Introduction
I couldn’t name my own strengths right away.
It was a spring night, not long after I’d graduated from high school. The house was completely silent. It was still chilly for the time of year, and I was burrowed under my covers in my room with the lights off.
The uniform I’d worn almost every day for three years had turned into clothes I would never put on again. The people I’d seen nearly every day had scattered, each to their own place. I had no plans for tomorrow. None for next week, or next month, either.
What was I going to do with my life now?
I started to think about it, and nothing came. It wasn’t exactly that there was nothing I wanted to do. Even if I went looking for something, I didn’t have a single clue where to start.
In high school, I’d had my hands full just enjoying the days in front of me. I’d had no time to think about what came after, and no need to. Each day brought the next one along with it. Then, at graduation, those days all stopped at once.
In that case, I’d start by thinking about myself. That’s what I decided. Once I knew who I was, what I wanted to do would surely come into view.
What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What kind of people do I like, and what kind do I dislike? When do I feel happy, and when do I feel hatred? And when, so far in my life, have I been knocked down?
I couldn’t answer a single one on the spot.
When I thought about my strengths, all that came to mind were words I’d heard somewhere before. None of them were wrong. But they weren’t mine alone. Apply them to anyone who’d been in that classroom with me, and they’d mostly still fit. When I thought about the people I liked, a few faces came to mind, but I couldn’t say what they had in common. I could recall plenty of happy moments. But when I tried to explain why they had made me happy, the words stopped right there.
Given enough time, I could put together any number of answers that sounded right. But they would just be other people’s words, cut out in my shape and pasted on. Words that fit anyone don’t describe anyone.
I rolled over, and cold air crept in through a gap in the covers and touched the back of my neck. As ever, there wasn’t a sound in the house.
For eighteen years I had used the product that is me, every day without a single day off, and I couldn’t list even one of its specifications.
When you buy an appliance, there’s an owner’s manual in the box. What it can do, what it can’t, the ways you must never use it, what to do when it’s acting up. The manual is usually written by whoever made the product. After all, nobody knows what’s inside better than the one who made it.
So who, exactly, made the product that is me?
That night, I didn’t know the answer yet.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, the outline of the desk surfaced in the corner of the room. The desk I hadn’t sat at even once in three years.
Three years earlier, with my own hands, I had removed the biggest part of myself.
1. Product Specifications
If I had to explain who I was in middle school, telling you about one game would be enough.
Fortnite. A hundred players drop from the sky onto the same island and fight until only one is left. Sooner or later a storm swallows the island, and the safe zone keeps shrinking, little by little. You grab weapons, throw up walls and ramps in an instant to protect yourself, corner other players, and get cornered.
I was so hooked that I competed in its online tournaments.
When I got home from school, I’d head to my desk before I’d even put down my bag. As soon as I finished dinner, I’d go straight back to it. On days off, from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep. If I had any time at all, that’s where I was sitting.
Moves I’d repeated hundreds, thousands of times no longer passed through my head. Before I could think, a wall was already up, facing wherever the footsteps had come from. By the time I realized I’d been shot, I was already racing up a ramp. Footsteps and gunfire in my headphones, and the sound of my own breathing. Those were the three sounds I heard most of every day.
Before a tournament, I’d practice to win. If I lost, I’d think about why. Even when I won, I’d look for moments where I could have played better. There was always someone better, and someone better than them. I never ran out of people to chase.
Written out like this, I might come across as a very dedicated boy. But back then, it never occurred to me that I was “dedicated.”
People often say that to keep doing what you love, motivation is what matters. They also say you keep at it because it’s fun. Neither one applied to me. I wasn’t doing it because it was fun. I wasn’t doing it because I was motivated, either.
If someone asked you whether breathing is fun, you’d probably be at a loss. It sits outside the whole yardstick of fun and not fun. Fortnite was something like that for me. There was no such thing as a day I didn’t feel like it. I sat at that desk every day, and motivation had nothing to do with it.
Playing it was life itself.
To say I “liked” it probably wouldn’t cover it. The things you like can be set side by side with the other things you like and compared. I like that one, but I like this one better—that kind of thing. But that game didn’t sit anywhere it could be lined up with anything else. If anything, the rest of my daily life was lined up around it. Eating, sleeping, school—they were just slotted into the gaps.
Seventh in Asia.
To this day, I can’t forget the moment that result came in.
The tournament drew people from all over Asia who, just like me, kept sitting at their desks day after day. Once every match was over, all that was left was waiting for the rankings. I was glued to the screen, on a call with my gaming friends.
I counted down the leaderboard from the top. Seventh. There was my name.
I don’t remember the details of what came after. I must have posted about it on Twitter right away—the platform that’s since been renamed X. I had a bit of a name back then, and a few thousand followers.
The post spread in no time. Reactions came pouring in, from names I knew and names I didn’t. The notification count kept climbing as I watched. My name was being carried to places I knew nothing about.
It was the moment so many people recognized me.
Until then, I hadn’t been sitting at that desk to be praised by anyone. I had just kept at it, the way you keep breathing. Now, for the first time, that breathing had been given a shape from the outside. The number “seventh in Asia,” and more reactions than I could count. It felt as if they were explaining, on my behalf, what kind of person I was.
So if someone had asked me back then, “What matters most to you?” I could have answered without hesitating.
That may have been about the only thing I could have answered.
I thought I knew myself. What I liked, what I spent my time on, what I could throw myself into. I thought all of it was being taught to me by that game, by the number from that day, and by the reactions on the other side of the screen. Me, sitting at that desk—that was everything I was.
As high school drew near, I would end up putting that “everything” on one side of a scale.
2. Replacing Parts
On one side of the scale, I put Fortnite. All of it: the hours that had been life itself, the number “seventh in Asia,” the few thousand followers.
On the other side, I put the high school years that were about to begin.
Which one would be the key to assembling the rest of my life? That was what I was trying to weigh.
I never considered leaving both on the scale and doing a little of each. That ranking was what came of sitting at that desk every spare moment I had. Choosing one meant letting go of the other.
If it came down to weight alone, Fortnite was far heavier. Years’ worth of time, a result I had finally gotten my hands on, a place where so many people had recognized me, and most of what made me who I was—all of it was piled on that side. High school hadn’t even started yet, and even sitting on the scale, it didn’t have a clear shape. Classmates whose names I didn’t know, school buildings I’d never walked through, three years I hadn’t lived a single day of.
And yet, the moment I pictured it, the scale had already tipped.
Toward the side that should have been lighter.
There wasn’t even time to agonize over it. I chose high school.
It wasn’t that I broke anything or threw anything away. I simply stopped sitting at that desk.
The desk stayed in my room just as it was. The monitor, the headphones, the chair—everything was right where it had been the day before. The only thing that changed was that no one sat there anymore.
To put it in manual terms, I had removed the biggest part of the product that is me, with my own hands. Normally, if you did that, the product would stop working. At the very least, it ought to run rough for a while.
But that’s not what happened.
What came in to fill the empty space was people.
There are plenty of people on the other side of a screen, too. The hundred players shooting it out on the island. The few thousand followers reacting to my posts. Even the friends who waited for the results with me over the call. But all I knew of them was their names and voices. What their faces looked like, what was on their minds as they sat there—I knew almost none of that.
The people in a classroom were different. Next to each name, there was a face. Each voice had that little pause before the words came out. Crack a joke, and their reaction came back whole, right down to the split second before they burst out laughing. Being in the same place, breathing the same air, laughing at the same dumb things. Something that simple could be this much fun.
The fun of actually interacting with people, in person. And the worth of it. As long as I was sitting at that desk, those had stayed mostly out of reach.
I barely had time to think about that game.
The three years went by in the blink of an eye. The spring of the entrance ceremony still seemed like just the other day, and already it was the morning of graduation. They say time flies when you’re having fun, and it’s true. Those three years were shorter than any three years before them, and fuller than any.
Was that the right choice?
I’m going to hold off on answering that here. Before I could say for certain that it was right, there was something I had to figure out.
Why had I been able to choose without hesitating at all?
Why had the scale tipped in an instant, not toward the side that sat there so heavy, but toward the side that didn’t even have a shape? Back then, I never once put the reason into words. I chose without putting it into words, and without putting it into words, I raced through three years. If I’d been able to choose, I didn’t need a reason. That’s what I thought.
It was on that spring night after graduation that I finally came to think about the reason.
3. Troubleshooting
Back to that spring night.
Looking at the desk that had surfaced from the dark, I was thinking about the scale from three years before. Why had I been able to choose without hesitating at all?
The reason itself turned out to be easier to find than I’d expected. High school lasts only a short while. Fortnite would still be there three years later. One thing that ends, and one that doesn’t. What I’d been weighing back then wasn’t weight at all. It was whether I’d ever get another chance at it.
But that’s where my thinking stalled.
Choose the thing that ends. On its own, that’s logic anyone could offer. Faced with the same scale and knowing the same logic, plenty of people would still choose the side with the game on it. I didn’t choose high school in an instant because I knew the logic. Before any logic came into it, something had already tipped the scale.
I didn’t know what that something was.
This is where the questions I lined up at the beginning come back. What are my strengths? When do I feel happy? I know better than anyone that those three years were fun. And yet I couldn’t explain, in my own words, why they had been.
I’d been able to make the decision. Without hesitating, without wavering. Even so, I didn’t know myself.
Being able to make a decision and knowing yourself are not the same thing.
Looking back, in middle school I had left it to other people to explain who I was.
The number “seventh in Asia.” The few thousand followers. The reactions that kept pouring in. They had been speaking for me, saying who I was. Before I’d written a single line, my manual had somehow been written up for me—from the outside.
When I stopped sitting at that desk, I left that manual behind there, too.
All through high school, I never noticed. The days in front of me were so much fun that I never needed to explain myself. Without any manual at all, I ran the product that is me at full power for three years. It didn’t break down, it didn’t stop—if anything, it ran better than in any three years before.
Which is exactly why, when it did stop, I didn’t know where to look.
Graduation came and went, and the days stopped bringing the next ones along. For the first time, the product that had kept running went quiet. Only then did I realize I didn’t have a single page of a manual on hand. The page you’re supposed to open first when it’s acting up. The troubleshooting page, the one you turn to when you suspect something’s wrong—it was nowhere to be found.
I had been shallow.
For eighteen years, the one who’d watched me the longest was supposed to be me. And yet all I actually knew about myself was a few lines someone had written from the outside, and the memory of having fun. The numbers told me how good I was at the game. The memories told me how much fun I’d had. But neither one told me why I was that way.
Between thinking you know yourself and actually knowing yourself lies a gulf far deeper than I’d imagined. That night, I was finally standing at its edge.
After that, I started writing my own manual. Not on paper. In my head, so I could answer on the spot, no matter who asked or when.
I wrote down my strengths. I wrote down my weaknesses. What kind of people I liked, and what kind I disliked. When I felt happy, and when I felt hatred. Every time a phrase I’d heard somewhere came to mind, I erased it and searched for words that fit only me.
As I kept digging into myself like that, the outline of something else slowly came into focus.
What I needed to step away from.
4. Operating Environment
Appliance manuals usually have a section called “Operating Environment.” Do not use in direct sunlight or in areas of high humidity. However well made a product is, depending on where it’s placed, it may not be able to perform the way it was meant to.
My manual needed that section, too.
The moment something inspires me even a little, I say it out loud. I want to try that. Maybe that’s what I’ll be. Things I hadn’t even thought of yesterday, I’m already saying today.
To the people around me, it probably looks like I’m blurting out whatever pops into my head. And it is whatever pops into my head. But to me, none of it has ever been a lie. I think of everything I say out loud as a waypoint in my life. Even if I don’t stop there, having passed through it means something.
And there’s nothing more worth achieving than a big dream. Going after something with everything I’ve got, not knowing if it will ever come true—I can’t get enough of that.
But whenever I said things like that, there were quite a few adults who would shoot me down.
Say the odds of my dream coming true are 10 percent.
If you take the side that shoots it down, you’ll be right 90 percent of the time. If the dream doesn’t come true, you get to say, “See? I told you so.” And if it happens to come true after all, nobody remembers what you said. Even when you’re wrong, you lose nothing.
Shooting a dream down is the safest bet there is. That’s why so many adults can shoot down other people’s dreams so casually, and feel good doing it.
That was what didn’t sit right with me.
Most of them aren’t bad people. If anything, they’re reasonable adults. Being normal, having common sense, doing things the way they’re usually done—they believe those are the things truly worth admiring, so they measure me with that yardstick and try to correct whatever sticks out.
But to me, that reasonableness was the most harmful thing of all. Reasonable words are hard to argue with. When someone beats you over the head with what’s right, you’re the one who ends up looking wrong.
Back when I didn’t know myself, my reasons for stepping away from adults like that stayed fuzzy, too. I’m not good with them. We don’t click. Something about it just rubs me the wrong way. On their own, reasons like that were impossible to tell apart from plain selfishness.
Once I started writing my manual, that outline came into focus. The people I need to step away from aren’t the ones who shoot me down. They’re the ones who shoot me down casually, from somewhere safe. The ones who take the yardstick of common sense and try to whittle away at my shape.
On the other hand, there are also words I should listen to.
Not words that beat me over the head with what’s right. Words that stay close by and try to support me, so I don’t go off the rails.
Words that beat me down try to stop me. Words that support me show me where the edges of the road are, so I can keep running. Faced with a 10 percent dream, those who beat me down take the 90 percent side. Those who support me stand right beside me, on the side of the bet where, if it misses, they lose along with me.
So I keep my distance from the first kind. At school and in my private life, without hesitating. It isn’t about winning an argument. It’s about keeping the product that is me somewhere it can perform the way it was meant to.
Three years ago, when I left that desk, I chose without ever putting my reason into words. Now, I put my reason into words first, and then I step away. It’s the same “letting go,” but it feels completely different in my hands.
Knowing myself first, then stepping away from what’s harmful to me and letting go of whatever is shackling my growth. I call this way of living “the declutter life.”
Still, neither way of letting go is right or wrong on its own. Whether it was right always gets decided after you’ve let go.
5. Warranty
Inside an appliance box, along with the manual, there’s a warranty. Use the product as directed for the specified period, and if it breaks, they’ll repair it. The moment you buy it, someone has promised you that it will work properly.
Decisions don’t come with a warranty.
When I chose to let go of Fortnite, there was no one to promise me, right then, that it was the right choice. The same goes for keeping my distance from the adults who shot me down. What you let go of doesn’t come back, and there’s no way to see where the road you didn’t take would have led.
When the three years were over, I started sitting at the desk again.
Not the way I used to. Not every spare moment I had—just a sensible amount. These days I enjoy it as a hobby, in moderation. The game that had been life itself has become one part of my life.
Sometimes I wonder. If I’d kept sitting at that desk through those three years, what would have become of me?
Maybe I’d have gotten even better. Maybe my rankings and my follower count would be higher, too. But whoever that is, they’re no longer the person I am now. Someone who never learned how much fun it is to laugh with people in the same room, living in a world of names and voices, relying on a manual written for them from the outside.
I don’t think that person would be unhappy. It just isn’t me.
Here, I’d like to answer the question I set out at the beginning. Who, exactly, made the product that is me?
It was my decisions that made me.
No longer sitting at that desk. Laughing with people in the classroom. Admitting, that spring night, how shallow I’d been. Stepping away from the adults who shot me down. Each of those decisions became a part, and together they’ve assembled the person I am now. If any one of them had been different, the finished product would have been a different one.
If that’s true, then I’m also the only one who can write the manual. Not a leaderboard, not a follower count, not the yardstick of common sense.
And I’m the only one who can write the warranty, too.
I’m living my life now so that I can say, for certain, that every decision I’ve made was right.
“It was right” and “living so that I can say for certain it was right” may sound alike, but they are completely different. The first is a verdict on the past. The second is my job today. Whether that scale tipped the right way hadn’t been decided yet on that day. Deciding it has been the work of the three years that followed, of that spring night, and of today. And tomorrow, I’ll still be deciding it.
Rightness doesn’t come included the moment you choose. It’s something you fill in afterward, with the way you live.
I enjoyed those three years to the fullest. That was the first stroke of the pen that made my decision to leave the desk the right one. The shallowness I was confronted with that night is finally starting to mean something, now that I’ve begun writing my manual. As for stepping away from those adults, the only way I’ll ever be able to say it was right is to keep chasing my 10 percent dream with everything I’ve got. So I’m still in the middle of filling it in.
To that end, I’ve set myself a ratio. Eight parts effort, two parts play. My own golden ratio for living.
In middle school, I handed my whole self over to the game. For my three years of high school, I took that game down to zero. Because I’ve swung all the way to each end once, I now know which mark on the dial is just right for me.
These days, that game sits inside the two parts play. The desk isn’t where I live anymore. But it’s still a place I can always come back to.
Afterword: Revision History
Ever since that spring night, I’ve kept myself ready to answer seven questions on the spot, anytime.
Strengths. Weaknesses. The people I like, and the people I dislike. When I feel happy. When I feel hatred. The times I’ve been knocked down.
I’m not going to write the answers here.
For one thing, that’s my manual. For another, the answers haven’t settled into a single form. A manual’s answers aren’t something you write once and are done with. They get rewritten with every step I take, every bit I grow, and sometimes every disappointment. Just as an offhand “I want to try that” becomes a waypoint in my life, today’s answers will someday become a waypoint, too.
So it isn’t only the days that went well that get added. On days I’m disappointed, I open my manual, too. A manual that lists no weak points is no use when it really counts.
Product manuals sometimes include a record of revisions on the last page. Which edition, when, and what was changed.
My manual has one, too. I started writing the first edition the spring I was eighteen. I’ve stopped counting how many times I’ve rewritten it since.
The newest line has only today’s date in it. The space next to it is still blank. What goes there is for me to decide, from here on.
Could you name your own strengths right away?