i.

“You are the master of your destiny.”

“Grab life by the horns.”

“Stay hungry. Never give up!”

Sound familiar? Of course it does — this flavor of life advice pervades the internet so deeply that you can’t doomscroll for more than ten minutes without hearing content just like this.

How about now?

“It will happen if it’s meant to be.”

“You are exactly where you’re supposed to be.”

“Stop chasing. Start manifesting.”

Wait, isn’t this the exact opposite? And yet this other flavor of life advice is just as prolific.

Nowadays, we are bombarded with so much modern day pseudo-philosophy that sometimes we don’t even recognize the obvious contradictions. The most confusing contradiction I’ve grappled with has been about agency (having the power to control your fate) vs. flow (letting fate come to you). Not only are these mindsets at direct odds with each other, there are tons of anecdotes that validate both sides.

The thing is — both flavors of advice are right, to certain people at certain times. The issue is most likely, we are all miscalibrated in one direction or another. But like the parable of the man who was taught to fish, I’m not interested simply in fixing the miscalibration; but rather, in exploring how we can identify and fix the miscalibration within ourselves.

ii.

I started running a few months ago, and I love it. This was a surprise to the people who know me well, since I’ve always been aggressively competitive and restless — traits that can feel at odds with the deliberate and zen-like nature of running.

It was surprising to me for a different reason. I’ve found that running is a sport which detaches effort from results.

Believe it or not, effortful running, where you’re breathing hard and feeling the burn of lactate in your muscles, is often a bad thing in a beginner’s regimen. If you always run hard, you dramatically increase your risk of injury, reduce your body’s ability to absorb the benefits of your last workout, stifle your recovery, and miss out on building a robust aerobic base. Of course, this is not to say that you should avoid running hard completely; instead, most experts suggest that runners take an 80/20 approach: 80% of your runs very easy, almost boringly easy, and 20% of your runs with high effort. In fact, experts overwhelmingly agree that the biggest mistake beginners make is running too hard too often.

So as a runner striving to improve as fast as possible, you’re supposed to try less hard.

This concept goes totally counter to how my brain is wired. I’ve written in the past about resilience — falling down seven times and getting up eight — and about striving for greatness. This agency is a critical part of who I am.

But for the first time in my life, with running, I’m grappling with the fact that simply trying harder doesn’t always result in the optimal outcome. Running is about balance and patience, finding value in both agency and also in flow.

iii.

Being in agency can feel powerful. Every day is spent striving for a better life. There’s no room for passiveness. But being in flow can feel wise. Patience and acceptance is the key to happiness. If you can accept everything, you can survive anything.

Imagine if you could perfectly balance these two states of mind. Studying for that super important exam or interview? You better believe you can ace that thing as long as you study hard enough. But can you guarantee whether that college or job will accept you? No, and that’s ok.

But being balanced is easier said than done. Just like a beginner runner, almost all of us struggle with knowing when to push hard, and when to sit back and let the fruits of our labor blossom. Sometimes it feels like we are aimlessly pushing a boulder up a mountain with no end in sight; sometimes it feels like we’re helplessly drifting down the river.

As with almost all things, sitting permanently at either extreme is no good. It’s not that pure agency or flow is inherently bad; in fact, I’ve observed that the strongest minds swing from one extreme to the other nimbly. What’s bad is being stuck, not understanding why you think the way you do, and not able to balance these opposing extremes.

So how do you know if you’re unbalanced?

I believe it comes down to fear. Ask yourself, “what outcome am I afraid of?”

Perhaps you are afraid of being “merely” ordinary. This is me. As someone who has identified as a “high performer” for much of my life, I was afraid of losing my identity if I did not continue to overachieve. If I am not exceptional, then who am I? This fear is what drove me to constantly push, erroneously convincing myself that greater effort would give my life greater meaning. I too often live in the agency extreme, where my existential anxiety could be disguised as ambition.

Or perhaps you are afraid of uncertainty. You grapple with the idea that big, scary things can happen to you despite your best efforts to avoid them. And your agency is in reality just your compulsive need for control.

On the flip side, perhaps you are afraid of failure. You want to try new things, take on new endeavors, but the reality is you can’t stomach the scenario where you put yourself out there only to suffer an embarrassing, public failure. You may have convinced yourself that you can start your new endeavor whenever you choose, but you are looking for that perfect moment where the “stars align”, a moment that may very well never come. This waiting around is making you complacent.

Or perhaps you are afraid of success! Because that would come with responsibilities, consequences, maybe even conflicts. And who has energy for all that? You’ve convinced yourself you’d rather just go with the flow.

Agency or flow that stems from fear is not productive. It is just your brain’s way of protecting you from that very fear. When fear-driven, these become toxic agency and toxic flow.

To those of you who read the above and thought to yourself, “maybe I am just disguising my anxiety as agency…”:

• Recognize that some things (maybe more than you think) truly are outside of your control. No matter how hard you try, you cannot force someone to like you, or compel a customer to buy what you’re selling, or instantly change the way an organization works; you can only try the best you can, with the information you have, and let the rest unfold on its own.
• If you reflect on your past, I’m sure there have been times when good outcomes have come when you didn’t try. That job that landed in your lap, or that girl or boy you ran into when you weren’t looking for love. Don’t close your heart to fortune. Serendipity is powerful.
• What would really happen if you stopped pushing for two weeks? Would your world crumble? Obviously not. In fact, your life would most likely be the exact same. So is the constant striving and pushing truly worth the mental and emotional cost? Burning yourself out (and therefore becoming ineffective for months) is a much bigger waste of time than learning restraint.

And to those of you who thought to yourself, “I might be sitting around being too complacent…”:

• If you’re not the main character of your own life, you’ll simply become a side character in someone else’s. You can choose to be pushed in whatever direction the universe has for you, but it won’t be your direction. You have one precious life on this earth; it’s worth figuring out that direction for yourself.
• Be honest with yourself about your desires, and the associated fears. Being patient until the “stars align” can feel like wise judgment, but it could also just be you talking yourself out of taking any risk to get what you truly want. Make sure the risks you are avoiding are calculated and intentional.
• Flow and serendipity are not bad things, but cutting off potential future opportunity is. Increase your “surface area for serendipity” by putting yourself out there, saying yes to things you normally wouldn’t, following your curiosities; and soon you will realize just how much power you have to shape your own flow.

I’m not here to tell you what to do or how to think. But if any of these points resonate with you, I want you to take the time to ask yourself whether any of these fears are subconsciously driving you towards toxic agency or toxic flow, and how you can find a more balanced state of mind.

iv.

I’m not the same person I was when I first moved to Jakarta. At that time, I was fresh out of business school, full of “sacrifice everything to chase your dreams” energy: hopeful, determined, but also anxious and impractical. I was so caught up on trying to do everything right and “make it big” in my career that I didn’t realize I was coming from a place of insecurity. I think I was trying to prove, mainly to myself, that I truly was worthy enough to do meaningful things with my life. My subconscious rejected the fact that I didn’t have to earn my worthiness by piling up accomplishments; I was trapping myself in a mental box where nothing would be enough.

Over the months and years since being here, I’ve slowly realized that meaning in life can come from “smaller” things than big shiny career accomplishments. Learning something new. Spending time on the phone with family. Supporting a colleague through a personal dilemma. Indulging in silly things once in a while. Grappling with existential quandaries just like this one.

Maybe this point is obvious to you, but it was a bit of a revelation to me: yes our careers are important, but so are other things.

Recently at my company, I worked on an intense and stressful project to develop a strategic partnership with a large US-based corporation. I spent months building relationships, more months exploring and analyzing the opportunity, and even more months negotiating the nitty gritty details. Hoping that this partnership would take my company to the next level, I prioritized it over everything else in my life — my free time, my friends and family, even my health. Almost every waking moment I spent deliberating how to optimize, thinking to myself, “if only I could devise the cleverest schemes or say the exact right things, I can brute force a perfect partnership into existence.” Toxic agency.

As life would have it, the project fell apart at the eleventh hour. We ran into some key terms that we simply couldn’t see eye to eye on no matter how hard we tried, and just like that, I had no choice but to walk away empty handed from many months of hard work. What I did get was a weird nightly rash (which I’m still dealing with!), induced by months of redlining my nervous system with no break.

There is a silver lining though. In the middle of burning myself out, I actually burned out my toxic agency. I had pushed and strived so much such that I had nothing left in my tank, physically and emotionally, and in that exhaustion I found calmness. Calmness that came from knowing I had done everything I possibly could, so I could accept whatever outcome without regret.

This experience was, admittedly, one of the first times in my life where my agency did not help me achieve my goals, and instead made life worse. I learned that no matter how hard I try, sometimes I can’t force the person at the other side of the table to see things exactly the same way that I do. And that’s ok — life goes on.

My toxic agency — driven by the fear that I am nothing if I’m not capable of making things happen — gave way to more flow in my mind: trying the best I can, while maintaining my humanity, and letting come what may. And now, since I’ve stopped either pressuring myself to squeeze every drop out of my day or guilt-tripping myself about not doing so, ironically I have found more space to find meaning within myself.

As I mentioned before, my agency is my superpower. But without its balancing flow, it became wild and destructive. Balance, I’ve learned, is not weakness — it is the strength to know when to run hard, and when to recover.

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 6: Resilience
• Moving to Jakarta Part 5: An Ode to Hope

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Moving to Jakarta Part 7: Agency & Flow was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a kid, a TV show that I loved to watch was Dragonball Z. It’s a super popular show, but in case you’ve never heard of it, it’s kind of a ridiculous concept — the protagonists defend the Earth against multiple evil alien villains; everyone flies around at light speed and shoots laser beams out of their hands; some even turn into blonde haired blue eyed macho men by getting really angry.

As entertaining as that all is, none of those were the main reason I loved Dragonball Z. The main reason was because the protagonists, who come from a species called “Saiyans”, all have one very distinct characteristic: the more they get beat up, the more powerful they become after healing. This characteristic is a crucial element of the show — we see our heroes defeated by villains time and time again, only to bounce back stronger each time, and eventually finally overcome their foes in dramatic fashion using the new strength gained after each defeat. Watching these arcs of existential struggle, perseverance, and eventual redemption, I was truly inspired.

As a young child, I found myself fascinated by this concept of resilience, and I started seeing it everywhere, not just in my cartoons. For example, my favorite athlete growing up was Kobe Bryant, and he spoke in an interview which has stuck with me ever since: in it, he asks the audience,

“Seriously, what does ‘failure’ mean? It doesn’t exist. If you ‘fail’ on Monday, the only way it’s a failure on Monday is if you decide to not progress from that. I’m gonna learn something from that failure and I’m gonna try again on Tuesday.”

The first time I heard Kobe say this, the undeniability of his simple message imprinted deeply upon me. It became a key pillar of my mindset — there is no defeat as long as I have resilience.

At this point, resilience has become such a core part of my life that, in fact, I’ve observed a clear pattern of “getting it right the second time around”, especially in my career.

When I was in my junior year of college, thinking about what job I wanted after graduation, I set my sights on working at a top management consulting firm — I was sold on the promise of a well-rounded business experience. The highest probability way to achieve that goal was by getting a summer internship, and then converting that internship into a full time offer. So I made it my mission to secure that summer internship.

But alas, despite my best efforts, I did not land any of the internships I wanted. I let myself feel down about it for a week… then I went back to prepping with a renewed fervor — I busted my butt practicing for interviews, networking, and improving my resume. Six months later, I was able to secure a full time offer at Bain & Company, my top choice firm, despite facing much steeper odds than with the summer internship.

I had something very similar happen for my next career move. After a few years at Bain & Company, I wanted to work in private equity, so I started recruiting for a handful of my top choice firms (where recruiting happens once a year). As you can guess, I didn’t get any offers the first time around. Again, I put my head down, prepped even harder, and by the next year’s recruiting cycle, I received an offer from every firm that I interviewed with.

A couple years into that job, I decided I wanted to go to business school. I set my sights upon Stanford GSB. You know the pattern by now: the first time I applied, I didn’t get in. Refused to give up, worked harder, got in the second time. And thank goodness I was only accepted then — had I got in the previous year, I may have never met my wife!

Understanding what makes us more resilient — deep optimism, extreme accountability, ruthless bias towards growth — was not new to me. But since graduating from business school and moving to Jakarta in 2021, I’ve gained greater nuance and understanding on this topic; after all, overcoming academic and career hurdles is one thing, but uprooting your entire life and moving to a foreign country as an adult is a whole other experience completely. And something I discovered is how powerful our identity (or identities, more on that in a bit) can be.

There are 3 aspects of identity that I believe are critical to reinforcing resilience:

1. Identifying as a resilient person

In the world-renowned book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, Clear writes:

“Your current behaviors are simply a reflection of your current identity. What you do now is a mirror image of the type of person you believe that you are (either consciously or unconsciously).”

Based on my personal experience, I find myself agreeing with this. A huge part of what makes us more resilient is simply believing that we are resilient (or in other words, identifying as a resilient individual). Some things are harder to ‘identify into’ — I wouldn’t become a much better tennis player just by believing that I’m good at tennis (plus, it would be difficult to convince myself of this without concrete evidence). But with resilience, the definition of which is the willingness to bounce back from obstacle, identifying as someone who has that willingness is definitionally the most direct way to become more resilient.

When I first got to Jakarta, I really had to start from scratch: nobody knew who I was, and I didn’t know who I would be here. I didn’t have a clear identity, in terms of what I do or my past. But one identity that I clearly held was my identity as a resilient person. Given my past life experiences, I knew that good things happen when I just keep striving, and that my journeys in Jakarta would be no different. Learning the language, dealing with physical adjustments and ailments, building my networks, and figuring out my career path were all exercises in resilience. And because I saw myself as resilient (and also competitive — I’d often say to myself “others might give up but I’m stronger than them”), I pushed through as well as I could.

One specific example: during my first year in Jakarta, I developed a highly rare skin condition where I lost the ability to sweat, presumably due to the heat or humidity or pollution or something about this new city. Might not sound like a particularly big deal, but in fact it was critical. With the loss of sweating, my body also lost the ability to regulate its temperature; spending 20 minutes outdoors in the Jakarta heat caused my internal body temperature to spike to over 40°C (considered a high fever). Most forms of exercise or even movement were off the table. And the worst part was the nearly-unbearable itchiness all over my body that struck when I’d get hot. Under constant air conditioning, this condition was manageable, but one particular episode where I had to evacuate my building due to an earthquake and stand outside for an indefinite amount of time really caused me to panic.

During the height of this struggle, I contemplated whether I had what it took to live in Jakarta. I had heard many stories of expats bailing on this city for a variety of reasons — tricky weather, constant stomach ailments from the food, difficulty in finding consistent job opportunities, loneliness, etc. etc. — and I wondered if my own story would add to that list.

Luckily, after several months of searching, my wife was able to find and convince a semi-retired doctor in Singapore, who had written a medical study paper about my condition, to treat me. Now, after roughly 1.5 years of taking medication, I’m mostly cured. The cause for the loss of ability to sweat is still unknown. But if I hadn’t seen myself as a resilient person, as someone who believes “just be strong, hang in there, and we’ll figure this out eventually”, I likely wouldn’t have been able to persevere.

2. The power of multiple, dynamic identities

As I mentioned earlier, since moving to Jakarta, I’ve had to largely rebuild my identity(ies). Back in the US, I could clearly identify as a business school student / with a past career in private equity and consulting / who loves basketball and the Lakers, for example. A lifetime of experiences and pursuits naturally develops one’s unique set of identities. But moving to a totally new country as an adult forces a hard reset.

And one thing I’ve very much noticed is that the breadth and variety of one’s identities can have a large positive impact on their resilience.

A hypothetical: imagine you have a single identity, as someone who is hard working. If your company goes under and you suddenly lose your job, then what? Your whole identity, your whole life, is crushed overnight. You’ll likely feel extremely stressed and confused about what to do next.

Or imagine you identify singularly as the mother of your child. When that child moves out of your home to go to college, leaving you an empty nest, who are you then?

Diversifying your identities and being flexible in those identities, I’ve found, can go a long way towards breeding resilience. When no single thing can shatter your entire existence, you’ll limit your downside and be much healthier in the face of change.

A few months ago, I was speaking with a friend of mine who is a globally top-ranked player in one of those hardcore mobile games. In passing, he amusingly mentioned that one of his fellow top-ranked gamers is a 65-year old grandmother. Apparently, she casually picked up the game one day after her grandson showed her, and since then, she’s become dedicated to becoming the best player in the world. I find this anecdote genuinely fascinating — who would have thought that a grandmother would find such an unconventional and profoundly different identity at her age? But it’s given her a renewed purpose, helping her to avoid the apathy and loneliness that unfortunately plagues many elderly individuals.

For me personally, as someone who has historically anchored so much of my identity in my career, adopting an additional identity as a loving husband has benefited me greatly. When times at work get challenging and I don’t feel good about myself, I find comfort in doing a good job as a husband; this balance allows me to feel grounded in my self-worth and provides the emotional stability that I’m needing. Also, knowing that I’m working hard not just for my own benefit, but for my family’s as well, gives me greater motivation and grit on the job.

But you might be asking: what if you just don’t have that many identities to lean on? That brings me to my final point:

3. Identities are easy to create

Identities can be simple things. The power in identity lies not in its uniqueness or its impressiveness, but rather in the recognition of them altogether.

Here’s an example of a “mundane” yet powerful identity: perhaps you identify as a kind person. Even if something bad happens to you, like you become the victim of a scam or your boyfriend leaves you, you can take surprisingly substantial solace in knowing that you are a good person, that you are still upholding your philosophy to always be good even in the face of difficulty, that the whole point of life is to be a positive force for each other and that’s exactly what you’re trying to do. So what if you lost your boyfriend? A core piece of you, that which believes in the power of kindness, is alive and well.

Here, having self-awareness of this character trait, and recognizing it as a distinct identity, is a resilience superpower in and of itself.

And actually, this is an identity that I’ve created and that I currently hold. I may not always be the nicest person, but I care deeply about ‘doing the right thing’ and making positive impact. I can’t control everything, especially the setbacks, but something I can always control is my integrity.

In life, many things will knock us down; the ability to get back up often depends on the things that inspire us (or force us) to get back up. Therefore, the person who is better at creating multiple authentic identities, and can lean on them as needed, is more resilient.

As I reflect on all this, I find myself coming to the conclusion that ultimately, resilience happens when we have a clearer and more confident view of who we truly are. Resilience is not something we just have at birth, or even a skill that we develop. It is something we become. It is the set of decisions we make about who we are. We are so much more than merely the things that happen to us. So I’ll leave you with this question: what identities make you more resilient?

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 5: An Ode to Hope
• Moving to Jakarta Part 4: A Letter to My Younger Self

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Moving to Jakarta Part 6: Resilience was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A couple days ago, the world celebrated the Lunar New Year. Many LNY traditions, such as hanging red paper ornaments on doors and giving angpao, revolve around ushering in a new year of luck and prosperity.

While I personally don’t celebrate LNY specifically, one thing I try to do every (solar) new year is to make resolutions. Nothing fancy, just jotting down a few quick goals over a nice hot cup of tea. Actually, this year the wife and I did this together, brainstorming and sharing our resolutions over a cozy dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in California.

But the reality is: as quickly as new year’s resolutions are created, they are often forgotten. Do you remember what your 2023 resolutions were? Is it even important to remember them?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a philosopher who led the American Transcendentalist movement (a belief that self-reliance, connection with nature, and being in the moment are the best ways to live) once famously said “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.” Of course, he’s not the only wise person to have said this: many others such as Aristotle, Confucius, and Marcus Aurelius all have their own versions of this ideology. As I reflect on my life so far, I find myself really agreeing with them.

A quick story. When I was 13, during the summer break before starting high school, I decided that I wanted to make it onto my school’s golf team. The thing was — I grew up playing soccer, and while I had swung a golf club a few times before, I was still a total beginner. I only had a few months to learn the game and earn a spot during try-outs, while my competitors had been playing the sport since they were barely walking. Still, with the odds stacked against me, I jumped into this new challenge with fierce determination.

Luckily, my dad was very supportive of my mission. He had been playing golf for 10 years at that point, and he eagerly coached me during our practice sessions. Slowly but surely, I progressed from barely making contact with the ball, to getting the ball in the air, to being able to actually aim the ball at the right target. When I was done practicing at the driving range, I would go home and putt on the mat that my dad had bought me. Rinse and repeat, almost daily. I spent so much time thinking about golf that sometimes I even dreamt about it.

After several months of this routine, it was finally time for try-outs. It all came down to just one afternoon; would all of my hard work pay off, or would it all be for nothing?

After a series of drills and scrimmages, the results were out: I had made it! It was close, too — I was the second-to-last player to earn a spot — but I was thrilled to just be a part of the team.

At that point, I considered this achievement to be one of the proudest moments of my life thus far . I had set a lofty goal for myself and gave it all I had, win or lose. I had earned this for myself.

But after just a few days, the initial excitement faded and I was already worrying about the next set of worries. How to win my next match, what skills to add to my arsenal, how to improve faster.

I’m sure many of us have experiences just like this: strive so hard to achieve an outcome, only for it to seem so small in our rearview mirror once it’s done. Simply put, I took my achievement for granted. And unfortunately, this is just one of multiple ‘destinations’ in my life that saw its meaning fading away over time. But you know what has never faded, to this day?

The feeling of pride, knowing that I pushed myself and achieved something highly unlikely. The work ethic that was forged during the long hours of practice. And the cherished memories I still have of being at the driving range with my dad, hitting ball after ball into that starry night sky, excitedly discussing with him why I mishit that last shot and what I should try to fix next time. To this day, golf is a wonderful shared hobby between me and my dad — despite life’s ups and downs, when we play together, in those few hours, nothing else matters.

So what do resolutions and journeys have in common?

Another quote, this time from one of my favorite authors Mark Manson: “the opposite of happiness is hopelessness.” Without hopes and dreams — beliefs that the future contains something awesome — it is impossible to hold onto happiness for very long at all. The heart of someone who just found out they have cancer is vastly different from that of someone who just found out there’s a cure, despite both being in the same doctor’s office dealing with the same disease. Even something as simple as the dread of going back to work on Monday can stain an otherwise beautiful Sunday, but the student who remembers that tomorrow is a school holiday is the happiest kid on earth. The opposite of happiness is hopelessness, and by extension, happiness is the presence of hope.

Resolutions are commitments while journeys are actions, but the key to both is the same: hopes and dreams of achieving something great in the future.

To live is to dream. Sometimes it’s easier to not dream, to just stay in our comfort zones. Self-sabotage, because we don’t believe we deserve what we dream of, is actually very common amongst even the most confident of us. There’s anxiety whether we are good enough. But having big dreams, and striving towards them with passion and optimism, is what I believe life is all about.

I came to Jakarta in pursuit of my own hopes and dreams. I hope to learn all about my wife’s culture, and figure out a way to be truly comfortable and confident in this place that she calls home. I hope to find career success in this whole new part of the world, so that I can calm the anxious voice in my head and tell myself that I can make it anywhere. And I hope to become a more compassionate and resilient man, having had encounters with so many people whose lives, cultures, ways of thinking differ dramatically from anything I’ve seen before, and finding my own humanity within that.

Just by having hopes and dreams, I am creating more ‘school holidays’ and taking away ‘dreadful Sundays’. When every day is seen as an opportunity to grow in exactly the way we want, or as a step closer to achieving our dreams, how can we not feel empowered and excited for what the future holds? What if the most important thing about setting new years’ resolutions isn’t actually remembering and achieving them, but rather keeping our dreams alive and practicing the habit of listening to our inner hopes?

I want to encourage all of us to take this to heart: that hope is happiness. Instead of seeking small, pointless pleasures, perhaps we can all set healthy resolutions, undertake difficult journeys, and pursue big dreams because that is what gives life its vibrancy. And who knows, maybe we’ll even achieve those big dreams after all!

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 6: Resilience
• Moving to Jakarta Part 4: A Letter to My Younger Self

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Moving to Jakarta Part 5: An Ode to Hope was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear younger me of two years ago,

At the risk (or rather certainty) of being cliche, I’m still gonna say it — time really flies.

How was the GSB graduation two months ago by the way? Bittersweet, huh? I hope you cherished those moments because it’ll be the last time you see many of those friends for a while.

I know exactly what you’re doing right now: you’re preparing yourself, physically and emotionally, for your upcoming move to Indonesia. It’s pretty daunting, I know. As someone who never really lived outside of the United States (being born in Korea but then moving to the US at the age of four doesn’t really count, let’s be honest), you have no clue what to expect. You don’t know what you don’t know. But the actual decision to move wasn’t too hard, right? I know, it surprised me too — that once we finally committed to the decision and we spoke our destiny into the universe, how suddenly the burden left our shoulders. It just felt right; and in that came a calm confidence about what lay ahead. That confidence will remain your guiding light, so although it may waver from time to time, make sure to protect it at all costs.

Let’s see — you’re currently also in the process of buying the engagement ring? You think she’ll like it? Make sure it doesn’t get damaged during your long trip to Jakarta — in a sock in a shoe in our carry-on luggage worked for me. But jeez, who knew how complex picking out a diamond is… forget ChatGPT, the world needs DiamondGPT! Oh right, you don’t know what ChatGPT is yet. I’ll explain that in a future letter…

Speaking of engagement, fun fact: it’ll happen sooner than you think. I know right now you think there’s no point in rushing, but after you experience her empathy and care from the moment you land in Jakarta, you’ll realize you were silly to even consider otherwise.

Not just that though. In the US, when someone is thinking about proposing, first they get the blessings of their significant other’s parents in a relatively casual conversation, and then weeks (or months) later is the actual engagement proposal. That’s how it works everywhere, right? Wrong! Turns out that in Indonesia, the ‘getting the blessings from the parents’ conversation IS the engagement proposal pretty much.

So one day in December you’ll be having the ‘blessings’ conversation with Maudy’s parents, not expecting much drama, and you’ll have this one moment where you think to yourself “wow that was surprisingly intense… wait, why are people crying??” Well, now you know. It’s because you’re engaged now! Luckily you’re totally fine with that, but it certainly is a surprise.

So that’s why it’ll happen sooner than you think.

Let me give you an update on my end. It’s been almost two years in Jakarta and I’m adjusting pretty well overall, though it’s not without its challenges. There are some things that I don’t have here that we used to take for granted; for example, clean air is unfortunately kinda rare where I live. Plus, my skin has really not been happy with the constant heat and humidity. These things make it hard to enjoy all the outdoor activities that we used to love back in California like swimming and playing basketball and going for hikes.

Of course, something else we used to take for granted is just effortlessly talking to people. It’s not just about being bad at bahasa; the cultural nuances, idioms, sentence structures, they’re all different and confusing. I swear, I think I spend 20% of my brainpower every day just making sure I’m speaking as clearly as possible and listening as hard as possible. You know the Duolingo you’ve been doing… I’d double down on that if I were you.

But Jakarta is also really exciting. It kind of reminds me of our time in San Francisco in the early 2010’s — the city felt young and so alive, just like Jakarta is for me now. Everyone is thinking about their next big thing and how to shape their destiny; the rules are still unwritten. It’s chaos in a good way. It feels like anything is possible in this city! And the dynamism of my career here thus far, while certainly disorienting at first, fits this motif perfectly.

I’ve had a wonderful time getting to know the people here too. I’m relatively still a foreigner so I don’t have strong friend groups yet, but what is lacking in depth is made up for in breadth. People often say “everyone knows everyone in Jakarta” and for that I’m grateful; I love that folks here are so familial and friendly. It’s honestly quite different from the individualistic culture of the US, and I find it refreshing. You will too. You’ve always loved that feeling when you connect really well with someone you didn’t expect to, right? Here, it basically happens all the time.

As I introspect, I realize that there’s something about us that I’m really grateful for: our perseverance and self-reliance. We’ve become used to big moves, haven’t we? We grew up in LA, we could have stayed in beautiful comfortable California forever, but we moved to New York City for college without an inkling of what to expect. Then from NYC to San Francisco: we again left behind our friends and home, chasing our next chapter in life. Back in California — maybe we’ll be there for good? No; destiny beckoned to us yet again, this time to Boston. Then business school. And now halfway across the world to Indonesia, our biggest move yet. I love how fearlessly and proudly we’ve ventured into the unknown in search of our fullest potential, that miraculous next adventure.

But this time, that adventure comes with a side of guilt. Particularly when it comes to our parents. You’ll become acutely aware that most of our time together on this Earth is behind us, and as that precious time becomes more and more scarce, that we make a conscious decision every day to be so far apart. Every time you see them on your screen, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised at how quickly they seem to age. You’ll worry about scenarios where being over 24 hours away is too far and too late. And you’ll wonder if this is how our parents imagined their lives to turn out: sacrificing so much for us to grow up in the US, only for us to leave them in their golden years.

At a deeper level, you’ll even wrestle with a vague guilt that you’re abandoning your own identity. We had family, we had friends, we had hobbies and routines. We had a life that we left behind in pursuit of another. You’ll become anxious that the further you lean into this new adventure, the more you lose your old self. Even as I write this letter to you, I feel like I’m a different person from you. And sometimes, that feeling can be unsettling, like the floor upon which I stood has suddenly fallen out from underneath me.

But I’m learning to embrace that guilt and discomfort — it’s the fundamental human condition after all. How can one truly appreciate their blessings without being reminded of the costs? Or experience adventure without walking out the door? Grow without risk? Isn’t life better lived embracing the highs and the lows, thoroughly celebrating our triumphs and sitting in our defeats, taking it day by day? And these experiences, they make me better.

That tattoo we have on our arm, the one with waves and palm trees against the backdrop of a rising sun, means something more to me than it does to you. When you look at it, you see the symbol of perseverance which we drew many years ago. When I look at it though, I now also see the coastline of California, reminding me of where we’re from and of the journey we’ve taken to get here. And just like a beautiful scenic drive down the Pacific Coast Highway, it’s the twists and turns, the brightness of the sun contrasting with the shadows it casts, that excites the senses and makes life worth living.

So in just a couple months you’ll board that plane to Indonesia for the first time. I still vividly remember the anticipation I felt in the car to the airport, going through the checklist over and over in my head (you better not have an expired passport this time!), the unexpected sadness while waving goodbye to our parents, and how I couldn’t help but crack a big smile as I settled into my seat on the plane. Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it! I hope you’ll take it all in, this once-in-a-lifetime moment.

I’ve realized that it’s not about chasing fleeting happinesses, but rather about living a life that we’ll look back and be proud of. Life is just too short to do otherwise. Well, get ready — you’ll face some of your greatest satisfactions and greatest frustrations here, but along the way you’ll realize that this is the proudest chapter of your life story yet.

See you soon.

With love and undying support,

Jesse

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 5: An Ode to Hope
• Moving to Jakarta Part 3: The 30 Reflections

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Moving to Jakarta Part 4: A Letter to My Younger Self was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three weeks ago, I turned 31. 😱

My birthday also happens to be my one year anniversary of moving to Jakarta! I celebrated my 30th birthday on the first day of my 10-day quarantine (the height of the Delta wave… ugh what a rough time).

In honor of having spent my 30th year around the sun in Indonesia, I thought I’d share 30 learnings from the past year. Thinking through what to write in this post was a nice reminiscent journey for me, so I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

On adjusting to moving to Indonesia

Chaos is not something to be avoided but rather something to be conquered. One of the first things I noticed about Jakarta was its hectic energy, which I’ve talked about a bit. This, combined with moving to a totally foreign place without friends, family, or job, threw my life into total chaos. But looking back over the past year, I’m now a big believer that chaos is an incredibly powerful positive force — when we can create a healthy relationship with it. Wrestling the chaos into some sort of order is how we realign our lives towards our highest priorities. Personally, it’s focused me on taking calculated career risks that push my comfort zone while achieving balance in life.

Authenticity and genuineness are universally appreciated. At Stanford GSB, we are taught to be authentic and genuine. This means always acting in a manner that is aligned to your values without shame, being truthful to each other even when it’s hard, and being humble enough to recognize your own imperfections. It can be a little… utopian at times, but I’m fully bought in. And while I was initially worried that this idealistic new-age philosophy would merely alienate me, I quickly came to realize that it actually allowed me to bridge cultural gaps and find connection in the most unlikely people and situations.

Driving made me more self-aware? When I first started driving in Jakarta, I was abruptly forced to learn the exact dimensions of my car in order to shimmy through the many tight spots and sticky situations on these Jakarta streets. In the same way, adjusting to living in Jakarta has forced me to learn the exact dimensions of my mind. I’m more aware (and therefore can be more intentional) of how I’m perceived, how my words could land, what I can or cannot do here. I suspect this increased self-awareness is a key benefit of any long-term traveling or relocating, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone.

Routine helps during big transitions. One of the first things I did after moving to Jakarta was to get into some productive habits. Mine were swimming and reading. When you’re not sure what tomorrow will hold and the doubt starts creeping in, it’s reassuring to know that at least you can look forward to swimming and reading.

To begin to understand a culture, start with the most basic expressions. I started taking bahasa lessons about two months into living in Jakarta, and the biggest benefit was a better understanding of the Indonesian psyche. Super basic words like “aja” and “gimana” may translate broadly to “just” and “how” — but the way “aja” is used to convey a huge range of emotions, or the way a single “gimana” can replace pretty much any English sentence that begins with “how” or even “what” — provides a window into how a language shapes a culture.

Differences are beautiful. From my point of view, there are many ways in which Indonesians are different than Americans. One big difference is their sense of community. For example, I’ve noticed that Indonesians are very much into social proof: they’ll really gravitate towards things other people like (such as certain restaurants, vacation spots, or even investment ideas) and put a lot of weight on friends’ recommendations. But this dynamic also makes Indonesians more family-oriented, more engaged in the lives of people around them, and ultimately, more generous. Indonesians have big hearts for each other, and observing that has made me really appreciate this way of life.

On career exploration and its resulting growth

There is always beauty in the struggle. Since the beginning, I spent a lot of time trying to craft the perfect career for myself (which, of course, doesn’t exist) in Indonesia — I’ve written about the plentiful struggles of my soul searching in the past. Even after I started the next phase of my career with Reku, entrepreneurship has come with its own unique plentiful struggles. But in hindsight, the times I’ve felt the greatest sense of purpose were during those times of struggle. Bringing that hindsight to the present allows us to discover its beauty in the now.

Networking shouldn’t exist in anyone’s vocabulary. One of my big tasks upon arriving here was to “build my network”. As much as people like to talk about networking, I never saw it as anything more than making friends and being interested in what others do or think or live. And I am sure that this more human approach to “networking” allowed me to be more effective in my goals while having more fun.

Dopamine is a currency? While I was doing my soul searching, I came across a Huberman Lab podcast episode that really opened my eyes to some interesting neurobiology. Quick synopsis: dopamine is a powerful neurochemical that drives motivation and pleasure; dopamine is a limited resource, and having too much today results in having less tomorrow; not all activities that produce dopamine are equally productive (scrolling endlessly on TikTok vs. spending quality time with your family). So manage your dopamine like the expensive currency that it is. Choose to indulge in less cheap pleasures and more meaningful ones!

The most important negotiation is with yourself. Finding the balance between your tyrannically-productive side (“it’s torture, but I’m going to work hard while I’m young so I can have a good life later”) and your hedonistically-naughty side (“today I don’t feel like going to work, so I’m just not going to”) is important. You don’t want to be complacent, but you also don’t want to unnecessarily burn yourself out. Treat these two sides of yourself as an active negotiation and you’ll find yourself better aligned and more self-compassionate.

Allow space for serendipity. I never planned to meet my wife in business school, let alone move to Indonesia upon graduation. I had no idea who I’d meet here or what I’d be working on. I’ve found that a lot of good happens when I go into situations with an open mind, ensuring I stay nimble enough to recognize life-changing opportunities from unexpected places.

Don’t force things when your gut isn’t fully aligned. Did you know that there are over 100 million neurons in your gut? Sometimes, our brain struggles to make clear decisions but not our gut. I’ve found, especially in highly uncertain situations, that it’s important to really listen my gut. In hindsight I can see that some of my best decisions (like pursuing entrepreneurship or getting married!) were made when my brain and my gut were aligned.

Think about where you can make the biggest change. My career exploration led me to realize that it’s more valuable to evaluate opportunities by considering what I can give to an organization rather than only thinking about what I can get. What are my strengths and weaknesses, and what situation will best take advantage of my superpowers while allowing me to develop the fastest? Both my personal satisfaction as well as the collective likelihood of success is maximized when I think this way.

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” I wish I could take credit for that wisdom, but it was Teddy Roosevelt who once spoke this. We’re all guilty of comparing ourselves to others, even if it makes absolutely no sense (why would I compare my running ability to my friend who’s been training for a marathon for a year? yet I still do), and this habit is particularly unhelpful in your career. Not just comparing ourselves to others, but comparing ourselves to the ‘ideal’ version of ourselves is also toxic. The only comparison that is worth doing, in my opinion, is with yesterday’s you — what are your own goals, whether they are many or few, huge or small, and how much closer are you to achieving those goals?

On the Indonesian startup ecosystem

Which is it — Indonesia has an exciting future, or Indonesia is already exciting? The short answer is both, but building a company that can ride the wave of macroeconomic development as well as thrive in the current situation is not as obvious. Very generally speaking, companies in sectors such as fintech or consumer goods have an easier time accomplishing both, but companies in sectors such as edtech and healthtech, while having massive potential, may have a harder time finding currently sustainable business models. Some factors that present current challenges include ability to pay, willingness to pay (driven by cultural & psychological nuances), infrastructure (financial systems, logistics across Indonesia’s 18,000+ islands and 1,000+ ethnic groups, access to resources, etc.), literacy, certain regulations, and more. I believe the biggest companies will be built with both the tomorrow and the today in mind.

The tech winter is an undoubtedly good thing. Given how young the startup scene in Indonesia is, very few entrepreneurs here have experienced economic cycles. I’m no expert and also fairly young, but having been an active investor since 2016, I’ve seen how rapidly sentiments can swing from “growth at all costs” to “cash is king”. The current tech winter is forcing founders to focus on sound business fundamentals — and developing this discipline early will create a much more productive tech ecosystem in the long run.

Porting successful business models from other countries to Indonesia sorta kinda works but not really. I’ve had lots of conversations with aspiring entrepreneurs who start their journey by considering porting over the business model of some unicorn from some country to Indonesia. It’s not a bad approach per se — but my hot (maybe merely warm?) take is that for Indonesia especially, it’s better to invest the time to really start from first principles. Understand the history of the tech landscape, do research on what’s already been tried, and focus on the most relevant way to solve the problem. Indonesia’s unique combination of massive opportunity, favorable regulatory and economic factors, psychographic uniqueness, and the sheer number of distinct user segments domestically make copy-pasting less effective here. So for any aspiring founders reading this, my humble advice would be to really do your homework, since I’ve yet to see any recent startup find success simply replicating an existing business model.

Venture capitalists and founders must (and will) find harmony. From my observation, in the Indonesian startup ecosystem, venture capitalists hold the dominant position in the founder-VC power dynamic — and this needs to shift if the startup scene will continue its meteoric rise. VCs are obviously a force for good (as someone who’s worked at two early stage VC firms, I can attest to that!), and a fully aligned founder + investor can be an incredibly productive combo. So I am in no way suggesting that VCs must take a backseat to founders in this ecosystem. However, what I am suggesting is that there needs to be greater founder empathy (which ideally comes from founder experience) among VCs locally. I’m excited for the future where VCs and founders find even better harmony and alignment.

On being married

There’s levels to this! Maudy and I got married in May 2022. One distinct change I felt after getting married was an ultimate sense of unity. I’ve always thought that the best relationships were “together forever” and “me and you against the world”, but I’m learning it’s so much more than that. It’s “sharing the burden, responsibility, and satisfaction of how our collective life turns out”; it’s “no longer fighting just for myself but now for someone else too”; it’s “having the psychological safety that no matter how bad my day has been, there’s someone who’s committed to love and support me always”; it’s “relationships take work, and that work is non-negotiable”; it’s “taking care of my health not just to feel good, but also because I want to live as many moments together as humanly possible”; it’s “knowing that my partner is my one true vulnerability, that her heartbreak hurts me more than my own, that I would be nothing without her, but choosing that vulnerability every single day because she is also the best thing in my life.”

Is that your final answer? Marriage has come with a certain finality to me. Of course, a finality around who I’m choosing to spend the rest of my life with. But also, a finality around truly accepting her for who she is. Pre-marriage, I felt I still had the right to get annoyed if she forgot to turn off the faucet or nagged me about working too much or whatever other little thing. But now, there are no excuses to expect perfection because I’m the one who chose to be with this person forever! And now that I’ve fully accepted her for all of her strengths and weaknesses, it’s actually been quite liberating and joyful.

Being with the right person really ups your game. The old saying goes “behind every successful man, there is a great woman”. I think this is really true for me. My wife is one of the smartest, most intuitive, most talented people I know; she helps me think through problems at work, encourages me to be healthy, and makes me a kinder person. I’ve never felt as supported while encouraged to grow as a human as I have in the last three years with her. I’m lucky that she’s in my corner!

Nothing makes me happier than being proud. I love feeling proud of my wife and seeing her celebrated for all the hard work she does, and since we’ve gotten married, this feeling has only amplified. I think it’s because now, her happiness is my happiness is our happiness, and it’s so much more rewarding to be proud of someone other than myself (especially since I’d never let myself be too proud of me anyway).

“What’s it like being married to a famous person?” People ask me this all the time. I first met Maudy in the classroom, never having heard of her before, so for the first two years of our relationship she was just a “normal” person to me. Of course I was aware of her celebrity-dom, but I’d never experienced personally. When I moved to Indonesia, however, I was immediately educated; between when I landed and when I got to my quarantine room, I must have seen her face over five times in the billboards. You can imagine what a surprise it was for me to arrive in a new country and immediately see my partner everywhere! Before I arrived in Indonesia I was worried that, if celebrities in Indonesia are treated how celebrities are treated in the US, we’d be subject to constant scrutiny. But since then, I’m happy to report that the concerns have been mostly unrealized. Sure, sometimes it can get a bit tiring when we’re often stopped for photos, or a little strange when people make assumptions about us as if they actually know us, but overall, people have been very respectful and for that I’m grateful. So to answer the question of “what’s it like being married to a famous person?”, my answer is “hehe, not as bad as I thought.”

Love is spelled T-R-U-S-T. At the end of the day, the reason our relationship is exceptional is because we have a high degree of trust with each other. We trust that we have each others’ best interests at heart, and we trust that even when we argue we are motivated by the same desire to forge an even stronger relationship. Trust is slowly earned and quickly broken, so we are intentional about treating it as the invaluable asset that it is.

On leading an organization

It’s all about time management. Being an entrepreneur and a leader of a company means there’s a nearly unlimited number of things to be done. So I’ve found that time management and prioritization are incredibly important — there needs to be a clear delineation between things you give your full attention to and things that you don’t, even when they all feel important. But also I’ve found this dynamic to be very freeing. When I could fill 24 hours a day doing only important things, I have to draw the line somewhere. And in that way, I feel empowered to make these hard decisions for what I think is best for the long term success of the company.

Don’t underestimate the room to think. When I first joined Reku, I had to fill my calendar up to the brim every day because there were many things I needed to get done quickly. I was productive, and that felt good. But after many weeks of this on end, I realized that I was not scheduling in the critical thinking time I needed to know where to focus, and that was impacting my effectiveness. Now, I try not to pack my schedule with nonstop meetings and instead slot in more thinking time.

Companies are science while startups are art. Having worked at various established companies, I know that those companies are highly dependent on its precisely engineered standards & processes (science). On the other hand, I now know that early stage startups are an accumulation of the strengths & weaknesses of the founders, and their intuitions around hard questions without any right answers (art). I believe striking the right balance at each moment in time, as an organization goes from art to science, is critical to its success.

Leaders can be servants too. I’ve always said that a company is nothing more than its people. While I don’t have the hard data to prove it, I bet the long term success of a company is most correlated to the quality of its team, how the people are supported throughout their careers, and how inspired they are. If this is indeed the case, my role as a leader should be to be to serve these people: to find the best people, give them the resources for success, and constantly empower them. And this is exactly how I will continue to lead.

No one (including you!) has the right answers. Knowing what you know: that’s straightforward. Knowing what you don’t know: that can be stressful, but at least you can create a plan (like studying the crap out of a textbook for your chemistry final). Not knowing what you don’t know: now that’s where the magic is. It’s in that quadrant of the 2x2 where the most anxiety, mistakes, yet growth happens. I’m lucky that my ‘superpower’ has always been being a sponge that soaks up new information and translates it into actions, since I’ve found myself in this magic quadrant the vast majority of my time at Reku. Being a leader is never easy, but I believe the key is to embrace this quadrant, become comfortable in the uncertainty, discover personal and professional growth from it, and know we’re not alone in the journey.

On looking ahead

Thanks for making it all the way here, I hope you’ve gotten something out of reading the 29 insights above. At the very least, I hope I’ve shown you just how much my mind has expanded over the past year. Now I’ll leave you with one final thought:

We don’t live forever. No really, we don’t live forever. There was something about turning 30 that made me really grapple with the transience of life. I realized that I had lived my whole life assuming, implicitly, that I would live forever, foolishly spending my time in ways that belie its scarcity. This realization hit home one day as I was scrolling on TikTok: I came across a series of videos where the creator ranked the hundred most beautiful places in the world, flaunting gorgeous pictures of each. I was first in awe of the majestic landmarks, but that awe quickly turned to sadness as it sunk in that I’d never see the majority of these in my lifetime. In that moment, lying on my couch with my phone in my hand, I feared my future regret.

Perhaps we are too short-sighted to see that we’ll pay for today’s complacency, complacency in going after the life we truly want, with tomorrow’s rue. Or perhaps we are too scared to admit that the life we truly want may require a lot of work and changes. Or perhaps we are too idealistic, hoping that life will fall perfectly into place such that we’ll have the exact right amount of time, energy, and resources to live our true lives later.

We only have a finite amount of time on Earth, and therefore only a finite number of times we’ll do anything. A finite number of times we’ll see a majestic landmark, a finite number of times we’ll eat our favorite foods, a finite number of times we’ll hug our parents. In fact, for many of us, over 90% of hugs-with-our-parents are already behind us, with less than 10% of the total hugs-with-our-parents in our lifetimes still remaining. This is almost certainly the case for me.

I find myself thinking a lot about what I want in this short journey we call life. What’s a life worth living as defined by me and me alone? Am I getting closer to that or not? 31 is not old, but it’s not young either. Am I making good use of the time I have left?

Let’s always keep in mind just how precious life is, and how easy it is to let it drift by aimlessly! Maybe only by embracing its fleeting nature will we appreciate it to the fullest.

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 4: A Letter to My Younger Self
• Moving to Jakarta Part 2: The Goals

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Moving to Jakarta Part 3: The 30 Reflections was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I talk about surviving in Indonesia, my new company, getting married, and more.

If you missed it, check out Part 1 here.

My plan coming into Jakarta was simple:

1. Marry the love of my life;
2. Become an entrepreneur.

I knew both of these goals would be much much easier said than done. Not only would these be dramatic personal and professional moves, but making these moves in a completely foreign country… oh boy.

Let me talk about my second goal first, then circle back to the first one.

I started my professional journey in Indonesia by joining AC Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence. The reason for this was to get a soft landing into the country, quickly expand my exposure and network while helping the team where I can, and get a better sense of what it would be like to run a startup in Indonesia.

I’ve always wanted to run a company, and now felt like the right time — I’ve had experience as an investor into all kinds of startups, as a venture capitalist as well as an active angel investor, and also have had experience as an employee at two startups. So becoming a founder was a logical next step.

But I knew the leap to entrepreneurship would be like no professional experience before, especially in a place like Jakarta where the ecosystem operates by its own rules and can be a tricky market to crack economically, regulatorily, and culturally.

I gave myself exactly 6 months from starting at ACV (so, until the end of April) to figure out what I was going to do — I was impatient and focused, a powerful combo. With that tight timeline, I jumped head-first into studying the Indonesian economy, “cofounder dating”, and exploring various startup ideas. I was discussing novel things with interesting people, and it was exciting.

One thing I immediately appreciated about Jakarta was, paradoxically, connecting with people on a deeper level. The individuals I’ve met rarely share my hobbies, hometowns, or personalities, but we do share the same “we’re all just trying to figure it out, navigating through the abounding chaos and opportunity” sentiment. In that way, I’d found kinship here that I would never have expected.

In these 6 months I was always busy, and for such a sudden life metamorphosis, I was seemingly making a lot of progress.

But — like a duck that appears to be gracefully gliding over still waters, below the surface I felt chaotic, much like the duck’s frantic paddling underwater. Many expressed surprise at how easily I was adapting to living in Jakarta, how many friends I was making, how much I was learning. But that was on the outside.

On the inside, I was less confident.

For the first time in my life, I was faced with serious self-doubt. Doubt around how I was spending my time — was I taking the right steps to achieve my goals? Doubt about adapting to a totally new place — would I be able to understand the cultural nuances well enough? Doubt even about what I wanted — did I actually want to become an entrepreneur?

You know the phrase “2 steps forward, 1 step backward”? Every day for the first 6 months felt like “4 steps forward, 3.9 steps backward”.

All this emotional grappling gave me the gift of contemplation, however. Sounds obvious in hindsight, but I started to slowly realize that life is simply an aggregation of how I choose to live each day. I often caught myself thinking ‘if only I could find the exact right opportunity / idea / situation, then I’ll have a joyful and purposeful life’; but I’m learning now that if it’s a joyful and purposeful life I seek, the most effective way to that is to pursue joy and purpose every single day.

I also decided that moving in some direction, even if I’m not 100% confident that it’s the perfect direction, is better than to be stagnant, plagued by self-doubt.

So I took a leap of faith.

I explored quite a few ideas in quite a few sectors but time and time again, I found myself gravitating towards an industry I’ve been closely watching: crypto.

It’s a technology that has the power to change the world for the better, not limited by country borders, plus some of the smartest minds in the world are working hard to make the crypto-future a reality. Nearly all of the top global venture capital funds are actively investing in crypto; in fact, Chris Dixon, the head of a16z’s $4.5B crypto fund, the largest dedicated crypto fund in the world, was named the top VC investor in the world. In a landmark deal in August 2022, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $10T+ under management, partnered with Coinbase to provide its institutional clients direct access to bitcoin. And even before that, industry leaders like PayPal, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Tesla have officially been accepting cryptocurrencies as payment. So it’s impossible to deny the legitimacy and momentum of this industry.

Most importantly to me personally, crypto has been an area that I’ve been watching closely and actively participating in for a long time now.

My journey with crypto started back in 2014.

I had just heard about this thing called bitcoin — apparently invented by some mysterious person named Satoshi — and it had just shot up from $100 to over $1,000 in a matter of a few months. None of my friends really knew what it was, other than that it was making some lucky fools rich (“damn, if only I held my bitcoin instead of buying pizza with it!” was often heard in the streets of San Francisco), and after it crashed down 80% in another few months, I never thought much of it again.

Until mid-2017, when bitcoin started yet another meteoric rise, eventually peaking at $19,000. I had started to learn more about bitcoin by then: it’s a system that is wholly impervious to manipulation or corruption; its design is autonomous and permissionless and future-proof; it might change the world of finance as we know it. At this point I was getting pretty interested, and had managed to get my hands on a small fraction of a bitcoin through some overly complicated process. Back then, and even now, getting into crypto was convoluted and intimidating.

Then another crash, this time from $19,000 to $8,000 in early 2018. The sentiment was grim. The skeptics were very vocal, claiming that they always knew bitcoin was going to die, while the believers hid from public discourse, tails tucked between their legs. FUD ran rampant.

But the truth is, 3 months before bitcoin hit $19,000, the price was $4,000 — barely half of the $8,000 price after the crash. The believers still believed in the revolutionary potential of bitcoin, but we started to realize that the adoption of bitcoin and cryptocurrency broadly would be driven by these big bull rallies + post-rally selldowns. In fact, these cycles are necessary and beneficial for rapid consumer adoption.

I continued to follow the developments in crypto, and when I got to Stanford business school in September 2019, I quickly found a community of colleagues who were even more passionate about crypto than I was. We went to conferences, attended crypto classes, and spent many dinners geeking out about the latest news. And during my summer internship at Playground Global I spent a large chunk of my time developing our firm’s thesis around crypto and web3.

While the price of bitcoin bounced around $10,000 during my first year at school, my friends and I felt that, given the rise of high quality projects, another big rally was inevitable. And indeed that big rally came, from October 2020 to March 2021 where bitcoin absolutely surged from $10,000 to $60,000. Consumer sentiment and adoption had finally caught up to the underlying quality.

The rest of 2021 was an incredibly exciting time: tons of new crypto believers poured into the market (in Indonesia, gross transaction value grew from $4B in 2020 to $60B in 2021 — an astounding 15x — before even taking into account the NFT boom), many new companies launched while many new sub-sectors emerged, and the optimism was contagious. The believers had finally mounted an offensive against the skeptics, and it was working.

As with every rally in the past, however, we’ve seen the price of bitcoin come back down to earth. And as of me writing this, bitcoin is floating around $21,000. But lest we get greedy, let me remind us that this “crashed” price is higher than the peak of the last big boom. Looking at a log chart (which is arguably a more useful view vs. a linear chart for exponential things like worldwide adoption of crypto), the trend is still healthily, steadily upward.

So what?

I’ve talked a lot about the price of bitcoin, and the truth is, bitcoin is only a small part of what makes me excited about crypto broadly. But the price of bitcoin is the single best indicator of consumer adoption (read: excitement) currently: it only goes up when people buy in, literally and philosophically, to the crypto-future.

To me, and to other believers, the crypto-future represents a fundamental shift in how we experience ownership — ownership of assets, ownership of data, even ownership of culture. I won’t go into a ton of detail right now, but imagine this:

• You live in a politically unstable country, and one day the government seizes all your assets without your consent. As unfortunate as this is, the government can do this because you rely on its currency (which is owned and controlled by the government) and because you rely on its central banks to hold your assets. With decentralized currencies like bitcoin, you take back ownership — no one can manipulate any of your assets or the value of those assets without your consent, and every transaction on the network is publicly transparent.
• You decide to change hospitals, so you need to take your medical records (which is currently owned by your current hospital) and transfer them to your new hospital. But when you go to your current hospital, it turns out they’ve lost your medical records — records that should have belonged to you in the first place. With NFTs and decentralized applications built on top of open source blockchains like Ethereum, you take back ownership — you own your medical records and you get to decide how others interact with that data.
• You’re a content creator on YouTube, and suddenly YouTube changes its algorithm such that your earnings are cut in half. Even though you’re a valuable contributor to the YouTube ecosystem, you have no say in what YouTube chooses to do. With DAOs and governance tokens, you take back ownership — you can participate in a democratic election system without reliance on key individuals who may not always work in the community’s interest (or may even be corrupt).

There are so many other examples we could talk about, but suffice it to say: the crypto-future fundamentally challenges many of the ways the world works today, and replaces them with a better system that gives power back to the people. So to the believers, I say keep believing. And to the others, I hope we can surprise you.

So what’s my new company?

At this point, I hope that I’ve convinced you (or at least made some good points) that crypto is an exciting industry. But as I mentioned earlier, one of the key pain points for users is still being able to access the ecosystem + investing in the growth of the industry. Even if users can do this, understanding everything that’s going on is a further challenge.

I’ve decided to join Reku — Reku (formerly known as Rekeningku) is a leading Indonesian crypto exchange, built on the philosophy of providing the most compliant and user-centric platform to invest in various crypto assets, without any of the frills or gimmicks. It offers the lowest transaction fees, with very high liquidity, in a super simple-to-use user experience, on a completely homegrown technology platform that ensures maximum compliance. And for the heavy traders out there, it has the tools and features needed for any technical analysis.

A crypto exchange plays a pivotal role in the ecosystem: it acts as a gatekeeper to the world of crypto. Users inevitably need to go through exchanges in order to access the rest of crypto. And it’s because of this that exchanges have both the responsibility and the opportunity to guide, protect, and empower users through their crypto journey.

When I first met the Reku team, I was impressed by their handle of the ins and outs of their business — how to run the most efficient exchange, how to ensure scalability, how to stay lean. I was even more impressed when they shared their numbers around traction and growth. As we discussed further about how to take Reku to the next level, I felt a great sense of immediate trust and alignment with the team, and I’m excited to help the company achieve still greater success.

In the coming days you’ll be hearing more about us and I’m excited to share what we’ve been doing. We’ve made big moves and partnered with some awesome folks in order to supercharge our growth as well as put innovative new products in the hands of our users. Stay tuned!

And about my second goal of getting married to the love of my life…

I have so much to talk about here, even more than my entrepreneurial goal. The stories of the surprise proposal I planned which ended with me being the one who was surprised; of all the work to win over her parents; of the time my parents and I almost died just days before the wedding; of the breathtaking emotions I felt watching her come down the aisle; of the first steps we took to finally start our lives together… honestly I could write a book!

But this wild journey is one that deserves its own dedicated post, not just a section at the end of another. So until next time, I’ll leave you with this one sentiment that summarizes our journey: true love is worth fighting for!

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 3: The 30 Reflections
• Moving to Jakarta Part 1: The Why

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Moving to Jakarta Part 2: The Goals was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I moved to Jakarta, Indonesia exactly four months ago.

This is a view of a particularly dramatic sunset from my apartment window. My phone doesn’t do it justice, but there’s something about the temperamental Jakarta skies that paint some of the most vividly magenta and gold sunsets that I’ve ever seen.

Here’s another sunset, this time from a cliff in Uluwatu, Bali, Indonesia (and with a better phone!).

As a tropical country sitting right on the equator, Indonesia doesn’t have the typical four seasons but rather just two — dry and rainy. February is the penultimate month of the rainy season, and as a result, the frequency of these crazy vivid sunsets have slowly dried up.

Jakarta is close to the furthest place that you could go from my hometown of Los Angeles. It is currently 15 hours ahead of PST and a one-way trip takes 24 hours to complete.

The stifling traffic of the fourteen lane I-405 in LA has been replaced by the chaotic macet of tiny alleyways bursting at the seams trying to fit far too many taxis and motorbikes, overtaking each other shoulder by shoulder. Many Jakarta natives have been shocked to hear that I drive here, a feat often considered too stressful and time-consuming. But luckily I’ve always loved driving, even in traffic.

The packed streets of Jakarta are lined with bustling warungs selling cigarettes and chicken satay and coffee sachets. Employees wear batiks instead of corporate logo hoodies. The food is cheap, sometimes merely a fraction of the $15+ salads that are all too common in California. Malls are a huge aspect of any social activity, whether you’re on a dinner date or watching a movie or exercising or conducting business meetings. Business is largely communicated over WhatsApp.

Culturally, Jakarta is nothing like what I’ve experienced before. Indonesians embrace the virtues of gotong royong and sopan santun — roughly translating to ‘community helping each other’ and ‘respect and decorum towards one another’ — which is in contrast with American individualism and directness.

As for the native language, originally invented for merchants, bahasa Indonesia is fairly quick to pick up and highly efficient but lacks grammar, forcing the listener to be especially sensitive to context and tacit social dynamics. And there are a lot of tacit social dynamics.

Suffice it to say, Indonesia is pretty different. So how the heck did I end up here?

September 2019 — two years and five months ago — I stepped into my first class at business school. Coming off of a “prestigious” yet “traditional” six year career thus far, and surrounded by classmates who had been rewarded for taking personal and professional risks, my heart was so full of hope, ready to embrace a profound change from my prior steady grind.

All the goals I had set for myself to achieve during school centered around a singular mega-goal: introducing more purpose and adventure into my life.

Well, the universe works in unexpected ways. It tends to deliver but almost never in the ways you’d suspect. I know we’ve all had those moments when we look back and think, “Ohh, so that’s how that makes sense in the grand scheme of my life!”

Even before my two years at Stanford, the universe had been steadily guiding me towards the big move. There were ultimately 4 reasons for the move: love, growth, pride, and opportunity.

On my first day at the GSB, I met a wonderful Indonesian girl. She has a huge heart for her country and, to this day, regularly encourages me to be “more global”. We started dating pretty early on, and having lived through the turbulences of business school, COVID, and personal circumstances together, we feel inseparable. I am deeply blessed to have her in my life; we are similar and yet different in all the right ways.

So when we discussed where to live after graduation, we felt that we had come to a character-defining moment in our lives. How important was it for us to be in the same place? And what would we do to make that happen?

I think it’s a mistake when people, especially younger folk, refuse to meaningfully and intentionally invest in their relationships because they presume it should all be effortless. We believe it’s how a couple comes together and works as a unit during times of turbulence that proves how committed they truly are.

So we decided that being together was a non-negotiable.

But if you’re thinking to yourself, “well, it sounds like you just moved to Jakarta for your partner,” that would be missing the full picture.

I’ve always had one key regret about college: I never took a semester abroad. Many of my friends who did take their semesters abroad credit the experience as one of their absolute best experiences of their lives, not just for the fun but also for the perspective-broadening and character-building. I wanted to undergo that personal growth too!

In my first job out of college at Bain & Company, I had to make a hard choice between doing an externship at a tech company or working in an international office during my third year. As much as I wanted to live in Amsterdam or Hong Kong for 6 months, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to explore the startup world.

At Bain Capital, I spent three weeks around Thanksgiving working on a mega-deal out of the London office. I was super excited about being abroad finally, but the 120 hour weeks didn’t leave me any time to explore the city beyond the two-minute walk from my hotel to the office.

And of course, COVID deprived us business school students of the opportunities to romp around the globe, usually a fabric of b-school life.

The benefits of living abroad are well understood, from expanding your comfort zone to gaining confidence in managing change to becoming a more cultured global citizen. Coming out of business school, seeking purpose and adventure, I wanted all that. I wanted to give myself the challenge of immersing in a totally new culture and feel myself metamorphose into a more well-rounded, resilient version of myself.

And particularly, in Asia.

Growing up, I was ashamed of my Asian-ness. In high school, words like “fob” (standing for fresh off (the) boat) or “fobby” were used derogatorily to describe peers who just felt more Asian, because of their hairstyle or small physical stature or meek personality, despite their actual background. It wasn’t cool to be Asian.

Over time, I ended up in places that increasingly pushed me to be more “white”. Especially so during my three years in Boston, a city that has historically struggled with racism, working in an environment where 100% of my bosses were white males.

In fact, during my first month in Boston out with some friends on a Saturday night, I was confronted by four individuals at a bar; they were taller and bigger than me, and they got in my face and told me (with more colorful language) that I was not qualified to hang out with my friends because I was Asian and they weren’t.

Before this incident, I was proud of being able to assimilate well with “American” culture. And this wasn’t the first time I was subject to a direct act of racism. But for some reason, this time lit a fire within me.

“I refuse to lie down and be told that Asians are inferior!” was my inner chant. “My Asian-ness is a source of honor, not shame!”

It was with this underdog mentality and newfound pride that I looked eagerly at the chance to live in Asia. I would finally get in touch with my ancestral roots that I had neglected for so long.

Simultaneously, as I’ve written about in the past, Southeast Asia uniquely appealed to me from an economic development standpoint. Given the inevitable rapid near-term growth in this region, I know that my years here will be a tremendous investment into my future. And I’m genuinely excited to contribute to innovation ecosystem and leave my mark. At the very least, it’ll be a hell of a story.

Believe it or not, at the end of the day it was actually me who suggested to my partner that I move to Jakarta. It’s an adventure I am excited about for so many reasons!

So what have I been doing for the past four months?

The short answer is: I’ve been learning! I’ve had to adjust in nearly every aspect of life, from language to diet to new friends to career aspirations to hobbies to a bunch of other stuff. I’ve gone through a wider range of emotions here in four months than I have in four years back in the States. And all along the way, I’ve become closer to my true self. It’s certainly not always sunshine and butterflies (literally and metaphorically!) but it has been packed with purpose and adventure so far.

For the longer answer: stay tuned! I’m excited to share my updates and insights in future musings, so I hope you’ll join me on my journey.

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 2: The Goals
• Episode 6: Creating financial freedom with Dzung Dang

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Moving to Jakarta Part 1: The Why was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dzung is someone who truly embraces change: taking on risky jobs, moving countries, even dropping out of HBS! But it’s led to an exciting career so far.

In this interview, we’ll hear about asymmetric upsides, B2B vs. B2C concerns, and the only healthy type of comparison in your life.

Jesse: Great to connect Dzung! To kick things off, would love to hear about your career journey — what you did in the past and what skills that journey has equipped you with.

Dzung: I started my career at McKinsey, first in the Singapore office in 2008, and then in 2009 I helped set up an office in Vietnam. Most of Vietnam didn’t really know what consulting was at the time so that was interesting! I also got to work across the world, mostly working with financial services clients and governments. My most memorable experience was working with the Georgian president’s office to work on economic development strategy; 6 months after that case, the president was overthrown! That was wild.

I was at McKinsey for just over 4 years. Then went to Harvard Business School in 2013, where I studied for one year before taking indefinite leave.

At the end of my first year at HBS, I had the opportunity to join Uber as a General Manager and help launch their efforts in Vietnam, which I thought was a really cool role. I was faced with a tricky decision to join Uber and leave HBS, or to go back to HBS but pass on the opportunity. Interestingly, almost everyone around me (including friends and mentors) advised me against joining Uber because it wasn’t obvious that Uber would do well in Vietnam. But to me, the Uber job provided asymmetric upside: if it works out, it’ll have been a great career move and hopefully great financial upside. If it doesn’t, it’ll at least be an interesting story and I can always go back to HBS. So I joined Uber! Fast forward 3 years, we sold the Vietnam arm of Uber to Grab at a very good outcome, so my decision worked out.

After Uber, I did a few things: I joined VNG (the Tencent of Vietnam) as the CEO and then did some consulting work with several Vietnamese banks on their digitalization efforts. It was during this time that I came across a business model that’s worked well in the US, Europe, and LatAm, and would eventually become the basis for Nano.

Jesse: Awesome, got it. And tell me more about how you thought through the tough decision to leave HBS.

Dzung: It certainly wasn’t an easy decision, but it actually wasn’t too hard either. The part I miss most are the friends, but I feel confident that the friends I made at HBS will continue to be there for me for the rest of my life. Apart from that, honestly the value of a business education is to prepare you and give you the confidence to make that career leap of faith. And that’s exactly what I did!

Jesse: For sure, leaning in and taking risk is a big part of what I learned at business school as well. Sometimes you need to live your truth!

Dzung: One thing I want to share with you: my whole life I suffered from what I playfully call ‘insecure-overachiever complex’ — which many people share —

Jesse: Of course, including myself!

Dzung: Right, and only during my time at Uber did I manage to get out of that complex. Taking the risk to work at Uber was the first time I made a career decision that felt right to me and made me feel completely accountable, instead of merely doing what was most socially acceptable. I believe getting into that empowered mindset is really important.

It was the first time I made a career decision that felt right to me, instead of merely doing what was most socially acceptable. I believe getting into that empowered mindset is really important.

Jesse: I totally get that. I often say that sometimes it’s nice to feel like the underdog — to do something where the expectation is that you’ll fail but you try your best regardless — and that’s liberating in its own way.

And so entrepreneurship must have been even more empowering and fulfilling!

Dzung: I was 34 when I first contemplated entrepreneurship, and I wanted to try it before my opportunity cost got too high. So I jumped in! We got into Y Combinator (Winter 2021 cohort) and recently raised a successful seed round. Entrepreneurship’s been hard, it’s not always rosy, and I have to do a bit of everything: have to tinker, have to put on lots of hats. But it’s been fun.

Jesse: Ok, so tell me more about Nano. The inspiration for the company and how it’s been going.

Dzung: Nano is an on-demand payroll product where we help companies pay employees on demand or daily instead of monthly, which is most common in Asia.

While at Uber, I experienced a lot of excitement and fulfillment from creating a positive impact for people. So I wanted to make sure my startup would serve the underprivileged. The segment we targeted were those underserved by banks: in Vietnam, 30 million people have no choice but to take on some kind of high cost credit, ranging from consumer financing at 70–80% APR to loan sharks charging 500%+ APR. I believe that Nano is a great solution for these people who need cheaper alternative financing.

Nano’s earned-wage access model gives employees access to their wages anytime (instead of getting paid once monthly) so that they can better manage their cash flow. In Vietnam, payday is commonly on the 10th of every month while big expenses like rent are due at month end, so Nano helps bridge working capital needs. And not only is this service completely free for the employees, but it also leads to better retention for the employers.

Building Nano hits all the elements of Ikigai for me: it’s my passion to help the underprivileged, it’s fintech which I know a lot about, it can significantly improve people’s lives, and it’s a good business model as evidenced by successful analogs in the US and around the world!

Jesse: That’s really awesome. And how’s it been going overall?

Dzung: It’s a roller coaster, in a good way. Our product is really great: Nano integrates directly with employer systems and because of that, the money we advance to employees is nearly risk free for us. Our writeoff is about 1/10th of a good bank (a bank’s retail book typically has writeoffs of 0.1–0.3%).

Consumer adoption has also been great. We’ve seen 60% of employees of our partner companies sign up, and 20–30% of employees using our services on a very regular basis. Retention is very high. For many consumers, Nano is a no-brainer.

The hardest part is selling to employers. Selling to back office is notoriously difficult, and even with the data that shows employee attrition is 60% lower when using Nano, companies are resistant to change. In B2C businesses, if your product is good, you’ll eventually hit viral growth. But in B2B, achieving that hockeystick growth is more than just good product — businesses like to wait until the service becomes mainstream before adopting it themselves, and sales cycles are very long. So for Nano, sales has been the hardest part. Now, our sales numbers are actually very good — we just signed 6 new employers including 3 public companies — but the day to day is a roller coaster.

Lastly, we’ve put in a lot of work to settle on a team we feel really good about. Early on, though, the situation was tougher. For example, the first sales team I put together came back empty handed after 6 months. And then they all resigned. That was admittedly a very hard moment for me. Now we’re in a much better place with a solid team that shares the same values. Suffice it to say, our history has included both highlights and lowlights, and all we can do is learn and move forward.

In B2B, achieving that hockeystick growth is more than just good product — businesses like to wait until the service becomes mainstream before adopting it themselves, and sales cycles are very long.

Jesse: Appreciate you sharing all that color, really interesting to hear what you’re excited about and what worries you. And how many users does Nano have currently?

Dzung: About 35,000 users (as of June) which we consider a big success at this early stage. Especially with a few big customers recently coming on our platform, we’re very hopeful. And hearing powerful testimonials from our customers, about how Nano is having lifechanging impact, gives us energy and purpose.

Jesse: That’s great. Now on the personal side — you’re from Vietnam but have spent a bunch of time in the US, and I’m interested in getting my readers to better understand Southeast Asia. So what’s something you wish more people in the US knew about Vietnam?

Dzung: There are so many things! But most interesting to me is the huge growth potential here over the next decade. Over the last 10 to 20 years, the pace of change has been extraordinary — on GDP per capita, infrastructure and architecture, the emergence of a vibrant startup ecosystem, tons of investment capital flowing in. If you compare Indonesia and Vietnam, people always say Vietnam lags Indonesia by 3 years. But there are many elements, including regulations, broader economic efforts, and demographic makeup, that make me even more hopeful about Vietnam’s future. Whoever among your readers is interested in growth should take a hard look at SEA and Vietnam!

But most interesting to me is the huge growth potential here in Vietnam over the next decade.

Jesse: Wonderful, fantastic to hear. And what’s the best life advice you’ve ever received?

Dzung: Also so many things I want to share! My favorite advice comes from my advisor at Amherst, Ronald Tiersky. One day as we were discussing my career path, he said to me, “comparison to others is the root of all unhappiness in life.” That I should compare myself only to my past selves and revel in the progress I’ve made, but comparison to other people is inherently unhealthy. That was 14 years ago, and I find that wisdom to be true every day. In this day and age, it’s impossible to avoid comparison: Uber vs. Grab, McKinsey vs. BCG, whatever it is. So Ronald’s advice has helped me be less anxious, focus my mind on the problem at hand, and stay in a state of realistic optimism.

That I should compare myself only to my past selves and revel in the progress I’ve made, but comparison to other people is inherently unhealthy.

Jesse: I really like that advice too, it’s not something that is talked about often but I agree with you that it’s very important to stay grounded.

By the way, one thing I wanted to mention to you: when I interned at Payfazz last summer, I helped build a payroll advance service very similar to Nano! So I have a lot of respect for what you’re building now.

Dzung: That’s cool! I had actually had conversations with that team about launching that product, so I’m glad you had a hand in it.

Jesse: Definitely. Well it was great to catch up with you. Until next time!

Dzung: Cheers, Jesse.

More from Going Southeast:

• Moving to Jakarta Part 1: The Why
• Episode 5: Key takeaways from Stanford GSB with Maudy Ayunda

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Episode 6: Creating financial freedom with Dzung Dang was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Maudy is an Indonesian singer-songwriter, actress, author, activist, entrepreneur, storyteller… whew, what a mouthful! She and I consider ourselves so lucky to have graduated from the GSB this June. I personally have found her to be one of the most thoughtful and wise individuals I’ve met, so I could not think of anyone better to collaborate with on this list.

Career

1. Your career is more than just a ladder. If you’re too worried about climbing to the next rung and don’t bother to look up at where you’re going, you might find yourself too far up the wrong house!
2. Your career is long and winding. Your career is a 30–40 year journey, so think broadly about how you need to grow and what questions need to be answered in order to accomplish your goals. Don’t just think linearly.
3. The wisdom of Ikigai. Being passionate and purposeful about what you do is just as important as getting paid for doing a good job.
4. Take more risks! It almost always pays off to take that risk and be bold, and the worst case scenario is not nearly as bad as you’re afraid of. Expect setbacks and welcome those opportunities to grow.
5. It’s all about the people. As Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, shared with us in class, “at the end of the day, every business is a people business.” As Professor Peter Kelly shared with us, “working effectively with people trumps pretty much every other skill in the long term.”
6. Become the smartest in the room about something. Go deep and be a specialist in a topic (preferably one that gives you energy!), and you’ll always be unique and valuable.
7. But also be okay being the least smart. That way, you’ll be most open to absorbing new information and maintaining a healthy dose of humility.
8. Be intentional. Know your goals & objectives, know your audience, know your value, have a vision, and communicate with confidence.

Personal

1. Be vulnerable and authentic. Have the confidence to be true to yourself — self-disclosure is almost always a positive thing! Reframe your personal growth as becoming more yourself always.
2. Own your impact. Sometimes your actions don’t land the way you intend, and that’s okay — take responsibility and use it as an opportunity to grow.
3. To have influence, be influenced. Like people, and they’ll like you. Be fascinated and be fascinating. People don’t care about what you know until they know you care about them. You get the point.
4. Get used to the FOMO. Determine what’s most important to you and learn to say no to things that don’t align. Focus on non-goals as much as you focus on goals.
5. Help people! There’s no greater purpose than helping the ones you love. Invest in self-respect.
6. There is a science to fulfillment. Don’t just expect life purpose to show up at your front door, do your part in understanding it (might I suggest Emily Esfahani Smith to start?) and take your mental health as seriously as you would your physical health.
7. Have a bias to action! Action over analysis paralysis, excellence over perfection.
8. The paradox of COVID. Maudy: “We had the amazing privilege of attending the GSB during a time of incredible stress and pain for many. That stark juxtaposition really highlighted to me how the universe works in mysterious, unpredictable ways — and oftentimes just trying our best is perfectly good enough.”

More from Going Southeast:

• Episode 6: Creating financial freedom with Dzung Dang
• Episode 4: Revolutionizing education with Pulkit Agarwal

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Episode 5: Key takeaways from Stanford GSB with Maudy Ayunda was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Pulkit is a rising star. But don’t just take it from me, Business Insider also agrees! In true star fashion, Pulkit’s startup Strive has recently been accepted into Y Combinator.

In this interview, we’ll hear how Pulkit found a co-founder halfway across the world, why students love his classes, and what it means to be joyful at work.

Jesse: Pulkit, great to chat again! Could you start by telling us about your journey and the skills you’ve gained in your career thus far?

Pulkit: I’m an expat child — I was born in India but I grew up in France for 11 years, and for 7 of those years I went to school in Switzerland. High school in Shanghai, and then I went to undergrad in the US while my parents moved to Singapore. So I grew up around a lot of different cultures and languages which is a key part of who I am.

At Georgia Tech where I went for college, I was a mechanical engineer major. A regret I have is not majoring in computer science! But I still taught myself how to code, and through that skill, got a data analytics job at Palantir.

After Palantir, I started a company in the blockchain space in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I had to learn basically everything that goes into starting a company.

Then business school. Lifechanging. Business school gave me the confidence to come back to Singapore and really focus on what I love doing. I love teaching, mentoring, education. So I started Strive, my edtech company, and now I wake up every day loving what I do! And lucky for me, edtech is booming in Southeast Asia.

Jesse: That’s awesome to hear. Has business school helped you in other ways?

Pulkit: In business school we learn that when startups fail, 33% of the time it’s because of co-founder dynamics. Business school has been very helpful for me on that front: I’m much more mindful of the culture of feedback I’m building, conflict resolution, and other managerial skills. And now that I’m hiring and managing employees, those skills are really useful.

Another thing is that the GSB community in Southeast Asia is quite powerful — they’re well connected and always open to helping me out. I’ve had some very great conversations that have been facilitated through the GSB network.

Jesse: Fantastic. And since you’ve started companies in both Singapore and the US, any interesting comparisons?

Pulkit: Starting a company in Singapore is so much easier than starting one in the US! Getting it started, filing taxes, hiring, regulations, etc. is so much easier. Singapore is years ahead of US in terms of ease of entrepreneurship — everything is streamlined and automatic.

Jesse: Wow, good to know. Okay, so let’s talk about your journey of founding Strive! First, what’s the story of how you met your co-founder?

Pulkit: I went through a program called Entrepreneur First — it’s an accelerator where you apply as an individual, and then you get to meet other founders in a speed dating-like format. Then you come up with an idea, pitch it to the EF board, and if they like the idea, they give you seed funding.

When I applied to EF, I didn’t have any expectations of finding anyone. But when I met Tamir in my third “speed dating” conversation, we hit it off immediately: we were both passionate about education, both young and hungry, both very similar values. So we officially linked up and Tamir moved to Singapore (from South Africa!) to start Strive.

I will say, EF can be a bit expensive. They take 10% of the startup for S$75,000 which is steep. But if you find a great idea and co-founder, it’s definitely worth it.

Jesse: What specific criteria did you have in evaluating co-founder candidates?

Pulkit: Values first and foremost. It’s important to ask “why are we doing this? Is it for fame and money or for impact?” Tamir and I consistently met eye to eye. We had a lot of deep conversations about these values, about our motivations, even about our religious beliefs — and at the end of the day, we are fully aligned in the mission of making education affordable for everybody.

A personal example of why values alignment is so useful: during EF I actually considered dropping out because of the 10% fee. It was Tamir who put my head on straight and helped me remember that we’re not starting Strive to maximize our financial outcomes for that last 10%, but rather to help students.

Values first and foremost. It’s important to ask “why are we doing this? Is it for fame and money or for impact?”

Jesse: He seems like an awesome fit for you!

Pulkit: Yeah, I certainly got lucky.

Jesse: So tell us more about the startup — what’s the grand vision, and how’s it going?

Pulkit: The vision is to dramatically improve math education globally. In classrooms, math is taught on paper; but in the real world, math is nearly entirely done on computers. So what we’re doing is teaching the same principles of math that are taught in school, but through code.

And that has 3 key benefits: first, students enjoy learning math more. We’re seeing that the the immediate feedback loop enabled through our curriculum gets kids to fall in love with math. Second, the students are more engaged and learn better. There’s research from UC Davis that shows our approach to teaching math increases learnings by 30%. And lastly, they’re learning what is arguably the most important skill in the 21st century — how to code! Today, learning computer science is not easily accessible to everyone which is unfortunate; computer science should be as accessible as math.

The students are more engaged and learn better. There’s research from UC Davis that shows our approach to teaching math increases learnings by 30%.

Jesse: So are you working with schools, or is this a standalone program?

Pulkit: At the moment, it’s an afterschool enrichment program. One-on-one, live, online classes. We have teachers around the world who use the curriculum we’ve designed to teach our students.

Jesse: Cool. And how did this specific idea come about?

Pulkit: It came about naturally, since I’ve always been into education. Most recently, last year during the lockdown I hosted a free online SAT class where 300 students joined. Through that I gained an insight: that students are taught to think too procedurally. They can memorize 50 digits of pi but if you change up a math question a little bit, the students get stuck! I wanted to encourage real learning, and one day I had the brain flash to combine math with code.

We quickly ran 20 classes with a prototype curriculum, iterating and improving between each one, and it was working! Kids loved it and outcomes were great. We then designed our first boot camp of 33 students, then worked day and night to design a full curriculum (since we were scrappy and sold the product before actually having it!). Tamir and I taught every class of the boot camp, where we quickly learned what worked well and what didn’t.

Now, our biggest challenge is balancing teacher growth and student growth as we prepare for our next phase. Classic chicken and egg.

Jesse: Congrats on the journey so far! What’s been the most personally satisfying thing and also the scariest thing about entrepreneurship?

Pulkit: As educators, Tamir and I have taken on serious responsibility. We feel very accountable for the success of our students. Not only that, we’re convincing people to leave their high paying jobs to come work with us, and it’s scary that if Strive doesn’t work out, we could potentially have set back their careers. That’s the scariest part.

The most exhilarating part is watching kids’ eyes light up and enjoying learning. The most common feedback we get from our classes is that they’re too short! It’s so fulfilling to see kids loving our classes and saying “oh I get it now!” One middle school student who had never taken coding classes before Strive just told me that she loves our classes so much, she’s going to take Computer Science AP next year.

In fact, several of our parents have approached us to invest in Strive just because they see the value we’re delivering to their kids — we could fill our next funding round purely with parents if we wanted! It’s that kind of direct, personal impact we live for.

The most common feedback we get from our classes is that they’re too short!

Jesse: That is so so great. Students themselves suggesting longer classes… that’s unheard of! That’s an incredible metric of success right there.

Pulkit: Exactly. Our north star metric for success is student enjoyment, which we track each and every class. If the students enjoy themselves, the learning happens automatically; very few educational institutions prioritize this as much as us. And what parent is going to say no to their kid wanting to take more math class?

Jesse: It’s apparent how much all this is giving you energy and satisfaction, it’s awesome. Now, to go a bit more broad, what’s something about Singapore that you wish more outsiders knew?

Pulkit: There’s a lot. Government process wise, everything in Singapore is so smooth. There’s an app called Singpass that gives you convenient access to basically any government resource you might need. I can pay all my taxes through the app, I can see my vaccination status, get my driver’s license, etc.

But another thing I’ve noticed is there is very little creativity here. It might sound a bit crazy, but even something like complimenting students when I’m teaching is new to the kids — they’re used to teachers being robotic. Or another example — we have a website where students can schedule class time online, and that’s revolutionary to them. Even the concept of Strive, combining two subjects together when they “should” be separate, is totally new. It’s quite easy to stand out here by thinking a little different.

Jesse: That’s interesting, would have never guessed. Final question for you: what is the best life advice you’ve ever gotten?

Pulkit: Don’t work in pursuit of happiness, but work as an expression of your joy. If I’m joyful, I can make a lot more impact in the world. If I’m truly happy at work, I can extract more learnings out of it. If I’m teaching a class, in pursuit of happiness, and a student doesn’t show up or doesn’t like the module, I’ll be sad; but if I establish my inner joy and then show up to class, then I am energetic no matter what happens, which has a positive impact on the class. As a company, we focus on a culture of joy because that’s the only way we can maximize joy for our students.

Don’t work in pursuit of happiness, but work as an expression of your joy. If I’m joyful, I can make a lot more impact in the world.

Jesse: I can see how that mantra has flowed through everything you’ve done — how you’ve built Strive, how you think about your impact on your kids. It’s so refreshing to hear, especially in a world where people feel stuck in their jobs, myself included sometimes!

Pulkit: In Hinduism, they say that the amount of money someone makes in life is fixed. Might as well enjoy what you do!

Jesse: I feel excited for you and for me, knowing you’ve been able to find success so far pursuing your passions unapologetically. Thanks for the time Pulkit, always a pleasure!

Pulkit: Thanks Jesse, chat soon!

More from Going Southeast:

• Episode 5: Key takeaways from Stanford GSB with Maudy Ayunda
• Episode 3: Decoding entrepreneurship with Phil Opamuratawongse

If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!

Episode 4: Revolutionizing education with Pulkit Agarwal was originally published in Going Southeast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.