People Who Are Naturally ___.

April 2026

Hockney, David. The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, 2011, oil on 32 canvases.

At the beginning of this month, I got lunch with a new friend (we’ll call him M). I recounted to M the last essay I wrote and my reflections on my week-long staycation, and to each story I shared, M responded with a series of thoughts that hit at the crux of what I was experiencing.

For example, I told M how I had a friend who showed up for me when I got my eye infection last March, and even though in total we have only been friends for a little over a year, this friend is now integral to my life.

M asked me if I’d heard about the two words ancient Greeks used to describe time. I said no, and he proceeded to explain that the first word is chronos which is viewing time in measurable, sequential units: each unit of time is the same as the next. The second is kairos which is viewing time as weighted: one minute of time can be more valuable than the next.

I asked him to say more, and he set up a scenario. Imagine your friend calls you at 2 AM. They are at the airport and for whatever reason they can’t get home and need someone to pick them up. You’re in bed, hair messy, eyes crusty. The warmth of the sheets weighs over you as you decide whether to drag yourself across the 101 or ask them to call someone else.

If you choose to haul your ass to the airport and pick up your friend, you show your friend that you can be the first person they call when they are at a low. The four hour drive to and back becomes a kairos moment—a moment that creates a deep trust and appreciation in your relationship that forty hours of yapping at parties could not.

And so, when M is put in a situation where he has to make sacrifices for his friends and family, he easily chooses them because he views them as opportunities; he knows that those kairos moments create deeper connections than any others.

We continued to talk about how I started my writing practice to dedicate time to understanding my confusion which he related to with his practice of truth seeking while building companies. Every single conclusion that I derived from first principles, M was able to map to something he had also thought through before.

I feel that M is naturally a deep thinker, a tuned listener, and great at connecting ideas.

Another one of my friends (we’ll call him H) feels effortless in a different way. We first met when I interned at his company in 2020. Last February, H texted me out of the blue and invited me to poker night at his place. I told him I had never played, and he insisted that I could learn with his friends. After poker night, we caught up over coffee, and he invited me to his hack and hike trip in Tahoe. One evening in the cabin, I asked how his company had changed in the last five years since I’d been there, and what he had learned. He sat down with me and pulled up slides on his laptop, walked through written entries of his ideas, even shared some company secrets that he trusted I would keep to myself for my own learning.

H introduced me to his partner who I now work on side projects with every month—she has become one of my closest friends in the city and someone who has changed my view on why I create. The copy of On Writing by Stephen King (now one of my all time favorite books!) on my bookshelf is borrowed from H and his partner. The camo hat hanging on my door was gifted by H to commemorate the time he brought me to experience Bass Pro Shops for the first time.

H is so naturally giving. In knowledge. In time. In people. And in the physical things he has. My life is filled with everything H has shared with me, and I’ve never once felt that H expected something in return. Wanting people to experience what he knows and what he loves comes naturally to H.

How did my friends become this way? Did M come out of the womb with a hunger for connecting experiences to ideas? Was H’s generosity learned from his parents, teachers, and friends? Did both of them wake up one day and choose to be these ways? And of all the behaviors one can learn, why did they choose to learn these?

I think about the behaviors that come naturally to me. Acting selflessly. Appreciating people for who they are. Respecting their autonomy. Deriving my world view from my first-person experiences. Building and trusting my own judgement. Being enthusiastic about life.

I identified these as natural behaviors because I am allergic to acting in an opposing way. Two days ago a friend asked me to hold his backpack when he went to the restroom. On the way out, he joked whether I had looked at his books and knick knacks. I laughed and said that I stole his company secrets, but in the back of my head I thought, “he asked me to watch his bag, so I watched his bag. If I was meant to see something inside, he would share it with me.” I believe people will share their lives with me, and I respect how much and in what way.

Of all of these behaviors, introspection runs most on autopilot for me. In fact, when I polled my friends for what behaviors they felt came naturally to me, more than half of them pointed out how it is “very natural for me to self reflect”, that I’m “naturally inquisitive”, and like to “probe at myself to understand why I feel the way I feel”.

Today, I woke up and on my car ride to my friend’s marathon race, I thought about how there are so many things I want to create and get better at, and I pondered whether I want to work on whatever I feel most excited by in the moment or strategically focus and sequence. Last night, while I was working on this essay, I thought about whether my selflessness came from the way my mom treated me growing up or if there was some realization I had that makes it obvious to me that often the best way to support someone is to sacrifice yourself (and after reflecting, I believe I learned a little bit of this from partner dancing!). The idea for this essay came while I was sitting at my desk, dissecting why I’m so impressed by the specific effortless behaviors my friends hold.

I wasn’t born this way. I remember my parents tried to get me to journal when I was in elementary school and they laughed at how each page was a recount of how I went to swim practice and how I didn’t want to do my Chinese homework. The earliest I can remember having an active, reflective inner monologue was starting in high school when my conversations with friends became less about “What happened over the weekend?” and more about “Why do I feel so stressed about test scores? Do I really believe my destiny is hinged on a number?”

College is when I deliberately learned to reflect, and I journaled as a practice to investigate all the moments my body did not feel at ease. I remember pacing around my freshman dorm room on a phone interview for an investing role and immediately after the call, I opened my navy blue journal and went through why the conversation felt off and why I didn’t think I got the role. Flip a couple pages, and I have another entry from when I learned I had actually gotten the role, and how I learned what imposter syndrome means.

I didn’t wake up and decide I wanted to become great at introspecting. I just followed my curiosity, asked questions to myself, and tried answering why I felt anxious, confused, excited, and inspired for twelve years and now introspection is part of who I am. M likely practiced listening to people and connecting his own to theirs for years and years. H likely noticed when people shared with him and the opportunities he could share with others. And now we’ve reinforced ourselves to be these ways.

One of my quests in life is to enjoy people to the fullest. The way an art critic who has studied art their whole life learns the beauty in a painting I cannot see, I reflect on the people in my life to distill what makes them beautiful to me. I feel lucky to experience the introspection that comes naturally to me, the idea-connecting engrained in M, the generosity of H, and I am even luckier to experience the parts of us that are still becoming.

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If you made it this far, thank you for reading my April essay. If you have questions, opinions, experiences about any of these topics, I would love to discuss! That’s why I write after all :) You can find me @jjanezhang on X.

A special shoutout to my friends Judy, Jessica, Nishant, Leona, Amy and Andrew!

Other topics I thought about but didn’t write about:

1.

You don’t always need to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. My sister texted me on a random Wednesday evening saying she wasn’t feeling great physically and emotionally. I was at the office past seven, trying to complete several projects. I felt tired. I hadn’t eaten yet. I still had a slew of work to do. But instead, I got out of my seat, ordered take out, and then Ubered to her place. Was I 100% present with her in conversation? No. Did I feel genuinely excited to be there? Half half. I felt like I was squeezing my brain to be awake and helpful to her.

Regardless, she told me she appreciated that I came to visit. We don’t have to have our lives figured out and feel 100% or even 75% before we can show up for people. Sometimes we can only give so much. But believing you can’t give unless you are perfect, that you need to fully help yourself before helping others, really means that you are choosing not to help people when they need it.

You don’t always need to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

2.

Editing my speech. After I write the first draft of my essay, I spend a couple hours deleting words. I do this to be concise and to say things more confidently. For example, in my first draft, I wrote:

“And not everyone who has a conversation with M will clock this natural behavior and feel as impressed as I do. Some people may identify his behavior squarely as intelligence. Some may find his responses to be overly rational or analytical and therefore feel that M is missing what they are trying to share. But I feel the “I get what you are pointing out and here’s how I’ve thought about that point” nature of his responses to be a joy to experience, and I think it is so fascinating that of all the skills and traits one can be, M chose to learn to be consistent at this one.”

I replaced this with:

“I feel that M is naturally a deep thinker, a tuned listener, and great at connecting ideas.”

Hopefully you feel that the second sentence is overwhelmingly better. It is an example of: tell people what something is instead of what it is not. Because I practice these principles when I edit my writing each month, I have also started applying these principle when I speak. I had a discussion with my technical lead on what we should focus on building this quarter, and I resisted the urge to first ramble about what we should not build. I started with what we should build. Then what we should deprioritize.