🌻 tryhard | Jasmine Sun 

Nabeel S. Qureshi says  "the most important life lessons you learn ... always sound like clichés", but Jasmine is able to paint what trying hard feels like and why it matters, especially with all the great references and personal storytelling. "Try hard" is probably the dumbest sounding lesson and it's amazing how she can turn it into such a gorgeous read.

• A habit is a decision you make once:

  It’s funny when people ask how I balance Reboot with my job because it’s less an active prioritization decision and more a fixed cost like sleep and showers and brushing my teeth. My therapist likes to remind me that I’ll never build a habit that I only squeeze into my “leftover time.” I hate to sound like a self-help book, but it turns out that trying works.

  This was an impactful  snippet I kept in mind.

• I don’t play in order to hit the goals; I set goals so I can play.

• Also I LOVE this Ted Chiang gem she references:

  Some might say that the output of large language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.

• 🤌 closing section

  In October, I run into a guy I’ve never met at a Russian sauna on the outskirts of San Francisco. We’re there with a group of friends; it’s Sunday, so it’s crowded; and we’re all near-naked and vulnerable, slick with sweat, towels wrapped precariously around our waists. I tell him my name; he says, Wait, I know you, why don’t you write anymore?; I say I don’t know, I got busy, but keep thinking about the comment. I suppose I never thought that anyone would notice.

  But this stranger noticed, and I notice, and to be really honest, all I’ve ever wanted to be since I was little was a writer but I honestly don’t write that much and I don’t think I can call myself a writer unless I publish more. Maybe this essay is just a long way of saying that I might start sending you more emails. Some of which will surely be boring or unpolished or frankly kind of bad. Like always, it comes down to that Ira Glass bit about the taste gap: “It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions… It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”