deliberate

Some things I learned and was wrong about in 2023

I’m continually wrong about all sorts of stuff. I like documenting this on a yearly basis:

Standing on my own two feet has been way more terrifying than I thought. 

• For a long time, all I thought I wanted was to do my own thing. But when I finally achieved personal and professional independence, I became paralyzed and actively made moves to limit my own freedom. I think there were two main reasons for this: 

  • I found it quite scary to be responsible for all of my own decisions and to have no one to blame for not reaching my goals but me. I had set an upper limit on how big I thought I should be based on how much I thought I was worth and I kept running into that limit, trapping myself in place.

  • I was terrified that the exposure that comes with attention would reveal to the world that I was a bad person.

• As it turns out, whether you’re terrified or not while assuming all responsibility for yourself does not matter much. What does matter is what decisions you make in the midst of the discomfort that comes with risk — do you see it as short-term and continue to make choices that are in your own long-term best interest? Choosing to keep going while bearing the weight of responsibility is what breeds self-respect.

• Furthermore, you are not a bad person if your conscience speaks to you all the time and doesn’t shut up till you act on it. You are flawed, but so is everyone else. Accepting this as fact has made me profoundly less anxious. I used to feel like I was pretending to be a chill person and now I feel like I actually am one.

There were answers to my questions about how to live, what to aspire to, and the role of beauty in a life well-lived.

• I found the answers, like most people, in religion :)

I had no idea what real love was.

• Or how much you bloom when you feel valued precisely as you are.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to say, I was just writing to the wrong people about the wrong things.

• I used to really struggle with self-censorship. I felt like I had very few opinions on the things those around me seemed to care so much about and was too ashamed of the areas my attention is naturally drawn (how people think and feel, creativity, beauty, love) to speak much of them to those who wouldn’t obviously relate.

• I’ve learned the hard way that it’s fine to let down those you share no overlapping interests with — it’s not your job to intellectually entertain anyone. Openly airing your esoteric interests is the only way I’ve found to find people wired similarly.

• Nowadays, I write almost every day to a tiny audience of people who love me and I’ve never felt less inhibited on the page. Intimacy is worth far more than attention.

In early-stage investing, inexperience can be an asset (you’re more differentiated) and the only immediate feedback loop is how fast you’re able to build trust with new people.

I hold myself to unreasonable standards and while that helped me get to where I am today, it causes me needless pain now.

• I used to value myself based on how fast I was learning and the breadth of the ground I was covering. This was a way to escape my own perfectionism — which caught up to me as soon as I started focusing on only one thing. I’m learning it’s a skill to sit with your mistakes, ask for help, and move slower and more deliberately.

Don’t try to convince people who don’t believe in your value that you’re valuable.

• Please, for the sake of self-respect (and in the name of Joan Didion), take this to heart. Accept nothing less than for all the people around you to love you very much.

• Similarly, anyone who makes you feel close to them without your having earned it probably doesn’t value themselves very highly. True closeness takes time and the trust that comes as a byproduct should be created without an end in mind.

Joy is seeing, caring for, and listening to someone you really love. Complete joy is being seen, cared for, and listened to by them as well. I think this is what life is for.