№ 77: Reflecting on 2023
Doubt, love and growing more into myself.
Hello Friends,
This has taken a while, but Happy New Year, and welcome to the first newsletter of 2024!
I’ve been procrastinating this 2023 year in review for a while because I knew this would take a while to write.
Anyway, I’m back and will resume the semi-weekly newsletters on everything I’m curious about.
Thank you for reading!
Jason.
When I look back at 2023, it was not a year that I expected.
It was a year of darkness and doubt, a year of light and love, and a year of further self-discovery and faith.
2023 started with great uncertainty. It felt reminiscent of the downswing periods in poker — deep in the hole, not knowing how long it would take to claw out and see profit again.
I didn’t know what I was doing career-wise. Everything seemed so messy and so confusing. Anything I tried, I kept on screwing up on. The worst of which was fumbling two inbound leads because I lacked clarity in my offering.
I’ve dealt with this kind of failure and uncertainty so many times in poker. You’d think I would be used to it by now, but failure will never not suck. Every setback is a punch to my ego and a humbling reminder that I’m not as competent as I thought.
But what matters most is your attitude towards it.
If you stop trying to pursue your goals, your world shrinks. The opportunities begin to whither away. Your curiosity dims, and with it, your ambition. Dreams fade into a distant memory.
Yet the paradox of success (in anything) is that it’s more about allowing mistakes than knowing answers.
2023 reminded me to have faith, keep taking action and trust the process. Eventually, things will unfold and bloom when they’re ready.
Professional Development
I’ll start with the most significant professional development change.
2023 began with so many questions:
What was my offering to the market?
Did I want to be a content writer or a copywriter? (Both are a form of marketing. In essence, content writing informs and copywriting sells)
Was writing for a living something I actually wanted to do?
Should I become a content creator and build a newsletter business?
I’ve been down this road before. I used to love photography and decided to monetise my passion. But doing photography as a side gig killed all my love for it. Was I making the same mistake with writing?
It sounds like semantics, but how you define something determines how you behave. There is a difference between a content creator and a writer. As a content creator, you’re trying to capture an audience for fame, status or money. The act of creation becomes a means to another end. Whereas for writers, writing is the end in itself.
There’s nothing wrong with being a content creator. But to me, I can’t not write. Writing is a sacred act. Writing is how I clarify my thoughts, illuminate the hidden truths I dare not to speak so loudly and express my feelings. I know the moment I start caring about email lists and follower counts, I begin to betray my craft.
I love writing, but I don’t particularly enjoy writing for others. After much reflection, I realised my gift to the world lay at the intersection of strategy, communications and psychology.
In July, at the MADFest conference, a chief marketing officer of a large beverage brand openly admitted they couldn’t figure out short-form content.
At the time, my friend Vanessa was doing a lot of short-form video content as a side hustle, so I sent her a message asking her to meet. We met the next day, and I proposed a 6 week project together to see if we could figure this out — She said yes.
We naively thought how hard could it be? However, the project quickly morphed into something bigger. So, I suggested a pact: we don’t quit on each other until we land the first client and deliver the project.
She thought I was crazy but took the leap of faith in building Bloomstory — a video marketing agency driven by memetics, behavioural science and AI.
I know AI is the biggest buzzword of the past year. However, I’ve been careful about mentioning it. We’re constantly testing at Bloomstory to see where we can effectively apply it to solve real business problems and have recently had some breakthrough results.
If you’d like to read more about it, as well as video marketing and advertising, please join me over at the Bloomstory newsletter: https://bloomstory.ck.page/ig.
A discovery I’ve made whilst building Bloomstory is how much easier it is to build with someone else than alone.
It reminds me of the old African proverb:
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”
Goodbye PhinPhin
My friend Beccy told me, “A business doesn’t fail when it runs out of cash. It fails when the founder runs out of steam.”
PhinPhin was starting to feel more of a burden than a problem I enjoyed solving. Increase in shipping costs, roaster burning down, loss of high-grade Vietnamese Robusta beans. All this made it hard to adhere to the values I had set for the business.
So, in March, knowing that my heart was no longer in it, I decided to shut down PhinPhin for good.
Personal Development and Life
Turning a little wiser at 32?
When I found personal development and self-improvement (PD/SI) back in mid-2020, it was liberating and exciting. It felt as though I could now see life clearly.
But there’s an insidious side to it.
PD/SI convinces you that there is something lacking in who you are and that you cannot enjoy life until you become the finished version. Don’t get me wrong, PD/SI is useful. It teaches you to do hard things first before the fun stuff. It’s better to go to the gym before you watch Netflix.
But if you’re ambitious, PD/SI can quickly descend into this arbitrary madness of continuous self-improvement before you let yourself enjoy anything. You feel that your life has not begun until you reach a particular milestone.
I felt a lot of that from 2021-2022. Quitting poker for a new career and moving back to Birmingham made me feel behind in life. Everyone was moving forward — getting married, buying houses, having kids, progressing in their careers, etc — and I was taking 10 steps backwards.
However, something happened in 2023. Call it maturing, gaining a deeper understanding of who I am, or replacing self-help books with philosophy, but I stopped comparing myself so much to others and realised I’m exactly where I need to be.
That’s the thing with life; it’s just this perennial dichotomy between being and becoming. Between feeling enough and wanting to be better. Between a desire for more and gratitude for what you already have. Neither is better than the other, but are dichotomies to be managed depending on the context you are in.
Finding Love
I started dating again this year.
All because my friend Harry said to me, “You don’t need your finances in order to experience love.”
It had been 2 years since my last relationship, and whenever someone asked me if I was dating or seeing somebody, I would always give them a list of excuses as to why I wasn’t. “I’m not financially ready.” “I need to sort out my career.” “I need to figure out what I’m doing with my business.”
The truth was that I didn’t want to have my heart broken again, and it was easier to hide this insecurity behind aspirational career and financial goals.
But when Harry pointed out the flaw in my rationale, I knew I had to stop lying to myself about the whole situation.
In June, I met F, my girlfriend. We found each other the modern way — through the dating app Hinge.
F softens the rough edges and magnifies the shine of life. She reminds me not to take myself so seriously and to stop and laugh.
Getting out of my comfort zone
I’m terrified of public speaking.
So, instead of continuing to avoid these fears, I did the opposite and ran towards them.
The first I did was come on as a guest for my Twitter/X friend Andrew Lynch’s podcast. We discussed Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense.
You can listen here:
The second thing I did was guest lecture at Birmingham City University (BCU) on business management and Bloomstory.
I’ve always fantasised about becoming a professor later on in my life, so this was a great low-commitment opportunity to test whether I would like it or not.
My friend Harry, a phonetics and English teacher in Macau, has told me on multiple occasions how rewarding teaching is. I never understood what he meant until I stood in front of that class, delivered a 45-minute lecture and received this email from one of the students a few days later:
Fitness Development
I completed my second triathlon in August.
I made a bet with my friend Chee that the slowest time out of us two would have to get a tattoo of the other’s choosing.
Unfortunately, I lost, but the tattoo design is still pending…
The plan for 2024 was to do my third triathlon. However, I want to officiate my half-marathon and also train for the Walt Disney World Marathon in January 2025. (Who wants to join me?!)
I had a mediocre year for climbing, largely plateauing because of other commitments. However, I did have my first outdoor bouldering experience:
I’ve yet to try ropes, but I would love to give it a go when it’s not so cold and dull here in the UK.
2024: Focus
I don’t set New Year’s resolutions.
If a change is important enough for me to make, I don’t need to wait for an arbitrary date like Jan 1st just to get started.
However, I love this concept of having a theme for the year, and for 2024, I’d like it to be: focus.
I see life as an oscillation between convergence and divergence.
When you’re in divergence, you’re open to exploring new careers, hobbies, sports, lovers, etc. When you’re in convergence you’re saying no and focusing on what currently matters to you.
2020 to 2023 was a season of divergence and exploration, but that time has ended. It’s impossible to do everything, so in 2024, I want to converge and focus.
I want to work on Bloomstory, write more essays, read fewer but good books, lift, run and climb, and spend time with my friends, family and girlfriend.
Everything outside of this is noise.
Thank you for reading and I wish you all a Happy New Year!
— Jason Vu Nguyen