Memo to Myself: The Three Money Thresholds
tl;dr Earn up to €100K with full effort. Save aggressively to €2.5M. Beyond €10M, give deliberately or stop — because past that point, the money owns me more than I own it.
Topic
Essays
A collection of 12 issues
The Happiness Equation: How to Have Big Goals and Still Be Happy
The easiest way to be happy is to keep your expectations low. But what if you still want big goals? Here's how to have both.
Torturous Chaos, Until It Isn’t
Jason Cohen is talking about bootstrapping startups here, but it might as well be about job searching in this market.
These things mean you haven’t yet succeeded, but neither do they prove that you’re failing. It’s always like this until it isn’t.
It’s like this
Is building a business supposed to consume your life - even when you do everything right?
I’ve been thinking about why work still consumes founders even when they prioritize well, automate, and build great systems. This post explores whether that pattern is inevitable.
Control is caffeine for your relationship with reality
I was researching how to fix my circadian rhythm.
One of the main levers is to have your last coffee by 2pm. Not because caffeine makes it impossible to fall asleep, but because of how it works: even when you can fall asleep, drinking coffee too late quietly degrades sleep
I miss sleepless nights
I miss sleepless nights.
The earliest time I can recall… It was probably summer of 2001, one or two years before my dad passed away in the summer of 2003. I remember because I just completed 5th grade. We were supposed to take a vacation to Boracay with my dad’
Why I moved to Germany
It was easier to move from the Philippines to Germany than it was to move from Caloocan to BGC. I think it’s the Filipino-Chinese. Perhaps, it’s just my family. Either way, it was frowned-upon and kind of unacceptable to live on my own. When you already live in
Being misunderstood is the price of an interesting life
I attended our high school year reunion (10 years!).
It magnified my chronic problem of answering two simple questions: What do you do? And what have you been up to?
I’m currently Research Director, managing global operations, of a New York-based tech startup called OnFrontiers. Before that, I did
Be a woman who wrestles
I was on a 2-month North America speaking tour. We were in Boulder in Colorado, and I was the only female speaker. During Q&A, a young woman asked me,
How do you overcome biases against women in business?
My response was that it’s not something I think
What sitting taught me about work: notes from a Vipassana course
I completed my first 10-day Vipassana silent meditation course last Sunday, May 22, 2016.
Upon returning, people asked me how the course was. I have never had a harder time responding to this question. Now that I’ve reflected on it, this is my response — why it’s tough to