“Do nothing that is of no use.” — “Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.” — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings I’ve been writing about a samurai named Miyamoto Musashi a lot recently, but I can’t seem…

Find peace in nothingness. — In the West, feeling empty is viewed as a negative condition. Emptiness is often associated with dark terms like depression, apatheia, or nihilism. In Asia though, things are a little different. The Chinese word for emptiness is kōng (空); devoid, the void, the space between breaths, between lines, between lives…

Not all friends are created equal. — It’s a longstanding tradition among the Chinese to have steamboat for dinner on the first day of the Lunar New Year — and an even longer-standing tradition to trade stories, gossip, and bond over the simmering communal stew. 2020 was no different — except this was the first time in…

And the third — creating a library of content — is ultimately superior. — “So, how do you actually make money off this writing thing?” In my experience, this is the most common question an aspiring writer has. I know this because my mind was burning with the very same question when I first started my writing journey a little over a year ago. …

You don’t have to be wealthy to be kind. — Leke was my first Jiu-Jitsu coach. He grew up in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I trained with him from the ages of fifteen to twenty. And throughout our years together, we became very close. …

It happened when I was only 12 years old. — I grew up in Singapore, where the citizens are wealthy, and the racism implicit. People don’t roll down their windows to hurl slurs here. There are laws against such things, and unlike some of our neighboring countries, we strictly enforce them. …

I had to spend days putting it together again. Don’t make the same mistake I did. — The image above is what the freelancer in question tried to do to my book. That is to say, he went apeshit on it. He tried to do to my first novel what Julius Caesar did to The Library of Alexandria. He tried to burn it to the ground. Here’s what happened. A…

Lessons from a retired fighter. — The above picture was taken in 2015, when I was still a fighter. I had uploaded it on my socials, with just a single word serving as caption. The word was, “War.” That was my mentality back then. I was only twenty years old, twenty and gunning to be a…

People — no matter how simple on the surface, are rarely what they seem. — As a writer, coffee is one of my life’s sweet sinful pleasures. The black brew jumpstarts my mind awake — except I take mine not black, I take mine white instead. White and iced, sweet flowery notes on the tip of my tongue, cool chocolatey motes in the back of…