Relationships are like gardens. You cannot plant the flowers once, you need to be constantly tending to them, pruning weeds, fertilizing the soil. Love grows from the obligations you willingly enter into together and the work you do for each other.

Now the work I’m left with is just for me. I have a company to build, friendships to nurture, and a body and spirit to grow.

I’ve become very one-dimensional over the past year. I take pride in excelling at many things and I’m at my most fulfilled when I’m using every part of my brain and body. I push my body athletically, I lift heavy weights, can run fast, and run far. I push my mind intellectually by reading, writing, and programming. I want to be able to solve hard and complex problems and communicate my ideas clearly. I want to understand history and politics and human behavior. I want to strengthen my soul and understand God and the nature of reality. I want to be social and form strong bonds. I want to dress well and look good. I want to cook good food and understand nutrition and play instruments and create art.

Historically I’ve done all of these, generally at a very deep level, but over the past year my life has become almost entirely focused on building my company and any time I wasn’t spending on the company I was spending on my relationship. I knew this would happen and I chose it. I had many opportunities to just work at big tech yet I chose startups, and I had every opportunity to stay a well-paid engineer at startups where I could share the burden of responsibilities, and yet I chose to start my own company, and I had many opportunities to choose easier markets or more straight-forward problems and yet I chose to start Mesa and go after the most competitive, technical, and challenging market in the world.

I’m at the edge of my abilities and every day I’m faced with new challenges that require me to grow and adapt in different ways. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done but I love it. I’ve gotten bored at every school I’ve attended and every job I’ve had. Now I get to spend every day scaling a mountain bigger than anything I’ve ever climbed and it’s incredibly fun but it has consumed my life. Every moment is spent thinking about the business, the market, the product, the team, the customers. I’m constantly rotating and analyzing, planning, and executing.

Simon Sarris has a great essay about the importance of leaving breadcrumbs.

I’ve had a similar concept which I call my gardens — areas of my life that have no endpoint, no goal, and require constant tending. Maybe it’s my health, or my lived environment, or this blog, or my friendships. These activities can often present themselves as chores or responsibilities. Doing the dishes, folding laundry, cleaning the apartment, working out, stretching. And yet it’s these activities that make up the bulk of my life and it’s these activities where I find romanticism changes everything. You can clench and distract yourself, or you can slow down and romanticize the process. You can take the time to admire your dishes as you clean them and become familiar with the artistry of your kitchen knives. You can experiment with how you organize your kitchen, inspect the materials of your clothes as you fold them, you can focus on every surface of your body as you stretch.

With gardens there is no end goal, just the process, and out of it comes beautiful flowers, or breadcrumbs, that can do a better job of telling your story than any biography, resume, or dating profile. Looking back at 2025 I produced basically no artifacts outside of my company and 1 singular blog post all year. This is a shame both because I don’t want to live a one-dimensional life (even if it’s necessary for brief periods) but also because even with a singluar focus on my work there’s so still so many things to share! I’m learning so much, I’m doing so much, and I’m experiencing so much.

I have many gardens I’m tending to and I want to share the flowers as they bloom.

Writing has been surprisingly effective at increasing my surface area of luck. Because of my blog I’ve received mulitple incredible job offers, I’ve met and become friends with people I admire, I’ve been able to raise money, hire people, and even my ex-girlfriend read my blog before we went on our first date. Even existing friends or acquaintences often reach out to talk about something I’ve written about and how it affects them and relates to their life.

Almost all of the interesting experiences and successes of the past couple years for me has happened not just because of my IQ or physical toughness or some other individual trait but because of the things I’ve shared from the gardens of my life.

The nice thing about sharing what I do is that it turns binary outcomes into a spectrum of possibilities. Sometimes it feels like my company will either succeed or fail but when I share the process, every learning and experience becomes an artifact with its own life and its own trajectory and possibilities. Just the act of creating artifacts and sharing them gives my life more depth than it otherwise would have.

The breakup gave me the impetus and the liberty to focus on the gardens I’ve been neglecting. I almost certainly work more now but I also more aggressively carve out time to focus on the other dimensions of my life and it’s made me more productive. It feels like things across my life have started to compound over the past 3 months and work has started to seriously accelerate as well.

I’ve recently re-designed this blog and I plan to make better use of it to share more about Mesa, the health experiments I’m running, photos I’ve taken, music I’m listening to, and more. It’s easy to feel like my life consists of three rooms: my bedroom, my office, and my gym. This is where 99% of my time is spent these days, but this is not reflective of who I am and I this year it’ll be more important than ever to tend to my gardens and share their flowers.