Week 11: Lifestyle, Doing Great Work, and Friendships

Welcome to my newsletter, where I share weekly wisdom on artistry and creativity. If you want to check out my previous editions, click the link here. For essays/long-form writing, you can click here. Thanks for reading.

Personal Updates

Officially 1 week into my sophomore year of college. It’s been a series of ups and downs. While the disorientation has completely faded, I’m faced with the question: so what do I do now? With the immense freedom in my hands now, I’ve directed all my energy toward working on my 3rd music film, Cascadia. I’ve been putting in 10-12 hour work days and have now finished ~50% of the entire film. Crazy stuff.

One of the coolest things about building an online presence is the awesome people you meet that translate into IRL meetups. I met my friend Akaash back in April through our mutual interest in Danny Miranda’s work (had him on my podcast last week). We talked about how amazing life f*cking is and dived deep into the world of spirituality, creative work, and all that.

A few days ago, I published a new podcast episode with none other than the goat, Jay Yang. He’s only 18 years old, but he’s making $15k+ a month with his online business, Head of Content to serial entrepreneur Noah Kagan, and former intern at Beehiiv (this very newsletter platform!). In this episode, we chatted about collecting great questions, building a brand/Internet business, finding your north star in life, and much more.

Learnings

1: Letter to Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life by Hunter S. Thompson

From reading Atomic Habits and through personal experimentation, I knew the great pitfalls of goal-setting. While goals can be a great way of setting a direction, they can lead to tunnel vision, premature optimization, and ultimately, chasing the hedonic treadmill aka arrival fallacy. Plus, people inevitably change. The same goal you had several years ago may not serve the present you anymore.

Instead, I believe it’s so much better to prioritize the process. Make the goals secondary - something that comes as a byproduct of you putting in the work every day and embodying a lifestyle that makes goals inevitable. When I wanted to run a marathon, the main goal wasn’t necessarily to complete the marathon; it was to make sure I put in the reps every single darn day. The marathon, then, was simply the victory lap.

The takeaway? Make your goals inevitable.

2: How to Do Great Work by Paul Graham

If there could be one essay I’d reread over and over again and recommend to friends, it has to be this essay. This essay, along with “How to Do What You Love” and “What You’ll Wish You’d Known” is on my knowledge Hall of Fame. Why? Because work is such a fundamental part of our lives, and if we find ourselves doing BS work, it can easily make our lives full of misery and misalignment.

There’s way too much to talk about here, but if I could sum up the essay in a phrase or two, it’d be this: “Pursue work that piques your curiosity, something you find exciting, interesting, admirable. Then, go all in and obsess over it.” In my opinion, finding work you genuinely love doing - something that brings you alive - is one of the noblest pursuits in life. When man unites with his work, beautiful things come out of it.

However, Paul argues that finding work you love to do is much harder than it seems. Grownups have convinced us that work is supposed to be “boring, the opposite of play,” but when you look at all the top 1% of A-players in the world, work = play. If work isn’t play to you, then you’ll have a hard time being the very best at it. Instead, the message here is this: find work that feels like play. When you’re ‘playing’, it won’t seem tedious.

Here’s the 4-step formula for doing great work:

While I was reading this, I came across this on Twitter lmao:

3: On Friendships

I’ve been diving deep into the topic of friendships recently, so here’s a brief list of collected tweets I found resonating:

Conclusion

Finishing off this week with a banger quote from none other than Tej Dosa (check out Week 8 for more banger quotes). Really makes you think twice, doesn’t it?

Keep crushing,

Jeston Lu