The Time Will Pass Anyway
I Just Need to Bridge the Gap Between Who I Am and Who I Want to Be
I love staying up until 2am perfectly crafting how I'm going to turn my life around tomorrow and become the most productive, successful, changed person ever. I love my 50 tabs of research and plans for newfound passions and hobbies that never make it to the morning. I love daydreaming about the infinite possibilities of my life and another year goes by and I've managed to execute none of them. Don't you?
Took me 26 years and probably my brain finally fully developing to figure out why this happens and what to do about it. The answer can be found, as it often is, from a childhood memory, in a favorite video game.
When I was in middle school I had 400 hours in The Sims. But I spent those 400 hours doing the same thing over and over again. I would create myself, give myself a programming job, and make my Sim do the same three things every day: go to work, code at home, study chess. Repeat until grandmaster. Somehow I was fascinated by this and always entertained.
Real me hasn't found applying these principles quite as easy. But the Sims taught me something I'm only now getting through my thick skill after years of banging my head against the wall that was a promise of a shortcut, an easy way: in the game, your Sim literally only has enough time in the day to work, focus on one or two things, and take care of themselves. That's it. Try to make your Sim do everythingâsocial life, multiple hobbies, career grinding, side hustlesâand they get cranky and pee on the floor and stop listening. All the needs bars bleed red. Nothing gets done.
And unfortunately, real life is the same. The game doesn't care about motivation. Your Sim will go to work whether she wants to or not. She builds the skill whether it's fun that day or not. Because you tell her to. And eventually, she gets promoted; she hits grandmaster. Not from luck or natural talent or some sporadic moment. Just from doing every day.
Surprise, surprise, the time constraint isn't a bug. It's the whole point.
Please for the Love of God Commit to Something, Anything
You have to pick something. Anything. Picking wrong is still better than picking nothing bc at least you're moving. At least time is passing and you're building something instead of standing still optimizing a decision you'll never make.
I used to have this whole list. Learn generative coding and write speculative fiction and finish my chess projects and do LeetCode daily and read every book and contribute to open source and get back into soccer and try woodworking and also be great at my job and maintain friendships and have hobbies and travel and I had this imaginary future version of myself where all of these interests coherently stacked into one impressive person.
Really I was lost.
At some point the fear of choosing wrong became worse than actually being wrong. You spend so long trying to optimize the decision that you never make one. What if I hate it? What if there's something better?
Instagram shows me three concerts this weekend. New pop-up galleries for May. Five book/writing/walking clubs meeting weekly. Upcoming networking events this week. I get overwhelmed and go to none of them.
Or maybe I try to go to all of them. Recently I've found myself chasing viral things that show up on my feed. The best matcha in town. Push pop sushi. Uniqlo tops. Standing in line because the internet said it was good. Buying things because everyone else has them. I had totally become someone living someone else's life in real time and it is so hollow!!! Consuming instead of creating. Reacting instead of choosing.
It's information overload turned into action and somehow it's still not a good thing. At least when I was paralyzed I wasn't spending money and time on things I'd forget about after a month. I was on autopilot following whatever's trending, and I realize now the hollow feeling is proof I'm not actually making choicesâI'm just responding to stimuli like a real life Pavlovian experiment where the bell is a IG reel and the reward is feeling like I'm participating in culture.
Consumption doesn't leave anything. You can eat at every viral restaurant and buy every trending product and watch every recommended show and at the end of the year you just have LetterBoxd entries and an untouched closet.
But creation leaves something. Even terrible creation. Even the embarrassing half-finished garbage projects. At least you pushed back against the algorithm for a second. At least you chose what to make instead of what to buy. At least there's evidence you existed and tried and got your hands dirty.
I think about this a lot bc people only see what you do, not what you wanted to do. Nobody is going to talk about your unrealized potential. Nobody is going to know the version of you that lived in your head. They're going to talk about what you actually made and who you actually were to them. And what you are is only what you do.
Side Quests Are Cool But You Need a Main Quest
Okay cool so don't consume so much, create instead. But what do I even create? This is where it continues to be tricky yay!
There's this trend right now of side questing. Optional tasks you can do outside the main storyline. On TikTok and Instagram it's become this whole thing about low-pressure adventures and activities in addition to your daily routine. Not quite hobbies, but fun and interesting enough to pursueâactivities that disrupt your usual routine and add whimsy to your days. People make lists: try embroidery, learn calligraphy, take a different route home, book a rooftop dinner, start a cassette collection. Small intentional decisions that make the year feel lived-in, not just survived. And I actually think this is good. Better than doom-scrolling. Better than chasing viral products. At least you're doing something.
But here's where I keep messing it up. Side questing is good. Having fun is good. You need hobbies you do just for enjoyment, no pressure, no goal beyond the activity itself. But you also need that one thing you're serious about. The thing you're willing to suck at until you're good. The thing you commit to even when it stops being easy. Like there's a difference between having casual hobbies for fun vs treating everything like a casual hobby bc then you never have to commit once the shiny wears off.
Casual hobbies don't compound. They're just a pile of half-starts that can't add up to anything. The serious thing is the one you stick with even when it sucks; that's what actually builds into something, where later on you get to say "I did that." Without it, you will end up just spinning wheels realizing that nothing ever sticks, somehow you're always back at zero, and you've never actually finished anything. And it'll be bc you jumped ship before you could see what happens when you stay.
The reason I can be so brutal about this reality is because I've watched myself do this on repeat. Get into pixel art for two weeks. Buy a tablet. Watch tutorials. Make sprites. Then discover interactive fiction. Try out Twine for three days. Start a project. Abandon it for chess variant design. Start planning a chess platform. Get distracted wanting to learn Rust. Download Rust. Do two exercises. See someone on Twitter talk about their writing practice. Decide I should write more. Open blank document. Close it. Scroll Twitter. Find another shiny thing.
Six months later and I definitely don't have six months worth of effort/proof of all this.
But before I go on: obviously you do have to try different things first. That's how you figure out what you actually care about. Not saying lock in one thing at 22 forever. Try things!! But when something does hook you and you find yourself thinking about it when you're running errands, when you're excited to work on it even when it's hard because you have that clear vision of the end result and you need itâthat's the signal to commit. That's when you stop jumping ship the second it gets difficult.
Murakami has this book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running where he just talks about running every day for decades. Not bc he's talented or naturally athletic or has perfect form. He runs bc he's a person who runs. That's his whole thing. Rain, tired, traveling somewhere new with no routeâdoesn't matter. He runs.
Consistency over years.
And you can only be consistent over years if you actually care. Which is going to mean letting go of everything else. Which means you might have to grieve the things you won't get to do. I let go of becoming a chess master. I'm not going to law school. I haven't touched LeetCode in months. I had to let go of the impossible version of myself that was going to do all those things because it was blocking the real me who is writing and traveling and being good at my job.
It's okay to feel sad about that. I literally started writing this piece bc I cried over the fact that I couldn't be an expert guitarist AND an award-winning video game developer AND a writer AND artist AND skateboarder AND surfer. But here's the thingâwhat's worse than picking the wrong one is being none of them ever. You can't do everything at a surface level forever if you want to make progress in anything so you have to choose. And time passes whether you decide or not. Picking wrong still beats picking nothing.
Think Less, Fail Fast
Once you've actually picked something, the next thing in the way is the gap between you and being good at the thing. Spoiler: there's no shortcut around it. Believe me I have tried it all and wish it could be done any other way. You just have to be bad first.
And of course you're terrible right now. You've literally never done this before.
Previously, I (and maybe you too) wouldn't start things until I had read every blog post and tutorial and architected the perfect version in my head first. Too scared of building something bad or building the wrong thing and wasting my time so I just never built anything.
I used to think I needed to understand the whole path to expert before starting. All the best practices, optimal stack, scalability, everything mapped out first.
Then I built the ugliest web app ever and learned more from that than from twenty blog posts combined.
The ONLY way to get good is be bad first. Submitted beats perfect. Done beats nothing. Even if done is half-baked and embarrassing.
What matters is iterations. Moving the needle even slightly, even slowly. I used to think I needed variety. My brain likes variety bc context switching feels like productivity but is way easier than deep work. In reality, I (and you!) need consistency and non-zero days. Five pages or ten minutes of writing or one commit every single day. Moving at 1 mph beats standing still bc (and I know it's cheesy and overstated to quote Newton's laws) keeping momentum takes less energy than starting from zero.
Don't Say Anything Until It's Done
So you've committed, you've accepted you'll be bad for a while, you're showing up. There's still a trap. A subtler one. And it's the one that's killed more of my projects than anything else.
The great project killer is a "working on a new web app!" post on Twitter. Get a few likes. Feel productive. And then it's not touched again for another year. Twitter posts are where projects go to die.
Because the problem is I already got what I wanted. That hit of validation. The feeling of being someone who does things without doing the thing. Don't make thinking about it the dopamine hit.
It's so easy to fall into this and spend more time talking about projects than building them. You get the satisfaction from the idea of being productive instead of producing anything.
And it's tricky because announcing projects feels like accountability. Feels like momentum. But for me (and maybe you!) it's backwards. The announcement is the endpoint. I tricked my brain into thinking I already did the work just by saying I would.
So now: I shut up until it's done. Show the finished thing. Or don't show anyone.
AI in All of This
Now the Twitter announcement is the old version of this trap. There's a newer one and it's worse bc it doesn't even feel like performanceâit feels like work.
I've been larping with Claude. Asking about career moves, projects, what to build. Like an LLM can give me anything other than the most generic slop advice imaginable for questions like those. Embarrassing to even admit but it's true. Live I've said before, talking about doing things feels like doing things without the hard work of, you know, actually doing things.
And it's funny because now the version of me Claude sees from our conversations, from what I just talk about doing, is completely different from reality. There's probably too much you could learn about a person from their chat history. Probably nothing more damning than seeing the gap between what someone says they're going to build and what they actually ship.
Claude sees me as someone who likes chess and writes essays and is figuring out sales engineering. A person who exists in what they've done.
The me in my head is cyber and code and cool and creative and shipping constantly and building work that's simultaneously tool and art. But that version only exists when I make it real.
And that's the other problem: talking to Claude makes me feel productive. I can spend an hour brainstorming a project, outlining architecture, thinking through features, and feel like I did something. But at the end of the day, all I did was have a detailed conversation about doing something.
Same trap as announcing projects. Thinking becomes doing. Planning becomes building. Nothing ships.
Nobody cares what I want to be. People only see what I am. And what I am is only what I do. I've said this to myself and on the internet so many times, but here we still are bc I'm stupid.
How I've Applied This at My J*b
The annoying thing is I know this works because I've watched it work on me already.
Not in my personal projects unfortunately. Those are still mostly graveyards of half-finished ideas and GitHub repos with three commits. But at work? Work forces the issue.
I started as a sales engineer at Samsara a few months ago and there's no real option to disappear into theory there. You have to do the demo. You have to answer the question. You have to talk even when you don't fully know what you're saying yet.
And afterwards you immediately know what sucked.
You can feel the exact moment the customerâs eyes glaze over. You know when you did the feature dumping without tying it back into why they should actually care. The answer where you started rambling because you're not confident enough in the material. The transition that sounded weird or awkward or was nonexistent. Then you do another call the next day and try not to do that exact thing again.
That's basically all improvement is. Just accumulating enough reps to build genuine confidence because youâve seen it all before.
Same thing with Lost Ark raids honestly (I love Lost Ark). The guilds clearing first weren't always the smartest theorycrafters. They were usually just the ones willing to wipe for six hours straight learning mechanics firsthand instead of discussing them endlessly in Discord.
At some point you have to stop researching and pull the boss.
I think that's why work has changed me more than personal projects have. Work has consequences. Other people are depending on you. You can't hide inside potential forever because eventually someone schedules the call and you're on it whether you're ready or not. Personal projects don't have that built in. Nobody cares if I finish them except me.
Which is probably why I need to stop treating my own life like it's optional.
The Time Will Pass Anyway
This isn't easy. Infinite content, infinite options, infinite comparison. Every Twitter thread is someone younger who shipped more. Every IG story is proof everyone else figured it out. Every blog post reminds you what you don't know.
And it's hard to commit when you can see every possible path. Hard to stay consistent when your feed exists to capture and fracture your attention. Hard to think less when thinking is easier than doing and the internet gives you more dopamine for hot takes than shipped work.
But: the time will pass anyway.
My Sim in middle school didn't have motivation. She had routine. Work, code, chess, repeat. Eventually grandmaster bc consistency beats motivation. She didn't know that, she was a Sim, but she did it anyway. That's it. You just keep showing up.
The me in my head has to die so the real me can exist. Snipping off branches so I can at least grow in one direction. I'll say it requires discipline I'm still building. Letting go of possibilities I'm still grieving. Being okay with sucking for however long it takes. But the alternative is staying here. 50 tabs, good intentions, zero progress. Whether I spend the next year thinking or building, time passes. I'll be 27 either way.