I graduated from college this past spring and spent some time afterward working on a project I’d been thinking about since the end of high school. It was the first time in a while I gave myself time to work on something I thought I’d love building—a closed-loop, wearable intervention for tics and OCD/ADHD-driven body-focused repetitive behaviors.

I spent years thinking about this problem space and building towards it throughout college, learning about hardware, healthcare, consumer, and more. The last time I ever made a “10-year plan” a couple years back, this project was Years 5-7 of that plan.

And then I worked on it now.

Something funny happens when you work on something you think was a calling but had been too scared/busy/<whatever other excuse> to do—when you work on something you had put on The Pedestal. Putting something on The Pedestal is more than just having a perfectionist view about it, or being too scared to approach it.

For me, putting this project on The Pedestal originally meant it was The Problem To Solve. But at some point, five years later, it became more of The Thing That Will Be Impressive To Make instead. After a while, putting this project on a pedestal made me feel like I had to make it impressive or complex enough to justify keeping it there for so long. And being around people working on technically impressive projects, I felt I had to do something comparable. How silly would it be to have the project I’ve been thinking about for years just wind up being a week-long side project? So I slowly began to feel that I needed to build the “better project,” instead of just building the thing I wanted in the first place.

I did feel excited when I started reading the new research in space, speccing out the project, and putting it together. The project was going to be awesome and complex and impressive and and and… But I mistook that excitement as a sign that this new direction was something I genuinely wanted—it wasn’t. And this misalignment became apparent very quickly.

Before you begin, there is often an assumption that your energy will naturally move towards the project, because it’s the Thing You Chose. But building a project, no matter how enthused you are about its beginning, will never be sunshine and rainbows the whole time. Every project has its lulls and late nights. And when I started facing obstacles, when my pace of work slowed, and when I didn’t feel the energy flow that way, I started to panic. After all, I’d finally approached The Pedestal. Was I just being lazy? Was I just not gritty enough? And don’t I owe it to myself to see these things through?

Working on things out of obligation for your younger self

The danger of putting something on The Pedestal is that you believe that it is What You Are Meant To Do, and you spend a lot of your time thinking about it.

And what you do in the meantime, before you actually approach The Pedestal, is in pursuit of and in preparation for something you believe you will love. Additionally, if you’re tunnel-visioned about it, it prevents you from looking at other opportunities or problems around you. It can make you less curious.

But the version of you that put the project on The Pedestal is often not the same person you are now. Over the past five years, I’ve learned so much more about engineering, the world, and myself. I’ve met and been inspired by incredibly curious and hardworking people. I learned more about my personal worldview. I discovered design, improv comedy, and other things that my energy does naturally flow towards. The world also looks completely different from the way it did five years ago. But keeping an eye on The Pedestal only took up more mindshare that could have been spent following these curiosities. The Pedestal moved me in a direction that younger me would have wanted, but not necessarily what I might want today.

And at a certain point (after numerous conversations with friends, mentors, and my dad), I realized that I was doing this project, in large part, out of a sense of obligation to my younger self, as if I owed it to her to work on this and give it a shot.

Doing something out of obligation for your younger self can sometimes work. It often does if there is genuinely nothing else you’d rather be doing. But it can only take you so far if you aren’t having fun and feeling joy while doing it now, because working out of obligation is also a negative pressure.

Tied up in the feeling of doing something out of self-obligation is a need to prove ourselves, a sense of insecurity, or a tendency to latch onto our last clear conception of ourselves.

But what I’ve learned over the past few years is that working from that place of negative pressure inevitably stops working. For me, it got exhausting. I had cried wolf to myself too many times about what would happen if I didn’t do those things (my internal, subconscious monologue was often, “If you don’t lock in and do X, then Y bad outcome will happen. Or you won’t achieve Z good thing”). And I had made incredibly driven and ambitious friends who had a different framework for ambition that prioritized health, curiosity, and joy.

Their framework prioritized being a good friend, following interests as they learned new things, and going where they felt most energized. It was a framework I used to look down on, thinking that it wasn’t gritty or ambitious enough because it didn’t look like bashing your head against a wall. It wasn’t the “eating bitter” phrase I grew up with. But I learned that orienting ambition from a positive force is possible: to build out of a belief that you deserve to move from a place of joy and curiosity, to learn the things you want, to solve a problem you feel strongly about, and to see what’s on the other side of it.

The Alternative (placing the Next Dot and Living Life like a Scene)

Actually following that framework can be difficult, though. So many people build out of insecurity because it’s an effective motivator. I’ve personally fallen back on it countless times whenever I needed a quick dose of motivation.

And my point isn’t to say you shouldn’t finish what you start or accomplish what you set your mind to. But our guts know the distinction between these two categories; between “I want to see this through, I enjoy this through thick and thin, and there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing,” and “this is genuinely not meant for me, and what I thought this would be like is not actually what the experience is like at all.” My point is that we have the agency to step out.

I often think about the life metaphor from The Courage to be Disliked—life is a series of dots that, from afar, looks like a drawn line, curve, or squiggle. As you move through every present moment in life, you place each subsequent dot.

What I’d done up until now is say to myself that, because the me from 20 dots back would have wanted me to, I ought to lay my next dot here. But just because you’ve laid out a series of dots doesn’t mean you owe the line anything. You just lay out your next point in the direction you’d like to go.

You can’t plan for what the line will look like at the end. You can only place each dot as you live, then, looking back, see the line that’s formed on the page. Improv taught me this over the past two years, but it’s taken me a while to internalize and apply it to how I live my life; you can have an idea of how life, a semester, or a scene will go, but beyond a general direction, no amount of planning will allow you to predict your future. The scene, semester, and life always change and often never go as planned. And that uncertainty requires you to be detached from the outcome, to whatever you think your line will look like. The only thing that exists is the present moment and your choice. The only thing you can do is decide where you wish to place your next dot, what you wish to experience next, and then place it.

I’m being very intentional about the next dot I place. I will go where my curiosities take me, do what makes me a better communicator and leader, take a path that allows me to create impactful things that people resonate with and connect with, and have fun while doing it. I don’t know the specific coordinates of that dot just yet. But I do know the direction I’ll put it, and that it’ll be a choice made by and for the present me—no more putting things on The Pedestal.

P.S: A Note to People with Menstruation Hormone Cycles

This was one of my first times having a longer period of time with unstructured, self-directed work. And for the first time, I really got to observe how a lot of this reflection was colored by my hormone cycle.

Up until now, I’ve always had a school-year structure, a work deliverable and timeline, or a sufficiently short project that isn’t longer than a month. And I’ve felt moments of doubt before about projects, the future, or what I’m spending my time on. I’ve felt what I believed to be a gut instinct about something. And I’ve made decisions based on those feelings. But over this past summer, I started making note of when I felt best and worst about things.

I found that, depending on how you experience your cycle, the phases of your menstrual hormone cycle can unearth things or influence how your gut intuitively feels. For me, I found that it’s typically been the second half (last ~5 days) of the luteal phase and the first half (~week) of the follicular phase where I feel most anxious and “off” about what I’m working on. For the rest of the cycle, the motivation to push forward is much more present. Often, the anxiety during the dip takes the form of the belief that I need to dump the project immediately. I’m learning not to take this as advice on what to do, but rather as a sign to reflect on what might be causing the uneasiness: to discern the message better each time. I’ve been heavily inspired by Chloe Zhao here on working with the seasons rather than against them, ever since I heard her talk about the experience of working with her cycle for Hamnet.

So if you’ve ever felt like things are off and everything on your plate feels wrong, I’d advise checking in with your cycle for an extra data point. Observe how you feel and what might be causing it, but hold off on making large decisions about it until afterward unless necessary. In the meantime, the systems and routines you put in place matter a lot (at least I’ve noticed they do for me). For me, my morning workout and supplement* routine, and my evening Magnesium Glycinate, help tremendously (my days with and without them look very different).

*Note: my supplement stack has recently been:

  • Vitamin B Complex for metabolism
  • Vitamin D for mental health and seasonal depression (was much more helpful back in Boston)
  • L-Theanine with coffee for clarity and focus
  • Calcium Citrate for bone health and mood support
  • Turmeric (just one 500mg pill instead of the two-pill serving) for anti-inflammation

This is just what has been working for me! I will sing praise for Vitamin D (especially if you’re in the Northeast) and L-Theanine (especially if you have ADHD) any day. I added Calcium Citrate and Magnesium Glycinate after noticing the impacts of a cycle this summer, and am keeping tabs on how those help.

P.P.S: TYs

The reflections I had and conclusions I came to while writing this weren’t realized alone. I want to thank all the wonderful people who sat down with me for a much needed chat, who gave their thoughts, who shared their own experiences, and much more. Thanks to my dad and mom, Claire Liu, Michael Hla, Gabriela Perez, Marcus Gomez, Paya, Vincent, Emily Neill, Akaash Kolluri, Annmaria Antony, Ameya Jadhav, Jason Gao, Odin Farkas, Andrew Hariri, and Krystal Montgomery.

On to the next:)