journal/

on-going mostly unedited stream of thoughts
May 12, 2014

Great expectations

The story goes — I went to New York, and came back a different person. Something shifted in the core of my soul. A question kept popping up in my head, “who would I be if I lived and loved fearlessly?”

I came back with a sense of urgency, driven by a sense of mortality. I am beginning to truly comprehend that my time here is limited, and every current moment compounds to the future I have ahead of me. Every act I do, every decision I make, will matter in the course of my destiny.

Here’s the reality. Even if I lived to my life-expectancy of somewhere around the range of 70s — I am right smack in the middle of my entire life.

There is not much time left. I only have half of my life to go.

Another 30 years or so with the capacity to create, is being optimistic and generous. What if one day I wake up unable to use my hands anymore?

I want to do things that matter to me. Things that I deeply care about. And that may mean that I have to stop caring about other things. I think it is a tradeoff I am willing to make, that one day on my deathbed I know I have spent the second half of my life the way I deliberately want to. Even if it ends up in a series of failures defined by the rest of humankind, it would still be a life I lived. A life that is not being defined by society’s or anyone’s expectations of me. A life defined by the greatest expectations I would ever have in my life — mine.

Originally published on Medium

May 5, 2014

The greatest love of my life

“Watch me choose you,” the fictional leader of the free world said to Olivia Pope, on the popular television show Scandal. It made me swoon for a split second — if only there’s someone who loves me this way, I thought. Having someone choose an entire country over you is incredibly moving.

Except when it is not.

How is it love in its finest essence, when someone thinks the best way of expressing his utmost love, is to give up his own responsibilities towards the greatest purpose of his life?

Why would he distribute the weight of crushing his own dreams, to the very person he loves? How is he a man deserving of Pope’s love, when he cannot discern the true weight of his choices?

I am a recovering die-hard romantic. I had spent a whole lot of my life seeking my one true love to complete me, before learning the hard way that I am really the only person who has the capacity to fill up that gaping hole in my soul. Several hearts were broken along the way. It was a very expensive lesson.

I fell out of love with that sort of love — the love that is so all-consuming that nothing else mattered except being with that person, the sort of love that makes people grieve over Romeo and Juliet while getting angsty over the finale of How I Met Your Mother.

I fell out of love with love, because now I have greater ideals for love. Love is unconditional, it doesn’t seek to possess, place labels or desire for sacrifices. Love is about having the capacity to understand that empowering the people you love is the best way you can ever love a person. To empower this person to achieve his or her own greatness, even if it means we may not belong to that same picture. Unconditionally loving is not the same as being a crutch or incessantly coddling a person.

The greatest romance for me, is when all parties involved want nothing but the most joyful and purposeful existence for each other. Sometimes that means supporting each other’s goals while being in a relationship. I have witnessed amazing couples who serve as amplifiers for one another and the relationship becomes an exponential force on its own. Other times it may mean setting somebody free with all the love and hopes you have for the person, to graciously step back and assume the role of the silent supporter.

I have found my one true love. My love for the world. It sounds really frivolous. Love the world, what does it even mean?

It means wanting nothing but a joyful and purposeful existence for the world. I want the world to achieve her own greatness empowered by her people.Can I be part of that?

I want to be free to romance the world. That anytime I can freely and consciously choose to experience different parts of her, different expressions of her, to serve her in any way I can. Her needs, hopes and aspirations will always be greater on my mind than anybody else’s.

I woke up one day in bitter-sweet realization — I can no longer belong to or be with a person. No matter how much I loved her and could have given to her, it would never ever be close to what I want to give for this world. She would always be second place, not even tying for first place.

I still fall in love with people, and with animals. It would be easy for me to get a dog for example, and the only justification I need is that I love dogs with my life. Someone asked me if I would consume my dog (hypothetically if I had one) for survival if I was stranded in a deserted island with it. I didn’t even think about it. I would let my dog eat me.

But here comes the paradox coupled with irony. If I truly love dogs as much as I think I do, they deserve all the love in the world with better people-companions. Not me. Love sometimes means recognizing we’re not the best people to give. I know my attention will drift away from it, and the most painful thing to realize is — if my dog truly loves me, it will want me to be free to love the world, the world I have chosen to give myself to.

In between moments I miss the people and animals I loved and still love, for a split second I wondered if it could have been different.

No matter how many times I think about it or how much time I spend going through all the possible scenarios, it still comes with the same conclusion:

I had fallen in love with the world, and I would not trade her off for anything else. Perhaps, just perhaps, there will be people out there who loves the world as much as I do, and we can all beautifully be each other’s second places, while pursuing the greatest love of our lives, together.

April 27, 2014

Self

I have an unbroken habit to write once a week, either here or at Medium. It is usually my favorite time of the weekend, where I would sit quietly, stare at the screen and wait for words to appear. Today I am nursing a slight migraine, but I don’t want to break my habit, so I am going to be even more spontaneous with my writing than usual.

Someone over at Twitter asked me how to write in a way that would express ourselves better in order to connect to our audience. I told him honestly that I write with my heart, if that is not the best way to express myself, I have no idea which way would be better.

I honestly don’t care if people think I write well or if I write posts which are too long. In some perverse way I am not even writing for an audience. I think when we start writing for an audience we lost a part of ourselves. It really depends on the why – why we write in the first place.

Life is extremely transient. It is a waste of our living moments trying to be an agreeable person. I take that back. It is a huge waste of our lives living as who we are not. It came to me in the middle of my New York trip. I stopped in the middle of my thoughts and wondered. Why am I waiting to be the person I want to be?

We are afraid because we have something to lose, but if we’re afraid of losing we will never be able to take the risks needed to truly live and love. If I cannot be my true self, people around me will always be shortchanged because I can never be capable of giving them the best of me. We are always waiting for people to validate us, only to realize that no amount of validation would suffice if we cannot validate ourselves.

I want to write as me, live as me, love as me, work as me. And my identity will keep on shifting because I will keep on growing. Every now and then I go through phases where I tear myself apart and put myself back together again. I feel like I just went through multiple phases of this and I am only expecting more to come.

At the end of my life, I want to look back at everything I have attempted to do and know that at the very least my very self wasn’t one of the obstacles put in front of me.

April 21, 2014

Space

That May of 2012, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in North Vancouver. It was the first time I had truly lived alone.

I moved out at 19, but I always had a romantic partner or housemates. I did travel alone before, but on my travels I am always out exploring and observing, which is quite different from just being in your own space.

It was a spectacular revelation.

Most of us spend an insane amount of time with other people. We grow up with our families, then there are more people we meet at school and work. We fall in love, or find friends to hang out with. We are hardly ever alone. When we are conditioned to be so used to having people in our environment, we have no idea what it means to have space.

I never really wanted to have that space anyway. For so much of my life I was trying to find that someone who would complete me, not understanding I was the only soul in the universe who was capable of doing that. I never felt the desire to be alone, because I equated solitude with loneliness. Being with myself exacerbated the gaping hole in my soul — people distracted me from feeling that disconnect, or so I thought.

But that May in 2012, I was ready to start a relationship with myself, I just wasn’t aware of it yet. It was gradual, the discovery of that space. The first morning I woke up all by myself, I felt something was different, but I couldn’t put a finger to why.

I slowly trudged to the kitchen to make myself coffee, I could have crawled if I wanted to. Nobody was there. Wow. Nobody was there. I no longer had to hide in my bedroom listening out to whether my housemates were awake because the last thing I wanted to do is to demonstrate my capacity to be polite in the morning when I have trouble adjusting to my mind and body upon waking up. I didn’t have to be awakened by someone pacing in the room. Nor do I have to deal with the possibility of waking up to someone upset about something. Or feel guilty that I negatively impacted someone’s morning by waking up angry with the world for no apparent reason.

I finally had that space to be me. To be as ugly as I wanted, as beautiful as I felt. To have that non-judgmental space for my emotions and moods to belong to. For my mind to kickstart into awareness before being hustled into a discussion about why I didn’t put my cup back to where it belonged.

I stopped having bad moods. I don’t even remember the last time I had one. It was so simple, only on hindsight. My adrenals have space to recover by not being triggered spontaneously by my external environment all the time. My cognitive load is drastically reduced because when I am alone, I no longer have to think and react to people’s behavior, their body language or anything, really. My stress hormones do not get fired up because there’s something different in the ambience. I no longer feel nervous all the time because there’s so much nervous energy in this world.

By shutting myself up religiously, I have created the space where I can be fully open to people and environment when I desire to. I am able to be present with the people I care about because I am no longer that perpetually stressed-out grumpy person.

I have been living alone since that May. It took me roughly two years, but I gradually healed from all those years of being under the stress I wasn’t even aware it existed. And how could I have known, when I never had the chance to be without it?

“Such an inability to suppress seemingly unnecessary cognitive activity may actually help creative subjects in associating two ideas represented in different networks.” — The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness, Scientific American

Inability to suppress. Unnecessary cognitive activity. Whether I identify as a creative person is up to debate, but here is what I realized. I am ultra-sensitive to my environment, and that is a beautiful blessing and a potentially life-destroying curse. I cannot be the person I am and do the work I do if I am not vulnerably open to what’s going on around me. I absorb everything like a sponge and it silently manifests in ways I cannot imagine.

That also means if I am not careful and I stop protecting myself whenever necessary, I bear a literal risk of burning out my neural network at any given time. I have been there before — you know what is worse than feeling sad? It is when you feel numb and no longer give a shit about anything.

For a person who thrives on her empathy, feeling numb is worse than death.

I spend most weekends alone now. Sometimes I break the rules, for the people and work I love. But I hurry back into my solitude as soon as I can and I am always watching out for signs that I am on the verge of burning myself out.

And slowly, it is no longer about giving myself the space to heal. It is giving myself the space to just be. To write, read, think, be a slob, eat, roll around on my floor, stare open-mouthed at the window, or bite my toes if I want to.

The space to not react to anything, not even to myself, is one of the most beautiful spaces I can ever be in.

April 14, 2014

New York

New York, the city that never sleeps. My adrenals went into overdrive just contemplating that statement because I endured years of countless nights when I literally never slept.

It took me three decades to find a city where I actually feel at home. It still confounds me that I can never call a place where I had grown up and had most of my life’s memories, home. Instead, it was experiencing the vast blue skies of San Francisco on the 22nd of July, 2011 that made me understand what it means to feel whole.I will always love San Francisco with all my life because she gave me my life. I didn’t know it back then, but on that day my old self died. It was from that seemingly ordinary moment onwards that I began to experience life with a childlike sense of wonder inexplicably gifted to me.

With so much love and history for a city, how could I possibly love another? It was with admittedly bias and skepticism that I stepped into New York. A city that never sleeps. Shudder. Within a day of my visit my friends asked me what I thought of her.

I didn’t know what to think and feel. I was confused. It was like going on a first date with someone whom I didn’t like or dislike enough to know whether I wanted to have a second date.

One week in. New York is still confusing and is probably designed to be. That is because she is everything, nothing and anything. I wrote,

New York is like discovering flowers bloom among the winter-drenched brown.

She is so empty yet so full. She means so differently to everybody that it is enough to fill up a dictionary. She is dense and hence she is rich. Yet she feels close to people because she is distant.

I had deliberately chosen to spend my 33rd birthday in New York, learning just to be, at Central Park. I remember thinking to myself, how much fortune I truly had to gather, in order to spend the day honoring my birth at one of the most beautiful parks in the world?

For the past week I walked aimlessly to be surprised. I ate like there is no tomorrow and in New York the distinction between today and tomorrow blurs into the background. I smiled at strangers and looked into their eyes. I told my old stories in order to give them new lives. I understood more of my meaning because her people listened to me. I replaced the windows of my soul, in order to be fully in her light.

I made new connections and revived old ones. I loved and I lost. I learned that everything is impermanent and yet eternal. I understood what it means to have nothing and yet everything. I discovered my feelings are not best expressed with the words I lean on as a crutch, but in the beautiful ambiguity of a moment.

I am selfish in order to be gracious. I am tremendously flawed yet imperfectly whole. I like to be invisible so I can be vain. I pursue solitude in order to exist with the world. I want to desperately hold on and yet bravely let go. I love vulnerably and honestly, but only at a chosen distance.

Full of concrete and filled with colors

This is what New York has taught me. She made me learn that in order to have my identity I must accept that I have no fixed identity. That I am everything, nothing and anything. I am defined because I am really undefined.

With San Francisco I understood what it means for me to belong somewhere. New York has shown me that perhaps ultimately I don’t need to belong anywhere, because I will still be me, everywhere.

I fly back home to San Francisco, tomorrow. I felt that weird disconnect for I could be breathlessly alive in New York, while in the depths of my soul I terribly miss that city who first gave life to me.

But it was here that it became clear to me, that love is infinite and has no boundaries. Each and every entity I love is unique on its own and should not be defined with human-incepted labels or compared with. That love is not black or white but a full spectrum of colors in between. In its truest essence love has no particular definition, time or space — that the love I carry will live on as a part of me and be felt, from everywhere, nowhere and anywhere.

April 7, 2014

My best years are ahead of me

Writing this has been a yearly ritual for a while now.

I re-read my entries for the past three years. I tend to cringe when I look back at the person who wrote those entries, but I found last year’s to be particularly reflective and accurate, even till today:

I have learned that life does not unravel in spectacular fashion once I have found myself. I had the naivety to believe that once I have found myself and my meaning, everything will fall into place. I was very wrong. It only opened my eyes to the gigantic mess I have to navigate through in order to have a stake in my dreams. Life gets harder, not easier.

This is still true, only at a much more pronounced level. The past year has been nothing short of spectacular for me. I am typing my words into the very platform which I am profoundly blessed to work on. How does one proclaim that she wants to be a storyteller and is given the exact opportunity to do so? What happens when a person is handed everything she needs to fulfil her life’s work on a silver plate?

Everyone presumes the answer to those questions would be — the said person would live happily ever after. I have the brutal honest answer instead:

It is extremely paralyzing.

I can no longer lament about my circumstances or that I had not been given the luck that I need. I can no longer say that the world has failed me. The world delivered her promise. Ask for what you want, I’ll hand it to you, and now you have to live up to your promise, I heard her say.

I get to live at where I want and work on something I fervently believe in. There’s nothing more I can ask for externally, so I drove my asking internally instead:

What have I done to deserve this? Do I deserve this? How can I grow stronger so I can be that person worthy of such gifts? How can I pay this forward? What can I do in my capacity to ensure that more people get to experience what it truly means to be alive?

These questions haunt me every single day, if not for every single split-second. From the day I was handed the things I asked for, I no longer belonged to myself. I gave myself to the world, because she has given everything she could to me. That was the only way I can truly feel alive, be alive, have the integrity to carry on and not harbor any guilt because I know I am privileged.

But life is a paradox. It is never linear nor logical. There is no 12-step guide where we faithfully do everything in sequence and things will fall into place. It is not as simple as — I am going to work as hard as a bull, give myself entirely and I will be doing what that is required of me.

The paradox lies in the distribution of power, which is one of the most important lessons I have learned in the past few years. Giving myself entirely to anything indicates an unequal distribution of power. This is where it gets counter-intuitive. To fulfil our own potential, to be at maximum capacity, requires seeing ourselves as equals to the entities we are serving. We want to give something that is of value. How can the other party receive something valuable when us as givers, see ourselves as less than them?

How can other people draw strength upon us, when we are only but empty shells having given everything away?

Who do we turn to when we need help? We turn to people who are pillars of strength, not people who are tired all the time because they spent too much energy giving away parts of themselves. We are not robots. There is no way we can be creative, strong sustaining individuals with a capacity for other people to lean on when we do not set aside time to recharge and nurture ourselves.

You may think that is obvious. But it wasn’t obvious to me at all. It was a hard lesson to learn, and I am still a long way from learning it. After years of self-demeaning, it is extremely difficult to see myself as worthy of anything, much less equal. My instincts drive me to burn-out territory all the time, because that was the only way I knew to seek self-validation. I was constantly disapproving of myself all the time before even others have a chance to disapprove of me.

To spend all that mental and emotional energy critically analyzing my self —which to be fair, is precisely because I demand nothing but the best from myself — is exhausting. It is not only exhausting to me, it is exhausting to any entity that interacts with me, because before they can get to me, they have to get past the obstacles I put in front of me. Instead of spending time obsessing over whether I deserve to be a contributor, perhaps I should just contribute. Obsessively thinking whether I deserve something or not (or to other people), is ironically a form of insecure vanity, as I have realized.

I am learning to just be. Just be me. To honor not only my weaknesses but my strengths. To understand what it means to have power without needing it to be given to me. To know that power is given, not taken. To not tie my identity to any external entity but to build upon it myself. That everything is temporary and is constantly evolving or destructing but I am still me at the end of it. That my life’s work will still be what I will choose to do regardless of the circumstances I am in.

On my own site, I wrote, “When I grow up, I want to be a storyteller”. I thought I wanted to become one, because I didn’t know how I could tell stories well. Yet it became obvious to me that I didn’t need to grow into one, because I was always one. Whether it was the young kid writing essays in school, or the designer who sought to tell her client’s stories through the design of their landing pages — I have always been a storyteller. The desire to share stories is what makes people storytellers, being good at it is secondary.

I just didn’t know it yet.

As I wrote the previous year,

At 30 I have found myself, at 31 I discovered the meaning of life, at 32 this year, I am learning that finding myself and the meaning of life is only a small step towards a long and winding road ahead.

Now at 33, I am learning to be truly me, to not only be comfortable in my own shoes, but to know where and how I should walk them, the weight I am allowing them to bear, and when I should take them off.

Being alive is not only about executing my life’s work, but to actually truly experience being with myself, without any act, thought, idea, emotion, words, requirements or achievements having to exist in any given moment.

Life can only get richer ahead of now, because only now I am walking this earth as myself, not as an identity constructed by the norms around me. It took me thirty-three years to get here, to understand life is beautiful because of lucid moments of both joy and heartbreaks, that the full spectrum of colors exist because of light and darkness; I am me because I have multiple fragmented personalities all bundled into one.

Happy thirty-three years of life, and an amazing three years of being alive, to me. Thank you for witnessing these years alongside me.

March 31, 2014

The sorry state of evolution we are in

We as a species, are bad at self-moderation. When rich, abundant resources are placed in front of us, whether it is a buffet table full of unhealthy food or a wild forest teeming with exotic wildlife — we simply take.

We take, and either we don’t care to think about the repercussions, or we know them anyway, but it does not change the way we act.

I am guilty of this myself. Be it in my personal life where I struggle to eat a conscious diet or simply by educating myself on what is happening with the world at large — I live in denial.

I have loved nature and animals my entire life, there are no words which can adequately describe why and how I fell in love with them. I simply do, but I have come to question myself in recent times, is my love for them an intellectual idea, or do I genuinely love them from the core of my soul, like how a parent would love a child?

I found out the answer very recently, when my tears fell uncontrollably, looking at a picture of a lioness. And here I am, with my tears falling uncontrollably again, as I struggle to find the right words in my mind to express a coherent thought while experiencing an unexplainable grief.

My heart breaks into a million pieces each time I come across something like that, but I carry on living in conscious denial without giving much thought to the things I consume or the efforts I choose to invest in.

If I cannot even consciously moderate myself on a personal level, what chances do I have to even try to convince the rest of the world that we have to revolutionize the way we live now, or face a future where our children will essentially live on as Wall-Es?

I don’t have an answer. I know all our effort, lobbying and campaigns will have limited impact unless we can change the way we think and more importantly, change the way our children think. There is no point applying band-aids when the brain is hemorrhaging. The rate of healing is so minimal compared to the rate of injury that it feels like a joke.

We as a species, have somehow evolved into this state where we have limited empathy for ourselves, much less for other people. If we cannot even possess reasonable empathy for our own kind, there is not much hope in trying to instill empathy for the rest of the species we actually share the world with.

Previously I would wait for myself to have enough bulk in my writing before I would publish a piece, but I want to change the way I approach writing. I want to see it as thought-forms in iteration, just like how we would commit a piece of code, open-source it and hope people can collaborate to make it better. My intention is not to prove that I am capable of reasoning and argument. It is to prove that I am not afraid to express my ideas and be bettered or be proven wrong. This is the way I think the human race should move forward — we should not be a species seeking dominance — why do we need to dominate if we are intelligent and secure? Collaborative betterment seems obvious to me, for both ourselves and other entities we share this world with.

Originally published on Medium

March 23, 2014

Bridging connections

I have a very small group of people in Singapore whom I have an exceptional soft spot for – people who were from the early web community, back in those days when the web isn’t such a distinct part of our lives.

There were some I haven’t had the opportunity to meet in person, mostly because my involvement in the community was mostly online, and I avoided meetups like plague because meeting people in general was not a very pleasant experience for me.

In those early days we were coming out of an era ruled by either flash-based or asp-based dynamic websites, there was once upon a time when developing in PHP was cool too. Contributing to the open-source community wasn’t a thing in Singapore.

Before twitter there were blogs for a long time. Some of these people I’ve gotten to know from an ambient-like asynchronous connection, by reading what they had to say and what they worked on. IRC, forums, comments and RSS were bridges for us.

I finally had the opportunity to meet two of these people yesterday. We have had followed each other on twitter for the longest time and prior to that I had probably stalked their websites for a while. I made a joke that it was easy for me to confuse the two of them, because they both contributed to Firefox, loved anime enough to mention it as part of their bios, and they both worked for Wego, a startup formed in Singapore at a time when nobody knew what startups were (Some people still don’t).

Through the asynchronous connection made possible by twitter, in those years which followed we were essentially silently supporting each other’s work. It is incredible to say this now, but there was really a time when being a designer or a developer was basically frowned upon.

They probably didn’t know this, but I have an immense sense of gratitude towards people who knew me then. The community that was there for me and for other people who needed to have one.

A sense of community.

Which ironically did not come to me from the traditional areas of life, but was given to me in a digital space.

It seemed like a full-circle to me that I was able to bring them around to my favorite spots in the Mission, showing them the parts of San Francisco that I deeply fell in love with.

We were all very different individuals, from vastly varying backgrounds and life stories, with divergent trajectories and hopes – but all of that didn’t matter when we were all bridged by the work we all love to do, made possible by the lack of a physical distance across ones and zeroes.

March 16, 2014

Rebuilding

I went through a strange phase last week. Strange, at least for me. For months and years I’ve been wanting to work on all the little sites I have or learn something new on the web. But I had hardly ever done so, unless for compelling (like @skinnylatte texting me non-stop) or professional reasons.

You see, I love making things on the web. That was why I built a career on it, because I thought it would be amazing to do what I love. And it most ways, it is. But I focused so much of energy in my professional work, that I thought that the last thing I would do when I have time on the side is to be building again. So I ended up doing other things instead. I chilled, watched tv, wrote, read, ate, hung out with people, everything else except touching anything remotely close to design or code.

Last saturday, I am not sure exactly why, but I thought it was a good idea to rebuild winnielim.org in Jekyll. It used to run on wordpress, and of course it is extremely overkill to run a simple one-page site on wordpress, but in those days I wanted to be able to edit the content on that page easily and also run multi-site. I had this grand dream that I will use wordpress multi-site to run tons of mini sites for all my crazy ideas and initiatives. Never happened.

Then something strange happened. I had to install brew and rbenv on my home laptop so that jekyll can run properly – that process started reminding me of the days when I would spend hours configuring my local dev environment in macports. It was painful back then, and I was sitting here in wonderment about how much things got easier. It is not that I stopped writing code, just that at work the dev environment comes packaged, for good reasons. Through the whole process of getting jekyll to run and then rewriting everything so my sites would start working again – I fell back in love with the process itself:

From rebuilding one site last weekend, I ended up rebuilding two in a day – this site is now running on jekyll too, migrated from wordpress. This weekend, the same thing happened again. I ported connections.sg from drupal to github pages. Apart from markdown being so much easier to maintain, I am now able to invite other people to contribute to the data in connections.sg through pull-requests. Within 24 hours, I’ve merged two of them. This rebuilding process started out merely out of curiosity and fun, but it redemonstrated the power of collaboration and community.

Sifting through links in order to freshen things up on connections.sg, I discovered Life by @cheeaun. I forked his project and starting putting in my major life events. For the past few years I have been self-quantifying as much as I can, and obviously I wouldn’t be able to resist seeing a timeline powered by jekyll.

That led to something else – in order to remember the dates (if I am making a timeline, it might as well be a really good and accurate one), I had to sift through my emails, tweets, files and photos. It made me realize my digital assets are all over the place. So I ended up trying to organize them as much as possible, as well as making sure I have them stored in a way that the likelyhood of me losing any of those data is kept extremely low. I didn’t do a good job archiving my life for the first 25 years of my life, and I really want to ensure I do not repeat the same mistake.

There is something transformative about keeping an accurate chronicle of our lives. What I’ve discovered through journalling or sifting through my own data is that – our minds are deceiving. They cannot be trusted to remember things. What seemingly happened in our heads is not the same as what truly happened. Through sifting through my data I got to remember things I had forgotten, parts of life I had dismissed as unremarkable but turned out to have had meaningful events. It still amazes me to this day how all the dots connected, and they didn’t seem meaningful at all when they were happening.

I realized organizing my data is like organizing a physical space. When we put things in proper places and review them periodically, it allows us to throw things out without anxiety. Remember those boxes you can never throw because you are paranoid that something important will be in there? By organizing my digital assets I have freed up the mental space, not only to store more things, but to be creative with what I can do with them. My cognitive load is reduced because I no longer have to entertain my own questions about where are my important memories or assets.

To go on a deeper meta level, by rebuilding my digital assets and spaces, I now feel like I can go on to rebuild other parts of my life. Not because they are broken, but now I simply want to always try to be better than the status quo.

I am slowly piecing myself together through these seemingly random fragments. They will all build on each other and make more holistic sense one day. For now, I will attempt to connect the dots as much as I can.

The best about making things is it makes us want to make even more things. The act of creation fuels more creation. It is one of the best inherent cycles we have as humanity. All of this brings me back to a time when I was just making things and all I cared about was making things. I would write these entries as though no one else would be reading. It didn’t matter if I was being too random. I don’t want to worry if writing geeky stuff about how I like building my sites would distract people from what I view as my more important work.

I am the person I am today, because I am entirely random and made up of seemingly disparate pieces connected by a thread of self-determined meaning. It should not change no matter what direction I am headed in. Evolve, it will, but I cannot disregard the very roots which brought me here today.

March 10, 2014

Build up habits that compound

It was by accident that I discovered that my three-decade worth of behavior history can be radically altered in a single day. I started making my bed two years ago (that’s another story to tell) and since then I have never stopped. Through that newly acquired habit I have learned:

  • Something really small can make a huge difference
  • Small habits permeates many other aspects of our lives
  • Daily rituals can be strangely meditative and grounding (This was new to me, I had always presented myself as the anti-routine person)
  • The act of making my bed no matter how tired, busy or stressed I am, reinforces the idea that I am willing to allow my well-being to come first (you have no idea how difficult is that for me)
  • Keeping the order in our environment can be key to having less mental distractions as nothing is tripping your line of sight

They say a leopard does not change its spots and I was one of those people who used that idiom as a vehement defense for my previous lack of trying. Having one mini successful habit changed the way I thought of myself.

If I could change how I had lived for three decades, what else is there I cannot change?

Inspired by Warren Buffett’s Snowball, I set out to think more carefully about the tiny changes I can make that will have the most compounding effect:

Three of my favorite little habits

Read on my eight-minute commute

I used to fiddle on my phone endlessly during my commute to work, but for more than half a year now I have been reading on my kindle instead. Eight minutes do not seem like a long time, but I have surprised myself how much I end up reading over a week. It really adds up when I include the wait time as well.

An unintended effect of this is that it sets the tone of my mind every morning before I walk through the doors of my workplace. It gives me more opportunity to think more critically and understand the weight of my privilege.

“Read 500 pages like this every day, That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.” — Warren Buffett

Write 750 words every morning

This is a habit that dropped off every now and then because it is really darn hard to write 750 words every morning, especially on the days with a packed schedule. I started writing them again at the turn of this year, this time fully committing myself to it by adjusting my body clock to wake up thirty minutes earlier. There is a lot out there why writing morning pages is so powerful and it differs for every individual. It allows me to understand my psyche better, acts like a mind dump so I can start the day with a clear mind, and I get to keep a record of things I think about.

Keeping a record of things I think about has had a massive transformative effect on me. When I go back in time to look at what I had written, I am both appalled and amazed by the distance I have travelled, as well as how much certain behavior patterns tend to repeat themselves a lot more than I would assume. In other words, I discover how neurotic I can be and it becomes so painfully obvious that I become motivated to do something about it.

Publish one post per week

By default I write a lot more than most, but they can be sporadic and extreme, when there was not a single post in months. It is not so much about keeping to an absolute metric for the sake of it. Just like how writing privately had a transformative effect on me, writing publicly adds a different dimension to my life. It is something I truly love doing, allowing me to connect to people I would never had a chance to come across in the same physical space. More importantly, it gives me a voice. A voice I still struggle to have verbally.

Writing one post a week gives me an established rhythm to write — to have that trust in myself that if I sit here once per week, there will be something meaningful to write about. It has been about six months since, and this is probably my most favorite time of the week.

It is also about my own curiosity. If I write once per week, how much would that compound in five, ten years? How many more opportunities would my writing create for connecting to my kind of people? How many more kids would I be able to reach out to?

These habits gather momentum by influencing each other. The more I read, the more critical I become in my thinking. The time I set aside to write my morning pages reflect that thought process. Some synthesis occurs and it presents in the writing I publish to the world. The more I publish publicly, the more connections I make and the more I desire to learn so I can contribute more.

In other words, they compound and become a snowball. The best part is, I have no idea what this will grow into or how exponential their effects will truly be on me. I am only starting to see how tiny decisions I have made a long while ago trigger or become huge turning points in my life.

Like that early morning decision to make my bed two years ago.