Tropicana Orange and The Meaning of Life

Originally published on December 1st, 2024

“What’s your favorite color, and why?”

My first ever Toastmasters impromptu speech (two minutes, no prep) and this was my topic?! I thought for a moment. Precious seconds ticked by. Then it struck me:

“My favorite color is Tropicana Orange. As a kid, we drank orange juice. Every day, twice on Sundays. And in the top right corner of the juice carton, tucked against where the cardboard folds, there was an orange. An orange imbued with the deepest, most perfect orangey-red hue, bold yet beautiful, an incarnation of fiery understatement. And every morning at breakfast I would stare at the orange-red fruit, and I knew not why, but I loved it. It grabbed at my attention and never stopped. There was some mystery in that orange that I never fully unraveled, and never got over. I remember it clearly to this day. So that’s my favorite color: Tropicana orange.”

Scattered applause. I’d survived. Only later would I discover my answer touched life’s deepest meaning.

______

When I try to convey the radiance of Emerson, or Emily Dickson (or Rilke, or Pessoa), words fail. Images must take over.

Here’s the latest image I’ve invented: A sheet of paper lies flat on a table. You press your palm and five fingers against it, then swiftly pull all your fingers back. Crinkle crinkle. Two dimensions becomes three. Do this quickly several times and it’ll tear. You’ve formed a hole in the center in the page. Keep going and soon it’s wide enough to fit your whole hand.

I’ve come to realize that this is what The Greats did in their writing. Emerson and Dickinson (and Rilke and Pessoa) held out their open hand, pressed their palm against the flat fabric of reality. And in their genius wisdom, they swiftly pulled their fingers back. Over and over and over. Until, suddenly, they’d torn a hole into space and time itself. This visible, touchable reality, that which we’re wired to assume is most real — Emerson and Dickinson (and Rilke and Pessoa) ripped right through it. A fake! A facade! And on they tore, and deep into the heart of the invisible actually real they peered, and my God, behold what they found! The bubbling, broiling, Infinite Magma, the limitless source, the endless eternal self. And in their writing, these “boring” black-and-white figures yell at us, begging to the world, “Look, LOOK! Look what I’ve found! It’s glorious! And you have it too, inside yourself, this churning life force, dynamic and alive beneath your crusty Pangea plates, if you would please take a minute to look at your inner self!” And in my mind, this lava of life glows Tropicana Orange.

Have you seen it? What does it look like to you? And what are you doing about it?

I’ve seen it. This year. Call it a rediscovery. My first pass at life-stirring literature half a decade ago gave me a glimpse. And then as work took priority, head self eclipsed heart self, and my inner self receded. Upon arriving in Kunming, China in March, it roared back suddenly, with unexpected force. After four intense years of company building, I gave myself a year off to study Chinese full-time. And as I spoke Chinese for hours each day, and spent my time reading Emerson, and others, back my inner self came. I relearned the great Transcendentalist truth, that the inner self truly is primary, and that viewable, touchable reality is secondary. It’s a profound truth that must be felt to be believed.

But that’s why reading these Greats feels like the most real thing in life, to me. Time feels different. Their profound truth smacks me across the face again and again, the reality of their ideas pierce ever deeper, cracking open my own true self. And it’s not just theory. Once you see and feel your inner self, you can align your life to it. You develop an ever-stronger instinct for what actives make you feel Flow, Aliveness, Resonance, and Attunement. The difference is not linear. Things properly aligned with your inner self aren’t 2x better than the default option, but 100x or 1000x better. I know this firsthand. Hour upon hour of speaking Chinese unleashes a flood of good feeling that’s exceptionally difficult to describe, but it satisfies my soul, so I know it’s truth. It’s absolutely self-justifying, the peace that passes all understanding. You know because you know because you know. You know because you’ve tapped into the infinite inner source. Let there be no doubt, this is what you’re meant to do.

And it’s not just Chinese. For me it’s also reading the right books, having conversations with the right people, pondering the right awe-inspiring questions-that-can’t-be answered. That which lights an uncommon fire within, and endless fiery Tropicana Orange.

But don’t just take my word for it. Listen to The Greats who pierced reality long ago and showed me the way:

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. What is the nature and power of that science-baffling star which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial or impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, of life, which we call Spontaneity, or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.”

“We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek to pry into the soul that causes, all philosophy is at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due.”

“Perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time all mankind — although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the Sun.”

“All resolves into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things are real so by so much virtue they contain…thus all concentrates. Let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact.”

Emily Dickinson:

The Outer—from the Inner
Derives it’s Magnitude
’Tis Duke, or Dwarf, according
As is the Central Mood

The fine—unvarying Axis
That regulates the Wheel
Though spokes—spin—more conspicuous
And fling a dust—the while.

The Inner—paints the Outer
The Brush without the Hand
It’s Picture publishes—precise
As is the inner Brand

On fine—Arterial Canvas
A Cheek—perchance a Brow
The Star’s whole Secret—in the Lake
Eyes were not meant to know.

________

The Brain—is wider than the Sky
For—put them side by side
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside

The Brain is deeper than the sea
For—hold them—Blue to Blue
The one the other will absorb
As Sponges—Buckets—do

The Brain is just the weight of God
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound
And they will differ—if they do
As Syllable from Sound

Ranier Maria Rilke:

“Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this thinking whatever you want to: a remembering of your own childhood or a yearning toward a future of your own—only be attentive to what is arising within you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.”

“It is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don’t think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

“It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.”

Fernando Pessoa:

“Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivial in the light of my soul’s supreme reality, and next to the pure sovereign splendor of my original and frequent dreams. These, for me, are more real.”

“I’m the size of what I see, and not the size of my stature. I look at the immense sky and the countless stars, and I’m free, with a winged splendor whose fluttering sends a shivering throughout my body.”

“Life is whatever we conceive of it to be. For the farmer who considers his field to be everything, the field is an empire. For a Caesar whose empire is still not enough, the empire is a field. The poor man possesses an empire, the great man a field. All that we truly possess are our own sensations; it is in them, rather than in what they sense, that we must base our life’s reality.”

“Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extend we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us. The dreamer is an issuer of banknotes, and the notes he issues circulate in the city of his mind just like real notes in the world outside. Why should I care if the currency of my soul will never be convertible to gold, when there is no gold in life’s fictitious alchemy? After us comes the deluge, but only after us all. Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them.”

On Reaching 600 Videos

Originally published on August 25th, 2024

600 daily videos.

My new milestone – since December 2022, I’ve published a 20-30 minute Chinese video every single day, 600 and counting. My volume of vocab has grown alongside my sense of self-discipline.

But why spend the time? What justifies the late nights, daily sacrifice, occasional outbursts at slow wifi? This grid of thumbnails is my response to life in 2024.

In 2024, we’re comfortable fish, coasting downstream, blind to the waters around us. Each day we face a mushy assault from the OUT THERE. The slew of outside stuff endlessly grabbing at us, grabbing for our attention – our precious life beam, our diamond of consciousness, dazzling, iridescent, shimmering bright, bright enough to make streaming platform VPs salivate and snatch.

We all face this outward tug. So normal it feels natural – hearing about a “bombardment of advertisements” or “slot-machine scroll feeds” is mundane. It barely registers. But oblivious fish are still wet. And the comfortable current flows on.

So much life today is second-hand. I’m guilty as anyone. News and clips and shows and Reels and viral posts about stuff happening OUT THERE, you’ve gotta see this, oh and this one too, and that one, and did you hear about THIS??? Hour by hour, this invasion of our consciousness carries on. We’re so thoroughly defeated as to forget this attentional assault even exists. It’s just daily life in 2024. Enjoy the memes.

This conquering of consciousness has a hidden cost. Life is the sum of what we focus on. To live life at second-hand long enough is to forget something better exists. The individuals we could all be – unique, radiant totalities brimming with passion and paradox – that self dwindles to a shadow.

This great externalization leads to an evacuation of interiority. The thing that makes us most human shrivels, replaced by video references and half-baked arguments about celebrities and burger chains and who’s-the-GOAT. I’ve come to believe most people don’t even know what their Inner Self IS, not to mention that it’s mostly gone. Perceiving the vast inner wilderness requires silence, patience, uninterrupted time – all in short supply these days.

So what to do? First is to realize it’s happening. In the past four years, Existentialism has given me new eyes. I see the water, I feel the relentless current tugging my skin. I notice that I have an inner self. Step 1, check.

Then what? Step 2 is different for everyone. You can ignore and enjoy (“The water’s warm, like a lazy river! And The Voice is on!”) You can rail against the “evils of the system”, corporations, capitalism….yikes, no thanks. As for me – I choose to swim upstream. To boldly chase something that no one is telling me to chase. To turn my attention inward. To expand my inner world.

Learning Chinese happens to make me feel ludicrously alive. I’ve written elsewhere about why, but it meets my (self-created) “Big Four” – Flow, Aliveness, Resonance, Attunement. Check, check, check, check. Few things bring me more joy than speaking about my favorite topics (history, literature, philosophy, art) in Chinese.

And so that’s how I spend my time. While working, I devoted thousands of hours to listening, speaking with online tutors, practicing vocab. Then I moved to China in March to study Chinese full-time. And just over 600 days ago, I started filming a daily practice video.

My solution to the comfortable currents of 2024 is Radical Individuality. To do the thing only I can do, the thing that makes my inner self burst with undeniable aliveness, the thing that bats back the Outward Assault and returns my consciousness to me. Language learning won’t be the thing for everyone, not even for most people – but I’m confident everyone has “that thing” for themselves, if they find enough silence to notice.

So here it is, my tapestry of selfhood, my swim upstream, my bid to be a Radical Individual in a depersonalized world. I call it “The First 600 Days”.

My Life on Literature

Originally published on June 7th, 2024

Reading literature transformed me.

It morphed my inner landscape from crumbling pizza shack into cavernous palace.

When we’re young, our inner self is endless. Imaginative, unbothered, still echoing with the afterglow of creation.

But it shrivels as we grow up. Especially today. We're cut off from the source. Someone born in 1790 instead of 1990 spent nearly every waking moment in nature, often alone, beholding its beauty. Compared to past centuries, we spend 0.001% as much time in nature.

Back then, images didn’t exist. Zero photographs. Zero videos. Outside of expensive paintings, there was nothing to display the world “out there”. Instead, you received the world firsthand as raw, unfiltered reality. This direct contact deepened your connection with nature, and also with your vast inner landscape. Marveling the outer revealed the unique wilderness teeming within.

That’s no longer true.

Most people today live secondhand lives (myself included). Gobs and gobs of precious attention given to the world “out there” – newsfeeds, foreign wars, fantasy football, or the latest fit of some celeb’s fourth kid. It becomes harder to distinguish the secondhand from what’s Real. Soon we forget there’s even a difference.

Meanwhile, the complex individual beneath dwindles and atrophies. One’s infinite potential for 1-of-1 variety replaced by the triple-stuffed comfort of scrolling and blanging arcade thrills.

The words we use each day reflect what’s within. The Michelin-star possibilities of language have been mostly reduced to kid-menu fist-pounding of ketchup and chicken strips.

An externalized world leaves us with evacuated interiors. So how do we remember the richness within? For some it might be marathons, music, or making indie films. But for me it’s language. Reading the greatest words ever written. Literature.

Your mind, once expanded by face-melting prose and bittersweet twists of fictional fates, can never return to its original dimensions. You’re permanently altered, an ever-growing chamber of palatial proportions. These ink-based architects have taught me so much:

Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, that childhood is an endless fount of self-knowledge. What naturally grabbed my attention when young? How can I better align to this true self?

The Razor’s Edge, that the life of the mind can be primary, which can be the right choice (plus the vanity of chasing status, and the terrific humbling force of death)

Niels Lynhe (that gem, over and over), to honor my creative impulses, to guard them as I get older and the pressure to be practical rises, and to grapple well with the harsh stakes of existence.

The Age of Innocence, that the fundamental emotion of life is bittersweet.

The Moon and Sixpence, on the intensity of divine inspiration, and the tradeoffs of chasing a creative dream at all costs.

On the Road, that I have a greater capacity for enthusiasm than most, and this is a gift.

Middlemarch, that sentences so stirring could even be written, and that minds in past centuries also spun full-on galaxies (yes, the 1830s actually happened, those people actually lived, it’s so easy to forget)

The Myth of Sisyphus, that we must live life maximally, to the point of tears; remain on that dizzying crest, fueled by the unresolved central tension at the heart of our condition

And, of course, none greater than Emerson, my trusted mentor across time, that the power in me is new in Nature, and no one but me knows what I can do until I have tried.

This sampling of authors has enlarged my inner life into dimensions that would stun my past self. These wordsmiths lived life firsthand. You feel it in their prose. The greatest books from the 19th century are categorically different from those written today. Yes, it’s all black and white marks. But the great ones tapped into a deeper source, a hidden magma which gives their words geologic force. Drawing upon it has produced my own volcanic explosion of selfhood, reflected not just in words, but in my life choices.

Don’t believe me? Pick one up and see for yourself. And careful not to burn your hands.

Life Lived Maximally

Originally published June 4th, 2024

I remember the day I chose to live maximally.

In younger years I often waffled. This or that? Yes or no?

Then, one week til college graduation. Beach trip, whole school. Winding down. When should we drive home? Today or tomorrow? Get back early or one last day? Logistical swirl. Waffle Waffle Waffle.

All wafflers except one friend. “Who cares. Why would I leave? Give me more.”

Stupidly simple. But something flipped, for me. Stop thinking. Reject the question. Live more life. We’re young, for God’s sake! Let’s live!

And so I did. For 22-year-old Will, that meant crisscrossing the lower forty-eight, hitting those pop-up meccas of American life, college football tailgates. Flight after flight chasing the unsayable bliss: when the sun is up, and you’re buzzed, and you feel like you’re never gonna die.

One flight home I finished On The Road. Wow. 250 pages brimming with holy-hallelujah-YES of life lived maximally. Even the thought creates a warm swirl in my chest that I’ve never properly described, beyond this line with close friends: “The best books, man…you can feel them, you know?” Uh huh. But it’s true for me.

So on future football trips I would quote Kerouac’s infinite scroll: “Yes, but what do you want out of life? You see, the people for me are the mad ones, mad to live, mad to save, who burn burn burn like fabulous Roman candles streaking across the sky…” And the pretty girl nods and leaves for a white claw.

My idea of maximal living grew as I did. From college bars with names like “Fred’s” or “Rick’s” to living bolder Monday to Friday. Quitting work to build a company with two guys from the Internet. Spending my slim free time learning a language I might never use. Plastering my apartment walls with quotes from Rilke and Woolf and Emerson. Ditching pesky pricks of concern for grand ideas (or at least trying). Stop flicking mud off your shoelaces! Look up at the stars!

And this year it meant moving to China to finish this insane solo-kayak-trip-across-the-Pacific-Ocean, also called “attempting to learn 100% fluent Chinese, by yourself, just because it makes you feel foolishly alive.” And some days the unlearned vocab weighs heavy; some days the food tastes bad. Doubts prick like icicles. But then I return to just saying the words, and how maximally alive it makes me feel. And soon the worries melt, and Flow floods back once more. In it pours, that sunny-tailgate bliss, that On-The-Road feeling which I cherish dearly and will not successfully convey to you in words tonight.

Roar now true fire maximally
Truth’s flames will rage fantastically
And light a path toward Infinite Play.
Yes you will die, but not today.

Since I can’t offer you a test drive of my infinite inner landscape (we all have them, remember yours!), I’ll leave you with poet Ted Hughes’ stunning words, which admirably jab toward this Unsayable It, soaring close like an asymptote while still forever away:

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears. People only regret that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart. That’s how we measure out our real respect for people—by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate—and enjoy. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.”

May we all live maximally, whatever that looks like for you.

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. 

Who Will I Become?

Who will I become? The answer to this question depends on my choices.

I stand at the edge of 30 proud of how I’ve grown. I started the decade drunk and confused. Exploding with energy but unsure where to direct it. Now I’m a co-founder, writer, and fluent Chinese speaker. I’m on fire with ideas, filled with vision. Transcendent visions of who I can become, of the impact Write of Passage and Will Learns Chinese can have on the world.

I love grappling with our human condition. I choose to stare the awesome glory and terror of life square in the eyes. I’m not afraid. Give me the full, unvarnished truth. Give me the majesty of art and the abject terror of Nothingness, that unfillable void at the center of subjective existence. 

Death is a glorious tool when wielded well. Death reifies life. It infuses each minute with rich significance. Wander to death’s edge and take a peek — feel the exhilarating gust rip through you. 

We’re going to die. But not tonight! 

Today we live with every ounce of force our biology can muster. Today springs fresh and vivid. This singular jewel rises reliably each morning. From where, we don’t know. For what purpose is ours to decide. We greet the new dawn clear-headed, with waves of fresh vitality coursing through our rivers of blood and air. 

I’m a knot of meaning against an infinite backdrop, a 90-year frame of emotion and significance set against eternity. Behold the borderless blur of Being within you and without you! What’s really there, past our perception? Endless sludge of time and space, forever expanding in all directions. And from this glopping grayness we sculpt our lives, choice by choice. 

I sit here at my desk as more than a man. Just like my heroes — Woolf and Pessoa, Camus and Emerson – I am a conduit to the infinite. Eternity erupts across space and time. Somewhere in this endlessness, slivers of the infinite tangled themselves together into me. Three decades on, my one wet kilogram spins its universes of hopes, fears, visions and voids. Here I now sit, detangling my messy web of self, packaging it into language, and freezing it forever in these humble bits of phrase.

Who I'll Be By 32

Note: This piece was written on May 7th, 2023.

Today — May 7th, 2023 — I’m 29 years old. Today I’ll share a few thoughts about who I’ll be when I’m 32.

Sharing this vision flows out of me so naturally, the way this fresh new keyboard allows the words to effortlessly spill out of my mind.

As I sit here typing on my new computer, I can feel limitless potential in my fingertips. The world is open, malleable. I am free. I’m free to pursue the goals and vision I find most meaningful and fulfilling. I have my freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationships, and freedom of purpose.

On July 29th, 2025, I will turn 32 years old. There are three things I want to accomplish by then.

ONE: I will have recorded 300 episodes of the “Will Learns Chinese” podcast.

I’m already on track to hit this goal. I’m not starting from scratch. I’m not starting from zero. I’ve already recorded 74 episodes of the “Will Learns Chinese” podcast. I just need to record around two episodes per week moving forward to hit this target. That means 76 more episodes this year (for 150 by the end of the year), then 100 episodes in 2024, and then 50 more episodes by July 2025. I’ll be at 300 episodes. And then Will Learns Chinese podcast will be a force in the world.

Centering around the podcast makes my Chinese efforts direct and focused. It also makes my efforts legible to the outside world — people get podcasts. They understand the idea of building a podcast, interviewing guests, and growing an audience slowly but surely.

This goal also focuses my attention properly. My long-term dream is not to make 60 second videos. That might be a means to an end. But my ultimate end if to have long conversations exploring the topics that make me feel most alive, all in Chinese. I’ll post videos to XiaoHongShu and BiliBili in addition to my podcast. But the Will Learns Chinese podcast will be my main focus. It’s the most fun to create, it’s the most legible to the outside world, and it’s most aligned with my long-term goals.

TWO: I’ll write and publish a book called “Will Learns Chinese”> I love studying Chinese. It’s my soul-mate activity. In a world of lost souls, I’ve found my passion, beyond a shadow of a doubt. I know exactly where I’m going. I’m going to speak fluent Chinese. I’m going to build a Chinese media empire. I’m going to carve my own unique path through life.

Til now, I’ve thought that the English-speaking world won’t care much about my chase of Chinese. Not so. My Tweet last week made me realize — my pursuit of Chinese is remarkable. People are captivated even if they can’t understand a single word. By writing my story, I’ll inspire others to find the things they find most enjoyable and pursue them mercilessly.

Writing this book will also serve myself. I feel this passion so strongly, but til now, I’ve only shared it in fragments — brief screenshot essays, passing journal entries, or frenzied conversation with close friends and loved ones. Writing this book will help me to crystallize the essence of my journey — how I got started, where I’ve been, and where I’m going. I’ll publish a series of Substack articles over the next 18 months, and then spend the first half of 2025 tying it all together into a single book. If my audience grows quickly in the next 18 months, I’ll look a formal publishers. Otherwise I’ll self-publish.

THREE: I’ll write and publish a book called “Mundane Miracles”. This book will be a summary of my life’s philosophy through the first 32 years of my life. I’ll draw from the rich variety of books and articles I’ve read over the past decade, as well as my own writing and ideas that I’ve developed. Each chapter will be a new coined phrase. I’ll weave together my phrases and ideas into a central argument for wielding the sword of ignorance to slash away the pesky and elevate the grand.

I’m bursting with ideas about how to live a good life in the Age of Abundance. This book will be my foundational theory of how to wrangle the web for good, and how to harness and savor your time without getting tossed by the waves of endless information. I’ll explore themes like the Outward Tug, the Inward Turn, You Are Everest, and the Infinity hiding within. Through small perceptions, all of us can transform the mundane into the miraculous. And now, thanks to the Internet, it’s easier than ever before. 3,000 generations trudged along the earth, craning their necks up at the sky. Now, thanks only to our lucky birth years, we get to fly. Ladies and gentleman, lift the plastic and take a glorious look!

From now until I’m 32, I won’t celebritize others. I will reify myself, my ideas, my enthusiasms, my great devotions. I will reify the people I love, and ignore the noise of the world. I am Everest. People I love are the mighty Himalayas. All else is pebbles.

The Internet and the Infinite

Picture infinity. You can't do it. Our brains break down when we wrestle with endless time or infinite space.

We usually don't think about infinity –– we're more focused on calling an Uber or scarfing a salad. But infinity is always there, patiently waiting beneath the surface of typical Thursdays and Tuesdays. When I dip below for a peek, here's what I see:

Everything we see is a frame on an underlying infinite. An infinite what? We don't know. My best mental image is the black-and-white static of old box TVs. Remember? When your cables weren't plugged in, your 4:3 JVC television would scream at you, an offensive, noisy, chaotic, chrhhrchrhcrhkchrhchhchrhhhhkchrhhhhh. That's infinity.

We receive the world in clear, crisp images. People, parking lots, lime green parakeets. Each a frame on top of messy infinity. Your shoes are foot-long frames on the infinite –– three octillion atoms of rubber and nylon lassoed from utter totality into fresh new Nikes that ferry your feet around Trader Joe's.

You're losing me. Hang on –– infinity is a proxy for the mystery of existence. None of us had to exist! The world didn't have to exist. We all forget this, almost always, but something existing, rather than nothing, is pretty rad. If existence is a glorious mystery, so is every thing within it –– cups, Gmail, salsa packets, sticks of butter. Infinity shimmers inside supermarkets and SaaS apps if you really look.

It's hard to see the radiant whole in a shopping cart. But we all have conduits to the infinite –– access points that allow us to glimpse this mirace more easily. Mine is language, great books and quotes that shiver my spine. For others, it's music, mathematics, kite surfing, indie films, or sweeping natural vistas. Whatever melts your mind and smacks you with wonder will do.

Most of our time isn't spent reading great books or hiking in Banff. We spend way more time joining Zoom calls, clearing Slack threads and diving down YouTube holes. Miraculous existence is crowded out by mundane digital schlep. But what if –– just maybe –– our digital devices are hidden portals to the glorious all?

Picture the Internet. You can't do it. Our brains break down when we try to wrangle the web. This vast sum of electric connection is effectively infinite, especially from our point-of-view. We bury our faces in phones and laptops a dozen hours each day. But maybe, just maybe, when seen properly, the Internet is the ultimate conduit to the infinite. A purple-white beam of Internet burst into the sky three decades ago just south of Palo Alto. And now ten billion devices all link back to this same infinite core.

As we live on the Internet, we interface with the infinite. Next time you're scrolling, glance up and notice the purple-white thread that tethers you (and everyone) back to the same infinite beam of Internet. You just might glimpse the magnificent all.

I Dream of Opportunity

Last night I dreamed I was a high school football quarterback. I was the starter, but I wasn't sharp. I ran for a touchdown early in the game, but I felt slow and I barely cleared the two yards necessary to cross the plane.

While my team played defense, I didn't stand with my team. Instead I left the sideline, meandered around, stared at my phone and started chatting with people in the stands. At one point I wandered into the tunnel and found a box odd-looking footballs. These kept my attention for a minute. This one's jumbo. This one's flat like a saddle.

After enough poking around, I realized "Woah! I need to get back in the game!" I ran out onto the field, but the game was going withiout me. The teams had moved on while I wandered. I sprinted across the field, trying to make it to my team on the far sideline. But I was running extremely slowly. My feet were heavy and plodding. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't pull myself across to the other side any faster. I hated how slowly I ran. I despised myself for not moving faster.

Then suddenly, about 2/3 of the way through my slow-motion trek, my heart sank. I was running toward the wrong sideline. All this pain and struggle trying to drag my sorry, slow self across the field, and all that time I was running toward the team in black. My team, in burgundy, was behind me the whole time. My painful slog was moving me further and further away from where I wanted to be.

I woke up from this dream feeling out-of-shape and upset with myself for running the wrong way. Something was off. Why hadn't I been on the sidelines with my teammates? What was I doing messing around with my phone and poking around the stands? Why did I run to the wrong side? Why had I squandered such a priceless opportunity? The game had moved on while I messed around. My chance to play quarterback might never come again.

My lesson? Playing starting quarterback represents opportunity: the opportunity I have in front of myself right now, to build Write of Passage. To create Liftoff. Leading a team, building a company. I scored a touchdown early in my dream, yes, but it wasn't my best effort. I didn't run fast. In fact, I barely crossed the goal line. I wasn't living up to my full potential.

My time spent messing around in the tunnels and scrolling my phone in the stands are the daily distractions that drip away life: Twitter, YouTube, even goddamn LinkedIn. Running slow-as-molasses represents my inability to sit down and focus when it counts. It represents my tendency to stay up late, feel tired, and get distracted. Running toward the wrong sideline is me chasing the wrong goals, while the right thing was behind me the whole time.

I woke up from this dream galvanized to install non-negotiables in my life that build character, get me in shape, and eliminate distractions:

• Phone and my computer out of my apartment by 9:30pm

• 30 minutes of cardio every day, for character

• Drink 1,000 mL of water every day when I wake up

• Clean my apartment every Sunday

• No food delivery, ever (bad for the soul)

• No YouTube

Trying to work at night is like dead money. Like burning cash, once you've spent it, it's dead time. Working at night doesn't help your future self. Replying to Slacks or checking emails after dinner doesn't contribute to any greater system that serves my future self.

Sleeping at 9:30pm (screens off and away) allows me to become my future self. I wake up the next morning ready to attack my day. I get quality sleep which helps me focus all day. I'm way more likely to exercise and eat healthy if I've slept well. The system reinforces itself. Serves itself. Builds character.

High performance is a checklist. What's my 9:30pm checklist? See above.

One simple decision, leaving my computer at work, produced my earliest wake-up of the year. That led to a productive morning where I wrote nearly 1,000 words. That's not a coincidence. You are your choices, so choose well. Choose to wind down at 9:30pm and wake up early. It just might change your life.

My Take on Heidegger

Here's my off-the-cuff rendition of Heidegger's thinking:

As we live, our minds are immersed in the day-to-day stuff of our lives. Good things happen, bad things happen. Big things happen, small things happen. We notice a never-ending stream of events passing by, and since our lives are simply what we focus on, these events become our life. Our lives are a ceaseless stream of happenings.

These happenings are all beings (with a lower-case "b"). We're subjects focused on lower-case-b beings, objects that interact with our subjectivity. We're internal subject colliding with external objects. At least, that's how most people receive the world.

Hediegger calls us to Zoom way, way out. We're awash in a world of objects. But, he says, let's start from the beginning: Why does anything exist at all?

Once more: Why does anything exist at all? Why do Playstations and Mack trucks and chocolate exist at all? Where did everything come from? Why is anything here at all? Why are we alive? Why does the world exist?

Heidegger shakes readers by the collar. Look around! Look at all this stuff! Look at it all! Why is any of this here? Why are we here?  Why aren't you amazed?!

If these questions land with a thud, it's because in the modern world, we've forgotten how to ask them. In fact, we've forgotten these questions even can be asked at all. 2500 years ago, before even Socrates, Ancient Greek philosophers pondered these questions. Heidegger tells us "reach back into the oblivion of history", remember to ask these big-picture questions in the first place, and then ponder away.

We're not sufficenitly amazed by existence.

In fact, our entire conception of existence is wrong. We're not discrete, independent subjects interacting with a world of objects. That collapses all of existence into independent lower-case-b beings. All of existence is capital-B Being. Being encompasses this world that for some mysterious reason exsists. Our day-to-day experience of life is Being-in-the-world. Each individual is the sum of their selves and everything they interact with each day. You're not an independent point, separate from other people and things. You are a cloud of activity – there's a mutual interdependence between you and all you encounter.

The opposite of Being is Nothingness. All of Being is surrounded by Nothingness on all sides. It's utterly remarkable that all of this Being exists against the backdrop of so much Nothing. It could have just all been Nothing!

The problem with not being amazed with existence is that we miss this miracle. We're so lucky to be alive at all! And yet, how do most live their lives? With a fearful eye, glancing around at others, seeing what others do and following along, not wanting to make a mistep. But look around – nada surrounds you on all sides. You've got your slice of Being-in-the-world, your little stack of decades against the backdrop of eternity. How will you fill those years? As a fearful follower? Or with the courage and conviction to blaze your own unique trail of thought and action?

The choice is yours. Choose well. And while you're choosing, don't forget to look around and say "Wow."

My 2022 Mid-Year Review

Written on July 1st, 2022

This memo will summarize where I’ve been in 2022, and where I’m headed. 

At the start of the year, I identified five areas of focus for 2022:

• Write of Passage 

• Reading 

• Writing

• Chinese

• Friends and family 

I’ll take each area in turn: what went well, what can be improved, and where I’m heading next. 

Write of Passage

It’s been a whirlwind six months for our business. In January David and I hired Michael Dean as our fourth employee (myself, David, and Becca, David’s producer, being the other three). We held a team retreat in Sedona, Arizona the first week of January to outline our plans for the year. Our big goal: build a Write of Passage media company to help draw attention to our flagship Write of Passage cohort, thereby increasing revenue, while also highlighting our best students’ writing. We hired Michael as Director of Content to pioneer this effort and work with top Write of Passage students 1:1 to develop the best essays of their lives. 

We ran the 8th cohort of Write of Passage from March 2nd - April 6th. The cohort was a massive success, with roughly 300 students participating (200 new, 100 returning) and a slew of new improvements. We ran our strongest-ever Alumni Mentor program, David and I made curriculum improvements, we added a secondary social hub for real-time video and text chat (Geneva), we shifted all course materials away from Teachable onto our Circle community, we created a refreshed “Build Week” schedule to help onramp students into the course, and we had a big team of Editors guarantee that every student article received high-quality writing feedback. 

After 18 months of stellar work, our Write of Passage producer, Becca Olason, left the company for a rare-in-a-lifetime chance to travel Europe for six months with her partner. We miss Becca’s rare mix of attention-to-detail and perennially upbeat attitude. As Becca transitioned out of the company, we hired Dan Sleeman to work as Director of Course Operations. Under our shared cost partnership with Forte Labs, Monica Rysavy helped us run operations for Cohort 8. Monica passed the baton to Dan in March and April, and Dan joined the team as our fourth full-time employee. He brings a rare depth of skills in education and no-code tools that has helped him grow into an indispensable team member. 

Soon after Cohort 8 ended, we hired two new team members – all-star WOP mentors Simone Silverstein and Tommy Lee joined the team full-time as Video Producer and Creative Director, respectively. Their first day coincided with our biggest-ever team retreat. We spent a week in the sunny Bahamas planning our two newest products: Write of Passage Liftoff (for high schoolers), and Write of Passage Business (for teams / companies). These are exciting new product lines that I’ll have plenty more to say about in the coming months. 

My role has shifted from jack-of-all-trades Course Director to my new official title of “co-founder and Chief Product Officer”. Fancy title aside, I’m laser-focused on hiring a team of skilled teams to develop our two new product lines, while ensuring all three of our products (Write of Passage flagship, Write of Passage Liftoff, Write of Passage Business) maintain our exceptional quality standards and the singular, je ne sais quoi Write of Passage vibe that students have come to expect from our programs. My job is simple: build and deliver the best educational experiences on the Internet for high school writing and business writing. Unlike with past cohorts of Write of Passage, however, I’ll have teams of several employees to help us build on each front. I’m already working with two of our top Write of Passage alums, who happen to be high school students, on developing a high school-oriented curriculum for Liftoff. 

I’m thrilled to take on my new responsibilities, which includes direct reports, hiring, and leadership huddles with David and our excellent new COO, Chris Monk. Chris joins us after nine years building the education company Decoded. I’m also excited to be working with Matt Tillotson, another all-star WOP Mentor who joins us as Director of Customer Success. Matt will be hiring and running our Cohort 9 mentor program, plus our other part-time teams for the WOP cohort (Editors, Ambassadors). These programs have a major impact on the quality of the Write of Passage student experience. Matt will also help shape our Write of Passage student experience, and he’s currently helping us build a robust hiring system. 

I’m proud of the work I’ve done on Write of Passage during the first half of the year. These include: 

• Running a successful Cohort 8

• Hiring five new employees (which took dozens of hours of interviews)

• Creating the vision for two new product lines 

• Starting to create these new product lines

My Work Habits 

Working with a team feels a lot different than running Write of Passage only with David and Becca. We’ve graduated from Google Chat to Slack. We’re implementing an org chart, performance reviews, and two-week work sprints. We track all project lists in Monday.com. Adding these new systems is a relief – David and I are both right-brained creatives, and scheduling and planning doesn’t come naturally to us. In the past, we would meet for planning sessions between cohorts and write up hundreds of sticky notes of new ideas for the course. Generating ideas was never a problem, but implementing these changes tended to happen in intense bursts in the few weeks before a cohort started. Our new systematic approach to project execution helps to spread the work out evenly through the WOP “offseason”. 

I’ve identified three ways I can improve in the second half of 2022: 

Work faster

Sam Altman and Tyler Cowen often tout the importance of working quickly. Successful people move fast. They respond to emails promptly, they finish their work ahead of deadlines. They act decisively and course-correct quickly in the face of new information.
I began working on Write of Passage in October 2019. Generally speaking, I’ve learned to move fast. In less than three years, between Write of Passage and Building a Second Brain I’ve built and delivered ten cohorts to more than 2500 students. For many of those cohorts I was the only full-time employee working on the student experience. Between emails and internal memos I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words. I’ve replied to over 10,000 student emails. We wouldn’t have made it this far if I didn’t move fast. 

That said, I can get better. At times I’ve felt fatigue from sprinting so hard over the past two-plus years. In recent months, I noticed places I can move faster, whether that’s my message response time or completing projects ahead-of-schedule. My commitment for the second half of 2022 is to move even faster in all areas of our business. We won’t build phenomenal products moving slowly. 

Be more focused

Focus is IQ for the 21st century. When I sit down and focus, I can crank out work (for instance, in less than 45 minutes I’ve written 1200 words of this memo). That said, my focus varies too much day-to-day. Some days I wake up at 6am and plunge into Deep Work with blistering focus. Nothing can stop my momentum. Other days, petty tasks in email or Slack drag me into distraction. Twitter tugs at my attention while the sun is still coming up. My attention flits between writing, email, and petty Internet distractions.

To improve my focus in the second half of 2022, I’m adopting a new rule: no Twitter or YouTube before 5:00pm. I’ve limited my time spent on Twitter this year – it’s a much smaller part of my life – but lately I’ve been pulled back into recent spirals in politics and the culture wars. YouTube has also slowly crept back into my life. That algorithm knows me spooky well. My new rule will free my work hours from my two biggest sources of Internet distraction. 

Learn proactively

Reading Talent by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross highlighted a major area for improvement: What am I practicing at work similar to how a pianist practices scales? To develop a strong answer to this question, I’m going to create a flywheel of learning around my work:

• Consume high-quality information about product building, business, and learning design (articles, books, videos, podcasts, Reddit threads)

• Write internal memos summarizing what I’ve learned

• Share the best ideas I learn in-public 

It’s not enough to work hard. I need to spend additional time outside of official work activities making myself a better thinker in product building, learning design, and business-building. What new mental frameworks will I uncover and adopt in the coming months? Keep following my writing to find out. 

Reading 

I’ve spent thousands of hours reading since I graduated college (as my vanity book list and apartment decor will attest). Were money no object, I’m confident I could fill a happy life simply reading great books. That said, I’ve read less in the first six months of 2022 than at any point in the past six years. The only books I read: 

• The Moon and Sixpence (W.S. Maugham)

• Irrational Man (William Barrett)

• Niels Lyhne (Jens Peter Jacobsen)

• Nietzsche (Stefan Zweig)

• The Myth of Sisyphus (Albert Camus)

• Talent (Tyler Cowen, Daniel Gross)

I’ve also read parts of other books, including Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, Michel de Montaigne, George Eliot, Nietzsche, Emerson, and John O’Donohue.

Compared to how much I’ve read in the past, my list of books feels thin. And that’s okay. In past years I’ve sometimes read too much. I want to be focused on creating, not just consuming. Most of my reading time has been converted into Chinese studying time, as you’ll read below. 

Going forward, I have a few tweaks to my reading system:

Read high-quality articles

Recently I found an article titled Crony Beliefs by Kevin Simler. A quick skim made it clear: I want to read more of this type of article. It’s a 5,000 word exploration of a hyper-relevant topic. I’ll walk away with a new mental model for receiving the world. A worthy investment! 

Often the best ideas are found in high-quality articles rather than books. I used to devour sources like Ribbonfarm, Tim Urban, David Cain, and Zat Rana. But I’ve fallen out of the habit of reading high-quality online articles. I’ll resume this process for the rest of 2022. My focus will be on articles related to my work, or new mental models for seeing the world. 

Review past books

What I’m doing with what I’ve read matters more than the total number of books I’ve read. I’ll spend the rest of 2022 reviewing books I’ve read – using Readwise to scan my favorite sections into Evernote for review. I’ll use these notes to fuel my future writing. I have a glut of books I’ve read but haven’t processed or written about. I won’t be able to review every book I’ve read in the next six months, but with focused attention, I can put a sizeable dent in my “to be reviewed” stack. 

Writing

Time to face the brutal truth: I haven’t written in public nearly as much as I would have hoped over the past six months. In fact, I’ve only published six articles on my website this year. This Mid-Year Review counts as my seventh. As former Redskins coach Steve Spurrier once said: “Not very good!” 

Before I mentally flog myself too much, a few thoughts: first, I’ve written tens of thousands of words for work this year. No, this writing doesn’t count as “writing in public”. But I’ve kept my writing skills sharp, even if I’m not sharing much of it publicly. Second, I have shared nearly 500 pieces of content in Chinese in 2022 (see next section). So while I haven’t shared nearly as much writing in public as I would’ve liked, I have been creating in public, albeit in a different domain. 

I write in two different modes: Artist Mode and Business Mode. My articles on my site are Artist Mode: I write lyrically and stylistically, some have said poetically. I’m proud of my best work. I love writing as an art, but it’s slow. I’ll spend 30 minutes crafting the perfect rhythm and cadence of my opening paragraph. The sentences don’t sing by accident. 

Meanwhile, this memo is written in business mode. It’s the casual, approachable tone I use in all of my internal memos. My Business Mode writing is imperfect but blazing-fast (I’ve now written 2,000 words here in under 90 minutes). My goal for the rest of 2022: write way more in public using Business Mode, with the occasional Artist Mode piece sprinkled in. I’ll focus my writing on the following topics: 

• Writing about learning (sharing what I learn about about product building, business strategy, and learning design)
  

• Writing about Write of Passage (updates on what we’re doing as a business)
  

• Weekly writing about Chinese (I’ll create a Substack or Ghost account to share weekly updates on my Chinese learning process)
  

• Long-form articles (I’d like to write three long-form articles in the next three months: What Existentialism Makes Me Feel, Chasing Chinese: My Chinese Learning Journey, and the Creative Cosmos)
  

• Book Twitter threads (summaries of favorite books I’ve read, presented in an *original* manner)

How much will I write in the second half of 2022? Follow my website or Twitter to find out. Or just check in at my Annual Review article. 

One thing I won’t be doing, for now: focusing on building a Twitter audience. I have just over 4,000 Twitter followers, based on past Tweets about books and course-building. More and more people these days are writing high-value threads with catchy headlines to grab followers. Why haven’t I joined the Great Thread Game? Three reasons:

1. I want to spend way, way less time on Twitter (I’m easily addicted to doom-scrolling, so I’ve made a focused effort to stay off the platform in 2022).
   

2. There’s no value in winning games that don’t matter to you. I have enough credibility on Twitter to message people if I ever need a connection. I don’t have any short or medium-term business goals tied to building a Twitter audience, so I haven’t felt a desire to spend hours crafting threads to build an audience.
   

3. Time spent on Twitter takes away time spent on work or Chinese. And I’d much rather play the Infinite Chinese Game than the Great Thread Game. 
   

Maybe I’ll join in the Great Thread Game someday. For now, I plan to use Twitter to share my article writing, book reviews, and not much else. 

You Shouldn't Always Learn from Others

The Twittersphere offers floods of ways to learn from others. Valuable skills are open-sourced in online articles, Twitter threads, and "How-To" clips. How many of these Tweetstorms have you seen lately: "Seven copywriting secrets" or "98% of people are BLIND to these marketing hacks!" You can build skills and grow a six-figure income, all from viral threads and some Gumroad guides.

This is a useful trend worth celebrating. Gatekeepers no longer hoard knowledge. Wifi and work ethic offer free avenues to a better life.

But learning from others has its limits. Here's a story: In my free time I'm pursuing fluent Chinese. When work isn't busy, I study five hours per day. Few things make me happier. Recently I hit play on a new podcast: The "I'm Learning Mandarin" show. Chinese-speaking guests share their language-learning secrets. What a chance to learn from others!

The first guest talked about working and living in China. His twenties were spent on trains and buses, criss-crossing the Chinese countryside, chatting with locals at noodle shops and coffee stands. All told, he'd lived in China for close to a decade, and he still wasn't fully fluent.

As I listened, pangs of doubt rippled through my mind. This guy lived in China for a DECADE and he still doesn't speak fluent Chinese. You only lived there for a few months in college. You have no chance! You'll never become fluent. Studying Chinese is hopeless.

Comparison. That familiar thief of joy, this time podcast-induced. My attempt to learn study tips from an expert instead whacked my self-confidence at the kneecaps.

To kickstart a skill or enter a new industry, you should learn from others. But I'm not a beginner. I've studied Chinese for thousands of hours over nearly ten years. At this point, my personal language-learning process matters more than secondhand advice. At this point, I am an expert. I don't need tricks and tips – I need to forge my own unique path forward, using my own instincts as my guide.

Learning from experts is valuable – others' advice can set your sails and start your journey. But keep note of your span from shore. Sail long enough and you'll enter waters unmapped by others. On distant seas you don't need a helper. Close your manual. Silence your Twitter. Turn and face the horizon. Feel the spray on your skin. Steer confidently by the starlight above and your own internal sun. Savor the silence as you press on alone.

How It Feels to Learn Chinese

When people ask me why I study Chinese, I tell them my primary motivation is internal. Learning this language brings me joy like nothing else. Here's a small example of what I mean.

Flight home from Denver. Listening to Write of Passage alum Camellia Yang's "Chiwi Journal" podcast. The episode covers a topic I'm familiar with (mental models). I understand 70-80% of what's being said. In certain sections, my understanding jumps up to a thrilling 95 or 100%.

Fourteen minutes in, Camellia's guest starts to explain the idea of  "First Principles Thinking." I understand him as he defines the concept.

It's worth mentioning – I've reached the point where, while listening to two natives speakers, I can distinguish every word I hear. This wasn't true a few years ago. As a mid-level language learner, full-speed native conversation sounded like a blurry slur of non-distinct sound, broken up by a smattering of familiar words and phrases. Now the opposite is true – while listening to this episode, I know the meaning of well over half of the words. For words I don't know, I can still hear what they are phonetically. I could write the "pinyin" version (the phonetic equivalent – think ni hao) for all the words in this 45 minute episode.

Distinguishing words is one thing. Knowing what they mean is another. This is my top limiting factor right now – for plenty of words, I simply don't know their meaning. I can carry a conversation for hours with no trouble. And yet, every day I'm humbled by the sheer volume of words I still don't know yet.

Back to the podcast. Camellia's guest starts to riff on an example of first principles thinking in action. I don't recognize a few words, so I'm not sure what example he's describing. I listen on. As he wraps up a sentence, I a crisp two-word phrase enters my ears: xingcheng jielun. "Shing | Cheng | Jay | Loon" is a direct translation of the sounds. These words sound familiar, but I don't know their meaning. I take a quick pause and jump over to my trusty Pleco dictionary app. Xingcheng means to "form" or "take shape". Jielun means "conclusion". Just like that, I've learned a brand-new phrase: xingcheng jielun means "to form a conclusion".

But the fun doesn't stop there. Each definition contains a slew of examples phrases beneath it. While looking up xingcheng, I see the phrase xingcheng xianming de duizhao: "to form a sharp contrast". Boom, there's two more new words: xianming means sharp, and duizhao means contrast.

Let's go even further: duizhao will be an easy word to remember, because it's made up of two building blocks of words I already know. Duibi means "comparison", zhaopian is a Chinese 101 word that means photograph. Duibi + zhaopian (comparison + picture) = Duizhao (contrast). Learning this newfound word is like discovering two old lego bricks fit perfectly together to form a beautiful new shape you'd never considered.

And don't forget xianming. Xian comes from xinxian, which means "fresh". Ming comes from shuoming, which roughly means "to illustrate". Xinxian + shuoming (fresh + illustration) = xianming (sharp).

Last one: while looking at xianming, I see the phrase goucheng xianming de duibi. I already know duibi means "comparison". I just learned that means xianming means "sharp".  But I've now learned that goucheng is another way to say "to form". I already know two similar words: jigou means structure, chengwei  is "to become". Therefore, jigou + chengwei (structure + become) = goucheng (to form).

For those keeping score at home, I've now learned:

• Xingcheng (to form)

• Jielun (conclustion)

• Duizhao (contrast)

• Xianming (sharp)

• Goucheng (to form)

All in a matter of about two minutes!

I find immense joy in piecing these words together. But I'm not just having fun in the moment. Learning these words has transformed my time into a renewable resource

By listening to Chinese in seat 9D of this bumpy Delta flight, I've converted two minutes of my life into five small gems (xingcheng, jielun, duizhao, xianming, goucheng). Assuming good health and fortune, I'll speak Chinese for at least the next five decades. These five words are five gifts that I'll  give myself in countless conversations, thousands of times, for the next fifty or sixty years.

Learning Chinese is an infinite game that gets better and better, forever.

Why Do You Love Quotes?

We're surrounded by language, like a school of fish submerged in an endless blue ocean. We're awash in words, so surrounded that we forget their power. We assume that words describe the world. But in fact, they do so much more. Language doesn't just describe reality. It generates reality. The words you use to wallpaper your mind become your world. Always complaining? Your world will shrink to the confines of your linguistic cell.

“Be careful of how you interpret the world; it is like that.”

Erich Heller

This I know: I'm over-calibrated to appreciate language. Others feel this way about music, movies or adrenaline-inducing sports. For me, it's words. Certain strung-together phrases imprint themsleves on my mind and never leave. My own personal collection of quotes, both on my website and committed to memory in my mind, becomes a reserve to draw on, a source of inspiration and guidance, a trusty lantern slicing through the shadows ahead.

“Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

Emerson

The right turn-of-phrase becomes a small encapsulation of life. A microcosm of a worldview, a small summary of a way to approach the world. The best quotes are the distillations of dozens of books, hundreds of hours of podcasts, entire Ted Talks compressed down into two lines and ninety-six characters. How many words have been spoken, songs have been sung, conversations held late into the night analyzing, dissecting, unpacking the intricacies of a relationship between two people? And then Emerson arrives with this ten-word gem:

"A friend is someone with whom I may be sincere."

Emerson

Infinite wisdom packed into a finite and memorable line.  A one word razor to measure the people in your life, and determine who clears the "true friend" bar. And who we surround ourself with matters. Your world is nothing more than the swirling combination of everything you allow into your mind. This simple truth flattens me with its importance.  Where do you put your precious attention? What's your standard? How do you direct  your one wild and precious beam of focus? Steady as a lighthouse, or spastic as a strobe?

“Your world is a living expression of how you are using—and have used—your mind.”

Earl Nightingale

We sacrifice so much life on the altar of petty details. No, no, no. We must resist the pull of the pesky. I want to live a grand life, so I choose to fill my mind with grand thoughts. Dazzling minds, rousing achievement, stirring prose, stunning images. Ditch the mundane and give me the marvelous. Skyscrapers, space exploration, The Sovereign Individual, Sarah Bakewell, Self-Reliance, Shackleton, Sartre, God's Debris by Scott Adams, fill my life with that!

"Do not lose time on daily trivialities. Do not dwell on petty detail. For all of these things melt away and drift apart within the obscure traffic of time. Live well and live broadly. You are alive and living now. Now is the envy of all of the dead."

World of Tomorrow

And the Pesky Fades Away

You’ve felt them, I’m sure. 

Little pricks of concern. Those worrisome wants that pester our minds the moment we wake. How will next week go? What do they think of me? Did I reply? No, I forgot. I suck, I’m the worst.

I would be terrified to see a yearly ledger of my time. How many hours have been lost swatting at the gnats of nonsense swirling in my head?

Time is our most precious gift. Everyone’s heard. But here’s the problem: while I constantly think about time’s tremendous value, my actions rarely reflect what I know to be true. I bleed away minutes to Internet distractions, then I drown further minutes in internal concern. Endless pondering of a detail, a text, a tiny fear about what may or may not happen. 

Call it “The Pesky.” 

Pesky, pesky, pesky. So much of my life is lost to the pesky. Trivial noise generated by my mind and amplified by my phone. Past generations at least took breaks. I’ll see them tomorrow. We’ll deal with it Monday. We find ourselves tethered to a blinking, beeping pesky machine that never skips an hour. Our world shrinks to a five-inch screen and a five-minute window, our time split into ever smaller shards.

What a waste! We’re the lucky few (billion) alive for the Internet Age. What a time. The world is ablaze with marvelous change, but only if you mute your mind and look around. Too often we miss our glorious present for pesky mental chatter. While a sky full of stars erupts overhead, we pass the hours flicking mud off our shoelaces. 

We become what we behold. Attend to the small, live a small life. In an uncertain world, of this I’m sure: I reject the small. I refuse to let my treasured hours splinter into empty fragments. I want to live a fulfilling life. A focused life. A life well spent.

That’s right: I want to live a life focused on the grand. Therefore I must dwell on the grand, not the pesky. Great writing, bold thinkers, exhilarating ideas that expand my world and stir my soul. There’s a rich buffet of calorie-dense information available every moment, and endless ways to meet others with shared enthusiasms, but only if we properly direct our attention. It’s so easy to fall back into the pesky.

This is our challenge. Can we treat our time like a glowing puddle we hold in our hands, making sure not to spill a single drop? Can we chill our overactive minds, freeze those gnats of nonsense, and feast on the fulfilling? Can we heed the wisdom of Emerson, grandest thinker of them all? 

Build therefore your own world. Unfold your mind’s greatest proportions. So fast will disagreeable appearances, spiders, snakes, pests, enemies, vanish: they are temporary and shall be no more seen. The sun shall dry up and the wind exhale.

Amen. May we silence the noise and broaden our minds. May we fill our lives with the grand, and let the pesky fade away.

An Uncommon Fire

You have an uncommon fire within. A vision for what life will look like when you speak fluent Chinese. From the moment you set foot in Shanghai, you realized you are on fire for this language. Learning it, speaking it with others, connecting with others in a foreign tongue. The rush of losing yourself in the flow of a conversation in Mandarin. What else can compare?!

You have a singular desire to learn to speak Chinese fluently. You will achieve this goal. That’s what’s so exciting about your vision: When you spend five hours per day over the next two years speaking Chinese and practicing Chinese, you will reach your goal. You will be able to speak fluently. Let me repeat: you will get there. Five hours per day for the next two years. You’ll still be 29. And you’ll speak fluent Chinese. At that point, a world of opportunity awaits. Who knows what could come next? 

It’s impossible to say. But your true inner fire isn’t for external outcomes. They will be nice, and they will be many. But the greatest gift, the most precious outcome will be the joy you feel along the way. Think of how you feel after you finish an hour of Chinese class: filled to the brim with joy and excitement. A rush of feeling within your chest and throughout your body. A felt, embodied certainty that this is what you’re meant to do. 

Think of the feeling as you sit for an hour and listen to a Chinese podcast: such a rich flow state that you begin to lose your sense of self. Just pure focus on the words filling your ears, surfing the perfect wave of known and unknown, certainty and certainty. You ride that wave with skillful balance. You’re good at it. And you love it. It’s what you do. 

In a world designed to keep us shallow, I want to acquire a skill and make it deep. I want to master the skill of speaking Chinese. I want to devote my time, energy, and attention to something that fills me with joy and makes my life rich. 

I love speaking Chinese the way a mountain biker loves hitting the trail, the way musicians love writing a song, the way a basketball player gets on a hot streak. I feel alive as the words tumble out of my mouth, as I listen and understand, as I learn new words that I’ll use forever. No one else on the planet knows exactly what my flow state feels like when I’m speaking Chinese. Constant learning, endless communication, the perfect level of challenge. I feel lucky to have found an activity that brings me so much joy. 

No one has ever made me learn Chinese. It has always been my choice, something that I’ve been drawn to on my own, something I inherently love. Love for its own sake. In a world that constantly tells us how to be, and who to be, I am taking a stand and saying, “Hey world, listen up. This is who I am! I, Will Mannon, practice Chinese five hours per day. I, Will Mannon, speak fluent Chinese.”

Nothing can stop me. It’s the Age of Abundance, baby! Information rests a thumb tap away. The stakes for how we spend our attention are higher than ever, and yet we toss our attention around more flippantly than ever before. 

Not me. When I study Chinese, it’s Christmas every day. Dòngchálì ! Kuàngjià ! What’ll be waiting under the tree tomorrow morning?! It’s an infinite game with infinite gifts, and infinite room for creativity. A life of infinite learning, infinite opportunity, infinite connections awaits. 

Five hours per day for the next two years. And I’ll be able to say: “I, Will Mannon, speak fluent Chinese.”

Trojan Horse Course

Write of Passage is a writing course. 

Or is it? 

Our website touts the benefits of writing online: publish quality content. Build a following. Grow your influence. These are true. Publishing your ideas unlocks opportunities. The syllabus describes how you’ll build your writing infrastructure, develop a system to write consistently, and distribute your ideas to an ever-growing audience. You’ll learn how it all aligns with your emerging Personal Monopoly of skills, experience, and interests. 

But ask any WOP alum: you leave the course with far more than articles. In our final live session last night, dozens of students shared how they grew over five weeks. All of them published, but few essays were mentioned. Instead, they spoke from the heart. Stories about challenges overcome, layers of self discovered, close friendships made. They described the courage it took to press publish as the pesky Resistance screamed at them to stop. Goals were shared, thank-yous were given. A few tears were shed. 

We don’t flaunt these moments publicly. And that’s by design. 

See, Write of Passage is a trojan horse course. In our public materials, we focus on tangible, career-related value. As we should! Write of Passage is expensive. Incoming students need to have a clear sense of the expected ROI. Writing online does open doors and help you stand out professionally. WOP alums grow their influence in their industries, and sometimes even launch new career trajectories. 

But beyond this professional exterior lies the hidden, heartfelt core. Students who keep showing up discover the depths of growth that even career-focused writing unlocks. Sharing your views with the world is an earnest act. Sincerity exposes you to irony, imposter-itis, and cold crickets of indifference. To overcome these hurdles you must become a fuller version of yourself. This growth journey happens among supportive peers: breakout rooms and mentor sessions filled with discussions, confessions, and encouragement. Open and honest feedback that flows from day one. Members overcome challenges and improve their craft while building close bonds with fellow students. 

On the surface, Write of Passage is a writing course. But our most committed students discover a rich swirl of personal growth and Internet friends well beyond initial expectations. 

Connections sparked. Fears shattered. New identities declared: I am a writer. You have to be there to feel it firsthand. The real Write of Passage is hiding within. 

Thanks to Julia Saxena and Simone Silverstein for conversations and feedback that helped lead to this piece.

Language Learning as Applied Trivia

I didn’t choose trivia. From a young age, trivia chose me. 

Who was president in 1843? What battle ended World War I? What’s the capital of Azerbaijan? 

Memorizing these mental morsels brought me joy. I learned names and dates with the uncommon enthusiasm of childhood obsession. I knew every US president in order at eight, every country’s capital by twelve. No ulterior motives – I wasn’t thinking about college applications back then – just an instinctive love for knowing about wars, countries, presidents. 

High school brought a new frontier: the quizbowl team. Think high school Jeopardy with skinny teenagers. After final bell, we pored over stacks of past questions and “Ya Gotta Know” lists, honing our skills while getting to know lots of girls (and by girls I mean Nobel-Prize winning authors). We won local tournaments and made noise on “It’s Academic”, a long-running trivia TV show in DC. 

My trivial pursuit stopped at college. As a new chapter began, I started to see my old hobby in a startling new light: was it all a big waste of time?

Learning and recalling each new fact brought a visceral pleasure, a satisfying action loop that, once completed, left me craving more. But to what end? What purpose was served by knowing Chekhov titles or impressionist paintings? Had I been hooked on an onanistic knowledge loop with no greater meaning? 

These musings stayed with me, as did the craving for learning. Thankfully, in my second year of college, I found a new outlet in an unlikely place: language learning. 

After an uninspired high school Spanish career, I stumbled my way into Chinese 101 on a whim. The first year was tough. But after a summer in Shanghai at nineteen, I was hooked. Each new word I learned fired the same trivia loop in my brain, satisfied the same well-worn mental grooves. Chinese vocab was trivia. But it was trivia I could use. I racked up two months of conversations with patient strangers. Learning new Mandarin words unlocked a world of people to meet and topics to explore.

In the near-decade since, I’ve continued to study Chinese well beyond the classroom. I have dozens of tutors and hundreds of YouTube clips to prove it. Learning Chinese is applied trivia, scratching the itch while building real compounding value. I have grand plans for where Chinese will take me, but each new word brings me joy in the present.

I didn’t choose trivia, trivia chose me. But I’m thankful each day for Chinese. Learning this language transformed my love of scattered facts into knowledge of language that bursts out of me, begging to be used.

What Novels Make Me Feel

“I like nonfiction books.”

A common sight in the Twittersphere. And it makes sense. People want to get ahead. There are ladders to climb, companies to build, mental models to acquire. I like nonfiction books, too. 

But hearing someone specify that they only like nonfiction books makes me feel ever-so-slightly sad. When I glance over my vanity list of books I’ve read, my eyes always fall back on the novels. Long after I’m done reading, novels are the ones I still feel. 

I love reading novels. Here’s why: 

You can live multiple lives.
We learn best from firsthand experience. Personal lessons learned resonate more than secondhand advice from others. This brings a problem: we only get one life to live. We can’t run 100 Monte Carlo simulations to see how different life paths turn out. We must commit. That’s the game of life.

Novels offer a cheat code. You get a glimpse of other life paths – where decisions lead, and what they feel like. You learn from others’ mistakes. When facing a difficult decision, you have a stable of lived lives in your mind from which to draw insights. 

You’ll be humbled.  

I’m not sure how internal life feels across the decades, but my 20s have been turbulent. I swing from driven and practical to breathlessly idealistic. Late-night talks with friends feel urgent, like we’re closing in on some solid-ground answers buried within, if we could just get out what’s inside. And on we talk, and up becomes down, and suddenly we’re searching for patterns in a Jackson Pollock painting. 

By now I get it: the racing thoughts can never be fully expressed. No matter how earnestly we share, we’re all asymptotes, growing slightly closer while remaining infinitely far apart. Rainer Maria Rilke puts it best: 

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered. 

So what’s the solution? How to respond to the mix of exhilaration and despair that comes when you lock eyes with the big paradox? I’ve found meeting characters in classic books helps. It’s humbling to read a description of the human condition from the 1880s so poetic as to make you feel like a JV schlub admiring a big leaguer. Not only have others felt similar emotions before – they’ve also been described in far richer language than I’ve ever even come close. Reading great fiction knocks me off my navel-gazing pedestal and into the applauding crowd. 

You channel the enthusiasm of youth.

I once saw a tweet about reading fiction when you’re young. I forget the author but remember the message: 

Read novels when you’re young, when your passion for life burns strongest. Novels help you channel fiery feelings. Don’t face the swirling emotions alone. See your questions through the eyes of great characters who already lived them. 

I’m not sure what life looks like at 50 or 75. I hope wild desires for the big picture never go away, and I’m sure for some they never do. But I realize that practicalities (mortgages, college funds) might one day douse these embers into a foolish pile of ash. For now, though, they still burn bright. And so I read novels to stir my internal self and fuel the search.

An Antidote to Attention Hell

Last night I gorged in Attention Hell.

If you've dined there before, this will feel familiar: late night. Can't sleep. Pull up YouTube. One click and I'm in. An endless buffet of candy-coated clips on which to feast. Sports highlights, podcast clips, podcast clips commenting on other podcast clips. All dripping with syrupy titles uniquely appealing to my taste buds. Each promising that sweet hit of dopamine.

I inhaled this fiber-less feast for more than an hour. At the end I felt empty, as is required. But I also left with a new level of despair for where we're headed. There's a certain swirl of internet-celebrity-TikTok absorbing more and more stations of the sugar buffet. Names like Portnoy and Paul dominate serve as ringleaders for this mad Attention Economy Hell-on-Earth.

And here's the thing: it's delectable. These internet-famous new-media moguls know how to blend the perfect mix of hype, shock, and controversy into honey-coated cotton candy dusted with pixie sticks and slathered in strawberry syrup. I know it's a one-way to mental diabetes, and I often still can't avoid a quick bite, and then three more.

Today, I found an antidote to the sucrose smorgasbord. The heavenly contrast to Attention Hell. As opposite a type of content as the ever could be. I found it in a 103-year-old book.

The novel is the spiritual opposite of the internet-celebrity-TikTok swirl. Internet sugar hits are extreme, ephemeral, and trivial. Great novels are nuanced, timeless, and profound. I've been drawn to novels more in the past year. Today I decided to review a powerful books I read recently, My Antonia by Willa Cather. Re-reading my favorite passages not only struck me with their depth and beauty. I also realized that novels are rich just as internet puff pieces are impoverished.

I'll leave you with a few favorite of Cather's breathtaking work. My hope is that I can train my mind to always seek out fibrous prose rather than the empty temptations of the Attention Hell buffet.

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy.

Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

___________

Antonia lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.

It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.