An Honest Accounting: What I Failed at This Year, and the Bets I'm Still Making

Note: this piece was refined with AI to cut out redundancies and save you time as a reader. If you’d like to read the raw text as I wrote it, click here. I think the raw version has way more soul, but it is an 11 minute read.

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It’s Christmas today. For as long as I can remember—at least for the last ten years—these weeks in December have been an odd mix of merry and somber for me. The holidays stack in a strange way. December begins, and I begin my accounting of things coming up and things gone. On the 25th is Christmas, a holiday my family and I didn’t quite celebrate growing up but have gradually begun to enjoy. Then, on December 31st, comes New Year’s Eve, followed immediately by my birthday on January 1st.

Growing up, I joked that I was particularly lucky—double the celebrations, double the gifts. Ironically, with time, this lineup has caused more headache than joy. Splitting myself across family, friends, and significant others has become its own logistical puzzle. Sometimes my family wants New Year’s and my birthday. Sometimes it’s friends. Sometimes it’s someone else entirely.

That dynamic is mildly annoying, sure, but it’s insignificant. That’s not what’s on my mind today, and it’s not what makes this liminal space between the 25th and the 1st feel so reflective.

What’s on my mind is an accounting.

On Failure and Seeing Reality Clearly

It’s time to be honest with myself. I have not achieved many of the things I wanted to have achieved by this age. You can say I had unrealistic goals. You can play perspective games ad nauseam to pacify and justify lack of progress. Or you can simply admit you’ve failed.

I prefer the latter.

I have a deep disdain for people who refuse to see reality for what it is. Vision is a skill—a necessary one—but vision without an understanding of present failures is just aspiration untethered from truth. The line between being visionary and being lost in abstraction is thin, and it comes down to whether you can simultaneously inhabit the future and engage honestly with the present.

You have to understand the here to build the there.
You have to understand the now before you earn the right to talk about what’s next.

So, with that framing, here is the accounting.

Money

I used to tell myself I wouldn’t get married until I made my first million dollars or hit age 30. The reality is simple: I’m nowhere close to $1M, and I’m much closer to 30 than I’d like.

In material terms, I am effectively broke. I have roughly $10,000 invested and around $150,000 in medical school debt—debt that will likely grow to ~$350,000 by graduation. I have no real assets. I manage a modest brokerage portfolio for my family because they don’t understand investing themselves, a dynamic many immigrant families will recognize: your children are your retirement plan.

If I treat myself like a company—and I often do—and imagine I had investors who believed in me, I would have to tell them honestly: we are not on track to meet our stated goals.

What makes this harder is that I was on track.

When I was 23, running JANUS out of coffee shops and my parents’ basement, I thought I was failing. In hindsight, I was anything but. I had no business experience, no network, no precedent, and no real hard skills beyond being able to learn quickly and communicate. Yet I was closing four- and five-figure deals, projecting six figures in revenue within months, and growing cash at roughly 4.5% month over month—about a 65% CAGR.

For context: the stock market grows at ~8% annually. A fund manager hitting 15% in a good year is considered exceptional. I was compounding at 65% and had absolutely no idea.

I shut JANUS down because I couldn’t maintain quality while in medical school. The work going out wasn’t good enough. Clients deserved better. Fixing the company properly would have required rebuilding systems, retraining people, implementing QA, and absorbing short-term chaos—all while risking my performance in medical school and potentially derailing the next four years.

It was a catch-22, but the solution was simple: hit the eject button.

Months later, while reviewing statements and documents, it finally hit me how miscalibrated my self-assessment had been. I thought I was failing when I was, by almost any objective measure, doing remarkably well.

In short: I was on track. I changed course. Now I’m not.

Body

I failed here too.

Before medical school, I trained six days a week at 5am for years. When school started, that entire system collapsed. I gained 10–15 pounds. I lost routines. Even early wake-ups became inconsistent once the behaviors attached to them disappeared.

This isn’t complicated. Systems broke. I paid the price.

Relationships

I’ve always been bad at maintenance.

I have a wide circle of friends whom I care about deeply and whose values I respect. I also intentionally keep people around me who see the world differently than I do, because I think that’s how ideas get battle-tested.

Where I fail is consistency.

I either respond immediately or not at all—not out of disregard, but because the message leaves my mind entirely. There’s no active ignoring, no “I’ll get to this later.” It simply disappears. Friends understandably don’t love this. At best, they tolerate it.

Intent doesn’t matter much here. The outcome does. And the outcome is that people feel unappreciated.

That’s on me.

What Matters (and What Doesn’t)

Health, wealth, and community. Those are the pillars. Everything else is downstream.

I don’t include faith in that list—not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s moved in the opposite direction. Over the past year, I’ve become more religious and spiritual. This started when I was building JANUS and needed something larger than myself to anchor risky decisions. It’s continued since.

A soul in search of growth benefits from an organizing principle, and for thousands of years, God has been the strongest one humanity has found. I understand why now.

So What Now?

The most honest answer is: I’m not entirely sure.

What I do know is how I think about bets.

Asymmetric Bets

The first is Capital Alpha, my investment and finance newsletter. It documents the growth of a portfolio that started at $1,000. I add $100–200 per month, publish my theses, and leave a public record.

In three to four years, one of two things will be true:

• I failed cheaply.

• Or I succeeded publicly.

If I fail, I lose $1,000. If I succeed, I gain not just capital but an undeniable record of judgment and discipline. The downside is capped. The upside compounds. That’s the kind of bet worth making.

The second bet is writing—what you’re reading right now.

I didn’t fully realize what this was doing until strangers started referencing things I’d written, reaching out for perspective, or telling me they looked forward to reading my work. Writing clarifies my thinking in a way few things do. I enter flow. The jumbled threads in my head arrange themselves into something coherent.

I write so that when I meet someone serious, we can skip the surface-level conversation and talk substance.

Because this comes naturally to me, and because one piece can reach many people, it’s asymmetric. Low marginal cost. Potentially high leverage. I’d be foolish not to continue.

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This isn’t a resolution piece. It’s not New Year’s yet.

It’s simply an honest accounting—of failures, and of the long bets I’m still willing to make.

There are more. I’ll write about them soon.

For now, this is enough truth for one Christmas.