After navigating life for nearly four decades, I’ve arrived at a stark realization: there are fundamentally only two ways we use money. Every dollar spent ultimately falls into one of these two categories.
The first views money as a tool. It’s a means to an end, serving a purpose beyond itself. This is money used to truly enrich your life and the lives of others. Think of it as investing in your personal growth, supporting those you care about, facilitating meaningful experiences that deepen your connections, or amplifying the positive impact your work has on the world. On this path, money becomes a lever for purpose and fulfillment.
The second and only other use of money is to accumulate stuff to show off to others. This isn’t about practical needs or genuine meaning. It’s about external validation, projecting an image, all driven by a desire to impress.
And that’s it. Every time you spend your money, you’re doing one of the two. And no, you can’t do both at the same time, because accumulating stuff to show off is inherently meaningless.
If you tend to do more of the latter, satisfaction will always be out of your reach. If you don’t start seriously reevaluating your values, you will have spent an entire life devoid of meaning.
We often hear the mantra, “Work hard and you can achieve anything.” I’ve certainly echoed this sentiment many times, emphasizing the value of effort in overcoming obstacles and reaching goals (as seen in my posts about the choice to be mediocre, self-limiting beliefs, comfort zone, choosing the difficult road, just showing up, and what makes you bad-ass). However, recent observations have revealed a crucial missing piece in this advice: wisdom in choosing what to work hard on. I’ve noticed that many individuals diligently pursue goals as I advocate, yet are deeply unhappy in the process. This is because they pursue the wrong goals.
A recent event I attended that included a Q&A with high-level directors working at big tech companies brought this point into sharp focus. Intended to inspire engineers to move up in their careers, the talk inadvertently revealed a different truth. Both directors expressed a desire to return to being junior level engineers in retirement – a role focused on coding, free from soul-sucking meetings.
The irony was palpable. These individuals, who seemingly reached the pinnacle of corporate success, yearned for the very role they had long since left behind. How did they allow so many years of their lives taken up by a job they don’t even want? Why are they still there? Perhaps the allure of higher salaries or societal prestige guided their mistaken choices. Or maybe they’ve allowed their lifestyle to inflate with every promotion and thus cannot afford to walk away, having made themselves slaves to their jobs.
This leads to my central point: be discerning about where you direct your efforts. Don’t let external measures like money or status dictate your path. By all means, work hard, and even pursue money if it serves your deeper goals. But do invest your energy in pursuits that resonate with your personal meaning. What constitutes “meaning” is a deeply individual question, rooted in your unique passions and talents. Trust your own inner compass and bullshit meter. Don’t let external pressures steer you wrong.
As I write this, you’re just a few months old, peacefully sleeping in your crib. You don’t know this yet, but you were named after my role model.
Kiyoshi came into my mother’s life when she was a baby, marrying my grandmother and adopting my mother as his own when he was only twenty. My mother didn’t even know of this fact until she had to go get her birth certificate one day to apply to a job, and she noticed that she was listed as Kiyoshi’s adopted daughter. She always thought that Kiyoshi was her father. I didn’t know about this growing up either, until one day my mother told me with tears in her eyes, well after Kiyoshi had passed away. I always thought that Kiyoshi was my grandfather because of the way he treated me.
Kiyoshi was a simple man – a carpenter who built his life with his own two hands. He didn’t have a fancy education, he didn’t own nice things, and he never traveled the world. But the legacy he left behind is richer than any I could imagine.
He poured his heart into everything he did. He cared for others, always showing up for his family, friends, and neighbors in need, using his handy skills to improve the community. A deeply private man, he refused to go to church on Sundays when there were people around. He abhorred the self-proclaimed Christians whose luxurious, pleasure-seeking lives were nothing like that of Jesus. Yet, he was consistently there on the weekdays, tools in hand, volunteering to mend whatever the church required fixing.
Kiyoshi really enjoyed bonding with kids though. When he passed away, the majority of those who attended his funeral were children from the neighborhood whose parents brought them to the funeral, saying that he had made a difference in their lives. He had touched them in ways words can’t capture. That, Kiyoshi, is the measure of the man he was. And to everyone’s astonishment, my grandmother never had to work a day of her life after Kiyoshi had passed. He had quietly amassed enough wealth to provide for his family for decades beyond his lifetime.
I named you after him, not because I want you to follow his exact path, but because I hope you carry his spirit in your heart. I don’t care if you obtain wealth, and I certainly don’t care if you obtain fame. Life is about the impact you leave on those closest to you.
Be kind, Kiyoshi. Be there for your friends and family. Be a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold, a light in the world that can sometimes feel cold. Love and be loved. Look out for others when it’s not easy, especially for those who cannot do anything for you in return. Use your God-given talents to improve the lives of others.
I know that you’ll find your own way, discover your own passions, and make your own mark on the world. But never forget the power of connections you form with others, because that is the true mark of a person. That’s the legacy of the name you carry.
A wise musician once told me that only mediocre players are picky about their musical instruments. If you are a bad player, then it doesn’t matter how good of an instrument you play on. The music will not sound good anyway. If you’re a good player, then it also doesn’t matter how bad of an instrument you play on, since you will figure out a way to make beautiful music with it anyway (like what Keith Jarrett did in Köln in 1975). However if you’re somewhere in the middle, you could fool yourself in thinking that you’re good by playing on a great instrument. It may occasionally produce decent music despite your lack of practice.
A little over a year ago, I came out of my sabbatical and started working with high school students at an independent school in Silicon Valley (yes I’m back on the west coast!). Getting to know more young people has been a really great transition for me and has given me a renewed sense of hope for the future.
I am concerned, however, at the general culture of the current times, and what some of these kids are told as “advice” by some of their outspoken but misguided peers and adults around them. For example, there is a tremendous number of tasks whose only purpose seems to be to just optimize the college admissions game. These are things like spending an entire summer learning the ins-and-outs of the SAT (just imagine how much wiser these kids would be if they spent an entire summer working a job, reading great books, or working on a passion project instead), or even worse, taking a year-long course whose subject the student is neither interested in nor plan to use, just for the sake of putting something that looks good on their applications.
To spend so much time on this game is horribly inefficient, since most undergraduate programs will teach very similar things anyway, and the time you spend on this game is necessarily taking away from true personal development. The name of the college, it seems to me, is very similar in effect to musical instruments. If you remain bad at what you do, then your work will have little to no value to anyone, so what college you attended won’t matter. On the other hand, if you become incredibly good at something, then your work will speak for itself and you’ll have plenty of opportunities as people covet your work, so the college you attended won’t matter either. So the signaling that comes from the name of the college on your resume, if it makes any difference at all, only matters if you’re mediocre. By telling kids to care so much about the name of the college they attend, we are basically telling them, “We have low expectations of you and think that you won’t amount to much, therefore you will need to go to a famous school in order to signal to people that you’re better than you actually are.” What an uninspiring message that will for sure kill the intrinsic motivation these kids all have.
The tragedy in all this is that by focusing on this admissions game, we are intentionally choosing to stay mediocre. Or at least we are optimizing our life with the assumption that we will stay mediocre. With this mindset, we’re guaranteed to stay mediocre, because our daily actions are not aligned to true growth. I don’t necessarily think that is a bad choice if you’ve intentionally chosen it and are content with it, but a lot of people are funneled into this mediocrity mindset without realizing that there are other options. Developing yourself is a time-consuming process; you must choose to do it, and do it on a daily basis. Because time is finite, you will most likely have to give up some other things for this, but trust me, the tradeoff is well worth it.
Cryptography is an old subject. Any time two parties wish to communicate in secret, cryptography is useful. For example, when Julius Caesar had to communicate information of military significance, cryptography, albeit a simple one, was used, leading to the algorithm by the name “Caesar’s cipher”. This algorithm simply shifts every letter in the original message by three (A becomes D, B becomes E, and so forth), and is obviously very easy to break. Modern cryptographic algorithms are much more complicated, but the essence of it has not changed much. Cryptography widely used in communication technologies today comes down to devising ways to encrypt a message so that only the intended recipient can decrypt it back to the plain text.
Suppose we wished to make Caesar’s cipher stronger. Instead of shifting every letter by three, we may devise a look-up table that switches every letter with another letter as given by the table. Such a table may look like the one below, in which you can look up any letter in the first row, and the corresponding letter in the second row is its encryption.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Z
Y
Z
G
Q
L
K
V
B
O
X
W
T
M
U
H
Y
D
P
Z
R
N
F
A
C
E
J
S
I
According to this table, to encrypt a message, I would switch all the A’s to G’s, B’s to Q’s, and so on. Decrypting is just as easy as long as you have access to this table. You look up the letter in the second row, and switch to the corresponding letter in the first row. The G’s become A’s, Q’s become B’s, and so on.
By this rule, “Meet me at the park” would become “HVVFHVGFFXVPGRM”. Here, I took out the spaces to hide some contextual information, because a three letter word in English is most likely to be the word “the” and I don’t want to give out such information.
Now, I simply need to share this table with the intended recipient of all my secrets, and as long as nobody else gains access to our secret table, I can communicate by sending encrypted messages, and the information will be safe, right?
Wrong. This is still a weak cipher. Let’s consider why. It is a major improvement on the Caesar cipher in which an adversary could simply shift the letters back by three to reveal the secret. However, the English language, like any human-spoken language on Earth, has distinct statistical characteristics that make a cryptographic algorithm like this one prone to attacks.
The most common letter used in the English language is the letter e. If I’m using the above table to communicate a message of significant length, it is not long before an attacker who observes the encrypted message will notice that the letter “V” likely is a substitute for “E”, because it seems to appear much more often than any letter. In English, T, A, O, then I are the next common letters after E, in that order, so the attacker may figure those out too by simple use of statistics. Eventually, all of the letters will be broken using a combination of statistics and inference from context.
So can we do better?
Before we discuss more cryptographic algorithms, let’s lay the necessary foundations.
Bits
At the heart of modern communication is the usage of bits to convey information. The word “bit” was coined by a statistician named John Tukey, who also coined the term “software”. A bit stands for “binary digit”, and each bit can hold a value of 0 or 1. Thinking of information as a collection of bits is particularly useful for designing computers, because computers store information in memory which consists of transistors. Each transistor can be in one of two states at any time. We denote one of the states as 0, and the other as 1.
All information can be represented by bits using some standardized process. For example, text can be converted into bits by lookup in each character of the text in the ASCII table, which assigns a number to each character. Those numbers can then be converted to 0s and 1s using binary math.
XOR Operation
The XOR Operation is commonly used as the building block of cryptographic algorithms. XOR stands for “exclusive or”. The operation takes two bits as inputs, and outputs 0 if the two input bits are the same. If not, the operation outputs 1.
So the possible input/output combinations of an XOR operation are as follows, where ⊕ denotes the XOR operation sandwiched by the two input bits:
0⊕0 = 0
0⊕1 = 1
1⊕0 = 1
1⊕1 = 0
The magic of the XOR operation, and why it is so useful for cryptography, is in its reversible nature. If you XOR a bit (call it the “original bit”) with a random bit (call it the “key” bit), you get a certain result (call it the “encrypted bit”).
Now, XORing the encrypted bit with the key bit turns the encrypted bit back into the original bit.
Here’s an example. Assume the following:
Original bit = 0
Key bit = 1
Encrypted bit is calculated as the original bit XORed with the key bit:
0⊕1 = 1 = encrypted bit.
Now, XORing the encrypted bit with the same key bit gets you back the original bit. This process works like a decryption, because you are decrypting the encrypted information to get back the original information.
1⊕1 = 0 = the original bit!
This works no matter the value of the original and key bits. I suggest that you try a few examples yourself to verify this fact.
One-Time Pad
Now that you understand how the XOR operation works, we are ready to introduce the “one-time pad”, a provably secure encryption algorithm which cannot be attacked on the basis of statistics.
To illustrate with a simple example, let’s assume that Alice and Bob already share a secret key. The topic of key-sharing will be covered later, so for now, let’s just assume that they’ve already gone through the key-sharing process and they both know that the key is “1001 1100”, while nobody else knows it.
Now, let’s say that Alice is trying to send a short message “1011 0101” to Bob in secret. To do this, Alice would XOR each bit of the plaintext with the bit from the key in the same position. This is called a “bitwise” XOR, and results in the following.
(1011 0101)⊕(1001 1100) = 0010 1001
Now, Alice can send this encrypted text (0010 1001) to Bob and it is completely safe from attack. An eavesdropper (let’s call her Eve) who gains access to this encrypted text in transit will have no way of knowing what the message is. It simply appears to be a random collection of 1’s and 0’s, and no statistical information is revealed that may help Eve break the encryption to turn it back to the original message.
Once Bob receives the encrypted text, he can recover the plain text by taking the encrypted text and applying the bitwise XOR operation with the secret key:
(0010 1001)⊕(1001 1100) = 1011 0101 = the original message!
The problem with the one-time pad is that the key can only be used once. Any key that is repeatedly used is proved to give out some information about the original text. Another concern is that the key must be the same length as the message itself, and if you had the ability to share a long key in secret, why not just share the message itself?
To overcome these problems, cryptographic algorithms have been devised to safely exchange a key (of limited length however), and to encrypt and decrypt a message using such a key. Although not provably secure theoretically, these algorithms still make it difficult for a third-party like Eve to figure out the original text, and only known attacks are brute force attacks that try every single permutation of possible keys. So far, these algorithms have stood the test of time to potential attacks, and are used in communication technologies everywhere today. This post will not delve into specific details of these algorithms, but an interested reader should read about Diffie-Hellman protocol for key exchange, and AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) as an example of encryption/decryption algorithm that works with a key of limited size (128, 192, or 256 bits), to get a taste for how some algorithms work under the hood.
These algorithms are in the realm of classic cryptography (as opposed to quantum cryptography). Classic cryptography algorithms depend on difficult math problems that even the fastest computers in existence cannot solve easily or quickly, such as the prime factoring problem. As long as computers don’t get too fast to solve these problems in a reasonable amount of time or to perform a brute force attack quickly, we can continue using these algorithms in cryptography.
A concern to classic cryptography is the observation that historically, computers have gotten faster over time. This means that classical cryptography may become useless in the future. Any algorithm that depends on computers being slow may become obsolete one day. Quantum cryptography, on the other hand, does not depend on math problems. Instead, they depend on the laws of nature. This is a paradigm shift from cryptography of the past, and has been of great interest in the recent decades as an alternative to overcome the limitations of classic cryptography. In the next sections, we will introduce the relevant laws of quantum physics that aid in cryptography, then quantum cryptography itself.
Qubits
We discussed bits in information theory previously, and it turns out that nature has its version of bits. We call them “quantum bits” or “qubits” for short, and we use this term generally to mean any quantum state that can be one of two values. Spin of an electron is one example, but for quantum cryptography, the orientation of the vibration of a photon will provide us with the qubits we need.
Quantum Nature of Photons
If you have a pair of polarized sunglasses, you have in your hands a device to measure the quantum nature of photons. Light consists of particles called photons, and each photon has an intrinsic orientation that can be filtered based on the orientation by the polarizer.
Sunglasses filter certain photons, but if we let photons through a calcite crystal, we will see that a random photon will pass through and emerge having one of two orientations with a 50/50 chance. If we orient the calcite crystal a certain way, we can force the photons to emerge with either a vertical or horizontal polarization.
Illustration: if a photon goes through a crystal in the following orientation,
then emerges with one of two orientations:
Once polarized, these same photons, if they were to pass through the crystal again, will retain the orientation as long as the orientation of the crystal is not changed.
A really interesting thing happens when I tilt the crystal by 45-degrees. Now, a photon is forced to be in one of two states, either 45-degrees up, or 45-degrees down as illustrated below. Surprisingly, regardless of the previous state (vertical or horizontal), the two new states are equally likely. There is no classical analogue to this nature of orientation and probability, so quantum mechanics is sometimes hard to wrap our heads around.
Illustration: A previously polarized (vertical or horizontal) photon goes through the diagonally-oriented crystal as below:
And emerges with one of these two states:
Another key feature of the photon’s orientation that makes it particularly useful for quantum cryptography is that polarizing the photon with this tilted crystal makes it “forget” the original orientation. Let’s call the original orientation the A basis, and the tilted orientation the B basis. If I measure the photon to be vertical in the A basis, it will stay vertical in the A basis as long as I don’t measure it in any other basis. But if I measure the spin in the B basis, then the original orientation in the A basis is forgotten, and measuring in the A basis again could result in a 50/50 chance of vertical or horizontal, since B now acts like the original basis, and A is now the new basis.
Quantum Key Distribution
With the above crash course in quantum physics out of the way, let’s see how we can take advantage of the quantum nature of photons to implement key distribution using photons. This process is called Quantum Key DIstribution, or QKD.
The goal is for Alice and Bob to share a string of bits that Eve doesn’t know. Alice can prepare a bunch of photons, and randomly select the A or B basis to send each photon. Suppose the below table represents the bases and the results that Alice observed. Here, we’ll denote the orientations with 0 and 1 instead of vertical and horizontal to be consistent with the notation of bits in cryptography.
Alice Basis
A
B
B
A
B
B
A
A
A
B
Orientation
0
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
0
0
These photons are sent to Bob using an optical fiber. Bob also randomly chooses the basis with which to measure (A or B). He measures the following orientations:
Bob Basis
A
A
B
A
A
B
A
B
B
A
Orientation
0
1
0
0
1
0
1
1
1
1
Notice that every photon which Alice and Bob chose to measure in the same basis resulted in the same value. This makes sense, since that is consistent with how photons behave. However, every photon that was measured in different bases has a 50/50 chance of flipping.
Now, Alice publicly shares the bases with which she measured each photon. Alice and Bob can keep the bits that were measured in the same basis as their secret key.
Here’s the end result:
Alice Basis
A
B
B
A
B
B
A
A
A
B
Orientation
0
0
0
0
1
0
1
1
0
0
Bob Basis
A
A
B
A
A
B
A
B
B
A
Orientation
0
1
0
0
1
0
1
1
1
1
Same basis? (Y/N)
Y
N
Y
Y
N
Y
Y
N
N
N
Key
0
0
0
0
1
So their secret key is “00001” in this example.
The example above only used 10 bits, and they ended up with a 5-bit long key since the other 5 were measured in the wrong basis. In actual applications, they would use a much longer sequence of bits to arrive at a sufficiently long key that can be used as a one-time pad.
Detecting Eve
Now, Alice and Bob must ensure that there was no eavesdropper present. Suppose their secret key is 256 qubits long. They could randomly select a few bits to compare, but the act of comparing requires them to give some of their secret bits away through an insecure channel, and they would have to discard those bits. A better way is to choose some random combination of bits, and share the sum of those bits, modulo 2. For example, Alice might say, “the sum of my 22, 54, 195, 200, 210th bits, modulo 2, is equal to 1.” And Bob can confirm whether his sum is the same. If their remainders don’t match, that tells them that someone had tried to measure the photon along the way, and because of the nature of quantum physics, the act of measuring has a probability to change the value had they measured in the wrong basis.
If the sums do match, that is still no guarantee that there was no Eve, since Eve may have gotten lucky by choosing the correct basis, or choosing the wrong basis but Bob ended up re-correcting the orientation when he made his measurement by sheer chance. Or maybe a bunch of bits were different, but the remainder just happened to be the same as that will happen 50% of the time just by random chance. So to be confident, Alice can now choose another combination of random bits and compare the sum with Bob. They can repeatedly do this until they are statistically confident that there was no Eve in the middle.
Future of Quantum Cryptography
The physics is there. Quantum cryptography, by the inherent nature of quantum physics, has the advantage over classical cryptography which relies on mathematics and the slowness of current computers and their ability to perform brute-force attacks. What’s preventing quantum cryptography from widespread use is the engineering challenge that comes with engineering a quantum network of intercontinental optical-fiber of long lengths and multiple nodes. One multi-node quantum network was built with a DARPA grant in the Boston metro area and was operational for 3 years starting in 2003, but it hasn’t been adopted much in the private sector where classic cryptography still works just fine, and still is much less expensive to implement. More recently, there is an ongoing effort in China to implement satellite-to-ground quantum channels. Only time will tell, but it may just be a matter of time before all cryptography will shift to quantum cryptography in the near future.
I got a flat tire so I went to Pep Boys. They replaced it in 20 min. Impressive. I mention this as a datapoint to keep in mind for the rest of this post.
I had to go to the DMV to transfer my car to the new state where I live. First I had to make an appointment, which was only available a month out. Once I got there, even though my appointment was a specific time, they had me wait outside for a while in the cold. Then I had to visit the desks of three different people for some reason, and one of them yelled at me for not being prepared to take out the papers out of my folder fast enough. There were more waiting in between, and I finally got one paper filed with them after 4 hours. At that point they told me that I must come back another day for the second part of the process because they were closing for the day.
Considering how difficult of a time our government has just to file a few pieces of paper, we should be very careful before we grant them the powers to let it devise and implement solutions to some of the more difficult problems our society faces today.
It is a big mistake to allow the government more control of society in the name of solving whatever popular problem-de-jour that virtue-signaling activists with absolutely no knowledge of the most basic facts claim “needs more government intervention”, whether that’s poverty, sexism, racism, the environment, or the pandemic. Our history shows that when politicians and bureaucrats try to devise a scheme to solve these societal problems, their schemes do far more harm than good in most cases.
Minimum wage laws have led to increased unemployment of low-skilled workers. Affirmative action schemes have increased drop-out rates of the very students it claims to help. Rent control laws have led to a housing shortage and increasing rent. FDA regulations have killed more lives than they have saved. The Affordable Care Act, despite its wonderful name, has made health care less affordable. The post-analysis of “Americans with Disabilities Act” showed that it led to businesses hiring less, not more, people with disabilities. Federal subsidies of student loans led to skyrocketing college tuition. Well-meaning creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase home ownership led to sub-prime mortgages and the global financial crisis of 2008. Welfare programs have led to a fantastic rise of single motherhood, but they haven’t at all reduced rates of poverty. Occupational licensing laws cause a shortage of workers when and where they are needed most (think nurses in a state experiencing the worst time of a pandemic).
If there is one lesson we should all learn from our history, it is that our natural inclination should always be to resist when a government seeks to grow in power and size as it is doing now.
“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” -Thomas Sowell
So that takes us back to Pep Boys. Why are they so good, while the DMV is so bad? Simple. Pep Boys would pay a heavy price for being bad, namely, going out of business, while the DMV pays no price whatsoever despite how bad they are at filing papers, or how poorly they treat the everyday Americans who have no choice but to keep going there.
What a year. I remember it starting out like any other year, but boy how quickly can things change.
Personally, it has been a year of many changes.
I got married and moved to the east coast. As the pandemic hit and the music gigs mostly gone, I shifted focus to teaching and engineering. At last count I taught over 180 students this year, and I have been developing code for a music technology start-up for the last few months.
Having a wedding in the midst of a pandemic was quite the experience. It was never our plan to have a big wedding, but with the borders of many countries closed, even some of our closest family members did not make it to the wedding. Notably, our parents were missing in action with the exception of my mother who got around the restrictions and managed to travel back and forth from her home in Kumamoto, Japan.
Speaking of weddings, did you know that the typical wedding in the US costs somewhere on the order of $20 to 30k nowadays? It is one thing if you can easily afford that kind of wedding, but if it’s common belief that an ordinary newlywed couple just about to start a family together should spend such a gigantic sum of money on a frivolous party as the first step in their marriage, our culture needs a serious reevaluation of what truly matters in life.
With the prevalence of social media, it can seem like every one of your friends is throwing fancy parties and going on vacations all the time. But before you join them on the miserable treadmill of keeping up with the Joneses, take a minute to consider what you’ll be giving up to live that life. For starters, try asking one of these friends, “so, are you really excited to go back into the office after your vacation?”. The sad truth is that a lot of people aren’t, yet they have no choice. Such misery could have been easily avoided only if people realized that the reason they have to work a job they don’t enjoy is because of their financial irresponsibility. If you had enough saved up to be able to simply say “fuck you” to anything that goes against your principles, many more doors that you didn’t even know existed will open up in your life. When you’re not having to do everything for the money, your life is more authentic, your work is more fun, and ironically, you do a much better job at it.
Thankfully, nobody in our close circles has such misplaced values, so we were able to have a ceremony that was tiny, intimate, and very special. It sort of became a fun family project to put together, and every participant ended up helping out in some way.
Peera walked Pi down the aisle. Satoko played the piano. Yuki and Mike made the flower bouquets. Kan broadcast the ceremony for families back home, and Rito helped tear down the equipment by carrying the tripod for a few feet. A major contribution considering his age. Minae baked the most beautiful cake after 3 practice attempts at home and happy neighbors who got free cake.
After the ceremony, we had some delicious Thai take-out from a local restaurant.
We are so grateful for our families, and our marriage is off to a great start. I’m surprised at myself for saying this considering that I had no desire to get married just a few years ago, but if you are unsure whether marriage is right for you, I highly recommend that you think about it seriously. There is something very special about committing to share the rest of your life together with a partner who knows you all too well (even your flaws), through both good times and bad. Nothing in my life up to this point has given me the level of fulfillment I get from striving to be a better husband.
As far as the east coast life goes, I’m actually enjoying the crunchy leaves and the piles of snow in New Jersey. We are just an hour away from New York City, so if you are ever in the area, please hit us up.
I just read a Wikipedia entry about this guy named Ronald Read. It’s rare that a Wikipedia entry inspires me, in fact, I think it’s a first in my life. Just read this opening sentence:
Ronald James Read (October 23, 1921 – June 2, 2014) was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant.
That alone carries so much weight. What a powerful statement about what is possible in life.
This guy walked or hitch-hiked over 4 miles to attend high school. He served his country. He didn’t go to college, but never stopped learning. He chose his investments by reading the Wall Street Journal every day. He didn’t make excuses about his modest earnings. He used safety-pins to hold together his old pants and kept wearing them. He made something of his life, a rather big something. He surprised everyone when he donated millions of dollars to his local hospital and library.
Why the story of Ronald Read touched me today likely has something to do with what’s happening around the world nowadays. In particular, I’m having a real hard time relating to the activists in the US. At least the activists in Hong Kong and Thailand are fighting some real big issues.
But “systemic” racism, in America of all places? Coming from Japan where I witnessed significantly more racist attitudes than I ever have in the US, it baffles me to hear Americans who have never lived in a different country speak of racism as if that is what’s preventing people from living a fulfilling life. Particularly despicable are those who resort to violence in their protest against racism, destroying properties of many who did no wrong.
If you are living in the United States of America in 2020 and think that you are “oppressed” because of your skin color, you should look around to see the atrocities committed because of race in other places, because in fact, you are living in the best time and in the best place to have ever existed in the history of our species. You have basically won the cosmic lottery. Any sane person who has done the research on some basic facts would whole-heartedly disagree with your claim that the system here is broken. No other system in history has ever allowed so many people of ordinary upbringing and of all races to make such great lives for themselves.
When it comes to racism, America in 2020 is the least racist country to ever exist on the face of our planet. Sure there are racist people here as there are anywhere else, and sure I get told racist things by people like “Go Back to China” (I’ve never been to China by the way), but how does one seriously claim that this is a systematically racist country? Compared to what other country? I am not aware of any other country in the world who is so open to immigration, and has so many people of diverse origins living and working side by side in peace.
As a teacher, it worries me that the prevailing philosophy of the day is that our system is broken. If this is what we are teaching our children, they are screwed. A victim mentality will never catapult them to live an honorable life of responsibility.
I have a few words of advice to anyone drawn toward the flavor of activism prevalent in the US today. Before you try to discard the system and reorganize the world, learn a lesson or two from Ronald Read. Stop trying to appear virtuous on your social media feeds, and try actually living a virtuous life. Work hard. Gain new skills. Contribute to the world with your labor and talents. Get to know people of all walks of life and learn what real issues they are facing. Make something of your life. Be an example to the youth. Then you’ll discover the wonderful society we are all so lucky to inhabit. You might even find the meaning of life.
What is a “job”? Your job is the task with which you earn, at the bare minimum, the financial resources to pay for life’s basic necessities. You need to have a job, either now or in the near future, unless you are financially set for the rest of your life.
You don’t necessarily have to love your job. In other words, your “job” does not have to be your “calling” (see below).
What is a “calling”? Your calling is the task that makes you feel alive. It is your source of pride, purpose, and meaning. A calling makes your life beautiful.
Your calling does not have to earn you money. In other words, your “calling” does not have to be your “job” (see above).
Putting the two together I have been lucky to have many jobs in my life that I’ve also considered my calling. I have only accepted job offers to work on projects that excited me, and whenever I had the urge to shift to a new calling, I would simply leave my job to commit more of my time on a new calling. Often, my new calling ended up turning into a job after some time anyway, as people start paying for my work.
Back when I was a software engineer at Google, Vint Cerf came by our office to give a talk about the future of the internet. Before you ask me “who that?”, let me tell you. It is a safe bet that, unbeknownst to you, your life was significantly affected by this man. His invention of the TCP, a reliable protocol that defines how data is sent from one node to another on the internet, has undoubtedly changed the way you live. That is so because a reliable internet has changed the fabric of society and continues to do so.
Today, most people take for granted the existence of the internet and how well it works. But let us remind ourselves that the technology is very new. Just the fact that Cerf, or “The Father of the Internet”, is still alive is a reminder of the massive change that our world has gone through in a single generation. The internet is so new that I didn’t even know of its existence for the first ten years of my life, and I didn’t even consider to study about it when I was choosing my college major. At the time, I hadn’t yet realized that it was an important topic to be knowledgeable about. Heck the internet is so new that I haven’t installed internet in my home yet! But I’m told that I’m one of the last people to do so in this country. Despite its newness, the societal forces of my post-college years pushed me toward learning about it and working with it, and little did I know, I ended up making a career out of it.
I was thinking about this quickly-changing society the other day when my fiancée, a computer science researcher, was explaining to me the Lamport timestamp algorithm by Leslie Lamport. It is a fascinating algorithm to say the least, but what hit me more is the fact that he is still alive. It turns out that Lamport, like Cerf, is another person who has affected all of our lives even if we don’t know it.
The systems that lie at the heart of the internet services we use today are “distributed”, meaning that they are made up of many components that exist in different places (and often in different continents) that behave as one system, and such a system must somehow order the events happening at different places at different times within the system.
A distributed system is required because you simply cannot have one server taking all requests and one server storing all the data. A modern system handles an incredible amount of data (think about photos on Instagram or videos on YouTube you interact with daily, but multiplied by the number of global users) moving from one place to another, and it is simply impossible to store all that in a single database or to take in requests for the data from millions of users simultaneously with a single server. Even if there were a server big enough to do that, a single server represents a single point of failure and a failure is unacceptable considering that these systems hold most of our financial assets among other things.
Delving into the technical details of the inner-workings of specific services we use today is not the purpose of my post today, but just to touch the surface of the challenges of implementing a distributed system, consider that the laws of nature, or more specifically, the limitation in the speed of light, forbids the components of a distributed system from synchronizing their clocks. Still, for the system to work, it must somehow order the events occurring in various components. Lamport’s algorithm is the building block with which a system accomplishes this ordering.
The fact that Lamport is still alive reminded me of the pace of change in the world that we are seeing today. Such fast changes have never been experienced by past human societies. This is the fastest we have ever moved as a species, so let’s take a moment to appreciate that. The world in 2020 is significantly different from what it was in 2010, the year I finished college. The fact that I have worked for eight different employers since is a testament to that, and I’m not even including all the freelance jobs I do now in music and teaching. This pace is a miracle if seen from a historical perspective considering that the vast majority of human history went like this: “Be born, die a few decades later, and the way the world works has not changed at all from the day of your birth to the day of your death.” Only recently does such a story not hold true anymore. And nobody even knows what 2030 will be like.
When I told a student of mine, who had just entered high school, that there is a high chance that he will be working a job that doesn’t exist yet, he asked me, “what should I be studying?” My honest answer to him was, “it doesn’t matter”.
In all honesty, your field of study does not matter all that much. Whatever specific domain knowledge you gain for a career that exists today will be outdated in 10 years, other than the fundamentals like reading and mathematics (so yes, be strong in those at the very least).
More importantly, whatever you are doing now, do it extremely well. This applies to everybody. I don’t care if you are a student, a parent, a barista, a surgeon, or a chief economist of a central bank of a country. Do your job well. If you don’t want to and you absolutely cannot get yourself to put in the work, don’t be afraid to switch fields. Pick something that you are at least driven to be good, and actually become good. I mean this advice seriously, and I mean it to be applied even for hobbies and recreational activities. Whether you are gardening, making YouTube videos, or playing the guitar, do them well. Because to do anything well requires that you build up your foundation, and that foundation will undoubtedly spring forward you in your future endeavors, whatever those foundations and endeavors happen to be in. You may not see the connections now, but you sure will in the future, looking back. Also, by doing things well, you will develop the inherent confidence that you can accomplish things, because you will have gone through the process of self-improvement already.
This importance of having that kind of confidence cannot be emphasized enough. When life throws a curveball at you and you must adjust course, the first step is acknowledging that you can indeed do so. Many self-help books like to claim that you can develop confidence in a matter of hours, and claiming as such must be helping with their book sales, but that is a flawed and deceptive message. True confidence takes time. It only comes when you actually are good. So become good.
As society gets more complex, the number of ways in which a person can live a productive life has increased as well. It is a natural byproduct of a trade-based economy in which we trade our skills for everything else we need in life, those other things being produced by other people with skills that you don’t have. Today, there are as many ways to live a fulfilling life as there are people on the planet.
For me, when I look back at my life so far, the foundational knowledge I have built up in mathematics and physics has been helpful. Because knowledge is most efficiently built up like a pyramid from the bottom up, shifting gears to a diverse array of possibilities is easier with a stronger foundation. For example, some of my recent pursuits in fields such as economics and artificial neural networks have been significantly accelerated because I had studied calculus extensively in the past. I would have never imagined this when I was doing calculus. Even though I applied calculus for years to the field of Newtonian mechanics, I had no idea that it could be applied to so many other things. I doubt that Newton, the inventor of calculus, knew either.
Another skill that does not get talked about often is the “confidence to learn difficult things.” Maybe that doesn’t really count as a skill, but it sure matters. So many people, when faced with a challenge, give up because they feel that they do not have what it takes to learn, and settle for what is, even when they know that they are not satisfied in their current situations. That’s really too bad, because we actually all have the power to change ourselves and our situations if it weren’t for our self-limiting beliefs. Sure it may take you more work than another person because of factors like your lack of experiences or innate abilities, but the words “hard” and “impossible” are not to be confused. They do not overlap.
It is certain that the world will continue to change, and you may need to adjust by learning new things. It it hasn’t hit you yet, expect that it will soon. A natural question is then, how do you develop the confidence that you can learn? Again, there is no one right answer here. For me, much of my confidence comes from music, the one constant in my life. Music’s purpose is in its beauty, but there are also positive side effects of having devoted my life to music that I didn’t even imagine while putting in the hours of practice day in and day out. I simply wanted to make good music, but music has taught me much more than how to make music. The side effects are too many to mention here, but they basically boil down to the fact that music is extremely difficult to do well. As such, any other challenge that come up in my life all just seem so easy to me in comparison. I don’t even think twice about whether or not I will be able to overcome it.
If you find yourself asking “Can I do this?”, that’s a silly question. It’s not even worth discussing. Of course you can.
