6 Lessons from 2023

From friends to fashion, my 2023 takeaways.

Hello friends, welcome! If you want to better understand how money, tech & society shape our lives, subscribe below:

You can check out my other articles or follow me on Twitter too!

If you wanna say Hi!👋, DM me on Twitter, or leave a comment below.

Now to today’s piece 🤝

I could create a massive list of lessons from 2023 (23 Lessons from 2023 sounds like 👌 headline), but tbh I think there’s only a few that really matter.

Let’s get into it.

1. Where you live relative to the people you care about drastically affects your baseline happiness.

After college, I moved to the South Peninsula, roughly an hour south of SF, where I knew no one.

I’d go to work, the gym and my studio.

Work.

Gym.

Studio.

Repeat.

Man, was it lonesome and life was just eh, OK.

Then, when the weekends came, I’d commute to San Francisco and see my friends.

I’d dance at bars, laugh incredibly loud, and crash at friends’ places. Colors were more vivid, food tasted better and I found myself in an upbeat mood most of the time.

Then I’d commute back to South Bay for the start of the week.

After a few days of my grind schedule, my happiness baseline would drop again.

I had a hunch that it had to do with people.

And, after moving to San Francisco, I confirmed my hunch; I found myself smiling at times without understanding why. When you’re around people who you really vibe with, they amplify your best qualities, help you work on your weaknesses and offer a ear to chat about the little & big things in life.

Now that I live in SF, I can text a buddy and 15 minutes later, we’re hanging out because we all live/work so close together. I laugh more, laugh often and live vibrantly.

You don’t see that in a job description.

2. Commute is a time, energy and mind-killer.

Recently, I moved to SF from South Peninsula and I’m beginning to see the negative effects of my commute.

Before you commute, it’s easy to make it about the time.

“Oh it’s only an hour and a half each way!” But there’s so much more to it. When you commute heavily, (I’m commuting 1.5hr each way, 3x/week by car), your headspace + energy gets eaten up.

It’s rather insidious. You’re not tired per se, not like you-just-ran-12-miles or squatted-hundreds-of-pounds-for-reps tired; you can still do stuff physically. But that little angel voice in your head that encourages you to do the things that nudge you to a better life like go to the gym, see that friend or go on a date is seriously muffled.

So you default to what’s convenient.

And oh boy, does capitalist America have convenience going for it.

Make a home-cooked meal? Ah you’ll have dirty dishes to wash. Besides you gotta then get groceries and you’re out of onions for that one dish. Doordash is fine.

Go to the gym? Well that’s a 15min walk away! And it’s cold & windy outside. Why go out when it’s warm & cozy here. Hmm, I wonder what that Youtube video we opened but never watched is on…

Meet a friend? Oof and wake up tomorrow for another commute? You really wanna be tired while driving? The bed is right there and we’ve got our Doordash already.

Go on a date? Another Hinge match is just a swipe away.

Dampened angelic inner voice + convenience = weight gain, social isolation, a lackluster dating life and worsening mental health.

Resisting the negative effects of the commute takes conscious effort. But it’s sort of like swimming upstream; why have your environment work against you?

3. Your relationship to food is the biggest factor in your weight.

Earlier this year, I lost 20+ lbs and have kept it off for 8+ months (still going).

How?

In a nation where 42.4% of Americans are obese, 30.7% are overweight and just 26.9% (a minority) are neither, a good chunk of the population is trying to find the latest hack or trick to lose weight.¹

Is it keto? Paleo? Vegan? No, wait carnivore; we need to eat like our ancestors. But wait, how many grams of carbs, fats and proteins do I need?

These approaches focus on the specifics; the exact measurements of food or the specific types of food.

But most fit people are not measuring their food every time they eat (exceptions for high performing athletes) or eating an incredibly strict diet and most wouldn’t last trying to do so, for every meal, every time, in every situation for the rest of their lives.

So trying to aspire to such incredibly high and rigid standards that work for athletes is silly!

Most importantly, it’s unnecessary and hard.

And because it’s hard, when people try & fail, they default to a common belief I hear time & time again: willpower.

I’ll be loading up my plate at a buffet or eating at a family dinner with loved ones and people will tell me I have immense willpower to not consume lots of desserts or sweets.

But I don’t! I just geniunely don’t want to consume those desserts!

And I wasn’t always like this. As a kid growing up, I had a major sweet tooth and would happily vaccuum up anything sugary. Cookies, ice cream, chocolate; you name it, I ate it.

So how did I turn it around?

Well consider that willpower is just a tiny bit of the equation to weight loss.

Consider going to the gym. On some days, getting dressed and stepping out the door can take willpower. But once I’m already dressed and out the door, I figure I may as well go to the gym as undressing feels a) harder and b)actively choosing a worse health outcome. So momentum has got me going and once I’m at the gym, I geniunely enjoy and appreciate that I left home. But I wouldn’t want to rely on willpower each time; not for something so crucial to my health & wellbeing.

What changed was my relationship to the gym; I associate the gym with wellbeing. Willpower is really only something I rely on when I’m having tough days.

When you get that it’s your relationship with food that matters, then your main focus is no longer on which diet to do or what your breakdown of macros should be.

Rather it’s on what experiences to have to SHAPE how you view food.

It’s a subtle but notable difference between the two.

When I first started working on my food plan with my personal trainer, I was initially worried as to once I lost the weight, how I was going to keep the weight off! I clung to the plan he gave me, using it but also studying it up and down, trying to reverse engineer the “magic” behind it.

But over time, as I began dropping weight, I observed my body weight responding to different foods and began developing an internal association with what foods are healthy for me, and in what quanities. Then over time, I started developing a stronger attachment to healthier foods.

Now, months after completing the personal training program, when I go out to eat, I have an intuitive understanding of what roughly constitutes a healthy plate and don’t need to track calories or obsess over an added dessert.

(If you’re looking to get a general understanding, I highly recommend Jeff Nippard’s Body Recomposition Guide ($50). I used his meal plans as a rough guide + learned so much into how calories work and how much of them to eat.)

4. Curiosity + hard work takes you farther than anything else. Use your extra time + resources to find what feels like play to you.

Society doesn’t encourage a particular employment outcome for anyone; ideally, you’d have a work-on-something-you-love-get-paid-well job, at neutral it’s find-work-put-food-on-the-table job and at worst, it’s sleep-under-this-overpass-there’s-no-work-and-the-economy-is-tanking unemployment.

But, assuming you have a job, in the long run, if you’re doing something that doesn’t feel like play to you, you simply won’t go far.

The reason is simple; the world is hyper-competitive. Your dad was right, it is a rat race out there. There are people out there willing to work twice as hard for a tenth the pay because their family does sleep under a overpass or is on the edge of about to. They have a hunger that is born of sheer desperation of circumstance and you, in your cushy life, reading this on your screen, won’t be able to match that level of work ethic.

But your dad was wrong in two ways: a) the economy is not zero sum but positive sum and b) working hard & long doesn’t have to come from a place of desperation but rather intense curiosity.

How?

To people whose work feels like play, they’ll work late nights + weekends + early mornings and enjoy it. They’ll be calling clients or studying a textbook or crafting their next idea and smiling all the while. I’m not saying it’s easy as every endeavor in life has its suck but it’s certainly a better way to live an exciting life than out of a fear of poverty.

OK, so if the world is competitive and the people it rewards are those who work smart & hard, those who work smart & hard & have fun are those who feel like they are playing while working, how do I find out what kind of work feels like play to me?

Experimentation.

Try a few things intentionally in your free time and see what you gravitate towards. Keep trying, failing and trying again. See what you stick with. You may not find it immediately, but the point is to keep experimenting.

How do I know what’s sticking and what’s not?

Are you waking up early to work on something before work? Do you spend a Saturday focused on something? Do you find your mind fixated on that thing while you’re walking around? Driving? Taking a number 2?

Over the past year, thru experimentation, I’ve discovered that one of my core interests is writing. I’d wake up early in the morning to work on some pieces, stay up late at night, work on weekends and think about ideas for pieces when I’m walking around.²

5. Being well dressed matters.

I used to believe that fashion was something only vain people partook in.

I’d think, Psshhh, I don’t need to convey my self-worth thru my clothes! as I walked around in my Costco sweater + socks; jeans, a shirt & a puffer worked fine for me.³

But I’ve come to appreciate that being well dressed is less so about surface-level materialism or vanity but rather as a form of self-love. When I took the time to properly groom and style myself, I found I began feeling more confident and more expressive.

As my friend Zac Solomon puts it,

“Fashion is about signaling to the world, as well as yourself, that you care.

When you go to a wedding, you dress nice, because you care about the bride and groom. When you go to a job interview, you dress nice, because you care about the job. When you go on a date, you dress nice, because you care about making a great first impression.

All the rest of the time, you should look as nice, and clean, and as fashionable as you reasonably can, simply because you care about yourself.”

 40 Lessons from 32 years - Zac Solomon

Couldn’t have put it better myself.⁴

Going to be exploring this much more in 2024.

Any recommendations are highly welcome :)

6. You need both cerebral and physical activities.

Writing is a very cerebral endeavor. I think of all kinds of observations I’ve made throughout my week, meaningful quotes I’ve read and combine them to create a very cohesive and interesting narrative that I enjoy.

And it’s basically me sitting in a chair and typing a bunch.

As is software engineering.

But your body & brain needs movement. Doing a yoga stretch or a deadlift simply activates different parts of your brain; it gets you out of your head and into your body.

If you do cerebral stuff without enough physical activity, you feel yucky. Your joints get stiff, your muscles waste away and over time, your meat container breaks down sooner rather than later.

Movement is the investment in 80 year old you.

If you do physical stuff without enough cerebral activity, you feel that your aren’t being pushed to your potential. All of this physical energy geared towards creating a perfect environment for your mushy brain to perform and for it not to be deployed, creates tension, even frustration.

You need both to thrive.

You can’t think your way thru life and neither can you gym thru it.

That’s all I got for 2023 and I’ll catch y’all in 2024. 🙂 

- Kiran

1. Overweight & Obesity Statistics - NIDDK (nih.gov)

2. And a good chunk never gets published! It’s just for me. So perhaps a goal for 2024 is to publish more.

3. Shoutout to all Asian moms who have determined a significant percentage of Silicon Valley’s dresscode.

4. Also in Silicon Valley, not dresssing up is a form of status. Puffer jackets, tees and tennis shoes reign supreme. But the net result is not that you escape status in some non-statusy way, rather you still have a status hierarchy & just dress poorly!

If you liked this piece, make sure to subscribe by adding your email below!

Kiran’s Gems 💎

• “I think I realize that I'm asking myself a lot of the questions around life that people 6+ years ahead of me hit. If I can hone in on what matters to me and focus on that, I can design a life that's truly aligned with what I want.” One of the wisest things to do is to look ahead and ask questions early.

• Interesting to see Cece Xie’s creative schedule after quitting years of BigLaw; looking forward to embracing something like this further.

• “I read until I can’t help but write—usually because I’m inspired by something I just read, or an idea just struck me…I write in Google Docs until it’s time for work. Most of the time I work remotely and write until 9am (on rare occasions, I’ll write until 10am if I’m really on a roll, and in this case I work until 6pm).” Fascinating to read about Elle’s writing schedule.

How was today's piece?