Sequences and Series
journal on feeling fragmented
That winter, she stripped her life down to the bright simplicity of a geometrical drawing: a few straight lines—to and from the engineering college in the city each day, to and from her job at Rockdale Station each night—and the closed circle of her room, a room littered with diagrams of motors, blueprints of steel structures, and railroad timetables.
—Dagny, Atlas Shrugged
How do I achieve my goals in:
Health
Sleep
Attention
Presence
Anki Quotes
Focus
Relationships
Reading
Engineering
Plan out deep personal projects
Personal Projects
I’ve observed that I work way more efficiently—by that, I mean almost 4x—when I reserve a block of time solely for the pursuit of a vision I desire. The most obvious and recent example of this is building my airplane—never have I worked so efficiently, gotten so much done, or felt so alive and scared as when I immersed myself in that project. For a whole week, I forgot about myself, my body, and my routines and schedules—I poured every ounce of energy and focus into that idea.
The problem with this type of pursuit is that it’s extremely expensive. It requires you to fully set aside a considerable chunk of time and cut everything else out of your life. Counterintuitively, you actually get way more done than you think, which means, in retrospect, you spend less overall time than you’d expect. However, prospectively, you have to commit to a huge amount of time upfront. This is because you need to convince your brain of the size of the sacrifice and commitment you’re making—if you’re willing to give up three weeks, then you’ll also be willing to say no to hanging out with your friends to put on the next 2AM 3D print.
To be honest, the only way I was able to accomplish this was because of the environment I was in. That last week in Elgin felt like something out of a dream: there was snow, there was the plane, and there was me. I was hundreds of miles away from family and friends, and it was the end of my internship—I could easily push myself hard without distractions.
But now, a week and a half into Fremont, I’m already seeing the effects of this new environment, if only by the chemical output of finding myself pensive and sad at the end of each day. After experiencing the thrill of that deep commitment, I seem to be desperately pressing that button again. I’m straddled between the desire to commit myself fully and the light flexibility required to adapt to this suddenly new, chaotic environment.
Anyways, it’s pretty clear that that level of deep commitment is unsustainable without the right conditions. The question is whether I desire that and whether I’m willing to make the sacrifices to achieve those conditions. I know there are other ways to work toward what I desire—writing a little in this journal every day is a great example of that. But I feel impatient for that type of passive, slow-rolling, compounding growth—at least compared to what it’s like to fully commit.
Honestly, I’m now considering a life where I only make deep, full commitments, one after another. Just adventuring around the world, focusing only on the next big arc. That seems pretty high-cost in terms of things like my relationships and health, but then again, those things themselves could be phases of deep commitment. I could, say, for a whole month, decide to live, write, and learn about Kieran, or train to join some high-performing sailing team in Japan. That seems really tantalizing.
And this environment of Fremont is not actually the environment of Fremont—it’s the environment that Blake has created while in this half-commitment, chaotic juggling mode. It could extend into the future, and I’m currently wondering what my life would look like if all I did was this chaotic juggling. To be honest, that doesn’t look very appealing. It’s scary, though—I fear the short-term losses in my health and relationships. I’m considering writing letters to my family and friends before I embark on this journey—maybe some sort of temporary farewell before I go under.
Because I really can’t take this juggling anymore. That vision of the perfect Blake, who is able to perfectly balance everything and achieve all my goals in parallel, is seeming more and more impossible. In retrospect, during the times I’ve attempted that, I got nothing done.
Like I said, in reality, I don’t think these commitments have to be super expensive time-wise. Eventually, they are likely to be—I can see myself embarking on year-long or even half-decade-long journeys in the future. But at this stage in my life, I can probably achieve my ambitions with 2-3 week endeavors; even with just a week, I accomplished more than I have in any other single project. The question is how to sync this up with my projected commitments—these next two internships and eventually returning to UCLA. Each involves 3-month phases where I’m in a completely new city—San Francisco, Redmond, Los Angeles.
Side note: That’s why Korea was so fun. Because I let myself fully be there.
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