I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal motivations to write.
There’s obviously the pedagogical reason - to impart some sort of knowledge or thought out into the world. But especially lately (circa 2024) as I’ve been primarily focused on startups and navigating my way through “what am I trying to do with life”, I’ve been feeling the itch to write for a different purpose.
It’s almost like I want to document myself.
A lot of my friends will “look back” and say “William hasn’t really changed that much, he’s the same old silly but also quite serious guy that he’s always been”. For a long time I would take that type-casting of myself and roll with it.
But it’s quite clear the me now, the one who’s desperately trying to start a startup of his own, is quite different from the me who just graduated undergrad, who was just trying to adjust to work life amidst the COVID pandemic, who is in turn quite different from the me in high school who dreamed of studying film.
Now though, with my selective and biased memory, I can only “recall” and “infer” what kind of a person I was at that time. And same with my friends. Of course with the recency bias, it’s easy to make the judgement that I was just the same old me. But I’m not.
I sometimes envy the current generation of teens who are much less video shy than my era of teens. Certainly there are loads of complications these teens have to deal with - rise of AI, actually realized climate change effects, etc. but when they choose to look back on themselves and their trajectory there’s a lot of objective “data” that they’ve just naturally collected.
I feel like that previous point was a bit of a ramble. All of it is to say that I wish I also had things to look back on and “SEE” what kind of person I was. I only have pictures and some videos of me doing sports. The personality isn’t there at all because talking directly to the camera wasn’t really a thing when I was growing up.
And I don’t think I will suddenly become the type of person to just talk at a camera and share my thoughts. Who knows though, maybe I’ll become a YouTuber one day.
For now though, I have my words. The itch can kind of be scratched with these random little posts. Just the same as I’m sure people look at their old videos and cringe, I sometimes go back and read what I’ve written and cringe. “Did I really think that way??”
I’m excited to see how my thoughts transition as I go from a wannabe founder to… whatever it is that I become. I hope that it’s founder.
But reality is often brutal.