“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. …

Lesson number one: followers don’t matter as much as you think. — The photo above was taken right after I had finished competing in a particularly brutal Jiu-Jitsu match. My arms were sore. My face was sweaty. I had just gotten done fighting (okay, grappling) for my life in the 30-degree Singaporean heat. But my heart was oh so very full. This…

How to bring value into any relationship. — My girlfriend is a professional boxer — a really good one, actually. Just last month, she fought and defeated a very tough Thai opponent to win a prestigious Asian title. When people — admittedly and unfortunately most of them men — find out that my girlfriend’s a professional pugilist, they…

We don’t realize what’s important until it’s too late. — My pet rabbit, Chester, died a few months ago. He was cut down in the prime of his youth, killed by a fatal combination of gastrointestinal bloat and the malpractices of an incompetent vet. Many thoughts ran through my head after Chester died, most of them sad. I kept ruminating…

Take a closer look at my title image, for instance. — The more eagle-eyed among my readers will have noticed that I have been using AI-generated images for my last couple of posts. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a newfangled technology that, like all new-fangled technologies in their time (think the internet, the newspaper, the printing press) has been much lambasted. …

This might just lead to a better Medium, after all. — This is going to be a short article, full of conjecture, but bear with me — I promise you it’s worth the read. If not for the content, then for the intrigue. Has anyone noticed that big publications are taking a longer time to publish articles now? They also seem to be releasing and accepting fewer articles. I’m writing this article because I noticed that…