Off the clock

Personal

Photography, things worth reading, and thoughts that have not gone anywhere yet.

Bixby Bridge · Big Sur, California · 2026 · © Stephen Yang

Photography12 frames · scroll →swipe →© Stephen Yang

Water Lantern Festival, San Jose, California, 2026 — Water Lantern Festival, San Jose, California · 2026

Pinnacles National Park, California, 2026 — Pinnacles National Park, California · 2026

The Meteor Shower, California, 2026 — The Meteor Shower, California · 2026

Yosemite National Park, California, 2026 — Yosemite National Park, California · 2026

Hearst Castle, California, 2026 — Hearst Castle, California · 2026

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, 2026 — Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado · 2026

Golden Gate Bridge, California, 2026 — Golden Gate Bridge, California · 2026

San Francisco, California, 2026 — San Francisco, California · 2026

California Street, California, 2026 — California Street, California · 2026

Strokkur Geyser, Haukadalur, Iceland, 2024 — Strokkur Geyser, Haukadalur, Iceland · 2024

Vatnajökull Glacier, Iceland, 2024 — Vatnajökull Glacier, Iceland · 2024

Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon, Iceland, 2024 — Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon, Iceland · 2024

Reading & notes

The Power of Now

Eckhart Tolle

Tolle's actual claim is narrower than the shelf around it suggests: the voice narrating your life is not the same thing as you, and much of what we call suffering is the interest paid on confusing the two. The mind is very good at presenting its own commentary as perception, and most of what I have learned about thinking clearly has really been learning to notice that gap — a thought arriving does not make it a finding. He treats this as a problem of attention rather than of belief, which is why the practice survives even when the metaphysics does not. Meaning, read this way, is less something discovered than something maintained: it decays if you stop attending to it, which is an oddly practical conclusion for a question that sounds so grand.

The moment you realize you are not present, you are present. Whenever you are able to observe your mind, you are no longer trapped in it.
Eckhart Tolle

The Let Them Theory

Mel Robbins

This sits close to Tolle, further up the page, and the pair says more than either alone. He describes watching the mind; she describes the bodily version of the same move — staying inside a feeling long enough not to act on it. Both point at one interval: the moment between a state arriving and it becoming the thing you are. What Robbins adds is an accounting rather than a virtue. Attention is finite, so the question worth asking is not whether you are right about someone but what the rehearsal costs, and that is a question I would rather keep open than settle. I doubt the gap is an insight you have once; it seems to be somewhere you re-enter. Less original than it presents itself as, and lighter than the idea deserves — but the reframe survives its packaging.

This is the hardest part of the Let Them Theory to put into practice—learning to feel my raw emotions without immediately reacting.
Mel Robbins

The Startup of You

Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha

The frame is that a career should be run like a start-up, and what is worth keeping is what that implies about time. A plan assumes the world will hold still long enough to be planned for; permanent beta assumes it will not, and treats a life as something iterated rather than designed. That turns a lifetime goal from a destination into a direction — its value is not arrival but knowing which way to lean when the ground moves, which is most of what a goal is for. Identity, read this way, is closer to a practice than a possession: you are whatever you are still willing to revise. The metaphor does wear thin at the edges. A company can pivot away from its past and a person cannot, and the parts of a life that compound hardest — people, commitments, patience — are precisely the ones that suffer from being iterated on.

For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never stop starting.
Reid Hoffman & Ben Casnocha

Elsewhere

Odds and ends that did not fit anywhere above:

I was born in Qingdao, a German-influenced coastal city on the Yellow Sea. The architecture is strange and the beer is good.
I shoot photography, mostly aerial work with drones. More on Bilibili, including some videos I made for my high school back in Qingdao.
I play VR games more than I probably should.
I am slowly rebuilding a very out-of-practice piano habit.

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