The difference between global trauma in this age compared to any trauma prior is the power of visibility and empathy. We live in a time when negativity spreads like wildfire. Not only did my best friend get laid off; not only did a former colleague spend weeks in the hospital; but I also have infinite visibility into everyone else’s stories and struggles.

I hear updates about the ticking death counter from my dad in the morning, my brother in the afternoon, my mom in the evening, and new articles flash across my screen on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and the news all day long.

And of course I wonder — what is the impact of this incessant influx? Is it making me better?

Let me preface this — I deeply respect those who are working on the front lines in health centers and in other essential industries. I’m grateful for those who are researching vaccines, developing faster tests, and helping others in need, including strangers, to have access to groceries, medication, and other essentials.

And if you want to help out — there are plenty of causes you can donate to; FEMA has a number of options on how to help.

But it’s not your responsibility (or mine!) to stay abreast of every new death, of every headline, of every model predicting when this will end, of every hot take. (Hmm, is this piece a hot take?)

We should probably all be spending less time on social media right now. It’s a great distraction — but now in particular, it can be deeply unhealthy, and it definitely creates more anxiety for me than it relieves.

So here’s the one simple tip that’s been helping me: Log out.

Once you’re done scrolling, log out. Whether or not you use social media on your computer, on mobile web, on the mobile apps… log out!

It’s so easy to open up an app when I’m working on something and I lose focus. Getting to the login screen requires me to ask myself — do I really want this? Why am I checking Twitter right now? Am I specifically interested in seeing what’s happening in the world? Or am I just looking for a distraction?

It’s ok to want a distraction. But I think many of us fall into the trap of distraction without actually wanting it.

We’re all struggling. It’s ok to be less productive than normal. It’s good to be kind to ourselves, and to recognize that there is a fucking pandemic going on around us, hundreds of thousands of people have died, and that it’s normal to be anxious right now.

But we don’t have to give in to every trap.

Be kind to yourself — log out after scrolling.

I’ve enjoyed my friend Patricia’s Wellness Stack framework. Logging out after scrolling is a small component of my emotional Wellness Stack. Do you have any unique strategies in your wellness stack? I’d love to hear about them!

We’ve just hit cruising altitude on the flight out of New Delhi. Things are still feeling rather surreal, though I’ve got to admit that being buckled in, in the window seat, knowing that I’ll have to annoy two separate people just to take a leak, is decidedly less dreamlike than I felt at the airport.

I had never booked an international flight so last-minute before.

My paternal grandma, the strongest, sharpest, and most charismatic woman I’ve ever known, the indisputable matriarch of our Mittal clan, my Dadi — passed away two weeks ago.

It was the first death of a family member I knew, so I learned quite a bit about the process — the Hindu rites of funeral are elaborate.

First, Dadi’s body was cremated in Dehradun, where she lived and many of my extended family still live, and her ashes were carried by my cousins and uncles to the Ganga River, the holiest in India. Then pass nine days of mourning. During this time, our family’s house is considered unclean. Visitors can’t eat food at our house, and we can’t eat at others’.

The final rites take place on the 10th and 13th day after death, which, conveniently gives relatives on the other side of the world (👋🏾) a bit of a window to make it to India.

I hadn’t been back to India in almost 4 years.

Last week on Monday, I booked a United flight for Friday, stopping over in Newark on the way to New Delhi. It wasn’t exactly cheap, but…. I mean, it’s a flight to India. And it’s hard to overstate how lucky/privileged I am to have a job where A) I can make a last-minute request for personal leave without having to wonder if it will be approved, and B) I can afford that decision.

I was Dadi’s oldest pota.

I’m not exactly a fan of the various instances of gender bias in Hinduism.. but… I appreciate our culture for what it is. And since Hindu daughters get “married off” into other families, the sons are the ones who carry on the family line. And consequently, as the first son to be born to any of Dadi’s four sons (making me the oldest pota), my birth had held great significance to her. This connection of ours had only been strengthened in her two separate visits to Houston, many months each, to stay with my family when I was in second grade and ninth grade.

We just launched Clever Goals a couple weeks ago, and, well, we have quite a lot to do. So, I booked a flight that would get me to India a day before the 10th day rites, submitted my time-off request, and went back to work.

On Friday (day 7), I threw a few things into a suitcase, lamenting that I hadn’t come up with any thoughtful American gifts for my cousins, grabbed my passport, and hopped in a Lyft to SFO. True to my nature, I was running a bit late, but I figured I would get my boarding pass from the United counter real quick — after all, I didn’t have any bags to check in — and hey, how bad would security be on a Friday morning?

I never got to find out.

Damn, just like, so, so many vibes of gratitude to the really wonderful lady who was working the United Economy check-in kiosks that morning (whose name, in my panic, I forgot to note). You see, fortunately for me, for international journeys, the kiosks have an agent come over to check your visa before giving you an “official” boarding pass and letting you pass through security.

I had totally, utterly, forgotten to think about my Indian visa.

I’ve been a US Citizen for most of my life. I had gotten a 5-year Indian visa before my trip in 2014. But in 2016, after my legal name change, I got a new passport, and didn’t think about getting new visas at the time. Turns out that the Indian government recently terminated the “Transfer of Visa” method for legal name changes, so I needed a new Indian visa altogether. I wasn’t even playing 1-dimensional chess though — I didn’t even think to bring my old Indian visa on my old passport to the airport. In the surprise of booking a last-minute trip, I had forgotten one of the key components of international travel.

I wouldn’t say that I’m the worst at preparing for things; my memory isn’t great but I’ve built systems to account for that, and generally get my errands done in life. But I do tend to approach everything rather lightheartedly. If I had thought in advance, I could have applied for an e-Visa that I would receive on arrival in India, but that application has to be submitted 4 days in advance of travel.

Sometimes, it can pay to take life a little more seriously.

Without batting an eye, the United agent bumped me 24 hours to roughly the same SFO-EWR-DEL journey the next day (with a bit less of a layover in EWR). I headed back home, submitted an urgent visa application online, biked over to the San Francisco office of Cox and Kings Global Services, the company that handles visa processing for the Indian consulate, since urgent applications need to be finished in person (well aware that this would have been a much less trivial process if I lived anywhere other than SF, since the Indian consulate only has 6 locations in the country, all in metropolitan cities geographically much larger than SF), woke up my brother/cousin-in-law, Piyush Jiaji, at 3 AM in Delhi, who sent over the flyer outlining the program for Dadi’s 13th day rites to serve as the “death certificate” I needed for my application (since there isn’t really any legal paperwork)… and crossed my fingers.

The CKGS reps helped me correct the errors I had made on my application in haste, and even delayed their daily courier to the SF Indian consulate by 20 minutes while I ran to Walgreens around the corner to get a passport photo (shoutout to the ladies at CKGS SF for their patience and empathy; that was the most helpful government agency experience I’ve ever had).

3 hours later, I got the text — my application was approved! I headed back to CKGS and picked up my passport with my new visa.

The next, 8th day, Saturday, I headed back to SFO, plenty early for my flight to Newark but a bit nervous about only having a 45-minute layover, since there’s only one EWR-DEL flight a day, and I had already burned my 1-day buffer.

Then our departure was delayed by 45 minutes due to “operational difficulties”. Eek.

There were 5 others on my flight trying to make the same connection to India, so I was hopeful, though the flight attendants let me know that United doesn’t wait for delayed connecting flights. In yet another stroke of luck (yes, this was getting a bit crazy), the pilot & flight crew managed to claw back 20 minutes of our delay on the voyage over, giving me a 5 minute window to shove past everyone to exit the plane first and dash through the Newark airport before United closed the gate to the flight to Delhi.

I guess Dadi’s spirit wanted me to make it in time, too.

At the Delhi airport, I hopped in a taxi Kalpana Mausi (my mom’s sister) had booked for me, arriving in Dehradun at 6 AM on the 10th day, less than 2 hours before the 10th day rites were to begin.

It took a village… but I made it.

I spent a week in India and it was absolutely magical. On the 10th day, Dadi’s sons and potas — my uncles and cousins and Dad, brother, and I — performed an initial set of rites and got our hair cut (another part of being ‘unclean’ is that in the first 9 days, sons and potas are not supposed to cut our hair or nails, or use soap when showering [I bent the rules on that last one]). Interestingly, the mandir (temple) for the 10th day ceremony of death employs multiple barbers.

On the 13th day, there were a variety of rituals, starting at the family home, and then moving to a nearby mandir later in the day, where friends and family from around Dehradun and even other cities around the state came to pay their respect. Though the atmosphere was tinged with sadness, it was largely about the celebration of a life well lived.

Dadi had lived a long benevolent life and had inspired many. She even had asked that her eyes be donated, and folks from the local hospital stopped by to let us know that two young lives are now seeing the world through her eyes.

We spent a couple days of the week doing various other family things in Dehradun and nearby. We visited my Mom’s side of the family, where I showed her parents, my Nani and Nanaji, a couple (clean) clips from my latest comedy show. Because of the language and culture barrier, pausing every few seconds to explain the joke ended up being necessary. Turns out the axiom that explaining a joke ruins it doesn’t hold up as strongly when the audience didn’t understand what you said at all pre-explanation.

We also made a day trip to the village of Pai, in the neighboring state of Haryana, where Bauji, my paternal grandpa, had been raised before he moved to Dehradun. We found the 80-bedroom haveli, communal housing structure, that had housed 19 generations (!!) of Mittals (dating back to Mughal rule of India), which was still being inhabited by distant relatives of ours, also Mittals, who actually (apparently) have a record of this family tree.

At a nearby mandir, we made an offering of my and my brother’s hair, and that of my cousins Kanhaiya and Mudit, a ceremony my dad and his brothers had performed at the same mandir 40 years ago — an offering, tradition says, one should make before marriage.

On this trip, I met 3 new in-laws, and my 1-year old nephew, Vibhav.

I met up with my nephew Utkarsh, who’s 13 now and has picked up guitar and roller skating and is approaching my height eerily quickly. He kicked my ass in Fifa, and I traded him my SF Giants baseball cap for his of Superman.

And as I was making my way through security in the Delhi airport, and waiting for my flight to board, just a couple hours ago, I broke down crying on 4 separate occasions.

I came so close to fucking it all up, but instead, I got a powerful reminder of the beauty of family, of people who will always be there to lean on. I got to see so many of my relatives all in one place, which isn’t easy to coordinate. I got to explore my ancestral roots, in a village where the natives’ rural Hindi was so terse and blunt that you could probably record a segment of one of them trying to communicate with me (in my generally fluent, but limited-vocab Hindi) for India’s Comedy Central. I even got two separate haircuts for free.

And I felt Dadi’s spirit with me the whole time, reminding me of who she was and how she made us all who we are today.

Thanks Ankit for encouraging me to write this!

Over the last year and a half, I have, for the first time in my life, established a consistent gym routine. In July 2015, I signed up for a membership at Fitness SF, knowing that I wanted to start prioritizing my health and fitness, and little else.

When they offered me a free session with a personal trainer, I happily accepted. That session was the first time I had ever performed a Deadlift, and I was hooked. Weightlifting feels good! The intense physical exertion and music in my headphones combine to help me escape into a peaceful, meditative corner of my mind. And after a really good workout, the pump can feel damn near euphoric.

So after that first session, I decided to go all-in. I bought a training package and started seeing my trainer twice a week. He would teach me new exercises, critique my form, give me nutrition tips, and recommendations for what to do when I visited the gym outside of our sessions.

And for two and a half months, I didn’t visit the gym a single time. I knew I was defeating the purpose of personal training by not hitting the weights on my own, but what can I say? I wasn’t in the most disciplined place at that point.

Anyway, one Saturday in October I finally found myself with an open afternoon, and I happened to be in the Castro, where Fitness SF conveniently has a location. And, of course, I still wear a t-shirt and shorts all the time, so I was already dressed for the occasion!

My visits to the gym began to pick up, and in March 2016, I hit the gym 16 times in the month. 8 of those were with my trainer, so not an incredible feat, but still serious progress. By June, I hit the gym 22 times, a personal record (and also a bit ridiculous), and I felt ready to reduce my personal training to 1x/week.

In the meantime, I had started to pick up a few other habits. In May, I had decided to start flossing every day (aided by Snapchat, but that’s a story for another time), and in June I started using Way of Life, an incredible app for lightweight habit tracking:

To wrap up this tangent, I want to mention that I feel more disciplined about my time and personal life than I ever have before, and I attribute it entirely to working out and seeing a trainer when I was starting out (I’ve been told that weightlifting has served as my Keystone Habit). I was able to keep up with Way of Life because I had concrete evidence (my gym habit) that if I wanted to change something in my life, I could do it. And so I added a few daily habits to my routine — reading, journaling, taking a moment to reflect on my day and feel gratitude for someone in my life, and asking myself if I was happy (and trying to dig into why or why not) — careful to not add too many at once.

So, what’s this about losing weight then?

I provide all this context to illustrate that I really do think I’m in a position to achieve my goals (empowered in a way I’ve never felt before), as long as I’m tactical about it.

Every couple training sessions, I ask my trainer to take me to the room in the gym with an InBody machine that purports to analyze my body composition and calculate my Body Fat and Skeletal Muscle Mass. There’s a lot of discussion about how accurate these machines are, but the numbers have made enough sense to me that hopefully the error, if any, is systematic (so at least the trends over time are sufficiently reliable).

I’m not totally proud 0f all the results, but I think they are insightful, so I went through my past InBody measurements and put them all into a chart to see progress over time:

A few trends stick out here:

1. In my first 4–5 months, I cut 10 pounds of body fat and gained 5 pounds of muscle mass (“newbie gains”).
2. Over the first half of 2016, I felt like I largely stagnated in muscle mass growth, but put back on some of that body fat.
3. Over the latter half of 2016, I put back on all of the body fat I had initially lost, while gaining about 4 more pounds of muscle mass.

As I was seeing my numbers stagnate early on in the year, my trainer advised that I aim to gain 2 pounds a month, and he really encouraged me to make sure I was eating enough, even at the expense of eating super-clean. I literally started eating 5 quesadillas a week at Taqueria Cancun, to help me meet my caloric goals (3200 a day).

And so, I did hit my goal of weighing 190 by the end of the year, but at the expense of putting on a bunch of fat again. Were my 5 pounds of muscle mass in 2016 worth 10 pounds of fat? Tough to say, but hey, now I know what a Dirty Bulk is like.

So here I am, ~20 pounds heavier than where I started, with about 10 pounds of muscle mass to show for it. But I’m also feeling ready to cut that fat all over again! So, here’s what I’m thinking to start out the year:

1. I’d like to cut my fat, at least back down to 24 pounds, but ideally down to 18 pounds, or 10% BF — which is about the point where I might be able to start seeing a six-pack (yes, a shallow goal, but a motivating one nonetheless).
2. I want to retain my 87.5 pounds of Skeletal Muscle Mass (adding some SMM while cutting fat would be amazing but we’ll call that a stretch goal).
3. I’m logging all my food on MyFitnessPal. Add me if you’re using it, my username is callmepotluck! I’m trying to log my food every single day. (I’ve found consistency with MyFitnessPal to be very difficult, but it helps that Zesty, the service that caters lunches at Clever, gives nutritional info for every item they serve. Peer pressure/celebration helps too, so seriously, add me! I promise to like all of your MFP statuses.)
4. I’m aiming for a caloric deficit, by eating 2500 calories a day: 30% carbs 35% protein 35% fat, i.e. 219 grams of protein a day. That is a lot of greek yogurt!
5. I’m going to check my Body Composition every single week, to make sure I’m not losing SMM.
6. I aim to continue to hit the gym 4x/week, and plank for at least 2 minutes, every day.

Bring it on, 2017! Hopefully this sheds some light onto my day-to-day strategies. I know I’m basing some of my plans on “gymbro pseudoscience” that gets derided in certain parts of the internet, but almost everything I see about nutrition is derided somewhere else as pseudoscience, so it’s the best I’ve got.

As always, I’m very receptive to feedback, so let me know what you think! Best of luck with your own goals this year, friend.

So last year, the New York Times wrote an article about the Silicon Valley Soylent lifestyle, prominently featuring my Peanut Butter Soylent (straight from the blender)

The article, in which I actually play a rather minor role as a dealer of powder, host of dinner parties, and Pad Thai Top Chef, paints the Valley full of coders and founders who sip their meals over the course of their day, to avoid having to take breaks to eat.

That lifestyle, naturally, received some flak on Twitter and in the comments — and in general, I feel like some people still just don’t get Soylent-drinkers.

And then, last month, that lovely picture in the backyard of Masonic, my old house in the Haight, was reused in another NYT article about how recently, a few Soylent consumers have gotten ill.

I figured I’d take these hard-earned 15 minutes of fame to clarify where Soylent fits into my life.

I’m a bit different from most people when it comes to food. I’ve never been very enthusiastic about eating. I don’t have any memories from growing up where I specifically remember a meal I enjoyed, but I do remember often staying in my room after my mom had been calling me to come to dinner for half an hour, because I didn’t really feel like eating.

I do enjoy food for its ability to bring people together. I’ve had significant, memorable, and enjoyable conversations over meals.

But if I were given full control over where a friend and I will be grabbing dinner, transportation considerations aside, I’d choose Chipotle 9 times out of 10. It’s affordable, tasty, and reasonably healthy. And when I’m getting a meal by myself, I’m not even that choosy on the “tasty” spectrum.

Enter Soylent.

In contrast to the image that is sometimes portrayed, Soylent occupies a relatively small niche in my life (it helps that Clever feeds me 12 meals a week). I mostly drink it on weekends when I’m hungry at home and optimizing for convenience, and weeknights when I want to get a few hundred more calories in. It competes with the Super Quesadilla Al Pastor from Taqueria Cancun across the street.

I’ve been on the Soylent train since their initial crowdfunding campaign. The first product took a year to ship, and in the meantime, a few Penn friends and I made some from DIY recipes online.

When Alex and I were working on Emerald Exam over summer 2013, our lunch options often rotated as if we were at a food court — Domino’s, Evergreen Chinese, Chipotle, Jimmy John’s, Qdoba. One of us had to bike over and pick up the takeout. And then — we started making Soylent, and we could just chill on the couches in our workspace, my basement whenever we wanted to take a food break.

When I worked at YC, I ate Soylent 1.x (the powder version that you have to mix yourself) for breakfast daily, and for a substantial number of lunches.

These days, I drink Soylent 2.0 and go through about one 12-bottle box a month. I’ve also been trying Coffiest, which has coffee in it and is a bit more chocolatey in taste, and I do quite like it as an occasional substitute to making my own breakfast at work.

To answer some common questions: I’ve had digestive issues just once, it does actually make me feel full, I do sometimes desire something to chew on after drinking it, it tastes like pancake batter, and no, I don’t get tired of it.

I really do love Soylent. Again, my taste radar is probably a bit off from yours, but I sometimes have to prevent myself from drinking too much too quickly. And I suspect the company will soon be shipping more flavored varieties, after Coffiest and having initially focused on fulfilling initial demand with a neutral-tasting, solid product.

Soylent is produced to be nutritionally complete with all of the elements of a healthy diet. I think a cheap, healthy, convenient meal alternative fits somewhere in most people’s lives, in the first world (I think Soylent has awesome applications in the developing world, but that’s a separate topic). It’s like a more nutritionally well-rounded granola bar.

I’m sure there are some of my peers in SF who literally “drink their meals so they don’t have to stop working”. Hopefully, they do take breaks from work in some fashion. But there are a lot of ways to take a break other than eating. It can also be helpful to do so on a schedule determined on factors other than when your stomach begins to complain, or when a meal is served — I think people routinely underestimate switching costs.

Are you intentional about all 21 meals a week, every week? Or do you occasionally skip breakfast when you’re on the go? Perhaps you felt lazy last weekend and reheated some pizza that you couldn’t fully chew through at the crust.

Soylent may seem ridiculous to you, and at this point, at v2.0, I get that. One can still bring up a number of reasonable objections to the product. If this is you — let’s revisit this discussion over a cup of Soylent 4.0. Or coffee, if you must.

I eat people was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Unrelatedly, I’ve now been going as Potluck for almost 2 years, and legally have been Potluck since January, so I think it’s been enough time for me to have some takeaways and thoughts on my name that are beyond just initial reactions to the change.

To start with the background:

I was, of course, not born Potluck. My birth name was पुलक, pronounced roughly as “pull + luck”, anglicized as Pulak. At some point in early elementary school, someone bestowed upon me the pronunciation of “poo + lock”, which is how I introduced myself for all of grade school and college. I do quite like the way the Hindi pronunciation rolls off the tongue, but I don’t feel like I ever felt a deep attachment to my name as I would say it and hear it said.

The summer after college, I was traveling in South East Asia with Alvin, who would introduce himself as “Alvin, like the chipmunk.” I was envious of how everyone remembered Alvin’s name, and that got me thinking down a path of mnemonics and nicknames for the next few months.

In January 2015, I was chatting with some friends about this, mostly jokingly kicking some ideas around, and Laura suggested Potluck. I was into the communal vibes, the similarity to my birth name, the idea of having a noun as a name, and just how fun the word is! Just a few weeks later, on my first day at Clever, I mentioned the idea of going by Potluck to Sparks, who was onboarding me, and he was into it as well. And that was it! In my “introduction email” to the team, I introduced myself as Potluck and asked my coworkers to call me that.

From there it snowballed — I actually really enjoyed being Potluck, introducing myself that way, being called that name. But I quickly started to feel cognitive dissonance in introducing myself as Potluck to my coworkers and new people I met, while still being referred to as “poo + lock” by old friends. It felt weird at first, but I started asking friends I knew prior to joining Clever to think of me as, and call me, Potluck as well.

I decided later in 2015 to initiate the legal name change process (which was fairly straightforward, though I had to print a Public Notice in the SF Recorder for 4 consecutive weeks), and on January 7th, 2016, my petition for change of name was granted by the San Francisco Superior Court. Since then, I’ve updated pretty much all my documents (SSN, DL, Passport, bank account/cards, insurance) and have totally settled into Potluck.

I definitely get some fun reactions. It makes for a fun impression. For most of my life, I was a tad too serious. My 24th year was a bit of an exercise in levity (including my first ever standup comedy set), and I think my name contributed, if only a tiny bit. Conversations and interactions where everyone feels at ease making a joke, just being fun, tend to be more fun (duh) than ones where that isn’t the case.

Interestingly, as a name you say, Potluck is a tad “clunky”. The consonants in the middle collide in a way you might not really think about, but it definitely does make it harder to achieve the optimal introduction — one in which someone hears me say “I’m Potluck”, and cleanly picks up and registers the name in time for me to say “And what’s your name?”

My favorite reaction was probably the person who tried to guess how it was spelled — as “Paatlak” — though of course I appreciate people who simply comment that my name is awesome. Some people assume I get tired talking about / explaining my name, which was kind of true in the first month or two last year.. but I’ve gotten sufficiently “good” at deflecting my name / treating it as just casually part of who I am, that I don’t actually get asked to explain it that much.

I do admit that I probably don’t quite answer the question people are intending to ask when they ask if Potluck is my Real Name, but that’s because since it’s my legal name and who I associate myself & my identity as, I do consider it my Real Name. And there are probably some people who think it’s weird but don’t tell me that to my face. Some friends I’ve known from Penn or earlier do take some time to get comfortable with it, which I understand — a name isn’t something you think about. It’s an implicit association. And knowing me for years definitely builds up the association between me and “poo + lock”. But I think Potluck grows on you!

My favorite nicknames are Pots and Lucky. I’ve definitely pulled my Driver’s License to “prove” it, and only once has someone (also of South Asian descent) still insisted “You changed it!!”.

So yeah. That’s me, Potluck! Be Happy, friends :)

Yesterday, we read chapter 3 of Super Fly Guy together. He flew through it, having read it multiple times at home. Almost in passing, he mentioned that he and his mom had gotten I Spy Fly Guy from the library last week. My heart skipped a beat.

I just finished my second week at Clever. I had an invaluable experience working with Sam at Y Combinator; the founders I met, mentorship I received, interactions I observed, and people I worked with helped make for an awesome first 6 months in the Real World. Still, over the last year, as I reflected on my learnings from Emerald Exam and then was exposed to the YC community — combined with my thoughts and learnings from tutoring, meeting with teachers and edtech founders, TAing, and interning at Piazza — I realized that I really did want to spend my life working toward bettering global education. Growing my technical proficiency at Clever felt like the best way to prepare to build the solution for the problem in education I’m most passionate about solving.

Two weeks in, I don’t think I could have made a better choice. I love the cultural values (my favorites are Don’t Trust the Textbook and Leave the Classroom Better Than You Found It). My onboarding buddy Sparks has answered hundreds of my questions with patience and empathy. Over lunch conversations, I’ve learned about Summit Schools, Constructivism, Dan Meyer, TEALS, Smart Sparrow, Vergara v. California… and started building my foundation and familiarity with Go, Gearman, Underscore, Docker, Salt, and PGP.

I’m fortunate that things fell into place like this — it’s hard to find life’s North Star, in part because the educational system doesn’t really guide us towards answering the questions “Who am I?” and “Where am I going in life?” At Clever, the Classroom left better is doubly literal — as a company, we are improving schools; as an individual, I’m certainly not the only one who works with kids. But at a more figurative level, I think everyone has a Classroom they want to improve — perhaps it’s our health system, the way we communicate, the way communities are structured…

Which Classroom can you leave better than you found it?

I’d suggest making a hypothesis and then finding a way to put it in practice on a small scale (e.g. volunteering at a blood drive, starting a Facebook group to discuss an interest). It’s important to make iterative steps, rather than getting intimidated by the larger question. And who knows? Maybe you’ll have experiences that move you, just like Xavier growing to love Fly Guy did to me.

If you’d like to bounce ideas off me about finding your passion, education, YC, or anything else, shoot me a Tweet or email.

PS. I love crazy experiments and trying new things. True to form, I’ve decided to go by a new name since my first day at Clever. Thoughts on that experience are forthcoming, but until then, @CallMePotluck.

Thanks to Tyler Bosmeny, Hong Kim, Zain Shah, and Adrienne Tran for reading earlier drafts of this post.