Curate your crew to curate your dreams

Surrounding myself with greatness

When I was eleven years old, my dream lightbulb was as bright as it could be.

I told my English as a second language teacher that my dream was to become a New York Times #1 bestselling author. He gave me a look, but I was unbothered. My lightbulb was gleaming. I continued writing sporadic blog posts, mostly notes from classes that I condensed into mind maps or one-page summaries. On exam mornings, I’d spot my classmates diligently reading printouts of my blog.

As I grew older, my lightbulb started to get weather-tested. Like how would a kid in Indonesia ever get to publishing something worthy of the acknowledgement of the Americans that owned best-selling lists? My parents raised me to be realistic, which is just based on the realities that they saw around them. I also learned that authors usually made very unsteady streams of income. The odds of getting rich from selling books are once-in-a-Percy Jackson. So I shrunk my dreams to fit my surroundings. I poured all my efforts into studying well in school.

In 2014, I received a scholarship ticket to Hong Kong. My parents viewed it as a miracle that I was able to emigrate out of Indonesia and earn a finance undergraduate degree in an English-speaking city. I looked away from any dreams of becoming a book author and thought of goals that felt more realistic instead, no matter how simple and dim they were. My classmates wanted to land a stable, corporate job. I thought I wanted that, too. I achieved that dream when I landed a job at S&P (yes, like the index) in 2020.

Whatever wishful thoughts I had for my future were long gone. I had set my sights so shallow. My dreaming lightbulb had been off for so long that it might as well have been a power outage.

Just when I thought I had made it, things got better. A bank sought me out to work in their marketing department. In author Ocean Vuong’s words, it felt like I was living in the whipped cream.

“We shouldn’t be here. We made it here. We already won, so whatever you make of your life, if you try hard enough, that’s the whipped cream. It’s just extra.”
- Ocean Vuong in a conversation with Dua Lipa

Landing that job wasn’t all because of my sole efforts. I was simply mimicking the behaviour of my classmates. The undercurrent led us to stable, corporate jobs. I was surrounded by greatness, so greatness was where I landed.

My shortcoming was believing that this was what greatness looked like, even though it didn’t resemble anything I had dreamed of when I was a child. I had believed then, that this was all I was going to become.

Perhaps by accident (or not), I stumbled into an online writing course in 2023. I thought it’d be a fun way to relive my Blogspot days. When I browsed through the introductions, I spotted that some of my classmates like

Karena

and

Rick Lewis

were writing books.

Woah. Could you just.. do that? Is that something you could casually do?

The dreaming bulb began to flicker. I just didn’t know it yet.

*

The online course connected me to some pretty inspiring writers who had high dreams for themselves. It felt like we were speaking the same language, sharing our adoring affinity for alliterations, puns, and verbalising everything around us. But most of all, they inspired me.

Seeing them write made me want to write. Seeing them publish made me want to publish.

I loved hanging out with and being continuously inspired by them so much that I maintained regular contact with them even after the six-week course was over. To this day, I:

• I trade drafts with other writers. We give each other feedback and validation that our ideas are worth publishing.

• I host weekly calls with other writers to brainstorm new essay ideas, exchange feedback, or write.

• I read a lot of creatives’ Substacks and interact with them in the comments or in chats.

• I ran two sessions to co-work on our Substack About Me pages.

• I invite closer writer friends to hang with the simple prompt, “Hey what creative projects are we working on?”

I’ve been publishing weekly ever since — a 92-week streak that puts me in the top 2% of publishers, Substack says. Sharing my ideas weekly felt like my entry ticket to the elusive panoply of thoughtful writers. Every post proved that I’m showing up, that I exist. As I continue to write alongside other writers, my confidence grew (that yes, this former journalist does have something to say after all), which then fed back into my keenness to cultivate deeper relationships with fellow online writers (I’m one of you guys now, so talking to me isn’t like talking to some noob). There was a light that started to illuminate my forgotten dreams.

Then in September, I had a flicker of an idea for a book. I hastily wrote it out chapter by chapter, trying to catch my own sparks as they ignited. I completed the first draft in December. How did that even happen?

Unknowingly, my dreaming lightbulb had turned back on. I thought writing a book was just something common, in line with the realities that I can see around me. This wasn’t all because of my sole efforts. I was simply mimicking the behaviour of my fellow writers. The undercurrent led us to write online. I was surrounded by greatness, so greatness is where I landed.

There’s a saying that you are the average of the five people you spend your time with. There was something in me that chose to latch onto the writers I met online and maintain those friendships. I curated my own crew of five (actually, more) people.

Greatness is in the agency of others. There’s a reason why tech innovation is clustered in Silicon Valley, fashion in New York, and art in Melbourne.

By surrounding myself with people who have a bigger sense of what’s possible, I unconsciously started to dream bigger, too. The lightbulb that I thought had been broken forever was now fully on. I just forgot where the switch was.

Maybe this Indonesian kid can become a bestselling author after all.

Thank you to friends whose flames continue to keep me warmly inspired:

Rik

and

Kelly Davis

.

---

Update log:

• 🐍 Happy lunar new year!

• 📖 Reading The DOSE Effect by Tj Power (49% completed) and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

• 🤖 I’m enrolled in a Write with AI course by Every. (h/t

  Kelly Davis
  for getting me on this!). I’m on an exponential learning curve with this whole AI thing.

• 💭 Hosted a visioning session for two on Monday. We looked 3 years ahead and started building on our vision boards. I’m gonna host another on Sat.

• 📝 Started a log book ala

  Austin Kleon
  and I love paying attention the mundane.

• 🗓️ I’m doing Ali Abdaal's LifeOS course. I learned even more that productivity systems are so personal. He has a morning manifesto that he starts off his day with. Turns out I already do that but in diff ways. LMK if my journaling routine is something that would be of interest.

Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project? Let’s give you a starting line boost a la Mario Kart - https://calendly.com/beckyisj/

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