A roundup, why I never got into a meditation routine, and the story of when I first arrived in Asia
I tried to write my experience of moving to Asia in 2015 in a novel-like way, after being inspired by the writing style of a book I just started. Also a wide range of other stuff.
What caught my eyes 👀
I finished Good Work, from
, and found it a damn near perfect follow-up to his first book The Pathless Path. What makes Paul’s writing so relevant for me is that we share a number of highly formative experiences, like the year we were born, hacking our way through school, early career starts in the business champions league, and a turn off the beaten path toward adventure. On the other hand, I feel like we have quite different personalities. It is remarkable for me to read the amazing pull that writing has on Paul, simply for the enjoyment of the activity. Paul writes about publishing his book, that he doesn’t have “launch energy”. On the other hand, I sometimes feel like I have nothing but launch energy. Where the Pathless Path was an affirmation of many choices I’ve made that others felt were dumb, like taking 2 years off when I was 32 years old, Good Work is more deeply affirming of my personality. There is no way that I would want to find an activity that I want to keep doing for ever. And that has nothing to do with achievement, or difficulty as I thought before. It’s simply that I would be bored to tears. Maybe the fact that I have tried for almost 10 years everything from writing, to marketing, to programmatic art, to music, to cooking, to videos, only to find everything becomes boring after a while. Maybe that is not a bug, but a feature. What could I do with launch energy?Started reading The Money Trap, from Alok Sama about working direct for Masayoshi Son at Softbank. The first thing that struck me is how nice the writing is, especially in the first quarter or so of the book. It’s written in a descriptive, novel like way that really transports you into the story. It inspired me to try rewriting the story of when I first moved to Asia in the same format (see below). I love these business adventure stories.
I’ve been dunking on the Degrowth ideology that’s somewhat common under Europeans before, but now I came across a long viral thread by a Dutch Phd student that puts the absurdity of these ideas on full display. One of his main fantasies is that washing clothes by hand would be better than with washing machines.
This piece on Substack dives into this in much more detail, declaring this degrowth stuff a form of role play fantasy. I think it’s a fitting description. What apparently needs to be said more often: life was much, much worse before technology. Here is a shocking story about what doing laundry was like in the rural US in the 1930s, before electricity.
The clothes would be shifted from tub to tub by lifting them out on the end of a broomstick. These old women would say to me, "You’re from the city—I bet you don't know how heavy a load of wet clothes on the end of a broomstick is. Here, feel it.” And I did—and in that moment I understood more about what electricity had meant to the Hill Country and why the people loved the man who brought it. A dripping load of soggy clothes on the end of a broomstick is heavy. Each load had to be moved on that broomstick from one washtub to the other. For the average Hill Country farm family, a week’s wash consisted of eight loads. For each load, of course, the woman had to go back to the well and haul more water on her yoke. And all this effort was in addition to bending all day over the scrubboards. Lyndon's cousin Ava, who still lives in Johnson City, told me one day, “By the time you got done washing, your back was broke. I’ll tell you—of the things in my life that I will never forget, I will never forget how my back hurt on washdays.” Hauling the water, scrubbing, punching the clothes, rinsing: a Hill Country wife did this for hours on end; a city wife did it by pressing the button on her electric washing machine.
All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
— Chuck Close
Why I never got into a meditation routine but still do it from time to time
It has always been difficult for me to be fully in the moment. I’m a dreamer and a thinker and usually have multiple trains of thought going at the same time. But I’ve known the benefits of being fully present for a long time. It’s one of the main reasons I enjoy difficult sports like surfing, and other difficult things like playing guitar. So of course I tried meditating. After trying all the apps, I settled on Waking Up as my favorite one. But I never fully made it a part of my routine. I meditate maybe 10 minutes per month or so, and I use meditation like techniques throughout my days.
Some of those are just taking a couple of deep focused breaths, or bringing my attention to the soles of my feet which I learned is really good way to settle into the present moment. It bothered me for a few years that I wasn’t ‘properly getting into’ meditation. But then I accepted that my meditation habit was just going to be 10 minutes per month, and that’s ok. Partly it’s because I feel there is only so much that introspection and doing nothing can bring. After spending 48 hours by myself in silence, doing hours of guided meditation in early 2023, the content started to become extremely repetitive. Unless you really want to reach Nirwana, there are dimishing returns. Another element is something a friend of mine said a while ago. He said he felt meditation made him ‘too relaxed’. I knew immediately what he meant. There is a thin line between calming your senses and letting go of things you can’t control, and letting go of a little bit too much, impeding your level of agency to shape the outcome in your favor.
Nepal, February 2015
As my tiny Suzuki Alto taxi came up to Kathmandu Airport I caught a glimpse of the Turkish Air 777 lying awkwardly on the grass. It's nose wheel had collapsed on landing a few days earlier due to fog. Luckily there were no fatalities. It gave me an eerie feeling. Just a day before that plane crashed, I had been on the exact same Turkish Air flight into Nepal.
Before my move from Amsterdam to Asia, I had spent quite a bit of time figuring out how I could best optimize frequent flyer miles, googling airline reviews, and working out the best value for money ways to travel. I expected to travel a lot. One of those things that turned out to be completely irrelevant to how the next few years would play out.
My taxi stopped in front of the domestic terminal. I got out, and carrying only a small backpack for what was going to be a quick one night trip to Pokhara I strolled into the building. It was still early, but the terminal was buzzing with activity. Sales people heckled me to sell all kinds of tours and even flights. The fact that people would come up to a random tourist inside the terminal to sell a flight made me smile. It would never occur to me to go to an airport without having a booking, but I appreciated that this must be at least somewhat common in Kathmandu, lest these sales people would have the most pointless job in the world. Although, that morning I realized I it was still uncertain whether I would be flying to Pokhara or not. I had booked my flight the night before from my laptop and got a payment confirmation from PayPal, but a booking error from the airline. So as I walked up to the Buddha Air counter, I wondered what would happen.
As soon as the staff member typed in my passport details, I could see something was wrong. She brought over a colleague to come and look at the screen. They gave me a puzzled look, and then told me that my flight had left at 9AM the day before. But I had only booked it at 9PM, so how could I have booked a flight in the past? I showed them the payment confirmation. We compared screens. They were able to confirm the time I had made the booking in their system as well. It was clear that I had indeed been able to book a flight many hours after it had already arrived at its destination. After a bit more back and forth, thankfully veering only briefly into the 'whose fault is this' territory, they decided that the path of least resistance was to just put me on today's flight. They told me there was plenty of space anyway,. We all laughed. They handed me a blue piece of paper that looked more like a brochure than a boarding pass. The details of my flight and seat were hand written. Whatever, in any case, it seemed I was going to Pokhara after all. When I arrived in the waiting area at the gate, I began to understand how I could have booked a flight that already left. There was a monitor with flight info, as you would expect in an airport. But every time an update came in, you could see a mouse pointer appear. The screen was switched out of full screen mode and the table with flight info revealed itself to be nothing more than an Excel sheet, which was edited by hand by someone in the back.
It would be the first of many amusing interactions across mainly Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. In a way, the reason I was there was to contribute to improving and accelerating digitalization in what we called 'Frontier Markets', to distinguish them from the 'Emerging Markets' like Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. In those countries you could no longer book a flight that already left. It was early 2015. I had just left my job in Private Equity to join Rocket Internet, a German startup builder known for taking businesses that worked in the US and launching them in other markets. After success in Europe with Alando (eBay) and Zalando (Zappos), they turned their attention to Africa, Latin America and Asia. Due to a series of coincidences, a bunch of Dutch ex McKinsey and Deutsche Bank folks ended up running the show in the 'frontier markets' of Asia. Having interned in the Investment Banking team at Deutsche and then spent 2 years in Private Equity, I was a shoo-in to go build a startup in Nepal.
The reason for Rocket Internet's success was that it had figured out launching before anyone else did. In a time before Shopify, Webflow and even Stripe were really big, getting to market fast was still rare. When I got to Bangladesh with my intern, we gave ourselves 5 weeks to launch a new online jobs platform. But first, I was in Nepal for a week.
I’ve never written anything like the above before, and I just randomly felt inspired to try it. It was quite fun. Let me know what you think of this and if I should write more stories like this!