Do the dirty work
Jasmine Sun on writing and doing everything to win
Photos by Karina Bao
Jasmine is an independent journalist covering Silicon Valley tech and culture. That’s the tight one-liner she’ll tell you if you ever meet her and ask what she does. What she won’t tell you is the million other lives she lives that seem to all perfectly culminate into that one liner.
There’s writer Jasmine, who spends 2-4 days buried in a post until it’s published.
“It’s going to be really boring following me around. I’m really just at my laptop all day.”
In the words of a close friend:
“Most people would like encouragement or a pat on the back, but Jasmine usually just needs 2-4 days to lock in. And that’s actually what makes her feel better. She finishes the piece and then comes back to life.”
Then there’s Jasmine the capital J Journalist. She goes to social events anthropologically. She’s measured in her tone and hyper-aware of how she comes off. She code-switches based on how long she’s known the person she’s talking to, how old they are, how close they are, which coast they’re from, and whether or not they might be an editor at the Times one day. The AI researchers respect her because she’s almost as knowledgeable about the industry than them, but still acts like she’s a beginner and peppers them with questions.
There’s also my friend Jasmine. The one who throws parties celebrating her friends quitting their jobs. Who has friends begging her to charge way more for her Substack because her writing is so good. The one who, every time I meet one of her friends, tells me to follow them around for a week and do a profile on them. The one who offered to edit my pieces and help me pitch major publications even though she works 80 hours a week because she believes in nurturing a young writer. She has everyone rooting for her, because how could you not? You want her on your team, because you know she’ll do everything to win.
I asked what motivates her to work so hard.
“I can’t tell you that. You need to figure that out yourself.”
I couldn’t for a while. Most of the time, it didn’t seem like she was having fun at all. Perched at her desk in front of a big bay window, she’ll stare at her laptop the entire day. She reassured me that she does in fact eat, just that she wasn’t hungry when I was. Sitting there, she radiates an aura that if anyone interrupts her, there might be a poison pill in their next meal.
She calls this “being in the hole”. Long-time friends know she’s not going to text back or be free to hang out until they see an email from her Substack in their inbox. When I was around, she was working on a piece titled claude code psychosis, which ironically is what it seems like Jasmine has when she’s deep in writing mode.
The world twists to the point where the piece she’s working on is all she can think or talk about. She’s obsessive with her research to the point where she got so wrapped up vibe coding that she didn’t have time to write. Her post was delayed for a week because every minor life problem was approached with “How can I use Claude Code to fix this?”
Even when she’s mentally occupied, she still makes a huge effort to hang out with people, and a close friend will be able to pull her out of the hole for a bit. She keeps a pretty good balance compared to 996 bros that use locking in as an excuse to avoid social anxiety.
J: “I have three events tonight but I’m probably going to skip two because I don’t really know them and really want to finish this [post]. But A is my friend and I told him I’d be there so I’m going to his.”
And she did. And she didn’t seem like a zombie who was so locked up in the piece she was writing that she couldn’t maintain a conversation about anything else. We’d have coffee and dinner with her friends of varying closeness and have a great hang each time. Jasmine seemed pretty fine, far from being in the hole. Though I always sensed the worry sitting in the back of her mind; that social time will break her concentration, and the piece won’t be as good.
She often talked about the time she shadowed one of her mentors. He took her to all of his meetings, even the ones with people who are pretty high up in the world, and treated her with a high level of seriousness when she was getting started as a solo writer. After each meeting, they’d debrief about how he came off. Jasmine asked me the same, and I’d give her my analysis.
—
Aadil: “I noticed you talked more slowly at first with the person we just met and sped up the longer the conversation went on.”
Jasmine: “Yeah, I normally talk really fast but slow it down for new people so they don’t get spooked.”
—
A: “I liked this friend the best. The other people seemed a little weird.”
J: “Oh yeah those other people aren’t my main friends. You’ll meet the main friends later this week. Do you mostly hang out with people you know well?”
A: “Yeah I guess. I already feel like I don’t get enough time around my close friends with everyone working so much.”
J: “I definitely prefer hanging out with my close friends but I like having a mix of interesting people around always.”
—
A: “Isn’t it odd having me analyze you?”
J: “No, I like it, it’s really helpful. Tell me my tics.”
A: “Well I don’t think you take compliments very well. Every time someone compliments you, you respond with ‘that’s cute’. And sometimes, when it’s crunch time, you cut off the ends of your words like someone speaking Cantonese.”
*Jasmine laughs*
Jasmine started out wanting me to only shadow her for two days but ended up settling for five. Initially it seemed like she thought of it as a distraction, and joked about how she would fire me if I was annoying1. But there’s a deep part of her that genuinely wants everyone around her to win. She has high standards for competence, so she’s constantly giving me feedback on asking better questions, grilling her friends, and talking about how I can’t just be writing ‘puff pieces’.
I’m far from her first mentee. Her younger sister also recently started a career in product management, though Jasmine will deny having any influence. Her sister’s friends at Stanford often call her for advice, so much that Jasmine says she’ll only talk to the friends her sister really likes. She’ll act annoyed, like helping others is a distraction, but you can tell she enjoys being a positive influence on people.
She got into creative writing at nine years old via an after school program run by former writers that compiled every kid’s stories into a book. With her best friend, she later started Reboot and got people who aren’t typically writers to produce creative works and published them all in a magazine that’s spanned five volumes over the past five years. She didn’t see the link until I pointed it out, but believing in people early and nurturing them seems core to her character. As she pushes me and everyone around her, I can’t help but wonder how much she must push herself.
It’s a mystery how Jasmine isn’t tired all the time. She’d write one day, do meetings on another, write in between the meetings, have a packed social calendar even on the weekdays, and schedule an 8am run after sleeping at 1am the night before. She did an article on Chinese peptides for the New York Times so I thought that’s what she was on, but nope. Just caffeine and vibes2.
For Jasmine, writing is a game. Talk to people, write something, post it, and enjoy the discourse you’ve caused. That’s what she told me, so I assumed the fun part of her job was finally being able to post.
She doesn’t like being attention-jacked for the whole day, stuck refreshing the stats page and constantly checking for comments and emails. And I get it. For someone who’s doing everything, the worst form of torture is a day where you don’t do anything.
So if writing days mean being stuck in a hole, social days are kind of nice but take away from writing, and posting days mean she can’t get anything else done, where’s the fun?
Jasmine is a tryhard. After 4 years of working at Substack, she quit to become a full time writer3. An independent capital J Journalist. That’s been her dream ever since she started writing. She spent middle school debating, reading millennial blogs and Reddit, and being a featured writer on Medium.
If you ask her, she’ll tell you all of it’s fun, even though she’s not laughing and smiling whenever you see her. She’s living the dream every day, because nothing compares to seeing something you’ve put your entire soul into come to life in a way that teaches other people, inspires them to put out their own work, or otherwise touches them so much that they just have to talk about it.
“I wouldn’t write if I couldn’t publish. Maybe little notes here and there, but definitely not long form essay writing, and especially not research pieces.”
It’s all of it, but take away any individual part and it’s not worth it.
Paul Graham talks about how doing great work requires choosing something you have a natural aptitude for, a deep interest in, and offers broad scope. Jasmine gets bored easily so what keeps it fun for her is being able to hop around topics. She’s as rooted in researching Chinese peptides as she is AI as she is tech policy. Infinite scope, for a skill she’s been practicing since she was a kid, about topics like AI, China, and policy that she’s been interested in since middle school. Everything is inherently enjoyable if you’re producing great work.
I asked one of her friends to describe her, and the word he used was ‘presidential’.
Aadil: “What do you mean by that?”
Jasmine’s friend: “Like she’s aware of and manages multiple constituencies. It’s the former debater in her. She plays the status games, super aware of how she comes off, good at debating and getting to the root of things.”
A: “Maybe she’s diplomatic?”
JF: “Yeah but she’s too slick to be diplomatic. But slick isn’t the right word because she’s not sleazy, she’s actually very sincere. But she’s cool too, diplomats are a little lame. Presidential, trust me.”
Jasmine rolls her eyes throughout this whole conversation as we’re laughing. I could see it so clearly. I always got the feeling watching her that even though she’s an incredible writer and reporter, she could do anything.
Her first article in the NYT was the cover of the Sunday edition, the most coveted slot in the Times’ weekly publishing cycle. And it was no accident. It took over 100 pages of research notes, 50 interviews to quote just 4 people, 7 different drafts, and hundreds of back and forth emails with editors. Each of the 2000 words in that article was hand-placed to produce a single banger.
She was a product manager at Substack and claims she’s not a good growth PM but they smashed every single metric while she led the team because there was so much market pull. She told her bosses this, that she wasn’t actually responsible and it was just market forces, and later got to work on much better projects because obviously they didn’t believe her. I don’t even believe her. She’s modest to the point where you can’t trust her to talk about herself accurately.
Even as I follow her around to write a profile, I get the feeling she could do my job better than me. I ask her friends how they would describe Jasmine in three words and she immediately says “that’s a bad question”, then gives me a better one4.
What Jasmine does now fits her perfectly, but I could easily see her being a successful founder or AI researcher making a few million dollars and escaping the permanent underclass. Yet, for better or for worse, Jasmine was indoctrinated into thinking about policy and ethics from high school debate, which means she’s cursed with the ambition of leaving the world better than she found it.
One of Jasmine’s favourite quotes is:
“If you do everything, you’ll win.”
J: “That’s the nature of this job. You have to do everything. And you have to love doing everything or you will fail.”
That original quote is from Lyndon B. Johnson, America’s 36th president. I have no idea where Jasmine will go from here, but that’s where she sets her ambitions at. If she’s already doing everything today, imagine how big she’ll win ten years from now.
You can find Jasmine here. DM her and tell her I sent you.
To be fair, she also said I could fire her if she was boring.
And a little oxytocin, which is the only peptide she's ever tried.
My friend Charles says he has one rule: "never trust a full time writer". He later implied something I often reflect on myself; that someone who writes for a living sees the world to write about it, rather than to live it.
Jasmine for president! This was so beautiful. I think the world would be so different if everyone was witnessed this hard.
This is not anthropology. It’s using a scientific term and pretending journalism is anthropology.