Thoughts 💭

the following are random thoughts i've accrued by existing over the years. I'm forgoing a lot of "design" on this portion of the site.

• fall in love with something man, pursue an art form, find the upper bounds of your abilities, fall in love with the world and everything everyone's created, work tirelessly to the point of insanity to create something, anything, that when someone looks at, they also fall in love
• this world we exist in, exists for one sole reason. individuals all across the world had things they cared about so much, that they wanted to share that beauty with others. the moment you stop doing that is the moment humanity’s beauty dies, and humanity with it
• the day after a loved one's death is fascinating, just an empty sickness in ones stomach, akin to what i'd imagine the opposite of the feeling of "butterflies" to be. i wonder if the opposite of death is love, and if death means the end, does love (creation) signal the beginning
• my mom often asks why i'm not friends with the other asian kids in my religious community, and earnestly it's that every time i interact with them, they're all playing incredibly low-stakes status games and making me constantly prove that i deserve to exist
• freshman year of college i cold emailed 100+ PlayStation designers asking for help on how not only to be a better designer but also how to enter the industry, and only one person emailed me back, and he's now my design mentor and one of my closest friends
  
  in life, a lot of people aren't going to take bets on you, but there will be those who do, and you should double down on them and hold them tight, and ignore everything else
• the tech sphere is constantly addicted to quantifying their intelligence in comparison to others, and at all points in these conversations these discussions are fundamentally useless, because the only thing that matters is just doing things
  
  i've seen people several magnitudes smarter than me dedicate their life to playing nyt minigames all day and working in sales at google
• i look around at all the incredibly talented engineers i'm working with on a day to day, and most of their backgrounds are so varied. part of me wonders if what truly separates mediocre engineers from great ones isn't intelligence, but willingness to be in the trenches learning
• my roommate went to a party, brought back a girl (they’re currently making out) and I spent the past 8 hours looking at muji designs
• i have a hard time understanding the idea that you learn way more by working at a startup than at a FAANG. feel like i've learnt more abt software engineering and design working at FAANG over the past 3 months, than my time working at a startup for over a year
• some of my favorite design projects are ones that are meant to be viewed by only one person and no one else. there's something innately special in crafting something for just one person to see, that everything was designed around them
  
  we are only as beautiful as the individual love we give one-another
• the idea that quality art is produced by those who are depressed or mentally ill in some way is true to an extent, but i think it’s truth lies in the fact that art for a lot of these people exists as the one sole thing that makes them feel happy/alive to an extent
• you shouldn’t be able to viciously critique art unless you yourself have created an art pieces that’s been viewed by others
• as an artist, you have the moral duty to create more art. i’ll see a tweet along the lines of, “i’m giving up on drawing” and earnestly, give up. let this world be polluted with low quality artwork, let the children consume the worst, all because you decided to give up.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on; 
and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

                        - Act IV The Tempest