50 Things I Know

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1. Discipline is a lie. It almost always backfires. Forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to do and living in pain for a sustained amount of time is against human nature. The trick is to set up your life in such a way that effort feels rather effortless. Tread the path of least resistance.

2. I know that not caring about what most people care about will make you charismatic. People gravitate towards those with “I don’t give a fuck” energy.

3. If you become famous by pretending to be someone you are not, you will feel hollow and existential at the top, because you are not loved for who you are, which means “you” are not loved at all. I am convinced celebrities juggle this all the time, and it’s very, very difficult.

4. Most social norms have no consequences when you break them. People who’ve figured this out keep saying “you can just do things” because it’s true. Society is not for individuals. It is for structural stability. You must be intentional about how and why you are participating. Plus, following social norms often requires pretending, another reason to eradicate such useless efforts when possible, which is almost always.

5. Inspirations are divine yet ephemeral. We can create conditions that encourage them, but we cannot control when and how they arrive. When they arrive, we must be open enough to receive. When we receive, we must be available enough to act right away.

6. Inspirations come more often for people who are persistent in a craft. They can be magnified by or completely disguised as talent, which is not to say talent isn’t real. The truth is anyone can be vehicles through which inspirations and beauty pass to create resonance in other human beings. That vibration seeds life.

7. I know that flow states are very similar to manic states.

8. I know that whatever practical thing you look for in a partner (e.g. money), you not only lack the thing yourself, you also lack the faith you will obtain it on your own.

9. It’s worth committing to always being truthful. When you can’t make it to a party, you can just say “I don’t feel like it,” or better yet, a simple “no,” instead of “I have work tonight.” We torture ourselves over lies on big things, but we don’t think twice on small lies. Stop lying, period. Lies stack up. Your body knows and will punish you.

10. Adventures are different from crafts. Startups are both. People often make the mistake of seeking excitement in crafts and seeking progress in adventures, which can lead to quick abandonment of both. I made this mistake many times over.

11. Your view of the world is immediately narrowed when you open a feed. Whatever shows up will convince you that is what matters, that is what you should pay attention to. If the top 10 posts are about one thing, you will overestimate its true relevance and forget a million things happen every single day. This is the more subtle and arguably more dangerous form of social pressure/manipulation. Don’t pay attention to the noise. Don’t start your day with feeds.

12. Anything that looks easy is hard. The effort is hidden from you. Anything that seems hard is easier than it’s made out to be. The appearance is to deter you. The only way to know the truth is to do it and find out for yourself.

13. Waking consciousness is a tiny part of our holistic intelligence and intuition. Within that waking consciousness, our thinking mind contributes a tiny fraction. We often mistakenly attempt to direct our lives by controlling that tiny fraction and end up feeling trapped. Instead, we should focus on indirectly tuning the rest, which is downstream from the basics of life: good sleep, exercise, healthy diet, relationships.

14. People get trapped in the idea of “deserve”. When we use that word, whatever comes after becomes conditional. Things just are. There is no deserving.

15. Expanding on the previous point, it is absolutely possible for self-love, happiness, and wellbeing to be 100% unconditional. If they depend on fulfilling desires or meeting preferences, they are fragile, at the whim of things outside of our control. The first step is to know this is possible and be utterly convinced of it.

16. Meditating daily will change your life.

17. I know that most shoes on the market are not healthy for human feet. They are far too narrow at the front for your toes to spread out and provide stability. I highly encourage you to try out barefoot shoes and five-finger shoes. They helped with my lower back pain.

18. I know that mystical experiences are realer than real. I used to question them, mock them. Surely, I thought, one could reason through everything. Rationalistic thinking provides a comforting scaffold, but really the refusal to accept the world’s mystical and experiential nature comes from deep-rooted insecurity about a singular individual’s helplessness in its futile attempt to grasp the cosmic. We fear what we don’t know, thus we default to observing from inside our clustered mind, convinced we can deduce the unknowable, without recognizing we are building the epistemology from a false premise. We have to accept our limited nature and smallness to be closer to truth.

19. Chongqing, my hometown in China, is one of the coolest cities on earth. You must visit when you get a chance.

20. For any single skill, there likely exists a species that far exceeds humans. Mantis shrimp can see polarized light and ultraviolet, elephants pick up infrasound, sharks sense faint electrical fields, planarians are quasi-immortal, peregrine falcons dive at 240+ mph, to name a few. What are their worlds like? What makes humans human? We’d understand ourselves far better if we could understand animals thoroughly.

21. My generation severely underestimates how fulfilling it is to have children.

22. Thoughts are downstream of emotions. Optimistic thoughts come from positive emotions; pessimistic thoughts come from negative emotions. Understanding that thoughts are derivative helps you identify with them less.

23. I know that enlightenment is in every single breath we take. Now, as you are reading this exact sentence, close your eyes for a few seconds, deep breath in, deep breath out, steadfast, ocean waves. When you open your eyes, intentionally expand your peripheral vision to see as much as you can.

24. I know that substance legality is arbitrary. Some are incredibly beneficial if consumed intentionally, such as MDMA and psychedelics. There is no shortage of thoughtful discussions and scientific research if you are curious. That being said, sobriety for the vast majority of time is good.

25. Consistency of efforts trumps all in the long run. Intelligence matters way less. Simply showing up every day takes luck out of the equation. Even if you roll a dice with a 10% win rate, with enough rolls, you will win once eventually. And in life, that’s all we need.

26. Loneliness is not strictly a lack of meaningful relationships with others. More often, it is a lack of connection with yourself in the here and now. When you are present, solitude can be deeply liberating.

27. I know that judgements and defensiveness come from insecurity. Try the simple exercise of noticing the qualities you judge in others and the qualities you get defensive over. They often align.

28. Freedom is not about overpowering others. It is freedom from self and mind. Power is a very different thing.

29. You can flip every annoyance into a problem to be solved. Take responsibility. Feeling stuck, disappointed, or angry is a matter of perspective.

30. I know that action is not efficacy. Staying busy does not mean you are getting things done.

31. I know I’ve had a worthwhile year if I think I was stupid and immature a year ago. Material progress is less relevant, because life is not linear.

32. We all need the reminder from time to time that the world is so, so, so big. Whatever we are dealing with crumbles at the cosmic scale.

33. People are people. They will continue to change and surprise and disappoint. Allow fluidity in relationships for them to be resilient.

34. Most things we allocate attention to are tremendously inconsequential, such as overthinking your inadequate response in a past conversation. Pay attention to what really matters and care less about the rest. We don’t need to shit ourselves with fears every day.

35. I know that having a great conversation is about letting yourself fall away and appreciating the human being in front of you, who feels comfortable and excited enough to share a slice of their mind. It is a privilege.

36. I know that people who spend time arguing online are miserable and best left alone.

37. I know that you are less likely to spill tea while walking if you look straight ahead and forget you are carrying liquid. The general principle applies in life.

38. I know that you need at least one thing stable out of these three to stay healthy: the physical location, a community, and work. When I was nomadic, there were months when I had none of the three. It was difficult.

39. Writing is one of the best ways to observe and understand yourself. If you feel blocked on writing for whatever reason, the most common one being “This is not good enough. I am not good enough,” try timed writing. Two rules. One, you write for a preset amount of time (it can be 5 minutes or an hour). Two, once you start you do not stop moving your hands, even when you are writing, “This is so bad. I don’t know what to write. I am just filling space because I told myself I need to write for 10 minutes so I am just moving my hands for the sake of moving them.” Read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones to explore this idea further.

40. I also know that the second words land on a page, they are no longer yours. They are a version of you at a moment in time. Creating anything timeless takes true genius that can only be judged by others and not yourself. And no one can predict with certainty whether something will be timeless when it is being produced. Create first so you give yourself a chance to be judged.

41. The role transition from a care receiver to a caregiver in child-parent relationships is a monumental phase that marks someone as a true adult. Many don’t go through this until their 30s or even much later.

42. I know it’s easy to misuse the tactic of channeling negative emotions, such as anger, towards motivation and productivity. It’s dirty fuel with potential to corrupt.

43. You do not have to stay in touch with people whose company you don’t enjoy.

44. Curiosity engenders life force. Every child is insatiably curious until they are discouraged in schooling and molded by man-made concepts. Much of life’s work is to get that curiosity back, to be childlike without being childish.

45. The concept of power implies a relationship. It cannot exist in a vacuum. That is to say, in many situations, if you feel someone has power over you, it is because you are allowing it. Take celebrities as examples. If you don’t know who they are, you treat them as average joes. If you are a fan, you will likely find yourself flustering in their presence. In either case, they are the same person.

46. I know it’s difficult, if not near impossible, to judge the merit of an idea on its own without bias from authorship. A well-known person can say the most outrageous thing and still get an amen.

47. I know that most people in the US don’t know the first thing about China. Having spent more than a decade in both countries, I don’t even feel qualified.

48. We often fail to see people as entities that exist deep in time rather than, as snapshots. Things happened to make every person who they are, but we are not interested in finding out or are unable to acknowledge we simply don’t have the full picture, which causes fatal errors in judgements of causality and decision making.

49. Tension exists everywhere and that’s fine. It is a membrane. We just need to let it be porous enough to allow good things to come through.

50. Every bit of wisdom that can be written down has been written down over the past thousands of years to the best of humans’ ability, yet we still falter, because wisdom cannot be learned pedantically. It must be lived. So live. One day at a time, fearlessly, until the day you perish.

I stole the essay’s format from Sasha Chapin, who credits Mari Andrew for the original idea. I have not read Mari’s writings but Sasha clearly knows things.