32! I’m officially double the age I was my last year living full time in Vietnam as a child in a family of 4. I’ve spent every year of my life since (except 1) by myself, learning a foreign language, getting a couple of degrees, moving places 14 times, going on hundreds of planes, working for someone else, working for myself, falling in love, having my heart broken, finding my person, building a company and a family of 4 of our own. What a ride it has been. 

I hope you enjoy this annual reflection I do around July 28th, #32nd birthday edition:

1. You are always the hero of your own story, and a background character in someone else’s. Recently, someone found the need to tap on my shoulder while I was working in a cafe and asked “How much do you walk?” I said “probably 10-15 thousand steps a day”, which made him laughed “No wonder!” Apparently his wife is a photographer who likes to take pictures of our neighborhood and he could recognize me from her work. She must have taken many photos, but I appeared often enough for them to notice and eventually found me to tell me that.

Relatedly, David and I often talked about inventing an app that aggregates pictures taken by strangers with you in the background* Imagine how cool it’d be to be transported back in time through other people’s memories and perspectives!

2. Self fulfilling prophecy is a real thing. In college, I learned about how expectation of inflation can actually create inflation but never thought one day I would actually experience it in a tangible way** Similarly, the energy that you send to the universe will be the energy that you get from the universe. “When there’s a will, there’s a way” - cliche but absolutely true.

My colleague Marcos still talks to this day about August 2021 when I helped him get his current house against all odds. He’d been been working part time for HackerNoon and was promoted to full time after a few months. The mortgage agency wouldn’t give him the loan if he couldn’t provide the necessary paperwork, which was almost impossible to do in such a short time frame due to bureaucracy and Covid. I wanted him so bad to get the house, and he even more so. David and I recently bought our first house - so I learned a thing or two about how terribly unfair the mortgage system could be to first time buyers. Despite my pessimism, I helped call multiple agencies (and was told “no” or “that’s impossible” at least 3 times). Luckily, we found a loophole and was able to pull off the paperwork at the last minute. It was meant to happen.

3. As I grow older, I value routine and predictability over adventures and surprises. For my birthday, David asked me what kind of day I wanted, I literally said nothing different from the day before because I have everything that I ever wanted right here. Still, he surprised me with a new fish for dinner and ironically it made me sick. “No more surprises for future birthday dinners!” We both decided like the old boring people that we’ve become. And you know what- I love it! Happiness these days to me means knowing what show to rewatch again and again with David (it’s The Office 🤪) , the barista knowing my coffee order before I got the chance to finish ordering (iced latte or cappuccino with oat milk and an extra expresso shot), and taking the same shortcut to and from work.

4. Courage is not about being unafraid. Courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. I recently jumped off a bridge in Hawaii after much coaching and hyping from my brother who used to be a semi-professional swimmer. I loved the moment my body touched the water, but the seconds leading up to that really got me question my life decisions lol.

On that topic, I don’t think the key to life is happiness, some higher power, or some larger-than-yourself meaning/purpose. The only true key to life is your breath: inhale, then exhale. Without it, there is no life.

But if I die tomorrow, the memory I would take with me is that of watching sunset with my loved ones, with the waves crashing, Norah running around in circles, collecting heart shaped shelves. There is something so utterly human about it. Fearing the imminent end of the day, yet daring to appreciate its beauty all the same. Soon the sun will set and everything will feel too short. But hey: breathe in, breathe out. You’ve got this.

5. The hardest balance to strike when working in a team is that of ownership versus collaboration. Without ownership, nothing will get done because everyone will assume someone else will do or already did it (“cha chung không ai khóc”). Without collaboration, there’s a high failure rate because people are much more capable of focusing on their own short-term goals rather than zooming out to see the big picture. Relatedly, transparency (who did what, how, and to which end) goes along way when you try to strike this perfect balance as a team.

6. Life happens in the small moments. The big moments are important but they come very rarely. Doing some thing small consistently matters more than doing something big but infrequently. Think: what is that one small thing you can do every.single.day that you know will make an impact, however small, in your life? For me, it is to get outside. I make sure to go outside, even just for 2 minutes, every single day. I did that the day after I gave birth to our son!

7. The true cost of a bad employee*** is never the salary. Think about it like embedded learning cost - you will have to pay for this sort of training one way or another anyway. The true cost of a bad employee is the mental health of your top performers, and that of your own. And no, you cannot avoid bad employees (the same way you cannot avoid bad weather - it simply just happens). But you can make the best out of their exit by coming up with better HR policy and bracing yourself it will better protect your company the next time a grenade explodes.

8. You cannot change people. You can only change how you react to them. It all starts with acceptance and humility, and then comes realization of other people’s perspectives. I’ve learned this from raising my own kids. As little as they are, they’ve come fully equipped with their own ideas of how things should be. You can guide them, or provide them with tools and suggestions, but you cannot tell them what to do “just because”, at least not convincingly. Also - for the other self-righteous Leos who are reading this (I’m sure I’m not the only one lol): you are not always right. Yes, I know. Big flashing news. But it’s true.

* please ignore all the privacy implication lol

** Only in the US for now, apparently. We are currently in Canada and inflation doesn’t seem to hit the country yet.

*** “What makes an employee a bad fit” is another discussion for another day. I’m still learning this.