Essays

(Originally posted on 27 November 2025)

Next week marks a small but meaningful milestone: my eighth year at this company. By Friday, I’ll officially step into my ninth year, the longest I’ve ever committed to anything in my professional life (well, except for my marriage and family, of course).

I wasn’t planning to write about this. Anniversaries like this usually pass quietly for me. But something happened this week that made me pause and smile at how strangely connected life can be.

I was at a formal dinner event, round tables, name cards, the whole thing. You never know who you’ll end up sitting next to. As always, I prepared my small talk-about-the-weather energy. Then the man on my left handed me his business card during introductions.

I froze for a second.

He’s the CFO of a company I applied to in 2017, my very first job application after graduation. I remember refreshing my email every day, hoping for a reply. It never came. I didn’t get the job.

And now, eight years later, here we were, sitting side by side. Life has a sense of humor, doesn’t it?

It got me thinking about how the things we chase, the doors that close, the paths we don’t take, they all quietly shape where we end up.

Back in university, I was an Android fanatic. I’d camp out for new flagship launches, compare specs like a pro, and proudly declare that Apple was overpriced. “For the same money,” I’d say, “you can get way better hardware with Android.”

Fast forward to today: I only replace my Android phone when it dies, and I’m the one excitedly unboxing the latest iPhone or Macbook. I’ve probably tried nearly every Apple product that makes sense in my life. Who saw that coming?

I used to hate Accounting with a passion—especially making financial statements. I’d groan every time the lecturer said “balance sheet.”

Now? A solid chunk of my job requires me to actually understand P&L, cash flow, and depreciation. I’m not saying I love it… but I don’t hate it anymore either.

And don’t get me started on that one neighboring country our national football team can never seem to beat. I swore I’d never step foot there, just out of sheer stubbornness and bruised national pride.

These days? I visit at least once a year. On a good year, three or four times. For work, for food, for short getaways. I even caught myself enjoying it.

Funny how life works.

This eight-year journey is now the longest “professional” commitment I’ve ever made. Before this, my record was seven years, finishing my undergraduate degree (yes, it took me a little longer than most). Before that, six years of elementary school.

People always get asked: “What did you do to get here? What choices led you to this point?”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a different question:

What didn’t I do?

I’m here, partly because I didn’t get that job in 2017.

Do I regret not getting that job back then?

Maybe a little. On quiet days, I wonder what might have been.

But most days? I’m just grateful.

Grateful for the growth I didn’t see coming.

Grateful for a journey that keeps surprising me, even after eight years.

There’s a saying that life is a circle, and people always go back to a certain point in life. I think the first time I started writing was when I wrote a Kaskus post/thread and tried to make it a Hot Thread so that I could get Cendol from other Kaskusers and reach a certain level so that I could give Cendol to others as well. If I remember correctly, it went quite well, I made it to Hot Thread several times. Then I started writing on my own website, partly because I had started investing in the stock market and needed to write my analyses about the companies so that I could get feedback and learn from it.

So that brings me to this point. For the past three years, AI has become a daily tool for a lot of people. Most people use AI chats for everything, and because text is the most basic result of it, AI writing has become so good and is everywhere. That’s why I’ve lately started to read and write again, because in the future, what will separate the good from the great pieces of work is how people think.

I remember an article Why is Business Writing So Awful published in 2010, that’s even before the Age of AI.

What’s bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing. If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.

Who writes this stuff? Worse, who reads it and approves it? What does it say when tens of thousands of companies are saying the same things about themselves?

Reading and writing, for me personally, are arguably the most important skills that people should master before they can become good listeners and speakers (respectively). My personal experience in the Indonesian education system, especially in the later stages (high school and university), is too heavily weighted toward speaking skills. Students are encouraged to be active and not shy about speaking in front of an audience; people are celebrated if they can deliver an oration well. We do write essays and theses as well, but I think there was no real feedback loop. I remember my university lecturers encouraged us to read the book before class, and to make sure we read it, we needed to write a summary or sometimes turn a particular chapter into a presentation. Sometimes, to really make sure we had read it, they asked questions about the chapters or how actively we asked questions in class. We as students had certain beliefs: first, we were almost 100% sure that the lecturers wouldn’t read our summaries, and the longer it got, the more likely we were to get a higher grade/score. Nowadays, a basic, free, and open-source AI model can do the summarizing and create a presentation easily. It gets even worse with social media flooded with short-video formats and people just doom-scrolling through it.

Back in university, I took an Indonesian Economy subject. The lecturer asked us to present on several chapters of the book, and that’s when I was introduced to the late Faisal Basri. Recently, I picked up my interest in the subject again, and I frequently stumble upon his blog during my little research on certain topics. It’s amazing that his writing is still relevant to today’s situation.

I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

– Paul Graham (Y Combinator)

Writing is everything, we can sit here talk about ideas for hours, but if you’re not willing to put them in writing, you never learn what truly they are, how deep they are.

If anybody can explain anything complex in a napkin, it means they have studied enough that they know how to articulate it.

– Micky Malka (Ribbit Capital)

So here I am, starting everything from zero again because I lost access to my personal website. I think writing has taken me to places I never imagined, so hopefully this one will do better than the previous ones. But if not, I can still use it to improve myself, and maybe it can be useful for the next generation.

Several publishing sites that I still loves to read:

• Paul Graham Essays – just the GOAT
• Generalist – Founders Fund series – great written research on of one of the most significant VC fund