Sunday: running up that hill

Strive fully in the process, but stay cool about the outcome—that’s the best mindset anyone can have.

In Chinese, the closest expression is “因上尽力，果上随缘”.

That’s exactly how I feel about everything in my life right now.

This year has been turbulent for me, especially on the career front, where I’m right in the middle of a full transition.

I traveled to so many places this year, studied (invest in) different business, and met all kinds of people. To me, this feels so much more like real growth than my old investment-banking days, when most of my time was spent staring at Bloomberg, digesting second-hand news and packaging it for someone else.

I’ll go ahead and say it: this is progress, at least you have skin in the game ( time, money & effort)

Still, turning insights, ideas, and human connections into a living, breathing ecosystem—an actual business—is hard. I’m deep in the thick of it. The one thing I’ve truly learned is to keep trying, fail fast, then pivot.

So this year I’ve had a ton of 0→0.1 or 0→0.5 moments, only to realize the path was a dead end.

A clean 0→1? That’s both rare luck and an exhausting, rewarding journey.

I traveled for work to Kunming and Beijing, auditioned for all sorts of roles, and even disappeared deep into the forest to learn plantation first-hand. So many failures, so many disappointments.

Yet here we are, close to the end of 2025, and at least for this chapter I can finally say it loud and proud:

I know what I can do and truly want to do:

to become a cultural writer and content creator, someone who honors her craft with everything she’s got.

This year I took a studio with four plain white walls and turned it into a beautiful, cozy space. It is my own design, my own curation—the place where new ideas will be conceived.

I’m always moved by Robert Frost’s insight on life and it will continue to inspire me :

“My object in living is to unite

My avocation and my vocation

As my two eyes make one in sight.”

I would be the luckiest person alive to fully close that gap—if the things I would happily do for free, like writing and teaching, became the very thing that feeds both me and my community.