Change
In what ways are you a different person from last year? In what ways are you the same?
This is a distillation from my 2024 review. I love writing reflective pieces like this because they act as a forcing function—an opportunity to step outside myself (however imperfectly) and critically examine who I was, who I am now, and the trajectory in between.
I began my 2024 reflections by noting that the transition from 20 to 21 is a period of significant change. But while the past year has certainly reshaped aspects of my mindset, priorities, and approach to ambition, I’ve also found that some core parts of myself—beliefs, habits, and ways of seeing the world—have remained stubbornly intact. The exercise of writing this is, in itself, proof of one of those constants: the belief that writing is a means of untangling thoughts into clarity.
This piece is an attempt to map out that evolution—what has changed, what hasn’t, and what that says about the person I’m becoming.
Same same
Amidst all the shifts of the past year, certain constants have remained—not just as passive habits but as anchors for grounding while everything else was in flux. In some ways, it's easier to quantify the things that stayed the same. These embedded routines and habits serve as proof of the underlying beliefs that sustain them.
I'd like to think I was as reflective as before -- writing as much, if not more. The underlying belief that writing is a form of untangling thoughts to a state of clarity hasn't changed. It allows me to audit lived experiences, examine relationships, and give shape to ideas that have been cooking in my mind. And a secondary benefit is that when I push these thoughts online, it's like a signal to other like-minded folks over the internet. This process of sitting down and reflecting after major milestones, whether chronological or personal, makes answering this question much easier!
Exercise, specifically long-distance running, has been an integral part of my life since I joined cross-country in high school. Even though I'm no longer running competitively, I love it when my body is in motion. Beyond the physiological benefits, running provides mental clarity and serves as a release valve for any pent-up emotions -- something that I've leaned on a little more in the past year. There's no need to think critically when I'm on an easy, open-ended run (unless I'm trying to keep my heart rate down to fit a particular zone haha). That said, the way I’ve approached running this year has differed slightly from previous years—a shift I’ll expand on later.
My faith has also been a cornerstone of my life: framing how to interpret suffering, differentiating between fleeting happiness and lasting joy, and a framework of understanding unchanging, objective morality in a Person set against an increasingly relativist, post-truth world. This conviction hasn't changed much, but exposure to external circumstances have prompted me to think more critically about my faith. Engaging with friends who've grown cynical of the faith has made me more aware of how easily it can be dismissed as a crutch or a purely intellectual framework—pushing me toward deeper introspection, not just in defending my beliefs, but in grounding them in a personal relationship.
But different
In my opinion, personal change can be categorised under two broad sections: external circumstances (loading) vs self-imposed internal goals (commitment).
As a whole, the amount of change that I'd went through in the past year wasn't as much as drastic as in previous years. For context, I was in the military for the previous year and ten months. 2023 was one that involved learning the ropes in training school (Basic Military Training and [Navy] Officer Cadet School), while 2024 was a year in which I spent serving the remainder of my time in a unit (an active unit, Changi Defence Squadron in the Republic of Singapore Navy). Simply by being exposed to new stimuli, the propensity for change was higher due to the (over)loading subjected to a trainee.
That being said, there are two key areas of growth stood out to me in 2024: a) knowing limits and b) synthesising a healthy response to status plays.
Knowing limits
In my 2024 reflection, I initially split this into high loading (external) and overcommitment (internal). In hindsight, these two are deeply intertwined, and can be distilled into a single, broader lesson: knowing my physical and mental limits.
Unlike the rigid training schedules in 2023, freedom in holding some power in a rank in 2024 meant free time-- at least whenever I got my work done. I used to look forward to weekends during BMT or OCS as brief windows for quick hacking, but that drive to optimise every available moment has since faded. The tighter restrictions of 2023 had provided rigorously quantified goals and clear boundaries on what was realistically achievable. With those constraints gone, the responsibility of structuring my time fell entirely on me.
The flexibility of my desk job (going home everyday is a privilege) led me to the fatal mistake of overloading myself. I stacked my schedule with too many goals: get a driving license, train hard for my running targets, get good at ML, settle college applications, and exploring sports science in depth. Like a division spread too thin across multiple fronts, progress felt painfully slow.
For instance, run workouts had to be early in the morning for me to get to work on time; the increase in training load left me feeling exhausted on most days. Starting my stint as a remote intern at Teraflop was exciting but I could only give it the dregs of my energy after work and training.
Since I managed my unit’s work plan and overall cadence, I at least had the foresight to predict high-workload periods—weeks where I’d have to stay in and focus on resource management and preparation. But even with that foresight, I miscalculated. After returning from a break in Europe, I was thrown straight into the deep end; I remember Grabbing (the local Uber) directly from a 12-hour flight to camp for a meeting. From September to November, my workload skyrocketed, and I assumed I could simply shift my energy from personal commitments (driving, running, etc.) to professional responsibilities. It seemed straightforward—ruthless execution meant ticking off tasks efficiently and moving on.
But even with that mindset, I failed to account for my actual energy and time expenditure. The high-tempo pace was thrilling, but how long could I sustain it? As my bandwidth stretched thinner and thinner from managing multiple stakeholders, I eventually hit a wall.
At some point, I realized I was running into the same fundamental problem as an overloaded CPU—too many tasks running at once, leaving no capacity for anything else. This applied not just to my ability to juggle responsibilities but to my emotions as well. After long days balancing work and high-mileage training, I became irritable and short-tempered—a terrible person to be around.
The value of analogies is that they don’t just help describe a problem; they can also hint at solutions. If a computer runs out of memory, an effective countermeasure is twofold:
- An early warning system—an alert when a certain memory threshold is crossed, preventing overload before it happens.
- Built-in buffer space—ensuring non-negotiables (like catching up with family) always have room, alongside additional margin for unexpected circumstances.
This is something I’ve begun to apply—not just in time management, but in knowing when to slow down before I overextend myself beyond repair. Hence, recognising these patterns, I've started to actively build in time buffers. Now, I see personal capacity as something to manage proactively, rather than reactively adjusting when things spiral out of control.
A healthy, personal response to status plays
I spent some time synthesising my thoughts on status in response to the wave of 2024 wrapped threads. But that wasn’t a personal reflection—just a compilation of broader observations.
An inevitable consequence of knowing my limits (from the previous section) was becoming acutely aware of how much more I could have done with my time. I know friends who have built and launched apps, won OpenAI hackathons during NS—they had focus.
Some of my good friends tell me I’m being too hard on myself—after all, what are people our age supposed to be doing anyway? But there’s a constant tension between freedom, accountability, and ambition that I haven’t quite resolved yet. I also can’t tell if my ambition itself has changed—or if it has been shaped by my current environment.
In 2023, my reaction to these feelings was more visceral: being stuck on an island off mainland Singapore after a month in NYC, watching friends move forward, secure funding, and build things gave me an extreme sense of FOMO. In 2024, I’ve grown somewhat jaded by the constant stream of "thrilled to announce...", "we're launching...", "new tool dropped by...". The sharp sting of FOMO has softened, but the underlying impulse to compare still lingers.
Young, ambitious, precocious people will always found things, start things, and claim their share of the limelight. But it pays to step back and think more deeply about the source of these emotions. A friend once told me that most feelings are really a guise for something deeper—something I’m still trying to put my finger on.
Moving forward, I’d like to think I’m still a work in progress in this aspect. But two concrete shifts in my mindset stand out:
- It’s much easier to gain traction on things that genuinely interest me rather than what others deem high-value or impressive.
- All comparisons should be made internally, not externally. Even when looking inward, context and time frame matter—I can’t hold myself to an absurdly high standard without acknowledging the circumstances.
I don’t think the latter is entirely new, but it’s something I’m actively working on.
Steady la
Looking back, I don't think I've changed in any radical way -- but I'm more aware of how I operate, where my limits lie, and what truly matters. Writing, running and faith remain the cornerstones, but my relationship with them continues to evolve. I've learnt that freedom without structure can lead to overcommitment, that external benchmarks are more noise than signal, and that personal growth isn't always about doing more.
I still don't have everything figured out, and I don't expect to. I'm always looking for ways to refine the systems that sustain me at SPARC 😎.