F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ricky Weekly #95)

This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:

I went to an adult basketball clinic for Asian professionals called Breakaway and got coached by Marshall Cho who just coached the Nike Hoop Summit earlier this month. I discovered more stories about being the only Asian face, getting cut by the team, not speaking up, and from the coaches I learned about the power of role models and bridging gaps through basketball. Shout out to Peter Ahn for turning his dream into something for the community.

A thing on my mind:

I’m considering ending this newsletter at issue #100 because I want to be more “goal-oriented” with my writing again. Sometimes you just want to have fun and enjoy the process, and other times you crave results and improvement. I think I’m ready for some results. I want to write more about 1) Flow Club and 2) consider a follow-up to my viral essay from 2016. I’d need to spend more time on them and care about their impact. The stakes will be higher but it’ll still be fun, just Type 2 Fun.

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My favorite quote is from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In light of recent anti-war protests, some of which spilled into my community, I’ve been thinking about how one develops and continues to develop this ability. I went to read the source material and learned that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote what he wrote only to say that he had lost that ability in his later years. Fascinating!

Fitzgerald described his belief in his twenties and thirties this way:

“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’ – and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future.”

But then he “cracked” and lost it in his later years because of “too much anger and too many tears.”

So how do you develop this ability to hold two opposing ideas and sustain it?

A clear answer to me as an immigrant is to keep living in America, the land of contradictions. I don’t know how it feels to have only known the American model, but I’m constantly comparing what’s happening in American society to Taiwan.

Take for example the debate about how SAT scores unfairly disadvantage underprivileged kids because rich people can pay for tutors. When I heard that, I immediately thought about how American colleges at least try to incorporate multiple factors through personal essays, recommendations, extracurriculars, in addition to grades and test scores. In Taiwan, you get a college entrance exam, and where you go and what you get to major in are almost entirely based on how you score on that test. It’s more meritocratic in one way, but it defines merit very narrowly and expects the entire society to fall in line with that definition. The American system is trying harder to incorporate more definitions of merit, but that invites many, many more contradictions that we must hold in our head, debate when necessary, and continue to function.

Last week, Biden signed the bill to force a TikTok divestiture from ByteDance or face a ban in the U.S., but his social media team plans to continue posting on TikTok to reach younger voters. That appears hypocritical because humans have consistency bias, but Americans seem to have the least of it. Reminds me of the documentary Waiting for Superman that talked about how American kids ranked #1 in confidence despite ranking 25th in math and 21st in science among 30 developed countries. Taiwan has already banned TikTok and prohibited any government worker from using the app. If anyone important in the government were outed for using the app, I can only imagine the tremendous backlash calling out the hypocrisy because it’s a collectivist society.

The fundamental contradiction is that America tries to have it all when having it all is an impossible task, but I don’t know a more compelling alternative.

Even F. Scott Fitzgerald “cracked” because he couldn’t find the success he had experienced earlier in his career, and the world seemed to be moving away from him as a novelist. “Holding opposed ideas” is hard work and very taxing, so we need to see our conditions improve, our dreams becoming true, and more positive reinforcement from our communities to keep the dream alive even when most evidence point to the contrary. The American Dream is an attractive story so you don’t need that much evidence, just enough to keep up the Kayfabe.

A piece of content I recommend:

Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? from Harvard’s Michael Sandel.

Speaking of TikTok, the time-waster app put me on this Harvard lecture series called “Justice” and I watched all 12 lectures in a week. What hooked me was this discussion about affirmative action from lecture 9. I’d recommend starting there and going back if you’re intrigued.

Bonus: “The best sports drone video you’ll ever see” from the Chicago Cubs.

Can a drone video make you cry? Yes if you love baseball. Even if it’s not your team. Even if you’ve grown apart. You still and will always love the sights, the sounds, and the stories. Sports are memories, and they are usually memories shared with friends and family. Watching sports help you access those memories, because while they keep changing they also stay the same. Watching a player break a record or win a game reminds you of when you watched another player break a record or win a game. You remember that time from your life, who you were with, and how you felt. Some of the people are not with us anymore, but you remember how excited they were when the exciting thing happened.

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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My primary focus (and where I focus) is on Flow Club.