Finding my life’s work, mastering my mind, and more

January 2025

Happy end of January! and welcome to my inner monologue —a collection of ideas and questions I repeatedly thought about this month. Read more about my goal to document my monthly thoughts here. Enjoy!

Finding my life’s work & focusing on hard problems over decades.

At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I’ve come back to this thought that if I choose to, my career will span decades, and I can choose to use these decades to make compounding progress on problems that I really want to see change. I’ll credit two people in my life for pushing me to think about this—my friend Alex and my dear sister Joyce.

I spent the top of this year in Miami with college friends (3rd year in a row!), Alex being one of them. Of the days we spent hanging out together, I would posit that at least a fifth of our conversations and the content I saw him consume were around semiconductors. Alex had recently done a career 180 from developing video games to working on cutting the production time of computer chips from months to hours—a change that would make custom, personalized hardware available during our lifetime. This is a hard problem to say the least, but I find Alex’s choice to focus on this difficult and technologically risky problem different than the approach of many of my SF peers. Instead, I see others apply a greedy approach (in the algorithm sense) to their career. Every two years or so, they jump from one company to the next to optimize for salary, stimulating engineering problems, greater leadership, and the most relevant technology at the time. But Alex retains a child-like joy learning about and believing in faster chip fabrication with the recognition that this may define his work for decades. His current Youtube “for you” page is video after video of semiconductor machines in action, and I’ll place bets that if we open it up next year, it’ll be similar.

I also observe my sister committing to a difficult problem for her career over a long time horizon. One of my 2025 goals, is to help her grow her dating coaching business and this month, I found myself laying on the couch with her discussing what kinds of clients she wants to take on and what she wants her voice and messaging to be. We talk about how people in major cities want more out of their romantic partners than ever before and how our dating behaviors haven’t grown to match that expectation. We imagine how our dating experiences could have been and can be more enjoyable and effective if we are kinder and more honest on apps and first dates. What motivates me about these discussions is that we dream of a world where the bar for the quality of everyone’s dating interactions is raised, and today we can make real actions to change this; for me, it’s starting by being a better dater myself and for her, it’s working to inspire more people to date intentionally, to the point where our dating culture and norms fundamentally change.

Spending time with both Alex and Joyce has left me rethinking how I want to spend the 100,000 hours I will dedicate to my career. I feel lucky that I can take bigger career risks knowing that I have a safety net of going back to corporate America (assuming AI doesn’t replace all professional jobs I could take on). While I’m still “confused” about what I actually want to do with this insight, I think about what would be a more fulfilling career purpose and routine every day, and I’m excited for a future post to have more thoughts on what inspires my life’s work.

My mind is the one thing that I will always have in my life.* Why not master it?

I have a recurring thought that I feel glad that I have myself for my entire life to work on. If I’m not who I want to be now, I can choose to become it, and I can also change my mind about who I want to be, and how I’m being, whenever I want!

I smile as I write this. And this conversation I have with myself, I believe, is one of the biggest ways I’ve changed in the last two years. Whenever I experience an awkward social interaction, I meet someone who seems more impressive than me, I get rejected from a job opportunity—I choose to have this conversation with myself, and I feel secure.

Some people like to call this way of thinking “enjoying the journey” or “being patient with yourself”. I don’t resonate with these framings because they feel passive, they don’t put me in the driver seat of my own self. When I act in a way that I didn’t appreciate in retrospect, I tell myself that I can choose to work on changing how I act in the future. And if right now, I don’t want to prioritize changing then that is the choice I’m making, and I accept the consequences. There are days when I have many interactions where I didn’t like how I acted and it makes “accepting the consequences” painful, but then I go back to the original statement that I have my entire life to work on the way I think and act and that gives me comfort.

As a result, my sister likes to point out to me that I noticeably have more confidence and self compassion than she did at my age. I know this didn’t come naturally to me, and I appreciate previous Jane for putting in the work to find a thought process that feels good to me and current Jane for exercising this thought process day after day. And though, I’ve made progress in acting with self compassion, I also find myself pointing out things that my sister, friends, and other creators do well that I haven’t fully mastered.

Finding purpose and motivation in work as I discussed above is one of those. And when I spot a difference like that between myself and someone I admire, I feel a yearning to hear what their day to day thoughts sound like, especially at different times in their lives. I really admire Lady Gaga’s approach to art and people and how she has built her world view over the decades that I’ve followed her. If I could hear what she thinks about when she creates songs or what she was thinking about when she chose to approach acting and jazz when she did—that would be an absolute dream.

My life, where I’m living, who I’m surrounded by, and what I’m doing will always be changing. But, I will always have my mind, and I like that a lot. I’m currently working on shaping how I think and process the world by reading autobiographies (the closest I will get to hearing the inner monologues of people I aspire to be like), doing this writing exercise, and asking people about how they feel and what they’ve been thinking about in conversation. We shall see if I have more ideas on how I approach creating a studio for my mind in the coming months.

*I say this with recognition that this may not be true both for others and me, but I ask for some grace for this thought exercise!

How do we kindly encourage someone to change the way they live.

I was at Stonemill Matcha with my sister last weekend for our weekly catch up. She very kindly treated me to what I called “letting me be a child”, which consisted of me enjoying my strawberry matcha latte and scarfing down a bowl of katsu curry with an unreasonable amount of glee. While I enjoyed myself, I also enjoyed a very fun and brain turning conversation with her about how she can most effectively encourage people to change the way they date. Telling, encouraging, inspiring people to change is nontrivial, especially for something like dating behavior which is very personal and unfortunately fashionable for people to judge all over the internet and in your local friend catchup.

As we discussed how to approach the subject effectively, I kept returning to a tension between two ideas: I want to share stories and create products for the world that encourage people to be better to others and themselves, yet I also want to accept and celebrate people exactly as they are today. We’ve all put in work to get to where we are and to be kind is to acknowledge that in all people. And to my previous discussion about mastering my mind, I feel happier when I give myself the opportunity to change, and I want to give others the space to experiment with how they treat people, what they want to spend their time doing etc. on their own timeline (excluding criminal behavior).

The easiest way I reconcile this dissonance is to believe that we can always encourage whatever behavior we want to see in people but we cannot expect them to change. We put our ideas into the world and if people want to take it and act on it great, if not, that’s their life, and they can choose to do as they will. We should find ways to accept them and their journey regardless.

I like this approach, and I’ve abided by it ever since I came to this conclusion during some poignant life events in high school. Pragmatically, people who resonate with the ideas you put out will “practice what you preach”. But I find something weird about the incentives for why I would want to build products that are aimed to change how people live if I didn’t expect people to behave differently as a result.

Both art and products can be vectors for helping people change the way they live, and how each producer promotes behavioral change shines some commentary on the difficulty of messaging new ideas toward people. Artist and writers are known to come from an opinionated standpoint, and I find that when they release an article or an album, there’s this unsaid rule that the art is out in the world for people to interpret, and it’s unadvisable to expect people to receive the art in your specific view. Traditional product sales doesn’t respect this—I get chains of emails where sales reps follow up with me week after week trying to convince me I need something. Maybe to their credit though, if I explicitly said I wasn’t interested, they would stop preaching at me…until they come up with something new that should change my life.

There are nuances to all of this. Arguably the product and the content of the art changes how “hands off” the delivery process should be and the exact wording of the sales emails and the launch posts gives context for how people should react. I challenge myself to think more about these nuances because I want to have a well-thought out stance on how to, for instance, build something that helps people feel the excitement I feel around choosing what to do with my life while also respecting where they currently are.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading my January inner monologue. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love more than to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friend Janvi for encouraging me to write publicly again :)

Other topics I thought about this month that I didn’t write about:

• Visualizing yourself and actions in first person vs third person

• Creating financial goals by defining what I want to experience in life rather than by the largest attainable number I believe I can achieve

• Attention and patience are the greatest forms of love

• Self-reliance

Read the original motivation for my this writing project here: