vegetables

I’ve kind of fallen off of writing here recently. There’s a mix of reasons: time, lack of novelty, priorities, or just not feeling it. I have several drafts, none of which I feel excited to share.

Ever since 2024, I’ve noticed that life goes through multi-month cycles. I anchor on a goal, hope for a chill break after the goal, only to realize I’m thrown into a new one. In 2024, it was training for a marathon, then immediately starting work on Windsurf. After Windsurf’s launch, it was online Armageddon, followed by the move to Google. At Google, it was training for a marathon and building Antigravity.

What about now? There’s always something cooking. What I’ve disliked about the recent multi-month cycles is that it’s a cycle of searching for local maximums. “What’s the next right thing to do?”. “What should we build next?”. It’s always starting from today and seeing tomorrow.

I’ve been trying to take a step back this year and leaning more into the other approach. Look into the future, and the steps needed to get there. In more practical terms, rationalizing the benefits of a longer cycle (i.e. multi-year) and prioritizing that instead. The ceiling is higher, but what is there to lose?

Well, the journey feels a little less exciting by default. One example is health. For example, it’s totally possible to lose 20lb of weight by eating at a calorie deficit, but research will suggest that there’s an optimal way of losing fat without losing too much muscle. The suboptimal way works, but at the expense of something else, whether that’s muscle, or something else.

Running is another example. You can probably train to run a great PR by only running, but at a certain point, you need to include strength training. Otherwise, you increase the risk of injuries.

A corny but cool metaphoric way to state this is that greatness requires eating your vegetables. In my case, I feel like unlocking new experiences requires eating my vegetables.

I used to be the kind of person who took things a little too literally. As a kid, my mom would tell me to eat my vegetables, so I’d eat two tiny pieces of a vegetable and then say I’m done. If I was more clever, I would’ve taken one piece and split it in half, eat it and then call it a day. I just didn’t like eating vegetables.

Maybe growing up is realizing that it’s not that vegetables are good for you. It’s that it opens up possibilities that weren’t once possible. It’s that in each aspect of life, there’s the fried chicken, and there’s the fibrous vegetables, and that you can only have so many fried chickens before you must start having some veggies. Sweet, this sort of makes sense, but I still dislike vegetables.

But I do like the idea of having longer cycles in life. A new approach means embodying a few new principles.

First, consistency is no longer enough. You need consistency with your veggies. This means that in running, running isn’t enough. You need consistent strength training. At work, this means that you need to consistently be learning, not just consistently doing.

Second, feel the why in the veggies. I like reminding myself of the goals when applying day to day veggies. They’re still boring, but I want to prefer boring over not not hitting my goal. As long as I can come up with a goal structure that incentivizes me to make good decisions, the most rational thing for me to do is to pursue these longer cycles.

Lastly, have fun. One tweet that stuck with me is that having fun is a competitive advantage. I’ve been having a ton of fun with these recent journeys. I’ve had a lot of fun writing here, but these other journeys of mine recently became more fun hence why I spend less time writing. I like what I do, and I have fun doing it. There’s diminishing fun past a certain intensity, so as long as I hover under that intensity, I’ll keep having fun.

So what’s been up these days? Actually, a lot! My routine’s been anchored around strength training, health, and learning. For strength training, I’ve been rehabbing an injured knee from last December’s marathon. It feels good these days. I had some habits at the beginning of the year like getting up early but I dropped it because sleeping early was too disruptive for my routine. For learning, I’ve spent time working on side projects learning new tools. I’ve also spent some time learning new video games (a topic I feel excited to write more about some other time).

Anyways, veggies are great for you! Thanks for reading.