Personal Growth

All I Want for Christmas Is You” is playing in a department store somewhere right now. Probably driving some cashier insane. That was me once. December 2007, holiday job behind the register…

On 9 April 2020, I published my first post on Steady Compounding. I was still serving out my scholarship bond, uncertain about my next step, and LinkedIn outreach during the pandemic went nowhere. So I decided to build something myself….

April 2012: I got the opportunity of a lifetime. Then I signed away 1,460 days. What that heavy pen taught me about the cost of freedom.

Back in secondary school, I remember one hot afternoon in March 2007. We were in physics class, under a ceiling fan that wobbled more than it spun. My desk was covered in vandalism—profanities, names of crushes, simple greetings. Some old…

AWS made it possible to start a tech company with just a credit card. Pay only for what you use, scale instantly when you succeed. Guangzhou offers the same revolution for physical products—prototype with hundreds, scale to millions, no factory…

I’ve recently returned from my trip to China, visiting Suzhou, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. The journey took me down memory lane—my first visit to Suzhou and Shanghai was in late 2008. That 16-year gap gave me a unique lens to measure…

For most of 2024, life was great. But as the year drew to a close, my dad’s health took a sharp and dramatic turn. He’s been smoking since his teens—five decades of cigarettes—and had always managed to shrug off the…

In primary school, I remember learning how trees constantly compete with each other for sunlight, each one stretching and outgrowing the others in a fight for survival. It made sense at the time. I often saw trees leaning toward the…

Last week, I shared Roger Federer’s inspiring Dartmouth commencement address on my weekly newsletter—The 3-Bullet Sunday. If you haven’t had a chance to watch the full 25-minute video yet, I highly recommend it! But I also wanted to distill some…

stop preaching, start asking

When it comes to reading, my goal isn’t productivity per se. Instead, I allow my curiosity to guide me, often entering a state of reflection. Over time, this approach has led me to read more, enabling me to compound my…

Recording of the Zoom book club discussion at the bottom of this post. Having written for about three years now, I’m mightily aware that I always have to put the most important thing first. Because our attention spans, much like…