2025 is coming to an end. There’s no achievement that can be summed up in a single sentence. If I were a lead, I probably would have been called around everywhere for failing to meet KPIs. But I think I’ve come to know somewhat more clearly how to move forward and how to be less shaken in the process.

A whole year entirely at school

This year, I spent the entire year at school for the first time in 8 years. If I had told my 21-year-old self this, he would have thrown salt at me and chased me away saying that’s nonsense.

School is such a strange space. It was the most relaxed period of my entire 20s, and at the same time, it became the driving force that made me think of various ideas and actually execute them after a really long time. This year, many people around me asked “Why are you still going to school instead of dropping out?” I gave various reasons, but thinking about it now, it’s because I couldn’t find a reason to drop out. It’s still quite a meaningful space as a sandbox.

From the second half of this year, I’ve been using school as a space to learn about “learning.” My goal is to achieve maximum learning efficiency using minimum time. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes priorities get pushed back and I can’t execute properly.

Since I haven’t had many opportunities to meet people who have lived their lives with completely different perspectives than mine over the past 8 years, just listening to stories from various people I meet at school gives me a lot to think about. There are also many things that make me reflect. When I get immersed in these thoughts, I have experiences of understanding others’ situations by drawing analogies to my existing experiences, and I often think that this might be the core of learning transfer. So I’ve gradually reduced saying that there’s nothing to learn at school. Of course, since the school didn’t intentionally provide this experience, I’m also trying not to forget my cynicism about the school system itself.

About aggression

The exercise of this year was boxing. At first, I went out only a little, but gradually I started going more often and exercising for longer periods. I wondered when I’d ever get in the ring, but recently I’ve been getting in quite often, and I’ve also heard that my stamina has increased a lot and my posture is getting better.

The theme I realized while boxing is aggression. When I got in the ring for the second time, I felt like my skills wouldn’t improve at this rate, so I asked the coach who was watching me. If you could only fix one thing right now, what would look best to fix? The coach told me I need to “attack more actively” for better sparring, adding that I looked somewhat defensive. It was a time for much thought. Not just because I wanted to get better at boxing, but because it was feedback I heard while I had been thinking I had become more defensive over the past 1-2 years.

That’s also part of why I trained harder at boxing. I thought if I could become more aggressive in this ring, I could transfer that feeling to real life. And the results were satisfying. I think I’ve started moving more actively and proactively to achieve the goals I want.

Not only that, but it also helped a lot in maintaining composure in stressful situations. As Mike Tyson’s famous saying goes, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” When you get in the ring and allow even one body shot, your reason flies away and your blood starts to boil. In such situations, you need to calm yourself down as quickly as possible and find another way out to get better results. Otherwise, if you just express the excitement as it is, your movements become bigger and you allow more attacks.

I thought of it lightly at first, but as I gradually applied it to various aspects of real life, boxing became more fun. I’m facing a move so I don’t know what will happen, but if I get the chance, I plan to keep going.

Things visible when escaping the noise

The theme of my first half retrospective was beef seaweed soup. Suddenly beef seaweed soup? you might think, but it means that rather than putting effort into unnecessary things, it’s much better to cook a bowl of beef seaweed soup for someone you love. But the time we really come to realize the gratitude we should always have for our surroundings seems to be during travel, when we become distant from that environment.

The starting point of my Thailand > UK > France > Monaco itinerary in the summer was the reunion concert of the band “Oasis” that filled my middle and high school years. By the time I went on the trip, the Korea concert schedule had already been confirmed so there was no need to go, but I really wanted to go to Wembley that I had only been watching in videos. In the first place, being that inefficient also meant being that romantic, and it will remain an unforgettable moment.

I passed through Paris in between, but what remains most memorable is Nice - Monaco. It was the first time I felt good just because of the weather in a city. I also remember Monaco, which I went to by renting a car. I resolved that someday I must go back and stay in Nice for at least two weeks.

When I travel, I don’t make very complicated schedules, but rather decide improvisationally based on where I want to go and my condition each day. This time, it was my first long trip with a friend, so I also listened a lot to my friend’s opinions. As a result, it became a trip retracing past preferences while opening my eyes to numerous new preferences.

Interestingly, as physical distance increases, the distance from the attitudes and actions in that space also increases. You can clearly see how much space in your thoughts the familiar surrounding environment was taking up, and what you missed in the process. During the not-short two-week trip, I could sharpen thoughts that were hidden by various noise, and I was able to set a primary direction. As I wrote in my first half retrospective, it was the thought to “stick to the basics.”

40 hours, San Francisco and Sharpness

After returning, I decided to make a realistic choice. I intended to work at a company while preparing for the next step. Since my savings were running out, it was perhaps an obvious choice, but during interviews at several companies, I could see myself getting stressed every time I brought up the “40 hours” topic.

When I shared my concerns with friends around me, one of them, Chanhee, invited me to San Francisco. With the words that I would definitely feel something when I came. Knowing that if I stayed in Korea, this worry would just keep circling around, I departed for now. After buying the ticket, departure was 6 hours away.

Most acts of pretending to be crazy lead to experiences that become great assets for that person. It was a trip I just took off on, but hearing stories from various people I met there, I felt my thoughts being clearly organized. What position I should aim for became quite clear too. It had been quite a while since I felt stimulated by looking at other people.

The topic that filled my head during the almost two weeks was sharpness. The problem awareness and concerns I usually had weren’t sharp enough to express to people here. There are moments where I can be sharper, I thought. I had been troubled by the feeling that I hadn’t been growing for the past few years, but this was time spent finding clues and direction for that. After having new experiences, it actually became clearer what I should do next.

On the way back, my thoughts were clearly organized and I expressed my intentions to decline here and there. There’s one email that remains memorable, which I’ll leave here. Everyone showed similar reactions when I brought up the topic of next steps, which felt quite strange. Their standards for people who will start a company might be different from mine, but anyway, it seemed to prove that my attitude toward work has been consistent for quite a long time.

Fundamentals and About Pain

On the flight back, I resolved to exercise every day. Because I thought I would need appropriate tension in daily life, and I felt I should be able to endure the pain I get from daily life first. To maintain balance in various upcoming situations, it also seemed necessary to build habits from now.

But unlike exercises I had done before, I decided to slightly increase the load every single day. And for that, I added exercises that I must do every day. I resolved to do 3 sets of kettlebell swings after every boxing session, and on one of the weekend days when the boxing gym isn’t open, I decided to go to the swimming pool and exercise at least 500m.

After the first 3 days, it was really so hard that I didn’t even want to go exercise. But ignoring that, I just went to the boxing gym every day. After doing that for a few weeks and sparring, my chronic problem of not being able to use my lower body properly was also solved, and I noticeably felt my stamina had improved. Around that time, I also received compliments from coaches or sparring partners that my stamina was good or my posture was good.

The pain that led me to a better direction and the pain that could be understood as a danger signal had almost no difference. An appropriate level of pain actually functions as a signal that I’m moving forward.

After these series of experiences, I try to go out to exercise as much as possible every day, and I’m making an effort to accept the pain I experience as a positive signal. Of course, there are days when it goes magically smoothly and days when it doesn’t. But if these moments start accumulating, I believe the day when I meet myself at the level I wanted will come someday.

With gratitude

During AC2 last year, I remember feedback from Changjun Kim’s coaching. Don’t try to do it alone. I wanted to do most activities alone, and I used to avoid the series of acts of asking for help from others because it felt like incurring debt. (I only tried to help instead.) As a result, there were limits to what I was trying to do, and through the coaching session, I came to recognize that from a macro perspective, I was working in an inefficient way.

So this year was a year of consciously making many choices in directions I wouldn’t have originally taken. The biggest one was asking for favors when I can. I pondered multiple times that it’s not so unpleasant when I receive requests, and I tried various requests, and everyone responded positively.

From not very big requests (asking to talk about my concerns, asking about experiences) to requests that might carry some risk (asking to introduce someone they know, etc.), I asked for various things, and each time I experienced problems being solved much more easily. Of course, I won’t ask like this in every situation. I think everyone responded well because I had thought that much about it and it showed.

Looking at these moments, beyond simple gratitude, it makes me resolve that I want to do better and give back. I hope to work harder so that next year I can receive more requests for help, and that it will be a year where I can help better.

Be yourself

A few days ago, I met a friend who is starting a company and talked about the influence the environment has on me. And the conclusion that came out at the end of that conversation was as follows:

Entrepreneurship is an outlier game, and because we pursue such outliers, it’s not wrong to pursue sharpness. However, the social environment we’re in often chooses a huge regression by not distinguishing between such Sharpness and Rudeness, in exchange for being a little less bothersome.

To grow, the premise is that you have to actively try to leave your safe area, and this is a really difficult and hard act. Like the law of inertia, people try not to leave their comfort zone. As I had this conversation, Jeff Bezos’s final Amazon shareholder letter came to mind.

You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading. Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free. You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

What inevitably comes in this process is what we call digging. Interestingly, to become endlessly sharper, an endless process of digging must accompany it. But after such a process passes several months and years, it all becomes truly mine. Looking at my own diagnosis, the biggest mistake over the past few years seems to be that I rejected this kind of digging and wanted to solve flashy problems from the start.

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Next year, I’ll do my own thing. Looking at people around me, pain seems certain for me in ‘26, but what can I do. I’ll just do it. I know well that I don’t know many things right now, and that the only way to solve that is to just dive in headfirst and move forward.

But fortunately, through this year, I was able to know a little about how to find composure in shaky situations and how to solve problems. Also how to change my situation.

Actually, this choice is close to a choice full of only courage. I don’t have much savings either. But more than various other reasons, the sensation that my life was shrinking was too unpleasant. I hope that after passing through what will be an extremely difficult (至難) next year, my life will have grown a little bigger.