Hello World - From Stability to Anti-fragility
Part 1
It’s midsummer in New York, and on the surface, everything seems unchanged. But inside, something is shifting. Maybe it started when I injured my back during a training session, or when I opened my MBA application draft for the 24th time and still couldn’t find a sentence that felt like actionable plan.
It was a Thursday afternoon. I sat in a climate-controlled conference room as colleagues stumbled through a jargon-heavy discussion of CPI and PCE. They spoke broken English, and the discussion didn’t sound right. It reminded me of watching a dubbed movie: words synchronized, but emotion misaligned.
At that moment, I imagined a whale rising out of the Pacific somewhere far away. Or a seagull gliding above Manhattan’s skyline—one fluent in silence.
I’ve moved from a global investment bank to a role in fundamental investing, and now into senior management at a Chinese-headquartered conglomerate bank with a global footprint. The job is respectable. The title earns polite nods. But I’ve started to see my future unfold like the waiting room of a luxury airport lounge—quiet, curated, and completely disconnected from weather, friction, or wind.
What unnerves me isn’t the routine, but the realization that I could live the next fifty years like this. Measured, frictionless, slowly unmade. It’s the kind of erosion that comes not from catastrophe, but from comfort.
Part 2
I was born with a heart valve defect. It wasn’t fatal, but it was enough to make my mother—already overly cautious with an often-absent entrepreneurial husband—clamp down on anything that resembled risk. In early-2000s Asia, a girl’s job was to stay still and study hard. Athleticism was for boys, for movie screens, or for someone else’s daughter.
Years later, I would graduate from Wake Forest and Villanova—two schools with serious athletic legacies. I walked the same campus paths as NBA stars (shout out to Knicks), but never once stepped into a gym. The idea of sweating for fun, of pushing my body just because I could, felt as distant as living underwater.
Then, in 2017, freshly graduated and quietly terrified, I joined an investment bank. It was everything people said it would be—hard-edged, loud, fast. In a city where everyone performs, I became aware of my body in a new way: not as something to hide or protect, but as something to sculpt, discipline, understand.
One morning, I walked into a Wall Street Equinox, dragging years of softness behind me. The treadmill felt like punishment. My breath was sharp and uncertain. But thirty minutes in, something shifted. My body, so long denied motion, started to speak.
Since then, I’ve trained before market opens. I’ve learned to distinguish between quads and hamstrings, between pain that builds and pain that warns. Dumbbells that once looked like enemies now rest like old friends in my palms.
The girl who wasn’t allowed to run has grown into a woman who craves motion. Not just in body, but in mind. Discipline isn’t punishment. It’s how I wage quiet war against complacency. Every skipped craving, every completed set, every 6 a.m. finish is a small rebellion against the version of me that was told: “stay absolutely safe.”
Part 3
By the time I reached my late twenties, I had done everything “right.” Graduated from respected schools. Worked my way up from analyst to manager. Moved from a bulge-bracket bank to another banking conglomerate in New York. I became, unintentionally, the embodiment of a certain immigrant dream: reliable, upwardly mobile, decorous.
I was the only child of a self-made man who helped build one of the largest airports in the world. For a father who rose from nothing, stability was success. Especially for a daughter. Especially for a girl. And so I became—almost without noticing—something resembling a cookie cutter. Not because I lacked originality, but because the mold was so precise, so rewarded, and so deeply familiar.
But somewhere along the line, I began to press back.
When I was eighteen and lost, I took a gap year, not because it was strategic, but because I couldn’t breathe. I worked as a business writer to support myself, interned at an insurance investment office in Hong Kong, and tried to locate the edges of a life not prewritten. Later, with no official plan to “become a thought leader,” I began publishing investment analysis on Seeking Alpha, joining conversations often dominated by older men. I wrote not to prove anything, but to think more clearly. I started helping Asian female founders enter the U.S. market, sometimes translating culture more than language. Even as my full-time role remained squarely in finance, my subconscious kept reaching outward. Each quarterly earnings call, each CEO letter, each pricing decision in a footnote—I saw stories buried under numbers, patterns hidden in noise, and flashes of innovation that deserved daylight.
The question began to nag: if I could see across industries, if I could read strategy in a sentence and dysfunction in a ratio—wasn’t that a form of entrepreneurial thinking, too? Wasn’t that worth building something around?
Part 4
When I joined the bank, I gave myself four goals: make one real friend, form one meaningful connection, publish something under my own name, and appear once in the media. I thought they were modest asks. They were all achieved sooner than I expected.
And then the real discomfort began.
It wasn’t the work itself—I knew how to work. I knew how to synthesize data, navigate ambiguity, lead meetings, polish language, and finish things well. What wore me down was everything outside the job description.
The rituals. The deadweight bureaucracy. The small, daily erasures of logic. The way a question could be dismissed simply because the asker wasn’t old enough, or male enough, or local enough.
As someone who had never worked with Chinese colleagues before, I began to experience, up close, what “a system where obedience outranks originality” truly meant—not just hierarchy, but hierarchy baked into language, pacing, posture. And with it came a progressive and steady ache.
Reading Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, one line seared itself into memory:
“Employees’ risks are hidden.”
It made too much sense. Taxi drivers, tailors, dentists—they face volatility, but rarely collapse. Their risks are on the surface. An employee, on the other hand, may live for years in still water, until one email or one phone call drains the riverbed dry.
Stability, I began to realize, is just a story—one we tell ourselves because it’s comforting. But comfort, left too long, becomes confinement.
Part 5
When I began writing my MBA application, I found myself stuck, not for lack of words, but for lack of something true. I couldn’t make myself write the aspirational one-liner about “becoming a global entrepreneur” or “launching a mission-driven family office.” The phrases sounded rehearsed, hollow, like something I might nod at but never feel.
After eight years in finance, I’ve become highly antifragile—at least economically. I can read risk, allocate well, live below my means, and protect upside. But walking away from a high-paying role comes at a cost. What I fear isn’t failure. It’s losing the clarity that comes from choosing discomfort deliberately.
So I asked myself, what exactly do I bring to the table if I’m not yet a founder?
First, communication. Not in the performative sense, but in the ability to map chaos into clarity. In the secondary market, I’ve learned how to distill an entire industry into a story, then translate that story into language an intern, a trader, or a CEO can absorb. This kind of fluency isn’t artificial intelligence—it’s accumulated human messiness, intuition, and care.
Second, temperament. I’m a Capricorn ENTJ—disciplined, forward-driving, yet oddly tender when it comes to people. I ask hard questions but listen twice. I crave structure but resist blind authority. Over time, I’ve grown fluent in cross-cultural empathy: explaining U.S. workplace codes to Chinese executives, and decoding Confucian power dynamics for American colleagues.
Third, synthesis. Numbers speak to me, but so do systems. I can read a 10-K, but I’m just as curious about how a pricing decision got made inside a consumer startup. My friendships span hedge fund traders and first-time founders; not because I collect people, but because I crave how ideas evolve across functions and industries.
And yet, I’ve never built something of my own. I’ve advised founders, written research, seen behind the curtain. But I haven’t stepped out from behind the scaffolding.
This site is my rehearsal. A sandbox. A small rebellion against my own inertia. A place to publish investment ideas, unpack business models, and document the messy, nonlinear process of becoming.
Maybe, and likely, I’ll fail. Or maybe, finally, I’ll name the edge I’ve been circling for years, and start to walk it.
—————————————————-with my 0 coding knowledge —————————————————————————————————————————————————
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
printf("Hello World!\n");
return 0;
}
