Summer in Shanghai – Part 2: Some Reflections

I will never take windows for granted ever again. No, not the operating system. I currently live in company-provided housing. My room is furnished like a typical hotel room with two twin-size beds and a bathroom, but it lacks one essential factor: the panes of transparent glass embedded in walls that provide natural light and panoramic views of the outside world.

Some pictures of my (messy) room:

I've been alternating between the beds, so they're both unmade.

The showerhead broke on the first day, so I had to spray myself with just the metal hose for a few weeks.

I asked the front desk several times to fix my showerhead, and the response was always, "Yes, of course. First thing in the morning!" I ended up jamming a water bottle cap in there to fix the hose in place. But still no showerhead.

If I didn’t have free internet access in my room, I probably wouldn’t spend any time in it. Not that I would permanently sacrifice waking up to sunlight for convenient access to Google News and email, but the internet provides a sufficient temporary placation of my needs.

In fact, internet access probably dulls my desires a bit too much. Every summer, I set goals of productivity: skim through some textbooks, read up on finance, learn more Chinese, etc. Before coming to China, I had this grand vision of working during the day, exercising or going out to eat with friends afterward and toiling away at books at night. The first two parts are fairly easy to accomplish, but the last requires much more willpower than I have been generating.

I usually return at about 8:00 pm, but after checking my email, going through my daily set of websites, handwashing my clothes (no washing machine) and showering, I am left with an hour before going to bed, but I’m pretty tired by that point and don’t care to do anything productive. That hour becomes consumed by surfing the web. I realize that no one ever became successful by being lazy, but for some reason, I have trouble motivating myself to take that extra step and go beyond what makes me comfortable. Yes, I realize that humans didn’t evolve to be productive during every waking hour (HarvardFML posts about spending the summer watching TV make me feel slightly better about myself), but it annoys me to no end that I cannot throw aside my tendencies to waste time, no matter the amount.

As a child and even up until high school, I believed that getting good at things would be fairly easy, and I wasn’t aware of how much effort was required to actually become proficient. I assumed that simply following the school math curriculum, participating in chess tournaments or playing pool would passively give me mastery of those skills, and I wouldn’t have to set aside extra time to acquire expertise. I was waiting for others to provide me with opportunities to learn, but what I really needed to do was actively pursue those opportunities.

A classic example was my attempt to teach myself programming in 9th grade; I only learned up to loops and conditionals (the most basic elements of programming), and then I stopped because I believed that it wasn’t necessary to push myself. My thought was that I would eventually take a structured class about the topic, so why bother? Chess was a similar situation; I incorrectly assumed that playing lots of games would impart new strategic and tactical knowledge upon myself. I realized too late (junior year of high school) that studying was a requisite part of improving my game, but I didn’t have enough time to devote at that point (or maybe I did but just squandered it).

As a result of my past naivete, I am frustratingly mediocre in all of the activities that I enjoy doing.

Recently, I’ve been finding myself stuck between two trains of thought. The first one is along the lines of “You’re already 19. What have you been doing? Magnus Carlsen is your age, and he’s the number one rated chess player in the world. When Ken Griffin was your age, he had written computer programs to price convertible bonds, and he had started two funds from his dorm room. All successful people have already proven themselves by this time in their lives.”

Fortunately, I can usually shake myself free from this kind of negative thinking (no one should compare himself to prodigies). My second mode of reasoning is slightly better: “You’re only 19. You’re still young, and you have the rest of your life to do things. However, you’re pretty average, and it’s too late to change that.” When I went off to college, I knew that I would be somewhere in the middle, but I never expected it to bother me to such an extent.

Ok, I really wasn’t expecting to write a serious post when I started off with my room, and I’m not even sure if my rambling was entirely coherent, but here I am. The (cliched) question is, where do I go from here?

I can’t blame internet access for my own lack of willpower. When I decided to quit playing video games freshman spring due to wasting too much time, Duncan told me that it most likely wouldn’t work because I’ll just find some other method of screwing around. This turned out to be very true. How do I get myself to just suck it up and work harder?

Summer in Shanghai – Part 1

Mid-July. I am halfway done with my college career. After reading through a few of my old Xanga posts, I’ve concluded that I might be more knowledgeable than I was in high school, but in the end, I’m still a kid.

Quick recap of what has happened in the past four months since I last posted:

1. End of school year/finals. Housing worked out well for us. We all have singles next year plus a common room. Finals could have been better.

2. Family vacation in Hawaii. We drove through Hilo, so Tom and I were in the same city for a brief moment.

3. Internship in Shanghai.

I’ve been in Shanghai since June 11th, and I’m staying until August 25th. This is the longest period of time that I’ve lived by myself, but I feel good. My schedule is fairly consistent (for better or worse): get up, go to work, lunch break, get off work, exercise or go out to eat with friends, go home and surf the internet. One aspect of Chinese culture that I wish the US would adopt is the extremely long lunch breaks; I have a 2 hour break everyday that I use to eat, facebook and nap.
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Conflicted

A few quick updates: All of us have been extremely busy over the past month, and this cut into our free/sleeping/blogging time.  Also, Duncan and I stopped recording our sleep times for various reasons, so no complete dataset will be posted at the end of the semester (I know, disappointing, right?).

In the spirit of Tom’s introspective posts, this one is a little more serious than the fun bullshit that I usually write about.

At the beginning of the semester, my roommates and I made a resolution to work out at least once a week.  Quincy basement has a gym, so we really didn’t have an excuse not to go.  I’ve always loved weightlifting; there’s something special about the state of pleasure you get after working your body to exhaustion.  I also savor the soreness that follows for a few days after a good workout (I’m probably a bit masochistic).  Maybe it’s just the change of chemical balances in the brain, but my outlook on life is always better after weightlifting.  I feel optimistic.

On a Sunday night a few weeks ago, I experienced a rare feeling of satisfaction with my life.  I had spent the entire morning and afternoon learning.  I wasn’t simply studying like I sometimes do by flipping through the pages just enough to complete an assignment; I was actually trying to engage myself with the  acquisition of new knowledge.  I do not attempt the latter nearly as often as I should.  After a productive day of absorbing new ideas, my roommates and I went to the gym.  As I was walking back to my room afterwards, I discovered what makes me feel content: progress and improvement of myself, both physically and mentally.

You’re probably wondering what that horrendously broad description means.  Doesn’t everyone feel good after they get better at things?  Well, yes, but not exactly in the same way.  I am more focused on the process of improvement than on the end results.  For me, an ideal life might be one where I could pursue an intellectual activity as a career, such as playing chess professionally, and also have time for sports as a serious hobby (or combine the two for chess boxing).

I wouldn’t have to be the best at anything; I would be happy as long as I could constantly strive to improve my abilities and achieve the maximum amount that my potential allows.  Of course, this particular lifestyle is off-limits to me, but my general point is that I like the idea of making myself better at a skill that I enjoy.  I don’t think I would mind going to college for a little while longer if it meant I could learn more things and also make myself more physically fit.  I find it so strange that I only have two more years of structured classes left.

I’ve been wondering how to reconcile the differences between my ideal life and the potential paths that I will take in the future.  If I enjoy making myself smarter and stronger, then why not just become a professor who lifts weights?  Alas, academia is definitely not the right choice for me.  I’m not going to lie; my materialism alters my career incentives.  I want to be wealthy, but not excessively.  I want to live in a big house and drive a nice car.  I want to be worry-free when it comes to expenses.  I want to be able to take a break and travel the world at any time.   I want to be my own boss and not report to a superior from 9 to 5.  I want the freedom that is associated with being out of the rat race.  None of these are guaranteed if I choose a finance job, but the probability of achieving them is much lower if I choose an career in academia over one in finance.

If I desire both money and knowledge, how do I balance the two?

My hope is that a career in finance will open enough doors for me that I can eventually leave it to pursue a more satisfying goal, e.g. starting my own company.  A friend of mine once joked, “you know it’s bad when you’re already planning an exit strategy.”

He’s probably right, but I hope it’ll be worth it.

Note: I added the chess boxing video because I was afraid of people being turned away by too much text.

Severe internet withdrawal

Ah, the great firewall of China.  It’s been over two weeks since I’ve had access to facebook, YouTube (I have no idea what kind of video Tom embedded in the post below), blogspot, fmylife, Harvardfml, and select Wikipedia articles (including the one on the great firewall of china).

I’m almost having trouble wasting time on the internet; luckily, failblog and the Onion are still accessible.  My Google searches are also limited although I was able to access images of the Tiananmen square incident while I was in Beijing.

Interestingly, Google is considering abandoning its Chinese operations.

More interestingly, why isn’t the most morally decadent site on the internet, 4chan, blocked?
Gotta go, angry voices are knocking at my door.

Best Dataset Ever

This is an end-of-semester thing that we’ve been looking forward to.  Back in mid-October, I thought it would be fun to record our sleep and wakeup times.  We started on October 14th, and here are the results from calculating hours slept.  I think we have a lot less than the average number of all-nighters for college students.

You can download the dataset (csv format) here.

Note: the hours slept are calculated for the night before, e.g. Sunday values correspond to hours slept Saturday night through Sunday morning.

Summary (hours):

As you can see, Danny, Duncan, and Tom have left-skewed distributions (the mean is less than the median) whereas I’m right-skewed.  I have the highest mean sleep time and the lowest standard deviation.  Tom has the highest standard deviation, and Duncan has the lowest mean sleep time.  Graph:

Days of the week:

We were also curious about our sleep patterns during the week.  Tom was usually very well rested on Tuesdays.  Graph:

Correlation Matrix:

Unsurprisingly, I am not very correlated with the others.  Duncan and Tom have the highest correlation.

My hours:

My variance increased over the semester.  Graph:

Danny:

Thanksgiving break meant a lot of sleep for Danny.  Graph:

Duncan:

I bet you can tell when Duncan had an astronomy lab write-up.  Graph:

Tom:

The wild roller coaster ride that is Tom’s sleep schedule.  Graph:

All of us: