This will be the last issue of Writemas ‘23.

It’s been tough juggling this, Bloomstory and other projects, but it’s been a lot of fun producing these short emails.

As we enter the last week of the year, I’m trying to let the dust of 2023 settle so that I can regain perspective.

Forcing myself to write almost every day has aided in finding some stillness in the chaos.

Since October, I’ve slammed my foot on the accelerator and gone full speed in my personal and professional life.

I’ve watched Bloomstory go from seed to…

…still seed.

Unfortunately, we’ve had a string of setbacks — Getting ghosted by clients (again) is not fun. But hey, that’s business life. As they say, roll with the punches.

Vanessa and I are doing all we can to provide Bloomstory with the right amount of oxygen, temperature, light and water for it to germinate.

However, it’s important to slow down and do nothing.

Scheduling time to think allows your true inner voice to emerge and speak your genuine desires.

You begin to see the image of yourself and the things you want inside your head have possibly become outdated.

When I partially reflect over the last 2 years, I see so much of myself has changed.

In 2021, all I wanted was PhinPhin to do well. But I was so naive about who I was and who I thought I wanted to be — a hotshot rising entrepreneur taking the coffee industry by storm and disrupting it.

But running a coffee business and being an aspiring coffee mogul was never suited to my temperament — strategy, creativity, and thinking are.

I used to think life was like a big project with stages, jumps and levels. But now I see it’s an endless unfolding of continuous change. I had to start with PhinPhin to accidentally discover my love for behavioural science and eventually co-found Bloomstory.

However, the only way to adapt with change is to reflect more often and not be afraid to let go of past plans and ambitions.

Change is the natural order of life. We are all changing every second — even at the molecular level — so I feel no obligation to be who I was 5 minutes ago.

December is a wonderful time of the year. I love the sparkly lights, the cold, crisp chill and the festivities. But it does bring in the mood of reflection.

Lots has happened this year. I need to go away and digest it all, so the next time I write to you, it’ll be my 2023 reflections.

Have a wonderful Christmas! Eat lots and be merry with your friends and family.

Jason.

There’s a quote by Jorge Luis Borges I came across that I think about a lot.

It goes like this:

“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

I will always look presentable because Mom taught me that how we present ourselves to the world is how it will receive us.

I will always cook my food with love because Dad taught me the secret ingredient to excellent food is care.

My clothes are minimalistic because my childhood friend taught me that fashion doesn’t need to be loud and trendy but timeless and elegant.

My most listened-to playlist on Spotify is Dark Academia Classical because a few years ago, my friend sent me the playlist, and I found it soothing to write to.

Every time I go to wash spring onions, I make sure to clean them thoroughly because my ex’s mom once said that you can tell a lot about a person’s character in how they attend to the small things.

How beautiful is it that even people we’ve not spoken to for years, or even at all, we unknowingly carry with us the way we present ourselves, cook our food, the fashion choices we make, the songs we listen to or the way we prepare our veggies?

It shows how our individuality is not only created but curated.

Nothing of me is original. I am the mosaic of everyone I have ever known, loved and touched.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

I had two main reading goals for 2023:

a) Slow down my reading

b) Try to read books that are at least 100 years old.

Here’s the full list of my completed books this year, in case you were wondering…

1. Ed Thorpe, A Man for All Markets (2017)

2. Kahill Gibran, The Prophet (1923)

3. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

4. Raine Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

5. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886)

6. Ryan Holiday, Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of A Media Manipulator (2012) and Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire’s Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire (2018)

7. David Clark, The Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth (2017)

8. Alain De Botton, Essays in Love (1993) and The Course of Love (2016)

9. Lee Kuan Yew, The Singapore Story (1998)

10. Sam Zell, Am I Being Too Subtle? (2017)

11. Drayton Bird, You Did What? (2019)

12. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791) and Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732)

13. Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman (2005)

14. Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes (2016)

15. Jim Paul & Brendan Moynihan, What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars (1994)

16. Gabriel García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

17. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler (1866)

18. Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire (1998)

19. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)

20. Kenneth Roman, The King of Madison Avenue (2009)

21. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (2011)

22. David Ogilvy, The Unpublished David Ogilvy (1986) and Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963)

23. Claude Hopkins, My Life in Advertising (1927) and Scientific Advertising (1923)

24. Michel De Montaigne, The Essays (1580)

25. Charles T Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack (2005)

In 2021 and 2022, I read, on average, a book a week. I suspect that when you read a lot of non-fiction, you train your eyes to start scanning because many of the sentences or paragraphs are just fluff.

After reading over a hundred non-fiction books, most can be distilled down to a blog post or, perhaps if you’re creative enough, down to 1 sentence.

I love books. However, there are too many for me to read in this lifetime, so instead of trying to consume as many as I can, I’m trying to find the books that force me to slow down and savour every word.

Here are my top 3 favourite books this year:

1. The Death of Ivan Illych by Leo Tolstoy (1886)

Ivan Illych, a highly regarded official of the Court of Justice, succumbs to a fatal illness after a freak accident. On his deathbed, he realises that he has wasted his entire life chasing prestige and status.

His unsympathetic wife, Praskovya, is too busy spending Ivan’s dying moments extracting as much money out of his life insurance. Meanwhile, his daughter, Lisa, is more concerned about how the funeral will affect her wedding.

Ivan attended law school because it seemed like the “right path”. He married not because of love but to tick off a milestone in his twenties.

He went through the motions of life because that’s what society told him was the ‘right path’.

As he lies on his deathbed, Ivan ponders the value of love and forgiveness and realises all he wants is for his friends and family to cry over him.

I think about this book at least once a week. One of my biggest fears is that I will reach the end of my life and become like Ivan Illych. While it’s easy to say don’t chase prestige and status, the harsh truth is that we’re all playing the status game, whether we like it or not.

The Death of Ivan Illych serves as a good reminder to play life by your own rules.

“Can it be that I have not lived as one ought?" suddenly came into his head. "But how not so, when I've done everything as it should be done?”

2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Brave New World presents a futuristic London society engineered perfectly around capitalism and scientific efficiency.

Unlike George Orwell’s 1984 of mass surveillance and oppression, the ruling class in Brave New World gain mass compliance through psychological innovation, consumerism and drugs.

The writer, Aldous Huxley, painted a future in which everyone is ‘happy’, mostly thanks to a drug called ‘Soma’ and frequent, non-committal sex. People are produced in factories, grouped into social classes, and conditioned to love their existence — and spend as much money as they can.

On the surface, everything seems to run smoothly.

Part satire, part prophecy, this book highlights how if the world were perfect and everything was easy, nothing would have any meaning.

Like The Death of Ivan Illych, I think about Brave New World weekly.

Written in 1932, this book was way ahead of its time — I think it accurately reflects today’s society.

Expect a future essay on this.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”  

3. Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire’s Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire by Ryan Holiday (2018)

In 2007, a short post published on Vallewag, a subsidiary of Gawker Media, outed PayPal founder Peter Thiel as gay.

Peter Thiel, a semi-public figure, wanted to keep his private life away from the prying eyes of the media.

The post would plant the seeds of a meticulous and well-plotted conspiracy that would end nearly a decade later with a successful $140 million lawsuit filed against Gawker Media — resulting in its bankruptcy.

Only later would the world learn that Gawker’s demise was not incidental but was masterminded and funded by Peter Thiel.

Some will cheer Gawker’s destruction, and others will lament, but I love a good story on power, strategy and secret plotting.

No one will deny that Peter Thiel is some sort of brilliant, ruthlessly efficient and hyper-competent genius.

“It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it.”

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

I’ve met many people in my adult life who are so much more intelligent than I am.

But most of them have ended up in well-paid corporate roles.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with doing a 9 to 5. These corporate companies are needed, but whenever I walk away from conversations with these people, I always imagine what these people could achieve if they had the conviction to bet on their ideas.

I’m gearing up to hire at Bloomstory and mentioned to my girlfriend last night that I thought the world has a lot of talented people, but what it lacks is high agency talent.

She asked me what I meant by high agency, so I’m writing this in an attempt to define it.

A person who has the high agency trait essentially has a “Fuck it. I’m going to figure it out” attitude.

High-agency people question everything, take control of their destiny and bend reality to their will.

George Mack wrote a fantastic Twitter/X thread explaining the different examples of high-agency people and how to identify them.

My favourite example is this one:

Jeff Bezos has a framework for identifying high-agency friends/romantic partners.

Answer this question:

“If you were stuck in a third-world prison and had to call one person to try and bust you out of there – who would you call?”

The first person who comes to my mind is my mum.

While we have a contentious relationship, she is a formidable woman and the first person people call when shit is going down.

She was able to have life the way she wanted it. By Naval Ravikant’s metric, that is true intelligence.

“The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you wanted out of life.” — Naval Ravikant

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

I had a call with an old poker friend earlier.

We both have similar backgrounds; we are reasonably well educated, started poker around the same time, and never felt like we were enough.

Both of our poker careers were driven by insecurity.

We both had this desire to prove ourselves to the world, and we thought the best way to do that was to play one of the most competitive games in the world, where the results were measured by how much money you won. We equated our self-worth to our net worth.

That insecurity drove us to push ourselves to the top.

However, my friend admitted that when he was playing high-stakes, he was always on the verge of a shit-in-your-hand-and-clap breakdown.

I expressed similar sentiments.

The call got me thinking about why we’ve both had similar experiences.

And I think it’s this:

When the insecurity of never feeling enough drives your ambition, each failure feels like evidence that you’re still flawed.

It’s taken a few years of therapy, journalling and meditating to uncover all of this.

So every few months, I always check in with myself and ask, “Am I doing this thing because I want to, or is it driven by insecurity?”

My contrarian take is that it’s okay to be driven by insecurity.

Sometimes you have to use what you’ve got — fear, insecurity, anger — in order to drive towards the future version of you.

Conditions can’t always be perfect. It’s going to take me a long time to resolve my issues.

I started my coffee business because I wanted to prove someone wrong.

It’s obviously not ideal, but it showed me that I could do something that I previously thought wasn’t achievable.

Has starting Bloomstory come from insecurity or a place of genuine want?

I like to think it’s finally coming from a place of genuine want.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

Last week, I finished Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson.

Isaacson portrays Jobs as a complex character with many paradoxes and personal contradictions.

For example, he was adopted and struggled with ‘rejection’, yet rejected his own daughter, Lisa Jobs.

Rejection plays an important role in Jobs’ life, making him intensely loyal but at the same time distrustful of people.

And for the first half of the book, the initial years he spent at Apple before he was ousted, he sounded like a petulant brat.

While there are many of Jobs’ traits I don’t want to emulate, here are 3 key lessons I took away from the book as I build Bloomstory.

Innovation and greatness are at the intersection of two fields

It is extremely difficult to be great at one thing.

It requires a lot of luck and extreme performance.

However, an easier way to be great is to be good at two things and work on the intersection.

Jobs created Apple and Pixar to lay at the intersection of art and technology, and his focus on that sweet spot led to their meteoric rise.

Never compromise on hiring

Jobs insisted on hiring only A-players. He knew, as well as many other great founders, that A-players only want to play with other A-players.

He explains it best in this video.

Know what you want and stick to it

Jobs’ focus was crystal clear on how he wanted things to look and be.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” — Steve Jobs

He was very clear on wanting two things: build great products and enduring companies.

Everything else was secondary.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

Someone once called me intense.

At first, I thought, is there something wrong with me? But I snapped out of things and realised it’s what makes me me.

No one is making it out alive; death knocks at everyone’s door, so why not be obsessed about the things I enjoy?

I have a hard time reining in my interests: literature, biographies, philosophy, psychology, cognitive misjudgments, human nature, marketing, advertising, behavioural science, business, investing, climbing, triathlon and so on.

I’ve been thinking about who I’m most drawn to, and it seems to be those who exude maniacal obsession.

People who are intense.

I love the obsessive energy of Steve Jobs, Sam Zell, Anna Wintour, Estée Lauder, David Ogilvy, Charlie Munger, Leonardo Da Vinci, and so on.

Because every outlier is obsessive.

Those who are obsessed do more. They think different. They work harder, push limits and fall into deep flow states.

They don’t struggle with discipline. They struggle to stop.

Is it healthy? Definitely not.

But there’s something so intoxicating about obsession.

It’s scary but seductive.

Anyone who has felt obsession knows that when you and the object of your focus are all that exists, it becomes dangerously mesmerising, addictive, and thrilling.

You just feel joy in a way most people will never understand.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

My mother used to say to me, “Go work for a good company and build your career within it.”

Her advice came from a good place. She didn’t want me to struggle and have the safety of a salary.

As many of you know, I didn’t do that. However, when I look back and reflect on that advice, I see that she was right but also wrong.

Right in the sense that it’s important to build something and try to compound it. Wrong in the sense that it had to be your career.

My mother’s advice made contextual sense for her growing up. Job security was practically guaranteed.

However, in today’s fast-paced technological society, putting your eggs in one job basket is risky. Companies are changing, evolving and dying faster than ever.

In Berkshire Hathaway’s 2021 annual shareholder’s meeting, Warren Buffett shared a list of 20 stocks with the largest market capitalization as of March 2021, including Apple, Saudi Aramco, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Facebook.

He asked the audience which of those stocks they predicted would remain in the top 20 in the next 30 years.

Buffett then shared the top 20 companies by market cap in 1989; it included Japanese firms, Exxon, General Electric, Merck and IBM.

None of those remain in the top 20 today.

If I were to update my mother’s advice, it’d be to focus on building skills.

The skills you pick to build don’t have to be related.

In fact, I think the more disparate, the better. Because your unique skills and obsessions, when stacked and applied, make you become the only.

When Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College, he was now free to follow his curiosity. This led to him taking a calligraphy class. He learned about typography, the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible and appealing when displayed.

Although he didn’t know it then, but this experience would later inspire him to incorporate beautiful typography into the Macintosh.

Jobs wanted the Macintosh to be more than just a functional computer. He wanted it to be an intuitive and user-friendly device that anyone, not just computer experts, could use.

To achieve this goal, Jobs turned to his love of calligraphy and typography.

He insisted that the Macintosh display fonts with variable widths and proportional spacing, which was a departure from the standard monospaced fonts used in early computers. This allowed for a more natural and aesthetically pleasing reading experience, and it set the Macintosh apart from its competitors.

It’s the reason why we have different font choices on our screens today.

Jobs and Apple is an example of how extraordinary new concepts and ideas can emerge when skills from various backgrounds step into the intersection of differing fields. 

“To develop a complete mind: Study the art of science; study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” — Leonardo Da Vinci

Speak to you on Monday,

Jason.

If you had asked me 5 years ago, “Would you do sales?” I would’ve looked at you with disgust.

I’m introverted, typically quiet and observant.

But as Bloomstory’s co-founder, it’s one of my roles within the business.

In fact, I volunteered for it. Most of my responsibilities involve writing pitch decks and presenting them to clients.

It’s fun. There’s something thrilling about talking to a prospect, handling their objections and negotiating the price.

The sensation I get is similar to playing for a huge poker pot, where the adrenaline kicks in and surges through you.

So why sales? What has changed?

Well, asides from being an adrenaline junkie, it’s because I’ve always understood that how you frame something or the order you present information can have a significant impact on the outcome.

There’s a joke that explains what I mean:

A Dominican and a Jesuit were chain smokers.

Both were eager to be allowed to smoke while performing their devotions, but needed to gain permission from a higher authority.

‘I tried asking the Prior, but he was dead against it,’ said the Dominican.

‘What did you ask, precisely?’ enquired the Jesuit.

‘Well, I asked him whether it was acceptable to smoke while I was praying.’

‘Wrong question,’ replied the Jesuit. ‘I asked my Abbot whether I could pray while I was smoking. Permission granted.’

In behavioural science, this is known as the framing effect and is one of the best universal findings to have come out of the field.

It shows how important it is to think about how to present information. Done correctly, it can be potent.

I believe Night Nurse’s origin story started like this.

Someone had developed the medicinal syrup to relieve cold and flu symptoms but found it caused severe drowsiness.

A marketer took a look and said, “Why don’t you sell it as nighttime medicine instead?”

And thus, Night Nurse was born.

For daytime medicine, it’s useless because no one wants to fall asleep.

But marketed as a nighttime medicine, it suddenly sounds like a sensible idea.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

Dear Ladies,

I wish you could see inside a man’s head when he falls in love with a woman.

It’s so surreal and stunning that you’ve got to experience it to believe it.

First, it starts small.

He begins to notice things about her appearance.

Like the curve of her small nose, the shape of her eyes, the sweet softness of her lips, her curves, her soft Italian-English accent and her milk and honey scent.

He can’t explain why, but he just knows that looking and being with her makes him feel good.

He then notices more things. How her eyes scrunch together when she laughs or the little crease between her brows as she frowns.

Every time he sees this, he gets a little flutter in his heart.

He wakes up one day and realises he can’t stop thinking about her. He misses her so much that it hurts. He develops mental movies of her.

He plays over and over in his head how her face lit up when she saw him after a long day at work. Or the gratitude she exhibits when he brings her Kinder Bueno. Or when she pretends to be a cat and knocks all his stuff off the bed.

It’s like she turned from a black-and-white photo to a 3D IMAX movie with Dolby Atmos surround sound.

He starts thinking about what else he can do to keep her around, to make her happy, and to take care of her.

He realises that he likes being with her more than any other human being in this world.

To him, she is perfect.

A man falling in love with a woman isn’t rational or objective.

He does not see who you see in the mirror.

He sees someone that is beautiful, perfect and divine.

I forgot what it’s called, but there’s an Instagram account that stops old couples on the streets of London and asks them how they met and how long they’ve been together.

If you look carefully, there’s something in the husband’s eyes when he looks at his wife whilst re-telling their love story. His eyes light up. There’s a sparkle to it.

He doesn’t see the same woman you or I see.

He’s seeing something wonderful.

If I hadn’t lived this experience, I wouldn’t believe it either.

But it’s true.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

Last week, on a Bloomstory team day out to the Design Museum in London, I said to my friend Myles, “Given we’re in a creative field, it’s important we develop taste.”

I know it’s subjective, but I’ve often wondered about how universal ‘good’ taste is. However, instead of driving myself mad with these impossible existential answers, I’ve settled for this meaning:

Having good taste means you are decisive about what you like and don’t like.

Yes, I pride myself on having excellent taste in food and coffee, which definitely borders on snobbery.

What can I say? My dad is a chef, and I inherited a palette for what great food tastes like.

It’s a bit of a side tangent, but most fine-dining restaurants aren’t as amazing as people make them out to be. I suspect people praise it because it’s an easy way to signal ‘taste’.

I’ve been to my fair share and only ever had 2 memorable experiences. The first was a Japanese place in Sydney. The whole experience was amazing. The second was in Vegas; the bread was phenomenal.

Great food and coffee should 1) change your world so much that life doesn’t feel the same again and 2) make you want to cry tears of joy.

Developing good taste is important, particularly in creative fields.

I see having good taste as a signal of good judgment because it requires you to say ‘no’ a lot.

In Steve Jobs’ biography, he says this:

Focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things. You have to pick carefully. — Steve Jobs

We all know that Apple products have impeccable design. Even the inside, which we don’t see, is beautifully organised and welded together.

While open-mindedness is generally seen as a good thing, too much of it can be counterproductive.

Developing taste is learning to be discriminatory in one’s judgment, in other words, being picky.

This is why asking someone what their favourite book or music is can feel weirdly intimate because it says a lot about who they are as a person.

Developing good taste applies to dating, too. In fact, I believe dating is where good judgment and decision-making need to be at the highest calibre.

It’s taken me many tries to realise this, but the first date isn’t about impressing the other person. It’s about asking yourself whether you actually like them enough to see them again.

Because knowing how to decide well leads to good taste, which in turn shapes who you are.

Sir Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

I’m going to modify this slightly:

“We develop our taste; thereafter they develop us.”

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend said to me, “A lot of adulthood is unlearning the things you learned as a teenager, like trying to fit in so you don’t feel left out.”

I added to her point that I suspected adult fulfilment is rediscovering your childlike wonder again.

Let me explain.

Last year, I re-read one of my favourite books growing up: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

The whole re-read with adult eyes was such a soothing experience.

It reminded me we were all once children. I know that sounds so bloody obvious, but along the way of going to school, graduating, getting our first job, renting our first apartment, meeting our partners, saving for a mortgage, trying to get a promotion, looking for a new job, getting engaged and so on, we forget about the playfulness and innocence of being a child.

I remember at 16 years-old, I was always in such a rush to grow up. I couldn’t wait to move out, start a job and do adulting things.

Yet, I spent most of my twenties thinking about the future. As a result, I experienced neither the present nor the future.

It’s why I’ve always loved the Christmas season so much. It reminds me to be childlike again. Let’s not get it confused with being childish. Childish means silly or immature. Childlike means trusting or innocent.

Walking away from my poker life and starting over again meant being a beginner. A beginner writer. A beginner at business. A beginner climber. But through the terror of not knowing what the hell I was doing, it helped me fully rediscover the childlike wonder I had lost so long ago.

It meant letting go of all my beliefs, living in the moment and seeing what reality for what actually is, not what I wanted it to be.

It unshackled me from any preconceived ideas and limitations of what I thought was previously possible.

But it also importantly taught me so much about love and life again.

“Don’t dwell in the past and live in the present”, “Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have”, and “If anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart,” all don’t truly register until you realise how much of your childlike wonder has been lost growing up.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat down with my co-founder, Vanessa, to brainstorm some ideas for a potential new client.

I had spent the week trying to come up with different ideas but could only muster up one.

You see, I suck at switching context quickly. Over the last few months of building Bloomstory, I’ve been in sales and business development mode. So, it’s been hard for me to switch back to creative mode when I’ve been putting all my energy into strategising, creating leads, and selling.

I told Vanessa this and suspected the lack of creative ideas was because I had not scheduled any time to think and write. It’s been go go go in the last 6 weeks.

Vanessa said she felt similar and that she had not been able to find the time to create videos either.

It’s funny because I recently gave a lecture to undergraduate students at Birmingham City University on how I cultivate and nurture creativity at Bloomstory.

One way I do that is by encouraging the team to carve out time to create videos, music, poetry and so on outside of their work. It seems as though I struggle to take my own advice.

In the Bloomstory meeting yesterday, someone mentioned vlogmas. Around this time of the year, video creators publish a vlog, either every day or every other day, up until Christmas.

Given that I have a video presence of an awkward teenage boy trying to ask a girl out, I’m not going to film myself. I am, however, going to write to you guys every weekday until Christmas.

Call it writemas?

I can’t believe we’re in December already. This year has passed by too quickly, but a lot has happened. I’ll give you the full update at the end of the year, in that weird purgatory period between Christmas and New Year’s.

It feels like it was only last week I left London to start PhinPhin.

I remember the terror I felt leaving everything behind and not knowing if I could figure things out.

But here I am, over 2 years later, still terrified but fucking excited to wake up and work on Bloomstory every day.

Even with the setbacks, which we’ve had a string of this week, I have faith that the future version of me can figure it out.

Fingers crossed, I can share a big win with you guys by the end of the year.

Speak to you tomorrow,

Jason.

P.S. Writemas will be close to raw stream-of-consciousness writing with minimal editing. So, I apologise in advance for the typos, half-baked thoughts and messy nature of things.