Why should you like everything?

June 2026

We are taught to sort things early. This is my thing, that is not my thing. I am a numbers person, not an art person. I do sport, not music. The sorting feels efficient, like we are saving time by not chasing what is not ours. But I think it quietly costs us more than it saves, because it closes doors before we ever find out what was behind them.

The longer I live, the more it looks like nothing is actually separate. At Citi I was doing software engineering and leading projects, and what it really taught me had little to do with code. It taught me time management and responsibility. It taught me that a system is just promises between people, and that keeping a promise is a skill you can practice. Those are not engineering lessons. They are life lessons that happened to wear an engineering costume.

Guitar taught me something the work never could have. It taught me that patience eventually pays. You cannot rush a callus into forming or a chord change into smoothness. You put in the hours that feel like nothing is happening, and then one day the thing your hands could not do, they simply do. The lesson is not about music. It is about trusting the slow part of any process, the long stretch where progress is invisible.

Art taught me to see. Specifically, it taught me that almost everything in the world is noise, and the work is to find the signal inside it. A drawing is mostly the decision of what to leave out. So is good engineering. So is a good life. Once you have felt that in one place, you start noticing it everywhere, the constant editing down of noise until the true thing is left standing.

Taekwondo taught me resilience. Not the inspirational kind, the literal kind, where you get hit and then you get up and continue, and slowly your body stops flinching at the idea of being hit at all. You learn that discomfort is information, not a stop sign. That lesson walks straight back into a hard week at work, or a song you cannot play yet, or a drawing that is not working.

Here is the part that surprised me. These are not four separate teachers handing me four separate lessons. They are the same lessons interleaving, each one explaining the others. Patience from guitar makes the slow part of engineering bearable. Resilience from taekwondo makes the failed drawings feel survivable. The signal-and-noise eye from art makes me a better project lead, because leading is mostly deciding what to ignore. Look at any two of your activities with the right eye and you will see them shaking hands.

That is why I think the right stance toward the world is to be open and to like everything. Not in a forced, agreeable way, but because every activity is secretly carrying a lesson you happen to need, often the very one you would never go looking for directly. The chess player and the gardener and the cook are all learning the same handful of truths in different dialects.

All of this is what makes me feel alive. Each thing I let myself like hands me a perspective I could not have reached from inside my own head, because it forces me to think in a borrowed grammar for a while. The more grammars you collect, the more of the world becomes sayable to you.

So be nice, be open, and let yourself like things. Every one of them is hiding a cheat code, the kind of shortcut that quietly rewrites how you move through everything else. You just do not know it yet. The only way to find out is to stop sorting the world into yours and not yours, and start treating all of it as yours to learn from.