[Issue 4] - 3m33s
This post was originally posted on www.albertdong.com. On June 5th, 2019, it has been transferred here.
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✋🏼👋🏼 ✋🏼,
I’ve been feeling the dreaded imposter syndrome heavy recently.
I’m not sure why, but in these last few weeks, it’s been flaring up at the most inopportune times. A few days ago, I was on a phone with a friend talking through their app design with them and while they were speaking, I thought to myself:
"Damn, do I really know enough to give them advice here?"
There’s a part of me that knows I do (I promise!) but sometimes that part of me hides under the covers refusing to show its face. I have to rip off its Gravity Blanket and kick its ass out of bed. I usually knock over its Otherland candles in the process. Even mini-me is an unnecessarily boujee tech bro.
In the middle of one of these episodes of self-doubt, I started thinking about the ways I’ve been learning and consuming information.
A good chunk of my learnings each day comes from mediums that are list-centric, the nature of aggregators like Twitter, Facebook, and many email newsletters. Each one of these mediums provides multiple news nuggets, and every one of them is screaming for attention and begging to be clicked on.
The fool I am, I click on them all.
In this deluge of facts and opinions, my thoughts get swept away. Numbers and characters swirl around my head while my brain desperately tries to grab everything and keep it in the box that is my memory. It often fails and most of this information rushes out of my head, refusing to be contained.
By the end of the day, I generally consume thousands of individual bits of content. And as a result of that scale, none are processed deeply. For the next couple of days, I would be able to quote random figures about funding valuations or design trends. I would be able to throw out new industry buzzwords or the word for word opinions of ~experts~ with ease.
For personal conclusions or analyses though, there’s nothing. Guess that means I’ve really learned nothing as well then.
Even worse, consuming all of that content is absolutely EXHAUSTING. My entire Wednesday was full of reading short-form (defining this as <1 min) blurbs and tweets and by the end of the day, my emotions were utterly drained. The amount of context-switching between ideas sucked out all of my energy and I jumped (read: crawled wine-drunk) onto my bed a husk of the man that I was when I work up that morning.
Why do I do this to myself? Anxiety mostly.
Anxiety from not knowing the latest tech and design trends. Fear of seeming ignorant on phone call and at dinners. Stress from talking to founders that I admire and not knowing the latest news around the industry. I feel the need to consume copious amounts of content so that when the time is right, I can regurgitate these facts and spit them out to make myself seem well-read and worthy of giving advice.
It’s a twisted form of social performativity exacerbated by imposter syndrome and FOMO.
So something I’ve been thinking about instead is that: what if we’re given just one high-quality idea (Note: high-quality is relative here, define it as you wish) and we spend our day’s spare energy analyzing and unpacking it.
Yes one idea is significantly less than a thousand, but the worth of our understanding of that single idea may be so much more.
The situation of Amazon backing out of NYC or on the nature of pine trees are both multifaceted topics that deserve more than just a brief article or a passing thought. Ancient monks, ascetics, and scholars of various affiliations have been known to spend years on a single idea of that level of complexity. We should be able to do that for a day.
One day for focusing on just one idea. Forgiving ourselves the time to let our minds wander around and between its structure. For formulating our own opinions and re-examining them over and over. For discovering parallels between its essence and our present. For engaging deeply with it and with all of our soul.
I think that’s beautiful, but I’m also a foolish romantic.