Life – Shin Adachi

Sources of Wisdom

Most of us have been conditioned to look at the hierarchy. When we scan a room or scroll through LinkedIn, our eyes naturally seek out signifiers of status: VP, Director, Principal, etc. We subconsciously assume the people holding these titles possess some rare combination of insight and capability.

But if you’ve spent enough time inside modern organizations, that illusion shatters after a few years. You start to realize that our heuristics for judging competence are fundamentally broken. You learn over time that if you want to find actual wisdom, you need to ignore the organizational chart.

Ideally, titles reflect meaningful work and merit. In reality, they are often a reward for mastering a completely different skill set: corporate politics, rule-following, and the art of managing up.

Leaders at the top rarely have the bandwidth to deeply evaluate individual merit, so they rely on shortcuts. Consequently, the system doesn’t reward the person doing the heavy lifting; it rewards the person producing the artifacts of work. It’s a game of optics. A title rarely tells you how wise someone is—it usually just tells you how well they conformed to the expectations of the system they are in.

If titles are a noisy, corrupted metric, where do we look? My initial instinct was to look at age.

I’ve always been struck by how deeply wise my grandparents were, despite lacking the typical markers of success such as corporate titles and fancy degrees. My mother is the same way. She spent most of her adult life raising a family at home, yet she understands human nature far better than those who spent decades climbing the corporate ladder. None of them had artifacts of wisdom; they simply had wisdom.

Of course, this kind of insight isn’t just a byproduct of getting older. If time alone made us wise, every senior would be a philosopher. But true wisdom isn’t chronological. You can see it in its purest form on a playground, where children negotiate, adapt, and solve problems in real-time with an intuitive clarity that adults often spend a lifetime trying to relearn.

So what connects the wisdom of a child on a playground to the wisdom of a grandparent?

I’m starting to see that wisdom isn’t about the total miles on your life’s odometer. It’s more of a balance. It grows when you live according to your own inner truth, and it stalls whenever you’re just performing to meet someone else’s standards.

Kids at play and grandparents who have outgrown the need to impress anyone share a rare asset: autonomy.

Chasing titles drains that autonomy. You filter your thoughts, alter your behavior, and suppress your instincts to fit a mold designed by a committee. You become a politician. Politicians are cunning, but are never wise. A child hasn’t yet learned to trade their authenticity for external validation, and a grandparent has enough experience to have realized that external validation was a scam all along.

When you reclaim your autonomy, you also reclaim your moral compass. In a corporate machine driven by optics, the “profitable” or politically safe choice is frequently at odds with the right choice. The middle-manager, buried under expectations, often compromises their values. They may get the promotions, but deep down are fundamentally dissatisfied because they don’t have any autonomy over their lives. True wisdom is recognizing that doing the right thing has a compounding, long-term value that an annual bonus or a fleeting promotion never will. When you operate out of your own will, you have the sovereignty to choose integrity and long-term value over short-term profits.

I have intentionally protected my autonomy by breaking the script. Throughout my career, I’ve taken regular, year-long sabbaticals. These weren’t “gaps in my resume”—they were preservation tactics that allowed me to step off the toxic corporate hamster wheel and return to a playground state of mind.

But what if you can’t just walk away? What if you need to work to keep the lights on? I would argue that if you are one of the few fortunate people of the world to have the time and the literacy to be reading a blog post such as this one, you can change your circumstances in a few years’ time with some agency. But in the mean time, you don’t have to quit your job to start living this philosophy today. Cultivating autonomy in a 9-to-5 requires a shift in how you operate. For example, you can detach your identity by treating your job as an economic exchange that funds your actual life, not as the definitive measure of your worth as a human being. You can practice micro-rebellions of integrity by doing something that you know to be correct even if it doesn’t serve your immediate advancement. And if you must put up a corporate persona at work, drop it completely as soon as the work is done. Reclaim your time and energy by being true to yourself whenever you are not at work.

The next time you are looking for advice, mentorship, or just a grounded perspective, change the heuristic you use to evaluate people. Ignore the LinkedIn bio altogether. Look for sovereignty. Look for people—young or old, employed or not—who operate out of genuine agency rather than an institutional script.

True wisdom isn’t granted by a promotions committee, and it isn’t guaranteed by a birthday. It is forged in the hours, days, and years you spend living life on your own terms.

This Time Is Not Different

Let’s cut the noise. The current freak-out over Artificial Intelligence, which promises a jobless, existence-threatening future, is fundamentally ahistorical. It misunderstands both the technology and core economic principles. AI is not some tragic, fundamental technology poised to undermine humanity; it is simply the latest, massive leap in efficiency.

Technology Has Always Replaced Labor
The core fear is that AI will take all the jobs. It’s a legitimate concern for any individual facing displacement, but let’s look at the historical precedent.

In the grand sweep of human progress, technology replacing human labor is literally the entire story. Every major innovation, from the stone tools to the plow, the assembly line, and the internet, has done exactly this. And what has happened each time? More people were lifted out of poverty as a result.

Take the cotton gin as a perfect example. It single-handedly replaced countless hours of human labor for seeding cotton. At the time of its invention, there were genuine fears of permanent, tragic unemployment. Despite those fears, the cotton gin made cotton significantly cheaper and more accessible. Critically, it drove a massive expansion of the textile industry—making clothing affordable for the poor and creating far more manufacturing, distribution, and design jobs than it replaced in manual cotton-processing.

In every case, the positive effect of making a key commodity or service accessible to the population at large has always outweighed the initial negative effect of job displacement. AI is doing precisely this to information work. The belief that “this time is different” ignores the economic reality that efficiency has always bred new, unanticipated forms of wealth and labor.

Outsourcing Boredom, Not Brilliance
Look at what current AI is actually doing: processing data. That’s the magic trick.

Large Language Models (LLMs), are statistical engines. They crunch vast amounts of text and spit out a statistically plausible next word. They are incredible tools for pattern recognition and synthesis. The speed at which modern data centers process this information is a massive technological leap, but to call it a bad thing is absurd.

We are finally outsourcing the most tedious, repetitive, and machine-like tasks to actual machines. Imagine if humans still had to manually sort, categorize, and cross-reference a billion documents just to compute the weights in the artificial neural nets that comprise a language model. They would be incredibly inefficient, prone to error, and maybe even miserable if they have other aspirations in life.

It has always been a good thing that this kind of heavy, mechanical labor is done by machines instead of humans. We are simply realizing a colossal efficiency dividend on data processing. Complaining that these machines are too good at pattern matching is like complaining that a calculator can add faster than you can. It’s what they’re built for. The idea that advanced data processing is somehow a tragic path for humanity is a confusion of progress with peril.

The Real Fear is Local, Not Global
I hear the debate daily. In company break rooms, you overhear fears that “AI is going to be bad for society.” But if you listen closer, the real fear is much more personal and much less apocalyptic.

Take software engineering as an example. The fear engineers express is not about the entire society, but about losing a specific economic advantage they currently enjoy.

For the last decade, software engineering has been like a gold rush. Demand for talent exploded faster than the supply of people who could write reliable code. This scarcity drove up salaries and gave engineers immense leverage. I am often amazed at the wages I am paid to write a piece of code, often rather simple code, especially because I have had to do much harder tasks in other fields such as music and education for a small fraction of the pay.

Now, AI is fundamentally changing the talent supply, helping a small team of engineers produce the work equivalent of a large team from just a few years ago. The unspoken, localized fear is: “Will my work be worth as much when the barrier to entry for coding gets dramatically lower?”

This confusion largely results from regarding the economy as a fixed pie where knowledge workers must compete over a set amount of rewards. In reality, the economic pie is an expanding one. Just as the cotton gin didn’t kill the textile industry but grew the industry by making clothes affordable for everyone, AI will expand, not shrink, the software industry and the number of jobs in it.

It will make custom software affordable and accessible to millions more businesses and people who couldn’t use it before. This massive expansion of the addressable market will likely grow the overall demand for engineers, though their daily routine will certainly change. The software jobs of the future will involve less line-by-line coding and more designing, architecting, and managing complex systems utilizing AI.

The resistance, therefore, often isn’t about saving humanity; it’s about defending the temporary, highly profitable scarcity that defined the last ten years of the industry. Similar dynamics apply to other knowledge work.

Human Creativity is Irreplaceable
As machines take over the tasks of pattern recognition and data synthesis, the value of uniquely human skills will rise. This shift doesn’t make us redundant; it liberates us to focus on what only humans can do.

To give an example, I have a serious problem with the inclusion of the word “art” in “AI art.” While programs can generate images, music, and movies, these systems imitate, sample, and remix content based on billions of existing examples. They do not possess the original intent, consciousness, emotion, and lived experience required for true art. Art is a meaningful expression of the human condition. I do not consider a statistical compilation of existing styles by computers to be art.

The future society in which more and more mechanical work is outsourced to machines will place its highest value on skills that resist automation, such as morality, originality, ethical judgment, and non-linear creative thinking. To thrive in this environment, you must transcend the purely transactional, data-processing mindset. AI can certainly read a vast amount of text and summarize the information, but ironically, it is more important than ever that you, the human, are also well-read. Now is a great time to start delving into wide-ranging fields such as history, mathematics, philosophy, literature, music, and more to cultivate a robust internal framework of meaning in addition to your purely technical skills.

Even if we get to the point where AI spits out the recommended courses of action for our lives, it is ultimately up to us to exercise judgment and decide if we are to follow its advice. By committing to deep, multifaceted learning, we ensure that we are the essential sources of original value in a world that will increasingly crave human wisdom.

Work on the right things

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 worldly pressures steer you wrong.

Dear Kiyoshi

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 wouldn’t even have known of this fact if it wasn’t for the day she had to go get her birth certificate to start her first job after college, and she noticed that she was listed as Kiyoshi’s adopted daughter. Up until that day, she never once imagined that Kiyoshi wasn’t her father. I didn’t know about this either growing up, 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 whole heart into every endeavor, a testament to his care for others. His hands, skilled and ever-ready, were always there for family, friends, and neighbors, building the fabric of his community. There was one curious contradiction in this deeply private man: he refused to go to church on Sundays when crowds gathered, yet he insisted my mother never miss a service. He did not get along much with the self-proclaimed Christians whose pleasure-seeking lives were nothing like that of Jesus, but he was consistently there on the weekdays, with tools in hand, volunteering to mend and maintain God’s house, a quiet act of devotion that spoke volumes.

Kiyoshi really valued bonding with kids. 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. Kiyoshi 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.

With all my love,
Your Father

the choice to be mediocre

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.

2020

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.

May your 2021 be a year of purpose.

Ronald James Read

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.

Here’s the rest, read on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Read_(philanthropist)

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.

job vs calling

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.

what to do in a changing world

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.

Looking back

Music has been a major part of my life, starting early on. My mother’s diary speaks of the day when the 26-week-old me discovered that a piano responds to my touch to make a sound. By age two, I was able to sing over fifty Japanese songs with precise intonation.

I must have decided early on, although not consciously, that it was okay to not be the best at everything, if it meant that I could play more music. Of course I wasn’t thinking that deeply about my life, but now I realize this about my past self, because whenever I got a time-consuming assignment or a project from school, I tended to not do them, opting to practice with my time instead. Of course I tried to make sure that my grades did not dip so low to a point to fail the class, but I was not always successful.

One evening after I came home with a failing report card, I was trying to sleep when I overheard my parents discussing in the dining area. The topic was whether I should stop playing music so that I can focus on my studies more. Thankfully, they decided against that idea. My father’s precise words were, “But if we take away music from Shin, he would have nothing left.” I think he underestimated me a bit though, as I have achieved some things outside of music too. I was just a late bloomer on most of my pursuits in life.

When I got in trouble with my mother, unlike most mothers who would take away their video games or a day out with friends, she took away my ride to music lessons. That did not deter me, and I simply walked. My cello teacher’s house was a 1.5-hour walk each way, and so I walked from and to the lesson, with a cello on my back.

When I was in high school, my father left his job to pursue more education. My parents said that they were financially okay to continue paying for our living expenses, but the music lessons had to go. That’s when I decided to take the only job I knew how to get at that time, a minimum wage job washing dishes in a restaurant in the evenings and weekends, and used almost all of my earnings from the job to continue with the lessons. Surprisingly, this was a change for the better (take note, parents). Did you know that people value things much more when they have to pay for it? I never knew until then, but from that day forward, I have never hesitated spending money for my education. My growth as a musician accelerated precisely because I had to fund my own music education. In fact I even asked my piano teacher to charge me more, simply because I had learned that I would take my studies more seriously if it cost me more.

When it came time to decide on a college major, I considered studying music for a bit, but the practical side of me won out and I chose physics instead, and I eventually changed to an even more practical major in engineering. Little did I know that the lessons I learned through music would propel me in all these pursuits.

Looking back, I still don’t know why music has always been such a large part of my life, but in hindsight, I do realize what a positive force it has been in all aspects. I attribute so much of the beauty of life: my happiness, a meaningful and challenging career that I’ve been lucky to have, relationships with other growth-oriented people, and the insights to make good decisions. Here are some key takeaways:

I couldn’t bullshit my way through music.
In an academic environment, I can have the illusion of having mastered something. For example, if I do everything that a teacher tells me to do, I can expect to receive an “A” in a course and I would think that I have mastered it. But in reality, getting an A is hardly “mastering” that subject, as plenty of students get A’s, unlike in the real world where only a few are called “masters” of any field. Compare that to music. Music is very honest, and less confusing. The music that comes out when I sit down at the piano and improvise is a very real reflection of the work that I put in, and my limitations because of the work that I did not put in yet. I doubt that I will ever get to call myself a “master” of music. As such, just sitting down in front of a piano daily aligns my goals to my long-term growth. It’s the small things that matter. The daily decisions to act in ways that improve the unseen future, that’s what most of life boils down to.

Music taught me about “abstraction”.
Some people are puzzled why pianists can memorize a long piece of music, such as a 3-movement sonata. If you think just in terms of the number of notes, it should be impossible that any human can just memorize so much information. But music is not about memorizing notes. It is about how the notes are combined with other notes, and how that combination of notes moves to the next combination of notes. All of those follow a few common patterns that appear in lots of different places within all genres of music. These common patterns are the “abstractions” of music, and by having the knowledge about more and more of these abstractions, what I am able to create musically has increased exponentially over time.

I later learned that my other pursuits in life, such as physics and engineering, are also largely built on this concept of abstraction. So a difficult problem is actually not a complex problem. It is a combination of many simple problems that add up to give it its seemingly complex nature.

Something I’ve noticed about my philosophy in life is that unlike many people who tend to focus on the end-goals and results, I don’t have long-term goals, nor am I interested in what the final result of my actions will be. Kind of like a good poker player, who can detach the aspect of decision making from the result of their actions which are driven by luck. I have never had typical aspirations in life such as getting married, buying a nice house, or being successful. If they happen, great. If not, also great. My focus has simply been on building up my skills from the foundation up, like a pyramid, and I just let life unfold. As a result, I get off to slower start compared to others, but I eventually get to a point where my foundation is strong so that I can learn things faster. That explains my struggles in math classes early on, and my eventual success in physics and engineering. It also explains I was never the kid to enter piano competitions. What I could play was extremely basic compared to other kids taking piano lessons. Instead of learning to play impressive-sounding pieces by these genius composers, I was slowly building up my ear for music by listening to songs and learning them by ear, note by note and chord by chord.

The result is that now I can hear a piece of music and learn and understand both the melody and its chord progressions in a matter of minutes. I can join a band and come up with a piano part on the spot to make the band better. I can compose a piece of music at will. I can accompany a singer singing in any key without sheet music. I can improvise my way out when I get lost during a performance. It turns out that all these skills are important to a musician.

Abraham Lincoln apparently believed in this “foundations-up” approach too, as he said “give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Music is more science than art
Although music is so powerful in appealing to the listener’s emotions, the process of becoming better at music is very scientific in nature, and has so much to do with planning effective practice sessions and executing on them. To detach the emotional part and focusing on the science almost seem wrong, and I even remember being told by a non-musician friend that I should “feel” the music more while I was drilling on a left-hand passage methodically with a metronome, but such practice can be a very effective way to develop the techniques so that later on when you are feeling that emotion in music, you have the capability to express that emotion by moving your hand in a very specific way that matches what the emotions require.

But music is still art
After all I said in the previous paragraph, the purpose of music is still to capture the beauty in the moment in time and space with your music. Music’s power is in its fleeting nature, as no same sound will ever be produced again. As such, music parallels life, because after all, there is so much joy in being alive and experiencing each current moment. It’s a tragedy that we forget this, and life goes on without us basking in the beauty of it.

Yesterday does not exist anymore, and tomorrow is not guaranteed. Today is different though. Today, we can choose what to make of it.