Getting back my mojo, quarter life crisis edition | Reflection | Day 1 / 100

First swing at this writing thing.

I felt empty inside having accomplished everything I wanted at age 20, and nothing I wanted at age 10.

In 2018 at age 20, I wanted to: work at a top tech company, call my own shots in projects, make a lot of money, eat nice dinners, buy nice things, you get the idea.

In 2008 at age 10, I wanted to spend my life doing something awesome and trying to change the world.

Back to reality in 2024 as a 26.83 year old, I went through college interning at some of the most well-known companies like Google and Intuit, and worked at Snapchat as an iOS engineer. Was the lead engineer on a large project that was called out in the company’s public quarterly earnings report (sorta cool?) and had significant sway over the project itself. I was getting paid very well living in New York City, didn’t really need to worry about how much my dinner was going to cost, and could realistically get away with financial splurges fitting for my age.

On paper — pretty freaking awesome: immigrant dream, the big apple, money, what’s not to like?

Yet I felt incredibly stuck and powerless.

It took me months of wasting away nights staring down TV shows from being brain-dead after long days at work and being confused at how some of my friends fully enjoy the exact same life to realize what I was missing.

For me, the mojo was working tirelessly for something I deeply desire. Living a comfortable life is great but insufficient against that criteria.

I like to think I take pride in taking the extra mile to accomplish something I set my eyes on. I had the “endearing” nicknames among my college friend group: Dr. Woke, Joe the Extreme, to name a few. I learned to own that over time.

I was never the smartest kid in the room, but I was often the one who worked by far the hardest. That was arguably the singular thing that brought me to where I stand today, for better or for worse.

When I set my eyes on a Google internship in college, I went as far as doing every single related question I could find online. Must’ve been 2000+ questions that took 40-50 hours a week for 6 months or so, on top of a full course load as an engineering student at Penn or a full-time internship.

When I was bitter over not making varsity badminton in high school, I trained footwork an hour every day in the 100-degree outdoor sun, lost 20 pounds of weight in a summer, became almost 30% faster and obliterated my competition in the following year tournament.

When I thought I liked the idea of feeling strong (more on that another day), I went through 3 back injuries and eventually put up a 450 lb deadlift at the gym, which at the time was a little shy of 3 times my body weight.

The point of these anecdotes is not to boast the results, since they pale in comparison to efforts of others in their careers / life events / upbringings, but to put in perspective my personality: I like throwing my weight around the hardest way possible to maximize my chances.

An all-in mentality, if you will.

Predictably, each time I went through these “give it 110%” cycles, I was left exhausted and burnt out. I would barely sleep 4-5 hours each fall doing interview prep for job interviews for months on end. I would binge eat junk food after months of clean eating diets to shed 20 pounds of body fat. I would also carry a chronic lower back pain for the foreseeable future and supposedly have a spinal health of a mid-40 year old at age 21.

I found myself losing the intensity edge I was so proud of.

It was becoming increasingly clear to me that my 10 year old self was more right than the 20 year old: It’s the journey that matters more. It’s the “doing something awesome” and “trying” to change the world that retains the vigor rather than the “make money” and “get a nice promotion” and “wear nice things”.

Taking a path for your personalized goalpost + doing so at a sustainable intensity = long-term progress + adaptability + continuous wins.

It’s cliché you say. Yeah it is. But it feels different when you’re living it instead of reading about it or watching it on a TikTok from a Gen-Z creator.

Now, just to be clear, not everything sucked — I went to Hawaii last year for the first time with 3 friends and it was awesome: jumped out of a plane and swam with turtles for a week — money does buy you some pretty amazing stuff.

But because my goal was to “work at Google”, I was devastated my first 2 years after getting rejected. If my goal at the time was to “give the interview my everything”, I would’ve accomplished them 3 years in a row, felt proud about it, and reaped the benefits my last year. But instead, I only felt “redeemed” my last time; in reality, nothing changed around the level of effort and hard work all 3 years and I should’ve felt proud before that too.

I felt like I needed a reboot.

So at 26.83 years old, two months away from being unequivocally in my late 20s, I quit my job and threw away the nice corporate benefits, a looming promotion, and cushy salary.

Publicly, I’ll be dedicating the next 1000 days to attempt to build my own business and share my progress with you all.

In truth, I’ll be spending the next 1000 days restarting my life: to relearn what it means to build a fulfilling, sustainable, meaningful life. My goal each day is to get a tiny win and become 1% better than yesterday, and to walk away from this experience with a set of principles and mindsets that will guide my thinking for the decades to come.

But a thousand days sound pretty scary, and frankly pretty unrealistic, so I’ll break it down to 100 day chunks of 3-ish months.

The first 100 days will be focused on transitioning out of a fixed scarcity mindset into a gritty abundance mindset. I’ll be structuring and sharing my thoughts around 3 topics:

1. Reflections: “I learned X”

2. Ideas & Perspectives: “I believe Y”

3. Updates: “I accomplished Z”

Some of the personal reflections I’m sharing this week:

1. Goals I can control the outcome of > Goals I cannot control the outcome of.

   1. e.g. “I’m going to run a marathon and train for it as I hard as I can, balancing everything else in life” vs “I’m going to target a sub 3-hour marathon”. I can guarantee a win for the first goal and only maybe 20-30% in the second.

2. Whatever my strength is, don’t lose sight of it.

   1. I have an almost radical ability to do things I don’t like to do in order to accomplish something. Rather than complaining about the tough shit in life, own the raw willpower and make the necessary sacrifices. In my case, the sacrifice is (hopefully) short-term financial stability, but it may be different for you.

3. I might have a higher chance of success by avoiding things I don’t like, instead of chasing after the thing I think I want.

   1. Taking an engineering job because I want to be a millionaire, not because I like it — I might be really miserable if that doesn’t happen.

4. Go all in on a few things and let the other desires go.

   1. Despite having an all-in mentality, I did not become a professional athlete or compsci whiz. Focusing on many things at once works for college admissions but becomes less purposeful in practice. Less is more.

I haven’t decided on the cadence of this series, but I’d like to do at least one entry a week. The next one will likely be an ideas & perspectives post on my thoughts around negotiation and relationship building.

If something clicked with you as you read this (both agreeing and disagreeing), I’d appreciate you letting me know and/or leaving a comment! Thanks for reading.

JZ, April 15, 2024