Self-expression, creation and making an impact

In the summer of 2024, I really wanted to write a song.

I had been listening to so much of my favourite bands and artists, I decided I was no longer satisfied being a listener. I wanted to be the one who plays and sings. The problem was, I had never written a song before. I was trying to think of the specific chords and the progression, the melody line, the riff, the tone and every detailed little sound which would convey all of the thoughts, feelings, ideas, dreams and imagery I had swirling in my head.

I couldn’t come up with anything satisfactory that whole summer. And it was the first time I came face to face with the noble difficulty of creation and self-expression. I had been a consumer of things all my life, and I had never created anything of original value. In school I studied textbooks somebody wrote and followed curriculums somebody designed. In army I had to follow orders in an environment where any kind of ideas (original or not) was discouraged. In university I am studying physics that was somebody’s discovery in the past.

To be a consumer and critic of original work is easy. Everyone knows how to do that. And among the people who do some work, most go from 1 to n, merely building upon existing infrastructures and ideas. To go from 0 to 1 is an incredibly worthy feat [1]. In the past, I had only focused on my subjective opinion of things. If a piece of work—music, any form of art, or otherwise—was not to my liking or didn’t make sense to me, I would openly express my judgement and criticism. In that summer I had learnt the difficulties of being a creator, and no matter how awfully bad a piece of original self-expression may be, I learnt to respect the virtue of creation first before jumping into judgement. To be able to actualize one’s feelings and thoughts into the world, to create something from nothing is truly such a virtuous achievement.

Another thing that happened in the summer of 2024 was the Loke Cheng-Kim Foundation’s Scholars Dinner, the first one I attended. I met the grandson of Mrs. Loke Cheng-Kim, the board of directors as well as the past and present scholars who came to attend the dinner. Seeing these incredible human beings who are outstanding figures in their own field gather in this one place, tied together by the connection and impact brought about by Mrs. Loke’s creation was inspiring.

If you are rich (I am not born rich so I can only imagine), you’d probably have so many ways of doing charity. The easiest way is probably to throw all the money to some foundation or non-profit organisation (the Red Cross, etc). Do some kind of PR and call it a day. And even if you narrow down the scope to education, there is still so many ways you could do philanthropy. You could build a school, for example. For Mrs. Loke to have chosen the specific way of establishing the foundation and forming a board of directors to interview students every year was her way of self-expression. It could have been any other way, but she chose to do it this way. Her way.

Thanks to her creation and this specific outlet of self-expression, I was able to study Physics at Peking University and live any way I want for the first time in my life. This freedom was only attained as a result of her ideas coming to life so many years ago. And it changed my life completely. In similar ways, it must have changed the lives of all these people in front of me. And it will continue to do so in the many years to come.

To do repetitive work on existing ideas and infrastructures, or “snow shovelling” as Murakami calls it in Dance Dance Dance is necessary work in human society (only to some extent). But to create, to self-express and to have an impact is truly something else. One can say so much about the great ideas and innovations he has in his head, but if they do not formally exist in the real world, they are all fluff. I have a proof of this theorem, but there is not enough space in this margin to write it [2]. It is as good as being non-existent. I feel so fortunate to have been able to see this perspective.

Be someone who sings, not just listens.

In the summer of 2024, I decided to be a creator. To channel most of my thinking and energy into expressing and actualizing the ideas and feelings that float around in my conscious and subconscious into reality. And I am sure when I create something beautiful, the impact will come along naturally.

 

Notes

[1] Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One Notes on Start-Ups, or How to Build the Future.

[2] French mathematician Fermat proposed that no three positive integers a, b and c satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2. He provided no proof for it and instead stated that he had a proof that was too large to fit in the margin.