2025 was the toughest year of my life. My mental, emotional and intellectual capacity were stretched beyond limit everyday. Finance had never been tighter and work had never been this precarious. It is a mystery as to why I volunteered for such experiences.

Volunteer is the critical word, as I took all of these upon myself through personal choice. I had, and still have much easier options, options that lead to ease and comfort with excellent pay. Yet I chose this path.

So the pressure and difficulties aren’t the problem. My problems, and hence the following reflections are concerned with known personal issues that I am hyper aware of, yet fail to do anything about. They lead to massive, yet preventable blow backs ever, single, time.

As such, my reflections will be focused on these internal turmoils, Personal quests if you will, instead of general issues such as budgeting, staff management and other specific result-driven tasks.

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Tolerance Towards Emotional Frictions

Outwards

This is by far my biggest nightmare. It is the mother and father of 90% of all my issues. To put it simply: I do not like to put others into a difficult situation due to compassion and consideration.

1. I do not ask for quicker payment when they delay;
2. I do not ask clients for more payment when we go beyond contract scope;
3. I do not ask for extensions from suppliers when we run into issues;
4. I do not ask third-parties to do me favors when I need them
5. And many many more.

No trait is a pure hindrance. I suspect such agreeableness was once an excellent strategy. I was always praised for my maturity growing up, as I never put my family in an awkward position by asking for expensive gifts, throw tantrums and etc. So I liked being this way, I got me to where I wanted to be.

However, this strategy no longer works as I am now a business owner, not a child looking for pads on the back any more. I cannot afford to allow others to take advantage of us. Agreeableness will be treated as weakness, and there are plenty, if not too many, predators out there.

I must get comfortable to have difficult talks, to make demand from others, and to be the bad guy that brings conflicts. I owe to my employees and partners, if not to myself.

Avoidance is cowardice. And I am no coward.

Inwards

On the other side of the same coin, lies a similar problem with equal importance but far more insidious in nature. Not only do I avoid making others feel bad about themselves, I do it to myself too.

1. When I review chess games, I only review games I won.
2. When I check advertising result, I only check days that went well.
3. When I know there is no one helping us to sell the product, instead of scouting more talents to fix this problem, I shut the observation down and forget about it

I avoid confrontation with my own problems, thus leaving ticking time bombs in my own lap that I know perfectly well that will blow up in my face in a month time. I kick the ball down the street for months and months, only to resolve it after everything crushes down, and guess what? It only took me 5 minutes with no difficulties. All the issues, the fears, the conflict, were of my own imaginations.

This is a slow suicide of my credibility, my coherence and my literal life. It must be dealt with.

Intellectual Masturbation

To make matters worse, I am susceptible to intellectual masturbation. Which refers to the act of doing tons of deep reflections, plannings and analyses that culminate to… zero actions (this post not included, hopefully).

Most of the time, I know exactly what went wrong and how to fix it the moment I saw the problem. In fact, often times I predicted them happening two weeks ago. But I will spend a long time, often a day or two, going through details that I already know just so I can go through the motion of “damn I am smart and I am doing proper analysis” to feel good about myself.

After obtaining an obvious result I already knew, I refuse to take swift actions because of my issue with emotional distress. Thus breed small issues into huge problems.

This has to stop. Thinking about the problem isn’t glorious. The gifts lay in the actions.

Diligence

To cause more problems in my work and life in general. I had also become rather lazy over time, which is becoming a trend since the past couple of years. I do not finish things on-time. I do not do what was promised. I forget important details and more.

I used to be very proud of my ability to be quick and responsive, but no longer. I firmly believe this issue is caused by my lack of internal drive due to being too low on neuroticism, and missing external drive due to me being the boss at my own company.

All of these problems combined, have resulted in a worse procrastination than the train schedule of Italy. Nothing is being done on time, nothing is completely properly to my odd standard. A 20 minutes task will be dragged on to span over multiple days. If I was working for Walmart or Allstate, this wouldn’t be an issue, but alas that is not the case.

The most important thing for this issue is find my internal drive that is strong enough for me to feel compelled .

Expression

Finally, the last one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It is my unwillingness to express myself in every way. This is not as dreadful as the others, but it is no less important.

The core of the issue is that I do not like to share my opinions, thoughts or knowledge on any topics. I prefer to stay quiet and let others take the floor, especially when there is more than two people.

Again, this had worked out for me for a long time. I learnt from others, listened to their secret, and hid my own weakness. But over time, this because a pathology.

I now feel uncomfortable to occupy other’s time because I don’t think my opinions are valuable enough, or I think my opinions are too armature and I would be laughed at by people who know better. Which are both true in some sense, but wrong often than not.

However the truth is, I am far ahead of majority of people in many areas that I’d like to talk about. And the people who are better than me will not laugh at me, AND I wouldn’t know about it anyway. By keeping my mouth shut, I allow worse speakers to take the floor and share their awful content. I am doing many a disservice.

Being more vocal about everything also has ton of benefits. With how much information out there, it is incredibility difficult to be noticed by anyone you care about. Clients are overwhelmed by outreach, clients are clogged with useless ads, and the people you share similar interest are so low in density it is impossible to find them naturally.

So one must speaks to the void without fearing the embarrassment that doesn’t actually exist. If a tree fell in a forest and there was no one there to see it, did it fall? If someone judged me as stupid without me there to know it, was I judged at all? The answer is arguably no.

Result however, will be visible.

For 2026

All the problems I listed above had been growing inside of me for many years. It would be unrealistic to expect them to be destroyed within a year. I am fully aware of their grasp on me.

The point isn’t to become perfect, but rather improve, to get better, and to live a more coherent life that I know I want but refused to get.