Surviving the Dip

My Chinese learning habit booms and crashes like the stock market.

The Dot-Com bubble. The Great Recession. The Turbulent 2020.

Today it hit me – the same thing happens with my Chinese. I’ve given eight sweet years of my life to this language, but my passion doesn’t stay consistent. Sometimes it’s a raging inner fire. Sometimes it cools to a flicker.

Take this year. This summer I was absolutely on one with Chinese. Check out how many hours of listening practice I did during this two week stretch in August:

My motivation had never been higher. I also did dozens of hours of 1:1 lessons (sometimes more than 10 in one week), published a daily 20 minute video on YouTube, and recorded podcast episodes. Despite all the past dips I’d been through, I knew this time would be different.

Then came September – the Write of Passage launch began, and my listening practice started to waver. By October 1st, it had screeched to a halt. This time wasn’t different – life got it the way, and my Chinese learning bottomed out.

Or did it?

See, in past dips that’s exactly what happened. Who could forget –

- The Crash of 2015 – senior year spring. Chinese bumped for Keystone Light
- The Great Recession of ‘17 – Weekly tutoring hours plummet to zero
- The Panic of ‘21 – A four-month halt following an explosive 2020

In past cycles, my Chinese learning would roar to life, then screech to a halt. The highs were filled with rapturous excitement, but in the lows, my learning crashed to zero.

During my August high I was certain things had changed. This is it! I’ve broken through, up and to the right forever! And then, cue the crash.

But this time actually was different.

Yes, my daily listening got replaced by Write of Passage live session prep. Sure, I haven’t recorded a podcast in a couple of months. But because I’ve been doing daily videos since last December, my new floor was “only” publishing a 20 minute daily vocab review. That’s way better than zero!

Look how consistent I’ve been in my “dip” month of October:

If that’s what a “down month” looks like, I’m doing okay. I know my next all-time-high will roar like never before.

Don’t fear slow progress, fear no progress. Keeping a baseline will help you survive the dip.

The Terrible Line

Each day it marches on. 

Women named Evelyn or men named Dale (but it’s typically the Evelyns) are the final holdouts. But biology has its limits. Somewhere just shy of six score years, the limit gets hit and the line takes over (there was one soul who pushed beyond this limit. Literally one. Congrats to the French). 

On The Line presses. Relentless and real. Go back and watch the old YouTube footage and you’ll see those it has passed. New York City, 1911. A classic clip, the first “glimpse of the past”-style vid I ever discovered. I’d have to Google it to be sure — there might be a few final stragglers. But New York City 1911 sits right on the edge of the line. 

Imagine dropping back into those old 8mm frames. Walking the streets of Manhattan, three years before the Archduke died. Men in striped suits. Women in their final decade of frilly hats taller than a toddler and dresses made of Robert’s Rules of Order.  

“Hello ma’am! Good day sir! Have you heard of The Line? The Terrible Line?” 

Quizzical looks. 

“The Line? You know The Line? That Terrible Line that each day marches on?”

Furtive glances as the crowd scurries on. No one knows it. 

“Good people of 1911, don’t you know The Line?! The Line lies scrapes forward, about 110 years hence. This Line marks the moment when everyone alive today is GONE!”

The scurrying stops. People listening. 

“It’s coming for all of you! Every heart beating around the globe will succumb to The Line. All the whirring organs, all the rich fractal thoughts of every man woman and child will cease. Life runs out, entropy wins, and the ground takes all. I come from two-thousand and twenty three. It just so happens that my time is your Line. The last living souls of 1911 are expiring as we speak! Don’t you see? This great, terrible Line is coming for ALL of you. This bulldozer of death does not miss.” 

Silence. Sadness. 

“Yes, yes, this Terrible Line of Certain Death for everyone you know and love, from friends to your kids to even that newborn down the street, early in the next century will be — what? What do you want?”

A young man steps forward with something to say.

"Ya say The Line's 'rotten', huh? But ya got it all twisted! The Line ain't for any of us fellas. It's just fer you! Knowin' that all this livin' will end one day — that thought, it gives a fire to today, see? This “Rotten Line” might be on its way, but not today, pal! Today, we got our hearts pumpin' and life buzzin' through us. The Line? It just means we ain't around forever. But ain't it the short-lived things that are the sweetest? Your folks in two thousand twenty-three, they got their own Line, just as real as ours. Don't go sheddin' tears over it."

The crowd cheers. The clouds of fear are gone. On they walk beneath their newfound sun. And I depart 1911, back to 2023, where my own Glorious Line waits for me. 

Why I Love Learning Chinese

It slows down time. People love to say that the years fly by as you get older. But every hour I spend on Chinese feels slow and methodical. When I spend time on Chinese I’m squeezing every drop of life out of these hours, all pointed at a shared purpose. It’s the exact antithesis of mindless scrolling on Twitter.

It lets me use my time for me. Every hour I spend on Twitter or YouTube gives most of the “juice” of that hour away to someone else. Studying Chinese allows me to keep my juice for me.

It makes me feel gratitude. Every hour I spend on Chinese makes me thankful for my past self already spending time on Chinese. I started at zero. Yes it’s hard work to listen to native speakers at full-speed for an hour. But I’ve already come so far. I’m thankful for that.

It feels good to do something over and over. Just stacking up consecutive days listening feels good. Looking at my record of days feels good. It’s living proof I can put my mind toward a goal and do it.

Because I’m already this far, and I can. Very few people have the chance to learn Chinese fluently. I happen to have already spent ~8 years on this crazy pursuit. Just because this grand accomplishment is accessible to me is reason enough to go do it. I’ll be so proud. 

No one else gets to tell me what to do or how to do it. I am the world-class expert on learning Chinese on the Internet. Every day Twitter floods my brain with thousands of “experts” telling me how to live, what to think or what to do. I’m sick of it! I don’t care what you think about your life, or AI, or investing or whatever else. I’m sick of hearing advice from others. In my daily listening habit, I get to be the expert.

It feels good to aim at something. My goal is so simple: I want to speak fluent Chinese. I’m not trying to facilitate my effectiveness of high-leverage growth opportunities using cutting-edge…..blah blah blah. No! I want to speak fluent Chinese. That is all! The clarity of my aim is refreshing. It’s freeing. Having such a pure aim is life-giving.

It’s relaxing. The hour I just spent listening to Chinese was one of the happiest hours of my year. It was a comfortable flow-state bliss for 60 uninterrupted minutes. I was exactly where I needed to be, doing exactly what I needed to do. It’s so simple. It’s relaxing and it makes me happy to practice Chinese. 

It’s mine. My ability to speak Chinese is my gift to myself. No one told me to do this. No one showed me how to do this. No one did it for me. It’s mine, all mine. No one can pay to have what I’ve earned through hard work. It’s rare, precious and valuable.

I get to be autonomous. I don’t have to rely on anyone else’s permission or advice. I’m learning Chinese on my own terms, my own way. I’m carving my own path.

I get to chase excellence. Who doesn’t want to be exceptional at something Truly world-class? I know I do. And at 30 years old I’m already on the brink of exactly that. I, Will Mannon, speak fluent Chinese. I, Will Mannon, am going to be exceptional. I’ll be so good they can’t ignore me. Step by step. Brick by brick. Hour by hour. Ferociously. You are your choices. I choose to speak fluent Chinese. 

So There I Beam My Beam

Your attention is a laser of life-force. 

A beam of hot energy you direct each day. 

Deploying this beam shapes your world. 

Do you even notice your precious beam of life? Where does it shine? Do you aim it carefully or thoughtlessly toss it about?

Recently I’ve realized my beam’s great power. Now I beam carefully. I beam as if ten thousand future Wills watch my beam’s every move. (They do.)

Hearing Peter Diamandis gush about Longevity fills me with hope. 

So there I beam my beam. 

Undisturbed hours with those I love slows time. 

So there I beam my beam. 

Work gives me abundant purpose. 

So there I beam my beam. 

Speaking Chinese brings me blissful joy. 

So there I beam my beam. 

Your beam is worth more than Japan’s GDP. The world knows this. It grabs and grabs at bits of your beam each minute of the year. 

But this fact the world hates: that YOUR beam is YOURS! For that forever degrades the grab. 

Beam wisely.

The Agency of Inputs

We all have radical agency over our inputs. 

It sounds mundane. “Your inputs matter.” Yeah no kidding. Familiarity keeps us blind.

Your inputs become your subjective world. Your life is what you focus on. Things that don’t reach your brain effectively don’t exist, at least for you.

But we mostly miss these choices. To get better, we think big: I’ll spend 30 minutes journaling each morning. Read smarter books. Expand my mind with a summer trip to Singapore. Do those things. But look past explicit moves. Scan your day carefully. Start seeing the river of inputs in which you bathe your mind. How many attentional choices do you make each day? 

Thousands! 

Environment and habits are the substance of focus. Inspect your invisible rituals: how you wake up, your pre-work practice (or lack thereof), your weekly grocery routine, subconscious swipes, the clips you watch, the songs or words that fill your ears at the gym. All inputs! 

The cleanliness of your home. Who you text after work. Your stack of Chrome tabs. The shirt you wear on a Tuesday. The weather outside your window. The city you choose to call home. Each an input - a subtle signal to self about who you are and where you’re headed. 

Life is a stream of inputs. Knowingly or not, you choose the ones that reach your brain and create your world.  To notice your inputs is to obtain agency, to reclaim your life from subconscious motion and habitual drift. And once you can see the thousands of inputs streaming by each day, what to do? 

Choose better ones.

You become your inputs. What are you becoming? 

The Snowball Principle

Write of Passage started as eleven Zoom calls with a few dozen students. Three years later, we're a team of 38 people delivering 150+ hours of live sessions to 364 students. We have fourteen alumni Mentors that each design and deliver their own weekly sessions. Our twelve Editors just provided in-depth writing feedback to over 250 article drafts in less than a week. Mentor and Editor programs are robust cohorts-within-the-cohorts, all with their own applications, training, compensation, and feedback systems.

But these groups had humble beginnings. The Mentor and Editor programs started as sticky notes:

• The first Mentor program was six alums on a Zoom call, 24 hours before course launch

• The first Editor program was five volunteers in a WhatsApp thread

When building a course, each new feature is a tiny snowball you push down a hill. Some melt, never catching on. But other snowballs work! Students love them. They keep rolling and growing beween cohorts, until one day they're core building blocks for your program.

Course building consists of pushing small snowballs down hills, watching them roll, and focusing on the ones that grow. All great course components start as tiny snowballs. If you're building a course, don't aim for perfection in your first cohort. It's ok to start small. To build a great online course, start by pushing snowballs.

East Versus West

Spend any time on Twitter and you'll be exposed to Eastern thought. More and more westerners are digging the East. Meditation, Dzogchen, Jhana. Sam Harris, Osho. Tao Te Ching, Yin Yang, Wu Wei.

Alan Watts, famed ambassador to the East, tells us to relax, stop the striving. You don't dance to reach a certain point on the floor. You dance just to dance! Life is the same way. Just dance, allow life to flow as it will. Clouds don't make mistakes, and neither can you. People rush around trying to achieve things, but there's no need. The point of life is to simply be alive.

Alan Watts lines soothe the western mind. There's nothing to achieve, nothing to chase. What a relief! All I need is within me. I'm a drop in the infinite ocean. I'm the universe exploring itself. I am not my thoughts.

Enter the West. Best I can tell, John Paul Sartre commands us to live in the exact opposite way. "There is no genius other than that  expressed in works of art. In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing."

He not only calls us to strive. Sartre says we are nothing but our striving. We aren't stamped with some pre-defined nature to guide us. We create ourselves through our actions. Great men and women look squarely at reality and dare to take authentic action. They carve a singular path. They don't go with the flow –– they swim upstream and dent the universe.

It's scary to create yourself, and most people duck this calling and conform. If you fail, that's your fault, too. Creative genius or conforming coward –– the choice is yours.

So which is right? East or West? Or more importantly, how do we reconcile these wildly different worldviews? This is a central question in my life, and I suspect I'm not alone.

One Small Change

Last night is the earliest I've gone to bed all year. I woke up at 4:30am this morning feeling refreshed and ready to. attack my day. What happened? What was different about last night?

Last night I left my computer at work. That's it! That's the only change I made. That one small decision produced a revolution in my life. I didn't waste time on Twitter last night because I couldn't waste time on Twitter last night. My computer was gone. I put my phone in my mailbox at 9:36pm. I fell asleep by 9:45pm. I woke up at 4:30am feeling refreshed and ready to attack my day.

All worry, stress, procrastination and anxiety melts in the face of a 5:00am wake-up. It just melts. My mind slows down. Time slows down. I can hear the waves of the ocean crash, clear as could be. The world feels still and calm. Anything feels possible. I'm grateful to be alive. I'm grateful to work at Write of Passage. My life simply makes sense before 5:00am. It's too early to worry.

I have finite wells of truth within me, but they all close early. Wake up before 5:00am to learn who you truly are. If you seek clarity, wake up before 5:00am. To pursue wisdom, wake up before 5:00am. Wake up before 5:00am.

My comments on Erik Hoel's "Exit the Supersensorium"

Exit the Supersensorium

This is the best essay I’ve read all year (so far).

Erik’s piece explains why fiction is externalized dreaming (just like how cooking is externalized digestion), and why we must have standards in art (while the world tells us that standards are elitist, oppressive, unjust).

This article hit the bullseye for me. After college I "rediscovered" reading. I started cranking through non-fiction books. I would proudly tell others that I "don't watch shows", then quote David McCullough ("However little TV you watch, watch less.") Who has time for Netflix when there's Taleb to read?

But there's a certain feeling of emptiness that comes from only consuming the real. It was a vague, hard-to-pin-down feeling. But it's the jaundice Erik mentions. Now I watch some shows. But mostly I'm on fire for great novels. I have trouble describing how much better (richer? more scintillating?) I've found the best novels compared to typical entertainment. Every other page of "Middlemarch" has a Michelin-level sentence so beautiful that I have to pause for a moment to savor it. You can't help but have a high standard once you've been exposed.

Go Narrow. Go Deep

Originally published on February 16th

On New Years Eve, it hit me. You've found your things. Now go narrow and go deep!

At this moment of realization, a wave of freedom and relief swept through me. With the fresh new year of 2022 laid out before me, I could boil down my entire life's focus into five distinct buckets. No more exploring, at least not for now. I knew beyond doubt I had found my targets, and this year would be the year to pursue them with the full weight of my focus.

The five buckets:

Write of Passage: I have my dream job. We have a strong foundation and long-term plans. Now, it's time to deliver. Deliver the best possible cohort; deliver the best possible Student Experience for every student in each cohort. That means hyper-attention to detail – student communication, community structure, live session transitions. While I usually like thinking big-picture, I go hyper-focused when it comes to planning and delivering Write of Passage. 2022 is the year in which we continue to perfect the course.

Writing: I love to write. In my best moments, I know I can write well. I think about writing all the time (both for work, and in my free time). My bottleneck? Actually writing. A common challenge with a uniquely devilish personal twist. I'm proud of the quality of my writing in 2021 (example, example) but not the quantity. 2022 is the year my writing habit evolves from sporadic to regular.

Reading:  For the past five years, no activity has brought more joy to my life. I love to read, full stop. This year, I want to read widely to inform my writing. I'm prioritizing reading fiction, because it brings me joy and because soaking my mind in beautiful prose can't but help my own flow of words. I'll sprinkle in some nonfiction for the sake of learning, but only the best ideas from the brightest minds.

Chinese: The only activity that brings me more joy than reading. If hobbies can be soul mates, I've found mine. Practicing Chinese feels like plugging into an always-on intravenous drip of Flow. I've found my perfect method, too: parroting, where I say exactly what a native-speaker podcast host is saying, to practice my tones and learn new vocab. It's free and perfectly challenging. I have exciting long-term visions for where learning Chinese can take me, but for this year, I'll be working hard, quietly, and mostly in private.

Family and friends: In college I tried to meet as many people as possible. Now I subscribe to a new line of thinking: you'd rather have four quarters than one hundred pennies. I'm prioritizing deepening existing relationships rather than forging lots of new ones.

Go narrow, go deep. 2022: it's go time!

The Outward Tug

“Your life is the sum of what you focus on.”  –Winifred Gallagher

Those simple words gripped me when I read them a few summers ago. They have yet to let go. Whenever I read them, my heart stirs and my mind floods: Time is a precious gift! Eliminate the irrelevant, elevate the grand! On my best days, my daily actions match my peak-state thoughts.

But it’s hard. Life pounds us with distraction. You know the ones – media, both mass and social. Advertisements. Breaking news. Rivers of information that endlessly enter our eyes and ears. This noisy deluge yanks our attention away from ourselves, out toward others. Look at her, what about him, eat this, wear this, watch that, did you hear about THIS?

Call it the Outward Tug.

We’re immersed in the Outward Tug. Modern life blitzes us with other people, other events, other gadgets, other stories, other shocking news you absolutely must know this very moment, right now, look! Out, out, look out, away from yourself.

The Outward Tug beats our inner eye blind – that subtle side of ourselves that notices our own thoughts, our own perceptions, our own connections, desires, friendships, hopes, disappointments, excitements, thrills, musings, curiosities, oddities, hilarities, amazements, joys. The wet, messy miracle in your skull holds billions of neurons firing trillions of times per second. The creative potential hiding in you (yes, you) and every person alive today dazzles the mind, like seven billion beams of kaleidoscopic colors. And yet. We scroll and stream. 

Fight the Outward Tug by making an Inward Turn. And quotes. Quotes help too.

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y.

This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral…You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

― Terence McKenna

Something You Learned This Year

I wrote this piece during a five-minute exercise in The Writing Studio. The prompt – write about a lesson learned this year by blending three writing styles. My styles: slang, ecstatic, surreal.

We must use our time better, yes we MUST, oh how we must. It's the highest stakes game, the ultimate winner-take-all, the ol' UWTA, yes the UWTA. My God, and people don't know! They think it's a game of patty cake with the nieces and nephews, have some fun, give it a shot, no big deal. Right? No!

No, no, a thousand times no. This is our lives, we have such a limited slice, one slim sliver amidst to crushing bricks of nothingness that press in always, never ceasing, always looming, then one day in the next few dozen years (or days, or months, who knows) it all goes CRACK and that's IT! Imagine! That's all we get, and then we're gone, and we're gone forever, nothing more, for trillions and trillions of years, then still trillions more. Think of the Exurbia video, we think we get another shot and then three blinks and it's gone, this whirl of life circles the drain and then we're left with nothing.

But not today! Today we still have time, life's most precious gift, this thing we should cradle in our arms with heartfelt intensity. On this moment hangs eternity. And the next one, and the next. Seize it! What else do we have?! Grab the cup of life and gulp like a parched man in the desert. Be glad that the water still flows today!

When the Internet is Good

We all feel it. 

Our screens deliver a ceaseless flow of the upsetting and the trivial. To live with a smartphone is to weather a daily barrage of updates you didn’t ask for: celebrity pets, a grisly crime, the latest outrage that has people talking. 

Welcome to life in the Internet Age. 

We’re conducting a grand experiment. What happens when you drop mankind’s most powerful tool into four billion pockets? Thirty years in, we’ve hit some growing pains, for self and society. Maybe you’ve felt them: the empty ache that follows a marathon scroll. Or the curtain of uncertain that hangs over public life in the age of pandemic-induced paranoia.  

These downsides of the Internet are hard to resist. They tug at our sleeves, those little red dots, snatching our attention, splitting our focus. We give in to the furious blitz of noise – the constant urge to read, react, and share. Slowly we acclimate. We notice the impact only sometimes, in small moments: a startling screen time report. Our inability to sit still with a book. A relative’s oddly sharp views on the jab. 

Our new virtual world divides us and distracts us. But Balaji says that the Internet increases variance, both the bad and the good. So where to look for the good? Something deeper than same-day delivery and SaaS extensions. When does the web leave the world doubtlessly better? What would you say? 

Last Wednesday night brought me an answer. 130 faces spread across five Zoom screens and six continents. The final night of Write of Passage. Student after student sharing stories of growth, new friends, and taking action in the face of fear. Love and support whipping around the world fast as light, a creative celebration that wouldn’t exist without browsers and broadband. 

Who knew you could feel so close to a group of former strangers you’ve never seen offscreen? Who knew the brief, intense bonds of summer camp and study abroad can also appear in five-week cohorts? Who knew a virtual room could feel so alive?   

On Wednesday night, distractions fell silent. Divisions gave way. For ninety minutes, Write of Passage students caught a glimpse of when the Internet is good.

Your Michaelangelo Self

Has art ever moved you to tears?

Two summers ago came close for me.

Florence, Italy. A two hour wait. Line stretching three city blocks. Thousands of sightseers from across the planet, scrolling their phones, tapping their feet, slowly inching forward, all for a glimpse of the greatest statue ever carved.

Finally, our turn. We round the corner and behold: down a long hall, rising above the tourist masses, the ideal vision of man.

Until you see Michelangelo's David in person, you don't realize its size. It's colossal. Goliath's killer stands seventeen feet tall, more demi-God than shepherd boy. That first glance so captivates that you miss the half-dozen statues lining the hallway in the foreground. 

But as we press forward, weaving through bodies, these side statues catch my eye. I stop for a look. Woahhh. What?!. I'm split between awe and disgust. They’re all unfinished. 

That’s right. The entire corridor is lined with half-finished sculptures. Human shapes twist out of marble blocks, eternally trapped in their stone prisons. As I stared at these lesser artworks, something inside me shivered. An unsettled feeling arose, a sense of pity for these grotesque figures. They had so much potential to be magnificent works of Renaissance art, world-famous Florentine figures. But instead, for lack of focus or commitment or simply running out of time, there they stay, the ugly hors d’oeuvre before the main event.  

On I stared. I couldn’t shake the gross, uncanny feeling of the unfinished human form. It bothered me unreasonably. Finally, my eyes swung away, upward, to the magnificent David statue rising high above the rest. What a contrast! A perfect depiction of man, carved to the finest detail. Not even a speck of excess stone. That’s when it hit me: 

We are the unfinished statues, shackled by excess stone: that fast food fix, gobs of time spent swiping glass, swirling worries that drain us of presence. Michelangelo’s David stands tall as our ideal self: who we know we could be in our best moments, stripped clean of our sticky vices. Close your eyes and admire your Michaelangelo Self: standing tall and purposeful, free from the icky nonsense our abundant age throws our way. 

It’s so easy to get stuck in the stone. Excess marble grabs at us, tugs us down, swallows some of us whole. But maybe, just maybe, the visceral disgust of the hall of prisoners and the magnificent David statue can help you in those modern battles with screen time, anxious thoughts and trans fat. Maybe this image can help you step into your Michaelangelo self.

The Internet Lives Within Me

The internet lives within me. 

It got in there early, I drew the lucky ticket and it arrived along with me. And now it's part of me, down to the very cells inside me. It leads me by green pastures, to still waters of endless streams of mindless information that dulls my mind for good and for worse. This mythic monstrosity will never not be me, yes it’s a part of me, as we become what we see. I ingest the internet and the internet ingests me, in my fragmented thoughts and my shallow curiosities and my impossible yearnings for all things, my deep desire to wrangle the web and know and see all. 

As I live on the internet, I interface with the infinite. My worldview is shaped by this constant brush with totality. I’m forever awash in the infinite glow. Past generations didn't have this, no way, they had 8 things and we have infinite things, infinite clips and tweets and ideas and people. Even people are now infinite, one person becomes 1000 more if you so choose. We’re frictionless, we’re limitless. But the cement-level certainty served up in each search makes us crave certainty everywhere else. What’s the meaning of living? How will things go and what do they think of me? We want certainty in abstract things, trivial things. We’re chained to detail, seeking fixation in a nebulous world.

And yet – look around! Behold what’s possible! We dwarf time and space with nudge of a thumb. Create whole worlds we can see but can’t touch. A brilliant future unfurls before us, amidst the clouds of noise. Beyond our obsession with certainty lies a boundless mystery, our chance to hurl into the void and build a new reality.  

Enslaved by small details but alive to the infinite. This is our paradox, the hand we must play. And on my mind churns, neurotic and grand. For the internet lives within me.

My Secret Joy

It began as a chore. Now it gives me a rush. 

The thing? Language learning. Chinese, specifically. Learning Chinese is my rock climbing, my kitesurfing, my skydiving just for fun. Listening to natives speak full-speed Mandarin feels like flying down the back bowl at Vail, skis pointed down the hill, ripping and carving at speeds suited for the interstate. 

Here’s how it works: I pop on the noise-cancelling Bose and fire up Shengdong Jixi (my all-time favorite podcast). Xu Tao’s perfect Mandarin slides back into my ears, her silky voice pulling me into blissful flow. Hai dajia hao, huanying nimen shouting shengdong jixi, wo shi Xu Tao. At this point it’s Pavlovian. Just writing those words feels like taking a small hit. 

She starts the interview. Some guest, some topic. I surf her words like a big wave pro, right on the edge of understanding and not. Sometimes just words come through, other times full phrases and sentences. I’ve got the thread, then I lose it, then I snatch it back again. The challenge pulls me into a perpetual presence, a flow state of known and unknown that raises my heart rate and makes me lean in. 

My body feels movement as she speaks. It’s hard to describe, this sense of forward momentum. Skiing fits best. That rush of sensation as you fly downhill, the swooshing sound of snow passing beneath. Recognizing certain words brings the same visceral pleasure as a crisp turn or big drop. Shenme shihou, jiu shi zheyang de, qishi wo juede…It’s exhilarating. The perfect Goldilocks-level difficulty: not too easy, not too tough. And it never gets old. Late at night, when I should be in REM, I’ll find myself entering my third hour of Chinese listening, still riveted.

It’s a privilege to be an advanced language learner. I’m thankful to have an activity that brings such a deep sense of joy. It’s an infinite game I can always return to. Sometimes I imagine I’m skiing a never-ending mountain. Picture it: 100,000 miles of slope beneath me, and on I ski, day after day, listening, carving, gliding down the mountain, never getting bored. 

I’ll never know what it feels like to experience most things – I’ll never be a champion kite surfer, a starting pro quarterback or a free solo climber. These activities all bring their own rush, one which I’ll never know firsthand. But that’s okay with me. I’ve got Chinese. 

Beauty and the Brief

Remember how it felt to be eighteen? 

The staggering freedom of living with friends, no parents, no rules. An open frontier of selfhood rolled out before you. Filled to the brim with the excitement of youth. 

Eighteen-year-old me relished those feelings. But bliss came paired with an awareness of brevity. Even my freshman-year self sensed the fleeting nature of these “good old days”. One moment stands out: walking home one night from a football game. Warm light from our dorm spilling out into the midnight. As we neared the door, a dad (40? 50?) pointed toward the brick. “See kids, that’s where I used to live. My old dorm.” His kids rolled their eyes. I took notice. 

A proud alum back to visit. A wistful gaze at his old home. Memories of days long gone, never to return. What would this middle-aged man give for one more night with his buddies, sipping bourbon and pondering life deep into the night? We walked by him, toward the amber glow, into his faded dream.

In that moment I felt the bittersweet split of time’s two-faces: the beauty and the brief. These joyful college years would soon give way to life’s relentless melt, and we’d soon enough be standing on that hillside thinking back to these very moments. But how sweet to know, not tonight! Tonight the glowing hallway was ours. It had passed through decades of hands before, and decades more would follow. But for a nine-month sliver, this precious space belonged to us. 

Now zoom out with me. From nine months in a golden hallway to 90 years beneath a golden sun. The point remains. Life is finite, we’ll be gone soon, just like all who passed before. Glimpsing a black-and-white photo does it for me: all those smiling faces, now dead, replaced by us, and soon to be eclipsed by those not yet born. 

How does this bedrock of the human condition make you feel? Do you bend toward the bitter or the sweet? Life is fleeting and finite, what a raw deal? Or do you marvel at the miracle of us being here at all? This brief slot of time, right now, when this brilliant world belongs to us? 

I’ll defer my answer to a certain John Paul Sartre, subject of many black-and-white photos, now dead: 

“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”

CBCs and 1940s Football

Remember Sammy Baugh? 

Maybe not. But if you know Tom Brady, you know Sammy. The GOAT of his era, Baugh ran rings around opponents. His jukes and spins turned defenders to fools. The Washington Redskins rode his arm to two NFL championships and countless wins.

Eighty years ago, Baugh’s scrappy play stunned the NFL diehards. Football in the 20s and 30s meant tough runs up the middle. Passing forward was a new invention, rarely used, until Sammy came along. He hucked and chucked his way into NFL record books. Crowds were delighted. 

But they were delighted for lack of comparison. Show a football fan his footage (it’s on YouTube) and see if they notice. His wobbling spiral. His frequent interceptions. The way the ball hangs like a duck before dropping into his teammate’s arms. Sammy was beloved, but put a 2021 practice squad QB in a 1941 Washington uniform and you have a new GOAT. Today’s standard of play has been elevated far beyond the black-and-white days. 

Enter CBCs. Online learning in the 2010s was like football in the 1930s: MOOC it right up the middle with a 4% completion rate. Then, suddenly, innovation appeared: live, virtual, cohort-based learning. Time-bound courses with community-driven accountability. Online education reborn, producing outcomes and friendships rather than unclicked Coursera lessons and guilt. 

I’ve run two cohort-based courses for nearly two years. We’re thrilled with our course experience and our students’ outcomes. But like all CBC builders right now, we’re also Slingin’ Sammy Baugh. The format is new, and crowds (see: the Twittersphere) are delighted, especially compared to the footsteps we’re following. But we won’t stop improving. Most of our software stack (Zoom, Teachable) was originally built for other purposes. We’ve just started using data to track outcomes and customize the course experience. We’re still building the systems and tools that will deliver the Brady-level course experience we imagine.

Our team is scrappy and delivers results, just like Sammy. But as Sammy laid the foundation for Brady, our current courses chart the path toward the technicolor future of cohort-based learning to come. 

Yes, And

Driving home on Sunday. Radio blaring in the background. A break in the music, and the host jumps in:

“Richard Branson went to space. Jeff Bezos will follow in a few weeks. The question everyone wants to know: do these space missions serve any higher purpose? Or do they just inflate the egos of billionaires?

It’s been interesting to watch the coverage of Branson and Bezos’s space missions over the past few weeks. Opinions seem split. Some feel excited to see space exploration move forward. Some feel indifferent. But a certain subset of very-online people are furious that these missions are taking place. 

“Imagine going to space when instead you could write one check and solve world hunger.” This not-uncommon hot-take can be easily found on Twitter and third-tier blog sites. Commenters share their desire to “eat the rich”. Tweets about Bezos’s upcoming mission include replies with Amazon-branded guillotines.  

Why the criticism? From my view, these space missions are self-evidently rad. Mankind’s most successful businessmen choosing to risk their lives scrape the edge of the atmosphere? I can think of worse ways they could spend their money. They’re pioneering new rocket technology and prying open a brand-new space tourism industry, and with enough cajones to risk their own lives as part of the effort. Dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands will soar through the stratosphere as a result of their zeal for exploration. 

But it inflates their egos. Yes. It does. Any doubt of ego-service disappeared when Branson scrambled to schedule his own spaceflight immediately after Bezos announced his trip.  These space flights bring attention and adoration to two of the wealthiest men on Earth, neither of whom are lacking for praise. They boost the billionaires’ companies and personal status. 

We’re biological creatures. From the poorest beggar to Bezos and Branson, all of us receive the world through a three-kilogram knot of neurons. No number of zeros attached to a net worth can help someone transcend our biological hardware. Our worldview is partially driven by an ancient caveman-like amygdala that craves food, sex, status, and not much else. Blasting through the stratosphere in a rocket you created is a high-status move. 

Branson and Bezos are motivated by their egos. But the ego stroke does not erase the nobility of these missions. All of our actions are driven by egos, at least in part. We’re beholden to our biology. But ego isn’t the only motivation. Both men do believe in the importance of spaceflight to accelerate human advancement, spur innovation, and inspire future builders. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and firing off hot-take criticism of these missions misses the mark. Yes, these missions bring status to the billionaires. *And* they inspire mankind. 

Cynical criticism of these space flights is tempting because it scores quick internet points. But beware a blindspot toward the benefit that spaceflight brings along with the ego boost. Cut the rocket billionaires a break, because we’re all status. Some just happen to leave the earth in service of their egos. Thankfully, unlike yachts or Rolexes or McLarens, this fancy hobby also moves the human project unalterably forward. Yes, And. 

Dreams Get Dusty

We all have it. What's yours?

That thing we're striving for. In our best moment, in our peak states, it shines bright in our mind's eye. Launch the website. Publish the project. Start that side business. In those moments of lucid clarity, we know exactly what we want, and why we want it. Our best selves construct a vision that stirs the soul.

And then, weeks later, after another late night, another wasted hour, the thought of that shimmering future self has become a blur of its original self. What exactly do we want, again? Why do we want it? And why aren't we doing it?

This weekend, I realized my apartment can help answer these questions.

In January, I moved into a slick new apartment. It's my first time living alone, which means no roommates to deal with, but also, no roommates to help tidy up. Cleanliness rests squarely on me.

Before long it already started. Dust began piling up under the couch and in the corners of my room. The off-white kitchen floor grew more off, and less white. Sand trekked in from the beach gave the floors a bit too much texture. My apartment was dusty. After a month, something needed to be done.

So I bought a Swiffer. And I cleaned my apartment. Problem solved.

Here's what I didn't do: I didn't feel crushing guilt when thinking about my dirty apartment. I didn't feel searing pain in my chest when looking at dust piling up in the corners. Why not? Because everyone knows it's normal. Apartments get dusty. It's part of life. We notice the grime, clean them dispassionately, and move on with our lives.

Not so with our goals.

In my best moments, I have big dreams. Projects I want to publish. Skills I want to learn. Principles I want my life to stand for. In moments of peak state, my vision for my future self is damn inspiring.

But all things in this life tend toward disorder. Our goals are no exception. But just like my apartment, my dreams gets dusty. Only in this case, the dust is made of iron. It weighs on me like an anchor, pulling me deep into mental loops of worry and guilt. I've got the mental scars to prove it.

Here's what I'm trying now: when I stumble on a goal, when I miss a habit, when I fail to publish, I'll recognize that these mistakes aren't heavy anchors dragging down my character. These mistakes are as natural as dust in my apartment. Not only harmless, but expected. No big deal. Just means it's time to use the Swiffer of solitude to wipe away the dark thoughts, clear up my goals, and move forward with clarity and confidence.