when work feels like play

watching alysa liu skate her heart out at the 2026 winter olympics

I swear I’ve watched her performance at least 20 times. And MacArthur Park is on repeat.

I’ve just been obsessed with her skating. I feel it has struck something deep inside me.

I watched her interview with 60 Minutes a few months ago, and I was so inspired by her energy and essence. Even though she’s quite a few years younger than I am, I feel I have so much to learn from her mindset and positive energy.

Alysa became the youngest national champion in history at the age of 13. After her performance, she sobbed—tears of joy, but also of relief and the release of an accumulation of pressure. Her old coach used to tell her not to drink water the day of the competition for fear of water weight.

Shortly after competing in the Beijing Olympics at 16, she announced her retirement in 2022 and stepped away from the ice for two years. She went to college at UCLA to study psychology, hiked Everest basecamp, and did a bunch of other normal teenager things. She got really into fashion, music, and dance—things she hadn’t had time to explore when she was skating full-time.

She then went on a family ski trip that made her miss the adrenaline of skating, and so she stepped back on the ice. She called up one of her old coaches and said she wanted to compete again. He tried to convince her otherwise, but she was insistent on coming back—this time on her own terms. And the well-roundedness she cultivated helped her develop her artistry and excel at her craft—because it wasn’t just about showing her skating technique anymore, it was about showing her art.

It is basically unheard of to leave figure skating and come back, especially after the changes one’s body goes through during puberty; during her time away from skating, she grew three inches. Less than a year out of retirement, she won the 2025 World Championships. And just last week, she became the first US gold medalist in women’s figure skating since 2002.

Four years ago, at the Beijing Olympics in 2022, women’s figure skating was dominated by Russian skaters who retired as soon as they exited puberty because the way they did their jumps was so harmful to their backs, and they ended up in a bunch of pain. They had to weigh themselves before practice, and if they were overweight, they weren’t allowed to continue. There weren’t many people in the audience in 2022 due to post-pandemic restrictions, and it was a dark time for women’s figure skating.

Fast forward to now, the 2026 Olympics in Milan. Alysa wins gold and hugs the bronze winner, Ami Nakai, who is crying as she realizes she got a medal. Amber Glenn is the first openly queer woman to represent the US in Olympic singles figure skating, and she comes back from a devastating short program to kill it in the free skate.

It’s just such a wholesome energy. I feel the world is coming back alive and healing. Alysa’s reclamation of her art and her power has captured the world.

flow: when work feels like play

I remember for a while when I was working at a startup (before starting my PhD), my work felt like play. Working on real drones and flying them to test my algorithms lit a fire in me. But then, after a while, switching projects and working on something that didn’t excite me as much, I felt uninspired once more.

And the same with the PhD—it’s hard to sustain that feeling of deep play.

I think that’s normal, though; it’s hard to sustain that kind of love for something for long periods of time. But what matters is returning to it, over and over.

I have worked on robotics since the beginning of high school, and I still love it. But it’s really hard not to be results-oriented in research, to care more about the process than whether a paper gets accepted or whether the experiments turn out well.

I’ve been thinking about why I feel avoidant sometimes towards my research and towards doing the things I like, such as painting and running. What are the conditions I need to thrive, to feel joy, to love what I do and how I do it?

During the pandemic, I had major anxiety about doing research. It was the summer after my junior year of college, and it was the first summer in college that I was doing research. The fall semester before, I loved going into lab and felt like it was exactly what I wanted to be doing—and I was even considering applying to PhDs my senior year. But during COVID, I would open my laptop and not be able to get any work done. And I wondered whether I was just externally driven, if I just needed people around me to feel motivated about my work. If I really liked research, why was it the last thing I wanted to do when no one was around? Why couldn’t I muster up any motivation at home?

All I wanted to do was make bread or doomscroll or go on long walks or bike rides or literally do anything other than work. But I wouldn’t let myself do those fully either, because those were my “reward” for doing research. And thus, I neither could work nor rest.

I had a lot of avoidance towards doing work that summer, the first of the pandemic. And it made me feel shame and guilt around that, which are kind of like secondary emotions about my primary emotions (stress and uncertainty leading to just feeling burnt out).

Looking back, I was way too hard on myself. I was burnt out from the stress of the pandemic and having to move away from college and back home.

What helped was not pushing myself. I had to allow myself to fall apart and learn to trust that I was still there to catch myself.

And to me, this cycle has come up again and again—although I am now much better at recognizing and navigating my patterns, and understanding that the avoidance really comes from needing to tend to my emotions outside of work. When I feel that way now, I look at what in my life actually needs attention.

Last fall was a special time for me. Not only did I take some time to find a good topic and start the project I am working on now, but I also fully invested in myself outside of research (like art, sports, and doing a weekend meditation retreat), which really helped me reset in my PhD.

Sometimes, you just need to step away to remember who you are beyond what you do, until you make what you do an extension of who you are.

One of the happiest I’ve felt recently was in the fall quarter, when I took a figure painting class. We had models every week to paint from life, and I just felt so alive after every session. I felt this total bliss that I feel when I am hiking or hanging out with my closest friends.

What I felt was flow. And I have been thinking about how to get that with my PhD currently.

I’ve been reflecting on what makes me really happy at work. And I stumbled across a list I wrote in 2022 about what I needed, back at my first job at the startup. I wrote: supportive (emotionally) mentor, people I like working with, intellectually fun, impact in the real world, or somehow meaningful. I had those when I was working at the startup, and I really feel I have all those now. But I think I can dig deeper into all of those and be more specific about my needs, and really set myself up to produce my best work.

I’m at a place in my research where I really do love it, but I feel I am still chasing short-term gains. Over the summer, I want to deeply learn more about certain topics and try to incorporate them into my research. Not only that, I want to get deeper into yoga, oil painting, and triathlon training. And most of all, I’m excited to travel and to go on a meditation retreat.

But before then, I am grinding on a deadline in the spring! Which I am very excited about, but I also feel pressured to produce fast enough results, and that wears me down. It’s starting to hit me that I’m at the midpoint of my PhD, and there are many things I still hope to do.

the AI arms race: protecting what it means to be human under interminable progress

What does it mean to be a researcher when the tools are changing faster than we can adapt, and what is uniquely human about the work we do?

I used to love coding, especially in C++. I remember in college and in my first industry job, when I felt like such a baller while coding. I still love programming, but I feel I have lost that thrill because of all the AI tools, which have potentially atrophied my skills. What will the software industry do when AI can solve bugs and write code in a fraction of the time? These tools are still in their infancy and still need a lot of human supervision, but we are not so far from a world where coding and the entire software industry as we know it will be different.

Especially now that robotics is heating up in industry, does my PhD matter if industry may have more resources and speed? Yes, of course—there are a ton of open questions in robotics still, and it’s nowhere near “solved” for many major applications. But I still feel the interminable progress in my own daily life.

What is left when AI can write the code, create the art, compose the music?

It is so important to develop taste, which often lies outside the confines of a technical question. Coding is an important part of research, but it’s more of a tool. It is most important to know what questions to ask. That’s why the “PhD-level intelligence” of GPT feels so ridiculous to me.

Even when these models get so good, a large part of society will still be optimizing, and maybe even grinding even harder than before. The 9-9-6 work culture from China (work from 9 am to 9 pm for six days a week) is showing up in San Francisco startups.

I talked with a bright-eyed undergrad on Friday about autonomous weapons, who wanted to join the Navy SEALs someday and was interested in building technology for the military. I feel deeply uncomfortable thinking about how what I am working on will end up benefiting the military, but what can I do about it? There's this massive AI arms race between countries, and even between companies.

Progress feels relentless, even inevitable. But why the heck are we even competing?

And we see that unsustainable progress, too, with figure skating. The Russian coaches are starving their women's figure skaters and making them jump higher and faster at younger ages, while doing long-term damage to their backs. Everyone wondered whether that was where the future of the sport was going.

But Alysa Liu showed us there is another way. She said, No one’s gonna starve me or tell me what I can and can’t eat. No one tells me what I’m gonna wear. No one tells me how my hair is gonna be. No one’s gonna try to change me.

We can structure our lives around joy. We can compete at the highest levels, but not focus on the outcome. Joy is not the reward; it must be embedded in the process. What Alysa has taught me, and maybe the whole world, who are all so captivated by her performance, is that joy is not antithetical to being great at something. And maybe even more than that: that joy is necessary to pursue something deeply, otherwise it leads to burnout and disillusionment.

As she said after her electrifying performance, “That’s what I’m f*cking talking about.”

what (i think) alysa cares about

There is a lot of discourse online about how Alysa has an IDGAF attitude, how her quitting and coming back to her sport is a sign that tiger parenting doesn’t work. Her father is an immigrant from China who fled from the CCP after organizing the 1989 Tiananmen protests, and became a lawyer and decided to have five kids via surrogates.

Actually, I think it’s the complete opposite.

Alysa does care. She cares so much about her sport. She loves it; her desire is what drives her skating and what makes it so captivating, and her joy is radiant through the screen. What she doesn’t care about is medaling, or at least that is not the focus. And that ease allows her to land jumps and stay consistent in her routine.

And her “tiger father,” who claimed to spend almost a million dollars on Alysa’s skating education? That is true dedication. Maybe it’s the Chinese-American in me, but I respect it.

But that dedication has a dark side. There is a clip of him praising 12-year-old Alysa for being strong and pushing to compete in the Junior Nationals, even when she had a bad fever, and the Bay Area Chinese sports community clapping upon hearing she received a high score, as if persevering through illness is a sign of strength. When asked to speak of her experience competing in the Junior Nationals while sick, she said that she wouldn’t continue competing if she knew there would be long-term damage, like an injury. But in what world is that normal, for a kid to be praised for pushing through a fever to deliver results? This incident is probably the tip of the iceberg—one of many compounding factors that led to her burnout.

Alysa is open about her ADHD, and I think people with ADHD actually need a lot of structure, not less. They can thrive on structure, but only if they feel they have autonomy and independence. And her leaving the sport, and coming to it with her own terms, is her reclaiming her life and her artistry. Her father’s role, then, was to step back, to learn how to let go. But without his guidance, his presence, his pressure, and the control he had over her life at a young age, she probably would not be able to get to the pinnacle of her sport.

When she came back to skating, Alysa had to learn to set boundaries with her father, to choose her coaches, to choose her music, choreography, and dresses. And that is what elevated her from becoming a skater to a true artist—because she cares deeply about her connection to her art as an extension of her personality and essence.

I refuse to not choose my own destiny.
— Alysa Liu

For me, the lesson is to nurture the Alysa in me and find the other Alysas in the world. There are many people I deeply admire for their energy, vibrance, and curiosity, and how they make their research uniquely theirs. I want to continue to learn from them. To nurture my lifelong curiosity, because that’s what I’m here for, after all. And most of all, to play.