Married to the hustle
Learning where ambition ends and meaning begins
“Your career and who you marry are the most important decisions in your life.”
People love quoting Warren Buffett on this, but it was the first time someone had said it to me. Not everyone sees it that way, but for those who do, they’ve probably either tried entrepreneurship or failed a few ventures already.
Our education system was unlikely designed to nurture original thinking. It was built to produce compliant workers, a system shaped by industrial-age values and, as many have pointed out, influenced by the questionable motivations behind John D. Rockefeller’s philanthropic initiatives. Conformity was rewarded more than curiosity. Obedience over imagination. Memorization over thought.
And yet, I have mixed feelings about John D. Rockefeller. I’ve read his 38 Letters to His Son several times. The advice he wrote for his own child does not align with the system he helped shape for everyone else. There is something painfully human in that gap.
I often wonder how we decided that work and life should be separate. How did we learn to accept that the thing that consumes most of our hours is not meant to be something we love, or at least something that gives meaning?
And honestly, who am I to speak like I know? I have not hit the entrepreneurial milestones I once set for myself. Not yet. My UK visa application was just rejected. I spent months proving I was a “promising” talent, only to be told I was not exceptional enough. At least not yet.
Maybe the reason I have never separated work from life is that I grew up in a family where work was life. I grew up surrounded by builders. Not bankers, not lawyers, but people who built the world with their hands. Our family home is still the home of my childhood, rebuilt piece by piece over the years. A vacation never existed in our vocabulary. My grandmother spent her entire life saving every cent, constructing properties on the land we owned, and providing for me in ways I did not understand until much later. Being a landlady meant contracts, receipts, negotiations, and family conflicts. That was my curriculum.
That world moves with history. The New Territories took their name from the 1898 extension of Hong Kong’s boundary under British rule. The decades that followed were far from gentle. It was a fierce, almost feral time when power could buy nearly anything. To own land was to command people, politics and business. And that power stretched far beyond Hong Kong, shaping the Chinatowns built across oceans.
Every inflection point creates winners. Just like the Opium War, the forced opening of the ports and the introduction of the security law, each moment reshaped our world overnight.
My indigeneity and my native Cantonese, the languages and textures that formed me, have become almost rare in my generation. These were the things I once found uncool, as if my identity was something I was meant to outgrow.
The entanglement of work and life can be self-destructive. I do not know how to explain my dissatisfaction when I have a roof above me and bread to eat. I grew up feeling lonely, and that loneliness returns whenever I sit in a taxi and see the glowing Bank of China building in Central, or when I run along my village trail that has slowly disappeared under concrete. Nothing is wrong with my life, yet it often feels like everything is.
Just when you realize life looks so perfectly constructed, you start to notice the cracks and pull it apart until an opening appears.
As a former publicist, maybe I’ve fallen a little in love with the thrill of a crisis. I don’t think I can grow fast enough without getting myself into a bit of trouble every now and then. I’ve questioned myself many times, why I choose to leave comfort, and why I get uncomfortable when life starts feeling a little too comfortable.
A friend once told me about her great aunt, who grew up in a privileged home in China. She became a journalist who stayed to document the Cultural Revolution, refusing to flee even when escape was possible. She died in prison after enduring repeated abuse. She was pregnant at the time.
“People want to find meanings in their lives.”
I made a light comment, imagining myself in her position.
As someone who has been part of many social movements, something in me stirs when I face a problem I cannot fix. I feel it in my chest, the way others who are just as desperate for change do too. We were raised to project idealism onto the world. And when the world refuses to match it, something inside us cracks. The hardest lesson, one I still fail over and over, is learning to pick my battles.
It is liberating to have a career as a woman, almost like buying my way out of the role tradition assigned to me. But the desire to prove others wrong is a dangerous fuel, simply because not every battle is worth fighting.
There are 0-to-1 people and 1-to-2 people. There are people who live through experimentation, and people who operate from frameworks.
After leaving my corporate job, I struggled to embrace the former. A mindset where every week demands a new iteration. No polished slides. No perfect decks. Only building, testing, and learning in motion. An exited YC founder coached me for almost a year, assigning KPIs and pushing me until the only answer left was:
“You need to throw away your old code.”
People romanticize startup life. The speed, the AI breakthroughs, the YC and EF halos. But in reality, I spent months filming shaky interviews, editing clips, tracking reactions, replying to comments, sending messages one by one, talking to strangers on the street, and interviewing LSE students in their study breaks just to understand how they behaved online. It was not glamorous. It was not Mayfair dinners or investor briefings like my former comms life.
Many nights I wondered if I even liked this work. But this is what 0-to-1 growth looks like. Unpolished. Obsessive. Powered by curiosity long before the metrics move.
It felt like a shedding when I packed away my corporate dresses and heels and chose sneakers, black shirts, and jeans instead. In my early jobs, I was not allowed to wear jeans at all.
“Being a founder and being an employee require two different sets of skills.”
Someone told me this when I pivoted away from being a founder. I do not remember who. But it is true. I am re-learning the basics I thought I already knew.
Maybe I have finally come to realize that not every battle is mine to fight. I spent years swinging at everything that came my way, only to learn that I had what I needed all along.
I used to believe pain was the engine that pushed us toward extraordinary things, that only through suffering could we learn how to live. I rushed to grow up, treating life like a race. But many of the battles I fought were battles within myself.
I am just a person, a human, a girl with two cats, moving through the world like anyone else, a face you might pass online without thinking twice. With every battle I lose, I find my way back to who I am. And only by meeting myself honestly have I learned when to surrender, and when to fold.
Thank you for the lovely bouquet.
