90 · My Mother's Project

In hindsight: my mom was the first person among her cohort to get a job — a big company, her dream job. She quit it to raise me full-time, and I was literally her passion project. That's one reason intellectual learning was front-loaded so young; studying hard — not just hard, but intensely — was a habit I picked up early. Passion was fuel for progress, but output and performance were a duty growing up. She was 24 when I was born. I was the only child. She was ambitious and I was smart. I was very studious, and we both had very neurotic personalities. It brought out the best in me, and I lived through several phases of cramming vast amounts of information in radical time periods to meet a deadline, a test, an output. That early exposure to pain, stress and obsession — alongside a paranoid, lingering feeling — set my bar for what actual greatness requires: not a good life, but extraordinary output, stretching the gap to second place.

Puberty hit and I lost that fire. I deviated. I was still in situations where I had to perform, but the fire was gone, and I began to see how trapped I was spiritually. My mom had her own crisis and a thirst to work again — lots of clashes in that era. But a deep part of me, to this day, carries this uncontrollable sheer force of output — push, push. I can't fully explain it. It seems to be a coalescence of a curse, a blessing, childhood wiring, and this Orthodox faith. And the suffocating part is when none of the grind manifests into visible output — when it's all reinvested into maxing out intellect, skillsets and sheer cognitive force: studying, learning, ingesting unfathomable amounts of pressure, accountability and information. Generational information.

Ten years ago I came to Daechi — the heart of Seoul's educational furnace — to study maths, English and physics. And now I am a totally different person. I didn't have a billionth of the knowledge I have now; I had zero willpower, zero drive, no stress tolerance, no pain tolerance, and I was simply drifting. To get a sense of how long a decade is: it's so far away, and the change is so insane. Imagine the person at thirty. Let that sink in. After a decade of what you're doing now — the work ethic, the dedication, the drive — it's almost too certain. And it's also crazy that there are people who have ten million times what you have — in finance, drive, force, stress tolerance, risk tolerance — while still twenty.

June of 2024: I could not understand a thing Jordan B. Peterson said in his lectures, but it captivated me enough to stay persistent — listening on and on, ingesting every speech, clip and lecture. And I reached a point where I could debate him internally, journal with more sophisticated lexicons and well-marshalled ideas. I expected it to take five years; the revamp happened semi-annually. Imagine what that means for trading, where I'm far more captivated, more driven, more exuberant. You can compress generations' worth of analysis into a decade. Think in decades — and act based on seconds.

I vividly remember both frustration and awe when I first found his lectures: A, the realisation that there were levels to this — I couldn't parse a single sentence; and B, discovering I wasn't as good at English as I thought. Keeping my intentions pure — living out authentic curiosity — is how I grew. That was the start.