(written ~Dec 2020?)

When I was a teenager there was a Singaporean band that I really liked called Ronin, and one of their songs was titled Do What Thou Wilt. (This is just an excuse on my part to introduce the world to singaporean bands that i have enjoyed over the years.)

Family

im the son of business owners. theres a 40 min video about this on youtube.com/visakanv if you wanna get into the details. my dad came to singapore as a child with *his* dad (RIP grandpa, thx for having the guts to migrate), who would do gardening work to pay the bills. my dad didnt study past secondary 2 or so. like his dad before him, he started out doing landscaping work and then eventually through trial and error of some sort, he ended up running an industrial waste disposal company, with a small fleet of his own trucks. its an interesting way to make your money, hauling trash. its dirty work, low status work. but back in the day it was pretty good money. at some point at the peak of his business i believe he was driving a mercedes or a bmw. by the time i was born things were slightly on the decline. my mom was his secretary who handled all the paperwork, my brothers also drove trucks. 

there are several consequences of this on me. one is i’ve never seen my parents work for anybody other than themselves. they didnt have bosses, they had clients. two is that i have no concept of work-life balance. life is work and work is life. its all connected for me. my parents had “office phones” not just in their office, but also in the living room and even in their bedroom- so they could answer business calls from anywhere. so work never ended for them. but also they made their own hours. someone was always around. dad would come home for lunch, watch cnn or bbc on tv (its always been an interesting thing about my dad, his genuine interest in international news and politics and so on. i wonder, if he had been born into a more comfortable middle class life, what would he have done? i can see him being like a professor of political science or something of the sort. he certainly enjoys lecturing :p. jk, love u dad. my mum i could imagine being a hoity toity type, maybe doing something in interior design. until i moved out of my parents house when i got married at 22, i never fully appreciated just how much effort my mum put into all the decorating. she does have an eye for such things, which maybe i inherited a little bit in a sort of passive way.

Teens

my school history follows a fairly cliche “burnt out ADHD gifted child” trajectory. did really well early on because i read everything i could get my hands on. got into singapore’s gifted education program. started doing poorly because i started to get more interested in internet forums, video games, mtv, anime, rock bands and girls. this was something i was made to feel terrible about. on retrospect, all the adults were wrong and i was absolutely right to do whatever the fuck i wanted to do. i know that lots of kids probably think this, and then they grow a little older, gain a little experience and think, fuck, i was wrong, thank goodness i was saved from making dumbshit mistakes by well-meaning adults. this wasnt the case for me. i was basically right about everything that mattered. i met a girl at 10, started dating her at 14. everyone said i was too young to know what i was doing. it was our 8th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago. 

[[theres an alan watts riff that echoes this and i want to share it here. alan watts rescued me in 2015. his old lectures and his cheeky mischievous disposition broke me out of the psychic prison i was trapped in. “what if money were no object”. I’ll add the link etc later google it if u want for now]]

some will say this is survivor bias. i agree. i am a survivor. i have always intended to survive. when i was a teenager i experienced suicidal thoughts, but then i thought angrily, why should i be the one to quit? its the world that sucks! and so i set out to prove the world wrong. the big lesson of survivor bias is that one should optimize for being a survivor. spend as little money as you can. be nimble and flexible. talk to lots of people. seek opportunities. be earnest and do the work. if you get it you get it.

Blogging

anyway. one of the things i wanted to do was blog, so i blogged a bunch. i was acting on my clever insight that the internet is pretty goddamn cool and that i should do cool shit. so i blogged. i wrote nerdy philosophical shit that hardly anybody cared about. i cared though, and still do. anyway. sometimes i blogged about local news and politics that pissed me off. that stuff went viral, or at least as viral as things got around 2007. facebook didnt have a share button yet, and twitter didnt have favs and RTs. people i think described me as a thoughtful, sensible, moderate voice – idealistic, earnest, trying to challenge people to rise to higher standards. in that sense i was the  same fucking guy i am now. lol. 

i got invited (along with a bunch of other bloggers) to meet my prime minister, wrote a blogpost about that, that went viral, and that got me headhunted to work for a local software company, doing content marketing.

Work 

working at RC from 2013-2018 was some of the best years of my life, and also some of the hardest, in a good way. work challenged me in a way that school never did- and the work felt significant and consequential. i respected and admired my boss and my colleagues, and i felt internally motivated and compelled to live up to the high standards of excellence they set. i became a much more disciplined and focused individual. my fortnightly 1-1s with my boss over those years were effectively therapy – he coached and guided me to work through many of my personal issues and failures, and i learned many useful things from him, most of all a sort of genuine can-do engineer’s mindset. figure out the problem, break it down, model it, solve it. set targets and work backwards. that sort of thing. when i joined the blog had something like 1000 hits a month. when i left it had crossed over 100,000/mo. i did that. our revenue increased dramatically in proportion. i helped to hire and manage others. 

in the last year or so though i started to feel sluggish at work. i felt like i had done most of what was interesting and exciting, and like i was transitioning into a sort of “steward” role, which i didnt enjoy. the team had gotten bigger, i had less facetime with my boss, and i was starting to want to leave. but i hemmed and hawed over this and was in denial about this, even to myself. i felt a sense of loyalty and obligation to my boss for taking a chance on me. i didnt really see any other companies or teams that i was excited about. also i was starting to feel edgy – working at a high-octane startup was tremendous for my personal growth but it left me little time and energy to do very much else. i had always wanted to keep writing, keep blogging, but i could only manage scraps during my commutes. (those scraps did add up to hundreds of thousands of words of introspective journalling over at @1000wordvomits.)

Going solo

so eventually i left my job in june 2018. i had always tried to keep my spending low (my biggest expense was really that me and my wife tended to eat out a lot, which adds up, but you can eat fairly cheaply in singapore), so i had about a years runway to do whatever i wanted before id have to start looking for another job. i spent a couple of months decompressing and playing video games, and then i started writing as much as i could, on every channel and every platform. i quickly found that twitter was the best platform for me. i got into the habit of doing lots of off the cuff threads which were pretty popular. my following grew from just under 2000 to over 5000, 8000, 10000. as i write this, it sits at 27000. i did some marketing consulting to pad my depleting savings. i started a patreon which currently gives me about 1000/month. i decided to write an ebook to try and represent my dominant themes, ideas, theses- that became Friendly Ambitious Nerd, which just crossed 1000 copies sold, making me almost $10000.

im not doing this stuff for the money. money was never much of an interest of mine, and a huge part of me would still prefer not to think or worry about it. what i have sought, what i have always sought and wanted, is True Creative Freedom to do whatever the fuck i think deserves to be done. it took me ~15 years of writing online for minimal reward to get to this point. i’ve left out some details- when i was in the singapore armed forces i started a tshirt biz on the side, experimentally, iteratively, for fun, and we’ve sold over 10,000 tshirts. its not enough money to live on, and its not really worth the effort if you’re trying to make money. but i wasn’t trying to make money. i was trying to do what was interesting and fun. i used to play in bands, organize concerts, etc. same deal. we’d get some beer and gas money but hardly enough to live on. (still, it was exceptionally delicious to eat food that i bought with money i made from playing music). in 2020 i started making “talking head” videos on youtube. i recently crossed 2000 subscribers and have made $2.15 in ad revenue. doesnt exactly pay the bills. but its interesting. i get really thoughtful comments from people.

you see how it works. im not going to stop. im going to keep doing whatever the fuck i feel like doing. sometimes i wake up and sit on twitter all day, or play video games. sometimes. sometimes i get struck by inspiration and do a 100 tweet thread. sometimes i make videos.

back when i used to have a job doing content marketing, we would try as a team to come up with systems to allow us to produce content in a predictable and procedural way. but the single most valuable blogpost id ever written- which was and remains disproportionately valuable in terms of search traffic – was a list of examples of something that i randomly felt compelled to put together for my own reference. this fact haunts me to this day. the power of a whim. the power of doing whatever the fuck you want to do.

lots of people will say, i cant live like that. i dont trust myself to operate like that. well… if thats you feel then maybe youre right. maybe this life is not for you. this is a very high voltage life. its about surfing on the edge of chaos, between intention and chance. its where most of all the real magic happens. and it does not happen on schedule, at least not in my experience. inspiration should find you working or otherwise ready to work.

talk about the scream event. being invited to san francisco. every day i tried to make one or maybe two proper appointments of some sort, and then i tried to improvise the rest of the way. i ended up visiting twitter, uber (did you know theyre literally next door neighbours?), airbnb, openAI. walked past pinterest and adobe. saw ask.com from the train going through oakland. ive become friends, mutuals with famous-ish, busy people. i dont wanna be tacky and name drop people but my point is that its possible. i did it. maybe i got lucky but it took me 15+ years to get lucky

Blah blah some shit about cultivating taste fuck it im tired gonna sleep now