January 2020

In which Steph is in her happy place

Stephanie Szeto

10 min readFeb 2, 2020

What I’ve Learned Recently

Politics

Biden’s perspective on policy is fundamentally more optimistic than Warren and Sanders’ — he cares more about the good that can come of making a deal and compromising, while Warren and Sanders are hardliners that are more focused on the bad that comes from letting the other side get what they want (Post debate special on the Ezra Klein Show)
On the same note about seeing situations from two different angles, the polarization we’re seeing between parties is driven in large part by the strong sense of identity that we draw from the political parties we’ve become aligned to: because we’ve become so much more tribalist recently, it’s hard for us to be rational: a perceived attack on your side is seen as an affront to your sense of self, while there’s much less interest in regulating people from your side, even if they’re acting egregiously. (Polarization episode I’m still in the middle of)
On a tangential note about identity, we usually see our self-worth and identity as something we define ourselves and is something that we all intrinsically have, but that’s not the case universally: dignity and honor cultures look at self-worth quite differently. In dignity cultures (e.g. Silicon Valley), slights may tarnish our dignity but ultimately our sense of self worth is still intact and unaffected, whereas in honor cultures (e.g. the South), someone’s self worth is absolutely negotiable and likely impacted when they make missteps (hence why certain offenses are seen as so much more severe in certain societies). (Michele Gelfand on Conversations with Tyler)
Thinking about government, I really liked one observation this guy made in his list of observations about Europe after living in Germany and Denmark for a few years: in Europe, it feels like the government is something that’s pulled together from the political parties, whereas in the US, the government is something that political parties get control over for a certain period of time. (Similar, but different in how you think about the institutions that take precedence.) (Chad’s Europe notes)

China

Influencer marketing is way further along there than in the US: 1) you’re seeing trends like supply chains to help facilitate influencer brands (I see this starting to happen with Western YT’ers but these arrangements seems to be more one-off partnerships as opposed to an entire industry supporting it), 2) the consumer ecosystem and time spent moving much more to e-commerce apps (this would be equivalent to social and content showing up on Amazon itself), 3) influencer-led studios taking share from agencies in creating content. I suppose it’s not surprising that Asia has found a way to mass-produce and create influencers, given the Kpop model of setting up musical acts — everything gets boiled down into a repeatable, rinse and repeat process (China influencer marketing)
China will always be operating from a fundamentally different space relative to the US when it comes to payments — the US adopted credit cards first and now China has onboarded directly onto mobile payments, both of which were substantial steps forward from a cash-based economy. Mobile payments (representing cash) enables the prevalent adoption of tipping and micro-payments in China, which currently are a major source for influencer content monetization. Credit cards (which represent credit and have fees associated with each transaction) make it difficult to do the same in the US (Stratechery on the Plaid acquisition)
We’ve been hearing a lot about the tariffs being levied as part of the US-China trade war, but it was helpful to get a concrete sense of the relative magnitude of those tariff hikes on both sides relative to historical levels: the average US tariff on Chinese imports was previously ~3.1% in 2018, it’s now ~20%. The average Chinese tariff on American imports was previously ~8% in early 2018, it will now be ~21%. I haven’t necessarily noticed it with my typical purchasing activity, but interesting to note otherwise. (Deloitte weekly economic update)
I was intrigued by Dan Wang’s argument positing China as a paper tiger: essentially that they seem impressive from the front with their advanced manufacturing capabilities and strong product sense when it comes to consumer product, but that they struggle when it comes to establishing globally recognizable brands and having a presence in R&D intensive industries where there’s clear technological differentiation. They will need to develop more advanced skills around building up necessary sub-components; it looks like the political will is there though — China appears to be committed to weaning themselves off and becoming less dependent on American / foreign technology. (Dan Wang’s 2019 letter)

Tech-ish

D2C brands are in an innovative model that have disrupted many entrenched industries (eyewear, mattresses, now orthodontics?), but revolutionary model aside, they need to find a way to differentiate to maintain relevance and growth (namely likely through more brand-building). (Stratechery on the Casper IPO)
There will only be 21 million BTC ever and 18 million of them have already been created — contrast the built-in scarcity and limited supply of BTC vs governments having the potential to inflate the supply of fiat currency (a la USD coming off the gold standard in the ’70s and government debt climbing since then as a result). (chats with Xianwen)

Psychology

I was recently introduced to René Girard and his framework for how we come to desire the things we desire. He has this concept of external mediation vs internal mediation: external mediation is how we develop our desires via a mediator who often exists on another plane as us (e.g. a celebrity or social media influencer who generally aren’t directly accessible or relatable), while internal mediation is how we develop our desires via observing our peers and the people around us, which often leads to rivalry and competition. Nothing particularly novel but it’s helpful to have a more rigid framework and specific language for thinking through how we come to want the things we want and why following some people can feel inspirational and positive, while stalking others can make people feel terrible, even if it’s the exact same action at play. (Dan Wang on college as an incubator of Girardian terror)
A friend sent me a recent Paul Graham piece on learning and how the institutions and structures we have in place to facilitate learning aren’t very good at accomplishing that — it echos a lot of what I’ve come to realize about my attitude towards school. As a student, I got really good at the act of school, but my good grades didn’t always reflect what I actually retained and learned from those classes (which was often at best an extremely vague, high-level sense of the concepts discussed). I remember wanting to take an architecture class for fun, but deciding to drop it after I found myself unconsciously falling into the same grade-optimization mindset.
As I’ve gotten older and gotten to take charge of my own continued education, I’ve found that I’m much happier and able to absorb and retain so much more by chasing after my own curiosities, doing broad-based research, coming up with questions that arise from that, and then working to fill those mental gaps. I’ve come to find that the more active I’ve been in driving my education process (thinking of questions and finding the answers), the more fruitful it‘s been.

A Not-So-Brief Aside on Me

After a particularly unpleasant holiday season of my own doing, I’m happy to report that I’ve been in much more positive spirits since the beginning of the year.

I attribute this to two primary factors:

Revisiting the way in which I think and plan for the future. I previously overly indexed on optimizing for the far out, abstract distant notion of the future: planning my long-term career trajectory, thinking about my future fortune and how I’d amass gobs and gobs of money. I was a textbook case of going through the motions, doing things, desiring things because I thought that was what I was supposed to be doing, this vague sense of success was what I was supposed to aim for.
I’ve started to think and plan more for the present and my short-term future: thinking ahead at the recipes I want to try for our weekly family dinners, planning out my weekends in advance to make sure I do the things I want to do and see the people I want to see, reading books and materials before traveling to better understand the place, its history, culture, customs, and people. I realize now I used to scramble and do everything last minute, whether it be being asked to cook dinner on the fly, trying to plan for the weekend on a Thursday, figuring out my travel itineraries, and be stressed out the whole time. I’d get things done, but with little pleasure derived from the experience (both before and during). This pivot in perspective’s helped me enjoy the process of experiencing these different parts of life so much more.
Making personal value-driven decisions on how I want to spend my time. I went through the exercise of determining my personal values last year and thus far, they’ve been extremely helpful in guiding my decision-making when it comes to how I want to spend my time and especially when it comes to making difficult trade-offs with my time.
I used to have this practice where I’d follow people I respected and try to adopt the relevant behaviors and goals they set for themselves (e.g. writing every day). I’d then get frustrated as I wrestled with actually adopting those practices and finding the time to prioritize doing those things in my everyday life.
What I’ve come to terms with recently though is that it’s not about blindly following specific goals, but about (1) figuring out how to organically work in the behaviors you want to adopt into your life and also (2) understanding how these behaviors align with your values and what you find important. In this specific case, writing was definitely something I wanted to do more of, but it didn’t fit cleanly with my personal values as stated. I had trouble finding the time to write every day as I’d initially set out to do in January, but once I connected it with my personal value around learning and growth, it suddenly became so much easier to act on.

My theme for 2020 is about trying to embrace depth, developing patience, and sticking with things more consistently over the long-haul, rather than flitting from thing to thing. I want to accomplish bigger projects with more scale, find consistency with people and commitments (relationships and intimacy are built from long-term sustained contact). That said, I accept I’m never going to be someone who can sit still and focus on one area (sorry Paul Graham) for too long, but I recognize I definitely need more balance on this spectrum.

This concretely translates into the following OKRs (it’s crazy how much I’ve taken to concrete personal goal-setting) and progress thus far:

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Engage with my communities

Host something every month with friends ✔️ (mini-din din, sushi night)
Cook a new recipe every week with my family ✔️ (avocado hummus — alright, sweet potato hummus — amazing)
Volunteer every month ✔️ (packaging bulk pasta at SF-Marin Food Bank with WQ, helping in the food pantry at West Valley Community Services)

Create + collaborate on long-term projects

Finish backyard deck with my dad ❗️(behind since it’s skiing season)
Make a book report-esque thing every quarter ⏲ (haven’t started)
Write every month ✔️

Continue investing in personal health

Of course Type-A Steph has a specific weight goal, although I’m trying to not get caught up in overly optimizing for the number and more on how I feel and getting there gradually.

As much as I’m trying to contain my areas of interest and find more focus and depth, they continue to expand all the time — right now, I find myself fascinated with understanding Portugal and its history and culture (trying to study up before my trip in a few weeks), understanding the myriad regions of India, Mexico, China rather than just the tentpole big cities, learning more about geopolitics and world history, studying decarbonization approaches and how we make progress on climate change, and discovering new calisthenics exercises and healthy recipes to try.

What can I say? Life feels bountiful and beautiful.