Two years ago, this one quote broke the inertia to help me start writing. Today is the 100th day I’ve been writing consistently on this blog. Just thought it was apt to share again. Thank you Anne Lamott.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of. Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability.

I stumbled upon this video again of Jony Ive speaking 6 years ago. Back then I was too enamored with the man to ever listen to what he was really saying. Now that the myth of Ive has receded, I’m taking away timeless lessons from this video namely, care in our work.

“I believe that we sense, I can’t articulate it, when there’s been care taken with a product, just in the same way we sense carelessness. Sadly, most of our manufactured environment I think testifies to a degree of carelessness.”

In another video he says, “People really do care, if given the choice.”

If given the choice. Meaning, the fault isn’t with the audience, but with the creative.

So much writing these days, is a race to the bottom of the brain stem, using our base instincts to get us to care. But the work that’s created is as careless as those products, force fed to us through feeds and algorithms.

People want to read something and be moved. People want to care. It’s us who has to create something worth caring about.

I finished reading Cathy Park Hong’s book “Minor Feelings” a few days ago. I wish it was written 20 years ago when I was trying to understand myself and my identity.

I’m still digesting the ideas, but I attended a talk she had with another author and one of the questions that was asked was for her to define what she means by minor feelings.

She started to answer, but said that she should just read the definition rather than try to answer it herself. She decided to rely on the words she wrote, rather than what she would say at the moment.

It makes total sense. The words in that book were labored over and thought through with such care and craft. Unless she memorized what shew rote, reading what she did was the most perfect way she could ever explain it.

That, to me was the power and beauty of writing. Being able to clarify our thoughts better than we can at any moment.

A few quotes I’ve recently collected about owning our stories.

A foreign accent is a sign of bravery. — Amy Chua

The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck. — Paul Virilio

What I cannot create, I do not understand. — Richard Feynman

Find out who you are and do it on purpose. — Dolly Parton

It is better to follow your own path, however imperfectly, than to follow someone else’s perfectly. — Bhagavad-Gita

The world conspires to hold us back, but it can’t do that without our permission. — Seth Godin

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” — CS Lewis

My last newsletter had the most responses from my readers. And the simple, but difficult reason why, is because I’m owning my story and sharing it.

The parts I have to own have to do with my pain and shame, two gauntlets through which I am finding my truth.

Life is a stacking of layers—layers of beauty and joy sandwiched in by pain and shame. If we can dig into it, understand it, and own it we are on our way to a greater story.

I’ve danced around this for too long. Five years of thinking about wanting to write, then two years of consistent writing has led me to that truth embodied in one essay last week.

The resonance I was looking to hit started with a bell inside of me.

So why is this under a series on membership and community? Because this is where I break ground and start to build the foundation.

I’ve reset the counter. This is where I start again.

This past year, I feel as if I’ve traveled through a circle of racial identity. I came into this year with a complacency created by the busyness of my life. I just didn’t have time to think about these things.

But this pandemic year dismantled everything I had built around me. It forced me to stop and digg into myself, carving out my assumptions about who I was and what I was doing. Then the summer came, and I leapt outwards learning to empathize and understand the oppressive effects of systemic racism and white supremacy. I wanted to understand and feel the pain of my fellow Americans whom I was told growing up to keep at a distance.

I’ve come back around to myself, examining my experience as an Asian American, the experience of other Asian Americans, and our collective experience.

It’s easy for me to point at the superstructure of whiteness and say that is the problem. I can clearly see what I am against, but that doesn’t mean I know what I am for.

I want a clear, specific, and wise vision I can live for even if I can’t see it fulfilled in my life time.

In our session last night, my therapist reminded me it starts with understanding my story, who I am, the pain and shame I’ve carried. If I can’t create space for that, then I can’t actually articulate what I am for.

Just finished watching the 9 episode series Giri/Haji on Netflix. It’s a show that bridges Tokyo and London with yakuzas, gangsters, family, love, and friendship.

It’s beautifully done, with a rapturous storyline. There’s choices the filmmaker made that are courageous, going after the core of emotion rather than the sheen of cinema. There’s a dance scene in the last episode, to me was the climax of the series. I couldn’t believe what I was watching, and I was fighting back tears the whole time.

But it won’t make sense if you don’t watch the first 7 episodes, so go and get started.

My impression of the brilliant nerds working at the Jet Propulsion Lab comes from the movie “The Martian.” It’s a great movie, but an even greater book. The short of it is Mark Watney is stranded on Mars, and they need to bring him back home. In the final rescue plan, the scientists at JPL are tasked with modifying a ship used on a previous mission to launch Watney back into orbit so it can meet another ship coming from Earth.

The executives at NASA can only tell them what they need, JPL needs to figure out how to do it. They are human superheroes, being able to pull off such a ridiculous plan.

So when I read that the real life people at JPL like to add hidden messages in their missions, I thought of those actors in “The Martian” and smiled.

The parachute that helped land the Perseverance on Mars’ Jezero Crater on February 18th, had a hidden message encoded in white and orange:

Dare Mighty Things

The outside ring were the GPS coordinates of JPL where the parachute and rover was designed and built. It is the motto of the Perseverance team and the saying is emblazoned on a wall at JPL.

It’s taken from a speech from FDR’s “Strenuous Life” speech: “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure … than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

I’m reminded of FDR’s “Man in the Arena” speech. And also reminds me that this is what it means to have fun while doing courageous work.

When the work you do relies so much on you as a person and who you are, you have to cook for yourself before cooking for other people, as it were.

And if you’re talking about mindset and courageous work like I am, I cannot allow what I say outpace what I do. I’ve seen too many leaders, pastors, and parents do this and I refuse to repeat it.

I started going to therapy again. It’s six months of weekly conversations. Almost like a bootcamp where I’m recoding my brain. After our first conversation the therapist gave me four different paths we can go down. I chose the last two because they scare the shit out of me.

One was about identifying negative self patterns, negative cognition, reducing negative self talk. The other was about fatherhood, which goes into what does it mean to be a man, my sexuality, and basically all the things that I was never taught or felt ashamed by. So yeah. This all sounds hard and scary, but I know I’ll be eating well for the next six months.

Courageous work is the work you do at the edges of who you are. You don’t know what it looks like, you don’t know where it’ll go, you just know it’s work you have to do.

Courage is what you marshal when the cause is greater than the fear. There’s no way around it, all you can do is march straight through the heart of it one step at a time.

The work can be as small or big as it needs to be. It’s the project in your mind that quickens your pulse. The one you avoid because it brings up too many emotions.

But in the end, courageous work is what we have the privilege of doing. Health, happiness, and humility mix together giving us the chance to show up.