Slime, Deadlines, And Trying Not To Explode
Jack Luo — 8 min read
If you watched all the reels I filmed that night, in order, you would see a guy slowly falling apart.
The first clip is me, bright and awake, talking like life is full of possibilities. By the last one, I look like someone who has survived three midterms, a breakup, and an airport layover in one night. The energy graph just goes straight down.
Underneath that slow collapse though, there was a real idea I was trying to get at. It is about people who are curious about everything, who want to do everything, and who end up stuck, because life is not Delta First Class, it is more like a strict carry-on baggage policy from Frontier.
I Am Basically Slime
Without deadlines, I am slime.
If there is no pressure, I do not move in a straight line. I just slowly spread into whatever cracks are available. I pick up every little bit of dust on the floor. In human terms, that looks like:
- fictional philosophy rabbit holes
- card shuffling tricks
- sci fi deep dives
- Fermi paradox YouTube spirals
- robotics
- random alien worldbuilding
- whatever weird niche my friends bring up this week
If I am around something for long enough, I can get into it. Not in a casual way either. I will start reading, watching, thinking, overfitting my brain to it.
That sounds fun, and honestly, it is. Your worldview gets bigger. You get stories. You get taste. You get the “experience” part of life.
But here is the problem with slime: it is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
If everything pulls you a little, your net movement is close to zero. You end up tired, overstimulated, and weirdly stuck.
The Fast Food Disaster That Exposed My Brain
This is not just some abstract metaphor. I have been like this for a long time.
Back in middle school, I was on a road trip and had to pick a fast food place. The options were not special:
Wendy’s, Burger King, Chipotle, McDonald’s.
That is it. Four places. This is not a moral test or some crazy thought experiment. No one’s life depended on this.
It took me thirty minutes.
By the time I was done overthinking, the group basically went, “Screw it, let us just go to all four.”
It was funny then, but when I look back, it shows something I am still fighting now. When there is no real constraint, my brain keeps searching for the “perfect” option, instead of just picking a good enough one and moving.
Fast food is whatever. When you scale that up to choices about school, startups, relationships, or what to work on for the next five years, it becomes a problem.
Random Exploration Is Better Than Nothing, But Not Enough
If you look at life outcomes in a brutally simple way, there is a rough hierarchy.
At the bottom, there are people who have no drive at all. They just drift because the world pushes them.
Above that, there are the people like me (and maybe you), who jump into random interesting things. We try a lot, see a lot, and collect experiences and skills. That is already a big upgrade over doing nothing.
But above that, there are the people who pick fewer things and go hard on them over time. That is where you get compounding. That is where you build depth, reputation, leverage. Some of the most successful people I know fall into this category (hi Etched, Mach Industries, Delve, and OpenAI and Neuralink peeps).
So yes, if you are doing “random interesting things,” you are doing better than a lot of people. But you are still going to lose to someone who took that curiosity and aimed it at something real for long enough.
The world does not reward curiosity by itself. It rewards curiosity that got trapped in a box because that packaging makes the slime look like a cute cube.
The Generalist vs Specialist Problem
This is where generalists and specialists show up.
Specialists are easy to spot early on. They are the kid who has been doing math competitions since age ten, the person who has been building robots since freshman year, the researcher who has been living inside one problem (bio security, multi agent Rl, reverse malware analysis) for eight years, and Gabriel from OpenAI.
Companies love specialists. If there is one narrow, extremely important problem, you want the person who can hit it like a laser.
This is why top AI researchers at places like Meta or Google get paid in almost billions. If you can ship one idea that improves a model used by billions, the leverage on your time is massive.
But if you zoom out to “who ends up running things,” the story changes a bit.
A lot of people who end up with visible power or influence are not the best at any one narrow thing. They are the people who can connect fields, pull together weird groups, and move a system.
Trump is an extreme example. Very polarizing, very messy, but you have to admit something: he did not become president because he was the best coder, the best salesman, or the best writer. He is not a technical specialist.
What he does have is some strange mix of breadth, instincts about people, and ability to gather a team and a crowd. You do not have to like him to admit that this is a real type of power.
So I think there are roughly two categories at the top:
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People who push the frontier technically, the pure specialists.
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People who coordinate others and move big groups, the generalist leaders.
Both are necessary. But the second category tends to be more visible. They are often the ones whose names you remember.
The Generalist I Actually Want To Be
I do not want to be a shallow generalist, the “knows a little about everything but cannot do anything end to end” guy.
That is not inspiring. That is just quiz bowl club with a body.
I also do not think I am wired to be a pure narrow specialist who spends twenty years on one micro topic and is happy in that lane forever.
The version that makes sense to me is something like:
- Go very deep in one thing at a time.
- Stay in that depth long enough to actually build competence, reputation, and results.
- Then later, repeat in a different area, stacking those specialties until you look like a generalist from the outside, but you know you earned each layer by suffering in it for a while.
It is like being a serial specialist.
So instead of being slime across everything at once, you pour the slime into one container, let it solidify, then move to another container later in life. Over a decade, you end up with multiple solid blocks. From far away, you look like a well rounded generalist. Up close, each patch has real depth behind it.
Just Because It Is Interesting Does Not Mean You Owe It Your Life
One trap I keep falling into is confusing “this is interesting” with “I must now turn this into a full project.”
That is not sustainable.
There are thousands of things that will feel interesting, especially if you are wired like this. Fictional philosophy, robotics, niche sci fi, weird energy systems, urban planning, whatever.
If I am honest, robotics is super cool to me. The idea of building intelligent physical systems, exoskeletons, flying stuff, all of that. Fictional philosophy is cool too, entire universes of thought about meaning, consciousness, alternate histories.
But my main thing is AI.
So if I want to actually get somewhere, robotics probably cannot be my main quest right now. It has to sit in the “supporting character” category. Same with fictional philosophy. It can be something I read and think about at night, not the thing that dictates my schedule.
Interests are allowed to just be interests. Not every spark has to become a startup, a degree, or a career move.
Constraints, Confidence, And Cutting Things Out
So how do you actually choose a path when your brain wants to do everything?
I am not pretending I have this fully solved, but here is what feels real to me right now.
First, your intuition is not useless. If you pay attention over weeks and months, not just random high energy days, you can tell which things keep coming back. The stuff you still care about when you are tired is different from the stuff that only excites you when you are in a good mood.
Second, at some point you have to be more confident and say, “This is my main thing for this season.” Not for life, just for this stage. That automatically demotes other things.
You might say: Ok, my main thing is AI.
Supporting pillars: school, a serious project or startup, maybe one relationship that I actually show up for.
Everything else has to go around that. It is not that you ignore everything else. You just stop pretending they are all equal.
Third, treat a normal day like training, not a performance. You do not need every day to be peak productivity. You just need a consistent baseline: sleep somewhat okay, do some work, move your main thing forward a little. That is it. Do that for a year and it looks impressive. Try to do everything in one week and you just burn out and binge YouTube and Sora if you are me.
Finally, you need to cut.
You cannot keep saying yes to every cool field. You cannot adopt every stray idea that walks up to you. Over time, you will need to look at your life and say, “These three things matter, these seven can wait, these five need to go.”
That is how slime gradually gets a shape.
What I Am Actually Trying To Do With My Own Life
If I apply this to myself, the things that survive after cutting are probably:
- one or two relationships I care about and actually invest in
- AI as the main technical spine
- a small number of serious projects that tie into that, like school and something startup shaped
Robotics, fictional philosophy, random obsessions, they don’t disappear from my head. They just stop pretending to be main projects.
I do not think everyone needs some grand “path” in a hero’s journey sense. But for most of us, going toward something is better than floating forever. Even if that “something” changes every few years.
Right now, I am tired. Making one min story collapse was real. But tired is fine. The real failure would be tired and directionless.
If you feel like slime too, maybe the point is not to fix that part of you. The curiosity is not the problem. The problem is never giving that curiosity a container and some friction.
Pick a container. Add a deadline. Let the slime harden a little. Then repeat.
Over time, you look a lot less like a guy stuck between four fast food chains, and more like someone who actually picked a road and started walking.
Maybe I will choose a container in the shape of a cat next time.
[1] maybe I will quote the term decision insecurity next time
Originally published on Medium.