There’s Nothing Wrong in Pursuing an Ideal

June 21st, 2020

I haven’t written a blog post in about a month, mostly due to the fact that I have been working at Jump Trading for the past two weeks. The experience has been great for the most part, with the only negative being the entire work-from-home situation (grateful to have a job nonetheless). Trading is a whole new world, and I’m glad I’ve been exposed to the various intricacies that this giant system involves. HFT, in particular, requires a whole stack of unique engineering that focuses on latency, correctness and modularity; your code needs to be correct (don’t wanna pull a KCG), fast, and easy for others to use. I’ll write about my internship experience in another blog post. Today I was thinking about the topic of pursuing an ideal and when it’s good or bad.

I usually get these kind of questions passing through my mind after reading or watching some show. Last night, I decided to binge all of Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer), and the entire experience made me wonder whether it was worth pursuing an ideal. I think many of us pursue some version of unattainable perfection in some craft or some perfection in some way they want to live their lives. A lot of the time, these qualities are honed in as something that we should be wary of pursuing. Don’t pursue money or you’ll be too greedy. Don’t work too hard or else you’ll never be satisfied and want to be the best. Demon Slayer has a lot of its principles rooted in Shinto and Buddhist principles of moderation. But in my opinion, I think this is kind of horse shit. I think that if there is an ideal you want to chase, then by all means chase it like there’s no tomorrow, as long as you are not hurting others.

From what I’ve observed of great athletes, writers, engineers, scientists, etc, there is never a sense of moderation when pursuing a craft. There is no free lunch. If you want to be the best in a specific thing, then you most definitely have to put in thousands of hours to attain your ideal. And there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as what you’re trying to do doesn’t harm others. And I think that last part is what a lot of stories, etc try to focus on - people being blinded by their ambitions to the point that they lose their humanity. You don’t want to pull the next Thanos and eliminate half of the entire universe’s population. Rather, you’d want to achieve an ideal by duplicating the available resources to satisfy everyone.

I think the moderation has to come into play when people begin to lose their humanity in their desparate chase. After all, we all are slaves to something in this world. Despite that, I think it’s still worth chasing your ideal. I think the few people who have a strong enough resolve to place their world view on the world can really do something quite impactful. As crazy as he is, Elon Musk was able to commercialize electric vehicles and space travel, two distinct industries that face stiff resistence. In short, it’s worth chasing your ideal because you never know where you may end up with your efforts. To want to be the best. To want admiration from others. To want eternal happiness. To want lots of money. These simple thoughts can drive people to doing some pretty remarkable things.