What to put in my mind?

I have been bored out of my mind recently because it generates very old and uninteresting thoughts, asking me to think about life problems 24–7 regarding career and relationships.

Usually, my mind tells me, “If you get a job, you will not have this problem anymore!” However, looking around at my friends, I can immediately see that I will have new but different problems even if I get one, like stress, people problems, and uninteresting projects…

Anyway, if my life is going to have many problems anyway, why don’t I change the way I interact with my mind and the world?

For instance, I see some founders stressing themselves out and constantly being unhealthy and unhappy every day, but I also see some founders chill, happy, and exploring on their China business trip even when their co-founder leaves them all of a sudden.

My founder friend is super happy because he got sponsored to go to China by simply asking his embassy if they have any program when he applied for his Chinese visa. I’m AMAZED!

Seeing different type of people, I wonder, how can I play with my mind and play with the world more? like the way I’m playing through rejection therapy.

I want to encourage my brain to think more interesting problems and questions and less on boring and repetative old stories. Okay, let me brainstorm it with you on the fly.

Play with the development of machine

I found the dream machine fascinating to ponder in my mind about how humans can collaborate with machines. For instance, this is the way they describe hardware and software.

“You can imagine hardware as an instrument while software is like music. You can play many different songs using the same instrument, but you can also play the same song from Bach on different instruments! This is like you can build a weather app and a traveling app on your laptop, but you can still run the same Google Sheet on both Mac and Windows systems!”

How can I explore different software systems? How can I explore different future ideas on futuristic machines? For instance, what if AI can make decisions like I do, using images, concepts, possibilities, goals, and past experience? For instance, I want to find someone to build an AI to play Minecraft with me (here)!

Play with trees

My friend hosted a tree tour to introduce the trees in San Francisco! When is the last time you touched the rough bark of a tree, tasted the juice in a flower, and smelled the freshness of the leaves?

I feel so happy that I’m finally not touching my keyboards but learning with my visions, scents, smells, and touch. How can I play more with blue gum trees and different vegetables in my fridges? I might invite my French chef friend to cook and learn about the personality of different vegetables!

Play with how junior engineers learn

Our idea is that the problems junior engineers face are numerous wrong assumptions and a fear of the unknown when they take the next action, such as choosing the right technology or functions. A lot of the time, I spend my time researching what to use or testing out if one idea will work. When it doesn’t work after 3 hours of testing, I’m so done with my life.

How can we alleviate engineers’ pain when trying to learn new technology and testing different hypotheses? My friend and I built this rabbithole tool:

1. Track what problems you are trying to work on during research.
2. Give you suggested questions to tackle your hidden assumptions and problems.
3. Generate explanations for you.
4. Give you some follow-up questions so you can learn beyond the superficial, getting into a rabbithole!
5. Give you sample code so you can “see” the concept and test the hypothesis easily.

For instance, when I try to learn about information theory, AI gives me Huffman code so I can understand how information is compressed!

I love the entire building process because I can stare at different people and observe how to solve their problems in real life. I want to have a good tool and make more software to play, not pain!

How are you going to play today?

Every day I do things that make me feel fun, worries, happy, bored…and I want to gear my mind toward “PLAY” no matter what I’m doing. Otherwise, I feel like an adult that worries about firewood, rice, oil, salt, sauce, and vinegar tea. I will rather rest in peace.

Now, when I wake up, no matter what is on my to-do list, I want to ask myself, “how are you going to play today?”

What I saw in SF exploratorium!

Alright! Need to go play, see you!