Eric Tian

Anything, no matter how primitive it is.

Then improve it.

Then write something else.

Repeat this until you have enough.

Then post it.

After writing more than 215 posts over three years, I’ve found that there’s really no such thing as writer’s block – there’s only a fear of bad writing. But if you do enough bad writing, good writing will eventually show up.

Along the way, you’ll meet some kindred souls, clarify your thinking and re-examine your point of view.

It all begins by just writing something.

The spotlight effect is a psychological phenomenon where people overestimate how much others notice one’s own appearance or behaviour. Depending on your interpretation, this can be sad, since we like to think of ourselves as important, but it can also be liberating.

The spotlight effect means that you may succeed or you may fail. But, for the most part, nobody cares one way or the other.

This is good. The world is big and you are small, which means you can chase your dreams with little worry for what people think.

We are all the heroes of our own stories.

There is perhaps only one universal truth – one that exists outside of race, religion or sex – we will all eventually die. But despite this grim premise, memento mori, latin for remember you must die, is rarely used as a fearmongering tool, but often ironically intertwined with memento vivere, or remember to live.

For the stoics, a life guided by death was critical for cultivating clarity in life. As Seneca urged in Moral Letters to Lucilius: “Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day…The one who puts the finishing touches on their life each day is never short of time.”

One exercise for living a life guided by memento mori is the Eulogy Exercise. Essentially, it has three questions:

1. If you were killed tomorrow, what would someone write as a eulogy for the life you have lived?

2. If, for the next 40 years you lived a life full of the qualities that you valued, and became the person you wanted to be, what would somebody write for your eulogy then?

3. If there is a difference, what stands in the way of your life moving towards closer to eulogy #2?

We all live with a dissonance between the person we are today and the person we could be if we dared strongly enough. This exercise clarifies this degree of dissonance, acting as spiritual windscreen wipers of sorts, and simultaneously challenges us to be better. It is designed to be uncomfortable, for as Alain de Botton wrote, “In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.”

Yet simultaneously, the eulogy exercise is quietly encouraging, for the nudging question slowly but inevitably arises:

What is it worth to live a life like your second eulogy?

When I was a kid, I was convinced that 11 times 11 was 111. I remember excitedly telling my friends, “hey, you know this thing called the rule of ones?” and then tell them all about this amazing multiplication. It felt so good to preach this elegant mathematical finding.

It took about three years until somebody said, “um… 11 times 11 is 121, dumbass.”

When something that you believe in crumbles right in front of you, you pay attention, for it’s a red flag to be more careful. What other glaring mistakes do you accept? What other falsehoods have you preached? From that on, I always double checked my math calculations. Failure is a great teacher.

Being passive, having no opinions and accepting whatever’s thrown your way is safe, but boring. You never really develop any convictions that challenge you. If you encounter a setback, it’s easy to think, “ah, whatever. That’s not really my opinion, anyway.”

On the other hand, having strong opinions, loosely held is a useful way to continuously push your character. If you have beliefs you are firm in, the tests that life throws at you will be far more worthwhile. The wins matter more and the failures shake you to your core. Sometimes it takes something quite dramatic to really teach you a lesson.

“Prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai”: Preach the falsehood to know the truth.

If there’s one thing I’d say to my younger self, it’d be this:

You should enjoy this more.

This moment, with these people around you and this thing you’re doing: it won’t last forever. In fact, in most cases it’s completely different within a year. You should spend some time to enjoy it.

You never know when the golden age is. You might be living in it right now.

From Neil Gaiman‘s Make Good Art:

“…More of today’s world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three. Two out of three is fine.

People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time.

They’ll forgive the lateness of the work if it’s good, and if they like you.

And you don’t have to be as good as the others if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”

The rules for success are rarely set in stone. There is always another way in.

Tim Ferriss: “A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”

I’ll admit it – I hate being vulnerable. When I play MMOs, I choose the tankiest class and equip them with the best armour. When I’m at uni, I only answer questions I know the answer to. When I’m suffering, I keep it to myself and put on a friendly persona.

This doesn’t always work out. Actually, if I’m being honest, it rarely does. If you harden your skin too much, you begin to crack and break. My most devastating memories have been when I’ve isolated myself from others and imploded.

Overwhelmingly, the most important moments of my life have been when I’ve taken off my armour. Telling my father I loved him before he died; informing a toxic person I couldn’t be their friend anymore; breaking down to my family in a cry for help. It felt disgusting at the time, but the feeling afterwards was liberating to no bounds.

Even here, many of my early articles I felt were too personal to post (see: Managing Imposter Syndrome; Challenges of Medicine; Restless Searches for Meaning), yet by some act of madness, I pressed upload anyway. These posts are often the ones people write to say, “hey, I really appreciated that.”

Perhaps I’m beginning to understand Neil Gaiman’s words from Make Good Art:

“The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.”

Every month at my old apartment, the loudspeaker went on and a man declared, “All residents: we are testing the fire alarm today. This is only a test: do not evacuate. I repeat: This is only a test.”

A few seconds later, the familiar wailing “whoooooOOOOOOPPPP… whoooooOOOOOOPPPP” would begin. After a slight pause, the loudspeaker would come on again. “Test complete.”

That memory has since been etched into my brain. “This is only a test. This is only a test.” I’ve found this mantra applicable to many other domains.

It’s tempting to treat everything so seriously – that one mistake will result in complete disaster. But really, most of the things we do are simply tests: an experiment to see what happens.

Some of my favourite moments began with a “see what happens” approach.

Let’s see what happens if I started running 5km a day.

Let’s see what happens if I actually tried to do well in school.

Let’s see what happens if I cut down my screen time by half.

The thing about a “test mentality” is that it’s impossible to fail if your only mission was to see what happens.

This is only a test.

Disclaimer: Caveats to this idea exist. If you’re a boyfriend, “testing” another girl could lead to you being dumped. If you’re a doctor, “testing” different drugs could land you in jail. If you’re a nuclear physicist, “testing” different parameters could blow up your lab. As a general rule, be careful if there are direct consequences on other people.

Sometimes, I wake up and think, I hope something goes really wrong today.

Something that would completely uproot the smooth road of mindless routines; that would announce itself screeching, “HEY! STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING!” and then create a thrilling disaster. An enormous speed bump, if you will.

My favourite chess games are the ones where I’ve made a spectacular blunder in the opening but claw back to victory. These chaotic games are much more exciting than the close ones, where all pieces are traded down to a quiet draw.

Similarly, my favourite journal entries to read are those written during a difficult time. The dark and fiery emotions that emerge uniquely from a disaster make the resolution so much sweeter.

I’ll admit, the disaster sucks when you’re dealing with it; you wish it would just go away and leave you alone. But the peace afterwards, where you come out scarred and burnt and collapse on a bed, are truly magical.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has a word for this: lachesism:

n. the desire to be struck by disaster—to survive a plane crash, to lose everything in a fire, to plunge over a waterfall—which would put a kink in the smooth arc of your life, and forge it into something hardened and flexible and sharp, not just a stiff prefabricated beam that barely covers the gap between one end of your life and the other.

We’re always told to “write what you know”, but you often don’t know what you know until you write about it.

Adam Phillips: “Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe.”

James Baldwin took this idea one step further: “When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know; what you don’t want to find out.”

The best thing about writing is that it’s a process of discovery. You can make connections where none exist, clarify half-shaped ideas, and find gold under dirt. Fundamentally, it’s a selfish, yet beautiful activity.