16 · Empty Stadiums

The crushing thing is when momentum dies — you see no progress, and worse, no signs of success. Nobody is cheering for you. Nobody knows you are working this hard. I have no idea how to deal with this. The advice I get is "go on vacation." How? I can't afford a vacation — I have no money, literally none. What am I going to do, fly to Tokyo with less than three weeks to the A-levels? This is the soul-crushing part: nobody is rooting for you, you are the only one you can depend on, nobody knows you are suffering in solitude. You're not making anything, you're not making money, you're just suffering. And nobody knows. Nobody cares. Everyone else is jolly on the subway.

The most important thing is momentum. You can't slow down. The acceleration has to stay positive at all costs; the moment it drops, it's suffocating. Just keep pushing. You are the only one who can create the positive emotions. Keep doing something that keeps the ship moving, ideally faster. When you can see progress, the positive emotions come. Push using them. I pray God gives me other methods later, because there's no way every entrepreneur I look up to runs on daily suffering that borders on fatal.

Bezos gives simple alpha: stress primarily comes from not taking action on the things within your control. The immediate response should be to do the smallest thing that builds momentum, because stress only comes from a dip in acceleration.

Maybe burnout is a real thing — today was a legitimate existential crash-out. I really don't have the power to do anything. I'm sick of this terrible voice inside telling me to take one more step. Why am I so masochistic? Where did my life go wrong? Preparing for Korean maths and physics olympiads, rejected from Korean top high schools, failing the Korean SAT, failing the resit, a failed gap year, missing the Cambridge conditional offer, rejected from LSE, UCL, Imperial, failing post-interview at Oxford, failing the MAT. Why can't I be optimal? Why can't I smile like other people?

I'm at the point where I realise emotional pain lacks utility. I cried my soul out, and my mom had breast cancer last year — I was in deep pain and unfathomable stress. Meanwhile someone from Eton follows the curriculum and collects A*s while I take a D. You have to stop making the same mistakes — but how? What should I do? Please, Jesus Christ, give me the strength to carry my cross.

Nobody is more stressed than a man in his twenties: broke, lonely, unemployed. Okay — so I guess this is what the greats experience. Extreme highs, extreme lows, unfathomable stress and pain, obsessive personalities, off-the-moon intelligence, a madman's ambitions and creativity. Do you think you can pull off EVERYTHING you said with a sane mind? The value itself demands insanity. This year will be traumatic — an emotional scar. The final year where everything explodes. You'll look back and say you missed out on almost everything — grateful to God, but poignant about a phase of light burning viscerally. Get it done. You can't ignite to the sky without this level of sheer intensity. You have to push, push, push like a crazy person, because otherwise there is not enough lift to do something no one in your nation — no one who has walked this planet — has ever done.

It is okay to not feel okay. In fact, be more pissed off, if that makes sense. You are clearly capable, you are doing everything right, working harder than anyone out here, and the situation is still shitty. One of those "My God, why have you forsaken me" moments. The only way I could fix my mentality was to fix my situation — accept that this is the martyr phase, suffer, and use it as fuel. Once I stopped trying to feel okay about rejection, accepted that I could be pissed off and sad at the same time, and just did the work — I finished the entire A-levels, all three subjects plus the modules I wasn't even taking, in less than a week. Then every past paper in existence across all exam boards, training until I could do them in half the time. Two weeks. Then the entire Cambridge maths course in the next two weeks, doing eighteen hours of maths a day. That was my life as a startup — when everything took off. Those years were painful and volatile, but so enriching, because I could see, visually, what I could do. It was like giving birth to untapped potential.