Personal Growth

Quick Navigation Start with the long read: 9 sections in the body above. 17 archived notes this month, filed under 7 themes: Daily Notes and Everything Else · 6 AI and Agent Systems · 4 Self-Knowledge and Psychology · 2 Content, Craft and Recording · 2 Business, Investing and Career · 1 Travel, Places and Cities · 1 Reading, Ideas and History · 1 For most of July I was in Shenzhen, and I also stopped briefly for a few days in other cities in Guangdong. ...

On the edge of a cliff, all logic fails. Only intuition can connect with the world. I wrote this sentence one night in Lhasa. Finding it now, I feel it can serve as the entry point to this review. Over these past fourteen months, I’ve been living on the edge of cliffs — almost literally. Encountering ice slopes on ACT mountain trails with drops beside me; every step at the altitude of Genie Sacred Mountain requiring all my strength; riding a motorcycle around the outer circle of Angkor Wat for three days with a splitting headache, yet not stopping. But I also know that those “cliffs” were more often internal. They were the cosmic-level monologues in one’s own mind after getting drunk late at night in a foreign country, with the world fading into the background. They were that night in Shenzhen, standing under DJI’s light beams, feeling like I hadn’t even reached the starting line. They were a certain morning at the end of 2025, suddenly realizing that exploration itself no longer provided enough traction, without knowing where the next fulcrum would be. ...

2025 October Thought Notes 441 notes this month | recorded from 2025-10-02 to 2025-10-31 Themes: Reading, Ideas and History 94 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 83 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 82 · AI and Agent Systems 60 · Content, Craft and Recording 46 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 38 · Travel, Places and Cities 18 · Business, Investing and Career 10 · Body, Health and Daily Life 10 ...

2025 September Thought Notes 287 notes this month | recorded from 2025-09-01 to 2025-09-17 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 83 · Reading, Ideas and History 66 · Travel, Places and Cities 30 · Business, Investing and Career 27 · AI and Agent Systems 21 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 21 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 17 · Content, Craft and Recording 14 · Body, Health and Daily Life 8 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 August Thought Notes 332 notes this month | recorded from 2025-08-01 to 2025-08-30 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 94 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 74 · AI and Agent Systems 47 · Reading, Ideas and History 43 · Travel, Places and Cities 25 · Business, Investing and Career 17 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 16 · Content, Craft and Recording 9 · Body, Health and Daily Life 7 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 July Thought Notes 226 notes this month | recorded from 2025-07-02 to 2025-07-30 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 51 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 47 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 30 · Travel, Places and Cities 30 · AI and Agent Systems 23 · Reading, Ideas and History 18 · Business, Investing and Career 15 · Content, Craft and Recording 7 · Body, Health and Daily Life 5 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 June Thought Notes 181 notes this month | recorded from 2025-06-02 to 2025-06-15 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 55 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 34 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 27 · AI and Agent Systems 19 · Reading, Ideas and History 17 · Content, Craft and Recording 15 · Travel, Places and Cities 6 · Body, Health and Daily Life 6 · Business, Investing and Career 2 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 May Thought Notes 84 notes this month | recorded from 2025-05-03 to 2025-05-25 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 29 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 19 · AI and Agent Systems 10 · Reading, Ideas and History 9 · Travel, Places and Cities 6 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 5 · Business, Investing and Career 5 · Body, Health and Daily Life 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 April Thought Notes 113 notes this month | recorded from 2025-04-05 to 2025-04-17 Themes: Self-Knowledge and Psychology 30 · AI and Agent Systems 30 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 26 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 12 · Reading, Ideas and History 5 · Travel, Places and Cities 4 · Business, Investing and Career 4 · Body, Health and Daily Life 2 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 March Thought Notes 52 notes this month | recorded from 2025-03-01 to 2025-03-22 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 21 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 15 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 8 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 4 · Business, Investing and Career 2 · Travel, Places and Cities 1 · Reading, Ideas and History 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

2025 February Thought Notes 40 notes this month | recorded from 2025-02-18 to 2025-02-27 Themes: AI and Agent Systems 11 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 9 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 8 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 4 · Business, Investing and Career 3 · Reading, Ideas and History 2 · Travel, Places and Cities 2 · Body, Health and Daily Life 1 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

During a 48-hour engineering task, I wrote down one sentence: “At this point, I’ve spent half the time designing, researching, understanding the requirements, judging the boundaries, and developing my taste and intuition. I haven’t started writing code.” The task began as a limited feature. After I kept discussing it with AI, it quickly grew a product model, system boundaries, and a complete design. Every step had a rationale. Every piece connected to the next. I could feel myself thinking faster and farther, holding more layers in mind at once. ...

At the beginning of 2026, my GitHub contribution graph stayed nearly blank for several weeks. A few months later, the same graph showed hundreds of contributions in a single week. In July, this blog published 55 articles in Chinese , while GitHub’s contribution calendar recorded 733 contributions. Those numbers prove neither quality nor user value, much less a business result. GitHub also makes clear that contributions may include qualifying commits, pull requests, issues, reviews, and other activity; the number cannot simply be relabeled as a commit count. GitHub’s profile contributions reference ...

At dusk, I sat on the rooftop of Youli Café and raised my coffee cup toward the twin pagodas of Kaiyuan Temple. The camera recognized the distant towers and ignored the hand in front of it. Cup and fingers dissolved into a red blur; across the old city, the pagodas held their edges. ...

This is a thought experiment-style simulated interview. The respondents are composed of organizational psychology and organizational economics perspectives, and do not represent any real individuals’ original statements. In my June 2026 monthly review, I wrote: Incentive structures colonize personality. At that time, I studied several founders and observed myself. An organization initially selects a particular narrative, user model, and revenue framework primarily to launch a business. Years later, that structure reverses to filter what members can see, what they are willing to acknowledge, and which behaviors persist. ...

I had only asked my second brain to organize the thoughts of a friend. It placed scattered notes in order by time, theme, and cause, then tried to explain how she thought about work, money, and freedom. A few thousand words later, I looked at the resulting portrait and realized that the person it had revealed most clearly was not her. It had shown me why I never stop building systems. ...

This piece is a thought experiment in simulated interviews. The respondents are synthesized from existential philosophy and behavior design perspectives—this is not verbatim dialogue from any real person. One June day, perhaps like this. I woke around noon. My phone lay on the pillow. First I checked the time, then the messages. Nothing was urgent, so I opened a short video. The algorithm did not require me to decide what came next. By the time I looked up, more than forty minutes had passed. ...

This piece is a thought experiment in simulated interviews. The interviewees are synthesized from field anthropology and documentary practice perspectives and do not represent any real person’s actual words. I work with AI, yet I am consistently moved by life outside of AI. The blackness of caves in Laos, the sting of a wound after a motorcycle fall, the wind along the Mekong, a stranger who read a story in my eyes, and the stretched-out time of walking instead of riding on the Four Thousand Islands—none of these experiences has model-like efficiency or can be reproduced with one click. ...

This piece is a thought experiment in the form of a simulated interview. Its two fictional voices combine perspectives from behavioral decision research and high-risk outdoor practice; they do not represent the words of any real person. Nothing here constitutes investment, medical, or outdoor safety advice. In May 2026, I injured my leg in Vang Vieng and still walked into the cave. Over the past two years, I’ve also been able to leave traditional systems, live long-term abroad, and place both income and identity within greater uncertainty. ...

This piece presents a thought experiment in simulated dialogue. The respondents are synthesized from phenomenological and psychotherapeutic perspectives and do not represent any real individuals’ words. It is not intended as psychological diagnosis or therapeutic advice. I excel at stepping back. Entering a city, I quickly see how its industries, spaces, and history shape life. Entering a relationship, I analyze attachment patterns, projections, scarcity, and familiarity. Developing a product, I first deconstruct systems, identify boundaries, and map information flow. ...

This piece is a thought experiment conducted through simulated interviews. The interviewees are composed of social psychology, editorial practice, and creator research perspectives and do not represent any real person’s original words. In November 2025, I recorded the phrase: “The creator’s loss: the scarcity of positive feedback.” In April 2026, I wrote: “Understanding generates positive feedback.” Together, these two sentences shift the question. Do creators truly seek only praise? When one hundred people like a piece but none articulate the contradictions it addresses, that void persists. Conversely, a single reader who precisely identifies how a detail altered their judgment—without public dissemination—might reignite the creator’s resolve to continue. ...

This piece is a thought experiment conducted through simulated interviews from the perspectives of cognitive neuroscience and AI memory engineering—representing no actual experts. In March 2026, I wrote in a note: In the AI era, perhaps forgetting is more important than remembering. The image that came to mind was simple: a water layer with hot, warm, and cold strata. Recently used knowledge resides in the hot layer, while content untouched for a while gradually sinks downward—only being retrieved under exceptional circumstances. If a knowledge system absorbs information without releasing it, it will eventually degenerate from wisdom into a mere repository. ...

This piece is a thought experiment-style simulated interview. The respondents are composed of cognitive science, archival studies, and product design perspectives and do not represent any actual expert’s original words. In May 2026, I stopped using flomo. That month had no daily reminders, no faint sense of debt from “today’s notes still pending,” and no rapid conversion of thoughts into cards. Surprisingly, life didn’t thin out. Instead, Laotian cities, caves, injuries, strangers, and bars coalesced in late May into a more complete self-reading than fragmented pieces. ...

This piece is a thought experiment conducted through simulated interviews. The two interviewees are fictional characters synthesized from environmental psychology, behavioral science, and urban studies—representing no real individuals or viewpoints. In May, I explored caves, rode motorcycles, and met strangers in Vang Vieng. By June, back in Shenzhen, I often did not come alive until after dark, relied on short videos to lull myself to sleep at two or three in the morning, and lacked the energy even to step outside during the day. ...

This is a thought experiment-style simulated interview. The respondents are fictional characters composed of developmental psychology, field anthropology, and the author’s personal experience—no real experts are quoted. In December 2025, I wrote in my notes: Exploration no longer provides sufficient momentum. At first, moving to a new city wasn’t just a change of scenery. New languages, social structures, and rhythms would disrupt your existing self. Once your position loosened, your identity followed; once your identity loosened, possibilities multiplied. For a long time, “traveling” and “becoming someone new” were nearly synonymous. ...

This is the final essay in Reckoning with Reality. The first six considered profit, competence, action, feedback, and technology. The last returns to a question no model or market can decide for us: what kind of life am I willing to pay for? When we discuss a choice, we habitually list the returns. How large is the market? How high is the income ceiling? Will growth come faster? Can the path eventually produce a moat? The more complete the spreadsheet, the more rational the choice appears. ...

This is the sixth essay in Reckoning with Reality. The previous essay separated fast feedback from slow results. This one turns to a question that technological progress makes easy to neglect: when an old bottleneck disappears, where does the new one appear? Whenever a new tool arrives, people first imagine what it will eliminate. AI makes writing faster, code cheaper, translation nearly instantaneous, and video production possible without a full team. Work that once took days can now be completed in minutes. ...

This is the fifth essay in Reckoning with Reality. The previous essay asked what kind of action can produce evidence. This one examines the speed at which evidence arrives—and how speed quietly changes our goals. A friend told me that content and retail have one enormous advantage: fast feedback. Change the opening today and the view count responds within hours. Adjust the price or the page and clicks or sales may change at once. Compared with spending months building a product in private, only to receive a faint response at launch, this rhythm does make it easier to preserve morale. ...

This is the fourth essay in Reckoning with Reality. The previous essay examined how intelligent people use competence to escape. This one asks the next question: once we leave the study, what kind of action actually brings us closer to the facts? “Think less, do more” may be one of the hardest pieces of advice to dispute today. It sounds brave and direct, and it often works. Many people are stuck not because they lack ability, but because they never quite put their work into someone else’s hands. ...

This is the third essay in Reckoning with Reality. The previous essay examined the limits of profit. This one turns to a more personal question: why can greater ability sometimes make it harder to reach the facts? I used to think that avoiding something must look like scrolling on a phone, procrastinating, or doing nothing. Later I learned that the hardest form of avoidance to recognize is often remarkably diligent. It comes with thorough documentation, elegant architecture, an unbroken commit history, and late nights at work. ...