my brother, hustler that he was, instilled a ‘please try’ mindset into me. but i need myself to augment it with ‘dont give up’.

i wrote with my friend’s younger brother in mind. he is so energetic and curious. i want him to be strong enough to stay that way even when it hurts.

please try

please for the love of god you have to try. you have to. it is your duty as a human to try. i want you to try. you need to try every day. i will be sad if you don’t try. it's ok if your best isn’t very good but you have to try. you have to. every other mammal on earth yearns for food, water, companionship, shelter. but as a human you get to have dreams beyond that. to become a really good baker. to make the world’s best sewing machine. to have a particular reputation.

it's risky to try. if it was easy there would be no need to try - you would have already done it. but to not try is to not believe in yourself. and if you don’t believe in yourself, who will?

please don't limit yourself

some my peers with shared career aspirations have left mn with me. and it has worked out well for all of them! they have grown faster than ever before, not only as engineers, but as friends, members of the community, partners, and lovers.

some of my peers for whom staying in mn is optimal for their goal are also doing quite well. someone who used to be a captain on my hs robotics team is now married to his partner of 6 years (a very sweet man who is a singer + business owner). an officer of a coding club in undergrad discovered his passion for urban planning, and is in the midst of leveraging his connections within the (abundance-pilled!) Minneapolis city government to professionally move in that direction. both of them are doing quite well at home, and i don’t think it makes any sense for them to leave the state.

but this leaves behind the people i feel melancholy for. my peers started undergrad with respectably lofty dreams. to become a new yorker. to study marine life abroad. to go and become the world’s best pediatrician. but as the years passed, they slowly but steadily found their place home and built their lives locally, and the size of their dreams have shrunk. without a doubt, they are happy. but they can’t stomach the risk of leaving now. worse, the risk is unlikely to shrink. as cute boy turns to boyfriend to husband to coparent. as 1 year of experience becomes 5 becomes 10, and your tenure at your employer makes you become more and more cozy with staying there forever.

of course, it is highly difficult for anyone to stomach risk without structure. but its unfortunate that the tendrills of home muted their dreams before they found the minimum structure to go chase them. ultimately, those are not lives i could live. to be so averse to risk that i don’t try something in the stage of my life where failure is the least risky?

i have suffered but it was worth it

leaving minnesota was probably the hardest thing i’ve ever done. with the exception of one, all of my close friends were in minnesota. of the friends that i had in high school, i didn’t maintain friendships with anyone who ended up going to undergrad out of state. of the friends that i had in undergrad, i had beat them to departure by a full year.

i did it anyways though. because it is my duty to try.

it was incredibly lonely to begin with. but over time, this went away. i became friends with my coworkers. i competed on the USC ballroom dance team for a semester (despite my only affiliation to USC being that i was near the school). i became a somewhat regular climber at the nearest climbing gym.

the pressure has forced me to fix personality flaws that beget loneliness. i’m much less socially anxious now than i used to be in 2022. i’m much better at talking to strangers and becoming their friend. i’m much more comfortable talking about things that aren’t directly related to my professional interests. i learned that it is better to reach out when i’m in pain than it is to withdraw into myself and grit my teeth through it.

it's going to be ok, even if your attempt goes poorly

i fucking love one piece. a story of a bunch of people who leave home to go chase their dreams. it's not easy by any means. every arc brings nearly all of the crew members to the brink of death. every member of the crew (the captain included) has an arc where they crash out over unresolved matters at home. but! its okay. because in the course of their journey, they make incredibly strong friends who understand these problems. friends who share a value system. friends who share the same trauma and understanding of what it's like to leave home to go search for something you yearn for. friends who are there to support each other through tough times.

real life is like that too.

after a while, my employer that I moved to LA to work for had a huge layoff. (they’ve more or less come back from that, but it was quite harrowing in the midst). i retained my job, but i was catastrophically demoralized nonetheless — i stopped having anything to look forward to at work. the corporate financial constraints that led to a bunch of my friends being laid off also meant that most of the interesting hardware projects were put on hold indefinitely.

but we were okay anyways. ex-coworkers who left before the layoff happily and freely gave referrals to layoff victims. when i called my friends, they were more than willing to pick up the phone and offer me advice* on what to do next.

*of course, when you seek advice, its important to also be thoughtful about where that advice is coming from. but i had faith that all of my friends were Also Trying.

i ended up leaving to go to a different startup. naturally, as with any attempt at anything, it was not completely smooth sailing either. but, the friends i had made in my post-minnesota journey made the transition easier.

when you try, it has to be something you want - not something other people want

it will almost never lead to self-fullfillment to go down a path that is prescribed to you by others. how many students actually truly enjoy school? how many kids end up studying engineering because their parents made them go into a field they didn’t want to pursue?

if you are trying to do something but the something is not coming from your heart, it will be that much more difficult to stand strong against struggles.

no wallowing allowed

one step at a time and you will go far. what is a marathon but just hundreds of thousands of steps taken in rapid succession? which is not to say that a marathon is easy. even though i run regularly, i don’t have the stamina to compete in a marathon.

but you need to take forward steps.

it took me a long time to get my social anxiety to be as low as it is today. but i didn’t stop. every now and then i would work up the courage to talk to a coworker i barely knew. a stranger in the climbing gym. a stranger in a bar. a stranger in a coffee shop. a stranger in the park. after every interaction, i became a little more confident. even in the failures, i learned [oh, it was not useful for me to do that].

in a sense, i still have a long ways to go. but we are not in stasis. and that’s what matters.

hey i think this post is cope actually

this post is 100% cope. but i find it effective for my purposes :3

are you ok?

every day is a blessing, a lesson, and an opportunity to take another step.

sometimes its hard but the rest of the time i get to stand on the face of a mountain and bask in the beauty of how far i've come.