Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what type of life I want to lead. I’ve been blessed to have a bredth of varied experiences where I’ve been exposed to many priveledged spaces with a lot of talented people. With that access, I feel I’ve gained some perspective on what games are worth playing and which are false peaks (at least for myself). Through the past decade I’ve bought myself some time to take a step back and re-prioritize my life, so I’m hoping to use that perspective and time to be more thoughtful with where I invest myself to build the future I want and decide what type of person I want to become.

The Power or Youth & Naivete 🏃

For the first 25 years of my life, the theme of my life was learning and grinding. I said yes to the opportunities that came along and did my best to work hard and learn from the people around me to make the most of those experiences. There was some discression and discernment to which path I took, but for the most part I was much more focused on how to do a good job and on being a person that does a good job, than I was on choosing what job to do. I was lucky to learn at a young age that hard work and consistency deliver results, and because I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to do, I believed that as long as I fully invested myself into something I could learn to excel at anything.

This model worked great for me for a long time. This core belief (of hard work + consistency = success) led me to choose the hard route often. For college, I chose the hard route of leaving my home to go out of state to reinvent myself. I chose the hard route of majoring in Electrical Engineering, a path that I wasn’t naturally gifted at. I chose the hard route of working at Tesla and putting my head down to produce value and climb the software engineering career ladder. Outside of school and work, I also leveraged this core belief to choose to set hard goals and push for new heights every day. I chose to run my first marathon on graduation day. I chose to bike through cold/rainy weather across the 520 bridge every day to get to work. I chose to climb mountains (Mt. Rainier & Mt. Adams) and backpack across national parks. I chose to do all of this specifically because it was hard. A major part of my identity was built on this validation cycle. Working hard and achieving difficult goals helped me prove to myself that I was the type of person that didn’t shy away from a challenge and that my efforts made me worthy of external validation (love/success/etc). It gave me a sense of control and internal validation to know that if I showed up consistently I could get the outcomes I wanted out of life.

But this way of life came with some serious tradeoffs. Pinning my self worth and identity to the need to constantly work harder and deliver outcomes (for both myself and other people) led me into an unsustainable positive feedback loop. I needed to keep the treadmill moving to validate myself. I put myself in a lot of positions where I felt like I was always making the “smart” choice (and speeding the treadmill up for the sake of status, security, validation, etc…) instead of the choice that resonated more intrinsically with where my heart lied. I often had expectations for myself that were unrealistic and unfair, putting myself in mental knots where regardless of how I spent my time I felt like it was never enough. Either I would be letting myself down by not striving hard enough for the next thing (in which case I pushed myself to work harder) or I was letting other people down by opting out and not continuing to climb the (financially lucrative) ladder they graciously gave me access to. I wanted to please everyone, but did so at the expense of myself.

Forced Perspective 🧐

I think some degree of grit to conquer challenges that come is a necessary part of life. I’m very thankful for my past and for the fact that I am willing to work hard to achieve a goal. In aggregate, I think that trait has given me more than it has taken away. But there is always a limit, and sometimes the limit is made obvious by forces outside of your control. For me, this happened in 2021 when my dad got brain cancer.

When my dad got cancer, my life flipped upside down. I became very aware (with sobering clarity) of the burden that Tesla was on my life and my identity. While previously I had seen my job as mainly a net benefit, I now saw it as a net negative that came with a lot of personal consessions. It was a job that offered financial stability and meaning, but at the cost of flexibility and control over my focus and my time. It was also a job that fed directly into my accomplishment-based identity foundation, providing an endless stream of problems for me to solve to prove my worthiness to both myself and other people. That tradeoff was once worth it as a new grad with no real responsibilities. But now, that balance was no longer tenable.

In the short term after my dad’s diagnosis I managed the conflicting pressures on my life as best I could, but eventually this level of pressure and stress broke me. I delivered what I needed to deliver at work and was able to show up for my family when it counted, but I burned myself out and lost my motivation and faith in the path I was on in the process. I realized through this experience that I had become too focused on the how (how to deliver faster? / how to avoid conflict? / how to balance exceedingly lofty goals?) and not focused enough on the why (why do you want this goal in the first place? / why are you investing so much of yourself into a direction you don’t care about? / why are you letting other peoples priorities take you further away from things you love in a time of need?). This setup was unsustainable and for my own sake I needed a change.

I needed to reframe and reprioritize my life.

Finding Balance 🙏

Fast forward to today, I’ve made many changes to regain balance in my life. About a year ago I chose to quit Tesla and to take a step back from work to reorder my priorities. This gave me much more time to focus on understanding myself better and investing myself more in alignment with my intrinsic goals (even if those goals didn’t “logically” make sense extrinsically to other people thru the narrow lens of finances/status/expectation/etc). I started going to therapy to rewrite the narrative of my life and decouple my identity and self-worth from the accomplishment treadmill. I had to officially close out the book on my past chapter of life before I could shift my focus toward the future.

On top of working on my mental health, I also invested more of myself into improving my physical health. I spent more time running around town, playing soccer with friends, and swimming. My focus shifted away from “how do I fit this in amidst other stuff in my life?” to “what do I feel like doing today?” and “where does my motivation lie today?”. Moving from a mental framework of have to to want to helped me improve my relationship with myself and my overall wellbeing. By leaning into what I intrinsically felt like doing, I’ve been able to improve my fitness, ground my emotional state, and generally feel better about myself more often with less overhead and less conflicting priorities in my life. Investing in my health has helped me regain balance and has improved my ability to adapt to whatever I choose to do next.

Lastly, I put more focus and time into slowing down. In contrast to the world around that is constantly speeding up, I plan to slow myself down to enjoy the current moment more. My Dad’s cancer journey showed me firsthand that there are no guarantees in life and no promises of tomorrow. With that lens, I have more clarity (and self granted permission) to make decisions that more selfishly benefit me today and take me off the status treadmill. Delayed gratification is important to any accomplish any goal but always delaying without appreciating the current moment is a recipe for burnout and regret. I want to wake up with a zest for life, and slowing down gives me room to rediscover that feeling every day. Whether thru hiking on a random weekday, traveling to see a friend I haven’t caught up with in a while, or using the day to dive into a good book, giving myself time to experience life without the need to deliver or optimize a particular outcome has been extrodinary to my overall wellbeing. It’s a freedom that feels more valuable than anything else money can buy and one that I’m thankful I’ve leaned into over the past year.

My New Philosophy on Life 🌹

To close out and synthesize the narrative above into a more succinct thesis about my new philosophy on life, here are my main takeaways:

  1. Prioritize Yourself and Your Wellbeing First (Mental/Physical Health): Life is easy when you simplify and focus on the basics. Nothing is more basic than the ability to do the things you want to do and the inner narrative you have about yourself. Investing in improving both pays dividends no matter what you end up doing in the future. Your health is the floor upon which everything else in your life is built. Make it as solid as possible.

  2. Relationships Over Personal Achievements: Outside of the relationships we have with ourselves, our relationships with other people are the main thing that gives life meaning. Having status, money, or accomplishments without people to share it with is a hollow achievement. The richness of our relationships is the biggest predictor of our happiness in life so if you care about your happiness, you should care about your relationships too.

  3. Focus on the ‘Why?’ Over the ‘What?’: All decisions we make are made within context. I believe that for most decisions the context and the why behind the decision is more important than the decision itself. Clarifying what you care about most (be it financial security, optionality of opportunities, free time for more leisure, etc…) and checking in on that north star as it changes over time will provide you a more coherent lens with which to pursue your goals. It will also give you more permission to say no to opportunities that match well with other people’s narratives but not your own.

  4. Time and Motivation are Limited Assets, Complexity Kills: Everything is relative except for the time you have left on this planet. Don’t let other people’s opinions or worldview speed up your process or shift your focus. Optimize for what you care most about and work backwards from there. There are a lot of places people put their time and motivation that to me feel fragile (ex: Optimizing for efficiency in a world that automates you away, optimizing for money in a world where your currency devalues or where you already have enough, optimizing for status in a world where status is relative and a moving target). Even if you choose a place to put your focus that ends up being a dead end, ensure the motivation for the journey in itself is intrinsic and worth your time.

  5. Perspective is Peace: Whenever overwhelmed, remember that everything is temporary and that nothing is truly THAT important (it’s all relative to our perception and the discrepancy between our expectations and our reality). Loosening the desire to control the outcome and gaining perspective outside your own lens is the path to inner peace.

I’m not sure where this next chapter of my journey will take me ✌️, but through this new perspective and holistic headspace I’m sure that it’s gonna be great 😊

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