Hemingway recalled his experiences as a young man living in Paris as a moveable feast. The people he met, the skills he learned and refined, and the ideas he was exposed to during those times stuck with him until the very end. It molded him into the person he would become.
College and graduate school seemed so short-lived and unproductive to be considered my version of Hemingway's moveable feast. During that time, I can not deny meeting incredible people and learning incredible skills. But it didn't feel as if there was a clear path to move any further from where I was and what I was doing. Keeping with the feast metaphor, those days felt more like appetizers and I needed to move on to the main course. Life is filled with many moveable feasts, some smaller and some larger than others. Perhaps the time I'm spending here in San Francisco will be of the grander ones. Time will tell.
Camaraderie
For what are we born if not to aid one another?
Whenever you put together a large cohort of people in a single location you will evitably foster a community of peers. There is struggle and passion. There is strength and humility. There is fear and there is success. You are placed on trial everyday and watch others sit through the same. And it's remarkable how we come back day after day to face those same plights again and again.
Some would argue that the atmosphere created by this mish-mash of different teams and people would make it difficult to be productive. At a glance this is true, there are distractions at every turn. However, distractions will always be there in one form or another. The greater value is seeing others spend just as many late nights and long days, struggling with the same problems, and coming together with the same solutions. Exposure to new lines of thought and new forms of thinking are intangible benefits, difficult to measure and quantify, but I believe ultimately useful in the longterm.
Late nights & long days
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart while I'm awake, you know?
Here we are a more than halfway through the accelerator and the feeling in the air is one of hazy optimism. The weeks have grown shorter and the task list compounds day after day. Nights blur together. Some people stay later, putting in crucial extra hours. Others bring in help to ease the pain. There is a general struggle for normality. More ping-pong games, more rowdy Friday nights. I don't think we don't fear the work, nor do we fear that it is too much. What we fear is that despite it all, it isn't enough.