In the New Year excitement of family dinners and firework displays, launched at the calendar’s consummate end and beginning—12:00 AM, January 01—a warm feeling comes to me. “This is my year” and other clichés come to mind. Excited, I open to a fresh page of notebook paper and scribble new goals. Go to the gym more consistently. Get better grades. Finally buy that new guitar I’ve been eyeing, which I’ll also have to figure out how to pay for.

One year later and it’s the same list of unfulfilled promises: no six-pack abs and still the same floundering GPA. I did get the new guitar though (reminder to self: make up the cash). Year after year, our lists appear depressingly unchanged. We haven’t done the things we set out to do. They get delayed, relegated to a “later” that may never come.

Making my personal website was one such self-promise. Ever since I learned how to code in Princeton’s intro computer science class, I’ve wanted to combine my budding programming skills with my love for writing and design. I wanted to arrange incisive, provoking ideas with intentional presentation. A website seemed like the natural next step.

I tried freshman year summer.

Then again later in sophomore year.

Then again, my junior year.

Still no website.

It wasn’t that I lacked the necessary technical skills. At this point I had taken all the foundational computer science courses and several long online tutorials. I wasn’t an expert, but by no means was I a novice. It’s only now, 2.5 years later, that I’ve finally done it. And in only five days. That’s why I wanted to look back and see what made this attempt different from the first three. What worked this time?

There are many differences. I could extend this one piece to a whole series, but for now, I’ll highlight just one change and lesson. That is:

Fortifying lesser identities obstructs progress.

I am not a UI/UX or web-related anything, although I tried to be. The dream first sprouted in Angela Yu’s Udemy class for full-stack web development: I had just completed the tutorial for “TinDog,” a dating app for amorous canines looking for love, and imagined this could even become a swanky tech career back home in Silicon Valley. Just without the dogs.

Excited, I dove into making my own website, trying to find the perfect colors and orientations for photos, the most intuitive navigation features and optimal spacing between letters for readability. Yet despite my earnest efforts and passion at the start, it was a flop. I stopped only meters from the starting line

It took several tries to finally understand why. Although I never made it clear to myself, somewhere buried in my unconscious thoughts, I knew I wanted to write about my life in college: The harsh northeast winters upon my palm-shaded Californian skin, my hands flaking over in white, wintry scales; or best places to wander around on campus, Keshi songs stuck in my head like a sad memory, kicking rocks over my econometrics midterm grade. I wanted to frame these everyday yet memorable moments online like a gallery, open to all who might enjoy their strangeness. But ironically, it was concern over their framing that muted my stories.

The problem wasn’t that I tried to learn web development. It’s a good skill to have, I still think. Rather, the problem was that I tried to adopt a new identity. I told myself “I am a web developer, so I make good websites”—a great thought to have if I truly wanted to become a web developer. Many like James Clear in his modern classic Atomic Habits observe how identity catalyzes new habits and gains in productivity. But when lesser identities compete with more important identities, then there’s a problem.

“I am a writer, so I write good articles.” That’s true (Well at least the first part and hopefully the second). Can I be a writer and a web developer? Of course. But can they both be my main purpose? In my experience, they can’t. Not without great difficulty.

“I am a web developer, so I make good websites.” When I adopted this belief, the website’s excellence hijacked my attention: Suddenly I was swimming in the morass of Stack Overflow forums, finding every minutia about when I should change margins over padding or how to make my buttons flicker when touched by the cursor’s shadow. I had forgotten why I wanted to make this website in the first place, blinded by the thrill of gimmicks. I was so distracted that, when I finally looked over all I had done, I was nowhere closer to a finished website. So I quit. Not a single article written.

Defining the “Am not”: Shedding lesser identities.

As before, I am still not a UI/UX or web-related anything. Admitting this was critical to getting things off the ground, and this time, I did it at the very beginning.

“1. Purpose: FIRST creative outlet, THEN career asset. The purpose of this website is to act as a professional portfolio of my data science and research projects and to give me a platform to record/store ideas I find important. Doing this will help me build my career and continue being creative through writing.”

That’s what I wrote, verbatim. Nothing about making the best website ever. It simply had to be passable to support my other, more important purposes.

If we know why we are doing something, we can actively avoid competing reasons that obstruct our purpose—to avoid “scope creep” as it’s called in project management, when work surpasses the scope of a project’s purpose. It can throw a project completely off the rails, disrupting timelines and wasting effort on features that may never appear in the final product That’s why it’s critical to define our purpose: When we do, it becomes easier to spot what pull us away from it—even the seemingly good things.

Warren Buffet recommends a similar philosophy in his 5/25 rule: First, he suggests people identify the 25 most important things they need to do, from the micro-level projects and tasks to grander questions of life’s purpose, then focus on the top 5 while disregarding the bottom 20. I would emphasize this second step and even up its intensity: Actively guard your time against the other twenty, because they pose the likeliest distractions from the focal five. That doesn’t mean we can never experiment with our sixth or seventh greatest ambitions: Moderate variation and novelty can add excitement to life, and our priorities are bound to change as we age. Yet we are finite in our time and attention. We cannot do everything. And with the handful of grains hanging in our hourglass, we ought to soberly consider what are our greatest investments.

The Vine and the Vine Dresser

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit He takes way, and every branch that does bear fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” – John 15:1-2

One final illustration comes from the Christian Bible: In John chapter 15, Jesus compares himself to a vine, His people to the vine branches, and God the Father to the vinedresser. For the branches to bear more fruit, two things must happen: First, they must remain connected to the vine, and second, they must be pruned of weaker, less productive segments to move nutrients toward the stronger and more productive.

We might then imagine 25 segments, each one bearing different amounts of fruit. For the branch to bear the most fruit, ironically, it must first endure the appearance of less: The vinedresser comes in with His sheers and chops off branch number 25 (learn how to snowboard), then number 18 (bench 300 pounds) and so on. The process hurts, and for a moment, our eyes are stuck to what we’ve lost, the fruit that falls with each lesser dream.

But if we are patient, we see a greater yield in the next season. Our largest segments double in size so the whole branch leans in their direction, dripping with fruit so large they look like swollen balloons and shine like disco balls. The vinedresser stands back to admire His work, satisfied.

If this were any other self-help story, it would end here. The vinedresser happily hauls in the fruit and ambles home, sharing his spoils with friends and family and selling his surplus in the following day’s market.

But we cannot forget the vine. Though the pruning determines the yield of each branch, the vine decides what each branch bears. We may be producing much, but what value is our fruit? A passing bite of pleasure, or shiny coins from the market stall? Maybe there’s something better.

I am convinced that both the absence and application of self-help strategies, apart from the vine of Jesus, all end the same, in death. That’s the existentialist’s complaint: What’s the point in life if, from the criminal to the saint, the commoner to the king, all end up burned or buried? And this is not to negate all that was said above but rather to say how, in my own experience, I have found it impossible to decouple the vine from the vinedresser, the growth factors from the yield, the substance from the performance, and have peace.

As we strive to improve ourselves and chase after dreams, my hope is that we do so in the rest available in Christ. For all are restless, as Augustine observes, until we rest in Him.