Who Am I?

Hello new subscribers and what to expect from me

Over the last month, my subscriber list skyrocketed from 30 people to 172.

The rapid growth is slightly intimidating, but Hey 👋🏼 How's it going?

Allow me to introduce myself and bring you up to speed as to who I am and what to expect from this newsletter.

My name is Jason Vu Nguyen.

I’m a 1st generation British-born Vietnamese.

My parents are Vietnamese war refugees. To make a living, they started a Chinese takeaway, working six days a week from noon to midnight. That meant I grew up in the takeaway, too — working front of house, taking orders and packing food.

My mother is a tiger mother – meaning she demanded academic excellence and obedience from me. At the time, I never understood why she pushed me so hard, but now I get it. Starting over again in a foreign land with no possessions or wealth is hard. So it was her intention to direct me towards a successful career and increase my social mobility.

Unfortunately for her, I inherited her strong will and became rebellious and disobedient. At 17, I began undermining her efforts and expectations of what my life should look like — breaking away from the model minority myth that every tiger cub faced.

Instead of going to university and choosing maths as my mother wished, I pursued a degree in psychology. Not because I was good at it but simply because I enjoyed it.

Looking back, I’m grateful for what she instilled in me. While I disagree with her trying to direct my life, without her, I wouldn't have adopted a relentless attitude to the things I do.

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Becoming a poker player

Around the same time, I discovered poker in the backroom of a snooker hall in Birmingham Chinatown (Yes, I gambled underage).

I immediately understood it was a game of skill and loved that it was a combination of maths and psychology.

I read books on it, practised on Facebook Zynga poker after school and played for real money on the weekends.

A year later, I moved to London for university. After finally getting my own personal bank account, I opened my first online poker account (Pokerstars) and began grinding micro-stakes cash games.

When I graduated in 2014, I knew I didn’t want to pursue anything related to psychology. Without further studying, every job prospect seemed so mundane.

A career in human resources?! No way, it sounded like hell to me.

Perhaps I was trying to avoid the responsibilities of adulthood, but poker felt like it was the only way forward.

After a year of playing professionally, but also a year of my mother nagging me to get a real job, I relented and landed a role as a graduate analyst for Lloyds Bank.

Six months later, on the morning commute train to work, I thought to myself, “fuck me, is this it? I’m only 6 months in and have another 40 more years of this. Is this the rest of my life?”

Later that day, I handed in my resignation and went back to being a professional poker player.

I had no grand plan. No career projection. I only knew what I didn't want to do: be a tiny little cog churning away in a tiny cubicle in a big corporate company.

I also knew I didn't want to play poker for the rest of my life either. But poker was an opportunity to explore what I could potentially want to do. It gave me flexibility and control over my life whilst earning a pretty penny.

I had flirted with the idea of starting a Vietnamese cafe or even becoming a professional photographer.

But right around the same time, things began taking off in poker. I went from playing small stakes online to battling high stakes with Chinese businessmen in both online and private card rooms.

Fast forward to 2020. After a long and arduous high-stakes session, I burned out. I had experienced burnout before, but this time it was different. It would normally take me at most a week to recover, but I lost all desire to play.

I just wanted out.

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No gamble, no future

The pandemic forced me to reflect on what was important in my life.

Swinging around tens of thousands of dollars at the cost of my sanity was no longer the life I wanted to live.

And so, I began plotting my exit options out of poker.

The idea of starting a Vietnamese cafe started to resurface. But with a little change. Instead of focusing on a Vietnamese cafe, what if I concentrated my business on just Vietnamese coffee? From what I could see, no one had done it well in the UK. A year before the pandemic, I was out in Vietnam and visited a few of the best coffee farms. I could find them, import their coffee and roast it here in the UK.

However, I faced a few major problems: i) I didn't know how to roast coffee. ii) I didn't even have any business skills. iii) the pandemic had ground the world to a screeching halt. How the hell was I going to get to Vietnam?

Fuelled by the desperate desire to escape the poker life, I became obsessed with making this coffee business happen. So I started reading books about business and enrolling in a lot of online courses.

Along the way, I became a little side track with investing, specifically value investing. The side quest taught me how to read financial reports and also identify the elements of a good business. I started to see the skills I developed in poker – probabilistic thinking, decision-making, margin of error, and mindset – were highly transferable to investing.

To throw in more side quests, at the start of 2021, I had a call with a business coach. I explained to him my background and my desire to open a Vietnamese coffee business. The coach suggested I search for an advertising man called Rory Sutherland on YouTube because he thought I’d be interested in what Rory had to say.

Listening to Rory talk was my gateway drug into the world of behavioural science. It all intuitively made sense to me.

During my time in poker, I saw and developed insights that I didn't quite know the terminology for. Behavioural science gave me all the codified knowledge for what I had seen and experienced.

For example, when the size of the pot had inflated, and one player was facing a decision to call an all-in shove, if the shove was small compared to the size of the pot, I would often see a person’s irrationality override their rational thoughts and as a result would call off, despite knowing they were beaten.

This is the sunk-cost fallacy and anchoring bias at play. Often I would try to exploit these biases against opponents.

The world of behavioural science gave me further insight into decision-making and was useful for investing, marketing, business and my own personal development.

I contemplated whether I wanted to become an investor. However, I knew I’d regret not trying out the Vietnamese coffee business. So in August 2021, I quit poker, adamant about never going back to play for a living, and launched PhinPhin Coffee.

Despite the challenges, I found ways to lower the costs. Instead of spending money on a roaster (cost is somewhere between £10,000-£30,000), I found a small independent roaster down in Bristol that was willing to do the work for me. This gave me the ability to see if my business idea could work without burning too much capital. I no longer needed to fly out to Vietnam because I found a coffee broker willing to source the best Robusta coffee beans from the motherland.

Six months after starting my business, two friends – independent of each other – sat me down and suggested I may want to consider pursuing writing and behavioural science instead.

At first, I was in denial. I thought PhinPhin was my calling. But when you write every day, it becomes a forcing function to reflect on your thoughts. I knew they were right. I started PhinPhin mainly out of desperation, but also, I didn't care enough about it.

Looking back, the signs were always there. I wrote every day, read everything I could on behavioural science and talked about it non-stop to whoever would listen.

In March 2022, I put PhinPhin on the back burner - servicing one client - and concentrated all my efforts into writing. Not wanting to be a starving artist, I had to figure out a way to make money from writing.

Fortunately, there’s a type of writing that is the intersection of my skills and interests: copywriting. It combines my love for business, psychology, marketing and writing. I also do it because I’m a bit of a nosy bastard and want to know how other businesses work.

A week into my new career pivot, with no portfolio and no experience but with a bit of luck and charm, I landed my first client - a US healthcare apparel startup called AmorSui.

I view the world through an investor’s lens and can't help but objectify myself as some sort of investment vehicle. Almost any money I earn, I reallocate straight back into the S&Me500 (Gotta thanks Alex Hormozi for that one): Compounding personal growth and skill acquisition.

None of this has been easy.

There have been days when I felt like I was going to run out of money, not deliver work on time, inadequate or straight up a failure.

Don't believe the people on social media who make it look or say it is easy.

They never show the frustration, the anxiety, or the terror.

The uncertainty can be crippling, and the volatility between euphoria and terror can be dizzying.

Personally, I don't recommend it if you have a weak stomach.

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Other Interests

Although work is a large part of my identity, and I love what I do, it’s not everything.

I spend 4 days a week climbing, specifically bouldering.

To me, it’s a great analogy for life.

If you can complete a climb on the first attempt (a flash), then you’re not trying hard enough. It’s only by failing a climb do you know you’re at your best. Failing teaches you that persistence, dedication and practice are essential to overcoming a tough bouldering problem. Isn’t that what life is all about?

When I’m not climbing or working, I’m reading.

I read anything and everything—autobiographies, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, fiction, poetry, etc.

In my view, books are the best asymmetrical investments you can make. For roughly the cost of £10, one line in a book can change how you think about the world, give you a brilliant idea or make a disparate connection.

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Left to Write

I’m an introvert. But I was once told by a stranger I had met in a coffee shop that she felt like I had a lot to say. I guess I do. I suppose that is why I’m writing this newsletter.

So what is Left to Write? Truthfully, I don’t know myself.

I started writing this newsletter in June 2022. Before that, I was writing on Medium. But I left because I found myself treading down the path of writing super-click-baity-content and gaming the algorithm.

This is going to sound strange, but I don’t consider myself a writer in the artistic sense. I can’t write beautiful prose like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ernest Hemingway, or Joan Didion.

I wish I had natural writing talent, but that stuff is far too professional for me. Instead, I consider myself a multidisciplinary person who uses writing to think.

“Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can't exist without the other.” ― William Zinsser

As a result, I don’t have a specific niche that I restrict myself to. I'm fully aware of the trade-offs I'm making by approaching writing in this way.

I like being a no niche because the benefit is that I can turn up each week and write whatever I want in a way that feels authentic to me. Rather than feel the continuous need to provide “value” to people.

This means I’m at risk of losing subscribers or growing slowly. And I’m okay with that.

Some weeks I’ll write posts that reflect on my own life. Another week I will write technical pieces talking about decision-making, probability and risk. Sometimes, I'll deviate and write about philosophy or even have a good old rant about culture and society.

And some weeks, I introduce myself to new subscribers.

This brings me to the end.

Thanks for reading! I do really appreciate you taking the time to read what I have to say, and I hope you stick around for the ride.