Dec 6, 2022
With 2022 coming to an end and the holiday season in full swing, some much-needed time off has afforded me more breathing room to reflect and plan for what's ahead 😄.
I'm really proud of some concrete steps I took this year to be more present and intentional.
I moved to New York, following through on something I’ve daydreamed about for a long time. I reinvested time and energy back into my relationships, telling my friends and family how much I love and appreciate them (annoyingly often). And I fell back in love some with old hobbies like writing and cooking.
After those pandemic-stricken years of feeling like life was just happening to you, 2022 taught me how life is so much more fulfilling when you're present and tuned into the things that make you happy.
Obviously, not every day was sheer bliss. I've had some really crappy days too but I am grateful for how many more good days I’ve had than bad.
Looking ahead to 2023, I've been thinking about ways I can ensure those good days continue to outnumber those bad ones. How can I create, organically, more moments where I'm undistracted by what's happened prior nor wondering what's going to happen after? How can I find more opportunities just be present, enjoy the company of the people around me and feel a true sense of peace?
I stumbled upon this concept of emotional fitness. If my goal for 2022 was to be more present and intentional, the next step in that journey will be gaining a better understanding of what drives my emotions and behaviors.
A critical aspect of that is taking an honest look at my biases and psychological blindspots. We all have emotional baggage we inadvertently project onto others and none of us can change what we don't take the time to notice.
My hope is that by better understanding my emotions and how they influence my actions, I can become a more honest, resilient, and even happier version of myself.
Lately, I've been reading a lot about psychology and emotional development and I've even taken the extra step of seeing a therapist to help guide me on this journey.
And while I'm still in the early stages, I thought it’d be useful to share some recent revelations I've had about myself.
They're neither unique to me nor earth-shatteringly profound, but I've come to appreciate how pivotal these emotions have been in shaping my behavior, my relationships, and the overall trajectory of my life so far.
Today, I'll write about 3 of them:
My unhealthy fear of failure
My tendency to be an insecure over-achiever
My inability to be honest and vulnerable
By writing this piece, I hope my close friends get more insight into why I’m the way that I am. I hope others find ideas and experiences they can relate to. Most of all, I hope I can clarify for myself what I’ll need to work on to find even more joy and fulfillment.
An Unhealthy Fear of Failure
I always considered myself someone who responds to adversity well.
Whether it’s a getting some critical feedback, working through a breakup, or losing all my money at the poker table, I’m usually able to dust myself off and keep chugging along. Few things get me visibly upset.
I was under the impression that because of my self-proclaimed resilience that I would also have a reasonably robust relationship with how the possibility of failure factors into my decision-making.
This all changed after a conversation I had with my therapist about what I wanted to get out of my career.
We discussed how much time and effort one invests into going to school, getting a job, and then growing into our roles. Because of that investment, it's easy to view every career decision as just a precursor to a binary outcome of success or failure. A choice is a success if it increases the dividend we make off that initial investment—usually in the form of more money, prestige, or recognition from our peers. And it's a failure otherwise.
This applies to other areas of our lives. For better or worse, we’ve adopted hobbies, interests, and qualities that our friends now recognize us for. There’s an inertia of expectation that works against us deviating too far from our personal narrative.
I certainly feel like every choice I make needs to trend up and to the right along some predefined axes and that conversation helped me realize how scary it is to potentially deviate from this pre-defined trajectory.
One of my primary goals in my emotional fitness journey is to start tackling decision-making with a sense of poise and curiosity rather than fear and apprehension.
To do that, I'll need to learn how to withhold judgment and definition—not rushing to label a decision as something that can be “right” or “wrong”.
It's being more comfortable with ambiguity instead of trying to make the unfamiliar familiar by asserting that things fit into discrete, quantifiable outcomes.
It’s giving myself permission to explore possibilities without feeling guilty or treating them like some optimization exercise.
It’s rewiring my brain to not see outcomes as final. Failure isn’t fatal and success isn’t permanent. Whatever happens, after that choice you make is feedback. If I like how the path looks ahead, I keep going. If not, I can always pause and reassess without catastrophizing.
On particularly challenging days, it’s easy to start relitigating all the “wrong” decisions that got us to that point. What if I lived here instead of there? What if I dated this person instead of that person? What if I took this job instead of that job?
We spend so much time revisiting all the potential paths in the, that we don’t focus on enough on all the awesome possibilities still available to us in the future.
I love this graphic from Tim Urban. It encourages us to focus more on the paths available to us in the future rather than the paths closed to us in the past
Instead of fretting over potential missteps, I should treat treat major decisions as an exercise in information-gathering and path-finding—keeping in mind that there’s more than one possible amazing future available to us
Insecure over-achiever
My unhappiest memories growing up all involved feeling inconsequential and overlooked.
I remember the panic of not being able to read out loud in class because I couldn’t yet speak English.
I remember the embarrassment of being the only one who couldn’t run a mile in under 12 minutes.
I remember the shame of being labeled “awkward” and “unattractive” when I had to make new friends at a new school.
These were critical moments in my adolescent emotional development, and, in response to feeling insignificant, I subconsciously adopted this belief that in order for me to be happy, I needed to be special.
We all send out these ongoing streams of status measurement and receive a stream of positive or negative scores in response. It’s our internal tally machine that perpetually hums alongside our hedonic tone of existence. Whether it's the new house we bought, how we look in the mirror, or an off-handed comment we hear from someone at a party, these tallies cumulatively define our own perceived place in society.
It explains why I’ve never spent long periods of time satisfied with where I was in life. I was conditioned to maximize the number of pluses and minimize the number of minuses so satisfaction was easily perceived as complacency. And complacency is a slippery slope back to the depths of insignificance.
So I worked harder in school. I exercised daily. I changed my appearance, wardrobe, and behavior so people could be more excited to be around me.
I did all this so that I could prove my self-worth in whatever arena of life I was currently participating in. And while that chip on my shoulder has culminated in a lot of personal success, it also has a tendency to create the conditions of my own dissatisfaction.
Underneath it all was a burning desire to silence that voice in my head that I wasn't good enough—that somehow the people I sought validation from wouldn't deem me worthy of their love or respect.
So I’m in the process redefining that implicit scorecard that so often stokes my inferiority complex.
I ultimately want to get to a place where I’m no longer tallying my achievements but tallying how often I wake up excited to start the day.
It’s learning to be more aware of what aspects of my job, my relationships, and my hobbies give me energy and then orienting my life goals towards those rather instead of the next obvious hoop to jump through.
I’ll need to stop being an insecure overachiever and ultimately define what it means to live for my own approval rather than primarily for the approval of others.
Self-Delusion
My friends know I have a really hard time ever admitting that anything is wrong. I'm the half-glass-full kind of guy who rolls with the punches without making much of a fuss.
Nothing ever seems bad enough to warrant voicing my own displeasure or having a difficult conversation. Rocking the boat almost seems sinful.
I've written about this previously. I was raised by immigrant parents whose native culture valued obedience, harmony, and conformity.
What I haven’t yet explored is the impact of immigrant children being thrust into environments where they're painfully aware of how different they are.
Something interesting happens in that moment of cultural exchange where we’re forced to relate to people from different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.
For me, it was transitioning from a school comprised primarily of children from working-class, Chinese families to a school that was primarily caucasian in one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
That laidback, half-glass-full version of Phil was a byproduct of feeling like an outsider. It was just easier to make friends if I laughed alongside the kids intentionally squinting their eyes, making fun of my homemade lunch, or mimicking of my parents’ broken English. I even participated in these behavior—sometimes even more emphatically—in an effort to fit in.
At its core, these were ways I experimented with calibrating my behavior depending on the social context. I not only developed a sensitivity to how others perceive me, but also a willingness to see how I can influence that perception to earn the acceptance and credibility of those around me.
Each social situation became a performance for a new character.
There's "Home Phil", who nods politely while my mom parades me around church bragging about what a good son I've been.
There's "Fun Phil" who feels the need to be the life of the party and will pretty much say “Yes” to anything—almost like an allergic reaction to being labeled the uptight, nerdy Asian kid.
There's "First Date Phil", annoyingly proper and chivalrous, with overly deliberate doses of spontaneity and irreverence I picked up from watching Hitch a million times.
As a defense mechanism, I've been conditioned to probe how I can earn the approval of others. I’ve been chasing validation, not fulfillment.
I cringe at the thought of writing so cliche but I really should be more true to myself.
That means being more vulnerable—and not the faux-vulnerability “First Date Phil” touts when he proudly announces to the girl across from him, “You know...I cried when I watched the Notebook”.
I did by the way but that’s not the point…
For me, vulnerability is learning to ask myself much more often: “How do I really feel about this?” and “What do I need right now?” and then actually expressing those things with poise and honesty.
It'll mean admitting that I’m sad more often. It’ll mean having more difficult conversations rather than avoiding unpleasantness. It'll mean not making it seem like I always have my sh*t together at all costs.
And this is part of that process of becoming more honest, shining a painfully harsh light on my emotional baggage so that I can grow as a human being.
Conclusion
So I severely underestimated how hard it would be to actually take an honest look at my flaws and blindspots. I started writing and then got stuck. I restarted and then got stuck again. All in all, I think this piece ended up taking more than two months to write. Some passages remained from the original, some I re-wrote entirely, and 90% of what I had originally outlined never made it onto the final post.
To steal Ed Sheeran’s analogy, this particular creative process felt like clearing out a backed-up water pipe. I needed to turn on the faucet to empty out the first mile of wastewater before something clear and usable could arrive.
The first versions of this piece were so fuzzy and imprecise—like I couldn’t describe my flaws precisely because I couldn’t admit what they were. And while I’m sure parts of this piece are still a bit too lofty for my liking, it's come a long way in terms of describing my character and emotional journey.
If nothing else, I've gained a greater appreciation for how I feel and how I think. And because I want to make the absolute most of the life I'm living, it's important for me to understand the psychology that governs my behavior and decision-making.
This definitely wasn't the first time I've tried to reflect in the name of self-betterment. But this time feels much more honest—like it was a challenge I genuinely wanted to take on rather than something I felt obligated to do.
Today’s piece was a modest first step in exploring the uncomfortable terrain of my emotional landscape. It was an attempt at honest self-assessment—acknowledging my crippling fear of failure, my insecure over-achieving, and my tendency to brush discomfort under a rug.
I’ll need to follow that by adjusting my behaviors based on those 3 principles we discussed above:
Making choices with more curiosity and optimism rather than fear and anxiety
Living for my own approval rather than for the validation of others
Being more self-aware and vulnerable
And finally, I’ll need to repeat this process over and over again accepting the inevitable lapses and feelings of apathy.
I won’t underestimate how hard it is to improve your character in some fundamental, enduring way. It’s a never-ending journey.
But I’m not convinced it’s even worth having an end-state in mind.
You do it for the wins along the way. With every small act of facing a fear we previously avoided, we bring new, previously off-limit ideas, feelings, and experiences within our reach. We enrich our lives by breaking down those self-defeating narratives that hold back our passions, relationships, and excitement for each day.
We are the builders of our own better future. And in fighting for that better future, we get to live in it today.
- Gena Gorlin, psychologist, performance coach, and writer [emphasis mine]
I really got into cooking this year! Here’s some crispy pork belly I made for our Thanksgiving potluck
Inspiration for this post
📰 In Defense of Radical Self-Betterment by Gena Gorlina
📰 The Importance of the Emotionally Fit Founder by Emily Anhalt
📰 Why You Shouldn’t Optimize your Life by Nick Maggiuli
📰 The Journey of Finding Satisfaction in Life by Mr-Stingy
📰 Dealing with Doubt on the Pathless Path by Simone Stolzoff
📚 The Social Animal by David Brooks
