From Competition to Creation

The Game of Being Chosen

This essay is inspired by the Chapter 4 of Zero to One. But before we dive into Peter Thiel again, I want to briefly share how I started and stopped doing math competitions.

My dad got me into math pretty early because he’s a brilliant math teacher himself. But back in middle school in China, I wanted to get into the best local high school. That’s when I started working on olympiad problems. It was part of an early admission system where, if you score high enough in this math competition, you can get into the best schools early. So I did that, and secured a spot in my second year.

In my third year, I received a scholarship to study in Singapore for 4 years. Same game, new country. I mapped out how to get into the top school there and built all my activities around that, which is math and coding competitions. A lot of practice again.

But one day I thought: “I’ve done this math stuff for years, but what have I actually learned?” I could calculate pretty fast. I could score on tests and win competitions. I knew Ptolemy's Theorem and how to use it in geometry proofs. But that wouldn’t make me a mathematician. I had not discovered anything. I just got really good at recognizing patterns and applying the corresponding solutions. Not so different from machines, because that’s how machine learning works too. I became perceived to be smarter because I can do math, but I didn’t really feel smarter, because I didn’t know what was the purpose of all this.

Back to the Book. In this chapter Peter Thiel talks about how we are taught by society to compete with each other. I really like how he dissected the entire education system. As students, we climb ladders: top of middle school, top of high school, then into elite colleges and then job positions. We keep moving up, until the competition gets fierce enough for us to feel the need to try really hard to just stay in the game.

“Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them.” — Peter Thiel

Now that I’m in UCLA, I’m once again surrounded by brilliant people, so the competition is once again fierce enough. Different from doing math in middle school, this time it looks like we have unlimited choices: finance, engineering, medicine, law, art, wow. But seems like we never escaped the rat race.

In the first two years of college, I was quite lost in the pursuit of getting into big tech. I was resume-padding and leetcoding. My friends in finance are networking, cold-emailing, interview-maxxing to just get into finance clubs. Some go into academia, trying to publish more papers or get under the best professor’s labs. We all have our own game to play and own ladder to climb.

The Sisyphean Loop

As a kid, I was told I have to get into the best high schools. Then in high school, I thought getting into the best colleges would mean I’m set for life. In college, the goal shifted to a job offer. Then it will be promotions and avoiding layoffs. There’s also this other game called dating that my fellow young men are getting into as well, and that game seems even more tiring.

Years later I’m still benefitting from the math training I did. When I prepped for quant interviews I could solve those dice and card problems faster than my friends. They’d say “dude you are cracked!” Then I did a Jane Street interview. The ladder never ends, they expected 5 minutes and I took 10. I just couldn’t move past some rounds in these interviews, eventually I gave up on quant.

I sometimes think us math kids are like seals doing tricks. You give the seal a ball, it balances it on its nose. Some can get the ball bouncing — what a talented kid! He gets the applause and the treat. Other seals watch in admiration or envy: “dude he’s so cracked.”

You know how I always talk about the god vs beast conflict in humans. Peter Thiel’s view of competition vs creation struck me the same. Competition is inherently animalistic. It distributes resources, it doesn’t create them. Two tribes fighting for food or land: the food and land already exist, but you gotta win it from someone else. Winning is essential to survival, but it doesn’t move civilizations forward. The God side shows up when humanity takes effort to create what wasn’t there before. That’s what separates us from animals.

But that is not to say competition is by any means lesser than creation. In fact, the luxury to not worry about survival — often from having won previous competitions — is the foundation of transcendence. In the context of tech, you should probably still try to land a good job offer first, so you can eventually build your own startup from a place of abundance, not desperation.

Humans cannot and should not avoid competition. There’s a barbarian gene in us that thrives on the adrenaline. What to do after winning, is the real question. If the sole purpose of competition is just more competition, then we are stuck in a never ending Sisyphean loop. There has to be something more than that, and to me, the only satisfying answer has always been creation: building something that outlives you.

What I Hope to Create

What is creation? I think about those videos where old people are asked about life advice. What are they most proud of, what was their greatest joy? They never said “my greatest joy was getting into General Motors.” Here are some answers I remember:

• Love. I love this answer. A bond created between two people that once lived in time. In moments of real love, we catch glimpses of eternity in our lover’s eyes.
• Kids. I love kids too. They’re the noblest creation: In Chinese we say children are 爱情的结晶: the crystallization of love, taking shape as a new life. You nurture and shape that new life together from birth to adulthood.
• Best version of self. Create an ideal version of who you are and validate that through action.
• Memories. We create memories with friends and loved ones. Vivid stories, shared moments.
• Art & work. This category is the most interesting because for people with this answer, these two are interchangeable. The iPhone is Steve Jobs’ best work. Albums to musicians, movies to directors, books to writers, schools of thought to philosophers. Kanye West is already a gone case, but I will always listen to the College Dropout.

What do all of these have in common? One, we take pride in that creation; two, these creations outlive us. They are our efforts to turn our fleeting existence into transcendence.

My own creative aspirations take a few forms:

• I write. I started a blog because I realized my thoughts are fleeting, but they mean a lot to me. I take pride in what I think, what I say, what I do; so I need to capture those thoughts and solidify them in form. I feel a great relief once they’re written down and ready to publish, because at that very moment, they’ve already outlived me. That gives me peace. Writing is definitely a life goal of mine; I want to publish a book one day, which will look like a collection of these essays and some short stories.
• I build. As a kid, I always wondered what the future would look like. Now that I study computer science and see the AI revolution happening in front of my eyes, I feel so close to that future, and I feel obliged to help shape that future. I want to build products that address problems I care about, like the mental health crisis among young people. I want to use tech to help people live more peacefully and intentionally.
• Video creation. I haven’t really explored this yet, mostly because I find editing videos to be such a hassle; but I know I’ll get into it eventually. Whether it’s longform or shortform, once a video is out there, it also lives beyond you. I think this interest partly comes from my love for movies. Great movies tell the best stories.
• Family and Love. My parents, my wife, my kids. A couple months ago, I met a new friend from Singapore who told me his greatest aspiration in life is to become a father, and I relate to that deeply. Sometimes, my guy friends and I talk about how we’d raise our kids — to pass on what we’ve learned through the lives we’ve lived. To raise them into loving, respectable men and women. That effort itself becomes a testament of the life that you’ve lived. And seeing how your kids grow up, I think that’s one of the greatest joys in life.

We are mortals after all. At some point in life we all have to think about what we want to leave behind. When I ask myself that question, I just want other people to see something that helps me say: I was here, and I made this.