I feel old

Which is kinda crazy cause I’m not even 20 yet. And in stark contrast to that statement, I still feel real angsty about life.

models to emulate

When I was younger, I was always reading about these amazing and accomplished people like von Neumann, Ed Land, Ben Rich, so on and so forth (there’s just something so archetypically and idealistically American about these men, Neumann excluded I guess). They were born and did something if not many things that shook the world.

I say this a lot, but one of my favorite books is Land’s Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It.

It’s one of my favorites because it’s a close, albeit biased, look at the life of a brilliant man. To give some context, he went to Harvard because of his parents, decided he wanted to research polarized light, and dedicated the rest of his life to it.

Something I found funny is that he broke into Columbia (my university) to manufacture the first polarizer in the world. He later got an honorary degree from Columbia. He must not have feared anything. Or if he did, it never turned out to matter.

Unfortunately, there’s no way he’d be able to get away with that today – take it from someone who had to break back into Morningside a few months ago.

Land went on to create one of America’s most iconic companies. What I find the most admirable about him though is that he was able to dive into a field deeper than anyone else and build something incredible out of it. More than that, he dedicated himself completely to his work. There was one excerpt from the book that really struck me.

“I had known other egos and other intellects. Land was a man who had lived more than anyone else I had known. He had created his life as he created his company.”

Oh, and he took a break from Harvard after his first year.

life post and (maybe) pre-college

The last year, I’ve been working at a robotics startup. It’s mostly made up of younger people as well (early 20s), which has really hammered home how much further along some people are. You’ve got people with an uncanny ability to form connections with people, drive themselves 24/7, or just engineer things incredibly well.

There’s this sense that I’m not fully making the most of my life or my time here. I made – what I think – is a pretty big decision to step away from school to pursue this other thing on the other side of the country and sometimes I feel like I’m squandering this opportunity. All in respect, of course, to the grass being greener on the other side.

It’s a fear that I’ve sacrificed my time in a college environment to work fully as a software engineer in a capacity that I might not want to be in or doing something that isn’t the best possible use of my time right now. Because unfortunately, robotics is hard and I spend practically every waking minute trying to make progress. And I worry that I’ll have nothing to show for it.

It’s a fear that, since I’m missing out on a year of college and all that it entails, I need to work as hard as possible to make up for it. What I’ve done so far – make a humanoid actually stand in place, run cutting-edge manipulation policies, and even examine the internals of leading humanoids – doesn’t feel like enough.

It’s a fear that I’m not walking the most optimal path towards a life lived well.

This fear isn’t something new to me. I’ve always thought that a sense of inferiority, in small doses, is a net good. It drives you to try to work harder and improve faster than anyone else. In the long (sometimes very long) run, $e^x$ always beats out $x^n$ for any and all $n$.

twenty

Yet, this year has been a bit sobering. From all the accomplished people I’ve met to those I haven’t yet, simply because I’ve been too busy working, and from the new skills I’ve gained to the ones I’m still learning, and the fact that I’m a founding engineer at a hard tech startup in its first year of life, this birthday feels like a bit of a watershed moment.

Legally, it doesn’t really mean anything in most places around the world. In the US at least, you still need to be 21 to drink and you’re already old enough to do pretty much anything else by 18.

Where I find the age 20 special is in its syntactic meaning. Syntactic semantics, if you will. 20 is the point where you can’t be referred to as a teenager anymore. It’s the point where, if someone wants to make fun of your age, they can only call you some kind of young kid in their early 20s – but not a teenager (if they cared at all about semantics).

As a dumb teenager with no clue what he’s talking about, I’d say that 20 is the most important age.

Syntax informs semantics and semantics informs the meaning of the world.

And in the world of semantics in the context of age, 20 is the most meaningful word of them all.

rambling on a couch

I wrote this first draft while sitting on a couch at my work at 10:17pm on Monday, December 23rd.

10 days before my birthday, I was in China and I got to visit some humanoid companies and work on some freshly assembled robots.

8 days before my birthday, I was back in the Bay Area and I’d brought a robot back with me. I told myself I would get it walking while I was still 19 – a teenager.

4 days before my birthday, my one and only 48v lithium ion battery died. Completely. It would only read 11v and refused to charge any higher. I verified its very dead state by fumbling around with a multimeter, resistor, and an excessive amount of electrical tape.

3 days before my birthday, I tried to run a policy for walking on a 1200 watt power supply. This didn’t work because the power supply was not built to handle unexpectedly large spikes that something like a humanoid robot might pull.

1 day ago, the eye bolts that I bought a week prior in anticipation of having to film a video without clunky passthrough harnesses were delivered. They were really thick and would probably have held easily 10x the weight of the robot.

2 hours before my birthday, I sat alone and in the dark on a couch within a pretty large house waiting for my new locomotion policies to train. I’d changed them to run with lower torque limits on the joints so that I might be able to run them with a power supply.

In the end, I wasn’t able to get my robot walking before 20.

I think that I’d feel much more confident about my $e^x$ if I’d been able to meet this self-imposed deadline.

But, there’s not much I can do about it now. I can only look forward and try to do better tomorrow.

After all,

“Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess”

— Ed Land