By Daniel Chiu in Goals — Apr 4, 2021

2021 Q1 Review and Q2 Planning

I gave myself a B+ for the quarter. I might have given myself an A- or A if I hadn’t ignored language learning.

Some highlights:

🏡 I moved! I now live in a nice lofted studio apartment in Taipei’s Da’an district (featured image), where I can now see the iconic Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall from the roof of my building, and can walk to Da’an park (Taipei’s version of New York’s Central Park) in ~15 minutes.
⏳ I’ve wound down my consulting obligations and have almost completely recovered my time. My recent client, Karat Financial Technologies, left me a very positive testimonial to share with potential future clients. I continue to coach a few students through The Spike Lab.
👨🏻‍💻 I’ve started working on Midana, my first independent project of the year, and am excited to report that the project is gaining traction with over 250 people on the waiting list and more signing up every day!
🤗 I’ve made a few new close friends in Taipei, having finally had more time to invest in relationships here.
👨‍👦 My Dad and I have reconnected and our relationship is improving. We’ve been playing Factorio together this year, and it’s been a surprisingly effective way to enjoy quality time together in a non-threatening way.
💃🏻 My girlfriend and I are celebrating a year together on Monday, April 5! Technically next quarter, but close enough.
🔓 The lock-up period on my Palantir stock options ended, and I’m now fortunately looking at a financial windfall. This has me starting to think about my work and finances in new ways.

Next quarter:

⛵ Smooth sailing for most goals. Just need to keep things up!
🇹🇼 Committing to pick up Chinese studies more actively again, but time-boxed to <60 minutes per day. I’ve added a fair number of new habits to track based on the Refold methodology.

Quarterly Review 🔍

Qualitative Review 🎨

Reflection 🤔

Q1 of 2021 turned out to be a great quarter! Despite feeling tired coming into the end of 2020 and some of that fatigue carrying over into the beginning of 2021, I seem to have rallied and am generally feeling and doing great!

The main things that happened this quarter are:

🏡 I moved! I now live in a nice lofted studio apartment in Taipei’s Da’an district (featured image), where I can now see the iconic Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall from the roof of my building, and can walk to Da’an park (Taipei’s version of New York’s Central Park) in ~15 minutes.
⏳ I’ve wound down my consulting obligations and have almost completely recovered my time. My recent client, Karat Financial Technologies, left me a very positive testimonial to share with potential future clients. I continue to coach a few students through The Spike Lab.
👨🏻‍💻 I’ve started working on Midana, my first independent project of the year, and am excited to report that the project is gaining traction with over 250 people on the waiting list and more signing up every day!
🤗 I’ve made a few new close friends in Taipei, having finally had more time to invest in relationships here.
👨‍👦 My Dad and I have reconnected and our relationship is improving. We’ve been playing Factorio together this year, and it’s been a surprisingly effective way to enjoy quality time together in a non-threatening way.
💃🏻 My girlfriend and I are celebrating a year together on Monday, April 5! Technically next quarter, but close enough.
🔓 The lock-up period on my Palantir stock options ended, and I’m now fortunately looking at a financial windfall. This has me starting to think about my work and finances in new ways.

Some of the above deserve elaboration, but before I do that here are a few other high-level things that did (or didn’t!) happen this quarter:

🏋🏻 I’ve found a new CrossFit gym closer to my new place and have been consistently going 3-4 times a week.
- I was having persistent shoulder issues continuing through the beginning of 2021, but am now feeling fully healed!
🌅 I’ve been consistently waking up at 6:30am on week days since moving into my new apartment.
- This is at least in part because the convenient CrossFit classes are so early (7:20am!) and I no longer have client meetings to worry about in the morning.
🧘🏻‍♂️ I’ve been consistently meditating every day since moving into my new apartment.

A quick demo of my new personal journaling system.

✍🏻 I’ve been consistently journaling every day since moving into my new apartment!
- I’m experimenting with a new journaling system I’ve created for myself in Notion, and am really enjoying it so far.
- This is probably the longest continuous streak of journaling I’ve ever had despite having wanted journaling to become a more regular habit for years.
📆 I’ve been playing with a new habit of planning the next day at the end of the current day along with actually blocking off chunks of time on my calendar to do everything I plan to do.
- So far I’m finding the exercise allows me to wake up each morning with a sense of purpose and momentum.
- I’m also really liking how this exercise makes it easier for me to zoom out on my day and realize that I have too much or too little of certain things happening so I can re-orient around my macro goals.
- This is also a habit I had been wanting to implement for years, and this is my first successful go at it!

Please excuse my language / excitement

🍳 I’ve been cooking a lot more since moving into my new apartment!
- I’m now making my own yogurt, my own flour tortillas, my own pasta, and all kinds of other fun things!
- It helps to be paying $$$ for my new place and my new kitchen, so I feel guilty not using it haha.
- I’m really enjoying how cooking for myself on a regular basis (believe it or not, I’ve never had to do this before!) is upping my culinary game by encouraging me to exercise my intuition and improvisational skills to whip something up using orphaned ingredients in my fridge.
- On average, this has meant that I eat healthier and I eat less. I actually lose ~5-8 lbs of weight shortly after moving into my new apartment.
- However, the trade-off is that I haven’t been as strict about any particular dietary rule set. Sometimes if there’s a particularly large amount of, say, rice left over my body metrics balloon for awhile haha.
🏝️ I’ve continued to be on an extended break from Anki and serious language learning.
- I haven’t made a lot of progress on Chinese, so much so that one of my uncles bluntly told me “Your Chinese hasn’t improved much since last time” which was hilariously awkward and hurt to hear, but was definitely true. I am planning to start back on this in a limited capacity with some new methods in Q2, so expect to see more about this in the Q2 planning section.
🎭 I haven’t really made time to go back to Improv.
- Improv used to be a 10-minute walk from my old place, and is now a 10-15 minute metro ride plus a 10-minute walk. For much of Q1 I was too busy either searching for a new apartment or setting up my new apartment to feel like I had much extra time for this outside of work.

Moving 🏡

It was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster getting myself to start the moving process. Despite years of being nomadic, for whatever reason I got stuck in a mode here in Taipei where the uncertainty and upheaval required to move places terrified me. I was extremely resistant to the idea, so much so that I dragged my feet on looking for a full 6 months last year. (In my defense, I also got really busy with client work and decided it wasn’t a good idea to start searching.)

When I finally did find a place I liked, I agonized about the cost. Ultimately, I landed on something significantly more expensive than what I had originally set out to pay (by nearly 20-40%), but as I searched around and started to clarify what I actually wanted out of a place, I began to realize that I needed to be willing to fork over more cash if I wanted to land in a place I was really excited about. By the end I was looking for:

Somewhere with an obvious working area with lots of natural light (since I primarily work from home)
Centrally located in a nice part of the city and very close to a metro hub (<5 minutes walking).
At least a basic kitchen, if not something bigger or better equipped to satisfy my cooking cravings.
Enough space to host friends for small events like dinner parties and board games.

After some intense budgeting, I’ve realized that I can stay mostly within my original budget if I re-balance in a few places (e.g. cooking more at home vs eating out all the time).

Now that I have moved, though, I’m super happy with the decision and I don’t regret the added expense. I don’t think I realized it while I was there, but at my old place I seem to have essentially compressed myself emotionally to fit the lack of physical space. I also don’t think I realized just how much the environment I had chosen was holding me back or promoting negative patterns as a result.

Moving was like making a clean break and flipping a switch. The first day I lived in my new apartment, I found it easy to establish a new routine that included many of the habits that I’ve been struggling to implement for years. Things like meditating every morning, or journaling, or taking time at the end of my day to plan the next day. It’s been over a month in this new place now, and I’m still going strong on all of them.

It’s absolutely crazy. The only explanation I have for it so far is that, before, the self-denial that went in to continuing to live in my old situation was subconsciously communicating to myself that I wasn’t worth or deserving of more or better. I’d guess that that seeped out into other things, and that believing that it wasn’t worth investing in making my living situation better meant that maybe it also wasn’t worth investing in myself in other important ways like self-care or self-improvement.

What’s more, in the process of setting up my new place I feel like I’ve been re-discovering and re-experiencing parts of my identity that have been gathering dust on a shelf since I turned nomadic. As I’ve been designing my new space, I’m becoming re-acquainted with the version of me that once lived in Palo Alto and enjoyed entertaining through lavish dinner parties and late nights playing games with friends. I’m re-discovering the joy of being able to arrange small details like the plates I use to serve my guests, or the shelves for my pantry, or my new office space.

True to my word in my 2020 resolutions, I’ve been investing time and money into making this place comfortable. Given the increased expense in my living budget, I was initially a little squeamish about spending extra money on things like a nice office chair or new furniture or a small oven. By degrees, I began to realize that many of these things are worth the expense—at one point I turned to my girlfriend and asked “If you knew your ass was going to be sitting in that chair for 70-80% of your waking hours for the next year, you’d buy a nice chair, right?!”

A few weeks (and a few thousand dollars 🤕) later I’m now very settled in. My set up here includes things like: an almost dangerously comfortable office chair (my ass is, indeed, very happy); a standing desk (hand cranked); fiber internet service; a Chromecast so I can play movies on the TV; a mattress top and pillows that make my bed sleep (almost) like a luxury hotel bed; a large dining table that can be extended to accommodate more guests or a particularly large dinner spread; an oven that heats hot enough to tackle culinary endeavors like pizza, bread, or pastéis de nata (Portuguese egg tarts); an instant pot; and a fledgling herb garden on my balcony complete with planters that hang over the rails.

In fact, I’m so settled in here now that my friends here have all taken to telling me that I’m “nesting”—a word that the nomad in me is finding hard to accept. And yet, though I still haven’t figured out whether or not I intend to stay here in Taiwan past the one year term of my lease, I’m finding myself more and more excited by the prospect of finally having a place to call “home” again and increasingly resistant to the idea of giving this place up. Lately I’ve become fond of telling people that, while I’ve known for a while now that Taipei was going to become a home base, I’m still feeling out whether or not it’s going to be the home base. (Though I still have no idea what it means for a place to be a home base without being the home base!)

If this is what “nesting” is, apparently I like it.

Midana 💡

Midana is my first independent project this year. As advertised on my landing page, Midana will be Taiwan’s first real English receipt lottery app.

For those who don’t know, the Taiwanese government has an incredibly clever receipt lottery system, which turns every receipt issued by any vendor into a lottery ticket. The system (successfully) aims to increase internal tax revenue by incentivizing consumers to ask merchants for receipts, which then creates a paper trail for income that must be reported to the government. Every two months, several receipt numbers are drawn and winning receipts can win as much as 10 million Taiwan dollars (~340k USD). Anyone—even foreigners and tourists!—can play and it costs nothing to participate—you simply need to keep your receipts and check them against the winning numbers every two months.

In tandem, Taiwan has a government-run electronic invoice system that aims to reduce paper waste and decrease the cost of the invoice process. Using this system, consumers can register for a mobile barcode which they can then show to vendors when they check out. Vendors equipped with a compatible system (which is 70-80% of them these days) can scan the barcode to upload the receipt details directly to the cloud instead of printing things out. This system is still relatively new all-considering (started in ~2006), so the government is also incentivizing people to use it by artificially inflating the prize winnings odds for electronically issued receipts.

While there are actually a few existing (crappy) receipt lottery apps out there in English like Colibri, Midana will be the first to offer access to the mobile barcode system and will aim to make major improvements over the user experience of other apps (and holy crap is the bar low, even for the ones designed for native Chinese speakers 😅).

Midana represents the first of a set of problems that I’ve personally been dealing with here in Taiwan: navigating processes and systems like a local despite not (yet) being fluent in Chinese. This is a problem that I know isn’t unique to me, and, actually, I’m confident isn’t even unique to Taiwan (my nomadic travels have taught me as much, though when I was nomadic I likely had less incentive to invest in figuring some of these things out than I do now). While I’m still not 100% confident that I’ll be able to monetize Midana yet, I am pretty confident that something in this space will generate revenue.

I had been slowly preparing to start Midana as early as January, when I started applying for access to the relevant APIs. Now that my consulting work has spun down, I’m working on Midana full-time and have been for the last ~6 weeks. Progress on the app itself has been slower than I would have liked (I originally thought it would take me 2 weeks to build haha… oh the hubris), and I’ve been slowed down by all of the tasks related to Moving 🏡 (so many trips to IKEA and Nitori haha).

Things are progressing steadily, however. Every now and then I have a slower or less productive day, but this tends to be more because I didn’t sleep well that day than because I’m feeling afraid of failure or rejection.

In recent weeks I’ve learned a lot about React Native and NestJS, and have finished some big features including QR code scanning, lottery result matching, push notifications, and manual receipt entry. There are still a few important things I need to finish before the app feels complete enough in its basic functions that I (and my beta users) are actually likely to switch to using it as my primary app:

iOS and Android home screen widgets for easy access to showing a user’s mobile barcode when they’re checking out
A more useful summary view for all collected receipts, including a place in the app where winning receipts are displayed
Better documentation and resources for completing common tasks like resetting one’s mobile barcode password or collecting one’s winnings
At least one play at potential monetization (without ads!!), and hints at a few others so I can start gathering data around demand

All of the development progress is nice, but the real breakthrough with Midana is that my landing page and Facebook ads are crushing it 🔥. Right now I’m advertising to people who speak English and either live or have lived in Taiwan, and I’ve already collected over 250 email sign-ups (and am continuing to collect sign-ups at a rate of ~20/day).

Even better, my acquisition cost right now is stupidly cheap. Each of these email addresses is costing me a little less than $0.10. That means 250 email addresses has cost me in the range of $25. This is by far the clearest signal I’ve ever received when marketing any independent project I’ve worked on.

I also checked, and in the past ads for products like Serenity (GTD task management) and Strive (goal actualization) were costing me ~$0.45 just to get someone to click on the ad!! Right now I’m getting people to not only click on the ad, but then to take action on the landing page for a fraction of that cost.

All of this is to stay that I’ve clearly stumbled upon something that people want and the market is actually way more underserved and much larger than I originally thought, though I may quickly need to expand in a direction I hadn’t originally planned to build for my MVP.

I’m very excited about what’s happening here, and really excited about some of the other products and services I’m already thinking about building up around Midana. Whereas before working on products like Serenity I constantly battled against the fear that I was building something that nobody but me wanted, I’m now building my product with complete confidence that once I finish it, people will gobble it up. My biggest worry now isn’t that I’m completely wasting my time, it’s that I won’t be able to convince my users to pay for any value-added features and services. All-in-all, a very good problem to have 🙂.

I want to say a huge thank you to my friend Richard who kept pushing me to put my idea in front of actual potential users, and also for introducing me to no-code tools like Carrd*, which have helped to take most of the thinking (and time cost!) out of putting up a simple landing page.

After my first experience putting up a landing page by designing something in Figma and then translating it into code by hand, I’ve been extremely resistant to setting up landing pages for new projects. This resistance has definitely hampered me, and it’s pushed me away from the original intention to sell first before thinking about designing and building a product, a piece of advice that one of my mentors, John Vrionis (then at Lightspeed Venture Partners), hammered into my head long ago, but which I had been tricking myself into ignoring.

No more!! With Carrd, it took me ~30 minutes to put up the first iteration of my landing page. When I came back to polish it a little more, it didn’t take me more than ~an hour to clean up the messaging and arrive at the current version of the landing page, which is getting something like 40-50% conversion on page. I’m definitely taking this learning and these tools with me for future projects!

For those curious / interested, I’m currently doing an experiment where I record a stand-up video every day recounting progress, plans, and blockers for Midana. I post these videos on Twitter every day.

* Full disclosure: this is my referral link for Carrd, and I earn 30% of any amount paid toward an upgrade or renewal from people who sign-up through it. That said, I’m only mentioning Carrd because it helped me make a major breakthrough in building beautiful single-page landing pages stupidly quickly.

Factorio with my Dad 🎮

My Dad and I have had a pretty shaky relationship over the last few years. There hasn’t been a lot of trust, and there’s definitely been a lot of emotional baggage making it hard for either of us to talk about, well, anything to each other in any kind of non-threatening or productive way.

I’ve written about this extensively before, probably most prominently in the journal I kept during my stay in Plum Village in 2018. It’s been over 2 years since then, and my relationship with my Dad hadn’t improved much. Things had been very up and down. I kept searching for ways to reconnect, but often found myself drained by the attempts. In some extreme cases, my attempts left our relationship even worse off than before.

Things got so bad that in 2020 I sought the help of a therapist (who I’m still seeing on a regular basis). Improving relationships with my immediate family became a major goal in 2020. All through 2020, though, I failed to make any real breakthroughs in my relationship with my Dad.

I almost didn’t get my Dad anything, but last-minute for Christmas 2020 I got him a copy of Factorio. I was inspired by a Reddit post I had seen months ago about a Redditor who was able to spend quality time with his Dad because of Factorio. I’ve been looking for a way to spend time with my Dad that might be fun and relaxing for both of us. Playing Factorio with a friend is something I imagine I might otherwise want to do on a random Sunday afternoon anyway.

For about a month I didn’t hear anything from my Dad about the gift, and I didn’t bother pinging him or reminding him about it. Then, one day in January I decided to check up on it. A couple of weekends later, my Dad and I had our first Factorio session.

I was hopeful, but I wasn’t sure this was going to work. The first time I had the idea of playing a game with my Dad (The Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game back in maybe ~July of 2020), I shared a project idea with him, which led to a conversation that essentially shut our relationship down for the next 6 months. We didn’t even get into the game we had planned to play that day before both hanging up the phone in a huff.

This time, I skipped the small talk and we got directly into the game. The first session was a little tough—the game is quite complicated, and video game controls have never come naturally to my Dad. I think he’s always been a little self-conscious about this, which is probably why he never played video games with me much when I was a kid.

My Dad also has a habit of being defensively non-communicative, which means that any time he perceives that he might be threatened, attacked, or criticized, he defaults to being non-verbal. It’s a perfectly reasonable defense mechanism that he’s developed through decades of coping with some of my Mom’s defense mechanisms, but which has also extended itself to interactions with me because, well, let’s just say I’m like my Mom in more ways than I sometimes care to admit.

Practically what this meant in the game was that, sometimes I’d be trying to help my Dad, or I’d say something and he just wouldn’t acknowledge me. At times, it made it very difficult, if not possible, for me to teach him concepts he needed to know or for us to collaborate on things in the game.

I put myself in teacher / coach mode and, with a little bit of patience, we persevered! I explained the basics, and my Dad started to pick things up. Over the now, ~10 hours we’ve spent playing the game together over several weekends, we’ve almost finished researching all of the red and green science technologies. We’ve progressed from mining and moving things by hand to now having access to cars and trains. My Dad has started communicating with me more when we play, and we operate more like a team. We’ve had a surprisingly large amount of fun along the way!

I think a huge turning point in our time playing the game together came a couple of weeks back when I needed to hop off to go to an exercise class. I asked my Dad if he wanted me to leave the server on so he could finish what he was doing, and he seemed to like the idea.

Fast forward 2 hours, I’ve just come home from my class and taken a shower and am sitting back down at my desk. I unlock my laptop and Factorio is still running. I can see little flashing power symbols indicating that a lot of our machines are unpowered. Curious, I walk around to investigate and I quickly realize that our main power supply has disappeared. Naturally, my first thought is “Holy crap, what in the hell did he do??” My second thought is “Uh oh, did we get attacked?”

Then I check my phone and I see a series of panicked messages from my Dad where he’s frantically typing “DANIE, ACKKKK! HELPPPP!!!” Turns out while I was gone, my Dad figured out how to get enough working that he started generating enough pollution to trigger our game’s first few waves of enemy attacks, and he got himself killed in the process.

I laughed for a full few minutes after I saw that. In that moment, I realized that both me and my Dad had started investing in the game and, through it, in each other again. We’ve been able to create some positive memories together. In turn, I think that’s created a more positive atmosphere for our relationship to start regrowing in. One moment that really stuck with me was when, after a few hours of playing Factorio with my Dad with my girlfriend in the room, my girlfriend said to me “The way you and your Dad talk to each other has changed a lot. You both seem calmer and happier.”

This is all still very early, and there are, of course, many deep emotional wounds that will require much time, much patience, and much love to heal. I expect that there will be setbacks and obstacles still to come. But for now, I’ve already started to notice that the positive emotions associated with playing the game together have begun to leak out into other areas of our relationship. Random messages my Dad sends now carry less of a default negative connotation. I’m more likely to read them and at least respond with an emoji.

My Dad and I also seem to, more and more, be able and willing to ask each other questions or engage in small conversations about other things. For example, for a very long time I haven’t wanted to ask anything of my Dad because I often feel like he’ll hold any favor he does for me over my head as a way to make me guilty for not doing more for him. Recently though, I feel comfortable reaching out to ask random, simple, stupid things. Things like questions about finance, or even just how to save one of the plants in my fledgling herb garden.

I can’t explain exactly how or why this all works where other things like book clubs or conflict resolution techniques from self-help books, or attempts at regular phone calls and dinner conversations have failed. Jane McGonical, an expert in game design, claims that parents who spend more time playing games with their children tend to develop closer and more resilient relationships with those children, and I have to say that so far I believe her. If I had to guess, I imagine it has something to do with allowing us both to let our guard down a little and actually see each other and interact with each other as human beings rather than as personifications of our demons.

Whatever it is, I can’t express how nice it is to finally be able to look forward to something involving my Dad rather than dreading it. I used to worry that I’d never have a chance to reconnect with my Dad before it became too late. Worse, in the past I’ve even considered whether or not cutting off contact with my Dad would be the most emotionally healthy thing for me to do in the long-term. For the first time in a long time I feel like we have time and a path forward. That’s a precious thing, and I very much hope that it continues into the future!

Romantic Relationship 💑

Ting Wei and I are celebrating a year together! It’s been awhile since I came back from my emergency Okinawa visa run. She was there for me to help me quarantine, bringing me treats and snacks to make the 14 days of isolation a little warmer. She and I got together not long after that.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my relationship with Ting Wei is now my longest relationship since college—I dated someone for about 3 years in college, and most of my relationships since have been ~a few months at most. There have been a variety of reasons the relationships before this one have stayed short, but one of the bigger themes for me is probably a fear of commitment. So, for me, a year with Ting Wei is no small feat! And though every relationship has its problems, on the whole I’m quite content with ours. Ting Wei makes for wonderful company—I think we experience a lot of play and laughter together—and, more and more a potentially wonderful partner.

Some problems seem solvable with effort and intention. For example, the language barrier can make it tough to connect as deeply as I would like as frequently as I would like. There was a point of some contention earlier this year, when I told Ting Wei honestly that if learning English to a high level wasn’t something she could imagine herself wanting to commit to, then I’m not sure I can imagine a future together. It sucks to say, and it wasn’t meant as an ultimatum—it’s just a fact: most of my life is and will continue to be in English. Just as most of her life is and will continue to be in Chinese. If we expect to be able to fully experience each other and participate in those parts of each others’ lives, we’re going to need the language skills to do so. She’s now taking English classes regularly, and I’m gearing up to dive back into my Chinese studies.

As being with Ting Wei begins to feel like being “at home”, I’m also realizing that many of the deep patterns programmed into me by observing my parents through childhood are starting to surface. For example, I’m starting to catch myself responding to Ting Wei with the same harsh judgement and criticism that my Mom often employed with my Dad when I was growing up. On more than one occasion, Ting Wei has, rightfully, gotten upset, telling me that I’m being unnecessarily mean about something that probably shouldn’t matter that much. More and more I’m realizing that, terrifyingly, the only template I have for an adult relationship is what my parents had. Despite knowing that their relationship is, in most ways, not the one I want to emulate, the behavioral patterns can be hard to control. I hope that with time, practice, and intentionality, I can rewrite these patterns rather than subject my romantic partners to them… Awareness is the first step toward transformation.

Other problems are harder to deal with, but potentially not insurmountable. For example, there’s are definitely parts of me that I’m not sure are 100% ready to be done with never being single again. Those are the parts of me that are afraid of commitment, and the parts of me that believe there is still more to learn, explore, and challenge with respect to women, relationships, and my deeper insecurities there. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) I can do about that. It’s an open question to me whether or not one ever fully feels “done” being single, or if one must, at some point, simply accept that what they’ve found is good enough to be worth the sacrifice of not experiencing more.

On a more macro level, I do also sometimes worry that my relationship with Ting Wei might be missing something important for me. I think it may have to do with how I believe love and authenticity are related—loosely summarized, I believe that love is meant to help us inspire each other toward authenticity. I think my concept of this is similar to what some people have described as a feeling of “being inspired to be the best version of myself” when in certain relationships. (I’ve been meaning to write about “Ideal Love Theory” for ages now to elaborate on my philosophy here… one day!)

In our case, I think it’s hard to say. I feel like Ting Wei is in a place in her life where she’s still discovering what authenticity means to her and finding the courage to express it. The coach in me is happy—excited, even—to be a guide to her on that journey. But in the meantime, until we hit a certain nebulous milestone that I can’t fully articulate (is it a moving target??), I think I only intermittently experience a sense of inspiration from and through her.

Nevertheless, part of what keeps me excited and motivated in the relationship is the prospect of finally getting to that place, and what I can potentially learn from being a part of Ting Wei’s journey. I am however, aware of, and cautious about, the fact that this is a significant amount of pressure to apply to a person or to a relationship… and that it sounds like I’m asking for a certain kind of fundamental change or a shift in a person’s behaviors in order for the relationship to be successful long-term. I know that these are ingredients for a potentially unhealthy relationship dynamic, and that needing or wanting someone to change is a common relationship pitfall.

I suppose my rebuttal is that what I want from her isn’t that she fundamentally change, but rather that she have the courage to be and express, in as many ways as she can, who she fundamentally already is. In the small glimpses I get to see of that person when her guard is down, I have an inkling that that person is really quite a beautiful being.

So far, she is making progress! And I’m excited about the direction she’s heading in. I think that, despite being afraid of the possibility of disappointing herself (and me?), a very real and authentic piece of her is cautiously excited, too.

Even when things are going well it can be tough though. It’s important to me that she ultimately do all of these things for herself and not because she wants my approval. I think romantic relationships muddy the waters on that question—we can’t help but want our partners’ approval. Within those murky depths there’s an extremely fine and dangerous line between influencing someone to become who you want them to be versus encouraging them to become who they themselves want to be. I can only hope that I’m navigating this quagmire with grace and self-awareness.

At the end of the day, though, most of the problems I’ve elaborated on here are, well, me overthinking things rather than me being present with the relationship moment by moment, day by day. The truth is, when I stop thinking and instead just be, mostly what I experience in my relationship with Ting Wei are feelings of playfulness, contentment, and appreciation. Despite my hyper-active logical mind, I think in order to be experiencing all of those things so regularly, we must be doing something right 🙂. Only time will tell.

Palantir Options 📈

As I think most people reading this probably know, I’m a Palantir alumni. I worked there between 2015 and 2017 right after graduating from college and before quitting Silicon Valley and the US more broadly to become a nomadic entrepreneur.

I am fortunate to be sitting on a non-trivial amount of employee stock options from my time there. To be honest, after leaving Palantir I kind of felt like these options were a scam, and I strongly regretted choosing to earn more equity over more salary while I was there. Most of this was because, before I left, Palantir had a strong anti-IPO stance (they’d commonly say things like “this is an advantage we get by staying private”), and while they were a private company they made it notoriously hard to liquidate any of those options or, frankly, even to understand the current value of those options so that I could make an informed decision around exercising.

I fully expected that those options were going to expire before Palantir ever went public, and since selling options on the private market is complicated (or, at least, I personally don’t understand how that works), I never expected to see a cent from my options.

All of this is to say that I’m pleasantly surprised by Palantir’s recent IPO and the timing of it. These kinds of things are never over until they’re over, so I’m cautious of counting my chickens before they hatch, but the prospect of receiving a decent windfall from my options has recently pushed me to think about my finances and my wealth a little more critically.

For example, lately I’ve been looking more into what FIRE actually is and how FIRE investment strategies work. It may surprise some to know that during my nomadic travels I never much cared what FIRE was, nor really understood it. Now that I’m educating myself about it, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that my lifestyle for the last several years has been very well-aligned with FIRE principles—not because I wanted to retire early, but because I was anxious to find ways to preserve my runway so I could continue my entrepreneurial pursuits in perpetuity.

I’ve learned a few important things from FIRE:

The average person doesn’t need nearly as much money as they probably think they do to retire.
1. In my head, the typical retirement goal had always been at least a million dollars. I’m realizing more and more that I need significantly less than that to maintain my current lifestyle without ever having to worry about doing things I don’t really want to do to make money. (Obviously, your milage may vary depending on your life style.)
There are multiple models for early retirement, and some of them involve supplementing investment income with regular part-time income.
1. Since I work as a coach through The Spike Lab and already have regular part-time income through that, my baseline early retirement numbers are significantly lower so long as I can continue to depend on that job (though, obviously, this isn’t the smartest thing to assume).
There are some clever and perfectly legal ways (without excessive taxes or penalties) to convert existing retirement accounts for incremental withdrawal inline with early retirement.

Of course, all of these calculations are being done against maintaining my existing lifestyle. I’m not at all accounting for the idea of having a wife and kids or other future life expenses. Still, though, especially with everything I mentioned in the section about Moving 🏡, the notion that I could perpetually maintain my current lifestyle with minimal stress is incredibly liberating to consider. Given that I don’t intend to actually retire, I think it’s reasonable to expect that my wealth will continue to grow—just primarily through more independent means rather than through e.g. consulting or full-time employment.

All of this is to say that, while I don’t consider myself rich based on my Palantir options (and neither should you), I may have enough. I’m finding myself in a really fortunate place where, at my current spend level, in the worst case scenario I may be financially independent while maintaining a small amount of monthly part-time income from coaching, and in the absolute best case, I may be financially independent even without my part-time gig (though I’d likely keep doing that part-time gig because I honestly really enjoy it and it’s extremely mission-aligned for me).

Potentially being in a place where I don’t have to work to maintain my lifestyle has had me thinking a lot more about the question of “What would I do if money weren’t a problem?” Interestingly, and happily, I’m realizing that nothing much changes for the foreseeable future—I still want to improve my entrepreneurial skills by tackling a series of smaller projects. As I develop my skills (and my confidence), I expect I’ll naturally finding myself wanting to tackle larger and larger and more and more mission-aligned problems.

These recent revelations have also taken a huge weight off my shoulders. Others who have walked the entrepreneur’s or artist’s path can probably empathize with how stressful it can be to watch your life’s savings dwindle from month to month as you struggle to keep yourself on task to launch and monetize a project. There’s so much space for self-doubt and other demons to creep in when you know a lot rides on your ability to execute and some amount of luck that you chose the right thing to execute on.

If things continue in the direction they’re heading, I may never have to worry about that problem ever again. I’m finding that, so far, removing that stress has made it much easier to stay optimistic, excited, motivated, and productive while working on things like Midana 💡, likely because I can be more equanimous since I no longer feel like I’m staking my future on the success of the project.

Quantitative Review 🔢

Summary 💯

I’m going to give myself a solid B+!

I think that this quarter could have been an A- or even an A if I hadn’t completely ignored Chinese. I’ve been cautious about reintroducing language studies as I’m worried it will pull other things out of balance, but I definitely need to play with that in Q2 to improve this score.

Break Down 🧨

Habits ✅:

Daily
- Wake up early
- Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
- Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
  - I’ve been OK about this, but not always amazing. My new habit of planning tomorrow today has been working really well for me! But sometimes leaves me needing to finish planning and clearing inboxes before I can get to sleep on time. Right now I do this around 9:30pm for a 10:30pm bed time, so I probably need to do this a little earlier in the night.
- Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
  - Lately not so great about this. I keep wanting time to play some video games before bed, but I don’t quite finish work early enough… so I end up just losing sleep instead ☹️
- Meditate for at least 10 minutes
- Journal for at least 10 minutes
- Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
- Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
- Clear Anki reviews
- Learn 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards
Weekly
- Exercise at least 3 times a week
- Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
Semi-monthly
- Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
  - My sister is surprisingly hard to reach haha. But the good news is that the outcomes are coming regardless.
- Attend an improv workshop
Monthly
- Attend a networking event
  - I went to one? Maybe two this quarter?

OKRs 🎯:

Maintaining a healthy mind and body
- Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
- Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
  - This has been all over the place so far this year. I’m currently ~13.5% on my scale, which is probably something like 15-17% in actuality.
Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
- Free up time to work on my own projects
  - Stop consulting full-time by February
  - Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
  - Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
- Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
  - Marking green because this is on track to happen, though it hasn’t happened yet. I anticipate I’ll have at least one product launch in Q2.
- Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
  - Marking yellow because this is on track to happen, but isn’t guaranteed. I anticipate I’ll have at least one potentially monetize-able product in Q2, but it’s hard to say if my monetization strategies will bear fruit.
- For inspiration and tactical advice:
  - Read Make by Peter Levels
  - Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
- Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
  - So far pacing isn’t on target, but I’m feeling good about the progress I’m making and the things I’m working on, so I think I’m following the general spirit here.
Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
- Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
- Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
  - I think I’m on track to make at least 2-3, and there are at least a few other people that I’d love to invest more deeply in so far!
- Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
  - I got to know one other Spike Lab coach really well this quarter and I’m really enjoying that because she’s awesome 🙂. Still on my todo list to reach out to the others and potentially start playing a more active role in that community.
Learning Chinese
- Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
- Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
- Find an apartment of my own

Quarterly Planning 🗓️

Goal Modifications ✏️

So far 2021 has been relatively smooth sailing (*knock on some serious wood*). So far, there haven’t been any major upheavals that would necessitate my drastically changing 2021’s goals. I’m pretty happy to continue committing to the existing goals in Q2 of 2021. I also, for once, feel like the work load is pretty sane, though adding language learning back into the mix may temporarily throw some other things out of balance.

Risk Mitigation 🛠️

Based on my Q1 review, I think I’m doing pretty well on the whole. There are, however, two areas where I think I need to intervene:

Language learning. I’ve been on an extended break from Anki and most other serious forms of language learning for all languages.
Improv. I haven’t been going despite saying I would go approximately every other week.

Language Learning 💬

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been on an extended break from most language learning activities since probably November or December of last year. Language learning (for Chinese) is a part of my 2021 goals, however, so analyzing and course correcting here is important.

The main reason I haven’t returned to language learning is Anki trauma. I had a lot going on in Anki before and was finding it stressful to keep up. I’d often feel behind or pressured to get my Anki cards done every day, and that pressure would sometimes affect my work or social lives. I also don’t think I have quite that much time to spend on language studies given all of my other priorities—for Q2 of 2021, I’d like to keep things to ~30 minutes a day if possible.

Since I was mainly just doing Anki to learn languages, learning languages was also becoming a chore. A lot of the joy and excitement of learning new words, grammar, and concepts got lost in the monotony.

Now that I’ve been on a break for ~4 months, I’m actually reaching the point where I’m naturally missing language learning and feel motivated to get back into it again. I think I need to make some adjustments to avoid having things to the same way as last time, though.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and doing some research, particularly on the Refold language learning methodology.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

Follow the fun. Language learning is most efficient and most maintainable as a habit when I pursue methods that bring enjoyment.
Corollary: prefer spending time consuming natural language media (books, TV, movies, video games) to rote memorization tasks with Anki.
Be judicious with what I add to Anki. Aim for quality over quantity, meaning more sentence cards and fewer vocabulary cards.
Use Anki to learn new things quickly, not to retain things forever.
- I had been using Anki as a sort of second brain, expecting that my Chinese Anki deck might one day include every word I’ll ever want or need to know in Chinese. This is not realistic, and does not play to Anki’s primary strength which is scheduling the repetitions required to acquire a new word or concept in the first place. For long-term retention of fluency, regularly consuming natural language media is likely the way to go.
My previous Anki settings were actually slightly wrong. The way I had the ease set up likely led to more reviews in the short-term, and my lack of a cap on review interval likely meant that I had less reviews in the long-term.
- The new settings will probably be less overloading upfront, and carry less risk of forgetting information over long periods of time (though with the trade-off that every piece of information will need to be reviewed at least once per year).

On the whole, I really like Refold! I think there are some super interesting ideas here that I’m excited to try. I also love their emphasis on keeping things fun and interesting. I am, however, in pretty strong disagreement with Refold on one major point: Refold doesn’t even want you to think about producing (speaking or writing) in your target language until you hit Stage 3.

From the Refold website:

You’re ready to move to Stage 3 when you have level 5 comprehension of slice-of-life TV shows intended for adults, without using any significant supports.

Refold defines level 5 comprehension as near-complete comprehension of words, grammar, and ideas but without a native-level understanding of the nuance behind the wording. (E.g. In “We’re quite normal, thank you very much” someone at level 5 comprehension might not grasp that thank you very much communicates an emphasizes a sense of dismissal or obstinance.)

A “slice-of-life” TV show is something like Friends or How I Met Your Mother where the topics, vocabulary, and slang closely mirrors what you’ll likely encounter in everyday life and conversation.

In other words, Refold essentially wants you to be able to fluently comprehend a large part of the domain of everyday language before you even think about writing or speaking. They have some OK reasoning for why this is, namely that all of the input you’re consuming is actually helping your brain to build subconscious patterns for how natural language is pieced together which will then get leveraged when you try to output the language. Refold thinks that if you build-up a really solid foundation for comprehension, all you need to transition to production is a little bit of time to connect the dots.

I see their argument, and I think it’s interesting, but I still think that waiting this long to speak or write in a language is absolutely nuts. Specifically I think this is nuts for a few reasons:

For many language learners the barrier to speaking is emotional, not knowledge-based. This is, for example, the primary reason why my girlfriend struggles to speak English—it’s not that she doesn’t know and understand quite a bit of English, it’s that she’s afraid to sound stupid or make mistakes around native speakers (especially ones whose opinion she cares about, like me).
1. Refold is targeted at pretty hardcore language learners, however, so it may be fair to assume that this isn’t the primary problem for this particular demographic.
Speaking a language is one of the most effective ways to internalize patterns in natural language. Both because you’re forced to use them until they become second nature and because the act of conversing in a language provides a ton of level-filtered natural language input, especially since language partners tend to automatically adjust their grammar and diction to match your perceived proficiency level. Writing in a language has similar benefits, but lacks the immediate feedback and added comprehension practice that normally accompanies conversation.
1. The risk, though, is that without a solid foundation for comprehension, you may internalize some bad habits that you’ll have to unlearn or re-learn later. Personally, I think this is an acceptable risk if it means achieving the goal of being able to communicate weeks, months, or even years faster.
There’s no faster or more motivating way to learn to converse than to have actual conversations. Watching yourself succeed (or struggle!) in a conversation with native speakers is incredibly motivating.
1. To be fair, people have a wide range of reasons for wanting to learn a language, but if I had to guess, being able to converse in a language probably ranks near the top.
For more difficult languages, it could easily take months or years to reach level 5 comprehension for a significant portion of everyday language. Particularly for a language like Chinese, this is a long-ass time to not even consider speaking or writing.
1. I can, however, imagine this being an acceptable upfront investment for languages more similar to English like French or Spanish, where this process might be achievable in 3 to 6 months of intensive study. To be fair, Refold is also recommending that learners spend at least twice as long each day for more linguistically distance languages like Chinese or Arabic, so it may be reasonable to expect ~twice the speed of progress (though I personally don’t think language progress scales linearly with time input).

Essentially, I think Refold’s model for language acquisition and build-up of comprehension is brilliant, and I want to give that a try. I have an inkling that their methodologies for production and building up confidence and competence are also brilliant, so I’d like to finish reading up on that. In my humble opinion, however, the production should be incorporated earlier in the language learning process in tandem with comprehension activities potentially as early as Stage 2A.

Anyway, my personal gripes aside, I’m still going to try templating my language learning habits around many of the suggestions made by Refold. Specifically, I’m going to work generally around the guidelines from Stage 2B, which I think approximately matches my current Chinese comprehension level.

At Stage 2B, Refold pretty much recommends:

~2 hours of focused immersion every day : 30 minutes intensive (really trying to understand everything), and 90 minutes free-flow (still focusing, but not bothering to break flow to understand everything).
- Active immersion should be spent on content aimed at adults.
- Free-flow immersion can be spent on content for children and adolescents, but at least 50% of this time should be spent without subtitles if watching TV.
Immersion time is spent “reading” TV or comics, since these are media sources that come with a lot of extra contextual clues (visual, aural, textual).
At least half of the free-flow immersion time should be spent without subtitles.
Refold also recommend that most of this time be spent on immersion through TV, usually accompanied by subtitles because this provides language input with 3 channels for cues (video, audio, text). Comics or webcomics are also recommended at this stage.
Create Anki cards for comprehension only. Refold doesn’t want you to mess with production at this stage.
- Cards should primarily be one target sentences captured from immersion.
- Refold’s baseline recommendation for number of Anki cards to add per day is 5, where the rule of thumb is that 5 new cards per day will lead to 7 times that number, or 35, reviews per day at steady state.
Clear Anki reviews daily.

To fit my specific needs, interests, and goals, I’ll be modifying the following:

I will be creating production Anki cards for all new grammar and vocabulary in addition to comprehension cards. Since I’m already speaking Chinese daily, it’s often not terribly useful for me to learn a new word, but then not be able to recall it in conversation.
- Refold doesn’t recommend this until Stage 3.
I want to make sure there is a component of regularly speaking or writing (or both!) in my target language.
- Since I live in Taiwan, have a Taiwanese girlfriend, and am constantly immersed in my target language, I don’t actually need to plan for this. My normal everyday immersion and conversation is enough on this front, though the added supplement of Improv will provide even more opportunities.
- Again, Refold doesn’t recommend this as a regular activity until Stage 3.
I’m only really going to be able to intentionally schedule ~30 minutes a day for active immersion, and won’t be scheduling much free-flow immersion time.
- I think Refold’s recommendation of 2 hours per day is good here, but I honestly don’t have that kind of time to commit to language learning at the moment. I can do ~30 minutes a day, and am willing to increase that if I manage 30 minutes a day while balancing everything else.
- Since I live in Taiwan, though, I think I’m likely to get exposed to a lot of extra unscheduled free-flow and passive immersion. I’m hoping this ends up balancing itself out.
- I will try to do some free-flow immersion during mealtimes, but won’t plan to obligate myself to do so.
I’m going to start reading much sooner than Refold otherwise recommends.
- Refold seems to generally recommend a combination of active and free-flow immersion primarily through TV shows in Stage 2B. Reading comes up more in Stage 2C. However, being able to read some of my favorite books (e.g. The Alchemist) is a big (and motivating) goal for me, so I’m going to mix in some reading earlier on.
- I plan to primarily use graded readers for this for now, as I think trying to work through The Alchemist directly is going to be too challenging and not time efficient.

With all that said, here are the habits I’m committing to for language learning this quarter:

Daily
- Learn 5 new Chinese cards in Anki.
- Corollary: Add an average of at least 5 new Chinese cards to Anki.
- Complete Anki reviews.
  - At a rate of 5 new cards per day, I should end up with ~35 reviews per day. Assuming a rate of ~20 seconds per card (which I think is generous), this should take me about 15 minutes per day to clear. That sounds manageable.
  - Since I have a huge number of overdue reviews from everything I haven’t done for 4 months, I’m actually going to move all of my existing cards into a backlog and potentially add those back in slowly over time. The most important thing is to clear the way to being able to quickly learn cards I add through my new language input channels.
- Spend 30 minutes actively immersing myself in Chinese.
  - Loose high-level plan is to divide this across: reading, TV, and podcasts. Where I expect to read 2 days a week, watch TV 3 days a week, and listen to podcasts 2 days a week. I intend to give myself flexibility to play with this ratio, however.
  - For reading, I plan to use graded readers purchased through Pleco, my Chinese dictionary app.
  - For TV, I’m planning to use the Bruce Lee TV series on Netflix.
  - For podcasts, I’m planning to use ChinesePod’s upper-intermediate episodes, which are all taught in Chinese only.
Weekly
- Spend 30 minutes free-flow immersing myself in Chinese.
  - I’m primarily planning to use TV aimed at teenage audiences without subtitles for this.
  - I’ll most likely watch Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix since it’s reasonably easy to understand, and I’ve already watched it many times in other languages.
Semi-monthly
- Go to Improv and participate in at least the bilingual groups, if not the Chinese-only groups.

Improv 🎭

The main obstacles preventing me from going to Improv are:

How far it is from where I live now (i.e. activation energy is high).
The fact that Improv happens on Mondays when I normally also have CrossFit. The two don’t conflict, but having two large extracurricular commitments in the same day tends to sap away the work day.

I’m going to do the following:

I’ve gone ahead and added the workshop to my calendar on a recurring once every two weeks basis. This will help me catch and plan for the event when I plan my Monday on Sunday night.
On weeks when I have Improv, instead of attending Monday morning CrossFit, I will instead attend Thursday morning CrossFit. I’m also notating this in my calendar now to make this clear to myself.
On days when I have Improv, I will work out of a cafe closer to Improv in the afternoon and buy dinner in the area.

I’ve also invited my girlfriend to Improv and dinner before Improv for added accountability. Since she lives close to where Improv happens, I think this could easily turn into a regular date night activity for us, which will further cement the habit.

Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Red is for subtractions, green for additions.