How I Will Live My Life in the Next 10 Years (part 1)

This gonna be a long essay

Why I'm Writing This (Even Though It Feels Cringe)

Everyone tells you to "live fully" because "life is short." Cool. But no one tells you how. And I've struggled with this for... years…, actually.

I've been connecting the dots lately, looking back. In Vietnam, I attended High School for the Gifted in Ho Chi Minh City - essentially the Harvard of Vietnam high schools. Everyone was brilliant, but when I got there, something felt off. I felt numb, like I had climbed to the top of a mountain only to discover the view wasn't what I'd expected.

I sat in chemistry class thinking: Why am I here, doing college-level work as a high schooler, when I don't even like this subject? My performance reflected my disinterest. If you knew my class rank, you'd know exactly how many students were in my class. My chemistry teacher even joked about how many houses my parents had to sell to get me into this school lol.

Too boring by school, I threw myself into every other thing:

• Built robots and IoT systems

• Ran a coding club, teaching CS students how to code (while secretly being a political science student myself)

• Developed an Indoor Garden Hydroponic System that reached the top 50 in the Google Solution Challenge out of 800 teams and almost became a commercial venture

• Worked on environmental projects in Indonesia under YSEALI funding

• Interned at an anthropology lab called Social Life, interviewing people during COVID

• Conducted research at a policy lab on civil society issues

• Did physics research with neutrino particles at ICISE in Quy Nhon, building small prototypes

• Went couch surfing alone across central Vietnam on my bike, staying with a Ukrainian stranger who became like a great aunt to me (we even got tarot cards together, which started my more spiritual phase—sadly, I lost her contact when I moved to the US)

I did a alot. I tried hard (or at least I think so). Yet despite all this activity, I still felt like a failure. My early journals are filled with exactly that word, written over and over on my worst days.

I have some random journal entries on my phone where I reflect on what helps me improve and what situations tend to make things worse - basically, what turns me into this glorious failure :)

*(this image is a note from my phone) just a bunch of random thoughts I’ve had for a while that I have never actually wrote a blog about it until today. Finally putting some structure to the mess in my head.

Then I make a pivot. I came to America at 21, I hoped a new geography, a new culture, and a new school major would solve everything, even make me get into Forbes under 30. It didn't. For the past two years, that same feeling of failure has followed me across continents, I stuck and feeling the same.

The reason I still stay the same for the last 2 years, because things I did change is just a surface-level, addressing the branches, not the root. The real issue became increasingly clear: in everything I do, I lack the fundamental foundation for thinking and executing in life.

That is exactly the reason. I have no mentor. No guiding principles. Just raw ambition thrashing around in a chaotic system which cause all of this chaos. I come from a communist country where certain conversations simply don't happen. No one discussed liberation, inventions, economic development or personal development. I'd never heard the word "entrepreneurship" or knew what a PhD was back then. The concept of dropping out of school to pursue something else was foreign, I once emailed my Vietnam college admission asking if I could skip high school and go straight to college. They said no, predictably, because our centralized education system maintains communist philosophy.

Even our success stories were different. The richest person in my country didn't become wealthy through innovation - inventing chips, phones, or AI breakthroughs - but through government connections and real estate speculation. (His new electric car is actually from China btw).

Hence, nobody really teach me anything of how I should live my life. I have to learn “how to operate in a framework way” in the hard way, through the hardship that my family will never know.

I didn’t win in the past two years as I had hoped, but coming to America broke my frame of thinking. This country (and the people here) gave me my first real taste of what I call 'life is a game' - build a strong foundation, and you’ll be fine. Here, I finally had an equal chance to win.

This is my framework for now. Everything else, every skill, every technique, every opportunity, improves through execution. But without this foundation, I think it’s just brilliant chaos.

Here are some reflections I wrote for myself, the philosophy that work for me, so I should double down on them

1. Have a high “bet frequency”

“Any given bet is likely to fail. Success comes from making lots of bets and trying hard at each one. The more bets you take and the better you execute, the higher your chance of success. That’s why fast cycle time matters.” — Nabeel Quresh

I think this quote is dead-on.

Most people think success comes from one big idea. One lucky break. One perfect moment.

But the more I live, the more I realize: it’s not about one. It’s about many.

Success is a function of how many bets you make and how quickly you learn from each one. You don’t win by being right all the time. You win by staying in the game long enough for luck, leverage, and compounding to find you.

That’s why speed matters. The faster your cycle time, the quicker you can make decisions, test ideas, and iterate. And the more bets you make, the more likely you are to hit something that changes everything.

This mindset applies just as much to life as it does to entrepreneurship.

A company, by default, exists at “room temperature.” It’s inert. Passive. It doesn’t move unless someone injects heat. And someone should be the CEO. CEO’s job need to be injecting heat by making decisions. Not just any decisions - but bets.

Strategic, time-sensitive, directional bets. (You can see this clearly in the contrast between two of the biggest names in the chip industry: Intel vs. NVIDIA. Over the past decade, Intel slowed down not because it lacked smart people or money, but because it stopped making bold moves (please correct me if I’m wrong). It got comfortable. It focused more on keeping shareholders happy than taking risks. While the tech world changed fast, Intel stayed still. Meanwhile, Jensen Huang at NVIDIA kept betting. First on gaming gpu, then on blockchain, and later on AI. Each of those decisions built on the last. The AI chip boom didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the result of years of smart, focused bets stacked on top of each other. And I believe Jensen didn’t win by being lucky. He won by placing bets. )

That’s what great CEOs do. I believe a CEO’s most important job, beside hiring and sales, is to create momentum through decisive action. To set the tone, drive the urgency, and keep the company on the edge of movement. Good CEOs don’t just manage, they bet motherf*****.

And in life, it’s the same. I’ve noticed that the periods of my most intense personal growth didn’t come when things were easy or stable. They came when I had the most at stake, at when I was making bold bets and backing myself, even when I had nothing but conviction.

So how to really make bet to better my-self ?

I recently read an essay by Huyền Chip on personal growth:
https://huyenchip.com/2024/04/17/personal-growth.html

She poses a great question: “What big problems was I worried about five years ago that I no longer worry about now?” I think this is a powerful reflection that nobody talks about. If you’re still carrying the same worries year after year, it probably means you haven’t grown much. It’s a good way to measure how quickly you’re learning and evolving.

But I also think this is a more about a lagging indicator. It only tells you after the fact whether you've changed. What’s missing is a leading indicator, a way to measure if you're growing right now.

My proposal: look at how often you bet.

If you’re not making any bets, you’re probably not growing (that fast). I think I should take bold bets on myself, my ideas, my future that forcing myself to stretch.

I learned how to structure bets from The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. The idea is simple:

• Form a small hypothesis

• Design an experiment

• Set clear success metrics

• Run the test

• If it works, double down. If not, learn fast and pivot.

This is how startups grow. And I believe this is how people grow too.

I now try to take one significant bet every three months - something that stretches me, challenges me, or changes the trajectory of my life.

Some of those bets have already changed everything:

• I moved to a new country with nothing but two bags, switched majors, and started from scratch.

• I founded SaynSave without a cofounder, without funding, and with a dominant competitor already in the market.

• I worked in restaurants, slept in roach-infested apartments, navigated legal and financial chaos - just to stay in the game.

None of that looked like success from the outside. But all of it taught me how to bet better.

My action

And now, I’m placing my next one:
I’m moving to San Francisco - no matter what happens.
Even if the logistics are hard. Even if my immigration and school situation are uncertain. I’ve decided. This is the next bet :)

2. Have a 5-10 years bet and act on it

This is version 2 of my gambling framework.

The first version was about survival. It focused on making small, fast bets every three months to push my life forward, to help me learn quickly, adapt rapidly, and build momentum when I didn’t yet know where I was headed. That framework served me well. It got me out of reactive living and into intentional motion. I wrote my thesis. I launched experiments. I gathered data and adjusted course.

But over time, I’ve come to see that short-term bets are only part of the picture. If I really want to do something truly significant and if I want to build something that lasts I think I also need a macro bet. A 5 to 10 years thesis. A guiding belief about how the world is changing that others haven’t fully seen yet and the courage to act on it early.

Look closely at the people who’ve built things that matter. Almost all of them are operating from a clear long-term thesis.

Sam Altman had one long before OpenAI:

“AI is a sleeping giant.”

Sam place his bet and he wons.

Jeff Bezos had a thesis: “Everyone will shop online.”
He built Amazon not for the world as it was, but for the world he believed was coming. The infrastructure he created, the flywheel, the logistics network, the relentless customer focus only made sense if his thesis was true.

Rich Barton believed: “Information needs to be free.”
He built these multi-million companies (Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor) simply based on that philosophy of “Free information” and he won.

Not all macro bets pay off on schedule. Mark Zuckerberg has been betting heavily on AR/VR and the metaverse for over a decade. Billions invested, years of development and still, mainstream adoption hasn’t arrived. Critics say he’s wrong. But I believe that maybe he’s just early.

That’s the nature of macro bets: they require conviction in the face of uncertainty. Being early can look a lot like being wrong until it’s not.

I also try to relax myself by if I don’t yet have my macro bet, that’s okay. Start with the 3-month version. Keep placing small bets. But as I learn, I start asking myself:

• What am I seeing that others aren’t?

• What shift do I believe is inevitable?

• What do I want to spend a decade building, even if I might be early?

My action

Finally, I have my own macro bet, and it runs counter to the hype cycle we’re in right now.

While the world is betting on AI to disrupt everything, I’m betting on the things AI can’t touch; for instance, businesses built on human experience, and real-world presence.

That’s why I’m building SaynSave, a doordash for secret shoppers.

While others race to automate every part of the customer experience, I’m focusing on something deeper: the emotional, human side of service. AI can analyze data. It can summarize reviews. It can optimize scripts. But it can’t walk into a restaurant as a real customer. It can’t feel the atmosphere, notice the body language of staff.

Secret shopping is a wedge into something bigger as a broader category of businesses that will rise in value as AI becomes more prevalent. These are the businesses that offer what algorithms cannot: real human judgment, on-the-ground context, emotional nuance, and relational trust.

I think the more experiences become virtual and automated, the real-world moments that feel genuinely human will only become more rare and more valuable in the future, and we will all crave for human experience more and more.

3. Play long-term game with long-term people

This actualy a quote come from Naval Ravikant.

His full quote is:

One should pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.
…
Essentially, all the benefits in life come from compound interests. Whether it’s in relationships, or making money, or in learning.

…

You have to be able to play a long-term game. And long-term games are good not just for compound interest, they’re also good for trust. If you look at prisoner’s dilemma type games, a solution to prisoner’s dilemma is tit-for-tat, which is I’m just going do to you what you did last time to me, with some forgiveness in case there was a mistake made. But that only works in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, in another words if we play a game multiple times.

Play the long game because it will enhance compound interest + trust

4. Have an Anti-List (Things to Say No To)

I don’t talk much about Framework #3 because it is quite straightforward: I need to play the long-term game with my 5 years bet. That means I can’t just spontaneously jump between working on biophysics one day, software the next, and human rights the day after as I did in the past.

But playing the long game comes with a cost. To do it well, I’ve realized I need to make trade-offs. I can’t say yes to everything. I have to ask myself honestly: Is this really helping me build something long-term with long-term people? If not, I either need to stop doing it or reduce my desire for it. Otherwise, I’ll end up spreading myself too thin, chasing short-term highs, and losing focus on what truly matters.

Because attention expands what it touches. Sometimes I think I can handle it all: the workload, the workouts, the language I’m learning, the degree I’m pursuing, the venture I’m building. But in the end, everything starts to collapse—not because they’re not worth it, but because I’m not focused enough. Everything expands as it grows, and that’s the hidden cost.

The best way I’ve found to stay long-term focused is to have a clear Anti-List—especially things that offer perishable rewards.

“Focus on compounding activities. Avoid perishable pursuits. Humans often compete over perishable rewards... If you avoid this mistake, you will be unstoppable in 5+ years.”
— Alexandr Wang

One tactic that helps me stay sharp on my anti list is setting a 5-year goal, then try to accomplish it in 6 months. I’ll likely fail, and of course I will, but it forces me to break out of my conventional thinking. Moving fast pushes me to strip things down to its bare essentials. (Shoutout to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel for this mind exercise.)

My Action

My 5-year goal is to grow SaynSave to $5 million in revenue. So now, I’m asking myself: How can I hit that by January 2027? (My brain is shaking while writing this line)

This have me thinking about what I need to elimiate in my list, like my job, my housing,… etc.

I’ve already created an Anti-List for myself. Will plan to share it publicly in the future.

5. The Best Productivity Hack Nobody Tells You

For a long time, I was stuck in the trap.

I hated myself for not doing enough. So I kept pushing the “try harder” button. Again and again.

I followed productivity gurus. I downloaded the perfect Notion templates. I spent hours tweaking the color of my Google Calendar like that would somehow unlock discipline. I believed productivity was a tool problem, if I just found the right system, I’d finally become the person I wanted to be.

But most of these gurus is just marketing stuff. The people talking the most about productivity probably not that productive. They’re optimizing to look productive, not be productive and to sell me their course.
(Yes, I bought it. Lol.)

And if I ever truly unlock productivity, I probably won’t be watching those YouTube videos about it anyway.

Real productivity isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing less, but with more leverage.
And the highest form of leverage I can think of? People.

The peak productivity hack is not a better system—it’s having others work with you.

It sounds obvious, but most people, especially solo founders and high-performers, miss it. We try to outwork the problem. We believe the answer is more hours, more hustle, more willpower.

It’s not.

If I don’t have the right people - aligned on the same long-term vision - I will stall out. Every. Single. Time.

Relationships aren’t a bonus. They’re the foundation, especially if I want to play the long game as an entrepreneur. And when I think about what makes a CEO great in this game, I’ve boiled it down to four key skills:

1. Betting (on data) – knowing what to focus on, what to ignore, and what to commit to

2. Hiring – attracting people better than you and getting them aligned with your mission

3. Sales – selling the vision, not just the product—to customers, partners, and your team

4. Fundraising – getting the capital to scale that vision

(This is my personal opinion of what a great CEO looks like—or at least, the kind of CEO I want to become.)

And at the core of all four? People skills.

Here’s my current thinking: I don’t just want to find great people, I want to attract them. Chasing is exhausting, but attraction can scale. One approach I learned came from an internet stranger-turned-inspiration: Andy Trattner. He writes a blog. People read it, stay in his orbit, and eventually his old friend from MIT message him about an advice for startup. It keeps long-term people in his cycle without chasing anyone.
(And yes, I read his blog. It’s great.)

That’s the kind of system I want to build.

• Write online
  The internet rewards people who think in public.
  Some of the most interesting people I’ve met came from writing and cold email from their blog. Parker Conley, for example, helped me understand how Twitter and blogging can actually shape my network.

• Network = Help people
  The best way to expand circle is to expand the network of the network.
  Not in the sleazy LinkedIn-connection-request kind of way.
  I mean genuinely show up, give energy, and make friends - not “contacts.”

• Send more cold emails
  Assume everyone is your friend.
  I’ve emailed billionaires. Tho no replies (yet), but that’s not the point.
  Every cold email is a swing, on of them will land I believe so. 2 of my first customer for my startup is coming from my cold email.

My Action

I’m starting this blog. This time will be serious.

It’s for me, to think out loud. It’s for my friends, to see what I’m working on. And maybe, it’s for someone out there who needs to hear exactly this.

6. Be the student of the (business) game

In the early days, I was told:
“If you want to do something great, go to school.”

That advice came from a teacher I respected, someone who genuinely cared. But the thing is, she was never in the position I actually wanted to be in. She never built a company, never played in the arena I dreamed about. She didn’t have the results I wanted, yet I took her advice seriously. For years.

Eventually, I gave up on that path, not because I gave up on myself, but because I realized it just didn’t work for me.

But once I stepped off that traditional path, a new problem showed up:

Now what? What should I actually be learning?

I started consuming a ton of content - podcasts, blog posts, YouTube videos, Medium think pieces. Everywhere I looked, people were saying, “Optimize for skills.”

Great. But which ones?

There’s an endless buffet of so-called “critical skills” being shoved at you. Everyone’s selling a different path: statistics, crypto, no-code, personal branding, cold outreach, design thinking, finance fluency, project management…

It’s overwhelming. And underneath it all, a lot of it feels like marketing in disguise. Courses wrapped as wisdom. I didn’t want to collect skills like merit badges. I wanted a compass - something that helped me filter, not just consume.

Eventually, I found a simple framework from Shaan Puri (via My First Million) that gave me a sense of direction.

1. Learn to build: Make things. Anything. A podcast, an mobile app, a newsletter, a landing page.

2. Learn to sell : One-on-one. Through content. Through stories. Through SEO. Understand psycology how to move people.

3. Learn to be lucky: Network. Explore strange ideas. Follow curiosities. Take weird bets. (Yes, I even mess around with tarot - because sometimes, randomness leads to the best connections.)

This framework actually got me results. I stopped flailing and started shipping. But even that is not enough, as powerful as that framework is, the world doesn’t stand still.

I think the way we build, sell, and connect is evolving really really fast. So if I want to stay ahead, I need to go one level deeper.

I’m adding a new layer: Learn the Frontier

What does that mean?

It means I don’t just want to learn how the game is played. I want to understand how it’s changing. I want to be early to the edges, not late to the middle.

Here’s what that looks like if I were studying marketing:

If I were a marketing student in college, I wouldn’t be focused on textbooks or generic strategies. I’d be diving deep into prompt engineering, studying how AI is transforming persuasion, content creation, and customer interaction. AI is making personalization at scale not just possible, but expected and that’s a game-changer for marketing.

I’m also studying how attention flows online—from TikTok hooks to retention mechanics. I want to know what grabs people, and why they stay. I’m learning to automate lead generation using AI, build smarter funnels, and create systems that can sell even while I sleep.

If I were enrolled in a marketing degree today, this would be my curriculum. But I’m not so I’m building it myself.

My Action

Right now, I spend about 5% of my week exploring new frontiers, searching for tools or trends I can hack. (That number isn’t random. It comes from the book Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which suggests spending 5% of my time trying new things to stay innovative and adaptable.)

Every morning, my routine includes meditation + vibe hacking act like reset mechanism for me to stay tuned to intuition and creativity. I’m experimenting with n8n to automate lead flows, and I’m currently building an AI-powered memory layer to create context-aware interactions layer.

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Here’s the end of Part One.

The truth is, knowing what to bet on—and why to learn it—is half the battle.
This is just the beginning of that journey.

In the next part, I’ll dive into how to think about constraints and how to build the mental tools, memories, habits, mindsets, that keep me sane and focused when the path gets messy.

Spoiler alert: I will explore ideas like:

• Carefully defining your constraint (a lesson from Andy Trattner and Elon Musk)

• Steal mindsets, not things

• Where you live shapes you

• Be hard to compete with

• Create memories

• Have one thing you suck at but love

• Learn to travel well & make friends

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