Max Lin (Theguyhere)

My Story

For most of my childhood and as far as my memory can take me, I lived and grew up in the suburbs on the fringes of Portland, Oregon. Before settling there, I lived briefly in Pennsylvania, 温州 (Wenzhou, China), and California, all before I began going to school. Even when I began my university studies, I still lived here for the first year as I cruised through a year of remote learning while I waited for the COVID-19 pandemic to settle down. I am definitely biased, but I couldn't have asked for a better environment to grow up in.

I always had this innate nature in me to be creating something, whether it be some abstraction in my mind or something physical. Way back when I didn't play computer games, I would construct fantastical RPGs in my mind and wander the house fighting enemies. It wasn't long before I stumbled upon my first concrete medium of expression: Legos. These plastic building blocks gave me the opportunity to bring my thoughts into reality through the cities and war fleets that I built with my own two hands. As I matured and developed new skills in 5th grade, I began writing stories. The complex plots in my head and ideas I couldn't construct were finally freed in the form of words in the novels I wrote. From then until the end of middle school, I populated a collective of hundreds of pages with the intricate fantasies and realities that I dreamed of. It was both a practice of creativity and an expression of self.

Around this time, I began to dabble in piano and music. I technically started playing piano around 3rd grade, but I stopped taking lessons after my parents saw that I didn't practice often enough. I eventually picked it back up and began learning pieces on my own. There was a certain beauty in this form of expression that drew me towards it—something I felt that was missing from before. As I searched for more pieces, I found that I didn't like some of the pieces available and began composing my own transcriptions of songs I loved. My high school hobbies centered around this melodic form of expression as I experimented with composing piano, instrumental, EDM, and even Vocaloid songs. To share what I had created with the world, I created a YouTube channel where I can present all my efforts.

Complimenting this were the art classes I took in Saturday/Sunday school. I began taking them in elementary school and continued them through my junior year of high school, learning how to sketch, paint, and critique visual arts. The combination of music, art, and video-making forged the beginnings of the YouTube channel that I have today. With the channel at my disposal, I started to focus on another area that I felt like I was lacking in: speaking. Here began my podcast, a project that stretched about two years. Every other week, I would sit down and pour out my thoughts in front of a camera. Although the results felt rough and strange at first, I was determined to keep going for the sake of self-improvement. It later dawned on me that self-improvement was, in fact, an art quite similar to music and visual arts. There was no objective correctness and no formula for success—a fusion of intricacy, grace, and humility had to be applied to the process.

As I continue my journey through higher education, the winds of life have become more erratic and turbulent. Sometimes, I hunker down and weather the gusts. Other times, I spread my wings and drift off somewhere new. I've landed pretty far from the traditional four-year college path, with mountains of opportunities and accidents in between. I've typically had a strong idea of what career path I wanted to take, but I've since learned that in this rapid development phase, nothing remains static. The best approach is to take things step by step...