My Life in Weeks // v29
This post is inspired by WaitButWhy’s blog Your Life In Weeks. I strongly recommend reading this piece and more writing from Tim Urban.
Hello, 30.
You felt so far away, yet here you are!
My 20’s had a certain kind of freedom to it.
Freedom like rushing to the car at midnight, driving an hour into the country, to watch a meteor shower, without worrying about how drowsy I’d feel the next morning. Freedom to spend months building a startup that ultimately fell apart. Freedom to decide to run a half-marathon, and then to run it only a few weeks later with minimal prep. Freedom to say yes without consequence.
That freedom often was accompanied by anxiety. Would I be able to get a good job out of college? Would I find something that I truly love doing every day? How do I make friends as an adult in a new city? What does it feel like to move 3,000 miles away from home? What do those around me think of me?
30 feels new. New freedoms, new stressors.
I carry an immense gratitude into my next decade from the freedom of being established in my career. The freedom deriven from having trusted friends who I know will be by my side no matter what. And freedom created by mentors who taught me not just the “right way to go” but taught me “the right way to be”.
While so much happened over the past 365 days, one major new life-scale moment rose to the top…
🧠 Remain Aware and Equanimous
“I will not tell you anything about the vipassana experience. But, I promise that you will leave with a smile on your face” a friend of mine, Frederik Pferdt, told me about 2-weeks before my vipassana.
This year I attended a Vipassana; a 10-day silent meditation retreat. This secular mindfulness technique encourages a deep focus on the physical sensations within oneself as the path towards liberation from one’s own mind.
Since the day we were born, our mind has been trained to react to sensations. As a baby, when we feel hungry, we cry. As an adult, when we feel an itch, we scratch. When we feel anger, we yell. Vipassana meditation aims to take back control of the unconscious mind by introducing a moment of thoughtfulness between the sensation and the reaction.
Over the course of 10 days, I sat in silent meditation for more than 10 hours every day. The day began at 4:00AM with the ring of a gong and ended with lights out at 9:30PM. The entire schedule can seem grueling at first glance…
To create the most effective environment for practice, I observed Noble Silence: No talking. No TV. No reading. No cell phone. No exercise. No journaling. etc. etc. etc.
As one might imagine simply by looking at the schedule, the experience was demanding in every possible way. I can say with confidence, no one is comfortable for sitting 10+ hours per day. And humans are social creatures, so noble silence is mind-bending challenge against our evolution. Yet the experience provided a mindfulness practice that will bear fruit for the rest of my life.
Here is a quick TL;DR; of how my experience went:
Day 1–3: WOW! What a fun, novel experience. I cherish the ability to separate myself from the distractions of the world and spent time reflecting on my past. I spent hours during breaks reflecting on nearly every part of my life — college, friends, family, work, and myself. I found joy in being able to sit fully through a 1-hour meditation session.
Day 4–6: During this period I deeply settled into the practice. I sat for hours on end in some of the deepest meditation I have ever experienced. So much so that I began to look forward to meditation and forget about the outside world I left behind.
Day 7–9: By far the most difficult days for me. They consisted of cold, rainy weather, an ever present wonder of what is happening in the lives of friends and family without me. This wandering mind often prevented me from settling deep into the practice.
Day 10 and returning home: I left with a feeling of gratitude throughout my entire body. Even though we had not spoken throughout the trip, I left with an odd feeling of connection to the other participants. I left feeling accomplished in a new form of mind-body connection. I left feeling confident that I could learn to live with a more intentional approach to the actions I take.
Why did I decide to do this now? I don’t believe there will ever be a *perfect* time to completely disappear from life for 10 days. So, with my 30th birthday approaching, I joined the waitlist for this session.
A quick note: I cannot officially recommend a Vipassana to you. Why? You and only you can make the decision to go. It is as immensely challenging and anyone who goes reaps the rewards of this hard work. But the decision to go must fully be yours and yours alone. If someone else pushes you to attend this experience, the experience will be shaded.
🚀 Joining a Rocket Ship
About a year ago, I made the toughest decision I have had to make in my adult life. I left Brilliant Hire, the startup I co-founded and hired the first 18 employees, to join Sourcegraph. Leaving the first team I hired and led kept me from sleep for weeks and felt as if I was breaking up with a long-time partner.
Sourcegraph is a hyper-growth technology start-up focused on empowering developers to understand and orchestrate changes across their codebase. When I say we’re growing fast, I mean fast. When I accepted my offer 13 months ago, Sourcegraph was around 90 employees. Now, we are 300+. Our revenue, customer count, usage, etc has all grown as fast. Many incredible companies around the world use Soucegraph.
The past year has been filled with chaos, joy, laughter, misery, and every emotion in between. Growing up in Texas and Oklahoma, working for a hyper-growth technology company felt like an unachievable dream that only occurred in the movies. Yet, here I am! Sourcegraph is another opportunity to refine my experience creating products that meaningfully benefit others.
Looking back now, I am grateful I made the change. I learned many life-long lessons throughout this process that will help me grow (described below).
My goal every year is to learn more about myself and the world around me by putting myself into new experiences outside of my comfort zone. These are a few of the most important learnings this year…
Small moments are where the joy in life comes from
Joy is defined as “to experience great pleasure or delight” (Source). For some reason, the past few years I found myself craving greater and greater pleasures — more extravagant trips, more expensive dinners and so on. I saw myself no longer finding joy in repeated experiences.
This past year I pushed myself in the opposite direction, to find moments of joy in smaller and smaller moments. This led to hundreds of micro-moments of joy every week.
Not only did it lead to more joyful days/weeks/months, it led to approaching the world with a heightened sense of observation, as a child would. I found myself observing two small birds searching for food and I found small moments of interaction with friends to spark fond memories. With this new clarity, not only did my world become more enjoyable, I also found myself sharing that joy more compassionately with people around me.
No one else can do the work for you
A lesson as old as time — To reap the reward you’re looking for, you have to work hard. One can only lean on others for so long before they find themselves a shell of their former self. Whether the reward is physical (I want to make more money, I want to run a mile in less than 6 minutes) or mental (I want a stronger relationship, I want to handle my anger more gracefully), you have to put in the effort.
Keeping this learning top of mind has encouraged me to work even harder this past year. The 10-day Vipassana, starting a new job at a high-growth startup, building a relationship, and many other moments reminded me that the most lasting, meaningful benefits come when I put in the work.
This is not to say that “if you put in the effort, the rewards will magically appear” and for me they certainly did not. I have worked tirelessly on many efforts that completely fail or lead to results that I didn’t value.
You change, others change, and thats okay
Two years ago I wrote “People come and go AND memories last forever”. This lesson rang true again this year.
In the ancient meditation technique of Vipassana, they preach about the concept of anicca (impermanence), the idea of constant change. This holds true for every single thing in the world around us. I am constantly changing. You are constantly changing as you read this. And so is everything else around you.
I pushed myself this year to lean into this change, rather than fight it. I embraced the new person I was becoming and focused on surrounding myself with people who build up the person I want to become.
As long as you’re honest and follow your values, you’re doing well
This year I made a decision to leave SAP and leave a team of 18 incredibly talented humans. It was the toughest decision I have had to make in my adult life. I tried every decision making framework. I talked to every one of my personal board of advisors for hours on end. I spoke with friends, family, and even random strangers about it.
Ultimately, I decided to leave SAP.
I was incredibly nervous to tell my colleagues. Incredibly worried my team would feel I was fake, having just days earlier sold them on an opportunity to join the fastest growing startup within SAP.iO.
But what happened will impact how I communicate decisions (big and small) to those around me forever: Be extremely honest and genuine. In the moment of telling my team, I expressed my desire to once again be closer to building a product, rather than the general manager position I was in. I expressed my desire to join a small company after spending the past 6 years at Microsoft (181,000 employees, source) and SAP (107,000 employees, source).
The exact opposite of what I expected happened. The team shared in my joy for the next opportunity. They celebrated me for following my heart. And every person jumped in to aid in my transition process.
While this can be taken as “be honest” it is far more than that. It would have been easy to simply be honest with my team and move on. I was honest and genuine in everything I did while I transitioned to my new role, focusing on sharing compassion to everyone who I talked with.
Everyone follows their own path. It isn’t a race, so don’t feel behind or ahead. It is YOUR journey
Turning 30 creates a moment of reflection at the life scale. Have I lived a fulfilling life? Have I lived a fun life? Have I accomplished the goals I set for myself?
At these junctions, it is human nature to look to my peers or to those who I respect, and judge my life against theirs. I learned this year this only leads to a serious lack of confidence and imposter syndrome. Respected music producer and entrepreneur Jimmy Iovine states this perfectly…
“When you’re a race horse, the reason they put blinders on these things is because if you look at the horse on the left or the right, you’re going to miss a step. That’s why the horses have blinders on. And that’s what people should have. When you’re running after something, you should not look left or right — what does this person think, what does that person think? No. Go.” — Jimmy Iovine
There will always be someone richer than me. There will always be someone happier than me. There will always be someone who dresses nicer than me. And so on.
Over the past year, I made a conscious effort to constantly focus only on the emotions I feel to judge whether I am on the right path or not. This is my journey and on one else’s. Following these emotions has led to more joy doing the things that I want. It led to more honest insights about what I feel is the right thing to be doing day-to-day. And it led to a year that I truly have no regrets.
Moments that shaped this year:
