One of the central questions of my life is, how much control or influence do I have over my own behavior, really? A lot of my misery as a kid and teenager and young adult seemed to stem from not being able to behave in ways that were seemingly ideal or even just appropriate for my circumstances. I simply couldn’t seem to bring myself to do my homework, for example, and I was punished for this in a myriad of ways. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of introspective journalling trying to figure out what the fuck that was all about, and I still don’t have an elegant answer to it all. I have many conflicting interpretations and I’ve gotten better at navigating them. I experimented with a lot of approaches to try and solve the problem (for a range of different definitions of what the problem actually was), some of which worked somewhat, some of the time.

If I’m allowed to be a little arrogant and boastful, I’d say it turns out that my childself was actually right all along, homework was stupid, I would actually be better off today if I had spent even less time on homework and self-flagellating about why I wasn’t doing my homework, and more time reading, writing, hanging out with friends and generally goofing off.

There’s a truth to that but it doesn’t feel complete. I can see now from my current vantage point that I didn’t need to endure nearly as much suffering as I did then – and suffering here is both the direct pain and the derivative pain, as implied in “pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional”. Nobody really helped me see how it was optional when I was a kid though. And I suspect that this was almost by design; the adults in my life had very much bought into a “suffering builds character” model of reality, and chose to torment me with their kindness, for my own good. I am scintillatingly, radiantly proud to say that none of it mattered, none of it made a positive difference, I could have skipped school entirely and I would’ve been better off for it along many dimensions. This might not be true for every other kid, but it was true for me. Unfortunately, in my social environment, and in probably most social environments, nobody gives that kind of personalized attention to kids. That was kind of a hard truth to confront, but it did set me free in a sense, when I realize that the universe wasn’t out to fuck me in particular, it just didn’t really care.

I’m meandering. I want to talk about behavior change, about agency, about doing what one wants, what one wills. One of the things that I wanted was to live a life of creative freedom, meaning a life where I can wake up in the morning and do whatever I like for a living. This is basically my life now. It has been for a couple of years at least. Some quick Visa backstory recap: I was blogging throughout my teens and 20s, I got hired in 2013 to work in marketing for a software company via my blogging, I saved up some money and built a bit of an audience and I left my job mid-2018, after which I wrote and posted and tweeted like a maniac, building even more of an audience. In 2019 my twitter friends put me on a plane to San Francisco so I could hang out with them, which was an experience that catalyzed me writing my first book, Friendly Ambitious Nerd, released early 2020. At that point I was gearing up to go on a world tour, travelling to major cities to organize twitter friend meetups, when the covid19 pandemic hit, and so I ended up writing my second book Introspect instead, released early 2022. I was then gearing up to do my world tour in 2023, when my wife and I learned that we were having a baby. And here we are in 2024, delighted, deliriously sleep-deprived parents, and I’m up writing essays while mentally impaired.

Alright so that was just for context. I still want to talk about agency and behavior change and doing what one wants. And you see from the big picture perspective, I’m doing great. I had a vision for myself about what my life’s work could be, and I’ve manifested that vision into reality. Luck is a non-trivial factor in this, and I have a separate essay to write about how to maximize one’s luck surface area (you’re likelier to get a relevant opportunity from meeting loads of people than from sitting alone at home, for eg.) But it took a lot of work. The most impressive thing I’ve done in this domain, I think, is that I wrote hundreds of “wordvomits” on a side-blog, which is a huge part of what gives me the confidence to be a writer.

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