Acoustic Cactus Carnival

Only took 3 hours to edit the first video I've done in 10 months, of a spontaneous camping trip with friends last June.

Lust to Love

Two years ago, I decided to teach myself computer programming. It seemed like an obvious path for me, a fitting convergence of my personal and career interests. So I bought a $40 book, spent $250 on online courses, and listened to hours and hours of a popular programming podcast. Plus, I had the time — five or six hours after work each day — to do with as I pleased. Sure, I was tired after hour-long commutes to and from my day job, but I didn't have children, or a sick relative, or any other commitments that life assigns without consent. All I had to do was study.

Which is why, naturally, it didn't happen. I spent more time wanting to study and regretting not studying than actually doing the thing. The problem, it seemed to me, was laziness. Perhaps I wasn't working hard enough, I thought. Or maybe I was too comfortable. Whatever it was, I was to blame, and so I persisted, struggling to work harder and work better, to no avail. Whenever I reflected on my progress (or, more accurately, my lack of it), I felt guilty and ashamed and frustrated, resolving to do better next time, next time, next time, until I simply got used to the inertia and became as unmoved by my lack of progress as I was unmotivated to make any.

And then, I fell in love. 

My friend Vicki owns and runs a successful restaurant in Chicago. During my first-ever trip to Chicago last October, she told me about one of her former cooks who, although he is good at what he does, couldn't seem to take it to the next level. No matter how hard he tried, everything he cooked was good, but not great, despite wanting so badly to be great.

"After this guy left, one of my other cooks made a comment that really stuck with me," Vicki said. "He said that the guy's problem is that he lusts to love cooking, but doesn't love it."

I thought of programming, something I lusted to love, and how I didn't end up learning how to program because, for whatever reason, I didn't love the process of learning it. What I did love, enough to hold on to this goal for two years without making any progress toward it, was the lifestyle I imagined it could provide — physical, financial, and artistic independence.

I don't think you necessarily have to love everything about something to be compelled to stick with it. (There is, after all, a reason why people stay in shitty relationships.) You just need to find something to love about your goal that will make you do the damn thing. If I loved formal education environments, I could've taken a programming class. If I loved video games, I could've found one about programming, or tried to make a game as my first programming project, or turned my self-education into a game. Or imagine if I fell in love with a girl who programs.

Maybe I could've been a great programmer, or a decent one that managed to pull off some great work. Or maybe, no matter how hard I worked, I was inevitably going to discover that I'm terrible at it or just don't enjoy it. Who knows? But one thing's for sure: you can't make yourself fall in love. It's discovered, not created. It's involuntary, something you're compelled to do.

Last year, I fell in love with two things: the stock market and fantasy football. On trading days and game days (which, on occasion, are every day of the week), I wake up just in time to check the market or to watch Fantasy Football Now on ESPN. I wake up immediately, without setting an alarm and sometimes without getting enough sleep at night, and this blows my mind because I'm a deep sleeper who, prior to this, couldn't wake up until I got at least six hours of sleep. And yet now I do, because I love these things that much. I spend hours a day studying and researching and planning, and I don't have to choose to do anything. I just do it. And that's how it should be.

There's an element of luck to all this. You're lucky every time you encounter things or people, goals or activities, that you fall in love with. But you're luckiest when what you fall in love with is actually worthy of it.

Steve Jobs, in his 2005 Stanford Commencement address, said it best:

[T]he only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

You'll know it when you find it. Don't settle.

Solitude and Leadership

In 2009, essayist William Deresiewicz delivered a lecture at West Point on the importance of solitude to leadership. He says that true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions, and that knowing what you believe requires solitude, of which there are four types: the concentration of focused work, sustained reading, introspection (talking to yourself), and friendship (talking to another person you trust). I've excerpted my favorite grafs below, although it's worth reading in its entirety.

On thinking:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube. I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought.

My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

On the value of books:

So why is reading books any better than reading tweets or wall posts? Well, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, you need to put down your book, if only to think about what you’re reading, what you think about what you’re reading. But a book has two advantages over a tweet. First, the person who wrote it thought about it a lot more carefully. The book is the result of his solitude, his attempt to think for himself.

Second, most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today. Even if they merely reflect the conventional wisdom of their own day, they say something different from what you hear all the time. But the great books, the ones you find on a syllabus, the ones people have continued to read, don’t reflect the conventional wisdom of their day. They say things that have the permanent power to disrupt our habits of thought. They were revolutionary in their own time, and they are still revolutionary today.

Again, it's worth reading in its entirety.

The Playbook of Nice

Susan Piver in the new edition of Emerson’s Self-Reliance:

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none. Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa coined the phrase "idiot compassion," to explain that thing we do when we react to others from the Playbook of Nice rather than from an authentic arising of goodness, because our heart is simply open. An open heart is never certain, it is in open dialog with this world and thus can respond with sweetness when sweetness is due, or wrath or silence or dismissal or an endless embrace. Because it is genuine, it is sharp. You are on the razor’s edge, meaning right here, right now, playing for keeps, not for appearances.

I'll take an honest person over a "nice" person every time.

Singles Awareness Day

When I visited Seattle for the first time, I stayed with a friend of a friend named Jesse. It was kind of him to take in a stranger on such short notice, without knowing things like whether I shower ever. I'd decided to go to Seattle only a few days before and had no idea where I was going to stay. I half-seriously considered sleeping on park benches, thinking it would make a good story one day. I'm glad I didn't do that because it rained.

I arrived on a Friday, so when Jesse got off work, he accompanied me around town, acting as a voluntary tour guide and impressing me with his knowledge of a city he didn't even grow up in. The only fact I know about Glendale, California—my hometown since 1995—is that it's supposedly the second-largest population of Armenians outside of Armenia, and I'm not even confident enough to put money on that.

At some point the conversation drifted toward relationships. This probably does not surprise you, dear reader, because that seems to be all I write about, but I find that relationship talk is a good way to size people up. You find out a lot about a person's maturity, like how they handle their emotions, what they do to get what they want, and whether they cry at night. So we began talking about relationships and Jesse mentioned that he'd been single for over a year.

"Do you miss being in a relationship?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Like, do you ever feel lonely, or miss the company, or consider getting back with your ex?"

"No, I don't," he said. "I don't wish to subscribe to the thought that I need someone to complete me. It implies that I was born incomplete and destined to live my life searching for that person to finish me. No person is born in two halves and so no person should feel lesser for not having someone to reflect and reciprocate them daily."

Over a hundred eighty days have passed since this conversation, and yet his response has stayed with me, outlasting thousands of memories created in that time. I mean, sure, I knew what he said in theory, but I'd never met someone who believed it and lived it and said it with such conviction. It became something I aspired to, though I always fell short. Until recently.

Some parents pressure their kids about their careers. Others pressure their kids to get married. Mine gently encouraged me to move back home. But I didn't want to. I'd been living in Downtown L.A. with friends for two years and enjoyed my self-reliance, my social life, and my curved shower rod.

Plus, I was afraid of regressing. You see, my parents spoiled me and my brother growing up. There were very few things we couldn't do or have because, like all well-meaning parents, they wanted us to be happy. But having a spoiled, comfortable life is a risk: chances are you'll become a lazy slob, an entitled brat, or some hybrid slobbrat, and I could put money on that. So when I finally moved out, I had a lot to prove, especially to myself.

Living on my own, I experienced my first true hardship when I had trouble finding a job for months, using my savings to pay rent. Finally, when my savings ran out and I was at the brink of desperation, I landed a sweet, sweet job through a friend. Grateful for a steady income, I immediately learned how to manage my finances, paying off $2,500 in credit card debt, raising my credit score just shy of 800, and saving up a healthy five digits—all in a year and a half. I also learned that I actually enjoy washing dishes and I finally, finally learned how to do my own laundry.

As 2010 was coming to an end, so was my lease, and my mom once again suggested I move back home. Except this time I agreed. There were a couple of reasons for the change of heart, which I won't get into here, but all in all it just felt right. But still the worry remained at the back of my mind that all my progress could come undone the moment I felt comfortable at home again.

The weekend I moved back, my mom asked me what I eat for breakfast.

"Two hard-boiled eggs," I told her.

"That's it?"

"That's it. Nothing else."

And the next morning I awoke to find three hard-boiled eggs, already peeled. And again the next morning. And the next morning. And every morning since.

And that's just breakfast.

So what does my spoiled upbringing have to do with relationships? Or Valentine's Day? Or anything else for that matter?

Well, it was the weekend before Valentine's Day, and after a long day of cleaning and unpacking, I lay in bed feeling accomplished and let my thoughts wander. I began thinking about a couple girls I've been interested in: Would I be happier with this person or that person...or some other person I haven't even met yet? Should I date one of my exes again, even though there are some serious concerns, just because I'm that attracted to her? How would my life be different if I was in a relationship?

That last question got me thinking: how would my life be different if I was in a relationship? 

I remembered what my life was like in past relationships—how distracted I was, how little time I spent on myself—and I realized that yes, things would be different, definitely better in some ways, but what would I be giving up for it? I thought about my life as it is right now and, in a moment of sudden clarity, it dawned on me: I'm already happy.

I'm happy that I have the time and energy to invest in myself—to train, to read, to teach myself programming, to learn the Beatles anthology on the piano. I'm happy that I have quality, trustworthy friends who enrich me and reciprocate my love. I'm happy that I like and respect my coworkers, that every one of them is friendly and honest and good. I'm happy that I got a brand new 27" iMac for work. I'm happy that I'm going to Japan for the first time next month. I'm happy that my nutrition and genetic tests came back positive. I'm happy that I'm saving so much money living at home. I'm happy that my longer commute allows me to listen to shows I love. I'm happy that I finally learned how to make two machines wash and dry my clothes.

And yes, I'm happy that my parents spoil me.

Because spoiling me is how they show their love for me. And I'm so, so thankful that they love me this much. When I eventually move out, my relationship with them will never be like this again. And one day, when they pass away, I'm going to look back at these moments as the time I spent with them when I was most like myself. When that day comes, when I'm grasping for memories I can no longer make with the people who never stopped loving me unconditionally, I want to be able to remember because I was paying attention. I wasn't sitting at breakfast eating my pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs, distracted by thoughts of some girl and the hope that she might love me as much as my parents already do.