2025 Reflections: A Year of Breaking, Building, and Becoming
What I learned this year—through wins, losses, and the ideas that shaped me—helped me grow into a better builder, a stronger leader, and a clearer version of myself.
Late November always brings a kind of clarity and a sense of excitement. With only 30–40 days left in the year, you start to see which choices mattered, which didn’t, and who you became in the process. Every year, I run the same ritual: I zoom out, confront reality, and ask whether I’m becoming the kind of person capable of building the future I talk about.
2025 made that question unavoidable. It was a year of rejection, breakthroughs, pressure, and momentum — a year where I failed publicly, grew privately, and built foundations for the next inflection point. Below are the breakthroughs that shaped me, the lessons I’m carrying into 2026, and the mindset shifts that changed how I build, lead, and think.
Breakthrough #1: Knowledge Compounds Through Reading
For years, people teased me for buying more books than I finished. This year, that changed. Thanks to Audible and physical books, I finished 13 books, from Zero to One to The Lean Startup.
It taught me a quiet but powerful truth:
If you improve by 1% every day, even a chaotic life can compound.
Books didn’t just teach me information — they upgraded the mental models I make decisions with. Side note: I also proved that even with ADHD and other challenges, you are still able to read and thrive with different channels of intake (audio + physical book)
Breakthrough #2: Stopped Building Alone
Last year, I was building a startup alone in the U.S. Ambition was there, but leverage wasn’t. This year everything shifted.
Cheng-Peng (CP) joined as my co-founder — a world-class AI engineer with rare speed, depth, and a sense of great engineering intuition. Later, Stella joined as COO — the operational force multiplier every early-stage team hopes for.
Together, we began building Mindify AI with conviction, technical ambition, and momentum that I simply couldn’t reach alone.
People talk about founder–market fit. Almost no one talks about founder–founder fit. They should.
Breakthrough #3: Mindify AI Hit the International Stage
We were selected to pitch on the international stage at Meet Taipei, matched with 6 different VC firms, and ranked in the top 1% of teams. These milestones don’t define a company, but they do signal something:
The vision resonates (to investors to early adopters).
The market is paying attention (waitlist is getting longer).
Early traction is real.
Breakthrough #4: Becoming Anti-Fragile
2025 tested me — mentally, emotionally, physically. But each challenge built resilience. I learned to tune out noise, seek signal, operate intentionally, and not collapse under pressure.
Stress is a tax on the untrained mind. It’s leverage for the trained one.
This year, that finally clicked.
Lesson #1: Not All Work Matters — Value Is Power-Law Distributed
Paul Graham and Sam Altman often stress the point that great value is not linear. It’s a power law. A tiny percentage of:
companies drive most returns
research shifts entire fields
founders redefine industries
The same applies to our own work:
1% of tasks create 90% of the value. Everything else is noise.
This pushed me to ask sharper questions:
Am I spending time on the highest-leverage activities?
Am I building something people desperately want?
Does my research meaningfully push the field?
Am I aligned with long-term trends, not short-term noise?
Going forward from now, this is my filter.
Lesson #2: A CEO’s Real Job Is Leverage, Not Labor
Urgency is seductive. But urgency kills perspective. The more I acted like an operator or contributor, the less I acted like a CEO.
The few things only I can do are:
Set vision and strategy
Make high-impact (10×) decisions
Hire, align, and empower the right people
Talk to users deeply and often
Create momentum and clarity
Everything else is optional. Most things are distractions.
A startup dies when the CEO turns into an employee instead of a leverage engine.
This year, I started guarding my time and energy like a founder who’s playing to win.
Lesson #3: Greatness Lives Outside the Normal Distribution
One of the hardest — and most freeing — lessons of 2025: If you want to build something exceptional, you cannot live in the center of the curve. The middle is optimized for comfort, safety, validation, and consensus.
But the middle is also where:
ambition dies
excellence plateaus
creativity shrinks
original thinking disappears
To build something extraordinary, you have to step outside the distribution. And that comes with consequences:
You will be misunderstood.
You will be questioned.
You will be told you’re wrong.
You will be rejected.
But history is consistent:
Every great idea looks contrarian at first and obvious later.
Now, when I’m misunderstood, I don’t panic. I ask a better question:
Am I being contrarian and careless, or contrarian and thoughtful?
If it’s the latter, I keep going — because leaving the center is the admission price for greatness.
Closing Thoughts: Becoming the Person Who Can Build the Future
2025 wasn’t smooth. But it was transformative. A year of becoming:
stronger
more focused
more resilient
more aligned with my mission
What I learned is simple:
Great work demands patience, courage, and the willingness to walk paths most people avoid.
2026 will demand more of me. But I feel ready — not because life got easier, but because I’m becoming the kind of person who can carry the weight. At the meanwhile, I am building an exceptional team that work with me side by side on the path less traveled not to impress others but rather “build something people want“
I’m no longer just building a company.
I’m building myself, my team, and the future.
And that’s the ultimate leverage.
It is time to say goodbye to 2025, and embark a new chapter of life in 2026.
I am ready.