Why I disappeared for 6 months

My beautiful people, my beautiful faces. It's been half a year since I made a YouTube video. Now, hopefully you missed me. If you didn't, I missed you guys and that's why I'm back. So, if you're expecting a video about, you know, the latest AI tools or something crazy like that, you're probably better off clicking off and watching something else because in this video, I want to cover three key things as a video coming back onto this channel. So, three things I want to cover, which is what have I been up to since I've been away for half a year, what will happen to this channel, and also what you can actually expect uh moving forward. So, in this video, I don't have a script. I didn't really do any planning. I just put together a presentation for you guys to sort of, you know, bring some visuals and give you guys a bit of context about what I want to be talking about. And the goal here is for me to, you know, spend a little bit more time yapping and just, you know, sharing a bit more thoughts and context around how I'm feeling, what I've been doing, and how I'm thinking about things. So, with that in mind

let's get right into it, guys. So, the first thing that I wanted to share with you guys with all my beloved subscribers, and by the way, I think we're at 210,000 subscribers. I think we gained an extra 30,000 subscribers uh when I was away, when I was literally not doing anything. So, honestly, I just want to thank every single one of you guys for making this happen. Um the trust, the support behind the channel. And to be honest, like that was one of the reasons why I decided to come back onto YouTube because I just kept seeing this channel growing and I haven't been doing anything. So it goes to show that you guys really do, you know, enjoy the content that I'm creating. You're finding it valuable. You're learning things. So you know what that's a very strong reason for why I decided to come back as well. So the first thing that I wanted to share with you guys was obviously you can see I got married. So beginning of this year I got to marry uh the love of my life. We had a very intimate uh wedding. So, I think we had just over 100 people. It was in Sydney, Australia, and it was at this beautiful uh place called The Mint. And this is where they minted the first coin ever in Australia, I believe. Yes, I do believe that. Um but yeah, this was a very very special day for me because I think um it was really there were many reasons why you know you want to get married but one of the main drivers for why I wanted to expedite this day was for my grandparents. So, my grandparents, that's my grandma on the left in her uh in her kitchen doing some, you know, cooking, cleaning the dishes, and that's my grandpa in the backyard. I think they've had this house for well over like 50 60 years. I pretty much grew up um with my grandparents because my parents were so busy. My grandma is 80 years old uh or 79 to be exact and my grandpa is 90 years old. So, my grandpa actually said to me uh one of the weeks last year, he said to me at dinner, it's like, "Oh, when are you guys going to get married? Like, don't like why what are you waiting for? Um, don't wait for too long uh to get married. " And I think like the underlying message he was trying to tell me was get married so I can I can witness the whole thing. And like to be honest, I have so much respect for my grandparents. I think because I was raised under their roof for a large portion of my childhood, I was able to inherit and you know pick up a lot of the values, their traditional values um that they have and so that was the reason why I expedited the proposal, the engagement, and also the wedding because I really wanted my 90-year-old uh grandfather and my 80-year-old grandmother to be there and to witness it all. So that was a on the day it was meant to be yeah it was a very special day but it was unexpectedly a very super emotional day for me. Um I cried a lot more than I thought I would had. I didn't even know I didn't even expect myself to cry um in the first place but I was just balling my eyes out um especially during tea ceremony. So when we got married as uh the Chinese culture is to have tea ceremony before the actual sort of ceremony and the um the reception. So the two families come together you serve tea to the elders um and to the ones who are married. And so yeah like everyone I was fine serving tea to but then once it got to my grandparents I just was just uncontrollably uh just crying. Um just like all these emotions. Yeah. It just it really hit me hard. But I felt as though because I just cried so much throughout the day um because of that moment. Um I think I got it all out. I was able to yeah, really get it all out. And uh yeah, I'm super grateful and I'm super happy with how the wedding turned out. Had all my best mates, my closest mates and my family and friends there. So super day. Once the wedding was done, oops, this

happened. Uh, partner and I went to Nco to Japan. We spent around, yeah, a week in Nco and we just carved it up. That's something we love to do. We loved snowboard. And this was the second time we went to Japan to snowboard. The first Hakuba, which is a different place. Um, and this time around we spent, yeah, a week snowboarding in Neco. I would say Hakuba is probably my favorite because in that area of Japan, they've still maintained a lot of the Japanese culture there. Um, while Nco, you can pretty much imagine American and Western businesses. So, imagine Australian and American businesses. It's like as if they discovered this part of Japan where there's beautiful snow. They invested all this money into it and they just built all these infrastructure there. So, accommodation, um, hotels, uh, restaurants, everything. It just felt like the Australia and the US in some part of Japan. There was no real uh, Japanese culture um, maintained there. So, I do love the snow in Nco. It was great fun. Super awesome views, very beautiful place, very convenient and clean. But I do miss the having the whole Japanese culture a part of it. So I think there are wins for both areas. So if you love snowboarding, you love skiing, uh, Hakuba in Japan is great. Nco here is also great. But they all have their own advantages. So this mountain here you can see is called Mount Yota and uh yeah it's famous for this uh this view. We went to this beautiful restaurant with like amazing views. Um and yeah, simple udon had some beautiful food there and of course something a luxury in life something that I I'm a simple man you know. So when I in life I don't really need much but there is one thing that I would say that I cannot say no to and uh I could not live without which is business class. So obviously whenever we travel we try to um uh yeah we fly business and um yeah it just makes the whole holiday so much more enjoyable. So we spent yeah two weeks in Japan in Ncoed

caught up with some friends there as well. And another thing I've been doing as well beyond that. So I got married. We went on this I wouldn't even say it was a honeymoon. It was just like we wanted to travel and it just so happened to be after the wedding. So, we just sort of called it our honeymoon. But another thing I've been focusing on over the last half year to over no actually I would say over the last two years has been my mobility. I've talked about this in one of my newsletters. It's um something that I think the western culture have actually uh adopted which is bad mobility. So because we spend so much time sitting at a desk doing computer work, at least for me, most of my life I was seated at a desk sort of doing computer work. And I think two years ago I realized, damn, my mobility is [ __ ] Like my hips were tight. They were constantly pin pinching and just my overall mobility was just so rubbish and sad. So I committed over the last two years. I had uh multiple mobility trainers. I have been consistently doing uh activities like sports and um yeah different types of sporting activities to be more mobile and spend less time sitting down. So, I was cycling for quite a bit, but I realized I was just going from an office desk to a seated uh position on a bicycle and I was cycling for like 3 4 hours on the weekend and it was just constantly sitting. So, I changed it up. I picked up Mu Thai. So, I've been doing that for around a year now. Um I also started to run because previously whenever I was running I would always find issues in my knee. They started to hurt. um some part of my foot would be aching as well. So I pushed myself to you know bubble up all the problems in my body, all the issues in my body and doing Muay Thai and running surfaced all those issues and now I would say I feel [ __ ] good. Like I ran my first half marrow with my wife. Um that was super fun. I now do Muai a couple of time couple times a week and yeah my hips are able to move. I feel a lot more fluid. I can sort of achieve a lot of these positions that I couldn't achieve before like a simple squat. So now um that's something that I've been really focused on which is my physical health. Um because I think that was something that was neglected and hopefully this inspires some of you guys because I know a lot of you guys also spend a lot of time at the desk and it's something that uh you do lose over time if you don't uh spend any time in investing into it. So something that they say which is you don't use it, you lose it. So if you don't use your mobility, you'll end up losing the mobility because the body thinks that you don't need it and it will just forget how to do lose all the uh the mechanics for achieving any sort of movements that you want. So yeah, now I can um I'm super happy with the progress with that.

Another thing that I've also been doing has been investing. So, as I took quite a bit of time off work, um I was still doing a little bit of work, like part-time, but I spent a lot of time going back to basics. I was re-evaluating my own net worth, my own portfolio. I was allocating my capital in terms of my investments. And I spent a lot of time like I would say you know 8 hours a day may maybe across like a couple of days just learning going back to basics learning how to invest properly. So I've always been investing ever since I was ever since I made my first dollar to be honest but I never took it seriously. And even as of recent years I would say I would just chuck money into an ETF. And I think that's great. I think a lot of people talk about putting money into ETF. Um, it's safe, it's secure, it's consistent, and it's very difficult to beat the market, but for me, I felt like it wasn't going to be that hard. Like I think it is hard and it requires a lot of work but if you have a passion in business if you have some basic understanding of financials if you're you know you're okay at mathematics I did general maths you can do very well in the stock market. So over the last I would say half year to one to one year I went back um documented and tracked my entire net worth in terms of my real estate portfolio, my equities portfolio um my other portfolios that I have um and also my super and all the cash that I have. I really put it all into a Google spreadsheet and mapped it all out. So now I have a very clear idea in terms of what my net worth is. And I think through that process I actually felt like this burden like off my shoulders because for so many years I was just constantly working and you know like I was making lots of money and that's great but I never slowed down. I never took the time to really process how much money do I have like what should I be investing in? Do I need to be working? so so hard constantly. And so throughout this process of like re-evaluating my whole net worth and tracking every single dollar, I started to realize I'm in this super super lucky position where I am honestly financially free. And even though I'm not, you know, super yacht rich, I have plenty to to keep myself, my family, um, you know, secure and, uh, sustainable. And so, I had a bit of a light bulb moment over the last half year where I didn't need to constantly grind it out anymore. Like, there are things that I enjoy doing and just don't enjoy doing at work in terms of like running my own businesses. And I think that was a moment where I decided to myself, you know, I'm going to let go of the things that I just don't enjoy doing anymore and I just don't care for the sake of money. And I'm going to focus my time and energy on things that I do enjoy doing because it's it is still about the money because I do need money to survive. And you no one knows what will happen in the future. Um, but I don't want to commit 100% of my time for the sake of earning more money. I want to be doing things I enjoy that still bring in some money for me because I guess my goalpost has changed. It's not just about a revenue target. It's about, you know, what do I actually enjoy doing? If I don't have to, if I don't work, I don't really need to work, but if I am going to work, I would be working on things I enjoy doing. So that was a ma a massive uh realization that I had and I think it took me a very long time to accept that. even wrap my head around that because I talked about this in a recent newsletter where like my entire life growing up in a Chinese migrant family like where, you know, we're conditioned where we're built and we're born and we're groomed and we're taught to work hard and keep growing and make sure that we don't uh have to go through the same challenges and problems that our previous generation went through. And so realizing that this whole mission that I was like taught to um accomplish when I was young and now that I've accomplished, you know, a significant part of it, it was just so hard for my head to really understand what was going on and tried to live a life that had an entirely different goalpost. So that was something that I've been this is doing for the last 6 months. Every day I'm watching I'm keeping up with the news, what's happening around in the world. And I think the advantage is that I genuinely love doing this stuff. I love staying on top of what's happening around the world, analyzing businesses and allocating capital, investing, seeing what the CEOs are doing, all that stuff. I love doing it. And the great thing here is that you can see just over the last year, I've done over 70 like nearly 70% or over 70% in terms of returns. And on average, an ETF will give you over the last 10 like o over the last like x amount of years, the average is around like 8 to 10%. And like I'm not going to say that I'm some sort of pro or some sort of you know extremely brilliant brill brilliantly minded person investor. I'm not. I'm just some ordinary guy who spent most of his life building products and has a passion for business and finance. And it is a lot of work. hard work. Um, and you do need to have a very strategic mindset. But hey, like, you know, you can achieve some crazy stuff if you really put your mind to it. So, if you can imagine, let's say my portfolio is in the seven figures. I've pretty much doubled my money in a year's time. So, this is something that I've really been enjoying. I really enjoyed doing consistently uh be doing this um while I continue building the businesses that I love doing.

Now, another thing that I've also been doing has been my Figma Masterclass 2. 0. I launched this, I think maybe two months ago now. We've had a couple of hundred new people or students jump onto the new course and all the other 8,000 I think 300 existing students got access to this course as well. I am super like you don't understand how much time and effort I put into this brand new course. So, the Figma 2. 0 O course was a refilmed course. So everything was redesigned, refilmed, redone from the ground up. And when I launched it, you know, when you launch a course, you have no idea how it's going to go. But I am super super thankful that we've had around 30 different testimonials come through from uh the new customers or new students have taken on the course. And it was just like testimonial after testimonial. It was just all like posit positivity and I'm super grateful for this because I put so much bloody time into it. It was I think it's around 20 hours worth of cont visual uh video content. So yeah, it honestly means the world to me. If you want to up um upskill in Figma, there is a link in the description. You can grab it. And yeah, this is something that I plan to continue doing, which is teaching my dedicated audiences what um what I've been learning and what I've been doing and everything that has helped me become um successful, I guess, in my career.

So some of the realizations over the last half year, it's if I was to really just like bring it down and con and condense it and simplify it for you is I enjoy teaching when it's not my main focus. I think before I was, you know, spending a lot of time or most of my time was my full-time thing teaching. I was on YouTube. I was making courses. Now I enjoyed it to an extent uh because what I realized was I actually miss being on the tools like I actually miss you know coding I miss designing I miss solving problems I miss talking to customers I miss shipping new features I miss that whole product development cycle like that's why I've been in the industry for so long is because I just genuinely love this [ __ ] like I love building cool [ __ ] um pushing it live and getting customers and users to use it. Like that's just what I love doing. And so over the last four or five years, I was spending too much time teaching. I was off the tools and I just felt very lost. I didn't know, you know, what I should be doing. Like teaching is making lots of like really good money for me, but I was missing this whole part of the of building the product myself. I felt like was missed. And so now that you know that I I'm married, kids are probably on the road map, the may probably shortterm uh the short-term road map. And so like I have this opportunity. I have this window where I'm not tied down by finances. I don't have kids yet. And I realize I don't enjoy teaching full-time. I do enjoy teaching part-time where I get to, you know, still have time to do things I enjoy. This is where I thought to myself, I need to build the startup that I've always wanted. And that is like to build the product uh or build a product that I personally would be using every single day. Pour my passion, my time, my commitment into building this. And so if I do end up having kids, like this new startup or this product has already got the foundations going and I can, you know, look after the kids while also building a cool startup on the side. And I think this is the window instead of wasting time and uh yeah taking time off I thought to myself this is the perfect opportunity for me to capitalize on to do the thing I've always wanted to do because for my last two businesses which have done extremely well made millions of dollars one it's an agency which was helping other people build their products and two it's education which is teaching other people how to design and think strategically ally like me. So, two businesses were doing sort of the things I enjoy doing, but not really the thing um I enjoy doing. And so, this third business, this third chapter, I'm really thinking about doubling down, not thinking about, I've already been doubling down on this for the last uh 6 months, which is building uh my own

products. And so, what will happen to my YouTube channel? like what what's going to happen now that I'm sort of changing my direction. Well, I'm not really going to be changing the direction entirely because I will be back. I do miss that part-time teaching because I feel like it's it is fulfilling for me to be able to teach people, receive the messages um every single day about like how I've been able to impact someone's life, how they've been able to get that pay rise, land that job. I enjoy that. But I want to have a format on YouTube which is a lot more sustainable. And so that's why in this video I'm using a presentations. I'm just using Figma myself to present these because I don't want to have to use some crazy camera setup with um a video editor who's going to create all these animations. I have to provide feedback. We have to get this right. Then there's like 2hour render time. Like I don't want all that logistics. that. um the logistics and just making things harder for the sake of making things harder. I want something that's sustainable that I can do easily. So my goal is just to have just to share my thoughts with you guys and the way and the process I get there should be simple and super lean. So, I decided I want to just stick to simple Figma presentations um and present my ideas in this way and it allows me to create more videos and just less burnout. So, this format is a lot more sustainable. I enjoy doing this as well. And instead of just focusing on creating tutorials um one after the other, I actually want to be documenting my journey. So, because I am still in the product space, I am designing and building my own product. Um, this is just going to naturally broaden the topics, but it's still going to be relevant to everyone because I'm talking about design. We're probably marketing, SEO, business strategies, and I want to actually be documenting the process behind the scenes of how I'm building my own startup, my own product, and I'm applying everything I'm teaching in the real world because I think that is probably even more useful than doing a random tutorial around how to turn, I don't know, a button blue in Figma. And so I think this is going to be a really interesting uh pivot and I think it's going to allow me to maintain a weekly cadence for my YouTube videos because I'm not going out of my way to, you know, teach something new. I'm just sharing with you the process or the journey that I'm going through and sharing with you the solutions and the mindset and the strategies that I'm thinking about uh to teach you. So, I'm teaching you with real world uh scenarios and situations. So, that's the plan for my YouTube channel. And so

what am I doing right now? Like, as of today, as of this week, what am I doing? So, I've actually gone allin in building products. Um I've just hired a head of engineering who's based in Sydney, Australia as well. and we've also got a full stack dev and they're both full-time in building uh the product that we've been building over the last six months. Now, our head of engineering is actually off on holiday for uh the whole of September. So, we're aiming to launch alpha in probably one to two months. So, this is going to be super exciting. I haven't revealed this to anyone yet. Uh but this but once again as I mentioned I am on a mission to build apps that I personally would be using every single day and then open it up to other people who will also find them useful. So I don't want to be uh going down the route of you know raising like millions of dollars of capital trying to make this like massive company and complicate my life. I think what I really want is just have a tight-knit team, super capable, and building products that I genuinely would be using and I'm super passionate about. That's what I'm going to be doing. And then alongside this, I will also be teaching everything that I'm doing. So, there are a few courses that I do have planned for the designership. Um, but yeah, I will have to take some time to do them because I just launched the new Figma course, Redime 20 hours of content, uh, just a few months ago. So, right now, I am fully focused on building out my own

products. And finally, this is this just happened this morning. Uh, I did acquire my first company um, ever, and I will be revealing more details about this company. um in the coming weeks or months because there is a few things that I want to uh tidy up first and fix up first before we make the announcement. But this company is related to the product that we have been building as well. So there's a it was a strategic move in terms of the business and how I was allocating capital. Um but I think in the long run this is going to be you know a smart move uh looking back. But, uh, that's pretty much what I've been doing. I've really spent a lot of time disconnecting from work because I needed to really figure out like what do I want in life? What's the way forward? And, you know, why did I feel so demotivated for a long period of time? And throughout the process of disconnecting, slowing down my life and focusing on, you know, important things in my personal life, you know, getting married, traveling, uh, focusing on my own personal goals, which was like a mobility and like picking up hobbies, like, you know, running with like friends on weekends and doing muai. All this stuff makes me happy and I feel like the progress that I make in all these different um activities makes me feel like it improves the baseline for my mental health. So when I was able to really disconnect, focus on the things I enjoy doing, slow down my life, I've realized and had this light bulb moment about what I want to be doing moving forward. And that's why over the last six months I've been super uh focused in terms of work and I feel like I'm procrastin procrastinate procrastinating a lot less. I've really enjoyed working again because I have a direction. I know what I want. And all this was made possible because I gave myself that breathing room. space to really think introspectively and understand what my mind and my heart really wanted. So hopefully this gave you guys a better understanding of what I've been doing over the last half year. Hopefully, you're excited about what's to come because I super am excited about the work I'm currently doing. And I'm excited about sharing this part of my journey because I think a lot of most of this entire channel has been me just creating tutorials and teaching you guys very specific things and tools, but there is so much you can learn about someone else's journey. So, let me know in the comments below um yeah, what you would like to see more of moving forward. And I honestly am excited to