On growth

Sat Jun 14 2025

tags: public featured life

if addiction is the progressive narrowing of the things that bring us joy, growth is the opposite: it's the progressive widening of the set of situations we can be comfortable in.

We are all prisoners to our own neuroses. The way to grow past that is to deliberately expose ourselves to uncomfortable situations. Some personal examples:

  • Forcing myself to speak broken German
  • Asking girls out in person ("cold approach")
  • Walking around Singapore barefoot
  • Going to bachata socials

Discomfort should be carefully calibrated -- too much and you'll be paralysed into inaction, too little and it won't grow you maximally. How I "titrated" my discomfort:

  • Learning German: I first started sounding out the letters to Celine, who (as a kind-hearted person and my partner at the time) was obligated to be patient with me. Then I signed myself up for an intensive German course in Singapore. Then I signed up for an intensive German course in Berlin and forced myself to speak German to strangers.
  • Asking girls out: I started talking to random guys at the gym; it's a pretty low-stakes environment. Then I started going up to people at parties and introducing myself.
  • Walking around Singapore barefoot: I first started going around my neighbourhood shirtless, then started wearing a sarong out, then started going about my day barefoot.

Many times our neuroses turn out to be unjustified or exaggerated. People are a lot nicer than you think! Examples:

  • I thought that people would make fun of my german in berlin but it turned out everyone was mostly VERY patient and very helpful (sometimes they switched to english when they were tired babying me, which, I completely understand, but 99% of the time they were amazing)
  • I thought I was a weirdo wearing a sarong out, was super self-conscious about it, but people just thought I was Burmese or something. It was fine! One time someone shouted to get my attention in the street, I turned around, it was this Indian man wearing a sarong as well, he was like "Good job!" gave me a thumbs up lmao.
    • The barefoot stuff was a lot weirder, people would come up to me saying "where are your shoes", I just said "I left them at home".
  • Some girls turn me down, some girls said yes (yay!) but even when they turn me down they do it in a very friendly and kind way. and of course, even one girl saying yes was a HUGE win
  • I was MORTIFIED going into social dancing, firstly I hate dancing, I'm on the spectrum so I'm super uncoordinated, I also am pretty awkward touching people, I'm even more awkward because I have to memorise moves and so on. But people were mostly very friendly/patient; the not patient ones were cordial enough, and the best ones came back to ask for dances on their own accord, even gave me feedback and taught me new moves

Things won't be perfect; not everyone is going to be OVERJOYED THAT YOU ARE TRYING TO LEARN GERMAN, some are going to be a little "black face" or mean, but BY AND LARGE it's going to be A LOT BETTER than you think.

My explicit goal in 2025 was to deliberately court failure, and deliberately seek out uncomfortable situations to be in. Put myself in positions to get rejected more. Seek out failure more. Be hungry about it. Remember what Xenophon wrote about Cyrus:

Of all Cyrus’s many qualities: willpower, strength, charisma, glibness, intelligence, handsomeness; Xenophon makes a point of emphasizing one in particular, and his choice might strike some readers as strange. It is this: “He did not run from being defeated into the refuge of not doing that in which he had been defeated.” Cyrus learned to love the feeling of failure, because failure means you’re facing a worthy challenge, failure means you haven’t set your sights too low, failure means you’ve encountered a stone hard enough to sharpen your own edge. He’s found a cognitive meta-tool, one of those secrets of the universe which, if you can actually internalize them, make you better at everything. Failure feels good to him rather than bad, is it any surprise he goes on to conquer the world? (source: REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon)