what's Wrong with doing what others do

on looking for better games

Paris Street; Rainy Day - Gustave Caillebotte (1877)

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” —Carl Jung

I grew up loving to read and learn about the world. When I was 8, I asked for How Things Work encyclopedias for my birthday, and I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up.

I wish the story from there was that by following this ambitious curiosity, I found something unique to me, that I loved doing, and focused on getting really good at it. That’s not what happened though.

Over the next decade and a half, I instead followed a very conventional path—getting good grades, padding my college application with extracurriculars, chasing the prestigious university, internship, career path. When I faced rejections, I actually cursed myself for being a vacuously curious generalist with no legible spike. I relied on the world to recognize my value for me.

Consider that when you do what others do, likely it is because you just want what others want. Maybe this sounds tribal, but it is really the gravitational force that funnels people into consensus tracks from an early age. Think of the Ivy Leagues, and the offer from McKinsey, or Harvard Business School, or becoming a lawyer, a doctor, a software engineer, an AI researcher. Think of your mom, who had heard from Jimmy’s mom, that Jimmy will be spending his summer at an advanced Pre-SAT prep agency, and now she’s anxiously checking if the registration deadline has passed. We were baptized in these waters, you see.

You can tell you’re in a consensus track by looking at the gatekeepers at the entrance. These tests, which determine who gets in and who continues upward, are almost always bad tests: college applications, standardized tests, Leetcode interviews, corporate performance reviews, academic publishing, VC pitch competitions.

Bad tests aren’t concerned with measuring actual value, which is difficult and hard to scale. Instead they content themselves with measuring the appearance of value. In response, participants learn to hack the test, meaning performing value. This is memorizing exam question banks to pattern match answers instead of deeply learning the material, prepping leadership-principle STAR responses for behavioral interviews instead of deeply understanding your strengths and learning to confidently pitch them, networking vacuously over coffee chats rather than building trustworthy relationships, obsessively optimizing pitch decks and narrative over creating a valuable product.

Consensus tracks tend to be intensely competitive; the top student clubs at UC Berkeley accept less than 1% of thousands of applicants (the undergraduate acceptance rate for the school itself hovers around 11%). Athletes and entrepreneurs will tell you that competition provides strong feedback loops which accelerates growth and learning. In truth, this only characterizes a small fraction of competition in our world. Far more common is junk competition, where losing gives you little signal to grow from. What learnings are contained in a rejection from a Berkeley student club? Perhaps that your technical understanding wasn’t up to snuff, or perhaps you just weren’t attractive enough. After making it into one of these clubs and joining the recruitment team, I saw that candidate evaluation can be arbitrary and utterly divorced from the reality of the candidates.

Most damning of all, bad tests compress variance in personality and ability in order to mechanically scale the filtering and selection of people, trading exceptional outcomes for predictable results.

What happens in environments where you neutralize the idiosyncratic expression of individuals? In the prison yard, shaved inmates in homogenous orange compete in the power and status games that remain—physical dominance, gang affiliation, social manipulation. In the school yard, privileged students in uniform blazers are also competing, through appearances, cliques, social manipulation. In any consensus track that strips away meaningful differentiation with bad tests, the same degenerate games will dominate. Without an internal sense of value or identity, people will always borrow it from the hierarchy.

In the early stages of your life, your environment shapes you much more than you shape your environment—most true when you were a helpless baby, still true when you’re a fledgling adult in your twenties. Because they are a primary lever for growth, it would be wise to choose your environments carefully. Because they do not incentivize actual growth and value creation, consensus tracks are bad environments. The collateral is your future.

You, with your unfashionable strengths. Maybe you grew up with an insatiable love of learning. You didn’t go deep, not yet, you’re still only 12! But college applications are just around the corner, and did you hear that Jimmy is headed to national math camp? Now freshman year, with club admissions and internship recruitment looming already—you thought you’d have time to wander intellectually but Jimmy already has a 4 year plan to triple major in computer science, business, and economics. Better stay focused. Senior year, home for the holidays, and mom shares that Jimmy has a full time offer to join Amazon as a software engineer. You work hard at interview prep and get a job in Big Tech too. Now it’s just you, this 9 to 5, and the rest of your life. You’re surrounded by people who chose this for the paycheck, same as you. You got good at not asking what you actually wanted. When was the last time you impressed yourself?

If you are in the consensus track you are probably aware of everything I’ve pointed out to some degree. Even without consciously thinking it, you feel the opportunity cost of not doing more meaningful work as a low-grade chronic discontentment. Maybe without realizing it, you’ve adopted irony, numbing out, or escapism to cope. If you are fortunate enough to have the option to leave, why do you stay there? Perhaps golden handcuffs, low-agency, fear of failure, or just inertia. All of these will keep you in the room even when the door is open.

---

Only you can give yourself the permission to leave and go search for better games.

When I did find my way out it was junior year of college. It started with the realization that chasing good grades and a job in big tech were not games I had chosen. I stopped prioritizing academics and internships for the first time and instead tried to follow what made me passionate and excited. I started small but quickly found that little wins have a way of parlaying into larger ones like dominoes.

I launched a generative AI project that winter that gained 500 stars on Github. In a strange way, this gave me the confidence to decide to start my own student organization—something I wanted to do since freshman year but felt too scared to. I posted announcements in class forums, put together a founding team, recruited members, and created and taught a semester-long AI curriculum to the first member cohort, and pitched collaborations to companies. By the end of the year, we had grown to over 40 members and signed project contracts with YC startups, Google, and Netflix.

After I graduated, instead of joining Amazon, I joined a YC startup as a co-founder. I started journaling and writing to more deeply know myself and what I really want. I spent a year doing things that scared me: starting this blog, doing improv for 6 weeks, solo traveling in London, singing in public. Then, at the end of the year, having learned a lot about my values, I left my startup to find something even more meaningful.

One of my favorite quotes ever, by Steve Jobs, goes like this: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” Now I can see them behind me, the dots, and the line they trace. Slowly, by achieving progressively larger intrinsically motivated goals, I built up the confidence and conviction to follow my own path.

There’s no value in winning a game that doesn’t matter to you, so what is it that you really want? Is that the game you’re playing?

“For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.”
—Oliver Wendell Holmes