Ten Life Reflections from 2021

The beautiful Bay en route to Alameda

Another year of “fun” comes to a close with more navigating an ongoing pandemic amidst huge life changes.

Some highlights of this year: Starting school with an amazing cohort of friends in the Berkeley Haas PT MBA Program, more than 50,000 words in the newsletter, an incredible new job with a great product and group of people at Grammarly, more travel and friendships and lots of smaller reminders of love on a regular basis that helped stem the burden of the lows.

As I did in 2019 and 2020, I wanted to take some time to reflect on some of the biggest things that stuck with me through the year.

1. There’s a certain folly in setting long-term goals. Almost every year before 2020, I set goals that were centered around things I wanted to accomplish at certain times of the year. Career goals, health goals, cooking goals, a list of random things that were compartmentalized to a neurotic perfection. At times, goal setting felt powerful, other times it just felt good to fit in. But as time went on, I accomplished little of what I set at the beginning of the year. There was a quote earlier this year I read from Jim Coudal that gave me pause: “The reason that most of us are unhappy most of the time is that we set our goals, not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them, but we set our goals for the person we are when we set them.” It made me see a beautiful new imperfection in goals and the malleability in the journey to accomplishing goals — this year, I’m much less concerned about setting longer-term ones and much more focused on the weeks and days ahead.
2. Perceptions can twist what we know of facts. I remember traveling to Kentucky for work where I had a client who refused to vote for Clinton. I learned that his daughter went through an acrimonious civil case that was stalled by a bureaucratic court system — a purely local issue. But this one experience influenced this man’s entire political philosophy of how government worked elsewhere. There’s a quote I read earlier this year from Morgan Housel that reminds me of this: “Your personal experiences makeup maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” In another year that was stemmed by disagreements on vaccines and COVID regulations, I think about this quote a lot — it’s a saddening epiphany that so much of a single experience can be extrapolated into fact. Maybe even a single clash with the healthcare system or government can drive someone reasonable to distrust vaccines. The crux of arguments I think often collapses on this.
3. Loss shouldn’t be feared in change. When I started school, I worried a lot about change. I didn’t want to lose friends in San Francisco. I was worried about pre-conceived notions people had of assholes in business school and whether my identity was at risk. I was nervous about even basic routine stuff, everything from balancing writing to dating with the new schedule. Some of my fears were definitely confirmed but the larger picture was inevitable: I lost a lot of my old life before business school. What I realized this year is that with any big change, the price to pay is your old life. The reward is that the person you become from your new one is going to come with its own rewards: The loss of friendships will bring you new friends. The people who no longer understand will be replaced by new people. As Briana Wiest says: “All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you no longer are.”
4. There is power in being a professional moron. When I started my new job at Grammarly, I came back to a familiar place: being the least knowledgeable in the room. It was nerve-wracking but also a bit fun being able to pause and be the person who had no qualms about questions. Molly Graham, Former COO of Lambda, has a great take on this: “The number 1 thing I’ve learned is that it is actually an extraordinarily powerful skill to ask the “stupid” questions that everyone else is afraid to ask. You create clarity in places where people didn’t even know there was confusion. There is power in being a professional moron.” I love the framing that it’s not just a new person to the job tendency, but a mindset we should adopt always.
5. People can die twice. My friend and fellow writer Lyle Mckeany wrote a piece about a eulogy for his father this year that touched me to the core. He included a Banksy quote I think about often: “They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.” When I think of people I’ve lost in the past that are important to me, I would often feel ashamed that I’m not “honoring” them in the right way — Lyle’s piece made me realize that simply telling stories sharing tweets, sometimes even sharing the mere existence in your life can be enough.
6. The best path to quality is time. Like many others on the internet, I used to love thinking about shortcuts and frameworks and hot sauce that can make you a brilliant and successful person. The more and more I’ve started writing and creating on my own, there’s a quote I find resonates by Sari Azout: “I almost feel what some people attribute to genius is actually just time.” Getting the 1,000th subscriber to my newsletter this year was fun but it came after years of writing, multiple pivots, lots of pieces that were read by maybe like 30 people, lots of luck, and lots of sleeping on bad first drafts before they became better ones. Now, when I read something that blows my mind on the internet, I remember that they may have gone through some convoluted version of the same journey.
7. Don’t charm who you don’t have to. It’s a hard-learned lesson anytime you start school, a new job, a new life — that ultimately being a different version of yourself is only a performance as long as you make it one. As Rumi says: “Half of life is lost in charming others. The other half is lost in going through anxieties caused by others. Leave this play. You have played enough.”
8. Following specific advice can be a blessing and a curse. There’s a fun thread that my friend Etienne wrote earlier this year on how following writing advice diligently can make your writing boring. It’s a fun read but carries what I think is an important lesson — that sometimes it’s fine to be inconsistent and chaotic on purpose. In writing and in life. Many companies we know and love today came from people who broke away from the norms. Lots of people who hit thousands of followers on Twitter do so through no specific playbook. You can’t build a course and teach people chaos — but chaos can be worth a salt in life.
9. It’s exhausting to be too good for effort. Remember back in high school when you were really excited about a class but wanted to make sure you didn’t raise your hand too much or try too hard on an assignment for fear of upsetting the natural equilibrium of your friendship with the cool kids? If the last decade since has taught me anything, it’s that this sucks. The whole charade of keeping up appearances to hide things that excite you and diminishing effort you put into things is exhausting. The best people in your life will love what you nerd out on. Even being back in school, it’s so much easier to be a cheerleader when you see the stars align for someone who is determined. Ava says it perfectly in her piece about effort: “I don’t want to pretend like I’m too good for ugliness, for effort, when I know very well that it’s the price that unlocks everything beautiful in the world.”
10. Being cheap is expensive. While frugality is good, you have to be comfortable spending money to make your life or work easier. Earlier this year, Ryan Holiday in his reflections on his birthday wrote a line that I think about a lot: “What I’ve found is that it is very expensive to be cheap. You just pay for it in the form of a frustrated spouse or a stressful life or with shit that never works and you have to end up replacing a bunch of times anyway.” For the first time, instead of agonizing hours on dismantling my bed, I hired a Taskrabbit to do it in 30 minutes. I bought nice shoes that can survive across terrains of SF hills, finally got good sunglasses, bought flights without layovers, paid for subscriptions, and even at one point got coffee that reduced my coffee-making time to seconds. None of it was particularly lavish but it’s definitely helped me build a new mindset with money.

Whatever this year brings you in reflection, I hope it’s equally nourishing. Happy New Year and see you in 2022!

Cheers,

Kushaan