Three Things #32: August 28, 2022
The three best things I’ve ever done
Last week’s topic was important but also exhausting and somewhat depressing to write about. I decided to write about something easy, fun, and optimistic this week.
Thing #1: Marathon
I started running about 16 years ago during college. Prior to that, I was pretty unhealthy, not really into sports, and definitely not a runner.
I still remember the first time I went for a run in Central Park. The thought of running the full park loop, all six miles of it, seemed beyond impossible. I could barely finish the 1.6 mile reservoir loop. I got winded quickly and didn’t particularly enjoy it. I also remember the first time I ran a race, 14 years ago. I was terrified. I asked the guy standing next to me, an older gentleman, if he had any advice. He said, “Just keep running. It gets easier, I promise.”
For me running has always been about incremental challenge. In the beginning it was just about being able to do a 2 mile run without getting winded. Eventually I tried running 4 miles, then 6. I ran more short races. I began running seriously when I lived in Hong Kong about 12 years ago. I’d go for what (at the time) felt like epic, long, exploratory runs of 8-9 miles, up into and around the hills and to the far side of Hong Kong island.
I ran my first half marathon in Macau in 2010. I remember the nervous energy. I trained intensely, and studied strategy for running a half marathon. (Looking back, it’s sort of laughable, but we all start somewhere.) I ran hard, enjoyed the race, and at the end as I watched the marathoners continue on to the second half, I remember very clearly thinking to myself, “Those people are insane, I will never run further than this, this is enough of a challenge for me.”
But I did keep running. I set out to run my first marathon in 2012, during my first semester of business school—a particularly insane task on top of classwork, social life, drinking, extracurriculars, and (sometimes) sleep. I really, really struggled with the training. I posted social media updates after my training runs with the hashtag #RedefinePossible, for which my classmates relentlessly made fun of me. I left parties an hour or two and a beer or two earlier than I would’ve otherwise. I tried to follow an intermediate training course that called for a handful of 18 to 22 mile training runs, but after doing a single 18 or 19 mile run, I couldn’t keep going due to injury, lack of time, and sheer exhaustion. I got in a few more short runs but went into my first marathon feeling completely unprepared. I was terrified: terrified of hitting the wall since I had literally never run farther than 18 miles before, terrified of my recovery, terrified of injury. I felt horribly undertrained.
In the event I remember the race being hard, but okay. I finished in a perfectly respectable 4:12:30. My coach—also one of my professors—ran the last mile with me. I wrote “For Mom” on both of my shoes in honor of my mother who had passed away the prior year (I still have those shoes, and still run in them once in a while). I remember the feeling of crossing the finish line for the first time: the incredible, powerful, overwhelming feeling of accomplishment, joy, strength, and possibility. I cried at the end (and I still cry at the end of a marathon, every single time).
Since then I’ve continued to improve my running incrementally. I’ve added more and more weekly distance, and now regularly run marathon distance. I’ve also continued to increase my speed. As I look back and survey this 16 year landscape, I’m really astounded. I don’t know for sure, but I think I’ve run 12-15,000 miles total. Running today feels like one of the very most natural things for me to do: it feels like breathing, or speaking English. When I’m overenergized, I run. When I’m tired, I run. When I’m happy, I run. When I’m depressed, I run. When I’m jetlagged, I run. I always, always feel better after going for a run. And when I don’t run for a day or two, I start to feel terrible.
Running that first marathon was one of the most important and beneficial things I’ve done. A marathon is a solid, physical goal. We all need such goals in our lives, because so much of modern life is fuzzy. In most things, you can cut corners and lie to yourself or the world about your progress. Not so with running (or lifting weights, or martial arts, or your exercise routine of choice). I worked my butt off to finish that first marathon, and it absolutely blew my mind when I finished it—I was always the lazy kid! I didn’t think I had it in me. Everything changed for me. There was a clear before and an after. It was the hardest, scariest thing I ever did, and it showed me that I could do anything I put my mind to. I know it sounds cliche, but it’s true. And now in retrospect the things that seemed so big and scary at that time are quite literally things I do before breakfast on a regular weekend.
I haven’t looked back since. As I get older and further along in my career, I realize more and more how much of my success is directly a product of that first marathon.
Redefine possible.
For more: Establish a regular exercise routine if you haven’t already. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you do in the beginning. The goal is regularity. You can and will improve incrementally.
Thing #2: Burning Man
This time of year, as my Telegram groups are exploding with people swapping photos of their art and their outfits and advice for the burn, I’m always hyper cognizant that it’s Burning Man season.
I went to college in the Bay Area and Burning Man was a popular destination even 20+ years ago. I always avoided it because I had the impression that it’s a drug-fueled crazy hippy sex party in the desert (as I later discovered, that’s not untrue, but nor is it the whole truth). Later, as it became more popular among my peers, I reflexively avoided it because it felt too mainstream, and that the contrarian move was in fact not to go.
I was finally convinced to go in 2018 as part of Camp Decentral. I felt better about it because the camp (which still exists and is in its fifth year!) produces a series of talks about blockchain, cryptocurrency, and all things decentralization, so it sort of felt like a work trip: not all that different from some of the crazy, hippy crypto conferences I routinely attended.
I have to preface this by recognizing that it sounds like the most cliche, predictable thing in the world, but: my first burn was transformational. It’s very difficult to describe Burning Man to someone who hasn’t been—I know how obnoxious this must sound, but it’s true. In essence it feels like humanity boiled down to its bare essentials: the closest I’ll ever come to a tribal experience. It feels like being in interactive theater, or in an immersive video game: something like what the metaverse might feel like if it actually existed and resembled the Oasis in Ready Player One crossed with Snow Crash steampunk. I met amazing people there, experimented with new substances, and, honestly, unlocked new aspects of my consciousness. That sort of sounds cliche too, and it feels weird saying that as someone who is a hyper-rational engineer and not exactly a new age, fuzzy frou-frou, but it’s honestly true. I felt a deep, incredible sense of connection to the people I met there, and to humanity as a whole. In some ways it resembled some of the experiences I’d have later during meditation.
Yet another way to describe Burning Man is that it feels something like being a child all over again. You explore the space with a genuine sense of awe, wonder, and excitement. Everything feels fresh, new, unfamiliar, and exciting. Most of all, it gave me appreciation for and awareness of the fact that things can be other than they are. We live in a particular society where things—people, organizations, governments, money, etc.—are all arranged in a particular way, for a particular, quirky set of historical reasons. Of course I had some sense that things could be arranged differently—I lived in Japan, after all—but Burning Man made Japan feel normal by comparison. It really showed me how people can arrange themselves in a completely different way, with different behaviors and motivations. People are incredible; Burning Man brings out the very best in humanity.
This experience strongly and directly influences my work every day. I know that, as magical as it is, Burning Man doesn’t scale in time or geographically. But it’s a blueprint for building something different, and something better along some key dimensions. At the very least, it’s an inspiration to keep trying, and to question everything. We can do better if we want to, and if we’re willing to work for it.
For more: Read the 10 Principles of Burning Man. And seriously consider going if you haven’t already. I promise you’ll have a blast and you won’t regret it.
Thing #3: Vipassana
I did a ten day silent Vipassana meditation retreat in 2019. I’ve written a little about the experience but, like Burning Man, it’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand. What’s more, I don’t want to give anyone who hasn’t expectations because meditation is very personal and everyone’s experience is unique.
The meditation retreat is the single best thing I’ve ever done. It changed me and my outlook on life and the world more than any other experience, and in a very positive, constructive way. It showed me things I didn’t think were possible—things that I wouldn’t have believed if you had told me about them.
First of all, it was really, really hard, but not in the ways I expected! I expected sleeping only a few hours per night, skipping dinner, and the physical act of sitting for around ten hours per day to be really difficult, not to mention the challenge of not speaking for ten days! In the event the sitting was difficult but manageable, and I got used to it pretty quickly. The sleeping and eating were not a problem. And the silence was joyful and relaxing. Those weren’t the hard parts.
The hard part was, well, everything else. Some have described Vipassana as a form of “surgery for the soul.” The first two or three days consist of opening up the soul, slowly and painfully. Then the real surgery begins: old experiences and very deep-rooted ideas and beliefs are surfaced and removed (Buddhists would describe this process as digging deep through multiple layers of consciousness to reach the store consciousness and reveal and expunge the sankhara present there). It’s really remarkable the thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and memories that arise during the middle and latter half of the retreat: happy, sad, painful, wistful, ecstatic, and everything in between. I don’t think it’s possible to spend ten days doing Vipassana without some form of radical transformation (though, again, the nature of that transformation will vary from person to person). At the very least, it forces you to come face to face with yourself, your own nature, and your place in the universe, something we don’t do often enough.
I realize I’m speaking in generalities here and it’s difficult to be more specific without going down a deep, dark rabbit hole and attempting to put very abstract concepts into words that almost certainly wouldn’t make any sense anyway. For now suffice it to say that there really is no better way to get in touch with oneself and the nature of reality, i.e., the very deepest of deep thoughts, than through a long, focused, intense period of meditation. Psychedelics may achieve something a bit similar but on a briefer, shallower, more artificial level. I recommend Vipassana to literally everyone. It will break you apart and put you back together again a better person. Religious components, spirituality, and epiphany aside, it is totally essential to find space for stillness in your life, and I find no better way than meditation to achieve this.
For more: Try meditation! Sign up for a Vipassana retreat. They’re free and they happen regularly all around the world.