2025 Recap; (Thai version)
This year, I tried breaking down my life review into categories. It should make it easier to write and easier to read (hopefully).
#Health
- Health goal completed: I managed to exercise 3 times/week consistently for the entire year. I plan to keep this up in 2026. It feels really effective.
- The key to success: Finding a gym near my home + buying dumbbells for the house. If I have energy, I walk to the gym. If I’m tired, I work out at home. Most importantly, I schedule this time into my Calendar every week so I don’t have to rely on “motivation.”
- Sydney Marathon: I joined the Mini marathon (5k) this year (mostly walking). It taught me my limit: my right leg gets fatigued first. This means my leg training wasn’t enough. Moving forward, I’ll focus more on single-leg exercises.
- Worth mentioning – Gentler Streak: The MVP app that kept me encouraged this year is Gentler Streak. Poom (@Poom) recommended it to me late last year. It provides monthly and yearly summaries. Seeing the progress that I’ve maintained—hitting that 3x/week streak—gave me the encouragement to keep going.
#Wealth
- Income is the key: After plenty of trial and error to see what kind of wealth-building suits me, I’ve concluded that I’m better at working to earn active income and then investing it for growth. I’m not skilled at “getting rich quick” through trading.
- Passive investment: I realized I prefer putting money into global diversification funds consistently. No need to time the market to buy or sell. The app says my portfolio grew by 15% this year. It’s not flashy, but after seeing red figures in the past, not being in the negative + (likely) beating inflation is good enough for me.
- Automatic investment: The key to growing my investment portfolio is setting up auto-deductions every month. No overthinking, no watching the market. I’d rather use that time to earn more money.
- Emergency Fund: This year really showed me the power of having an Emergency Fund (honestly, I would have preferred not to see its power lol).
- We faced a situation where our household income suddenly dropped by half, with no certainty of when it would return. But opening my Emergency Fund account and seeing enough cash to survive for another XX months reduced my anxiety massively.
#Career
- Obstacle is the way: While work used to be pretty chill, this year my full-time job was full of challenges.
- I moved to a new team, had to relearn everything (still learning now), and the workflow is quite different. The upside is that I’ve learned and grown a lot.
- DataTH: This year I got to touch a lot of AI from a Developer’s perspective. I did many Lives (available to watch for free on the “Red App” / YouTube) and launched the Gen AI Engineer course with very talented instructors, which helped me learn and improve alongside them.
- However, the impact of AI on content creation is real. People’s search and consumption behaviors have changed, so we must adapt. In 2026, you’ll see new things (like the book I’ve been quietly writing for a while).
- I want to thank the teaching team, content team, backend team, and everyone who stopped by to read articles or study with us. You make this ecosystem a great place to live, share knowledge, and allow us to donate revenue to help various hospitals.
#PersonalGrowth
- Time-blocking: I consumed a lot of Personal Growth / Productivity content this year (videos/reading) and discovered that I really love Time-blocking.
- Before this, I just used a To-do list, but I’d often write down too much and have to keep pushing tasks to the next day, forgetting that a day only has 24 hours.
- I needed a way to balance life: Sleep, Exercise, Full-time work, and other passion projects (without overdoing it). Time-blocking was the answer.
- Note & Calendar: From listening to successful people + reading productivity books, a Productivity system really only needs 3 things to record + schedule + to do list:
- NoteCalendarTodo list
- I think I’ve found my complete stack (though there might be better tools in the future). Right now, I use: Craft + Google Calendar + Akiflow.
#Relationship
- Partner: She is very good, very talented, and very resilient. Love her very much. Let’s do our best next year.
- Family: A good year. I got to see the whole family, both my side and my wife’s side. We visited Thailand twice (start of the year and end of the year).
- Friends: Met up with friends in both Thailand and Australia. Some friends I rarely see in Thailand, I actually got to meet in Aus, including close friends from high school.
- Also, the Tech Thai BBQ happened several times this year were very fun. Thanks to everyone who came to hang out and chat.
#Lifestyle
- Happiness = Stability: A realization this year from reading Naval Ravikant book is that “Happiness is a default state” (I wrote a post about this earlier this year with the purple tree picture – Jacaranda – check it out if interested).
- It means we don’t need to chase dopamine spikes. If we create an environment that fosters happiness automatically, that’s enough.
- I interpret “creating an environment” as making life stable. e.g.
- Having Emergency funds.
- Having a secure place to live without fear of eviction.
- Etc.
- I don’t think I have stability in every aspect yet, so I need to keep building better stability in life.
- Personal Value: Another realization from the book Elevate is understanding your own Values. This helps clarify decision-making.
- If a choice aligns with your Values, choose it. Of course, every choice has Trade-offs (e.g., if you spend all your time making money, the trade-off is having no time to live).
- We have to choose which Trade-offs we can accept and which we cannot.
This turned into a bit of a rant/long post. If you read until the end, thank you so much!
Congrats for reaching the end of 2025. Happy New Year 2026 everyone!
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