notes from two years in china

october 8 marked two years since i moved to china. retrospectively, it feels very different from when i first came here. here are some of my thoughts and reflections:

everyone knows a different version of me

people meet you at different stages of life, under different circumstances, and see different sides of you. they form impressions based on what they see, and those impressions don't always change as you do. some will get you wrong, and you'll get others wrong too. and that's okay.

it also makes me wonder if i've failed to see the best version of other people, or failed to bring out the best in them.

your world is not the world

where you grow up shapes what you consider normal. living elsewhere makes you question assumptions you never realized you had.

independence and roots

living on your own terms feels wonderful. but being away from home has made me appreciate how much meaning comes from staying connected to family. you can value freedom without wanting to be alone.

technology is more interesting than ever before

among frontier technologies, ai has enormous potential to drive change. ai has made experimenting with ideas remarkably easy. things i once could only imagine now feel possible to try. the more i explore, the more curious i become about what i could build.

interests are discovered through doing, not thinking

you often don't know whether you genuinely enjoy something until you've tried it.

be useful

just being useful changes a lot of things. aim to do things that are useful for other people too. that's how you bring value and make a change.

try to be as articulate as possible

people can misunderstand you even when you think you've been clear. what you mean and what others understand are often two different things. i'm learning to choose my words more carefully and check whether they landed the way i intended.

i care too much or not at all

i've also noticed that when i care about something, i care deeply. when i don't, i barely care at all, even when it's important. this tendency has sometimes worked against me.

learn to think long term

people really underestimate the importance of thinking long term. it's very easy to fall into short-term thinking. i'm learning to do things with the long term in mind, choose people for the long term, and make decisions accordingly.

be decisive

internal conflicts can be more exhausting than the consequences of a decision. i've spent too much time weighing possibilities when i could have been moving forward. sometimes clarity comes from deciding, not from thinking longer.

two years is both a long time and no time at all

individual days can feel slow, but looking back, two years feels impossibly short.

still figuring things out, haha
thanks for reading <3