Nostalgia can be a compass

I wrote the following essay and posted it on Twitter where people seemed to love it, but I realized recently that I’ve never shared it here.

Lately I’m trying to speak more from personal experience, so this is a perfect excuse to share this.

Hope you enjoy:

Life has a way of showing you what you need before you even realize it. 

In 2017, I spent the summer before my freshman year of college working at an Amazon warehouse from 5:30am to 1:30pm. After that, I spent a few hours lifting weights & training at a local Little League field. 

Any days off or free time on work days was spent between the library and my family’s apartment above a bodega reading, writing, and learning. 

It was the most repetitive, simple, and isolated time in my life — and yet, it’s the time I look back to with the most fondness. 

I was extremely insecure in my teenage years. I was broke, had no social life outside of baseball or school, and wasn’t very confident in myself. As a result, I found myself only saying and doing things I knew most people would agree with.

That summer gave me the autonomy to choose what I did with each minute of the day: I could do what I wanted without worrying what other people thought. 

That step was important because I needed to be able to do that in isolation before I could do it around others. 

So it’s no surprise that after years of college and a season of professional baseball, my return to solitude, disciplined training, and self-directed education has returned me to a state of unsurpassed happiness & fulfillment.

This realization is a perfect example of something Marcus Aurelius once said: 

“If you seek tranquility, do less. Not nothing. Less. Do only what’s essential. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.”

I live a life that I have constructed piece by piece. I do not accept things simply because of convention. I’m always asking myself “Is this necessary” when it comes to the most basic of life’s decisions.

And while my baseball career didn’t go as planned, I’m fine with how things went. I was genuinely obsessed with the game and worked harder than 99.9% of players I’ve met, so there’s no regret.

Besides, there’s no such thing as a complete failure in life. You can mostly fail at something, but in every failure, there are pieces of the things you did well, the things you’re good at, and the things you enjoy. 

Make sure you take those things with you in your next pursuit. I surely did. And this time, I’m going to outwork that final .01% that got the best of me in my baseball career so that there is no room for failure.