the day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit - 26' intentions
part three of my 2025 retrospective, or rather, intention-setting for 2026; on audacity, focus, abundance, and adopting a gardener's mindset
This is the part three of my 2025 retrospective where I set my intentions for 2026. If you’d like to read about my tumultuous yet fruitful 2025, it’s available here as part one (foreword and half one) and part two (half two and conclusion).
Prelude - the notes app
I’ve got a potentially unusual habit on my iPhone Notes app which I’m fairly certain isn’t that uncommon.
Whenever I need to note something, I paste it at the bottom of whatever note I had previously open. Due to this, I usually have a single note that is increasingly and exceedingly long, spanning entirely unrelated topics at completely different points in time which are honestly pretty bad at helping me remember things but does work in a pinch at times.
These notes are usually a sentence or so long, which can include but is not limited to:
Diagrams drawn by my pointer finger where I’m trying to explain something to someone via a matrix or chart
Calculations to figure out how much people owe me for badminton and dinner and a record of who hasn’t paid me back @Mike
Links that I vaguely need to reminder like cars that I intend to inspect, information on switching between Windows and Mac, or my pant size for a specific model of trouser.
Dreams that I have written right after I wake up but without a timestamp and pretty much 35% spelling accuracy.
Whatever fun thoughts and ideas that cross my mind like “you should make a quiz called “what kind of chicken dish are you?” or “the mcflurry is 5.2 dollars and makes me want to die”
The most prominent thing in my Notes app though, is quotes.
I collect a lot of quotes on this app.
Sometimes word-for-word, more often than not paraphrased, and admittingly without too much attribution; from podcasts I’ve listened to, articles and posts I’ve read, from what people have said to me, from the depths of my subconscious, buoying up like an inflatable flamingo in a pool.
What I do with my Notes app is akin to the commonplace book, which is usually a physical compendium of quotes, thoughts, ideas, etc. collected in passing that have really inspired the collector, one way or another.
I’ve always wanted to run a commonplace book but don’t like the practicability of carrying a notebook in my pocket at all times, the hassle of whipping it out like a dong while standing, and that awful sense of pretentiousness and self-importance that comes with doing so.
What also doesn’t help is that I recently lost the notebook I previously used as a commonplace book due to a mishap with security at Guangzhou Airport. Fucking hell.
As I log off 2025 and sign into 2026, I revisited this commonplace book to lay groundwork on what kind of energy I’d like to bring into the lord’s year of 2026. This post that you’re reading covers exactly that:
Vol 1. Audacity
People who set New Year’s Resolutions tend to fall under two camps.
Group A is ambitious and far-reaching, setting intense goals for personal and professional productivity whether it’s doubling down on their side hustle, going to gym five days a week, formalising a date night schedule, all while waking up at ungodly times yet getting eight hours of sleep. Lean, mean, optimised machines.
Group B, usually after fatiguing out of being Group A, opt for a life of slowness and self-forgiveness; setting gentle initiatives to remember birthdays, express gratitude more freely, be more consistent with their journal, detox off social media… all about finding magic in the mundane, holding firm to humanity and heart in an accelerated world.
I could be in a bit of delusion, perhaps even selfishness, when I ask this:
“Why not both?”
The universe isn’t on a budget the same way you and I are.
Why not have the audacity to ask for more?
This includes heading to a brunch place on my own and ordering both the sweet and savoury dish because they look too good to miss. This is doing a freelance job and asking for ostensibly preposterous rates just to see if it sticks. This is having both salmon and steak on my meal prep menu because I’m really craving them. This is learning game development in my spare time and turning dreams into a playable format. This is booking a trip to Japan and thinking… fuck it, let’s link in Thailand and China and Cambodia and pencil in plans for an incredible Mediterranean summer.
Whether it’s in career or personal or relationships or faith — I’ve never achieved anything of lasting satisfaction by acting small and nervous and meek.
Excellence is created by having the audacity to ask these daring questions.
Where can I find it?
How can I make it?
In 2025, I promised to myself that Journaling in Public would solely be a creative medium. I would spend zero time on marketing, have little care for views and subscriber count, and refuse to have any expectations on money earned1. I had the belief that the moment there was annual recurring revenue or the desire to grow, I would start thinking in external benchmarks instead of quality/quantity of craft, and all joy associated with this project will run dry.
In 2026, you can expect to see more movement here in addition to writing, because I’ll be seeking ways to actually grow this platform — and I won’t be nonchalant in doing so! Journaling in Public, if it continues to be called that, can be both a digital journal of ambitions/vulnerabilities AND a small media company dedicated to sharing stories about our 20s.
The lion, the witch, and the audacity of this bitch — do yourself a favour and dream BIGGER.
why can't it be both?
Journaling in Public is a newsletter sharing stories on career, relationships, mindset, and all the joys and mishaps of navigating our 20s. If that appeals to you, feel free to subscribe to the void that is my mailing list:
Vol 2. Focus
A sage saying as old as time that I so incessantly tell myself but live in a constant state of forgetting, so I’m really formalising it this time, setting it with iron and steel and stone:
“You can do everything you want but not at the same time.”
I am not a slab of butter! I am not meant to be spread so thinly across career commitments and personal projects and relationship requirements and administration authorisation such that I cannot give any of them an honest shot, ending up with a bucket full of mistakes and a dirty mop to clean it all up.
Balance is awesome but also atrociously overrated at times.
There will be days where I spend the entire weekend doing life admin like updating the budget and taking the car to the mechanic and preparing far too many boxes of food for next week or wiping rust off the taps; and in turn, let my writing habit fall to the wayside. There will be days where I practically live in the CBD as we approach our quarterly business review, with data to be squelched and decks to be finalised and narratives aligned across all levels; and in turn, let my muscles atrophy and for dishes to cemetery in the sink. There will be days where I invest incessantly into my writing, either to strike these invisibles deadlines I had built for myself or take advantage of a fleeting comet of inspiration; and in turn, let my inbox fester to a menacing amount, letting my clients wait for the luxury of my attention.
Sure, there is opportunity cost to choosing A over B today, but doing so does not condemn B into the grave forever. There is always next month, and the month after that, and dare I say even next year — and if this means giving A the focus that it needs, then so be it.
In 2025, there was not only a ton of scatteredness on the macro level (i.e. Should I write or should I gym? Should I spend time with my partner or my friend?) but equally as much multitasking on the micro level (i.e. Should I write about relationships or wealth? Should I do chest or legs?)
This results in a quiet yet persistent choice fatigue that lowered the quality of everything I did — especially on early mornings and late nights.
In 2026, this will manifest in the form of dedicated and sequential projects that, very strictly, do NOT run parallel with one another. These projects can span things I actively do (see: writing, group sports), things I have done in the past but let fall on the backburner (see: personal sports, reading), and should I have the bandwidth, a handful of entirely new things (see: game design, musical instruments).
We might not be able to do everything we want on a given day, but we can probably do so in a given week, and most certainly in a given year.
Vol 3. Abundance
Historically, I have always seen time as the enemy.
It is a thief that slips so elusively through your fingers.
It is a dagger that harvests attention, ails you with growing pains, and throttles your neck with guilt and regret.
I have complained endlessly that there never seems to be enough time — that the time in the morning does not truly belong to me, that the tug of responsibility eats the leisure I have at night, that even the huffs of downtime between tasks (e.g. sitting in commute, after ordering food, waiting for programs to load) are so thoroughly monopolised by this primordial force.
> I don’t want to see time that way anymore.
Time is just a wee lad who follows instructions, putting one second in front of the other, marching at a pace that God had chosen for it no matter who warped my vision of it is.
Time has never really taken anything from me — if anything, I’m the one who has been ‘killing time’, squandering it on things that I don’t even enjoy, that do not embody intentionality.
It is the most important non-renewable currency in the world that we have no idea how much we have of.
It turns small towns into sprawling cityscapes.
It turns risky betsinto mature investments.
It turns beginner’s luck into practiced excellence.
It turns green shrubs into gemstone-like fruits.
It turns budding relationships into lifelong commitments.
It turns gnashing wounds to gentle healing.
It turns good times today into future nostalgia that pay memory-dividends for as long as you live.
> I want us to be friends.
I used to be mildly terrified when resumes and podcasts and coursebooks throw out sentences like ‘seven years of experience’ or ‘spent the last three years building my brand’ or ‘it will take six months before you can hit a proper serve’.
These concepts felt so far away, like home ownership2 or retirement or a work sabbatical that I’ve never even intended on taking.
But let’s think about it this way:
If you started learning piano at age 30, by age 40 you would have 10 years of experience playing piano. There is an abundance of time at your fingertips.
“Time will pass anyway.”
If I just zoomed out even a teeny bit, a lot of younger people or even older people would regard current twenty-five-year-old me with similarly terrific awe.
I’ve spent four years at a top Australian university doing a competitive degree. I have three years of experience in the insurance industry. I have driven a car for five years. I have lived away from home for seven years now and developed a ton of habits, lessons, tips and tricks that I can impart on people who are just starting. I have been writing online for one year, and lowkey if you include my catastrophically cringe forays on Wattpad and Fanfiction.net, you could say I’ve been writing for a decade.
This is the fifth annual retrospective I’ve written, isn’t that wild?
And at least half a dozen people have asked me for career advice, something I scarcely consider myself in the position to give, and in some cases had pushed people into pursuing actuarial studies at the University of New South Wales3.
Yes, life is short — You should act with no regrets, you should live in the moment, you should leave nothing unsaid, you should spend all the time you can with your parents, all the well-known and abundantly-spoken jazz.
However, I’d wager to say that life is also LONG.
Long in that; any investment today will contribute to a bright and wonderful future, holidays and travel today will fill your future with merry memories, systems and habits built today will have incremental boons for your future; and that most importantly, you’ve got an abundance of time to be a rookie — and time will pass anyway.
Vol 4. Gardener’s Mindset
Given all of the above, I am entering 2026 with a gardener’s mindset — something I totally did not just make up on the fly, buzzed out of my mind, about seven hours into my South Korea → China → Indonesia flight.
A gardener’s mindset in that the day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit. There is an understanding that it takes incredible patience, significant time, and a mix of both conscious and subconscious attention to allow your plants to grow the way they’re meant to. We cultivate the right environment for nurture; the right temperature for growth, the right nutrients for development — we are well-researched and full of kindness, curating our garden in way that is intentional, fruitful, and essentially ours.
A gardener’s mindset in that we’re unafraid to get our hands dirty. We will give new things an honest shot. We will extend a green thumb to help others. We will monitor and review and overhaul and reiterate. Perhaps most importantly, when the alarm bell rings, we enter the greenhouse with sickle in hand and cut corruption at its root. One of the most difficult parts of cultivating our garden is unwinding our limiting beliefs, knowing what to invest in, and when to pivot out of strategies, tools, and sometimes: people.
A gardener’s mindset in that there is more to a garden than its beauty and aesthetics — it is also the fostering of a like-minded, uplifting community who appreciates nature as much as we do. We build and share a wonderful space, with hyacinths and tulips and lilies on the verge of bloom, inviting friends and family to a tea party on a porch, with cheese and ham and succulent grapes picked straight from the vine; where we may talk tireless of our ambitions, openly about our vulnerabilities, of what has occupied the streets and lanes and boulevards of our world4.
A gardener’s mindset is not growth for the sake of growth.
It is intentional growth; such that the plants and flowers and accessories and ugly little gnomes that sit in our space are only of which we have chosen.
It is sustainable growth; basked in abundant sunlight and amicable temperatures, cultivating a loving ecosystem that can sit independent of us.
It is community-led growth; where between the squelching boots and ammonia-tinted equipment, it is an adobe of sharing and gratitude and heart, aimed to increase the level of love in the world.
So with that, I say, welcome everyone to my garden :)
postlude - the moodboard
I’ve decided to take a page out of tumblr me, who doesn’t actually exist but would have existed in other timelines, and put together a moodboard for the year ahead. I opened up a Pinterest account, typed stuff that vaguely made sense to me, and tossed it onto a Canva template.
There is vague context to everything on this moodboard but I’ll keep it to myself for the time-being. Some things that should sit between myself and God.
This moodboard is not end-all-be-all of course, and is more of just a thought exercise on what kind of images call my name at this point in time as things I’d like to fold into the lord’s year of 2026.
And finally, I saw this cute concept somewhere called ‘more of this / less of that’ which is really the newest rendition of ‘in and out’ list that populated Substack same time last year. So, to finalise this already overwhelmingly long retrospective, here is mine:
Hi there, thanks so much for reading. I’ve never been one for paywalling my writing — cause then it would no longer be ‘in public’! If you’d like to support me and for whatever reason show it via monetary means — a link to buy me a coffee is available below:
Note: It’s $0.
Home ownership is not THAT far away, mind you, and that’s lowkey an equally petrifying thought.
You know who you are guys I am sorry to have scammed you lmao but at least you’ve got a bright future ahead I think (L.A and M.C)
I’d like to very specifically highlight that I use our here, referring to the world of individuals and not world in the macroeconomic sense. When I hang out with someone, I am interested in hearing about YOU.
I loved these reflections! especially what you said about focus (‘I am not a slab of butter! I am not meant to be spread so thinly across career commitments and personal projects and relationship requirements’…such a great metaphor and visual image)
and abundance of time; I’ve also been thinking lately that, from the perspective of years and decades, there’s more than enough time to pursue creative interests and deepen one’s craft
ooo I like how the typewriter font conveyed what you meant more wholly. also, cool list of ‘more of this / less of that’! happy new year 🥳