On Being "Addicted" to Building a Website — and a Few Things I've Come to See

These past few days I’ve been building a website for the whole community to use. The interesting thing is that I can barely detach myself from it. Wherever I go, whatever I’m doing, I’m thinking about how to improve it, develop it, make it better, slicker, more effective, more beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever been through anything like this before.

I used to say to myself: “if only there were something for me to focus on, I’d pour my whole mind into making it as close to perfect as I can.” I kept saying it, but I never found anything that gripped me like that — head over heels, the way they say. [By the way, where does that expression even come from?] And now, out of nowhere, I’ve discovered that developing a website is the thing that genuinely costs me sleep and appetite. I’m writing this at 5:10 in the morning, after a whole night of not sleeping. Every time I lie down, there are dozens of ideas and thoughts circling around my head, and I’m free to picture them, imagine them, turn them over.

It’s tiring work, but I feel real joy watching the website get better, more beautiful, more capable. And it’s fun, honestly. Now and then I run into some wall and get stuck, and I’m exhausted, I want to throw the whole thing out. But I shut it down for a while, go somewhere, do something else, step aside — and then I come back, and somehow I’ve solved it. Part of that is because AI has become powerful and remarkably smart now; part of it is that I’m no longer tired and my mind can gather itself again after rest. Haha, it’s a love-hate thing. But in the end it’s love — without love you don’t see a thing through. Haha. However much you hate it or feel dissatisfied with it, those are just the ups and downs along the path of building something. Everything’s like that.

The important thing is that I’ve genuinely come to see that having something that costs you sleep and appetite — in the good way — is a privilege. Because it gradually becomes a source of life, an interest, a passion, and something of value that I’m able to make. I imagine Einstein was also entranced by all that light drifting around in his head, or Newton never stopped thinking about how all things interact with each other. And then I suddenly remembered old Mr. Duy Cần: “Genius is nothing but patience sustained over a long time.” What that means is that any difficulty can be handled, can be solved, as long as you see it through — steady, unhurried, and it’ll fall into place. That’s what I need. And I think everyone needs it.

Ever since I threw myself at this website, I seem to have come to understand how my brain and my whole person actually work. Work straight through without a break, and then my head is tight, stuck, confused; so I rest, go out, move around, swim, talk to someone, do something physical. Once the inspiration comes back or I can concentrate again, I just return to whatever I’d left half-finished. Bit by bit, but focused like that — and somehow everything gets done. What’s interesting is that working with a mind that isn’t preoccupied with gain and loss, winning and losing, easy and hard, that only focuses on improving, fixing, upgrading — that’s a strange experience for me. It’s as if I stepped out of that dualistic realm, the long habit of calculating advantage that humans live in now — the thing that gives me headaches, makes me dizzy, makes me shrink, tires me out, drains my energy and my strength — and into a metaphysical realm of passion, of that original and miraculous spark: which I take to be a gift the divine entrusted to humankind, and to the earth, so we might make it more beautiful, better, richer. It’s a pity that after a stretch of schooling and a stretch of working, we lose that precious gift entirely; or more accurately, it gets worn down in us, withered, faded, barely flickering inside. Even so, it’s still there — like a fire smoldering, always on the verge of going out; and the strange thing is that it never does. It only takes a bit of dry kindling, a few new gusts of wind, and it flares up again — even when it looked like it had gone out for good.

So: if you’re reading this and you feel like a dried-out husk, don’t worry. What matters is knowing that the brilliant source of life inside you has only been beaten down quite a bit over the course of growing up. It just needs you to tend it a little, pay attention to it a little, and then catch hold of it each time it calls out weakly — so that it can exist, can take form in this world — through the marvelous person that you are. At first you won’t be used to it, because it’ll feel so foreign to the real you; you might even be suspicious of it, dismiss it, push it to the margins, box it in, treat the fire inside you badly. But hey — don’t be afraid, listen to it. It’s the salvation your grandparents, your ancestors, the divine have sent you. You don’t have to believe me. But try paying attention to the voice inside you, see what it has to say, and then decide however you want. What matters is that you step away from your own pessimism, defeatism, negativity, in order to connect with that voice of wisdom inside you. Just try it and see!