Today is the beginning of what will no doubt be a huge year for me, 2014.
Adulthood
In ten days I will turn 18 years old and become an adult, at least according to the laws of my country. “Adulthood” means a lot of things and nothing at the same time. I don’t plan on serving in the military. My brain won’t stop developing until my mid-twenties. I won’t let this label define my characteristics or inhibit me from goofing around and having fun. I will never be fully sure of my identity, because it’s always changing. I still won’t legally be able to drink alcohol. To me, adulthood only means I’ll be able to vote and participate in our country’s democracy; pretty much everything else I do is age-agnostic, as it should be. Using age as an excuse for anything is similar to using laziness as excuse for not fulfilling one’s responsibilities. If there is a will, there is a way. Conveniently, my name is Will.
Transitions
Speaking of responsibilities, a lot is changing for me soon.
In a couple weeks, the first semester of my last year of high school ends. In my school system, this is the symbolic end of effort and grade point average monitoring. Well, at least until college. At the end of the semester, colleges will receive my scores and have everything they need to make their decisions. The future scores, barring catastrophe, will have little impact on my chance of admittance. This, I hope, will be a transitional period for me. Instantly, I’ll be able to justify changing my focus towards things that I am truly interested in and passion about. I will be able to work on myself. I will be able to read more for leisure and on topics that are out of the scope of my studies. I will be able to write more. I will be able to work on my company more, and spend more time coding. I will hopefully be able to convince investors and mostly myself that I have the time to commit to seeing my ideas through. Suddenly, school will not be the priority for me. My time will become a vacuum, and I will want to fill it quickly with fun.
The true challenge comes in deciding to budget time to work on things that may not be as immediately satisfying.
Hopefully, the last semester will go by quickly and alleviate a lot of the anxiety I’ve built up throughout high school. It will finally be time for me to let loose… a little bit. I am hoping to replace a lot of my scholastic responsibilities with things like exercise and work, but I will give myself a short vacation if I deserve one.
In June, I will graduate high school, hopefully satisfied.
With high school passing, so is my supposed childhood. I’ll be moving out of the house for the first time in my life. I’ll probably live outside of the beautiful state of California for the first time too. No matter where I go, the weather will almost definitely be worse. No matter where I go, the tech industry will be less present. No matter where I go, the culture will be different. But I will go.
With the passing of childhood comes an age of independence. I am the youngest of a four-sibling blended-family, and while I haven’t been neglected by my parents, I’ve certainly been more taken care of than raised. Just as I had early-onset senioritis, my parents had early-onset empty nest syndrome. They eat out and socialize with their friends more than I do. I’m not particularly close to my immediate family, and I’ve learned to be somewhat independent. That said, my family is omnipresent and very into pseudo-bonding. I visit relatives often, even if my parents seem to not get along with many of them. We have holiday dinners. I have family all around the country, and as a clan, we’re well connected and hospitable. Anywhere I go in the country, I will more than likely know someone and have a couch to sleep on if needed.
No matter what I do, I can count on my parents to support me, and I know that I’m very fortunate to be able to say that.
I’m looking forward to having my own family in the future and building off of the way I was raised. While the time is still potentially decades out, it’s becoming more and more relevant as I mature. I’ve recently begun to come to terms with the fact that I will never again be a middle schooler at an awkward school dance. Never again will I be a student at a high school home football game. I will never be a junior in high school again or sit in the class of some of my favorite teachers. Some of the people instrumental in making the person I am, I will forget in time. Some of them, I already have, albeit unintentionally. Some will even pass away. Never again will I be able to redo my first experiences. I believe in some ways, life is measured in the amount of “firsts” one has. Reflection is good, and when I start a family of my own, I know I will look forward to experiencing everything I have but from the perspective of a parent. That said, for now it is the past.
I believe that it’s important to always be looking forward—looking for the next new experience.
Tonight, I will be sending out my last of 15 college applications. This is the end of what has been a long process, one that began well before I put any thought into it. Going to a 4-year college is a deeply engrained expectation in my family. All three of my siblings are enrolled in college. Both of my parents went to college and grad school on top of that. Their parents went to college. When I first encountered the exciting tech industry early on in my high school career, I actually battled with the idea of going to college. “Just look at Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, they dropped out,” I would justify to anyone who would listen. I was lying to myself. Truth is, Zuckerberg was a great student in high school, and GPA does in fact matter when dictating your future path. At least until you get into college and start a company with traction. At that time in my life, I wanted any excuse to get out of the boring and discouraging environment that high school had been. And I did what my irrational teenage brain said was an appropriate course of action: I decided my ticket out was proving that high school was a flawed system so I could let my GPA drop. That’s not to say that school system doesn’t have issues, I do believe the school system is flawed, but that turned out to not be my issue. My issue was that instead of being proactive, I was subscribing to the power of negative thinking and psyching myself out. I sought excuses and shortcuts where there were none. I would like to have an impact on altering the school system someday because I serious do think that the paradigm needs to be changed and current efforts have been futile at best. But that time was not then, and it is not today. I fully intend on directing my own life, and making use of as many opportunities and resources as I possibly can. I will not take a back seat to my education, ever.
“I never let my schooling interfere with my education” — Mark Twain
This time in my life is for learning as much as possible, listening more than I speak, and keeping an open mind. I believe college will be instrumental in accomplishing my goals and is completely necessary for now. I want to be surrounded by inspired like-minded individuals. I want to let my thoughts and curiosity ferment and develop. I want to have fun and mix with people that have completely tangential interests to my own. I don’t care as much about the degree as I do ensuring that I get my money’s worth. I hope to only take classes that interest me and put a significant amount of effort into mining my professor’s respective geniuses. School can be wonderful if you make the best of it, as many of my friends have told me. By April I will have made a decision of which college I will be enrolling in. By September, I’ll be having my first day of college.
Entrepreneurship
For the past 5 years, I’ve been ideating, hacking, contracting, designing, and networking, all with the intention of learning how to build things of my own. I want to make something great—something that makes life even a little bit easier for people. I’ve come up with many ideas for companies, some that sucked and were truly bad ideas, and others that I still believe in and that I’ve shelved for the right time. Coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part, it’s finding the time for me. While that may sound like an excuse, it’s more the result of me not prioritizing my entrepreneurial endeavors. Building my skill-set and practicing as much as I can has been my number one task. I’ve created many smaller projects following a philosophy of quantity over quality, similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s law of 10,000 hours. I’ve hacked in hackathons and met many truly inspiring people who have caused me to think of things differently (who knows, some of them may be future co-founders or hires). I’ve even worked at two startups (Uber and Change.org) because I wanted to cultivate my skills and ask questions. I decided that the only practical way to learn how to run a company was by working in one first. My working hours have been filled with school and my allotted free time has oft-been spent moving me towards my goals.
My most recent endeavor is me finally executing upon an idea that has been nagging me for over 4 years. I constantly come back to it, shake my head because I don’t know how to solve it, and move on. I went through these motions late this last summer, and something clicked. Now, I think I’ve got it, and I’m excited to share it soon. I’m working on it with two friends: a fantastic dutch designer, Thom, and a UMich senior and brilliant iOS engineer, Chris. This year will hopefully be big because I have high ambitions for this project. When school slows down, I’m going to start raising some seed funding and more heavily investing my own money to put a fire under the development. I plan on seeing this through to launch at the very least, which is a big step towards my entrepreneurial goals. In the past, my dedication was lackluster due to my numerous pressing commitments, and the time wasn’t right. This year is when I begin on a new path of risk, ambition, and a little bit of craziness.
Many other things will happen this year, and I can’t wait to see what life has in store. I may go to Vidcon for the first time. I may take a summer road trip or travel abroad. I may even go skydiving. The possibilities are endless and there are many things I cannot control. For now, I plan to work on what I can control: myself and the way I react to opportunity. I have a lot to learn and lot to work on from my identity to my productivity and focus to my obsessive tendencies. Today is when I start. It is the first day of the rest of my life—the one I need to make count because it’s the only one I get.
Resolutions
In order to force some level of accountability onto myself, I’m publishing some of my short-term achievable goals. Due to finals, I’m adding a short delay — they all go into effect on January 25th. Consider them my delayed New Years resolutions.
- I will read at least 30 pages a day of material relevant to my interests. My twist on Warren Buffet’s philosophy of knowledge. (10,000+/yr)
- I will use a do and don’t do list in my everyday life, as recommend by Jack Dorsey at the YC Startup School that I recently went to.
- I will use todo lists to prioritize my tasks.
- I will test out and employ an effective technique to increase my productivity and focus (like Pomodoro or GTD).
- I will write a post on Medium at least once a month.
- I will seek opportunity once a week by emailing or otherwise reaching out to someone I can learn from.
- I will sit down for coffee, tea, or a meal with someone new once a month.
- Be present offline more. Disconnect from the grid and appreciate life at least once a month (if not more).
- I will exercise with a trainer as much as I can, and for at least 6 hours a week.
- I will have a usable product finished in 5 months (by June).
- I will get an average of 7 hours of sleep per night, per week.
- I will watch no more than 1 movie a month, and no more than 1 season of a TV show every 2 months.
- I will do at least one altruistic thing every day — something purely to benefit them and with little-to-no self interest.
- I will smile more.
Email me when Will Strimling publishes or recommends stories