One thing that still makes me angry

"And there is kind of a magazine named Colussus, and they features really in-depth interviews with tech figures. If you can built something like that, you'll...(make it)"

Yesterday, around midnight, in the shared working space of our house. M was a third-time founder from the Korean tech scene, and I'd just asked for advice on how to find a decent founder in SF tech scene. He kept probing what I was really after, so the conversation expanded into our magazine's survival strategy. He gave me a lot of useful, practical advices and references. All of it was true, though there was plenty of bitter criticism too. I knew there were plenty of problems with me and my project, so none of it hurt at all.

But one sentence made me stumble. "If you can build something like that..." Well, it was perfectly fair for him to say. Yeah, I still, I hadn't made a high-quality piece. But it really stung my pride. Only that single sentence did. The other criticism, about the direction of my project? That was all fine. I could take it without trace of anger. So it was a strange moment. All he'd done was recommend a reference, and encourage me to follow it.

So why?

Because it touched the making of content itself. It was about the quality of writing. It was about my ability to make content. And there, my pride runs deep. If I sense that someone has done it far better than me, I feel envy and fury at once. It always makes me angry, and honestly, that competitiveness in writing has been my strongest drive my whole life.

It's so funny how much more hopeful and optimistic this all looks on the page. At the time, it just gnawed at me, and I turned it over again and again that night, ending up asleep at 4 am. My pride was wounded, and it sent me back over the last 6 months, and honestly it was a mess. It seemed like I'd failed to find even a small breakthrough or a clue. And there was no one I could ask for help, or even talk to about this.

I know that Life is essentially solitary. I know building career is a lonely process. And I'd always thought that I was strong and talented enough to figure everything out alone. But that night everything suddenly felt overwhelming, and the sense that there was no one I could easily turn to felt unbearably lonely.

Looking back, it's no wonder it hurt so much. Basically, here I lost my biggest weapon: language. But I have a mission: to overcome that, to rebuild my weapon in another form, and to fight with it and win. A pretty tough challenge. And I try not to lean on anybody and trust anybody. It almost sounds like something written for a therapist. Which means, yeah, what I thought that night was total bullshit, and now I can snort at that.

What I have to learn from yesterday's conversation is just one thing. The fact that I can still get angry about not being the best writer. The fact that there's still a fierce desire in me to be a good writer. A media for AI era? A GTM for Korean new-media startups? Becoming a media-business builder? Set them all aside for now. I should focus on the one goal that still makes me angry, and that's writing. Surprisingly, still.