nicholasbraman.com

Category: Life

  • Feeling the Wrong Way

    Feeling the Wrong Way

    This holiday season, I’ve been thinking about how often we make ourselves feel bad for not feeling the way we think we’re supposed to. Times when you’re supposed to feel happy, but just don’t. Or others when you feel guilty for being happier than you think you should be. When that happens, we often end up making ourselves feel even worse, creating a vicious cycle. We would all enjoy ourselves more if we learned to shut out those expectations and let ourselves be.

    For years after my mom died, I would catch myself feeling guilty if I was in a good mood. Especially if it was something she would have enjoyed, or something we had done together before. I would be enjoying it, and then all of a sudden, the thought of her would pop into my head, and I would feel bad for feeling good. Logically, I knew that’s not what she would have wanted, but it didn’t stop it from happening for a long time. I’m not sure I learned how to fix it so much as that feeling slowly faded over time.

    Over the years, I’ve also caught myself feeling bad on special occasions like birthdays or holidays, simply because I put so much pressure on myself to enjoy them. I’d prepare for days or weeks beforehand, making sure all the elements were in place to live up to my expectations. But when the time came and I didn’t feel as happy as I thought I should, instead of relaxing and letting things be, I’d make myself feel even worse. Disappointment, guilt, and frustration would come crashing down, and instead of having a good, but not perfect time, I’d end up having a bad time and not enjoying it at all.

    I only started to turn this around after I recognized that I needed to be more flexible and adaptable to what was happening and how I was feeling in the moment. Anticipation of joy can be just as fulfilling as the moment itself. But I had to learn how to balance expectations with reality, and not let everything fall apart when they don’t match.

    It isn’t always easy. We build up scenarios in our minds, and when things miss, it’s natural to feel disappointment and loss. It’s something I’m still working on, and something I’m getting a lot of practice with as a parent. Just recently, I cooked one of my favorite meals, and when we sat down to eat, my daughter barely touched it. This time, instead of forcing her to eat or holding onto my disappointment, I was able to let it go.

    I hope this holiday season, we’re able to put some of our expectations aside and meet the moment as it is, whatever that turns out to be. Maybe we won’t feel the way we think we should, and that’s okay. Let’s give ourselves permission to feel what we actually feel, and find some peace in that.

  • What Makes a Place Feel Like Home

    What Makes a Place Feel Like Home

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of home lately. Not the physical place, but the feeling of it: how it shifts, fades, resurfaces, and sometimes surprises us. After more than a decade and a half of living abroad, the question of what “home” really means has become harder to answer cleanly. The longer I live away from the place I grew up, the more I realise home isn’t fixed. It moves as we move.

    After 15 years of living overseas, sometimes I feel like I’m on a permanent trip, and there’s no home to return to. The home I remember is gone, and when I go back, both of us have changed too much for me to belong. I wonder if everyone feels this way. As time passes and we evolve, even if we stay in the same place, are we coming back to the same home?

    Nostalgia is a strong seducer, leading us to remember things as better than they really were. We can’t go back to the home we remember, but I’m not sure if we should anyway. The home that shapes our early memories is made up of feelings, tastes, and smells. Sometimes that place is fuzzy in our memory, and other times a single note comes back to us like it was yesterday. On the other hand, the place we call home now is easy to describe and clear in our minds, but we don’t get to decide if the feeling of home comes along with the title.

    We all know the phrase, “Home is where the heart is”. On the surface, it’s a nice sentiment, and I agree. I do feel at home when I get back from a trip and hug my daughter, and lie down on my own bed, surrounded by the things I’ve chosen to live in my house with me. And if we had to pack up and move somewhere else, it’s true that as long as I had my family with me, that would be enough. But beyond the embroidered wall art, sometimes it feels like I don’t belong anywhere, and that makes me a bit sad. I’m realizing you can call somewhere home for all the right reasons and still not fully feel it.

    On the other hand, there are many times I feel at home wherever I am, living out of a suitcase or in Singapore with friends and family: from riding the local train in Mumbai with my hair blowing in the wind, to downing highballs in an izakaya in Golden Gai with strangers, or sitting on a plastic stool eating at my favorite char kway teow stall in Kuala Lumpur. I feel comfortable, I blend in, I am content. I get spoken to in Mandarin in Singapore and China, Bahasa in Malaysia and Indonesia, Tagalog in the Philippines, and Cantonese in Hong Kong. It may just be because of my pan-Asian face. But it still makes me feel good.

    If home isn’t just where the heart is or the house we sleep in, if home is a feeling that we know when we have it but not something we can manufacture, then those stretches of not feeling at home are just proof that we aren’t standing still.

    Maybe the feeling of home isn’t supposed to be static. If it were, we might stop moving and searching for places where we feel we belong. Maybe we can’t feel at home for very long because the world keeps spinning, and we can’t just get off at the next stop. Maybe we can learn to feel at home wherever we are. But for now, the desire to feel at home keeps me going, or maybe it’s the other way around.

  • Learning From the People Ahead of Us

    Learning From the People Ahead of Us

    I wrote this in a season where I was obsessing over podcast downloads and social media numbers, watching other people’s projects race ahead of mine. I kept trying to stop comparing myself to them, but that never really worked. So I started asking a different question instead: what if comparison could be useful?

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “Comparison is the thief of joy”. As I’ve been spending more time working on my podcast and social media, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers and worrying about what other people are doing. But when I started to really follow other creators and examine the work they are putting out, I realized that comparison could be a tool for me to learn from, rather than a discouragement. Everyone can teach us something, so rather than focusing on feeling jealous of the people ahead of me, I started to see what I could learn from them. I didn’t stop comparing myself, but I started framing it differently.

    Research helped me make sense of what I was experiencing. Comparison happens automatically: we size ourselves up without thinking. Sometimes it shows up as pride when we’re doing well, sometimes as admiration for what others have achieved, and sometimes as envy (Crusius & Lange, 2017; Smith, 2000; Steckler & Tracy, 2014). Recognizing these reactions as normal made it easier to separate the emotion from the information. That shift turned comparison from something discouraging into something useful, as long as I stayed grounded in who I am and what I’m actually trying to build.

    Most of us have thought about putting together the ultimate athlete or hero by taking the best attributes of different people and combining them into something unstoppable. As I compared myself to others, I realized I could do the same thing with them. One person is super good at speaking, another at editing, another at creating systems. All of these were areas I could take lessons from and apply to my own work. And as I did this more, I also found that I gained more actionable insights from comparing myself to people who aren’t too far ahead of me. It’s great to look up to a New York Times bestselling author or the top podcasts in the world, but they are playing in another league; the rules and lessons aren’t the same.

    Research supports this. Studies show that comparing ourselves to people who are similar to ourselves, in socio-economic background, status, age, etc., increases inspiration over discouragement (Andreeva, Irina & Kim, Youllee & Chung, Sungeun 2024). I’ve found it isn’t useful to look at people who are too far ahead of you in their journey. Look at those who are just a little further down your path. That will give you inspiration to achieve what they have instead of facing a seemingly insurmountable gap. You can identify with where they are and what they’ve done, and recognize the areas where they have progressed ahead of you. If you want to get better at basketball, don’t look to Michael Jordan as an example of where you want to get to; look at the guy in your neighborhood who outscores you in pick-up games. If someone slightly ahead of you can do it, then it feels possible for you.

    Comparison isn’t something we can switch off, and psychology shows it happens whether we want it to or not. So instead of fighting it, I try to use it with intention. I look for people whose next step could realistically be mine, and when I notice that familiar pang of envy or inadequacy, I’ve learned to pause and ask what I can learn from the moment. Now, when I compare myself to others, I’m looking for direction, not validation. Comparison hasn’t stopped being part of my experience, but it’s stopped stealing my joy.

  • My “Wasted” Years: From Shame to Gratitude

    In November of 2007, I moved back to my hometown of Seattle after two years of living and working in Shanghai, China. For those two years, starting when I was 20, I felt like I had made it. I was making good money for my age, and the living costs there, I had a nice apartment, girlfriends, I had successful expat friends, a monthly poker night, a maid, and I even bought an electric scooter. That all came to a screeching halt when the school I was teaching English at wasn’t able to renew my work visa. In my heart, I knew the timing was right. I needed to go back and finish my last two years of college, I didn’t want to end up as a 40-year-old ESL teacher. But at the time, it was heartbreaking. I felt like I was losing my life.

    My apartment in Shanghai when I was 20 years old

    On a dreary Seattle day, I landed back home. While I was waiting for my application to the University of Washington to go through, I needed to get a job. I didn’t have a lot of cash saved up, or even a car to get around. I applied to a bunch of places within walking distance and ended up getting hired at an Asian supermarket. I’d worked similar jobs before. The last time I had lived in the states, I had saved up money for the move to China by first working on a fisher processor in the Bering Sea, and then a summer of double shifts at Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts. The supermarket felt nice at first, the owners were Malaysian Chinese, and a lot of the other workers were immigrants or international students. Eventually, I also started working at the IHOP across the parking lot, and then, after a lot of crazy events, including getting fired for eating hash browns that someone made by mistake, I moved on to other serving, short-order cook, bartending, and food delivery jobs.

    Most of the time, I wasn’t very happy. I met some amazing people and had fun, but the work was hard and the pay meant living paycheck to paycheck. The treatment by both managers and customers wasn’t always great, and sometimes even crossed the line. From being yelled at or told I would be fired if I didn’t cover for someone with no notice or being forced to record bathroom breaks, to being called racial slurs by drunk diners. It wasn’t pretty a lot of the time, but I stuck with it to pay the bills, at least some of them.

    After I started working in marketing, I downplayed this part of my working life as much as I could. To be honest, I was ashamed. For a long time, I felt like those jobs made me less than other peers who went straight from college to working in the field of their major. I felt like I was behind where I should be, and less qualified for “wasting time” at those jobs. I’ve only just started to realise that I wouldn’t be who I am today, both personally and professionally, if it weren’t for those jobs. I don’t mean it in a “I understand marketing better because I used to sell shots of Fernet to hipsters.” or “Cooking brunch for 150 tables on Mother’s Day made me good at multitasking.” sort of way. I mean I wouldn’t appreciate the work I do now or the life I have if I hadn’t eaten all that shit.

    Several things led up to this realization, some Reddit threads on people being too “proud” to get a job outside of their field, some Caleb Hammer episodes with guests who looked down on dead-end jobs. And the thought popped into my head that I want my daughter to work a job like that while she’s in school or starts a career. I’m not saying that I’m a boomer who wants my kids to have to work for everything and start at the bottom. I hope to pay for her schooling and give her as much of a head start as possible. But, I want her to experience working in the service industry or doing manual labor, so she understands what it’s like for the rest of her life when she’s a customer.

    I actually caught myself thinking the other day when I was flying out of Changi Airport and noticed the staff entrance by the Starbucks, there was a cleaner there already working at 8am. I was picturing her waking up at 5am or 6am and taking a bus, and then the train to get to work, and changing into her uniform to begin a long shift. And I thought to myself, I can’t imagine having to do that. And then I remembered, I actually can imagine doing that, because I did it for years.

    I’m sure empathetic and socially aware people can put themselves in the shoes of people working blue-collar or service jobs. But I’m not sure if everyone can truly feel the weight of being stuck at that kind of job, beholden to customers and assistant managers, clocking in and out day after day for minimum wage unless you’ve lived that life. So, going forward I’m not going to shy away from that part of my life story, it isn’t something to be ashamed of or to avoid talking about in fear of being looked down on. I’m proud of working those jobs, they are mentally and physically harder than any stress from deadlines and KPIs in my current career. They made me who I am today, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

    On my podcast, Before We Get There, I talk to interesting people like athletes, creatives, entrepreneurs, and more — about their journeys and often uncover times in their life like this that brought them to where they are today. You can find all of the episodes here.