This is an excerpt from my latest book Dear Hannah: 70 Methods I Used and Abused to Change Who I Am.
My Experience Working on a Start-Up While in School
Date: March 1, 2002
Age: 19
Location: Stanford, CA
Subject: Common Sense, Round I
Hannah, I’m just now waking up from one of the worst episodes of my life. I’ve been sick and bed-ridden for the past month, and I nearly had to drop all of my classes. It started a month ago, when I came down with a cold. I woke up at 7 a.m., sneezing in my bed, and I cried to myself, “Not again. I can’t get sick, I promised myself I would work at least 20 hours this week on vTrump.” But instead of taking care of myself by, you know, visiting a doctor, I hoisted myself off my bunk bed into my computer chair and started coding.
I would type for a few minutes, then sneeze, then I would type some more, then I would sneeze again. A week passed like this, but my cold wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking about a quote that the CEO of Gamespot had on his bio: “That which doesn’t kill me, only makes me stronger.” I don’t need a Band-Aid, I’m stronger than this — so I decided to “starve my cold” and stop eating. I wasn’t hungry anyway, which may have been because of my cold, or maybe because I had been working so hard. I found myself getting weaker and weaker, and it became harder and harder to sleep. Headaches came frequently, and every time I got hit with one, it was accompanied with an hour of depression. I would lay on my futon, unable to pick up my textbooks on Logic or Existentialism, berating myself for not having enough tenacity.
I didn’t take any medication, which is stupid in retrospect, but I really wanted to “stop being a baby” and “learn to bear pain.” I didn’t want it to play out like last year, when I eventually caved in. Then, all of a sudden, two weeks into it, I started to get better. After coming back to Narnia from classes one Friday afternoon, I felt completely fine. My head was clear, my eyes were lucid, and I could grasp my code easily on my computer screen.
Just as I was about to get into it, though, Chad went around rallying everyone to go to a party. I said, emphatically, “No, I have to stay in my room and get over my cold.” To which, he replied, “Come on, don’t be a wuss, besides vodka kills germs.”
Maybe it’s because I was over-worked and cooped-up, but somehow I took him up on his offer. It was a small gathering of old friends who lived on the same floor in Gavilan, including my old roommate Justin and my ex from freshman year, Gabbie. In the middle of the suite, there was a small handle of Absolut on the table, and I started making everybody drinks. Then Chad challenged me to some shots, and I took him up on it.
After the party, I came home, crashed on my bed, but then woke up at 4 a.m. sneezing all over creation. The next two weeks were even worse than the previous two. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work. I had to start dropping classes. And then all of a sudden, I lost hearing in my left ear. One of my most profound memories is hanging out in the living room of Narnia at odd hours (like 5 a.m.), leaning in on my good ear, watching Apolo Anton Ohno speed skate in the Winter Olympics. Even though the sound of his skates made me shiver, I clung onto his success as the only thing keeping me going.
After another day of barely eating, I finally keeled over with an insurmountable pain in the middle of my chest. I then stumbled to my neighbor’s door, knocked, and mumbled, “Please take me to the hospital.”
Lying in the hospital bed, with an IV in my arm, I was stunned by what was happening to me. “O, how the mighty have fallen,” I kept hearing. I searched my soul for why I was here, until finally the words “common sense” entered my head. Common sense said that you need calories to get healthier. Common sense said that if you don’t get better after being sick for two weeks, you should see a doctor. Most importantly, common sense asked, “Why the hell are you working so hard on a start-up while in school?”
I like to think that I invented this epiphany about common sense on my own, but I think it had more to do with the nurse’s blasé attitude. After looking me over for a few minutes she simply said, “Take some fluids and rest.” It was then that I realized that most problems in life have simple solutions, if you only think to look for them. Common sense.
I then promised myself that if I got better, I wouldn’t work on any side projects while in school. I would appreciate the fact that I’m young and in college and would try to be a kid again. And more importantly, I would be kinder to my body.
When I got back to my dorm, I cleaned my room up and gave myself a fresh shave. I believed that feeling better about myself would be part and parcel with actually getting better. I forced myself to eat, even if it was only in half-meals. But most importantly, I shelved vTrump, which was really hard to do.
So I went out, bought a TV, and let myself bask in the wastefulness of being a couch potato. After all, I needed something to sponge up my new free time. I held fast to a strict “no working” policy. I stopped comparing myself to Chad and Justin, and instead compared myself to some of the quieter dormmates, like the swimmers and the rock-n-rollers, to make sure I was being enough of a bum.
And then gradually I got better. Nyquil helped me sleep, which reduced my stress levels. Hours of wellness expanded to days of good feeling, until I had a weekend completely free to myself, feeling 100%. I had no homework and no start-up to work on. Saturday morning, I woke and asked myself, “Now what?”
- Phil
At the time I seemed to have had no memory of my own life. The problems of the previous winter did not register to me as instructive. I wonder if self-improvement prevents the integration of life lessons. If every problem is treated with a quick solution, there’s no room for self-realization, which otherwise might lead to self-acceptance.
If you had told me that the trajectory from all that success in high school was towards the living room of a lonely dorm in the middle of the night with partial hearing loss, I would’ve thought you were speaking Japanese. My winning streaks led to a lack of self-examination until I hit rock bottom and realized that my philosophy of life had become a threat to my survival.
The conclusion, “common sense” was a little trite, and I didn’t get much use out of it after recovering. However, getting sick led to significant changes. I forbade myself from working on start-ups until I finished school, which opened up my interest in liberal arts. For example, I started painting soon thereafter, and eventually I got into writing. Had I remained focused on vTrump, I might’ve missed those things, and maybe wouldn’t have written this book.
This is an excerpt from my latest book Dear Hannah: 70 Methods I Used and Abused to Change Who I Am.
Before Philip wrote his first line of code, he tried to re-program his mind. For his 14th birthday, Hannah gave him Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which kicked off a life-long obsession with self-improvement. Follow Philip over 82 letters as he re-tells his journey from winning ThinkQuest, to quitting Stanford, to dealing with dating, happiness, and direction, to eventually making it as an indie iOS app developer. Dear Hannah is either a cautionary tale about self-improvement, or it is a filter for the 10% of self-help that may actually change your life.
PHILIP DHINGRA is a President’s Scholar from Stanford University, where he received his B.A. in Mathematical and Computational Sciences. In addition to authoring books on life change, he develops best-selling iOS apps including Nebulous Notes and The Creative Whack Pack (a collaboration with creativity pioneer Roger von Oech). Philip divides his time between Austin, Texas, and San Francisco, California.
