This is the long answer to a short question.
I’m back in Singapore for the summer, reconnecting with my middle school and high school friends.
They ask: “What are you up to?“
Interestingly, the same question popped up many times as I’ve applied for various startup funds and fellowships.
To me, “what are you up to” really is asking (1) what are you doing right now (action) and (2) what do you hope to accomplish (goals).
So what am I doing right now?
- Today, I am working on Miso AI, a multi-modal real-time AI cooking assistant. It’s a personal project of mine that started from a hackathon project with friends.
- This week, I’ll be curating lemon moments, and attending them. It’s a consumer IRL social startup I started in Singapore to solve modern loneliness.
- This month, I’ll be attending some of my friends’ graduation ceremony and hanging out with them.
- This year, I hope to move to San Francisco or New York City to build and create in an environment surrounded by the most technical and ambitious people in the world.
What do I hope to accomplish right now?
1. I want to create something of original value that will bring a positive impact to the world.
That is to say, I want to actualize all of the ideas I have in my head. This desire to create only crystallized in the form of words in the first essay I wrote in September last year and has only grown more intense since.
To build something of original value is to start doing. To create something of original value is to be cringe.
2. I want to be the best in my pursuits.
That is to say, I am constantly seeking novel experiences and putting myself in places of discomfort and change to grow and learn. To be the best in something is to be a few standard deviations away from the mean (to the right, of course). You cannot be the best doing what everyone else is doing. Hence, to strive to be the best is to make unconventional bets, or take the road not taken [1].
3. I want to find my community.
That is to say, I want to find my city.
In his essay Cities and Ambition, Paul Graham talks about how each city sends a message, and it attracts different types of people. Boston (Cambridge)’s message is: you should be smarter. Los Angeles’ message is: you should be more famous. New York City’s message is: you should be richer. And San Francisco’s message is: you should be more powerful.
In the cities where I’ve lived long enough to discern their message, Singapore’s message is: you should be richer, have higher social status, or some combination of both. Kids quickly judge other kids’ financial status from the house they live in, the car their parents drive and their parents’ occupations. In Singapore, you would be highly respected if you were a doctor, lawyer, dentist, or investment banker. It is amusing the number of my classmates who chose medicine, dentistry or law as their major when previously there was no inkling of interest or desire to pursue them. The concept of socio-economic status (SES) is a common fixture of conversation only in Singapore. I have never heard this concept being mentioned anywhere else. In a way, the message Singapore sends is: stick to the conventional path and beat everyone in the rat race. This message shows up everywhere when you live in Singapore.
Beijing is special because each district is so culturally distinct from the others. Haidian district and Chaoyang district feel like completely different worlds. I’ve only lived in Haidian, and the message Haidian sends is: you should have more prestige. The main message isn’t that you should be smarter, but rather you should be more educated, because people don’t seem to respect raw intelligence or creativity. What they care most about are your accolades, your degrees, your titles, the number of academic papers you have published. If you hold a PKU undergraduate degree, a 3.99 GPA, a Harvard PhD, come back to PKU to hold a tenured professorship, and have 20 papers published in Nature Physics or Physical Review Letters, you are top in Haidian.
Cities are large collections of people, and the message they send shapes the culture. There are subcultures and other smaller communities each with its own message, but ambitions are to some extent incompatible, and admiration is a zero-sum game, so each city converges to one message.
One could make the argument that if you are strong enough mentally, you should be able to thrive in any city and lead your own fate. I used to think this way too. But I have come to realize that our environments shape us to a large extent. In Cities and Ambition, Paul Graham justified his claim by looking at historical trends of people doing great things being clustered in a few places where that sort of things was done at the time. Notable fifteenth century Italian painters all came from Florence. Today, notable AI startups (or just startups) all come from San Francisco.
I’ll add one more justification: we are what we eat, and our diet consists of what we actually eat, the content we consume, and the people we surround ourselves with. The content and the people are largely affected by the cities we are in. There is no way of optimizing that diet in the wrong city unless you somehow have a completely enclosed community and a completely controlled stream of information. For most of us, we live in an open virtual and physical space.
Finding a community is about finding the city whose message resonates with you.
And I’m finding my Florence.
If life is a bitmap image made of pixels, then each pixel, with its own hue, is a day in our life [2].
Whatever I commit my time and energy to each day and each week (action) will manifest in the weeks and years (goals).
For now, here’s what I’m up to.
Notes
[1] Poem by Robert Frost, a prominent American poet from the early 20th Century
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
[2] Tim Urban, Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel.