Thoughts About Seriousness

Urgency

I used to swim competitively in high school. From the outset, I was incredibly focused on optimizing my time, diet, and fitness to perform incredibly well. But for that one-hundredth second cut, it just seemed useless in hindsight. Does it make sense to just throw that whole experience away, claiming it was a failed path not right for me?

At the very core, urgency is the bedrock of seriousness. It contains a raw, unfiltered push toward something—almost out of a vacuum. It needs no external pressure, but can begin in one. Where does it come from? The simplest explanation is if you take your life state on a level set, meaning your life is constant, and try to just…move around. Anywhere but staying on the current level you are on. And this urgency to leave this level set seems to be where seriousness is born.

Maybe it’s a feedback mechanism for adjusting your direction on the tiniest timescale. Perhaps the frequency of updating your direction is so small that you don’t notice it, but you can feel it pulsing everyday, like your heart beating.

Acknowledging the comfort of the headspace you are in should just be a checkpoint of a grander vision. Another property of urgency is that it’s a one-way function. Once you elevate your level of urgency it is embedded to your core.

Most people unknowingly have this. When I started my first business selling T-shirts, I wasn’t serious about it. Making money was what sold me. And this seemingly superficial goal is what got me out of a level set rut. Fast forward a few years later, I ran a more serious startup where we reached MVP but never generated revenue. Urgency started with taking action for a small outcome, but it compounds to the next experience. Life is about continuously jumping to different level sets, and urgency is the invisible hand guiding you away from that comfort zone.

I do not want to conflate urgency with pressure to meet with expectations. It is agnostic to any kind of external pressure. Expectation does exist. It just does not force your every movement. Rather, urgency is a permanent quality of someone to be constantly improving themselves. I also can’t confound it with other pessimistic qualities like envy, hopelessness, or anxiety. It’s still mired in optimism. The only way this can occur is through the humbling recreation of your self and the perpetual correction of errors in your beliefs (Nietzsche?). Learning is the only vehicle in which urgency prospers. You can simultaneously be satisfied and unsatisfied during the constant wear and tear of understanding the world. The value of learning comes from the frequency of tiny gradient changes in your brain’s understanding.

Environment

As many of my close friends know, I am a big believer of choosing the right environments so that I can achieve desired outcomes, especially if that environment is serious and aligns with my goals. For instance, I want to be around people who are rarely comfortable and drowning in uncertainty. After living alone for a year, I experienced loneliness and self-reflection that exacerbated my yearning to live with people who understand me. But environments just give you direction. You still have to pick the step size and when to recalculate a different direction. It also molds the second order information you are in. For example, taking the direction of building a startup will be significantly easier + encouraged if you live in SF as opposed to other places. You live in a warped space in which certain directions are more convenient due to environments.

However, beware of environments as well. If you stay in there too long, you often normalize to these directions. These create biases and often hive mind ideas that are easily attainable. It is good to always reflect on your urgencies and purpose as frequently as possible.

Amongst these normalizing pitfalls is credentialism.

Yet, I don’t think credentialism is to blame. Yes, one can argue it offers a blanket of comfort or external validation, smothering urgency. But it can be an incredibly positive, stabilizing force, especially for those who truly don’t know what to do. I also think companies are the best environments to provide stable, clear trajectories while you explore beyond what’s possible, and meet some great friends along the way! What matters is what you do after school, or work. It’s seeing beyond the local maxima that truly realizes your potential and hunger for more. But sometimes, especially young naive people, their gradients don’t stretch out that far to see beyond the smallest hills. So having that internal dissatisfaction or conflict—as if you haven’t experienced full potential—is what gets you behind the wheel and steer in the right direction. When I attempted my first entrepreneurial venture, I was too afraid to question and be curious at the risk of my own self-image. I consistently had no voice and self-confidence.

Decision making

When making decisions, there are two phases: objective and intentional. I will not go into objective too much because this is more a practical, multi-faceted evaluation that does not offer much abstract grounding. This can almost always be resolved through some applicable exercise like making a pros and cons list. For me, I prioritize thinking about decisions to leave something, because I recently have been unseriously dropping things without considering the consequences. Here is a doc that evaluates whether I should drop something.

Intentionality

(I use the word intentionality because willpower seems a bit stronger than what I credit to be)

Intention is a sustained cognitive commitment guiding actions consistently over time. After a decision is made, especially significant ones, there’s often a period of inaction or stability. Those who live intentionally try to shorten this feeling. It’s the behind-the-scenes planning before or after big life decisions. Intention doesn’t really reveal itself through one-time decisions, even if it’s a big one. It’s more permeated through time, having influence on every tiny decision. One could even claim this is culture? But it’s something that you are cognizant of.

Intention is self-reinforcing. One property of intention is to notice your actions are quite powerful in the stillness of time. It’s like developing a stronger feedback loop that builds your conviction for a purposeful life. What’s the opposite of intention? Ignorance; a willful blindsiding of large decisions. When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance.

Intention happens everywhere. From writers who generate sentences and stories that flow, to a runner waking up at 4AM for his 7000th practice. So when picking your passion project, you have to really be honest with yourself. Doing that requires constantly projecting your understanding of the world in real time, in the face of uncertainty. And once you’ve seen what you’ve created, you can see if it fits your world view. If you don’t like it, try something else. Almost like trial and error.

Outcomes

From a high level, outcomes are binary: failure or success. But from a granular point of view, you can often see a rich build of understanding after pursuing a project. Think of this as correcting your weights or even editing your objective function! What’s most important is the pivoting to the same directions, or trying something new. I really think there are few decisions that rest on those big outcomes. They are not immediately realizable, more so discounted in time and uncertainty.