Tag: meaningoflife

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Ambitious without an Ambition

My best friend in 1st grade was the first person who ever told me I was the most ambitious person she knew. As a kid this was easy because most people I knew weren’t very ambitious. My parents were so swamped with work they were hands off raising me, so maybe my Asianness sensed the power vacuum and stepped up so that I effectively tiger-mommed myself. (My team has called me a tiger CEO, which is maybe not entirely flattering. For example, during a team meeting I said, “Hitting this revenue target would be a B+, which is an Asian F.”)

As a kid if I underperformed my expectations, friends would try to comfort me, “You did way better than most.” This type of thinking was alien to me because I held myself to a higher standard than others. Should I compare myself to a girl born in Sudan in the 13th century and congratulate myself for being literate? Of course not- it’d be a miserable failure if I were illiterate and I should compare myself only to people who have my privileges, and I unflinchingly admitted that I sucked compared to Einstein, etc. (who didn’t have half my privileges!).

Growing up, ambition was all I had, and all I understood. I liked proving I was the best. Demoralizing friends during casual games delighted me. Once I challenged my cofounder to photograph Dustin and forced our team to vote on which anonymized photos were better. Afterwards I rubbed in my victory a lot, because, although Jeremy did the camera settings for me (“Nancy, your photo isn’t even in focus”), I was 1) president of the photography club in high school, 2) a classically trained graphic artist, and 3) generally the best at everything. I was only satisfied after he verified, “You’ve crushed my spirit.” I still get competitive about everything from how fast I am at email (I send 400 emails a week within 1 hour of receiving them) to how much Lynn loves me relative to her husband (“You don’t love me more? But you’ve known me longer”).

Ambition as my primary motivator started running out of fuel around when I started considering what my wikipedia article would read while googling myself from my deathbed. (At this time, my mom was on what I hadn’t acknowledged to be her actual deathbed (My mother does not have anything remotely resembling a wikipedia article).) I modeled my deathbed wikipedia article with the most optimistic fit springing from current data, “HFT billionaire, MIT philanthropist, personal history includes leaving at the altar Justin Bieber and Peeta Mellark.”

I noticed I didn’t feel excited by this forecast. Thus was the hallmark of a bad plan: both unlikely to happen, and undesirable to happen.

This feeling was like sighting an iceberg in the horizon. I continued charging towards the South Pole, plowing through the ice, but glanced over every once in a while- had the feeling maybe gotten imperceptibly bigger? I brushed away the suspicion of lostness because near the pole all my compasses point due South- if you blindly follow ambition, direction is meaningless. For most of my life ambition was all I had. It was all I needed. It had taken me far, and it was always there. (I can be sharkish in my inability to not keep pushing. If my life were an epic poem, my fatal flaws would include my drive.)) What would I do if ambition stopped telling me how to go?

I left HFT. I read and I wrote. I walked the earth. My world was Apptimizes all the way down. I built my team. I thought about things you wouldn’t think about unless you were fixated on specific goals that are unusual and hard.

One day I was pondering the 7 deadly sins and thought, “I grapple with few of these. Lust? As if.” I decided I could write a better religion than the Bible and wrote my own version of deadly sins with corresponding virtues:

1. long term thinking vs impatience/ short sightedness
2. curiosity/ learning vs mental laziness
3. agency/ courage vs fear/ passivity
4. sincerity vs dishonesty
5. empathy/ compassion vs cruelty
6. love for something greater than oneself vs selfishness
7. commitment/ passion vs indifference

As I was wordsmithing my list (I never finished that project), I realized I had another thing that motivated me outside of “ambition:” Nancy’s virtue #6: love for something greater than me. For one thing, I loved my team. I learned the power of teams after high school, but I also recognized that the point of Apptimize was not to provide a cozy haven for us to live happily ever after. The point was the users. They’re the thing greater than myself or my team, the ones we must love.

I admit love for users was not natural. In HFT I never had users or clients- we traded our own money because it was all proprietary. I quickly discovered users can be annoying. They are silent, and then they ask something but it’s unclear if they really mean that thing. You try to help but they don’t listen and then you have to find another way to help and suppress the urge to point out if they’d just listened the first time it would’ve been much better for everyone.

I was unkind to our first users. I feel sorry for our early cohort and am amazed by the ones who stuck with us. I was like the crotchety, unfeeling businessman who reluctantly gets won over by exuberant wise child despite repeatedly trying to abandon her to a maid or an intelligent family dog (don’t remember if this is all the same movie, whatever). I thought I knew everything and that it was somehow all about me, but I realized when I don’t listen to our customers my decisions are confused and myopic. When I listen to them I learn so much. My users are the smart ones and I have to pay obsessive attention to everything they say and do.

The instant we had a user tell us they discovered a valuable insight, with the extra exclamation point in their email conveying excitement, I saw that customer success is what it’s all about. No matter how frustrating and exhausting, we’re nothing without our users. The smallest sign of excitement or happiness from them makes my day.

I stopped thinking about my own achievements or my team achievements and started thinking about our users’ achievements. Instead of how much more badass I would be, I thought about how much more badass our users would be. Instead of being ambitious for me or my team, I am ambitious for our users. Instead of my wikipedia article saying anything about me taking over the world, I think of how our users’ wikipedia articles say they took over the world, and it won’t mention Apptimize because our users do it on their own and we’re just one of the ways they figured out how to kick more ass.

Everyone on our team from sales to engineering has woken up at 6am and stayed up till midnight to take customer calls and push new builds. Once we accidentally forwarded an internal support discussion to users and were proud of not being in the least embarrassed by our casual thread- in fact we were secretly going the extra mile to make sure everything would work swimmingly. My team has worked on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Saturdays (while calling it vacation)- not for the team- but to keep our promises to our users. That’s love. That’s commitment. That’s the right kind of ambition. That’s my religion.

I’m excited for 2015 because I can’t wait to figure out how to help our users accomplish even more this year. In case you want to try out some new apps for 2015, here are some Apptimize customers who kick ass (Maybe Apptimize is installed on your mobile device right now! (If you use one of these apps and say, “I summon the spirit of Apptimize,” 3 times I’ll jump out of your phone and tell you to stop goofing off and get to work!)):

Health:
Strava: Top 10, running and biking
Omvana: #1 meditation
Runtastic: #1 fitness in 80+ countries

Entertainment:
Vevo: #1 premium music videos
Rhapsody: Top 10

Business:
Glassdoor: Top 10 jobs postings and reviews
eToro: Top 10 social trading

Social:
Yik Yak: Top 10 anonymous social media
Glide: Top 10 video texting
Flipagram: #1 free app in 80+ countries, make video stories

Travel:
cars.com: Search 4 million cars
Autotrader: Buy and sell your car
HotelTonight: Book a hotel instantly on your phone

Commerce:
Rakuten: World’s #7 largest e-commerce company
ReTale/ KaufDA: Weekly offers
OLX: Top 10 in >100 countries, classifieds
Stubhub: #1 ticket marketplace

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Mother’s Day

I never asked her to work nights in a restaurant and go to school during the day. I never asked her to prepare my favorite fruits and vegetables with my favorite dipping sauces as my daily snack. I never asked her to turn down her big business opportunity to stay at home with me.

The debt you can never repay, the debt that makes you owe more than you can ever accomplish in your entire life, is the debt you owe for the stuff you never asked for. I never asked my mother to love me, or to give birth to me, and now I owe a debt impossible to repay.

How do you pay back that kind of love? Is it one of those divine conundrums where everything’s impossible except through grace?

Luckily, my mother told me how to pay it back. She said, “You simply owe it to me to become as amazing as you can. Also, promise me you’ll break up with that boy.”

I didn’t listen to my mother in many things, and I can never deserve everything I have, but I’m really trying to earn back my debt by making something good out of my life. It’s impossible to be worthy, but you try to be a better person.

I want to try as hard as I can because I owe a million debts like that. It’s impossible to repay all the innovators who birthed our amazing world, the scientists and artists. We didn’t ask for it and we can never deserve it- the past asks things of the future, but not the other way around. We just have to try our hardest. We pass on our best attempt so that when our children inherit our earth we have some right to ask them to make something even better.

To all the moms whose only wish is we do something good with the gifts we got without asking, happy mother’s day.

hua mom and dad!

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The and My Future

“Why are you taking the 101? Can’t you see your iPhone 5 is lying to you? Its map was wrong in Santa Clara and it’s wrong here.”
“The 101 is the 280’s uglier sister. Clearly Steve jobs wanted us to take this route. Anyway now we can have a nice talk where you advise me on my finances.”
It’s funny how I’m the financial expert amongst my non-trading friends even though my opinions are almost certainly things no financial advisor would recommend to anyone.

When I first joined GETCO, I introduced myself to a new employee saying, “GETCO is my first job after MIT,” and the closest person I had to a boss interjected, “And your last.” At the time I sincerely believed and hoped that this would be true. In 2007, the company had 30 traders across 4 offices. Each trader did whatever they decided was optimal in a market that bloomed with opportunity: it was like the wild wild west- so much fertile terrain waiting to be conquered by a few explorers, populated only by some occasionally annoying but generally innocuous natives. I loved it. I never had someone telling me what to do, or really even anyone questioning what I was working on. I didn’t think about the future after GETCO because who would ever want to leave? The business was exploding, we were at the forefront of technology, and if you hesitated to size up your coworkers would make increasingly loud chicken sounds.

4.5 years later, after Singapore I went straight to my NYC desk to clean it out, then to Chicago to resign. I and everyone assumed I was going to stay in HFT because I’m a “world class expert in HFT,” plus headhunters were busy setting up lunches with billionaires with ambitions regarding their nonexistent/proto/growing/declining HFT operations. I was advised not to sign anything till the noncompete was up so I participated in some fantastic handshakes and told everyone I’d see them after my noncompete was over.

I’m not good at vacation so I viewed this year as a rumspringa world tour- I just got back from New Zealand and am writing this while jetlagged, thinking about how my paid vacation will be up in 2.5 weeks. This year I zoomed my head out of focus to see what everyone else is looking at. Let me tell you: Other People are looking at some pretty crazy stuff. I met Verner Vinge and Ray Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit. Compared to these impassioned singularity people, I feel like an ape for mentally shrugging when they bring up existential risk and AI. Nevertheless, my main impression is it’s cool these people are contemplating and perhaps helping decide a vision of mankind as a species. Most people never think about that kind of thing, as individuals or as a species. What is the destiny of mankind? Who even asks this question? Shouldn’t we wander blindly towards our fates like all other species? Aren’t we just dominant, blessed by god to be gods among animals? Anyway, the Singularity Summit led me to go to Rationality camp. This post was originally about Rationality Camp but I guess I’ll write about that some other time (sorry to leave you as irrational as ever, although I can tell you that I made $280+ from poker, won a prize despite not being the most rational (Dilip had the most points in the whole camp but somehow lost his prize to me. Yes! Plus I beat him at some kind of augmented reality game, which victories are documented photographically)).

This year has been upside down: I’ve been paid to not work, spent more time in CA than NYC, and I realized I’m old- I think I’ve aged relative to my non-finance peers. I’m 27 and I’ve started finding younger people annoying. Those fools have no idea how lucky they are. At my age, people are suddenly so hard to impress. If I were starting a company at age 17 people would say, “Awesome.” Now everyone’s like, “Whatever.” Too old to be effortlessly impressive, too young to shove offending kids off my subway seat, I’m at an age when I don’t really notice anyone else’s age unless they bring it up, whereas for years I was conscious of even a year’s difference. Looking back at my childhood, the hours reading in the grass, the biking with friends, my main impression is that an idyllic childhood is a colossal waste of time. Yes, even the priceless hours bonding with family had diminishing returns, and no one really needs to read the collected works of anybody- very few writers have anything to say after their first real book.

Sometimes I see flashes of myself 10 years in the future, so clear it’s almost a memory. This year I started seeing what future Nancy would be if I kept going down the trading path, and I didn’t feel excited. In fact I felt bored. Because it’s basically the same as always, except I’d need increasingly larger sums to get the same level of stimulation. For someone who lives so much in the future, I hadn’t really thought about what I’d think about the future after (if) it already happened. When I’m 40 will I see my 20’s and 30’s the way I currently see my childhood- objectively successful by most measures but privately viewed by myself as largely a waste of time?

I feel ennui regarding the kind of stuff people are supposed to do in their late 20’s, early 30s: the house and marriage stuff. My mom was in constant turmoil over the fact that she was too sick to see me “settled” in my NYC apartment. Prior to NYC, she had “settled” me into all apartments I’d ever lived in. Perhaps out of a desire to do what I thought she’d want me to do, I went out and bought my first furniture since she forced me to buy my mattress 5 years ago when I first moved to Chicago and needed a non dorm issued mattress. I ended up buying a $5000 coffee table made from a single solid cross section of a gigantic tree. Maybe I thought my mom would rest assured in my competence if I showed her this coffee table and other furnitures, that I was a grown up and finally handling this kind of stuff. I think I even bought a house plant of some kind, which never would have occurred to me to do in my youth. Mom just wanted me to be happy, which might not be what I want for myself. Now that I know what it’s like to have the perfect set of plates, I never want to own plates again. That stuff is all at my dad’s house now, completely out of place with his ornate, plasticky furniture.

I think I might’ve reassessed my trajectory sooner if it weren’t for the parents’ cancers. Cancer put me in a mental state of martial law where I was single-mindedly attacking obstacles without considering the problems of philosophy- who cares about higher ambitions when it’s life or death?

Now I feel like there’s more pressure. Maybe this is true for us as a species too- just as we’re most successful, there’s the most danger. Humans have accomplished a lot relative to other animals so the universe is ours to lose, plus we have to decide the extent of our future ambition. Similarly, as a kid the difference between working a little and a lot was the difference between an A- and an A+, whereas now there’s so much at stake- it’s now the difference between losing money and making money.

I’m acutely aware of being the writer of not only my writing but also of my own life. It’s exciting and scary and writer’s block-inducing to decide the next act. But from my life there’s just one thing I ask: don’t tell me how it ends.

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On Ambition, then Criticism of High School Nancy

Next year is my 10th high school reunion. Looking at people I went to high school with, I’m stupidly surprised by how normal they are. I guess I had never internalized what normal people are or where they come from. Consulting Facebook: the prettiest girl in school cut her hair short and married an unphotogenic fat man. The track star is fat and unemployed. This one kid I could’ve sworn would be a CEO has a baby and is obsessed with golf of all things. I guess we’re all still young and maybe people take another 10 years to really get going, but I’m still… disappointed. How is everyone so freaking comfortable? Was I the only one who watched Fight Club 100 times when skipping school?

A thought flashes through my mind: what a fool I am for trying so hard, for being discontent. I should have some babies, learn to cook. Everyone else is doing it and they’re happy. Why can’t I be normal, make my dad happy? Why do I want to rule the world when it’s so much easier to just do what you’re supposed to do? Marry a nice boy from a nice family, buy a house.

My personality has changed a lot in the past 10 years. These days I can’t understand why anyone without a family would be risk averse or unambitious. Literally nothing bad can happen to us, so why not shoot for the stars? Worst case, we go get mindless corporate jobs. Absolute WORST case, we go live with our parents like the Italian or Japanese youth.

Looking at my attitude now, you would’ve expected childhood me to have been hacking into FBI databases (well, maybe I did and was never caught!) and selling powdered milk to my obliging neighbors. But I wasn’t an entrepreneurial kid. I didn’t work that hard because everything was easy. I applied to stuff and got into selective programs of my own volition- my parents had no idea what the SATs were or anything about the USA school system and probably thought most kids were out helping on the farm during the summer- because I’ve always had the instinct to try to get into whatever the most exclusive program was. I probably got that from centuries of Chinese breeding, along with the lack of inclination to bend the rules or start something up.

I wish I’d taken more risks as a kid, especially since kids can’t go to jail or get sued. I think regret is part of why I feel so drawn to risk now. I don’t want to look back in 20 years and wish I’d taken more chances back when I didn’t have 3 kids. But I wonder, Would I be happier if I were less ambitious? Not to suggest I’m not happy. But I have so much work all the time. Normal people do not work that much towards something with such a high chance of failure. Why am I making things so hard for myself? Do I really think that one day I’ll achieve even a fraction of what I’ve dreamed? Ambition: virtue or folly?

I think I want to prove that I’m getting better. That this passage of time isn’t a waste of time. That at reunions I’m always a different and better person. High school Nancy was an idiot, especially senior year because that was a total waste of time. I’m glad I’m not her anymore.

High school and Pittsburgh are the same tangled knot of neurons. Senior year I was late > 30% of the time (you were late if you arrived before 4th period, anything after was absent) and missed 20% of my school days. I forged my notes and ignored a summons to a truancy hearing (nothing ever happened). At home no one spoke to me and I spoke to no one, taking my meals alone in my room. There were 4 chairs at the dinner table- not enough for me and I wasn’t about to go get one. My mail was dropped at my closed door. I wish I could say I occupied myself building an industry-transforming technology like Sean Parker, or even systematically devouring the collected works of Shakespeare, but I wasn’t. I was useless and watched movies on cable. School was wretchedly easy and I shamelessly did my homework during class, garnering the resentment of the nerds who actually tried and took everything seriously. I never talked to my mom, who had abandoned me to travel the world, telling me, “Now is my time,” to which I ungratefully replied, “Good, I don’t need you.” This was true to my feelings- I didn’t think I needed her. I was going to college soon, plus my dad bought a new house in which I occupied the entire wing of the first floor. When I left for MIT, my dad, stepmother, and stepbrother promptly moved in, shoving all my junk upstairs. Everyone was sick of me. First my mom had gotten sick of me, then everyone in Pittsburgh, and I was sick of Mt. Lebanon too- chicken and egg.

I hadn’t told my parents what colleges I was applying to. To my mom, I said, “I got into MIT but I’m probably going to Princeton because of my boyfriend.” He was my first boyfriend. Who isn’t completely fucked up by their first relationship? Who doesn’t fuck up their first relationship? Anyway, I told the same thing to the Princeton admissions people, including the part about always wanting to go to MIT, and didn’t get in. Funnily, my mother had moved to Princeton, “to be close to you, Nancy.” I’m not sure how accurate that is. She was tired of globe hopping and probably realized Princeton was the most homey, non-cosmopolitan place she could imagine.

At MIT, my high school friends kept messaging me but I forsook all things Pittsburgh. My dad, stepmother, stepbrother, and all my high school best friends were still in Pittsburgh; I was the one that had left. When I came back, we had all diverged. Now that there actually was drama, my best friends and I no longer knew the dramas of each other’s lives, we who had spent hours on the phone together, hours whispering in the darkness at sleepovers. It’s still a shock to realize they are now people who go to clubs and party and drink. I’ll always imagine us frozen in time, girls in shorts on the grass in our backyards wondering about the world.

When I go back to my dad’s house now, I devolve into my senior year self, eating in bed and reading Robin McKinley and getting crushes on stupid underage boys who I don’t even know. To get out of the house, I try to channel my pre-senior year self, who spent all her weekends at the library taking out 20 books at a time and sneaking the rest through the security system, ate at Lulu’s noodles in Oakland, sketched dinosaur bones at the Carnegie Museum, saw inscrutable movies at the Denis theatre, drank Izzys at Uptown Coffee in Mt. Lebanon, laughed so hard with her friends our abs would be sore, inhaled my friends’ parents’ ethnic cooking, went swing dancing downtown. All those happy times in Pittsburgh- I have to dig for them, whereas the sad stuff bubbles up unbidden.

Beyond my circle, I barely knew my classmates, aghast whenever Anjani would casually mention so-and-so’s eating disorder and so-and-so’s boyfriend. I had no idea who was dating or eating what. I always felt separate and different, which I was in a lot of ways but I should’ve been able to get to the places where we were the same. I got asked to 4 or 5 different proms (but I only went to the Fox Chapel prom in addition to my own) and could make friends easily in certain settings, but during senior year the desire to relate to others drained from me. Having befriended the seniors who were the previous keepers of the photography club clique, upon their graduation I became the new photography club president, but I didn’t go much, didn’t amass a new clique. Mentally, I had already left Pittsburgh. Moral: don’t stick around bodily if you’ve already mentally checked out- you can ruin years of good memories that way. But who ever learns from the moral of any story?