I have been living in my own bubble for many years. I did many things alone. In fact, when I was in law school, I often asked my lecturers if I could complete assignments by myself instead of working in a group.
But this year I decided I could not continue like that. It is difficult to go far alone. It took me many years of doing things by myself to arrive at that conclusion. So, when I started meeting new people, a common question appeared:
"What do you do for a living?"
And I struggled to give a precise answer.
For most people, careers are relatively linear. Mine is not. I went to law school and while I was there, I came across trading in the financial markets. Later, when I thought I had accumulated enough experience, I started teaching people how to trade. After graduation (with honors, whether you wonder about it or not I want to tell you that), I got involved in an engine oil business that my sister had left behind. Then came the travel business. Then Covid arrived and I moved into crypto trading during the lockdown.
Today I want to become a paid speaker and trainer. Maybe one day I will add coaching or consulting too. As part of that journey, I create content on TikTok and Instagram. And to prove that I know something valuable, I write.
As part of my effort to become more visible, I decided to create my own website. I wanted people to know me before dealing with me. The problem was that I did not know what I was supposed to put in there.
At first, I thought I only needed a short biography. A few paragraphs about my background, what I do, and what I am currently working on. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it became. How do I explain myself in a few paragraphs when I struggle to explain what I do for a living?
So I turned to ChatGPT for help. I put everything into it. And when I say everything, I mean everything. It felt less like writing an About page and more like compiling a short autobiography. I wanted it to be as accurate as possible, so corrections after corrections were made. Every detail mattered because I wanted the story to reflect what actually happened, not a polished version of it.
What surprised me was not the writing, but the pattern recognition. Instead of focusing on the industries I had been involved in, the AI focused on how I made decisions. It did not care whether I was talking about trading, travel, crypto, or speaking. It cared about the thought process behind those decisions.
That was unexpected because I thought I was writing an About page. Instead, it felt like an investigation into my own life. The deeper we went, the more a pattern began to emerge. I almost cried because, for the first time, I could see the pattern. The individual decisions had always made sense to me, but I had never looked at them together. Suddenly, experiences that had always felt separate appeared connected. It felt like I was finally seeing myself from AI's point of view.
The pattern that emerged was surprisingly simple. Whenever something catches my attention, especially if I think it is interesting or challenging but still doable, I explore it. One thing leads to another and eventually an opportunity appears. When that happens, I test it.
Looking back, I think part of that habit came from law school. Every legal issue required me to gather information by reading textbooks and case law, understand different arguments from different points of view, and arrive at a conclusion. Somewhere along the way, that way of thinking extended beyond the law.
Instead of applying it to legal issues, I started applying it to everything else that caught my attention. Markets. Businesses. Technologies. Industries. I wanted to understand how they worked, why people behaved the way they did, and whether there was an opportunity hidden beneath the surface. The more curious I became, the deeper I went. When I eventually tried something and it did not work, I often found myself digging even deeper to understand why.
That cycle repeated itself more times than I can count. Whether I was studying the financial markets, exploring the travel industry, learning about crypto, experimenting with tokenized gold, or trying to understand the speaking industry, the process was remarkably similar. Something would capture my attention, I would spend time learning about it, I would test my understanding in the real world, and if the result was different from what I expected, I would return to the books, articles, videos and conversations in search of a better explanation.
I was not moving randomly from one industry to another. I was following my curiosity. Each experience started with a question, led to a period of learning, and eventually became an experiment. Some experiments worked. Many did not. Either way, they often left me with more questions than answers, which pushed me deeper into the subject.
One of the earliest examples of this pattern was trading. I discovered it during law school and initially thought I could make money from it. At the time, it looked like a skill worth learning. The idea that I could analyse the market, make decisions and potentially earn an income from it was appealing, so I decided to give it a try.
What started as an attempt to make money quickly became something else. I became fascinated by the financial markets and spent countless hours reading books, watching videos and trying to understand how they worked. More importantly, I wanted to understand why they moved the way they did. The deeper I went, the more questions I had. Every answer seemed to reveal another layer beneath it.
Later, I taught others how to trade. Trading was one of the first times I experienced how a single question could lead to years of learning. The results raised new questions, which pushed me back into learning again.
Until today, I still enjoy trading and spend time reading and watching content about the financial markets. Over the years, I realised that my interest was never limited to making money. What fascinated me was how markets influence human behaviour and how human behaviour, in turn, influences markets. Fear, greed, optimism, pessimism, confidence and uncertainty are constantly reflected in prices. The more I learned about the markets, the more I felt I was also learning about people, and the more I learned about people, the more I understood the markets.
The travel industry entered my life through a series of events that would have been difficult to predict in advance. At the time, I was involved in an engine oil business that had been left behind by my sister. The business was not doing particularly well, which forced me to look for other opportunities. Around that period, the car rental industry was attracting a great deal of attention. Curious to understand why, I decided to learn more about it and arranged to meet a car rental operator.
The day we were supposed to meet, he was hospitalized. Instead of cancelling, I visited him in the hospital and we had our conversation there. During our discussion, he mentioned that he was supposed to attend a familiarization trip in Phuket the next day but could no longer go because of his condition. Without thinking too much about it, I asked, "Why not let me go?" He agreed.
That decision led to a chain of events that I could never have planned. In Phuket, I met other Malaysian travel agents and began building new relationships. One opportunity led to another and eventually I received an invitation to join another familiarization trip in Indonesia. Before long, I found myself travelling to Indonesia frequently and getting involved in the travel industry.
What attracted me initially was the opportunity. What kept me interested was everything that came after. The experience allowed me to meet people from different backgrounds, learn about different cultures and observe how people in other countries lived, worked and made decisions.
The travel industry eventually came to a halt when the pandemic arrived and countries began closing their borders. Around the same period, I became increasingly involved in crypto trading. The market was highly volatile at the time, and I managed to make some money from it. More importantly, I spent a significant amount of time learning how the market worked and understanding the ecosystem surrounding it.
During the lockdowns, I reconnected with an old friend from university. We talked about many things, including crypto. At the time, I had already started trading. A week or two later, she pitched the idea of a tokenized gold startup. I thought it was doable, so I joined.
The experience exposed me to a different side of the industry. As the project developed, I formed my own views about how we should approach the market. Fundraising was slow and eventually I left when another source of income became available. Even today, I still believe the idea can work. In fact, part of me still wants to prove that my approach was correct.
The challenge was that I was not a programmer or a technical founder. My role was in business development. That did not stop me from exploring the space further. I started learning about token creation, which eventually led me into meme coins, NFTs and the broader crypto ecosystem.
What fascinated me was not the speculation itself, but the structure of the market. From my perspective, it was largely a value-extractive environment. People were constantly moving money around, but I became more interested in how the underlying technology could be used by real businesses. I believed tokens could be used to raise capital without giving up equity. Loyalty programs could be replaced with tradable digital assets. NFTs could function as membership cards that provide discounts, rewards and exclusive access.
The problem was proving that the idea could work. I needed data. I needed users. I needed evidence that could be shown to other businesses. To test the concept, I collaborated with an online community from Indonesia and conducted free webinars for their members. My hope was that I could eventually build a community of my own around the idea. The effort did not generate the volume I needed.
That realization eventually led to Scarred Ape, an apparel brand that I created as a pilot program. The goal was not simply to sell T-shirts. The goal was to test whether tokens and NFTs could be integrated into an ordinary business in a practical way.
My hypothesis was relatively straightforward. Whenever a customer purchased a T-shirt, they would receive an NFT that functioned as a digital membership card together with a cashback reward in the form of tokens. The NFT could provide access to future benefits, discounts and exclusive offers. The tokens could be used to unlock rewards, redeem exclusive merchandise and access special privileges based on the number of tokens held in a customer's wallet.
I believed this would create a stronger business ecosystem than traditional loyalty programs. Customers would have a reason to keep their tokens instead of immediately spending them. As more people joined the ecosystem, demand for the token could increase, which would benefit early supporters who received tokens through cashback rewards or acquired them directly from the market. If the model worked, businesses could potentially create additional revenue streams while building stronger relationships with their customers.
The next challenge was attracting attention. A business ecosystem cannot exist without people. I needed customers, community members and enough activity to generate meaningful data.
Since I had always enjoyed travelling and strongly believed in content marketing, I decided to combine both interests. Together with a close friend, I started working on a travelog project. The idea was to document our travels while wearing Scarred Ape apparel and use the content to build awareness around the brand, attract a community and eventually generate the data needed to test the hypothesis.
Unfortunately, the project never reached completion. My friend was responsible for filming and editing the content, but he passed away before the work was finished. The travelog was never published. Without the content, the audience never materialized. Without the audience, I never obtained the data needed to properly evaluate the experiment.
As a result, the hypothesis remains unproven. I still believe tokens and NFTs can be integrated into ordinary businesses in a practical way, but I never gathered enough evidence to prove it. The experiment stalled before it reached the stage where meaningful conclusions could be drawn.
Even today, I continue wearing Scarred Ape T-shirts in many of my TikTok and Instagram content. I do so because I still want the idea to work. Scarred Ape was never just an apparel brand. It was a proof of concept. It was an attempt to demonstrate how tokens and NFTs could be integrated into an ordinary business. The experiment may have stalled, but I have never abandoned the underlying hypothesis. If the right opportunity appears in the future, I would gladly restart it.
I can understand why I struggled whenever people asked what I did for a living. The question assumes that a career can be summarized with a title. Lawyer. Engineer. Teacher. Accountant. My difficulty was never that I lacked an answer. The difficulty was that every answer felt incomplete.
If someone describes me as a trader, they would be correct. If they describe me as a business owner, they would also be correct. The same applies to travel, crypto, content creation and the projects that followed. Each description captures a chapter of the story, but none of them explains the process that produced those chapters in the first place.
The more I reflected on my experiences, the more I realized that the industries were not the common denominator. The process was. I can understand why other people were confused. Law school led to trading. Trading led to teaching. An engine oil business led to travel. Travel led to crypto. Crypto led to startups, NFTs and Scarred Ape. Viewed individually, each decision made sense to me at the time because it was based on the information, opportunities and interests that existed in that particular moment. What was less obvious was how those decisions were connected to one another.
The industries changed. The projects changed. The people changed. The questions changed. What remained constant was my curiosity. Whether I was studying financial markets, exploring a new business opportunity, learning about another culture or testing an idea that might fail, the process was remarkably similar. The outcome was often less important than what I learned along the way.
Perhaps that is the closest thing I have to a career. The common thread was never trading, travel, crypto or any particular industry. The common thread was a desire to understand how things work. Looking back, what appears to be a collection of unrelated experiences is really a series of experiments driven by the same instinct.
Perhaps this essay did not help me discover that. It simply forced me to put it into words.