I was born in California, but my earliest memories were of humid rainy summers in Taiwan. My parents moved back to Taiwan shortly after I was born, so American culture arrived through a screen: disney channel, HBO, and youtube vlogs. At 18, I flew back “home” to the United States for college, landing in Los Angeles, a city that was familiar through movies but in reality so foreign to me.
I doubled majored in Computer Science and Business Administration because I grew up reading the biographies of entrepreneurs, artists, and billionaires. I briefly considered a major in guitar but I figured these two were the most important things. The curriculum was one of the hardest things I’d ever done in my entire life at that point. All nighters, hackathons - this is when I developed my coffee habit. There were nights I’d go into the library at midnight with a cold brew, and work until the morning. But on the flipside, the lifestyle was one of the most fun that I had ever had. First time not living with my parents, plus in a totally new country - I visited tourist spots, planned trips with friends, and went to concerts for the first time. America was exactly like the biographies that I grew up reading.
But unlike the biographies I read and could re-read, I started to notice how days, weeks, and months started going by faster, and it became harder to recall them. Vivid experiences became distant memories that were only held on by low-resolution photos - and I didn’t want to just forget them entirely. At first I started by writing a line a day in a notebook, what I did, how I felt - but over time the habit grew. By junior year my notebooks had mutated into grids of habits, lines of daily highlights, and graphs from experiments on sleep, productivity, caffeine, and lifting. I wrote about my goals, reflections, and documented my path to reach them. When I re-read them, I could tangibly see my own growth and live through the same years like a movie. One day I’ll pass it down to the next generation, I thought. I called it the life tracker system.
In my senior year, I started studying Japanese and I studied abroad there for 6 months. Burnt out from learning programming languages, I became obsessed with Japanese and spent every waking hour totally immersed. I was told it was the hardest language to learn, but in about a year after I started to learn, I passed the JLPT N1, which is the highest level of fluency of Japanese.
After graduation I joined Ernst & Young as a technology consultant, which was my dream job. This was supposed to be the ultimate cross section between business and computer science, but reality hit different. It was bureaucratic, uninspiring and most importantly, I wasn’t learning anything. I felt directly as if I was getting paid to give up on my dreams. Did I really work this hard, for me to come this far, to sit in an office where nobody wants to be there, just to collect a paycheck? Is this how this book ends?
During this time, I started posting on YouTube. Even though after 1 year I only had 1,000 subscribers, it was one of the most fulfilling things in my life at that time. I was helping people, I was doing what I was passionate about, and it was a creative outlet. For the first time, my work was actually being seen.
It didn’t take much for me to realize that I didn’t want to waste another day there - so one day I woke up and I just quit my job right on the spot at the age of 24.
to be continued..
