Hello, (cruel) world
I have decided to shout into the void. Dear reader, congrats on being the void.
Why have a blog?
Because too much of my world is internal, and it’s bad to be completely insulated from it. I need at least some parts of my life to persist online, cast out into the ether; to face judgment.
Yes, you should judge me
If you found this site then it’s fair to assume you’re judging me. Thank you for reinforcing my rationale for having a blog/website; the idea of my creative work being judged is one I need to get used to.
If you have any ambition whatsoever, judgment is unavoidable. And I’m really sensitive. So I have to get over the fear of putting my work / self out there, because I’d much prefer to stay “in the cave” if it was possible to enjoy the benefits of being creative / ambitous (wealth, recognition, etc) without any of the downsides (humiliation, wasting your life, ruin…)
So here goes nothing. SwimInSight is gonna launch soon; since day 1, I’ve had kanye-level (borderline delusional) belief that it’d be economically viable, feel obvious after widespread adoption, and that I needed to move quickly to ensure that I capture all the value from it. But that’s where the grandiosity ends: I also plainly knew that I was 100% the cracked engineer who could build it.
SwimInSight is brilliant and so am I
So, I did a thing… definitely the most creative thing I’ve ever done. I used to be a doofus who spent his free time making whiny guitar music. Now I’m a doofus running a niche tech startup with a functioning product.
If I had stayed in grad school, I’d have a PhD in biostats by now. I feel grateful every day that I gave up lmao. I am not smart enough to be an expert in custom experimental designs or statistical genetics, and thats ok.
I don’t think I needed to be smart to make SwimInSight. What really mattered was:
- furious focus and discipline
- being really good at stats
- understanding swimming deeply
- having life experience that primed me to solve this problem.
That last one is definitely the most important one. I think everything I ever did was prep for SwimInSight. You could say I’d been training my entire life lol.
Besides my experiences as a swimmer / swim instructor / swim coach, being a (failed) solo musician was integral to priming me to spend weeks “in the lab” working on a grandiose project of apocryphal value without second-guessing my instincts. The venn diagram of “making a cohesive album” and “writing software” looks like a solar eclipse if you’re barely outside the path.
The other big one was working at a technology startup. Gaining an end-to-end appreciation for a real hard/soft/firm-ware product gave me the courage to try my hand as soon as it was clear that I was being pushed out of the company. Moreover, being pushed out of the company lit a gigantic fire under my ass. I had a chip on my shoulder and I still do.
On my 28th birthday, I was sitting in a hostel in Taipei’s Ximen district, jetlagged, drinking shitty instant coffee at 6am. As I stared at the wall, the idea for what eventually became SwimInSight came to me. Two years later, SwimInSight is real. Cue the fortissimo climax to Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C♯ minor.