Preface

To My Future Kids

I'm writing this around my thirtieth birthday, kiddos, between cities, with a lot still ahead of me and a lot I'm still figuring out. The last few years have been a kind of slow geographic blur — apartments in San Francisco, then New York, then Singapore, then Vietnam, then Beijing, then back to the US, watching the world reveal itself as bigger and stranger than I'd been told. Somewhere in the middle of all that motion, I started writing these letters to you.

I should explain why.

I grew up with a lot of activities. Swimming, violin, soccer, science fairs, public speaking, entrepreneurship competitions — the standard immigrant-kid lineup. We didn't have much, but my parents found ways to keep me busy with whatever they thought I might need. Swimming taught me grit. Violin gave me discipline and somehow nimble fingers. Standing in front of strangers and defending an answer taught me that my voice mattered if I chose to use it. The list goes on.

I'm grateful for all of it. But looking back, I've come to realize that most of those things weren't actually what mattered. The activities, the trophies, the ranking sheets — those were the visible currency of a childhood, and a kid's mind takes them very seriously. What I actually needed, and didn't have, was something much quieter than any of them. The wider mental frameworks. The philosophies for how to live. The compass questions.

What's a life for? Whose life are you actually living? What's worth being a slave to? What does it mean to be authentic versus to perform? How do you tell the difference between effort and direction? I didn't grow up with anyone asking me those questions. And it's not my parents' fault — when you arrive in a new country with almost nothing, you don't have the luxury of philosophy. You have the luxury of survival, and that's what they gave me. They gave me everything they had.

But somewhere in the gap between what they could offer and what I actually needed, there were these slower, broader questions that I had to find on my own — mostly in my twenties, mostly the hard way, mostly in those apartments I mentioned, at 2 a.m. with nothing to prove. The frameworks I eventually pieced together, kiddos, are probably the biggest difference I've noticed between the good person and the world-beater. Most people don't lack effort, or talent, or even discipline. They lack a map. I've watched it in my own friends, my own family, my own quiet panic — the struggle is rarely about working harder. It's about pointing the work at the right thing.

So a lot of why I'm writing this is, honestly, selfish. I'm trying to lay down the maps I actually used — not as a rigid bureaucratic structure of rules, but as a set of compasses you can pick up when you need them.

There's a related thought I keep coming back to. There's a famous saying that you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. I think that's mostly right. But it always struck me as a strange limit — why only the five people you can see, why only the ones currently alive? The teachings of Marcus Aurelius, the long quiet of Lao Tzu, a Greek playwright on grief, a Chinese poet on autumn — these are all available, and they cost almost nothing to listen to. So a lot of what's in these pages is me trying to be in conversation with those voices, and to hand that conversation forward to you.

There's another quote I love, often attributed to Pascal: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." We live in an age of unprecedented distraction — where suicide and depression rates among teenagers are climbing, where the nuclear shadow that defined the twentieth century has not really left us, where everyone is shouting and almost no one is listening. In an age like that, sitting quietly with old wisdom — and asking what actually makes a life worth living — feels more urgent, not less. "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. I believe him.

You'll find, I'm sure, that some of what I've written here is utterly wrong. That's part of the deal of being alive — every generation has to retest the older ones, and I'd be disappointed if you didn't argue back with me on a few of these. But the willingness to ask these questions, in the first place, is itself the real inheritance. The wisdom and the experiences, more than anything material I could leave behind, are probably the greatest gift a parent can give a child.

One last thing, before we begin. I think a lot about my own parents in their twenties and thirties — the daily struggles, the small fears, the choices they made before I knew them as Mom and Dad. When you're young you think of your parents as perfect humans; getting older and learning their imperfections is what lets you love them as people, not just as idols. The biographies of famous statesmen and military generals are fine — read Isaacson on Jobs, read Grant — but the most profound biographies are the ones of the people you actually love. So I'm writing this partly so that you have, at least from my side, the biography I never got from mine. The unfiltered, mid-life, still-figuring-it-out version of your dad. Take it or leave it. Argue with it. Love me anyway.

A Note on How to Read This Book

The following note was written specially for this collection — to set the contract before you turn the page.

A quick word before you begin, so the shape of this book makes sense.

What you’re holding isn’t one continuous argument. It’s a collection of letters I wrote to you across 2024 and 2025 — some on planes, some at 2 a.m., some on slow mornings when I had nothing to prove and just wanted to think out loud. They were written one at a time, in no particular order, each one whole on its own. I’ve grouped them into parts and given them a rough arc, but please don’t read this like a textbook with a thesis to defend. Read it like what it is: a stack of letters from your dad, at a particular moment in his life, still figuring it out.

That means you can open this book anywhere. Read it front to back, or read whichever title pulls at you on whichever day you need it. Each letter will hand you back to yourself just fine.

But there is one thread running underneath all of them, and it’s worth naming up front. I have spent my whole career standing close to the machines — AI, automation, the technologies that are remaking your world faster than I can describe it. So nearly every letter here is, in some quiet way, asking the same question: when the world is being rebuilt by machines, what stays constant and human underneath all that change? My answer, the one I keep circling back to, is this — agency, authenticity, real relationships, and the examined life. The container changes. The water does not. If you remember nothing else from these pages, remember the water.

A small note on the architecture, in case it’s helpful. As you read, you’ll occasionally see a small maroon-bordered box labeled Concept — that’s me flagging the mental model or principle the letter is leaning on most heavily, so you can recognize the underlying move and not just the story on top. Each of those callouts links to a longer entry at the back of the book, in the Appendix of Concepts. The appendix is its own thing — sixty ideas, nine stories I keep returning to, and a short directory of the thinkers I quote, all organized by mental-model family rather than chapter order. You can read the letters as letters and ignore the appendix entirely. Or you can use the appendix as a glossary, jumping back to it whenever a callout catches your eye. Both are fine. Use it the way you’d use a friend’s annotated paperback — only when it helps.

So — in any order you like, with all my love. Let’s begin.