ourselves and our health. I take this seriously and would love to share my personal philosophies on these topics.

• Math and Philosophy of Life: I’ve included this as its own section because of the way that math has informed my worldview and how it informs the way I make decisions in my everyday life. I hope to write about the various methods and algorithms that have become useful frameworks for making better decisions about my personal life.

• Computer Science, Data Engineering, and Technology: As much as I like math for the hell of it, I am also flourishing into an avid technologist. I hope to write about existing concepts and tools as well as emerging trends that I'm excited about as I learn about them.

• Money/Financial Wellness: It took me a while to realize it, but I think I grew up with some seriously f*cked views about money and wealth creation that have been severely limiting. I think i’ve basically overcome a lot of them and now feel like I can take over the world, or at least have my little slice of it. Might write about what I had to learn to do that.

• Miscellaneous: My brain does a lot of things and thinks a lot of thoughts. I’ll try to write them down as they come. I also want to make this a high value-add to peoples' days so i'm open to writing about whatever topics people are interested in learning more about.