Vietnam is a country with a rich but turbulent history. It’s lived through occupation by the Chinese, the French, and the Americans as recent as two generations ago. Foreign cultural influence and scars from not-yet-forgotten conflicts blend to make Saigon, known at its peak as the “Pearl of the Far East,” a complex and deeply interesting city.

Amongst digital nomads, however, its southern capital, Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City), is a polarizing and controversial place: some love it enough to settle here for months or years at a time, while others leave quickly and never give it a second thought. A short walk down any street obviates the reasons for this: one’s senses are swiftly overloaded–motorbikes whiz around, narrowly missing each other and any uninitiated pedestrians who dare to cross; the sounds of horns and honking are present at all hours of day, as are the clarion calls of street side vendors; smells of delicious meals from any number of amazing local joints waft through the air, mixing with and ameliorating the common odors of waste, vomit, and urine; heat and humidity compound with dust and debris to create an often hot, dirty, and uncomfortable environment.

To an outsider, Saigon can look and feel like untamed, unfettered chaos. And yet, in the time I’ve lived here I’ve found myself mesmerized by the energy of this city. It’s chaotic, yes, but it makes me feel alive. So much so, in fact, that I decided early in my stay here to skip spending the month of April in Penang, Malaysia, and instead extended my time in Saigon to two months. (There are, of course, other good reasons for having done this: the time, financial, and mental costs of switching locations every month turn out to make 2-3 months a more ideal amount of time to spend in each place when also trying to get work done.)

Unlike Chiang Mai, which, despite being the second largest population center in Thailand, had a distinctively “small town” feel to it, Saigon is a true, full-blown city, and it turns out to be the first city I’ve ever lived in for any real amount of time. I’ve been surprised by how much I enjoy the city lifestyle here–in the past I’ve always preferred sleepy college towns and quiet suburbs with easy access to nature. While Saigon doesn’t have much to offer tourists passing through for

Bánh xèo–a savory crepe-like Vietnamese dish

just a few days, it does have a slew of interesting coffee shops, bars, and live music venues for the slower-paced traveler or longer-term expat to experience. There’s also a lush variety of foods to sample from all over the country–Vietnamese food is, as it turns out, much more diverse than the typical phở and bánh mì sorely under representing this cuisine in the States–certainly more than one could experience in weeks, months, or even years here.

 

Contents:

Cost of Living

Despite being a city, Saigon is quite affordable, making it a prime location for potential expats and digital nomads. A month’s rent in a serviced apartment close to the city center runs typically between $300 and $400/mo, while meals can be found for anywhere between $.75 (street food) and $30/meal (an upscale restaurant). A membership at a good coworking space with a flexible desk runs $90/mo. Braver travelers can rent a motorbike for ~$60/mo or purchase and re-sell for around $250. By my estimation a nomad really looking to save, or an entrepreneur seeking to extend her runway could live a decent life in Saigon for under $700/mo (less, even, if you’re willing to pinch pennies).

People and Community

Frustrated and angry bloggers sometimes give Vietnam and the Vietnamese people a bad wrap. Personally, I’ve had a lot of great experiences with both Vietnamese locals and the expat community in Saigon, so I feel I have a responsibility to set the record straight.

Locals

Some people hear stories about swindlers and hustlers in Vietnam–people who will overcharge tourists because they don’t speak the language, for example–and imagine that all Vietnamese people are liars and cheats. Of course, as is the case anywhere one might go in the world, these people do exist, and one should exercise caution and common sense when traveling. These people are, however, far from a majority. Most Vietnamese people I’ve met–business owners, students, Viet Kieu–have impressed me with their kindness, their generosity, their work ethic, and their optimism. One student even befriended me, showed me around, and came back to help me when my motorbike broke down during a long road trip back to Saigon. I would honestly not have known what to do without his help.

As an American, I find it especially encouraging how little animosity anyone ever showed me despite the fact that the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War) happened so recently–if anything there was a distinctly pro-American sentiment, especially among the younger generation. Though war is terrible, I find myself hopeful knowing that in just a few generations two peoples that were previously in conflict can so easily forgive and forget the transgressions made by their forebears.

To be fair to all involved, however, as an Asian American I likely have a different experience in Asia than other Western travelers do. Everywhere I’ve visited in Asia so far I’ve been mistaken for a local until I opened my mouth to speak, and since most Asian cultures have similar customs and values, my pseudo-Asian upbringing helps me relate to these people more naturally.

Entrepreneurs and Expats

One of the initial reasons I chose Saigon is because I read that it has more of an entrepreneurial community than some of the other hubs for digital nomads like Chiang Mai. Saigon is, indeed,  home to an up and coming tech scene in one of the fastest growing economies in the world. There is, however, still much room for the entrepreneurial scene in Saigon to grow and evolve–it doesn’t yet have the same energy, infrastructure, or prevalence as it does in Silicon Valley.

Nevertheless, there are at least a few pockets of very interesting people. In my opinion, Start Coworking Campus, where I chose to both live and work for the majority of my time in Saigon, is one of those places. Admittedly, I didn’t know much about Start when I booked my room there in December–I chose them because I wanted to try something new with coliving, and because their marketing promised a heavy emphasis on community, which can be hard to find while moving around. I was super pleasantly surprised by Start, and I honestly can’t rave about them enough. They deliver well on their promise of community, with daily community lunches and plenty of events throughout the month.

Most, but not all, of the people I met at Start were somehow related to tech, though not all of them were actually nomads. Saigon is home to quite a few long-term expats–sometimes former nomads–many of whom form a consistent backbone for community at Start despite a constantly rotating cast of travelers. After just a few weeks there, I really felt that I knew all of the regular faces, and after two months I felt that I had made some cool friends with whom I hope very much to keep in touch. Over lunch and during random breaks throughout the day, I’d often find myself engaging in deeply interesting conversations about a wide variety of topics, including political theory, global economics, philosophy, and current trends in tech. I can’t be sure because I haven’t yet seen that much, but I have a strong hunch that communities like this are pretty rare to find.

Dating

Just as I’ve been searching for a sense of community while abroad, I’ve also been experimenting with dating and romantic companionship. When I left the States to become a nomad, I expected that doing so meant I’d realistically have to put romance on hold until I settled back down in a single place. I felt that the odds of finding someone right for me while abroad, and the difficulty of pursuing something serious or long-term while moving around simply left real romance out of the question, but perhaps there was no reason not to experiment anyway. Much to my surprise, this turned out to just be the latest in what’s becoming a long string of false assumptions I made about traveling and the nomadic lifestyle–it didn’t take me long to fall in love with a beautiful, intelligent, and deeply reflective local Vietnamese entrepreneur.

When I landed in Vietnam, the differences in the dating scene struck me almost immediately–whereas in Chiang Mai and Silicon Valley I’ve often found dating frustrating, I quickly had four dates scheduled for my first week in Saigon. For the first time in my life I felt like I had more dating prospects than I could possibly have time to talk to, a complaint I normally only ever hear from my girl friends. It also felt easier than ever to open conversations and get dates scheduled.

Some of the difference could perhaps be attributed to me and a general mindset shift on dating: in the interest of putting myself in uncomfortable situations and learning more about dating, I decided to be more open-minded about first dates and made it a goal to quickly push for an in-person meeting with any girl I messaged back and forth with. Most of this, however, is likely attributable to Saigon and its particular dating pool: I tend to be more popular with Asian women, and densely populated international cities tend to have more young single women who speak English confidently enough to communicate. (By contrast, Chiang Mai was a much smaller city notably lacking in English-speaking confidence.)

Despite having more options than ever, I met the woman who would become my girlfriend on literally the second night I was in Saigon. In fact, she was the first date I went on in my new city, and probably the first local Vietnamese woman I’d really interacted with.

As is becoming more and more cliché these days, we met on Tinder. My expectations were pretty low, and our pre-date conversation barely had an ounce of substance to it, but I wanted to push myself out of the comfort zone so I asked her on a date anyway. To my surprise, she agreed to a hastily scheduled date for later that same night, and not two hours later I found myself walking anxiously to a craft brewery in the center of town.

I remember being terrified on my way to our first date–not because I felt nervous about impressing her, but because a couple of things she had said and done left me super confused about what to expect. Most of my pre-date anxiety centered around the fears that she wouldn’t look like her photos (this happened to me in Chiang Mai), that I’d get stuck in an awkward conversation with a weirdo or, worse, that I’d somehow get murdered. (Hey, I’m not proud of that thought, but I was in an entirely new city and my brain was running wild with catastrophic worst-case scenarios :P.)

When I walked in I was pleasantly surprised to find a woman whose beauty and personality would be hard to fully and accurately portray in still photography. She was funny and made me laugh easily (she’d later tell me that she thought I was laughing way too hard at her shitty jokes, but I honestly found them that funny). It turned out we’re both tech entrepreneurs–her as a designer and a product manager, me as a jack-of-all-trades software engineer–and could understand each other’s careers and daily job struggles. She shared a lot of my interests as well, and it quickly became apparent that we had extremely congruous mindsets, perspectives, and worldviews.

In short, I wasn’t sure what to expect at first but I was totally and completely blown away by the time I parted ways with her nearly four hours later. In fact, I was so blown away that I was almost scared in the opposite sense from before–things just seemed too uncannily similar and way too good to be true. I felt like either I had been super thoroughly stalked or the perfect woman had somehow just manifested before my eyes.

For awhile now, I’ve professed my belief in the law of “fuck yes or no”–if my gut doesn’t scream “fuck yes” about someone I don’t pursue them further. At that point, however, I’d never experienced a true “fuck yes” after a first date with a total stranger, and I’d been on enough first dates to begin to wonder whether or not the bar for going on a second date had been set too high–after all, maybe sometimes one just needs a couple of lukewarm experiences before a deeper connection can occur. My first date with this girl proved to me that the bar for second dates was, in fact, not set too high. She was a total and complete “fuck yes,” and now that I know that that’s possible I don’t think I’d ever want to settle for less.

Though I did go on dates with a few other women, I very quickly lost interest in anyone but her. She continued to be a “fuck yes” for me for many, many more dates and I’m now proud and excited to call her my girlfriend. She understands, challenges, pushes, and inspires me all in ways I didn’t know I could expect from a partner. Meeting her and choosing to enter a committed relationship with her has also tested some of my self-perceptions and my worldview.

Some of my past dating experiences left me questioning both my adequacy and my competency to meet and charm a potential partner through the silly, awkward dance we call modern dating. In particular, the last time I dated someone with serious intentions, through no purposeful fault of either party, it left me feeling like I didn’t know what I was doing, and like experiencing the kind of connection I hoped for with someone I found extremely attractive might be impossible for me without further growth. With my new girlfriend, though, I’ve come to realize that I am already enough, and that, with the right person, it should always feel that way. I shouldn’t need to feel like I have to constantly pursue someone to win their approval–the attraction can and should be mutual enough that a connection develops smoothly and naturally on its own.

Wanting something real and serious with my new girlfriend does leave me with new questions about where and how love fits into my larger worldview, however. Much of my personal philosophy centers around maximizing authenticity and growth. These are easy things to solve for independently, when one has no responsibilities or other people to consider, but they become complicated when a romantic partner enters the picture. Prior to coming to Saigon and meeting my new girlfriend, I thought that I might travel around the world and work for myself for a few years, chasing growth and adventure wherever it waits to be found. I thought I’d have at least a few years before I might meet anyone serious (I never expected to fall in love on the road).

Having found her though, I find myself faced with the serious question of returning to Saigon to spend more time with her in the near future. I know that successful relationships occasionally require sacrifice and compromise, so I find myself asking what I can and can’t authentically compromise on. If being with her means sacrificing some amount of travel and exploration, can I justify that at this point in my life? But even as I consider giving up on growth from exploration, I find myself wondering how our relationship might allow us to help each other grow and become even more authentic versions of ourselves. If we’re not careful, though, could it do just the opposite?

I also find myself asking questions about the implications of falling for a foreign woman in a land far away from where I previously called home, though I know it’s too early to be thinking super long-term about such a young relationship. Before meeting her I always just assumed I’d probably meet a nice American woman some day, and we’d probably settle down in the States. I never really had a good reason to think this, it’s just one of those assumptions that fills a space and goes unchallenged for a long time. Now, however, that idea is being questioned and replaced with a more globally inclusive idea of what it might mean to settle down with someone someday.

Some of these questions frighten me, and I don’t have great answers to most of them. I am, regardless, excited to find myself and my perspective being pushed in new and completely unexpected ways–ways they never could have when I was just an unattached solo traveler. My girlfriend and I are long distance right now, as I’m back in the States and still have plans to travel to France for at least 3 months before I might consider returning to Asia. Though I know the distance will be hard, and relationships are an art, I’m very much hoping that she and I will have a chance to explore answers to these questions together, one step at a time.

Exploring

Saigon is a large city, organized into 12 numbered districts and several more named ones–this sometimes gives running around the city an oddly Hunger Games-like feeling–but even so is less of an adventure-driven place than Chiang Mai, with fewer grand, iconic, and touristy things to do. It does, nevertheless, make for a great homebase to explore the South of Vietnam, and if you’re willing to dig a little bit there are fascinating and beautiful remnants of a culture extant in Saigon before much of its recent history, which hauntingly feels as if it is slowly slipping away as the younger generations forget. Since I spent a lot of time dating in Saigon, I also found that it can be a very romantic city, though many of the city’s best spots are hidden away off street level, and would have been very difficult for me to find without a local.

The many districts of Saigon

Live Music

Saigon turns out to be a city full of music, and there are quite a few cool places to go for different kinds of music. My personal favorites were the places where they’d sing old Saigonese songs from before the War. Most of the music in this time period is incredibly beautiful even not being able to understand the music, and really creates the sense of haunting nostalgia I alluded to earlier.

Cafe Vừng ơi, Mở ra

17 Ngô Thời Nhiệm, phường 6, Quận 3, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

In English, the name of this place translates to “Open, Sesame.” My now girlfriend brought me here on our fourth date and it blew my mind. To find this place, one has to walk through a pretty sketchy alleyway, then through a rather nondescript door and up several flights of stairs. I like to joke with my girlfriend that she brought me here to murder me, but then thought better of it and took me to hear some live music upstairs instead. Step through the door here and you’ll be transported to a different world, full of candle light and beautifully romantic music. The artists and the music here are top notch and they play a mix of beautiful Vietnamese classics and popular romantic songs in English.

Le Saigonnais

9 Thái Văn Lung, Bến Nghé, Quận 1, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam

This one’s hard to find because it’s not actually listed on Google Maps, but it’s in the same building as the Bâng Khuâng Café at the address listed above. This place is truly a window into old Saigon, even down to the furniture and decorations. Many of the patrons here are Saigonese people who either lived in the old days themselves, or remember them wistfully. There is almost an underground resistance-like vibe to this place, as if this is where people would meet to plan the second coming of Old Saigon. The music here is, of course, beautiful, and they play mostly classic Vietnamese songs from Old Saigon.

Craft Breweries

Saigon has a burgeoning craft brewing scene, which is heavily influenced by American expats and packed with loads of interesting, delicious beers. My favorites were:

Heart of Darkness

31D Lý Tự Trọng, Bến Nghé, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam

I’m biased because I also met my girlfriend here, and we went back to hang out a few times, but it does have the most cozy, intimate, and well-decorated vibes of any of the breweries I visited in Saigon. My personal favorite here is th Eloquent Phantom Imperial Stout.

East West Brewing Co.

181 – 185 Lý Tự Trọng, Phường Bến Thành, Quận 1, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam

I actually had their beers here a couple of times before I went to visit their brewery. The venue is nice–a well-decorated and mood lit warehouse with seating on the roof for those willing to climb the stairs. I’m not usually that into Belgian beer styles, but their Belgian Blonde and Belgian Darks are both very good, and their Independence Stout is fantastic.

Pasteur Street Brewing

144 Pasteur, Bến Nghé, Quận 1, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam

Pasteur Street is iconic in Saigon as one of the first craft breweries to crop up there. There beer is quite good, and they try some interesting things there–I tried a dark beer here with jalapeno and other distinctly Mexican flavors. The place itself, though, is, unfortunately kind of sterile, so I wouldn’t personally recommend hanging out here.

Weekend Adventures

Some of my favorite memories from Vietnam are from riding long distances on the back of my trusty motorbike on my way to some weekend adventure somewhere. While I didn’t spend all of my weekends in Vietnam off on adventures, there were quite a few memorable ones.

Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta actually describes a very large region in the South of Vietnam. Many people, myself included, initially make the mistake of thinking that it’s a single place or attraction that one can visit. In reality, you could drive for nearly 8 hours from Saigon and still not reach the end of the Mekong Delta.

That said, one of the most popular attractions in the Mekong Delta are the floating markets–markets run on clusters of small boats in wide rivers connecting trade between villages that until very recently had no easy road access to each other. The most widely publicized place for tourists to see the floating markets is Cần Thơ, though many of the locals will express that they feel the markets here are overly commercialized for tourists.

I personally didn’t have time to venture further into the Delta than this–Cần Thơ is already a 5 hour drive out of Saigon–but I enjoyed both the drive there and the tour I took of the markets. I would love for my tour to have spent more time moving in and through the market itself so that we as passengers could participate in it a little bit more, but it was nevertheless a very cool experience to have coffee and phở made and then served to me on a boat.

If I had more time, I would have considered going to An Giang province, further into the Delta, in search of a more local floating market and the Trà Sư forest.

Đà Lạt

Đà Lạt is an old French vacation spot nestled in the mountains to the East of Saigon. It’s a ~7 hour bus ride to get there from Saigon, but it’s a worthwhile break from the city routine. Temperatures in Đà Lạt are usually quite a bit cooler than Saigon, and this time of year a typical day in Saigon is humid and hot (90+ degrees F). People are much more laid back in Đà Lạt, and if you plan for it there’s plenty of nature to explore.

Cu Chi Tunnels

The tunnels are an old remnant of the war located about an hour north on the outskirts of Saigon. It’s interesting to experience, and it’s one of those

A cramped entrance to the Cu Chi Tunnels

things that you “should” do while you’re in Saigon, but I honestly felt a bit

underwhelmed by them. I got the idea pretty fast after 20 minutes, did find the engineering behind the intricate tunnel systems fascinating, but then was quickly over it. If traveling on your own by motorbike, however, one can keep driving north to find more interesting and less staged things. I ended up at a very colorful buddhist temple overlooking a large lake and had a good time.

Work

Having fewer touristy things to do in Saigon did help to make it a more productive setting, though this was perhaps balanced out by wanting to spend time on my new relationship. My overarching goals have not changed much over the past couple months: the aim right now is to launch a functional product and create product offering that might net me recurring paid customers or money in the bank. As expected, my previous consulting engagements have mostly wound down, leaving most of my time available for my own projects.

On average,

Serious mode: engaged.

I spent about 6+ hours working each day, and though I do think I’ve accomplished some important things in the last couple months, I am feeling more and more behind on the actual feature development required to launch my initial product offering.

I had a Facebook Ads credit expiring at the end of March, so invested time in a marketing experiment to spend the credit on. My goal was to create the marketing site that I think I will use when the MVP of the product launches–past versions of the site advertised moonshot feature sets that likely would not exist for many months past my initial product offering. Doing this required me to think very critically about what will and won’t be in my MVP, and raised a lot of concerning questions for me about how I will differentiate my product from my competitors in its early stages. (I won’t have a mobile app for some time, and don’t plan for one in the MVP, and whether or not to include some of the cool differentiating features before launching the product has been a topic of some internal debate.)

In the process of doing research on my audience to improve my marketing copy, I concerningly learned that the potential market for my product is much smaller than I originally thought. Unfortunately, in total, the number of people interested in Getting Things Done on Facebook in the US is below 50k. For English-speakers globally, that number is still only about 200k. Unexpectedly, the largest market segment for my product appears to be Italian women

Facebook Audience Insights for GTD in the USA

(600k), so I may actually want to consider translating my product into Italian in the future. (For those wondering, I used Facebook Audience Insights to find this information.)

Given the success of Getting Things Done and David Allen, I previously just assumed that my total market was somewhere in the millions, which meant I hadn’t been thinking super critically about market saturation for my ads or other experiments. With millions of people potentially interested in my product, I didn’t care much if I alienated a few thousand in the process of refining my product offering. My thought has also always been that I would really only need Serenity to hit 1000 paying customers for it to be a huge success, a number which I previously thought would be a very small percentage of the overall market. Now that I know the market is an order of magnitude smaller than I thought it was I need to think more carefully about how I expose the product to the market at every stage, and I’m a bit more pessimistic about the lower and upper bound earning potentials for this project.

Regardless, once I had a pretty a good idea of what my product roadmap looks like, I completed a design overhaul of the Serenity marketing website, split tested some of the information on the page, and added pricing information to the email sign-up page to loosely validate the price point I’ve proposed for my product. I wish I had thought of enticing people to give me their email addresses in exchange for a free month of hypothetical product usage before–this has turned out to be the simplest and most effective way to test my early pricing model.

The results of this experiment were positive–the ad click-through and on-page conversion rates were very reasonable, and I collected a fair number of email addresses despite the inclusion of pricing information. In retrospect, however, since Serenity is a product in an already crowded space, I could probably have just trusted my competitors’ pricing models (most of them do have recurring paying customers) and foregone explicitly validating pricing myself.

At this point it’s clear to me that I can make some money off of Serenity, but it’s not clear how much money, and it’s also not clear how much time I’ll need to invest in the product before the cash starts to flow. Even so, I’ve decided to move forward with the product for a few reasons: 1) the main investment I’m making in the product is my time and runway, both of which are still abundant 2) even if Serenity can’t get me to my income goals by itself, some relatively passive income is better than none and 3) I am actually very excited about the future of the product, and think it could have an important role to play in a larger suite of products I hope to create to help people set and achieve their goals.

My next milestone is to launch the product in public beta. Since the market is small and I don’t want to alienate potential customers, but I do want to start collecting signal about what is and isn’t working, I’ve decided that positioning the product as a free beta is more prudent than just slapping a payment portal on the thing and letting the market decide when it’s worth something. I will, however, be offering beta users the chance to pre-purchase subscriptions for the product at a significantly discounted rate, which should help me detect when the product is truly providing enough value that people are ready to pay for it.

By my current estimates, I’m a few weeks away from being able to launch the first beta version of the product in production. This month is going to be hectic, since I’m taking care of administrative things and spending a lot of time with friends and family while I’m briefly back in the States, but I am hoping to find a way to push to this milestone before the end of May. I’ll probably start reaching out to close friends and family to try out the product and give me feedback soon–if you’re reading this and that sounds interesting to you, please reach out :).

Sanity

Things have been pretty good lately. For the most part, I haven’t experienced much fear related to self-employment in the last couple months. The low cost of living in Vietnam, has helped me to realize that if I live in the right places, I could continue working on my own projects almost indefinitely. While this revelation does wonders for any money- or survival- related anxieties I might have felt, it’s tended to have the opposite effect on self-discipline and self-motivation. Not having external deadlines and not having any real external pressure to deliver means that my motivation really has to come from within. Connecting well with my deeper, internal drive still doesn’t happen consistently, but I think it’s slowly getting better.

Meeting my girlfriend has, for the most part, helped here. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve certainly found myself sacrificing productive time to be with her, and she and I are trying to learn to balance that better going forward. But her belief in me does sometimes help bolster my belief in myself and, more importantly, some of the ideas she’s introduced me to–mainly the more secular sides of buddhism–have forced me to think a lot more about my fear of death.

It’s been a long time since I’ve thought of myself as someone who fears death, but when I really examined it I realized that my attitude towards the brevity of life is usually to shrug it off in a way that’s so dismissive it’s almost denial. In truth, I think that this is probably how most of us deal with the question of death, but it’s not necessarily the most healthy. Through buddhism, and to some degree through stoicism as well, I’m learning to embrace and accept the reality of my own impermanence, and the reality of the impermanence of any ego-driven legacy I might want to leave behind. While it is terrifying to remember that life is short, and that my stay here on Earth is really just a blink of an eye, it does provide a sobering reminder that, while I am still young and there is still time, there is no time to waste. There is a very real cost to spending my time doing or not doing something even if my savings could last me a decade or more some place in the world.

I’d say I’m optimistic. Most days, fear doesn’t visit anymore, and I do have some good tools for kicking myself back into disciplined focus when I find myself goofing off. Hopefully I can build that into a habit and use it to deliver my first product, and maybe many more.

It’s been about a month since I left the States, and, though I expect there will be many more twists and turns on my journey, I think I can already confidently say that leaving to travel was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. Learning to balance work, tourism, and new friends has, indeed, been challenging. While overall productivity has slowed a bit, I can’t help but feel that my sense of growth and fulfillment have both accelerated.

Despite being on the learning curve, I think I did decently on my goals for the month. My consulting engagement has, unfortunately, stretched on a little bit, and I’ve only just recently reached a point where it no longer needs my focus full-time. I had hoped that I’d get back to my own projects and start making some non-consulting income in February, but alas that hasn’t been the way of things. I did, however, make a lot of great friends and a lot of great memories in Chiang Mai. Here are some of my favorites, pulled from my vlog:

Meet Squeaky, my trusty pink steed. See us in your rear view mirror and be afraid.

I’m in Ho Chi Minh City–aka Saigon–now (though I’ll wait until next month to write in-depth about this wonderful new city), and my plan for March is to buckle down and finish releasing my first product into the world. I’d ideally like to have my first paid customer before I leave Southeast Asia at the end of April, and more ideally would love to have my first paid customer before the end of this month. As was the case in Chiang Mai, however, while work is a high priority, I’m also hoping to find time to really experience Vietnam, and discover new ways to push my comfort zone. In particular, dating, which didn’t end up being a huge emphasis in February despite some of my efforts, seems likely to be a focus area for me in March.

Moving abroad has done wonders for my morale. Before I left, I had a lot of fears about traveling, especially while still trying to get my business ideas off the ground. I worried that I’d be isolated without friends out here, that it would be impossible to form meaningful relationships with people on such small timescales, or that living abroad would be devastatingly unproductive.

The reality has been almost completely the opposite of my fears. Though I was nervous about meeting new people abroad at first, I found that my fear of isolation really motivated me to push my social comfort zone. I’ve never been the social traveler hanging out with strangers in hostel lounges, so I arrived in Chiang Mai with the self-perception that I’m not the kind of person who usually meets other travelers. When I left Chiang Mai, however, I did so feeling confident in my ability to start new conversations, and connect with new people everywhere I went. It’s become something of a habit to make eye contact with people when I walk into a room, to smile, and even to ask them where they’re from.

Despite my short length of stay in Chiang Mai, I got to know some people very well. I’ve left feeling like I now have friends all over the world, who I hope to meet-up with as I make my way through and around the world. My roommates, Richard and Kat, in particular, have become close friends whose company and counsel I value very highly. I’ve also met, and gotten to know, other nomads from all over the world, working on various interesting things. I’m beginning to open myself up to the idea that, even in a short length of time, it is possible to create a meaningful and valuable connection with someone, and that it is worth my time to invest in these relationships despite their semi-transient nature.

Productivity has been up and down while traveling. Since I’ve been consulting an hourly rate, I’ve been tracking my time very carefully, and have found that I usually work about 6 hours on an average day. At first, I found this number disconcerting: I normally expect that I’m getting at least 8 hours of work done each day. In reality, however, with all of the breaks modern knowledge workers take for lunch and other things, 6-7 hours is probably closer to right for a business day. For me personally, being abroad has definitely meant more time spent out at lunch, especially when meeting new and getting to know new people. It’s also meant less time spent working after dinner, which is also prime time to be spending with new friends. For the most part, I’ve been able to find enough of a routine to stay on task–usually I’d work out of a coworking space for the entire day, or out of a coffee shop for the afternoon.

I have, however, taken a good amount of advantage of the flexibility that being self-employed provides: where necessary to accommodate travel activities, I’ve taken impromptu 3-day weekends or half days off. Calibrating my balance of all of this is something I certainly want to continue working on going forward. I think that as an explorer, the first time I visit a new place, there’s likely to be some overhead in my wanting to really experience and get to know the place. At this point, though, I feel that if I ever return to Chiang Mai (and I really hope to), it will be easier for me to focus on work.

Through traveling, though, I’ve also been exposed to a wealth of new people and perspectives. Chiang Mai is, itself, a very laid back place–the locals tend to live simple lives and prefer it that way, and the nomads are often also a little more chill in their working mindsets than I’m used to coming from Silicon Valley. Many of the Europeans I’ve met have helped me to understand how the American work ethic is often perceived by the rest of the world: there’s a subtle belief that Americans are willing to commit kind of a frenetic and, potentially, ill-conceived trade-off in quality of life against the desire to be productive and accumulate wealth. Some have even considered moving to the States for work, but thought better of it after learning of the insane hours and work expectations often implicitly upheld by employers in places like Silicon Valley and New York City. To be fair, I’m learning as well that American salaries are also often much higher than their global counterparts, but I’ve also heard enough to begin to question whether or not our quality of life improves proportionally. In fact, I’d say that my early conclusions are so far that we Americans may actually have disproportionately low quality of life when plotted against our wages–an average worker making minimum wage in America is actually making more than some of the highest paying jobs in some places, but isn’t able to afford many of the basic amenities that some people value. This, among other things, has deeply challenged my perspective, my worldview, and my workview.

Of course, it hasn’t been all sunshine and roses abroad. On my third or fourth day in Chiang Mai, I experienced an extreme amount of anxiety around my situation and my decisions–so bad, in fact, that I felt it necessary to do some research on remote therapy solutions, so I might be able to unpack my experience with an expert. I couldn’t believe that I’d left the States. I couldn’t believe that I was in a new country. I was scared that I couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt, that I’d find myself alone in a strange place. I was afraid that I’d just bet my career against the house, and that I’d never recover.

By the end of my first week, however, the crisis had passed. Quite counter to my fears, as time goes on I’ve been finding that travel has produced many of the growth side-effects I had hoped it might. I can feel myself becoming more comfortable with uncertainty, in part because I’ve placed myself in more unplanned scenarios, and gained more confidence in my ability to figure things out. Meeting other people like me–nomads and entrepreneurs making a living while traveling the world–who share my values has also helped me internalize a deeper sense of acceptance and contentment with my decision to leave the normal bounds of society behind. I think much of this still has yet to play itself completely out, as I am also still riding on the stability of a cash influx from my recent consulting project, but I’d like to think that my fears have started to quiet themselves, and that the way is becoming clear to achieve some of my business goals for the year.

Saigon promises to be a very different experience from Chiang Mai. The energy here is chaotic and frenetic–frenzied, even–but it makes me feel very alive. This month, I’m trying a stint in a co-working and co-living space in the heart of the city called Start, sort of an experiment for me with a new type of living situation. My experience has already been very positive, and I’m looking forward to new friends, new foods, and new avenues for growth!!

The adventure begins! (Not that everything before this hasn’t been its own sort of adventure.) I’m actually writing this while en route to Chiang Mai, Thailand, the first of 3 destinations in South East Asia. I’m going to be in Thailand for an entire month, and now that I’ve actually had time to stop, think about it, and do a bit of research, I’m really excited. Chiang Mai sounds like an adventure-seeker’s paradise: scenic hikes offering both cultural immersion and physical challenge and a flourishing food culture complete with street vendors in bustling night markets. So many new things to see and experience!!

I have to admit, though, that the jump abroad is bittersweet–most beginnings are also endings. While I’ve never found it terribly sexy to say out loud, I lived at home with my parents for a full 6 months. I hadn’t originally planned to spend that much time at home, and I had also mentally prepared myself to go a bit insane moving back in with my parents. While it wasn’t always perfect, and it did occasionally test the limits of my sanity, I’m surprised to find myself incredibly grateful for the experience. A wise friend pointed out that most people have already spent the vast majority of the time they’re going to spend with their parents by the time they leave for college, so getting to spend another 6 whole months with my parents was a rare opportunity to build a deeper adult relationship with them, and really get to know them better at a time in my life when I’m starting to be able to contextualize their experiences and their choices. While I’m excited to forge ahead, and ready for a new chapter, I can’t help but feel nostalgic that my time at home has, yet again, come to close.

So, how did I spend my time in January? I obviously completed my travel preparations, as I’m (finally) safely on my way to Thailand. I set up an LLC, opened a business bank account, and took care of a bunch of other little logistics to make everything work. It was a bit of a mad dash, and I was honestly packing and prepping virtually up until the last few hours before I left, but I’m off :). I also made significant progress on my first consulting project. I unfortunately wasn’t able to finish it out completely in January, but I’d say it’s 80% done. Now I’m kind of just hoping the last 20% doesn’t take 80% of the time as they say. I didn’t get around to slapping a payment portal on Serenity, but I did spend a few hours setting up a couple of unrelated experimental projects that will exercise my long-dormant artificial intelligence expertise (I have a Master’s degree in AI and Computer Security, but haven’t done much with either in a few years). In all honesty, dabbling with some new projects probably wasn’t the most objectively smart way to spend my time, but I’m nevertheless feeling really excited about the discovery that my AI fundamentals are strong enough to teach myself more and potentially to apply to future products.

Consulting has had an interesting positive effect on my morale. Working on a project for someone else temporarily removes a certain amount of the uncertainty and anxiety around being self-employed: there’s no question as to whether or not I’m wasting my time since value for work has already been pre-negotiated with the client. Knowing for certain that I do have a way to make money if I ever need it is also very comforting–I knew that consulting was a possibility in theory before, but now it’s more tangibly true.

There are also some really useful processes I go through when consulting that I think could be useful for my own projects. I’m finding that the drive to complete a project quickly, and to impress a customer has naturally re-activated some of the skills that I honed at Palantir, but which I haven’t been disciplined about applying when working for myself. In executing at a professional level for a client, I have to be good about planning, designing, and estimating the various project tasks, and then need to execute high quality work and show progress on a regular basis. Going forward, I’m hoping to treat my own projects as sort of mini-consulting engagements where I am my own client–I’m curious to see if doing so enables me to produce higher quality products more quickly.

February promises to be an action-packed month. With a little luck, this consulting project will only occupy me full-time for about another week, and past that will likely require my occasional attention as the project winds down. Once that’s done, my top priority remains slapping a payment portal onto Serenity and getting it out into the world. On top of all that, I have a hefty bucket list of things to do and eat before I leave Chiang Mai on March 4. It’s becoming increasingly clear that my biggest challenge in the coming months will be to successfully balance building a business with taking as much advantage of my exciting new surroundings as possible. I’m not entirely sure how this is going to work yet, but I’m excited to find myself naturally contemplating how to get things done more efficiently so that I can feel good about spending time adventuring. While there were sometimes troughs and crests of productivity at home, I think the call to adventure will apply constant positive pressure to make the most out of my limited time.

Should it interest anyone reading this, I’ve started to record some short vlogs about my adventures. My thought is that I’ll generally keep these short (~5 min max per day) and will do virtually no editing or post-processing on them. I’ll still be posting a broader update with reflections here on my blog once a month, and may start to do more in-depth travel posts about places or things I find really interesting, but for those interested in a video format at a (probably) higher frequency, consider finding me on YouTube. No hard feelings if not–both those videos and this blog are more a form of personal but public documentation of my journey for posterity than anything else.

In December I set out to get my first product, Serenity, off the ground and prototyped to a point where I’d feel comfortable putting it in front of close friends and family. I also wanted to complete my annual goal review and goal setting exercises for the New Year. It was a fairly productive month despite the holidays; I published my 2018 goals, and I ended up writing a lot of code. However, I didn’t quite get my end of year review into a publishable state (I did go through the entire exercise before writing out my new goals) and I’m still a little embarrassed to show Serenity to friends.

Unexpectedly, I also had a huge marketing breakthrough for Serenity in December,  managing to gather 80 email addresses with a $250 FB ads credit over ~a week. Even better, these numbers came from a split test, where I intentionally spent money on poorer performing ads to establish a baseline for comparison–running the best ad in the experiment over the entire budget will probably yield better results. This success provides clear signal that what I’m marketing addresses a need that people want solved, and that I potentially have an efficient channel to reach them. However, it doesn’t validate how much (if anything) people might pay for a solution.

Now that I have potential customers waiting for my product, I’m realizing that I’ve fallen into a common entrepreneurial trap: I don’t know how much product I need to build for it to be “enough”, so I keep delaying throwing something over the fence out of the fear that the product will be missing important features my potential customers will want. Left unchecked, I could easily build the product in a vacuum for months, extending the time needed to find my first paying customer while building features that may or may not provide real value. The answer to this trap is a slight execution strategy shift: rather than guess at what customers will want, or guess at how much product I need to provide before customers will pay, I should let the market decide. This means that my priority now is to create a “free trial” period and slap either a real or a mock payment gateway on the product. I can spend ~$50-$100 in ads to pay for a new cohort of potential customers, measure how long they stay engaged in the free trial, and see if anyone actually pays or indicates that they would pay at the end of the trial period. I’ll risk alienating some potential customers in the process, and I don’t want to throw buggy or unpolished pieces of the product over the fence, but I can and should post the product before it’s strictly “ready” in my own eyes.

My priorities for January, however, have shifted away from Serenity. I’m taking my first consulting project this month, and it’s likely this project will take most of my January bandwidth. Those who read my 2018 New Year’s Resolutions might be remembering how I said I’d be generally avoiding consulting projects this year and thinking me a hypocrite, so I feel the need to justify why I’m taking this project. Though the project is paying a decent sum of money, money isn’t the only consideration here. This project is actually for a friend, and is in the healthcare space, which is one of my stronger interest areas. I think this project provides some useful exposure and credibility-building experience in an industry I care about (and may get more involved in longer-term) while also bolstering my war chest. Also, while I do have enough money in the bank to potential weather no profits from my business for a year or two, even while traveling around the world, I’d be lying if I claimed that having a little extra cushion doesn’t put my mind a bit more at ease.

Since I’m also slated to depart for South East Asia on February 1, my priorities are as follows:

  1. Make sure all of my affairs are in order before I leave the country. (This includes things like making sure I’m happy with the legal structure for my business, taking care of my taxes, getting vaccines, and other logistics which I either cannot take care of while abroad or really must happen before I leave.)
  2. Execute on this consulting project. Try to wrap it up this month, if possible.
  3. Stretch: polish Serenity up a little bit, slap a free trial/payment flow onto it, and run my first cohort through the product to see if anyone bites.

I’m also making it a goal to get back to more consistently writing these updates closer to the actual beginning of the month, since I know I’ve been slipping on that.

Sanity-wise, there were some moments of fear in December, but mostly I stayed focused. Even through the fear, I stayed productive by maintaining a few touchstone habits like waking up early, meditating, exercising, and making my bed. I think my larger fear right now is less that I will fail, and more that I’m wasting my time or doing something that might not lead me to where I ultimately want to go.

Unlike much of the working world, I’m not really on the rungs for any predefined career ladder, and I know that some things do require that one build a track record and earn experience over time. I have been trying to think critically about what my narrative is and where what I’m doing leads me (or leads me away from, since every choice inevitably means not choosing other things). Some reflection on this has led me to the conclusion that taking some limited consulting projects tied to industries I care about helps me to continue to build a story for myself for working in those industries even if I don’t ultimately do tech in those industries (law or policy have been ideas I’ve played with for a little while).

I’m also realizing that entrepreneurship is and always has been one of the primary skill sets I’ve wanted to develop. I believe at our core, many entrepreneurs are passionate, empathic problem solvers. We’re the kind of people who get excited about making the world a better place by solving problems through the creation of businesses, services, and products. I think there are a lot of problems that can be solved this way (Elon Musk has inspirationally pushed the limit on this), though there are also some that can’t (e.g. policy).

For me, entrepreneurship is one tool in what will hopefully become an arsenal for a life spent working on the problems I care about most. I also believe that cracking the value creation cycle means that I won’t ever need to be tempted by money from sources outside myself, which I’m hoping will mean that I can maintain a higher level of personal integrity and authenticity (this is particularly important to me if, for example, I were ever to go into politics).

I mastered the technical implementation and execution aspects of software entrepreneurship a long time ago, but I still need to work on some of the surrounding skill sets, including learning to steer my own ship with confidence, crossing the marketing chasm between value and delivery of value, and designing products that people will love to use. Though it sometimes feels like I’m wasting time when I’m not writing code, or like I’m failing when I find myself gripped by fear, these are actually the moments when I’m learning and experiencing exactly what I need to right now.

Being honest with myself, I think I missed the mark in 2017–and that’s OK! I had some pretty ambitious goals and I had a lot of goals. I stretched myself attempting to complete them, and learned a lot in the process. A lot of great things also happened as a result of the intention behind this set of goals, even though I didn’t even come close to hitting them all. There were some confounding factors like deciding to leave my job earlier than I thought I otherwise would (I had hoped to go to Paris through work, but those opportunities didn’t materialize, so I advanced my timeline), but even so I think I’m willing to admit that I bit off more than I could chew. I’ve learned that there are only so many things I can effectively focus on at once, that I should define my plans for goals in terms of sustainable habits rather than just one-off events, and that I could give myself a little more flexibility to adapt and improvise. All-in-all, I’d have to give myself a D+ this year. I’m not quite comfortable giving myself a passing grade, but quitting my job was a big deal and all the work I did conquering other fears definitely helped me get to that point. I’m taking my learnings into 2018 so I can keep improving the process as I go forward :)!

Detail

  • Conquer my fears and insecurities by cultivating courage.
    • Do at least 150 things total that scare me this year. (Does not have to be 150 unique things if appropriate level of fear is still present.)
      • Honestly, I did a terrible job of keeping track of this. I’d guesstimate that I did on the order of 75-100 of these, but didn’t keep a good record. Off the top of my head here are some memorable ones:
        • Quitting my job. I could probably argue that this counts as multiple since this has regularly exposed me to a lot of fear, which I’m still learning to process effectively.
        • Learning to lead climb. This is a form of rock climbing where the rope comes up behind you as you clip it into the wall to save your progress. When you fall, you can fall as far as 10-15 feet. It took me awhile to get over the fear of falling.
        • Scuba certification. Open water still scares me, and the idea of vulnerability while diving worried me. At this point, diving in a group doesn’t scare me at all, though I’d probably shit myself diving alone.
        • Completing an Alcatraz swim. There be sharks in these waters ._.
        • Rejection. There was a decent amount of rejection this year :). Those double count here, but I’ll leave a longer accounting of them for below.
    • Conquer my fear of failure.
      • Figure out what I would do if I weren’t working at Palantir.
        • I’m now doing it :)! It’s not entirely clear exactly how long I’ll continue to do what I’m doing now, or what I’ll do after this. Most likely I’ll continue for as long as what I’m doing now feels like the best way to grow, or until my priorities change.
      • Stretch: Take a leave of absence from work or quit and do my own thing for 3-6 months or leave my current job to work on something more risky.
        • I ultimately couldn’t get Palantir to send me to France on a timeline that made sense to me, so I went with the last option and left. What I’m doing now is much more risky, and much more self-directed, which is both amazing and terrifying. Can’t say I’ve totally beaten my fear of failure yet, but definitely on the right path.
    • Conquer my fear of rejection.
      • Get rejected at least 100 times trying 100 different things.
        • I didn’t do a great job of tracking this one either. I probably hit ~50 with scattered rejection challenges earlier in the year, and then 30 challenges in November.
      • Complete at least Foundation Level 2 improv at BATS.
        • I got this one done real early! And I’ve fallen in love with improv in the process. When I left the Bay Area, one of the first things I did was find a new place to go to continue improvising. I’m not sure how I’ll keep it up while I’m abroad, but someday I think it would be really fun (and frightening) to participate in an improv performance.
    • Conquer my fear of sharks.
      • Go swimming in a shark cage.
        • This didn’t happen. Logistically this was difficult as there weren’t many local opportunities for this in the Bay Area, and most of the services I found were prohibitively expensive. If I can find an opportunity for it, I may end up doing some version of swimming or diving with sharks while I’m abroad in South East Asia though!
      • Unfortunately, didn’t do much for this despite some risk mitigation steps outlined during my mid year review. The Alcatraz swim ended up being the closest thing I got to facing my fear of sharks.
    • Conquer my fear of spiders.
      • Hold a tarantula in my hand without freaking out.
        • I got nowhere close to this.
      • Unfortunately, didn’t end up doing much for this despite some risk mitigation steps outlined during my mid year review. I still hate spiders :/.
    • Conquer my fear of falling.
      • Go bungee jumping.
      • Go rock climbing outdoors.
      • Stretch: Go lead climbing outdoors.
        • Lead climb certified! Never logistically got around to organizing a group to climb out doors, let alone lead climb outdoors, though.
      • I didn’t end up getting to all of the key results here, but I honestly don’t feel that irrationally afraid of falling anymore. The idea of going bungee jumping or sky diving doesn’t really bother me. I know there’s inherent risk in doing things like this, but I’ve learned not to overly worry about things like equipment failures, which are unlikely and relatively out of my control. (By contrast, the first time I went sky diving I mentally prepared for that day to be the last day of my life :P.)
    • Conquer my fear of open water.
      • Complete an Alcatraz swim.
      • Complete scuba certification.
      • Stretch: Go on 2 additional dives after certification.
      • Hilariously, I completed all of the key results for this one, but am definitely still irrationally afraid of swimming in open water. I think this is because the fear wasn’t properly defined here: it’s becoming more and more clear to me that I’m afraid of swimming alone in open water, but most other cases are fine.
  • Become confident around attractive women.
    • Ask out at least one woman I find attractive each week in person.
    • Go on at least one Tinder date.
      • This is a terrible key result. But I did go on a Tinder date this year, and I did go on a Coffee Meets Bagel date this year. In the bigger picture though, I’ve pretty much completely divested from dating apps at this point–would really prefer that I learn to get comfortable approaching and talking to women I find attractive. Plus, I honestly suck at texting strangers and kind of don’t see the point.
    • I noted in my mid year review that the key results for this goal weren’t planned well. I still believe that’s true. I did go on a record number of dates this year, but I think that was 5 or 6 dates total. All first dates–for either logistic or compatibility reasons I didn’t really ask for second dates.
    • I think I could have done a lot better on this. I did learn a lot this year, and my anxieties around going on a date have mostly disappeared now that I’ve experienced it a few different ways (ask me about the time I crashed a sailboat over a beer sometime :). I won’t argue that I’m amazing at dating, but I do think I’ve gotten a lot better at listening to how I’m feeling during an interaction with someone and acting authentically based on that (rather than feeling like I need to act like I’m having fun, feeling like I need to impress them if they’re not also making an effort to impress me, or feeling like I should do this or that at a particular point in the date). I still have a lot of approach anxiety, though, and the idea of making a special effort to put myself in situations where I have to approach and talk to a stranger I find attractive with the intent to get to know them and maybe ask them out still scares the crap out of me. I think I should have done more to force myself out of my comfort zone for approach anxiety. This is something I’ll need to continue to actively work on, perhaps by doing some dating-oriented version of my rejection challenges. Technically, this falls under the umbrella of “fear of uncertainty” for 2018, but I’m not sure how realistic it will be to pursue romantic interests while abroad.
  • Read more
    • Learn to speed read.
      • Read a book about speed reading.
      • Watch speed reading lectures I have saved.
      • I failed to make practicing speed reading a consistent habit, despite recognizing mid year that this was what was needed. I have some decent software which, if I used regularly, I’m fairly confident would get me to where I want to go. I just haven’t.
    • Read at least 40 books.
      • Looks like I actually only read 39 books this year -_-. I think I got complacent here–I expected that my normal reading habits would easily get me to 40 books, but apparently not. I did start and not finish a record number of books this year, which doesn’t help. I have also been doing less reading since being self-employed, in part because I accidentally broke my Kindle… now that I have a new one, I need to get back into the habit of reading at night!
      • My top books of 2017:
        • The Book of Joy by Dalai Lama XIV, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Carlton Abrams
        • Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
        • The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
        • Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
        • Little Princes by Conor Grennan
        • The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee
        • Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
  • Become a polyglot
    • Become fluent in French.
      • Spend at least 1 hour each day learning French.
        • Definitely didn’t make this! I did have some regular French habits for awhile, but they fell off when work got busy, and I definitely didn’t re-establish them when I became self-employed.
      • Earn the DELF B2 French language qualification or higher.
        • Didn’t end up registering for a test or making a concerted effort here. This fell off the priorities list once I became self-employed, and I also realized that I’m trying to learn the language so that I can communicate with real people, no so that I can pass a test. As noted in my mid year review, I did pass a diagnostic claiming to be rated at a B2 level, however (by the skin of my teeth).
        • Stretch: Earn the DELF C1 French language qualification or higher.
      • Read Harry Potter in French.
        • I have the first book in both French audio and on Kindle! I don’t have a good excuse. I can’t quite read all of it without pausing to look up some words on a regular basis, but most of the gist makes sense. I just never got much further than the first chapter. I think my weakest areas in French are speaking and listening, however, which is maybe why I de-emphasized reading.
  • See the beauty and strength of which my body is capable.
    • Qualify for the Boston Marathon.
      • Injuries earlier in the year, and then after I became self-employed I decided to double-down on the gym since I don’t know if weight-lifting will be a real option while I’m abroad. Ultimately, I could probably have made progress toward this, though actually qualifying for the Boston is going to take at least a few attempts. I think after my injuries I mentally knew this wasn’t going to happen this year and let myself slack. I’ve recommitted for 2018, however!
    • Develop a 6-pack.
      • Not much progress here from mid year. Still 4 up top, and no sign of the other 2.
      • Get down to 9% body fat.
        • Closest I got was 13%, which is pretty laughable since I think I started at ~14% or 15%. Palantir fed me 3 meals a day and I had trouble getting myself to be disciplined about macros and calorie restriction. I tried meal planning after I left Palantir, but keep finding reasons to cheat which sink me. The meal plan did seem pretty effective however–I think if I really committed to a well-designed plan for 3-6 months, this would happen. I just like food a lot >_<.
      • Do an abdominal workout three times a week.
    • Stretch: Lift weights three times a week.
      • I lifted weights regularly when I got back to San Diego, but can’t say that I did this often enough to give myself credit. This wasn’t really the priority.
  • Improve my ability to regulate and compartmentalize thoughts and emotions, especially negative and anxious thoughts and emotions such as fear or insecurity.
    • Meditate for 20 minutes every day.
      • I definitely didn’t get every day, but I think I did this enough to feel that it made a difference, which is good.
    • Write in a journal at least once a week.
      • Once a week is pretty excessive–I don’t always have anything useful to journal about on that schedule. I do have a decent number of journal entries from 2017, but there isn’t a consistent pattern to when. Sometimes I’m very regular, other times I’ll go months without thinking to write.
  • Become more politically active.
    • Become more politically informed.
      • Read at least 2 books about healthcare issues.
      • Read at least 2 books about global warming and environmental issues.
      • Read at least 2 books about education issues.
      • Read at least 2 books about immigration and globalization.
      • Read at least 2 books about economics.
      • Read at least 2 books about political theory and political philosophy.
      • This is something I’d like to do, but I keep not actually taking the time to read books that get me closer to it. I think it’s not the highest priority right now–when trying to figure out how to feed oneself, one doesn’t worry as much about politics.

Reflection

2017 was another interesting year for my goals. I can’t quite call it an equivocal success, but it certainly wasn’t a total failure, either. In the first half of the year, I accomplished a decent amount of what I had set out to do, and was looking reasonably on track to hit the majority of my goals with a little bit of extra effort. In the second half of the year, however, I shook everything up by quitting my job and starting to actively work on my broader fear of failure. Doing so has, inevitably, led to a bit of a slow down on the rest of my goals.

Interestingly, this is the second year in a row where, in the second half of the year, I’ve decided to take a major leap toward a larger goal that I hadn’t otherwise been planning to tackle in the current year. (2016’s leap being making an attempt at an Ironman triathlon many months earlier than expected.) In both cases, I took action because I recognized that my largest growth opportunity lied in a direction that perhaps didn’t completely align with my yearly goals. While I’m proud of both of these steps, I think that this trend is symptomatic of my goals not being focused enough, my motivations not being clear enough, or not having enough flexibility allowed by the set of goals I’ve chosen.

I also wonder if I really would have been able to complete everything on my goals list had I been more committed to doing so. Last year I argued that I probably would have. This time I’m actually not so certain.

Most of my goals are not things that are immediately achievable, so they require longer-term, consistent effort. For these goals (e.g. learning a language, speed reading, running a marathon), it’s less about big pushes and spurts of effort, and more about the little habits that slowly but surely push me toward where I want to go. Ultimately, my ability to create sustainable habits is integral to accomplishing these goals.

If I’m being totally honest with myself, I think in 2017 I struggled to create and maintain new habits in support of many of my goals. I’ve had success with new habits in the past, so I definitely know how to do this under certain conditions. Training for my first marathon, and later for an Ironman, for example, required that I build the habit of exercising 5 or 6 days out of the week.

So why did I struggle this time? I think one of the major factors here was focus. I had a lot of goals this year, and there were times when I think I probably threw too much at myself at once. Creating new habits isn’t too hard if I have just one or two to focus on, but I overwhelmed myself a little with the sheer number of habits I wanted or needed to create all at once. I think I might have been more successful if I had chosen a smaller number of things to focus on or if I had organized my goals into “phases,” giving myself a couple of new habits to focus on at a time until each had set. Willpower is finite.

Another factor was my environment and a failure to either change it or adapt to it. When I was working a full-time job, there would sometimes be busier periods where I wouldn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to keep up a habit, so my progress would be lost. Adding in a frequent coast-to-coast travel schedule also made it challenging to establish habits and routines without more thought or effort. Again, here I think focusing on one or two things at a time could have helped. I trained for my first marathon despite traveling coast-to-coast every week by running on treadmills in NYC hotels after work. I was able to make this happen through the establishment and prioritization of a single, very important habit. When the shit hits the fan, it’s much harder to do the same with 5 or 6 different things.

There are two other major factors differentiating some of my past successes from the goals I’ve been struggling more with: 1) a sense of consistent, measurable progress and 2) a plan which, when followed, provides relative surety of making it to the goal. When training for an Ironman or a marathon, it’s hard not to notice myself getting stronger each week as the workouts get harder or longer and I still manage to complete them. This feeling is exciting and motivating in and of itself. I’m also usually following a workout plan put together by someone else whose had experience with the event, allowing me to reasonably safely assume that if I can complete the workout each day, then I’m on track to actually complete the goal. I’ve found it harder to establish both of these conditions when working on a goal like learning a language, for example. Sure, sometimes I have a sense that I’m a bit more fluent, or can understand a little more, but this is nowhere near as measurable or granular as having completed a 10-mile run last week and 12-mile run this week. I’m also finding that plans for many of my non-fitness goals are much less cut and dried–at the end of the day 3 miles is 3 miles no matter how fast or slow you run it, but what’s the equivalent metric for language training?

Despite the struggle to establish habits, I did learn a few useful things to carry into the future. I was having only sporadic success with rejection challenges before I decided to crowdsource challenges from friends and publicly commit to doing one challenge a day for 30 days. From that experience, I was reminded how helpful it can be to get friends involved in goals–they can serve as both an accountability check and a support network. I was also reminded of how powerful it is to have a “streak” doing something. After 10 days of doing rejection challenges, the momentum was enough to keep me from quitting even as the challenges got increasingly uncomfortable.

All-in-all, I think my big takeaways from 2017 goals were to focus more on a few things at a time, to re-frame my goals in terms of sustainable habits I can create that will ultimately get me where I want to go, and to leave myself the flexibility beyond that to pivot when necessary–committing to the spirit behind a plan is sometimes more important than following the exact letter of the plan. I’ve incorporated these learnings into my strategy for 2018, where I have notably fewer different goal threads, and have left things a little bit more vague. There are still some strong themes for growth areas, and while there are a few key results I intend to hold myself accountable to, I was overall a lot less specific this year, hopefully giving me a little more space to adapt and improvise.

At the end of each year I take some time to reflect and to write out new goals and resolutions for the coming year. This exercise is about more than just the goals themselves, though–it’s about really taking a moment to check-in on my growth and to find alignment between my values, how I choose to spend my time, and my overall life direction. These words were written to inspire a future, struggling version of myself to stay the course and keep pushing to grow despite bouts of discomfort or laziness (both of which are natural parts of the journey).

I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and for the last couple I’ve chosen to make my goals public here on my blog. I don’t publish these to show-off, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers–if you spend 20 minutes reading this blog you’ll quickly realize that, while I have some strong convictions, I’m very much a work in progress. In fact, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that not every goal I’ve ever written down here has been accomplished. (Fortunately, though, many of the really important ones have.)

I publish these in the hope that, if I’m lucky, my journey to improve myself and an account of what I learned along the way will inspire or enlighten even just one other person. I hope that by writing about living my ideals and leading by example–with all of the bumps, blemishes, and bloopers left in–I may lend someone else the courage, the discipline, the perseverance, the authenticity, or even just the awareness to start living their own. Life is about the journey, and this is how I make the most of mine.

 

* * *

 

2016’s theme was discipline, concluding in an Ironman triathlon. 2017’s theme was courage, culminating in leaving my job to pursue my own path. 2018, in a sense, is going to be a combination of the two. There are two main areas that I really want to work on:

  1. Learning to deal with uncertainty, and to fight against my instinct to plan and control everything.
  2. Learning to identify, trust, and follow my authentic inner voice.

Learning to Deal with Uncertainty

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”
–The Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr

We spend the first two decades of our lives with an abundance of externally-defined structure. Grade school, high school, and college all provide relative rigidity with our parents, our teachers, or our majors delineating a path forward and giving us a definition of success to strive for. Then we graduate, and suddenly all of that structure evaporates. In the vacuum, the game becomes about defining meaning, purpose, and success for ourselves, before learning to apply them in the face of life’s fundamental uncertainty.

There are two primary ways we learn to cope with uncertainty: 1) creating, finding, or borrowing structure so that we have control over what we can control and 2) learning to let go of the need for control over things we fundamentally cannot control. Both methods are important, and they involve different and opposite skills: the former requires that we learn to be a proactive and creative force in our own lives, the latter that we learn to go with the flow and not burden ourselves with what we can’t control (e.g. the past, the vast majority of the future, how others think and act).

In my limited experience, most people I’ve met excel at one of these strategies, but not both. In fact, in a funny way, those who naturally excel at one strategy are often awful at the other–when you have a hammer, everything kind of looks like a nail. Personally, my hammer has always been proactivity and control (that’s why I started writing these goals in the first place); acceptance and going with the flow has always been a weakness. Ideally, one masters both of these strategies. Once that’s done there is a third challenge: learning when to apply each strategy for maximum effect.

In the past, I’ve written a lot about courage and discipline. In fact, last year I wrote, “I believe that I need two main virtues in order to accomplish everything I want in life: the courage to dream, and the discipline to execute.” I don’t think I realized it then, but those virtues map pretty well to the methods of dealing with uncertainty I just described: discipline involves creating and following through on structure, while courage requires a learned acceptance of the things we cannot control so we can function despite fear.

Though I still have a lot to learn about both courage and discipline, and though I’ve made a lot of great progress in the last couple years, I’m realizing now that a piece has always been missing from my thesis: learning how to use courage and discipline together, and when to apply one over the other. As it is, my instinct is still very much to control, plan, and analyze. I think in 2017 I learned a bit more about how to let go, but I still struggle with when to let go. Finding or creating opportunities to practice this skill is one of my top priorities in 2018.

Learning to be Authentic

Learning to deal with uncertainty is a little like learning to sail a boat: you have to learn how to trim the sails and weather different conditions at sea. Ultimately, though, you could be the best sailor in the world and never get where you’re trying to go without some means of navigation. Authenticity is our means of navigation on the capricious sea of life; it’s the compass needle subconsciously guided by our deepest values, and the north star that lights the way to who we’re meant to be and what we’re meant to do. I believe authenticity is one of the highest pursuits in life, not because there’s some pot of universal truth or meaning at the end of the rainbow, but because it’s the path that maximizes individual long-term happiness realized through integrity and self-actualization.

Sometimes, however, the compass spins or the night sky is cloudy, and we can’t seem to find our way. This is because the concept of authenticity is complicated–certainly more complicated than “just being yourself,” as the platitude goes. There’s a multitude of different influences in our lives–our parents, our peers, our significant others, the culture or environment we grow-up or live in–that can passively or actively push our internal compasses away from true north. Completely avoiding any of these influences on our lives is impossible, and not entirely desirable: sometimes pieces of external influence create resonance, shedding some light on what we truly value. Other times, though, our internal compasses point us in directions that lie in direct conflict with where external influences would have us go. When this happens, one of two things occurs: we choose to go someone else’s way, thereby learning to wear a mask; or we follow our inner voice, moving us closer to our authentic selves.

That process is, of course, also not as easy as it sounds. The more external voices there are and the louder they are, or the meeker our inner voice–if, for example, we aren’t very secure about ourselves–the harder it can be to identify, trust, and listen to our inner voice. Ultimately, I think the goal is to be able to remain true to self especially in the presence of strong external influences. Personally, this is something that I’ve struggled with quite a bit in my life to date, and there have been a few key points where I’ve caught myself walking a potentially inauthentic path, not the least of which led to my leaving Palantir and Silicon Valley.

I’m very much still learning to trust myself, to feel internally rather than externally secure in who I am and who I choose to be, and to follow my internal compass. I think that these are among the most important things I can learn in life, both because I believe it’s the path to truly internalized happiness, and because life is full of stories about the archetypes played out by the alternatives: the entrepreneur or creative who regrets never believing in herself enough to take a chance; the ego-driven playboys, businessmen, and politicians who believe attention or money lead to happiness only to find themselves feeling hollow inside; and the go-getters who climb the corporate ladder in a desperate desire to “get ahead” without ever stopping to wonder what it really means to be ahead.

Goals

How will I pursue the two priorities outlined above?

  • Running my own business
    • Uncertainty
      • As I’ve been learning for the past few months, trying to get a business off the ground is sometimes overwhelmingly uncertain. By continuing to pursue this path, I think I place myself in an environment where I have no choice but to apply both courage and self-discipline, and where I must learn to accept the occasional inevitable negative outcome that I cannot really control.
    • Authenticity
      • Being self-employed means that I’m solely responsible for setting my priorities, giving me the freedom to pursue work, growth, and meaning the way I want and at my own pace.
      • Learning to create value on my own will help me to learn to trust myself (or, perhaps, require that I learn to trust myself). I think there’s also no baser sense of personal security than knowing that if I have to fend for myself in this world, I can.
    • Key results:
      • As hard or as scary as it gets, stick with it for the entire year. Don’t take on consulting projects unless they’re actually really interesting, or I somehow really need the money (I shouldn’t this year).
      • Launch 4-6 (more ideally, 8-12) different projects this year. These don’t all have to be of the same magnitude or significance, but they should all have some monetization plan from the beginning. Learn to scope projects well, learn not to be afraid of throwing something over the fence before it’s perfect, and really get the process down to a science.
  • Travel
    • Uncertainty
      • I’ll be moving around a lot in 2018, and I think doing so will help to create an environment chock-full of uncertainty. I expect to encounter situations I couldn’t predict, and I think this will challenge me to learn to find the balance between acceptance and proactivity.
    • Authenticity
      • Traveling around to new places, meeting new people, and encountering new perspectives will give me opportunities to learn more about what I’m drawn to.
      • Pulling myself away from past influences, including my parents, my college peer group, my existing friends, Silicon Valley’s culture and environment, and all past and current romantic interests will help to turn down the volume on the external voices that sometimes drown out my own voice.
    • Key results:
      • Meet new people and have adventures wherever I go. Try to spend every weekend doing something exciting, new, or terrifying. Don’t get so singularly focused on running a business that I become a shut-in.
  •  Mindfulness
    • Uncertainty
      • Mindfulness has and continues to be one of my most important mental tools for learning to deal with uncertainty. My mindfulness practice has taught me skills to accept my thoughts and emotions, as well as other external situations that I can’t otherwise rationalize away or control.
    • Authenticity
      • Many of the same mindfulness practices useful for accepting external situations are also very useful for accepting myself. The more I accept myself, the stronger my inner voice becomes.
    • Key results:
      • Attend a 2-week mindfulness retreat.
      • Complete the Headspace Pro series in one continuous streak.
      • Meditate for at least 20 minutes every day.
  • Reading
    • Uncertainty and Authenticity
      • Books exist for pretty much every topic imaginable. Some books I’ve read have addressed topics relating to uncertainty and authenticity directly. Others have characters and plots that explore questions and themes that are central to my own life, and so are inspiring, or instructive, or at least thought provoking. Still others, simply introduce me to new ideas and new perspectives I might not have otherwise considered (and some of which I’d never have found by just meeting people). The more of these I’m exposed to, the more I get to see what I do and don’t resonate with, refining my internal compass.
    • Key results:
      • Read or listen to 52 books this year.

I have just a few other goals unrelated to this year’s primary objectives:

  • Compete in the Boston Marathon
    • Why?
      • Exercise is an important part of my health and happiness, but I’ve found that I honestly don’t do well with just exercising 30 minutes a day to stay healthy. I need something larger than that to work toward, or I don’t end up putting my heart into it. I’ll also be moving around a lot next year, and though other exercise equipment may not always be readily available, running is pretty much always an option. As a runner in high school, and now a post-college amateur endurance athlete, qualifying for the Boston Marathon represents a huge accomplishment in speed, not just endurance. (Qualifying times for my age and gender require running a full marathon at an average pace of 7:00/mi.)
    • Key results:
  • Become conversationally fluent in French
    • Why?
      • This is part of a larger desire I have to learn several foreign languages. This time, though, I actually have a one-way ticket to France in May 2018, and I’m going to need to work on my French both before and during if I want to survive/thrive while I’m there.
    • Key results:
      • Spend at least 3 months in French-speaking countries in 2018.
      • While in French-speaking countries, actively push to have a conversation in French every single day, no matter how uncomfortable, awkward, or broken my spoken French is.

I’m purposefully trying to keep my list of goals leaner and more focused this year, so I’ve cut several threads from 2017 that weren’t totally completed. Rather than overtax my focus and willpower, this year I’ll narrow in on a few larger things, and will consider throwing in more if I seem to be totally crushing it with lots of time left in the year.

October marked the beginning of the part of this journey through the “Trough of Sorrow.” It was like sailing into a section of the map ominously labeled “Here There Be Monsters…” True to analogy, October was littered with what felt like small failures–early marketing experiments flopped, there were moments when I let my fears consume me, and it didn’t seem like I made tangible progress toward having any working products. By contrast, November was a month of small victories–not enough to banish my fear, but enough to start learning to be curious instead of just afraid.

In a sense you could say that in October I saw the tip of an iceberg and, thinking myself clever, gave that iceberg an extremely wide berth, believing that it must extend for miles below the surface. In November I dove below the surface to find that the iceberg was exactly as it seemed from above, and that I put myself through a lot of extra misery for a false assumption.

In October, I had run a set of ads on a test marketing website I built for a product concept called Strive. I had launched some ads on Google AdWords and Facebook Ads and got exactly 0 email subscribers. When I actually examined the results in November, I realized that I had spent less than $10 between both ad platforms, and had only gotten ~25 actual clicks–not nearly enough data to draw conclusions from. I decided to up the ante and spent 10x the money on ads, hoping to get enough data to reach the truth. My new campaign performed much better. Without changing the test marketing site at all, I ended up with 6 email addresses for $59.18 in ads, which was surprising to me because the marketing copy is vague and the site has no screenshots to make the product real in any way. While it’s hard to quantify the value of the email addresses themselves, and hard to predict how many email subscribers will ultimately convert to paying customers, this did loosely validate the market need, and reset my expectations on how difficult it should be to get someone to leave an email address.

Despite some marketing success with Strive, I chose to divest from the project early on. I realized that the product wasn’t well-defined enough for me to have a sense for what to build and what would actually provide value, and I was coming to realize that the scope of the product was nebulously expanding to include other potential products. Instead, I broke Serenity off of Strive and started working on that, loosely piecing together a library of reusable code for marketing websites and web applications. Contradicting my October declaration that I would focus more on building than selling and designing, I actually found a good groove in November for designing with Figma. Wanting to improve on the marketing materials for Strive, I actually spent a good amount of time designing a few mock screenshots for Serenity to make things look a little more real. (App Launch Pad’s mockup generator was also invaluable here.)

I finished the Serenity marketing site in time to pour a friend’s unused Facebook Ads credit into the site to see how it would perform. Somewhat discouragingly, I found that $250 in Facebook Ads led to only 4 email sign-ups, with dismal click through rates and dismal on-page conversion rates. Rather than despair, however, this time I got curious and started designing some new experiments, including a salvo of Google AdWords ads to test different text copy.

When my AdWords experiments came back at a 3.61% click-through and a 10%+ email sign-up conversion, I started to realize something was up with my Facebook Ads. Though I’m still inexperienced, I’m coming to the conclusion that the kind of test marketing I’m doing works much better on AdWords than it does on Facebook. Part of this may just be a failure to target the right people with the right ads on Facebook, but it’s clear to me now that a user searching for a keyword on Google right now is a way stronger signal of potential interest than a user having liked some page in the entirety of the lifetime of their Facebook account. I’m also learning that Facebook is a more complex and harder to master ads platform, as there’s an order of magnitude more options to try and compare for any given ad, often making it difficult to declare a clear winner (e.g. where does the ad get placed? what image do you use? what specific audience do you target? what text copy do you use for your ads?).

I had a few other wins in November as well. While I’m still far from having a full MVP that I’d be willing to show-off here, the product for Serenity is beginning to take shape, and I’ll hopefully have something useful enough to show to some close friends before December is out. I also successfully finished all of my November rejection challenges!! It’s still on my list of things to do to write a longer debrief and reflection about my experience, but I think the most important thing I internalized is to get curious rather than upset when things don’t go my way.

Being honest though, despite November wins, I’m sometimes still finding much of this really difficult. It’s easier overall when things are going well, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t challenging days. I share this not because I want pity–remember, I chose this, so save your pity for someone who didn’t–but because it’s an important part of my truth. The world has enough manicured stories where the protagonist tries to air brush his past and pretend he was stronger in every moment than he really was. This is not one of them.

In my darkest moments, I’m frustrated and impatient. I’m now four months in and, while I do have some good learnings, the beginnings of a reusable library of code, and a few loosely validated ideas to show for it, I can’t help but feel like I should already have a complete product out and done by now, perhaps even have found my first paying customers. I keep expecting myself to fly, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that I’m just now learning to crawl.

In my darkest moments, I also worry about everything. I sometimes worry that I’m wasting my time and the best years of my life. I worry that my growth thesis is wrong, and that in the name of chasing growth, I’ve run away from other important things like commitment or responsibility. I worry that after a year or two of doing this I won’t have enough to show for it, and that I won’t know how to recover. I worry that I’ll lose touch with the people in my life who matter, that I’ll miss out on important events in their lives, and that I’ll fail to be there for them when they need me. I worry that while I’m out exploring the world and the depths of my own soul, the dating pool will thin and that I won’t ultimately find someone to share my life with. Trust me, if there’s a way to worry about something, I’ve worried about it.

The darkness sometimes leaves me feeling a little like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde–like there are two versions of me, and I don’t always know which I’ll be when I wake up in the morning.

One version seems fearless, unafraid, and undaunted. He embraces uncertainty, excited for the adventure of discovering his life one page at a time. He is optimistic, but not naively so. He understands that risk, pain, failure, and mistakes are all a natural part of the journey of life. He accepts them without worrying about them or overly identifying with them. He knows he can handle whatever life has to throw his way, and he trusts himself to make the best decisions he can in each situation. He has a will and a zest for life that is infectious–inspiring, even–to those he meets. He acts from a place of hope, not one of fear. He is unquestioningly the captain of his own soul.

The other version is anxious, fearful, and constantly worrying. He seeks certainty through a fragile sense of control over the future he’ll never truly find. To paraphrase my own words: the quest for certainty biases him towards defining things in blacks and whites, towards over planning and overthinking, and keeps him from fully embracing life which can so often be beautifully messy, gray, and uncertain. He fears that failure and mistakes imply that he is incapable or fundamentally flawed, and therefore doesn’t handle them well. He worries he won’t be able to handle what comes his way, he doubts himself, and he agonizes over every decision. He is terrified and his fear taints his experiences and his perspectives, desperately seeking comfort instead of adventure. He acts from a place of fear, not one of hope. Fear consumes his soul.

The fearless side of me knows that no adventure comes without struggle and unexpected challenges. He knows that hardship often means one is headed the right way because few things worth finding in life come easy, and that very few stories worth reading feature a perfect protagonist who experiences no hardship. By contrast, the fearful side sees hardship as a sign that he’s made a mistake. He sees monsters in these waters, not realizing that he is, himself, the only monster that might sink the ship. He thinks about turning back before he can no longer see the shore, forgetting that, in the words of Christopher Columbus, “You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

That’s why my last major update for the month is that I’m forcing myself to lose sight of the shore. For better or for worse, I’ve booked myself flights to spend the majority of next year abroad, and in a sense there’s no turning back from that, at least not unless I feel good about abandoning a small wealth in cash and travel points. I leave February 1 for Southeast Asia (Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia, each for a month), returning only very briefly to the States in May before continuing on to France (most likely Marseille) for 3 months, then likely Morocco for 3 months.

While the fearless side of me smells adventure and can’t help but be excited, the fearful side of me is terrified by this. It’s not that I don’t love travel–I’ve been all over the world and experiencing new places and cultures is still one of my favorite things to do–but that I know this isn’t exactly the most sane business decision I’ve ever made. I don’t have a product yet. I’m not making any income yet. My pace is likely only to slow when presented with a new place to get used to, especially if there are interesting things to explore and I’m moving around every month. Sure, some of these places are cheap to live in, but they’re nowhere near as cheap as living at home. However, as I mentioned when I initially set out to do this, this has never been as much about starting successful businesses as it has been about personal growth and conquering a set of fears that clearly controls me. That obviously isn’t to say that I don’t intend to put my all into my business ideas, but it is to say that financial success has always been secondary to self-mastery (I don’t always remember this in my darkest moments). That this scares me so much tells me that I’m moving closer to the heart of my fear–the heart of the monster. In the end it will be me and the monster, and either I learn to tame him, or perhaps he and I will sink together.

Given the facts above, my goals for December are pretty simple. First, while I clearly believe some cliffs just need to be jumped off of that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in checking, double-checking, and triple-checking my parachutes before doing so. Tangibly this means taking the necessary steps to prepare to leave the country including figuring out how to find cheap long-term rentals abroad, acquiring visas, renewing my passport, getting all of the proper vaccines, and gathering supplies/equipment I’ll need abroad. Second, since time is clearly running short and I really would like to have a real product before I leave the country, I’ll be putting my nose to the grindstone to make progress on Serenity. I’m aware that there are still clear open questions about the market viability of Serenity like whether or not people will actually pay for what I build and whether or not I can establish any sustainable growth channels. At this point, I’m going to build it anyway and if it fails I’ll learn, pivot, or work on something new. Lastly, I’ll need to find some time to write this month, at the very least to reflect on the year, my growth, and progress towards my 2017 goals so that I can define a new set of goals for 2018. If there’s time, I’d also like to reflect more thoroughly on what I learned from my November rejection challenges.

Welcome to the Trough of Sorrow

I want this to be an honest, raw, and vulnerable account of the ups and downs of my journey, so I’m not going to sugarcoat it: October was a challenging month, and it may be the first of many very challenging months ahead. When I say October was a challenging month, I don’t mean that I pushed myself particularly hard mentally or physically–I didn’t work 100 hour weeks, I didn’t lose sleep, and I didn’t solve any particularly challenging problems. Rather, I think October was an emotionally straining month as I began to truly acquaint myself with the realities and unique challenges of being self-employed.

I definitely did not accomplish everything I set out to at the beginning of October. By itself, I’m not overly upset about that; sometimes when I set a goal, I don’t achieve it on the first try despite my best effort, and I’ve found that applying extra self-criticism and pressure to the process is usually counter-productive. I am, however, candidly disappointed with the level of effort I put in this month, and I’m honestly a bit ashamed to admit it publicly. There were definitely a couple of days in there where I literally made no progress on any of my projects. Sometimes I was just distracted, and despite my best efforts couldn’t seem to get myself to produce a tangible work product. Other times, I found myself actively avoiding the work and over indulging in things like video games and Netflix. I’m not trying to give the impression that I’m on my own case because I couldn’t get myself to work over a weekend and indulged instead–the days I lost were during the business week when I had otherwise promised myself I would get work done. In short: I failed to consistently self-motivate in October.

As I ordinarily consider myself an extremely self-disciplined individual, of all the problems I expected to have in self-employed life self-motivation didn’t even come close to making the top 10. Initially, I was shocked, confused, anxious, afraid, and stressed out by my seeming inability to self-motivate. I struggled to understand what was going on, and the more I felt myself spinning my wheels in the mud, the more my morale dropped. Not only did I feel like I was failing, I felt like I wasn’t trying, and like I didn’t even know how to try.

While there were many factors, the two root causes I identified were an unexpected manifestation of the fear of failure and a lack of optimization around flow (aka the feeling of being productive or “in the zone” which may naturally boost productivity and focus).

At this point in my journey, I sit squarely in what Paul Graham of Y Combinator refers to as the “trough of sorrow.” This is the emotional rollercoaster portion of the journey when much of the initial enthusiasm and novelty of being self-employed have naturally worn off, but it’s too early to tell if anything is going to work. In theory, somewhere in here is also where the majority of unsuccessful entrepreneurs give up, succumbing to the pressures of emotional inertia rather than learning, pivoting, and persevering.

While books like The 4-Hour Work Week and The $100 Startup (affiliate links) are great for building a vision of what’s possible, they present what can feel like an overly rosy and optimistic view of the journey, and they’re glaringly silent about the trough of sorrow. Ultimately, I feel the right takeaway from these books is simply “it’s easier and more possible than most people think.” While I strongly believe this statement, I came into the journey knowing that it would likely also be harder than I had come to believe, and was under no illusions that there may be a significant amount of luck involved.

In October, I launched my first set of advertising experiments and managed to net a whopping 0 email subscriptions for the product I described. Despite the product being poorly described and not having screenshots, I expected giving up an email address to be a relatively low form of investment and was a bit discouraged by these results. I also had a couple of blogs posts totally flop from a metrics perspective, underscoring that I haven’t yet found the audience I may be writing for. September’s income from affiliate links turned out to be a fluke, and I haven’t been able to reproduce that in any capacity. In fact, I made more money in October (an impressive $10) by helping a friend sell mail-order rubber chickens than everything else I did on my own combined. (Actually, you should check out the rubber chickens haha–they make great gag gifts! You can use the offer code CHIUBAKA at checkout for 15% off.)

Having seen a few indications that early experiments might fail, the scary reality of the trough of sorrow is that I’m beginning to have enough data to validate “it’s likely harder than I think” but still not enough data to prove “it’s likely easier than most people think.” Standing where I am now, I absolutely understand why this is the crucible that makes or breaks entrepreneurs. Learning to navigate the trough of sorrow is going to be an essential part of my growth if I’m ultimately to succeed.

However, since I’m still learning to swim here, my unexpected response to early failure indicators was to freeze up. I discovered that faced with the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, of failure I would naturally rather make no progress than to fully realize a potentially failed outcome. Despite all the years I’ve spent building my self-discipline, my intense fear of failure can still outweigh it if I’m not self-aware and proactive about countering it.

Doing things that remind me of my own power, skill, and self-efficacy helps to chip away at a sense of despair, hopelessness, or paralyzing fear by putting me in a mode where I start to think about what’s possible rather than what’s not. The opposite is also true: doing things that I’m not as good at, or that I struggle with contributes to a constrained sense of what’s possible, and therefore a stronger sense of fear that projects will fail.

I’m realizing that flow is an important part of what separates the things that make me feel effective from the things that don’t. Because flow is good for my morale, it’s important to my long-term productivity that I organize my time in ways that promote it where possible. Unfortunately, the way I set my priorities and built my routine for October didn’t take flow into account, so not only was I hit by a paralyzing sense of fear, but I also mostly engaged in activities that made me feel like I was struggling rather than crushing it.

In large part, flow seems to be the result of conscious competency–engaging in activities I’m good at and know I’m good at like writing or coding. In October, I didn’t spend much time in flow. Pushing to post a new piece on my blog every week forced me to spend more time writing than my energy naturally allows (I usually have about two good hours of writing time in the morning before my energy dips and putting sentences together eloquently becomes less natural). Additionally, my push to test market forced me to spend much of my time writing marketing copy or doing visual design for marketing websites–both tasks I can do, and do reasonably well, but which I haven’t yet put in the sweat to learn to do quickly.

The theory behind why I spend my time this way seemed sound at the time: the strategy was to grow the blog and use it as a cross-marketing tool for software products. I’ve since learned that the blog is unlikely to be a viable short- or even medium-term play. Simultaneously, the strategy for determining which products to work on came from the advice of a mentor, John Vrionis of Lightspeed Venture Partners, to sell, design, and build in that order. I 100% believe that selling, designing, then building is the best way to systematically de-risk a business idea–building something takes a lot of time investment, while generating early signal about market viability can be really simple. Unfortunately, since much of my consciously competent skills specialize on the building stage, delaying building for as long as possible, while strategically sound in abstract, leaves me with fewer daily sources of flow.

What am I actually doing about all this? Firstly, I’ve de-prioritized my blog. Apologies to any avid readers out there who may have noticed the slowdown–I’m still planning to write about topics that interest me, but I’ll be doing so without a real posting schedule (the one exception to this is that there will be at least one monthly set of posts in the Escape Velocity series as I continuously reflect, analyze, and plan to make this all work). I’d love to get to a point where I actually do have something worth publishing every week, but I’m not going to force it at the expense of quality and sanity.

I’m also now actively searching for the right personal balance between selling, designing, and building. Though I know it’s dangerous, I’ve been increasingly biasing toward engineering time because getting something tangible done builds more forward momentum than struggling with the rest. Since I’m taking an approach to engineering that involves building a toolset that should make it easier to build subsequent projects, part of my hope is certainly to bring the time cost of prototyping a new product so low that the risk of building without selling first is minimized. I won’t be putting all of my eggs in that basket, however, as I do need to start building the other skills.

Hopefully the shift in strategy will allow me to pick up momentum to use against any future paralysis I encounter while walking the trough of sorrow. Just in case, though, I’ve also decided to get serious about systematically desensitizing myself to the fear of rejection (failure is, in a sense, a form of rejection). While I don’t expect all of the learnings from my November rejection challenges to map directly to beating back the fear that threatens to hold my productivity hostage, I do think making a habit out of facing my fear will better equip me to counteract it when it comes up.

Based on these reflections, my new priorities for November are:

  1. Complete all 30 November rejection challenges.
    1. Even though it won’t directly lead to income, I am committed to following through on this, so will be making this a top priority.
    2. This will likely be taking the slot of my writing time for the month, so I probably won’t be publishing many non-rejection-related articles.
  2. Complete a prototype MVP for one of my products ideas.
    1. This may end up being rushed, but I will make sure to take the time to slow it down, and factor out re-usable pieces where possible.
    2. Should aim to at least be usable enough that I can start using it on a day-to-day basis, and potentially onboard a few close friends for feedback.
    3. Ideally: should also have a competent looking marketing website so I can start pushing ads to it, but this may be more than I can handle this month.
  3. Run more Google and Facebook ads experiments to refine ad copy, narrow target audience, and determine CPC.
    1. Aim to always have an experiment in flight. Go for impression volume rather than conversions to gather demographics data, and a large enough n to draw real conclusions.
    2. Ideally: should have enough data to design a useful experiment to push $250 worth of Facebook ads credits through.

Was October tough? Yeah, definitely. I have not, however, been beaten. I never asked for this to be easy. In fact, if I really thought this was going to be easy I’m not sure I’d have set out to do it in the first place. I may not always make predictable progress in the directions I want, but I am growing and learning from all of these experiences. I am facing my fears and insecurities on a daily basis. Sometimes they win, sometimes I win. No matter what happens, I am grateful for this opportunity to be in the ring rather than watching from the sidelines even if it means taking a few jabs to the ribs now and then.

Rejection Challenges

One of my New Year’s resolutions this year was to conquer my fear of rejection by getting rejected at least 100 times trying 100 different things. I have done quite a few things to that end: I’ve taken several Improv classes, and I’ve tried a couple of self-directed rejection challenges here and there. Admittedly, I haven’t kept great track of where I am out of 100 different ways to get rejected, and I still have a moderate fear of rejection which is currently manifesting itself as a resistance to putting my work as a self-employed individual into the world for real feedback.

In an effort to fight back and make real progress toward this goal before the year ends, I’m trying something a little different with November: I’ve asked six friends to each give me five rejection challenges of varying difficulties for 30 challenges total, enough to do one a day for each day in November.

Why am I doing this?

The short version is that I read Rejection Proof (affiliate link), a book about Jia Jiang’s mission to get rejected once a day for 100 days and everything he learned from the experience. Reading his book made me realize that I am acutely afraid of rejection, judgment, and just plain looking silly; that that fear limits me; and that I also could potentially learn a lot from being rejected a whole bunch of times. The longer version of the story is that this is part of a larger campaign to challenge my fears and cultivate courage–topics about which I’ve written a (at time of writing unfinished) series of posts.

Of course, the goal isn’t to reach a point where I completely disregard others’ opinions–that’s called being a sociopath, and I certainly don’t want to get there. The hope is, however, that a lessened fear of rejection, and a weaker preoccupation with what others think of me will lead to a greater sense of self-acceptance, a higher degree of authenticity in all of my interactions, and the courage to ask people for what I really want.

What is a rejection challenge?

Loosely described, a rejection challenge forces me into a scenario where I need to ask someone for something to which the answer could be “no” (or, equivalently, to which the answer could be something I don’t like or maybe don’t want to hear, e.g. negative feedback). The challenges I have here are all over the place ranging from simple and easy requests, to requests that are just completely ridiculous and awkward, to requests that require me to bother people I wouldn’t otherwise bother, to requests for things that I might actually feel somewhat emotionally invested in. These challenges are designed to make me cringe, and I imagine that they will be extraordinarily cringeworthy (and/or just amusing) to watch.

Accountability

By asking friends for challenges rather than coming up with them myself, I’ve added some very acute social pressure to actually follow-through, and by publishing this post, I’m adding some additional public accountability to the mix. I’ll be making every effort to do one of these challenges every day, and if I can figure out how to make it work, I may even vlog them on YouTube so everyone I know can make fun of me (in a sense, this is its own rejection challenge). At the very least, you can expect that I’ll write about the more interesting or informative experiences.

The Challenges

Without further ado, here are the challenges rank ordered by approximate relative difficulty scored out of 10:

  1. 2: Smile, make eye contact with, and ask for a high-five from every person you encounter while walking down 2 blocks of street (or equivalent distance in a mall).
  2. 3: Ask a waiter to take you to the kitchen and meet the chef/see how things get made.
  3. 3: Ask a homeless person if they will eat dinner with you.
  4. 3: Ask a homeless person to tell you their life story.
  5. 4: Ask to make your own sandwich at Subway.
  6. 4: Go to a mattress store and ask to take a nap in one of their beds.
  7. 4: Go to a convenience or grocery store and ask to speak over their intercom system.
  8. 4: Go to a burrito joint and ask if you can come behind the counter and call out a few orders.
  9. 4: Ask to help prepare something in a food truck.
  10. 4: Call the office of the Mayor of San Diego and ask for a meeting.
  11. 5: Challenge a stranger on the street to an impromptu chess game.
  12. 5: Ask 3 strangers if they will play a quick game of Simon Says with you.
  13. 5: Ask to walk a stranger’s dog.
  14. 5: Ask a running stranger if you can jog with them.
  15. 5: Ask 2 people to jump into the Pacific Ocean with you.
  16. 5: Offer to autograph a stranger’s hand with a sharpie.
  17. 5: Try to sell a roll of paper towels to a mall stall vendor or street-side vendor.
  18. 6: Ask 3 strangers if they can text you a screenshot of their phone’s home screen.
  19. 6: Ask someone if you can create chalk art in their driveway.
  20. 6: Ask 10 people on public transit (or at the beach!) what they’re listening to and try to turn it into a conversation.
  21. 6: In a crowded place, ask a stranger if they’d be willing to pose with a potato mango as if they were in the Lion King while you take a picture.
  22. 6: Ask a stranger to join you as you walk like a crab for at least 1 block on a fairly busy sidewalk (or until you pass at least 3 people, whichever happens last).
  23. 6: Ask a stranger to swap shoes with you for a block.
  24. 7: Carry a rubber chicken around, and ask a random stranger if they will kiss it.
  25. 7: Ask someone to give up their seat for you on public transportation. (Bonus: Do this when there are empty seats around them.)
  26. 7: Ask a stranger to apply sunscreen to your face.
  27. 7: Try to convince a stranger to feed you a banana.
  28. 8: Spend at least 30 minutes busking in a crowded place. Explicitly walk up to someone at the end of a performance and ask for some money.
  29. 8: Go to a karaoke bar, a stand-up venue, or something similar. Perform, and then explicitly ask a stranger from the crowd for feedback afterwards.
  30. 9: Apply to be a chef on Feastly. If approved, host a pop-up kitchen event and cook for a bunch of strangers through Feastly. Ask them for their honest opinions after the meal.

Closing Thoughts

Are some of these challenges incredibly socially awkward? Yes. Do some of them force me to break social norms? Absolutely. Will they get me in trouble? I’m really hoping not. Are all of these completely realistic rejection scenarios? Of course not. Do I think they’ll teach me something anyway? Definitely.

Regardless of whether they are realistic or contrived, socially acceptable or socially awkward, all of these challenges will put me in situations that make me at least a little bit uncomfortable. As I’ll elaborate in a soon-to-be-published post, learning to act in spite of that discomfort and that fear is an important part of what I’ve learned to call courage.

Wish me luck!

 

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Interested in keeping up with the challenges? Please consider subscribing to be the first to know as new content comes out!

Have a great rejection challenge idea? Tell me about it in the comments below, and I may end up doing it later this year!

Related Posts

2017 New Year’s Resolutions

Fear: The Invisible Prison of the Mind

Emotional Inertia: The Secret to Unlocking Potential

Self-Awareness: The Everyman's Superpower

This is the second post in a three-part series on Fear and Courage. While this post is designed to stand alone, you can get caught-up by reading Fear: The Invisible Prison of the Mind.

If you could be dipped into a vat of radioactive liquid and granted any comic book superpower, what would you choose? The ability to fly? Invulnerability to everything but Kryptonite? Laser vision? Personally, I’d love to be able to learn how to do anything perfectly after watching just once. Since, unfortunately, I’ve never met a vat of radioactive liquid that wouldn’t also kill you 10 times out of 10, however, I want to talk about a superpower that all humans are born with, but don’t always fully utilize: self-awareness.

Self-awareness is our ability to examine our own character, emotions, motives, and desires. It’s an important part of any good definition of what separates humans from machines and artificial intelligences (at least for now). In a lot of senses, self-awareness is also what differentiates humans from animals: rather than continuously react to our environment, we seem to have the ability to step out of situations, self-examine, and proactively choose a response. We literally have the ability to think about our thoughts–otherwise known as metacognition in psychology–which, when you think about it, is pretty damn mind-blowing. (No pun intended.)

Our self-awareness plays an important role in our lives on multiple levels: it’s what allows us to identify our emotions, it’s what gives us the choice in how we respond to events in our daily lives, and it’s what allows us to ask deeper questions about our lives and our motivations. Developing a sense of self-awareness can be helpful for understanding and promoting virtually any quality of mind: among other things, it allows us to understand when and why we feel lazy so that we can foster discipline; it allows us to understand when and why we despair so that we can learn to persevere; and it allows us to understand when and why we feel afraid so that we can cultivate courage.

Developing self-awareness requires that we question ourselves and our motives. We must first acknowledge that virtually every action we take represents a choice, conscious or subconscious. Then we must ask ourselves why we choose what we choose, and ask why again and again until we understand the deeper motivations behind our choices. This process can, however, be difficult, and, for some, it can be downright terrifying to question deeply. Sometimes in the short-term this process leads to more questions than answers, and the ensuing uncertainty can be overwhelming. Ironically, it takes a certain amount of courage to even ask ourselves questions like “what does it mean to live a good life?” because occasionally we’ll find that the answers aren’t congruent with the how we’ve chosen to live our lives. Sometimes it’s easier to banish the questions and change nothing than to acknowledge that we are not living way we hope to. In the long-term, however, giving ourselves license to ask these questions even when we don’t have the answers or don’t like the ones we find builds self-awareness and helps us to lead more authentic, and therefore happier lives.

Self-awareness of Fear

While self-awareness can help us understand and identify complex emotions, most of our emotions can be generalized as extensions of two primary emotions: hope and fear. Ultimately, therefore, our choices are made from either a place of hope or a place of fear. For example, someone who has had a bad romantic experience, and lets that experience color all of their future romantic entanglements may make choices out of the fear of being hurt again rather than the hope that they will find a love that is fulfilling and true. Similarly, someone who has tried and failed to accomplish something may choose to give up out of the fear that they will continue to fail rather than the hope that they will eventually succeed.

The essential question we seek to answer when confronting fear is: what would I do if I weren’t afraid? If self-questioning and self-awareness come easy to you, answers to this question may come naturally. If not, don’t fret–I have another trick up my sleeve for you to try.

Sometimes fear is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we struggle to connect with our hopes, and so can’t imagine an alternative to fear. When this happens, we can either wait it out–all emotions are transient, including fear, and so will pass if we don’t give them time and don’t actively hold on to them–or we can use a mental exercise called visualization. Both options are often paired with a meditation practice, but a full overview of the power of meditation and how to start your own practice is out of the scope of this post. (Check back in the future for a separate post on that topic.) For now, this simple exercise should suffice for the purposes of combating our fears and reconnecting with our hopes:

  1. Find a comfortable place to sit down where you won’t be bothered or interrupted, and where you won’t feel subconscious about what you’re doing.
  2. Sit comfortably, but erect. Leave your hands comfortably on your legs or in your lap. Keep your eyes open for now.
    1. I’m going to ask you to close your eyes so you can visualize without sensory distractions, but if you’re too comfortable you might fall asleep (been there, done that), and if you’re not comfortable enough you’ll be distracted by your posture.
  3. Take 10 slow, deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth, paying attention to the physical sensations of the air filling your chest and lungs.
    1. The purpose of the breathing is to relax and calm you. Paying attention to the physical sensations grounds you in the present, and helps you to focus your mind and your senses on what you’re doing rather than on random thoughts or on the world around you.
  4. Return to breathing normally in and out through your nose and close your eyes. Maintain your focus on the breathing by thinking “in” as you breath in and “out” as you breath out. Do this 10 times before you move on.
    1. We’re now lowering the focus on the breathing, but still trying to maintain it as a loose touch point to keep you present and grounded in the exercise. Closing your eyes helps to block out additional visual distractions as we ease into it.
  5. Recall a time when something really good happened that made you feel powerful or unstoppable (e.g. I often think back to hearing the news that I landed my first job out of college).
    1. We’re going to take this feeling, and use the human brain’s awesome power to replay and reexperience memories of emotions as if you were experiencing the same thing now. Essentially, if you’ve ever been in a state of mind where you felt less afraid because you felt powerful, you can always get back there by visualizing and replaying those emotions.
  6. Imagine that feeling embodied as liquid sunlight. Everything it touches, it soothes, cools, and infuses with that feeling of power. Visualize that liquid sunlight entering and then sort of filling the body from above your head, starting with each of your toes, then up your legs, then your stomach, torso, arms, and finally filling your head until it overflows out of you.
    1. As you visualize the feeling filling your body and overflowing, what it’s actually doing is permeating through your mind, amplifying that replayed emotion and fixing it squarely in your mind.
  7. Now, with your eyes still closed, stop focusing on the visualization, and just let your mind do whatever it wants for the next 20-30 seconds.
    1. This time is so that your mind can just get used to resting and being in that emotional space we’ve just created.
  8. Open your eyes to conclude the visualization. Now that you hopefully feel less afraid, ask yourself whatever question you were struggling with again and see what answers you come up with.

Even just having the self-awareness to recognize that we are influenced by fear loosens its hold on us. However, once we know that fear manipulates our actions, we have two choices: we can accept the fear and the boundaries it creates in our lives–sometimes in the face of unacceptable real risk or danger, this is preferable and rational–or we can decide that something we value is more important than avoiding fear.

In accepting fear, it’s worth pointing out that as we build more courage our perspective of what is too terrifying, too risky, or too dangerous can change. What’s impossibly scary today could be very manageable in the future, and the only way to really know is to cultivate courage so you have as much perspective as you can when faced with something that scares you. However, there is a difference between courage and recklessness: courage is facing fear and taking a potential risk when fear is irrational or when something we value or hope for is truly more important than the danger we expose ourselves to; recklessness is putting ourselves and others in real danger just for the sake of it and without principle or reason to guide us. Courage is a virtue; recklessness is a vice.

Cultivating courage, however, will be the topic of next week’s final post in this series. Stay tuned for that, and in the meantime in the comments below tell me: what would you do if you weren’t afraid?

Other Resources

Disclaimer: this section may contain affiliate links where, at no additional cost to you, I receive a small amount of compensation for things you purchase through links on this website. I never list things here that I don’t personally use and believe in, and the money goes toward supporting this site and allowing me to continue writing.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of my favorite books, and contains much of what powers my personal philosophy today. The first time I read it, it blew my mind, change my perspective, and ultimately altered the course of my life. The first habit, Be Proactive, has a lot of echoes to the concepts of self-awareness. Stephen Covey claims that the space between stimulus and response is what makes us human and gives us choice. I’ve expanded on this concept to place self-awareness in this space.

 

 

 

Headspace LogoHeadspace is a mindfulness and meditation app that’s gained a lot of popularity recently. Despite my parents insisting that I try various forms of meditation for years before I found it, Headspace is what really got me into meditation. Rather than frame meditation as a spiritual practice (which it does not have to be), Headspace frames it as a set of mental exercises that help us to learn and maintain different states of mind.

 

 

Related Posts

Fear: The Invisible Prison of the Mind

Emotional Inertia: The Secret to Unlocking Potential