You Can't Want What You Can't See

Exposure creates the possibility of recognition. Recognition creates desire. Desire creates exploration.

01 — What do I want to be in 20 years?

Looking back, I don’t think ten-year-old me lacked ambition. I think I lacked imagination. People can only aspire toward lives they can imagine, and we can only imagine lives we’ve somehow encountered. But not every life we encounter changes us. The ones that do are the ones we recognize ourselves in.

In May 2024, after more than a decade of building a life in New York from nothing, I went back to Kuai’an, Fuzhou, where I grew up. When I stepped back into the home where I spent my entire childhood and adolescence, the kitchen and dining table I remembered were so much smaller now. The streets where I used to hang out with friends were quieter than I remembered. The elementary and middle school where I spent my first nine years of education felt tiny from the inside. The teachers who taught me math, Chinese, and English were around my current age back then, and now they had grown old and were curious about the world through my lens. I remembered that when I was ten years old, I wrote an essay: What do I want to be in 20 years? I said I wanted to be a teacher, because that was the most impressive life that I could actually feel my way into.

02 — I knew the uniform, not the life

Did I want to be a scientist? I knew what the word meant. I knew Newton was a scientist who discovered the BIG physics theories from a falling apple. I knew Einstein was a scientist who had a really high IQ. I could say their names the way I said my teachers’ names. But I couldn’t imagine the life. What did it actually involve? What did a scientist do all day? I didn’t know why anyone would give their whole life to it — or what it felt like the first time something in the world cracked open and showed you a piece of how it worked.

Did I want to be a doctor? I knew a doctor wore a white coat and a stethoscope. I knew a doctor’s job was to save people. But I didn’t know the other side of it — what doctors do when they can’t save someone. How they walk out to the waiting room. How they carry a death on their hands and go home and sleep. And I didn’t know the other reason people become doctors at all — not just because they want to be heroes, but also because they fell in love with something. With the human heart. With the brain. With the strange, magic fact that any of this works. I knew the uniform. I didn’t know the hundred different lives standing inside it.

Did I want to be an astronaut? I knew it was a cool job and you got to fly out of the Earth and wander the universe. But I didn’t know what it took. I didn’t know why people would want to see the Earth from above. I didn’t know the beauty of how precise a spacecraft has to be, or what it would feel like to float. I didn’t understand that some people want to leave the planet because they’re chasing the origin of human life.

Did I want to be a musician? I knew do re mi. I never trained my ear to feel the subtle differences a musician feels — the difference between this pitch and the one a hair next to it, between this rhythm and the one that pulls a beat late. That was a kind of hearing I’d never been taught. But I also didn’t know what was on the other side of that training. I didn’t know that music isn’t really about technique. It’s a vocabulary for things people otherwise can’t say. Sorrow. Jealousy. A kind of love that arrives too late. I didn’t know that learning music is about expressing and appreciating the most fundamental human emotions.

The ten-year-old me knew nothing about the world, or the people in it. The only thing I knew was that being a teacher was the coolest, greatest thing I could imagine. It was the single life that had stood in front of me, up close, every day for many years. So yes, I knew from an early age that I wanted to do something great. I just didn’t have enough shapes in my head to imagine what greatness could look like. No one around me could have shown me those possibilities. The people who raised me loved me completely, and they could not give me what they had never seen themselves. There were no scientists at the dinner table. There was no surgeon down the hall. There was no astronaut living next door telling me what the sky looked like from above the clouds. Not because the people in my life were lesser, but because their lives, however full, didn’t contain the possibilities my life was reaching toward.

03 — The world started flowing in

But my imagination of the greatness got expanded after fifth grade. I got my first desktop computer, and the world started flowing in. I started seeing worlds I couldn’t have seen on my own. They came in through TV shows, films, music, reality shows, talk shows, online forums, and social media. Each line of dialogue, each character, each piece of music carried information about a place I had no other way of reaching. Together, they helped me understand what passion meant, what love was, what the world was made of. More importantly, they activated something hidden in me, something I wouldn’t have found with my surrounding.

I watched 鉴证实录, and I wanted to be 聂宝言 (Nie Bao-Yan). Black suit, black bag, heels, the necklace, the shoulder-length hair. I had never seen a woman dressed like that in real life, not at school, not in my neighborhood, not anywhere I knew to look. The outfit clicked something in me before I had words for it. I wanted to be sharp like that. I wanted to walk into rooms like that. And I wanted what came with it as well — the power, the control over your own life and your own decisions, the great work you got to deliver. I just knew that one day I’d dress like that, walking down the street to the office.

I watched Grey’s Anatomy, and I recognized myself in Cristina Yang. The way she fought to get every cardiac surgery. The way she cried because she couldn’t touch a heart for months. She was unapologetic about loving the heart. She knew every bit of it. She could feel the rhythm of it in a dark OR. Watching her, I knew immediately how much I was like her. I didn’t yet know what my heart would be. But I knew I’d have one — and that’s in my personality too.

I watched Infinite Challenge (무한도전) and saw people build something together that was worth crying over. None of them were trained musicians. They argued, struggled, and nearly failed. Then they performed those songs to a stadium full of people singing along, and I watched grown men cry because something they had poured themselves into now existed in the world.

These shows didn’t just entertain me, but also put the first set of shapes of greatness in front of me. A fact tells me a life exists, but feeling a life makes me want it. That was the thing missing from pure names and rules — names told me scientists and doctors existed, but they couldn’t make me want to be one. The dramas could, because they let me stand close enough to a life to catch the wanting coming off it. And once my ambition had something to chase, my curiosity took over. The modern algorithm fed it. Through founder interviews, I learned how a company actually gets built — not the logo and the launch, but the thousand quiet decisions underneath, the bets someone placed before anyone knew they were right. Through physicists talking to each other, I finally caught a glimpse of the life I couldn’t picture at ten: the obsession, the years spent on a single question, the joy of one small thing cracking open. Every answer opened three new questions, and the feed handed them back, and for years the loop ran on its own.

But the order matters more than the loop. The dramas started it, by giving me lives. The feed only sustained it, by giving me answers. A founder interview would have bounced off ten-year-old me — I had no question yet for it to answer. The desire had to come first, and desire doesn’t arrive as a fact. It arrives by recognition.

That same act followed me into my career. At KPMG, I never experienced work as execution for a paycheck. One month I’d be learning telecommunications, the next deep inside an automotive business model, then a payments company, then an airline — each engagement a different system, a different set of incentives, a different way people organized themselves to create value. I loved building models, because every model was an attempt to stand close to a small piece of reality until I could feel how it behaved. It was the same thing I’d been doing since I was ten, only now I did it on purpose: standing close to something I couldn’t previously see, until I could finally feel my way inside it.

04 — Why me, and not my friend?

When I went back to Fuzhou and saw some of my childhood friends, I keep returning to the same question. Many of them were as smart as I was; some were smarter. We grew up on the same streets, sat in the same classrooms, and eventually got the same computers and the same internet. Yet our lives unfolded in dramatically different ways. Why?

• Was I wired differently?
• Was there some original hunger already in me?
• Did I find those stories, or did they find me?
• Why me, and not the friend who walked home beside me every day?

For a long time I thought I didn’t have an answer. We got the same machine and opened it onto different worlds — different clicks, different feeds, different rabbit holes — so by the time anything reached either of us, it had already been filtered through something each of us brought to it. The same field of lives went past all of us. It caught on me because something in me was already shaped to catch it. 聂宝言 lit me up; she’d have slid right off another kid watching the same scene. The drama didn’t install that shape in me. It named it. Which means the thing I once treated as a crack in this whole idea — same street, same school, same internet, different lives — was never a crack at all. Sameness of input producing difference of output is exactly what you’d expect, if the thing that decides the outcome is the receiver and not the signal.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe their lives are exactly the lives they would have chosen. But when I look at some of those friends, I don’t see a lack of ability. I see possibilities that never had the chance to fully unfold — versions of their lives that might have emerged if the field had only extended a little further in the direction their particular shape was pointing, and it didn’t reach that far.

05 — More lives to see

So this has become one of the puzzles that I wanted to solve. If imagination expanded the boundaries of my own life, how many other people are carrying ambitions that simply haven’t found a shape yet? How many are waiting for the one life that keys into something they can’t yet name? And here is the part I haven’t solved: a life has to be shown, but it also has to match — and the kid who most needs the match is exactly the kid who doesn’t yet know their own shape, who emits no signal you could aim at. I don’t know whether the answer is to make the field of lives wider and more vivid and trust each person to do their own recognizing, the way I did, or whether it’s something else entirely. I only know it isn’t advice. Nobody handed me Cristina Yang as the life for this particular girl. I found her, across a field wide enough to contain her.

Because when I look back at the ten-year-old girl sitting in a small town in Fuzhou, I don’t think what she needed was someone to tell her what to become. She just needed more lives to see. And maybe that’s all any of us are really looking for — not instructions, not advice, but the moment we encounter a life and think, before we have words for it: “There I am.”