“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

The opening scene of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, tells the story of an art dealer who scammed a young museum eager to add to their collection of fine art pieces. In the early 1980s, Gianfranco Becchina went to the Getty Museum in California with a proposition — he had a statue called a ‘kourous’ — a rare gem often…

If you walk into the self-help section of any bookstore or library, you might come across a simple, bright cover book with an eye-popping word — “badass,” which might prompt you to stop and glance at it. The author, Jen Sincero, isn’t someone you’ve heard of. In fact, if it weren’t for the book You Are a Badass, and the two subsequent ones, you may never have heard about her at all!

In the mid-2000s, Jen Sincero was in her 40s living in a garage in Venice Beach, California when she realized that she had no money in her savings…

As someone who aspires to be an entrepreneur (or rather, work for myself), I’ve always been fascinated by people in business, technology, sports, entertainment, and/or creative industries who seem to embody the kind of personality that enables them to succeed. It wasn’t until I made a conscious effort to learn more about entrepreneurs from all types of industries that I soon realized how little I knew about the struggles of entrepreneurs.

To be an entrepreneur requires a lot more than a certain type of personality. It has very little to do with upbringing and more to do with persistence, passion…

Recently, I realized that one of the most common things I do is also one of the greatest mysteries — eating spicy foods. Consider, for example, the following phrases:

Koreans are obsessed with spicy food. (Kimchi, anyone?)

Asians love to eat noodles.

Everything’s better with sriracha.

The first two are common stereotypes; the last one, I made up.

On a fourth season episode of the TV show Kim’s Convenience, titled “Chammo,” Kimchee Han, played by Andrew Phung, stakes his ability to eat the spiciest foods ever. During a scene, he discovered his coworkers had given another coworker, Terrence, the nickname…

The late basketball player Wilt Chamberlain once said, “Everything is habit-forming, so make sure what you do is what you want to be doing.” There’s no time when that’s truer than right now, in the dark days of January, when many of us are beginning to work on New Year’s Resolutions — things like Dry January, working out, eating better, etc.

Many of us were forced to change our habits when the pandemic happened. As a result, our view of the world and of ourselves changed. For the past nine months, I’ve been running. It started with several days a…

Have you ever sat on the bleachers at a baseball game, with great anticipation rising up in your chest as you watch a player slide into home base? Or sat at a basketball game and watch with awe as a player dunks the ball into the hoop? Or be mesmerized when you’re listening to a violin player at an orchestra? Or be completely blown away when you’re watching a gymnast fly through the air faster than you can say “cheese”?

These all appear to be great feats done by superhumans who possess a certain skill or talent. …

NOTE: Earlier this week, I shared a personal reflection of how 2020 has been for me. Today, I wanted to share some important lessons that I’ve learned in the past five months of writing my newsletter, Little Tidbits, and how it can be applied to all aspects of your life.

I’m not the first to say this, but it’s been a tough year. With new restrictions lately, it feels like Quarantine 2.0 to me, a deja vu. I was looking forward to a more “normal” holiday experience, where people can go places and enjoy some festivities together. …

This morning, I checked my email and saw a phrase I’ve never heard before. The writer and creator of Ness Labs, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, said in her recent newsletter, “This year was both the slowest and the fastest of my life. Some parts feel like a blur, others feel like they lasted forever.” The statement couldn’t be truer for me. For many of us, 2020 is the year where nothing happened according to plan.

I began 2020 with vacation plans. Normally, I take awhile to decide on a location and plan it down with precision. However, I decided in January…