At 31 years old, the days of career anguish feel squarely behind me. I largely know what I want to do with my life and what activities light me up. I realize that if your friend has an impressive job, it probably just means they’re a busy nerd.
The appeal of being a pure digital nomad has also subsided a bit. I find joy in my community and have found that spending time on my interests is often more rewarding than travel.
I still love to travel, but I feel like I’ve largely quenched that youthful lust to “see the world” and learned to really appreciate home (and investing in one’s home).
I think many ambitious people reject the city they come from, because in a way, it represents stagnation. I’ve struggled with that for a while, but age is helping me get over myself. I also think there is no perfect city and there are tons of happy and unhappy people in most cities. You cultivate your space and where you live doesn’t have to be a pillar of your identity.
Very very excitingly, I got engaged to my long-time partner in 2024. I’m grateful for her partnership and honestly, very little of my life would make sense without her.
I intentionally try not to write publicly about her, but her wellbeing and needs are foundational to everything else. There’s so much more colour in my life with her. She has a care, grace, and elegance that I hope our future kids are lucky enough to inherit.
Peak Frameworks
Peak Frameworks has been really awesome to me and I would again like to express my gratitude to the customers and people who have supported me. I’m also sorry if you get bombarded with my ads on Instagram… but those pay for my mortgage and my food.
Peak Frameworks is a high-margin business with an excellent NPS that continues to grow at a comfortable pace. I love the mix of finance, content creation, and entrepreneurship and I think I’m uniquely suited for it. In hindsight, I may have been created in a lab to teach people how to get into finance.
I’m also pretty sure Peak Frameworks is the best educational resource for people pursuing private equity in the world. It doesn’t bother me if it’s not the best; I just genuinely think it is. I get a high volume of thank you emails from people who get jobs because of my content. Recruiters are quick to recommend the product.
There are many adjacent business ideas (job boards, recruiting for small firms, Excel plugins) I could pursue to meaningfully grow the business. But, I don’t really want to.
If I can maintain this level of profit for the rest of my life (or even just like… 7 years), I think I’m good. I find myself saying “no thank you” to additional work.
I am so incredibly glad I did the searching, delayed gratification, and experimentation I did in my 20s to get me to this point. Life is so much better when you can take pride and joy in your craft.
I think you should be very ambitious to figure out your preferred job setup in your 20s. You are much more likely to be lazy and encumbered by your 30s (I know I am).
Arial Ten
I know it sounds frivolous to talk about music production in such an important way, but I just really love it. It’s an important puzzle piece for how I want to live my life and who I plan on becoming.
I will say that my obsession with music production often feels like a weird little, alienating defect. Like, shouldn’t I be channeling my extra energy into making more money or running half-marathons?
I would say my music is pretty good now. But I believe I have the taste, work ethic, and vision to make awesome art that cultivates fans around the world.
My delusion is primarily rooted in desperate self-belief, but I do have some cool wins from 2024:
- I have two songs coming out on a label called Multicolor Records (affiliated with Warner Music) in 2025. I think this could potentially 10-20x my current reach
- One of my songs got placed for sync and is scheduled to be used in a Big Tech company’s ad
- I reached ~8k monthly listeners… which is nothing special, but I think it elevates me out of the “Amateur/Hobbyist” realm. My missed goal for 2024 was ~10k, but my goal for 2025 is >50k
- I’ve been recognized by a few strangers for being Arial Ten (…yes, only by other Asian guys)
I will say there has been some more tension this year because of how quickly artificial intelligence has advanced. My brother is a visual artist so I’ve been witnessing AI’s creep into the creative fields, but it has still been uncomfortable.
Many musicians stubbornly say that “AI is good at making elevator music, but it won’t replace humans when making art”. I’m not so sure. It was extremely demoralizing listening to the quality that AI is currently at.
But now that more time has passed… I don’t really care that much.
I don’t rely on music for income and I create art because it’s fun and pleasing to my soul.
On some level, it’s like why I write this blog. There’s just some message or emotion I feel compelled to express – and that’s enough for me.
Obligation
One theme on my mind lately is that I have inundated myself with many obligations. Despite having relative time freedom, I’ve filled my cup up to a point where I don’t have as much idle creative time.
Any creative energy I have, I force myself to spend on music to advance The Goal. I still listen to finance and business podcasts to keep my brain sharp for Peak Frameworks. There is also an absurd amount of house-related upkeep to do, which gobbles up the remaining time I do have. On the horizon are kids and it’s important to me to be a present and good father.
Idle time isn’t necessarily good, but it does mean I do less exploring and less self-reflection. It means less writing and potentially stagnating personal growth.
Health & Wellness
The other big theme this year is an increasing focus on health.
Like virtually every other entrepreneurial ENTJ, I would like to live as long as I reasonably can. I guess because I am scared of death/non-existence and I that think life is overall pretty good.
I don’t do anything crazy, but my daily rituals are:
- Getting morning sunlight
- Getting on average 7k steps per day (I don’t care if you get more, this is what’s sustainable for me)
- Exercising daily
- Using a red-light machine
- Eating an avocado and kefir + blueberries, nuts daily (for skin and digestion)
- Using an Oura ring
- Cutting down drinking dramatically (ideally only twice a month now, but some of my friends are charming and excellent at peer pressure)
- Checking my blood glucose regularly
I have honestly zero clue how people with tough jobs consistently work out. The amount of willpower that takes is incredible.
2024 Round Up
Here are a few loose details about me, so you can feel like you know me more:
- I read my first fiction book in years and the series has been extremely good. Did you know that reading can be fun? I thought it was just a way to learn about the latest self-development research
- I’ve been reading Red Rising per the recommendation of my buddy Arjun. It’s digestible science-fiction that is extremely plot driven
- Given how much of media is video and snappy, it’s actually really refreshing to read for fun. You can read at your own pace, which allows your brain to chill out
- I got deviated septum surgery. If you’re an Asian male, you may have a flat nose like me. It’s still in the early innings, but I would recommend this if you snore or have relative difficulty breathing. For my entire life, I’ve been extremely bad at cardio and I think with this surgery, I can elevate myself to “mediocre”
- I got engaged in Lake Como in Italy. I posted the photos to Twitter and they went semi-viral, which gave me a very unpleasant warning about the dangers of fame. Broad fame seems like it generally sucks
- I’ve been on a few group trips with people who stayed on The Path (ambitious, NY/SF-centric, finance or founder types) this year. It makes me realize that there’s a certain level of ambition and thirst for self-improvement that is missing in my life. Not enough for me to act on anything yet, but it does make me think how “MBA-y” some of my personality traits are
- My top artist on Spotify was Men I Trust, a dream pop/indie band out of Montreal. Their album Oncle Jazz is an incredibly lush and warm piece of art with excellent replay value
- My music taste really resembles the kind of music I want to make: dreamy, groovy music that has the compelling vocals of R&B and the smoothness of indie
2025
I don’t have that many discrete goals for 2025. I think I’d like fitness to be a larger part of my identity. I’d like to optimize my diet a bit more to increase my protein and fiber intake.
I’d like to hit 50k monthly listeners on Spotify, which would be an ambitious ~5x increase. I hope Peak Frameworks grows 20%. I’ll probably be going to Coachella and EDC in 2025 for the last time in a while.
And I hope I make a few good friends. It is so much rarer to see my best friends now.