2016 New Year’s Letter to Myself

Dear Tinabeans,

You’ve had quite an interesting year, haven’t you? These past 12 months you experimented with different models for living, going from depending 100% on Yang’s single income to finally achieving a comfortable truce between trading skills for income and doing work after your own intention.

It hasn’t exactly been a smooth ride. Throughout all of this, you’ve continued to wrestle with feelings of self-doubt and being lost. Those feelings never really went away even though it’s been a whole two years since you quit your full-time job. But whatever. I do know this: after each skirmish with the reprimanding voices in your head, you remained staunch and determined to live a life of your own design. Which says to me that you can do this.

This past year, you’ve made many new friends and connections, expanding the spectrum of perspectives and resources available to you. You’ve carved out important time for developing relationships with people who can nourish and support you. In the process too, you’ve learned the valuable skill of saying “No” — to obligations once felt that no longer bear fruit, to drains on your energy and mental stamina, to tempting offers of employment that would plop you right back at square one, that is to say, financially well-off but struggling to find fulfillment in the minutes and hours that tick away each day. Well done. And if you haven’t noticed, all those “No’s” did not result in any skies collapsing on any heads.

In fact you seem to finally be learning that ultimate lesson of independent adulthood: that time is your own, rather than a debt continually to be paid out to others.

This can’t be easy. This wasn’t how you were raised. Your hardworking Chinese parent ingrained in you a collectivist aversion to anything that would raise disapproving eyebrows. But what worked for a country of 1.3 billion suffering from decades of hardship and tragedy doesn’t make sense in New York City in 2016. You live in an environment where every major problem faced by your ancestors — hunger, exposure, political dangers — has largely been solved. You need different instincts now to thrive. You need to redesign the software in your head to prefer excellence over acceptance; adventure over comfort, failure over safety.

Redesigning your brain software will take some time, as you’ve seen. You’ve been working pretty hard at it this past year, actually, but it still doesn’t come naturally. You still shy away from uncomfortable encounters, you still get lost in strategizing worst-case scenarios that never materialize, for fear of ever being without a plan. But you just need to accept that some days, you will be plan-less, and yes it could get ugly. Mistakes will be made, resources will be wasted, people disappointed and their regard for you challenged. Will you be brave enough to weather the greatest of all of your fears — rejection by those you crave acceptance from?

I think you can do it. I will be here. I’ve been a little mean to you in the past, but I’m learning to be a better friend to you, now. Maybe I’ll even be your best and biggest ally someday.

I only have two hopes for you in 2016:

1) That you’ll trust yourself more.

2) And that you’ll apologize less.

In fact, I don’t care how many projects you launch. I don’t care how much money you earn compared to your friends. Just promise me you’ll do those two things, and one day you’ll achieve your dream of bringing maximum net good to the world in the best way you know how.

Happy New Year,
Tinabeans