Find Your People

Commencement speeches are often long, banal, and full of clichés. Jessica Livingston's, however, is none of these. Her journey from an aimless English major to the co-founder of Y Combinator is rich with valuable advice for students of all ages — and students of life. What makes her speech so impactful is a lesson that resonates with me as a teacher: learning is a process of discovering one's place in the world, not something acquired with a four-year degree.

The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want, but really today is the last stop.

So I'm going to tell you about a trick you can pull right here at the point where the train tracks end. You can reinvent yourself. I wish I’d known I could do that. I was lazy in college and got bad grades. But the real problem was that I believed them: I believed that mediocre grades meant I was a mediocre person. And that stuck with me for years.

The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

This blog post is one of my favorites, and I often share it with mentees who are struggling to begin their journey. While this advice may seem trite and tautological, the only way to start is simply to start.

The power of this straightforward guidance lies in its simplicity: getting started generates motivation that propels you forward, creating momentum that drives you to reach one goal and then propels you toward the next. All you have to do is repeat that every day, and before you know it, you'll be far beyond where you ever thought you could be.

When I first started working on Typesense six years ago, I set myself a simple rule:

I shall write some code everyday before or after work.

With no self-imposed time pressure, I was able to focus on just one thing: showing up every day and writing some code. Some features took an hour to implement, some took several hours spread over days, some even stretched into weeks, but it did not matter because there were no deadlines of any sort.

Birthdays Are Important

I recently celebrated my birthday and was deeply touched by a blog post just a few days before I turned 29 for an 8th time (36). Many baseball fans know Sarah Langs as a wizard of baseball statistics, but her dear friend Lindsey Adler explains why Sarah is an incredibly beloved person too. It's not just her perseverance through a terminal condition; it's because Sarah is a living testament to the importance of cherishing life's special moments. To not celebrate the milestones we are given would be an affront to Sarah's unique sense of humanity. With this in mind, I celebrated my birthday this year with a little extra joy.

“Birthdays are important,” Sarah says every year. It’s a position that predates her ALS diagnosis; she really, really loves birthdays. She posts countdowns to her own birthday on her Instagram stories. She does this not as some guilt-trip reminder to the rest of us, but in the way a kid crosses off days on a calendar before their trip to Disneyland. She loves your birthday, too. She loves birthdays in a way that I can’t understand — I hate the annual reckoning with the passage of time!