Michael Chang

Things you need to do ASAP: 🤜 Start learning Chinese. Your brain starts rewiring itself when you learn Chinese because you are no longer processing language only through linear alphabetic sound systems. Your monolingual brain realizes the world does not revolve around your grammar structure, sentence flow, or hometown logic. Chinese forces the brain to process multiple layers simultaneously. Sound through tones, visual meaning through characters, context through sentence structure, and rhythm through flow and expression. A single syllable can completely change meaning depending on tone, which activates auditory precision in ways many Indo-European languages do not. Meanwhile, characters function almost like compressed visual concepts. To me, they feel closer to art, symbols, and meaning maps than simple letters. You are training pattern recognition, auditory discrimination, visual memory, contextual prediction, and cognitive flexibility at the same time. That is why it is hard, but so rewarding both for your brain and lifestyle. X may have implemented auto-translations, but in real life effort still counts. People still appreciate when you try to speak their language. 🤜 Move to China or at least spend serious time somewhere in Asia. Warning though, this will for sure permanently damage your tolerance for inefficiency. When you move elsewhere afterwards, you’ll end up asking dangerous questions like:
Why is the metro this dirty?
Why is the delivery app telling me 57 minutes as if it’s normal?
Why do I need 6 different apps, a physical card just to pay a bill? 
 After experiencing cities where infrastructure actually INFRASTRUCTURES… it’s hard to go back emotionally. 🤜 Become AI fluent. I mean actually understanding prompting, workflows, automation, AI agents, research tools, data analysis, and how businesses are integrating AI into operations. You do not need to become an AI engineer. But becoming AI illiterate in 2026 is starting to feel like refusing to learn how to use the internet in 2001 because newspapers were enough. 🤜 Learn how economics and money are actually intertwined. Market forces, investing, inflation, debt, business models, pricing power, compound interest. Too many adults are walking around financially illiterate. Some people know their moon sign, rising sign, emotional sign, and Mercury retrograde schedule… but cannot explain why purchasing power matters. 🤜 Build a global mindset. The world is not your neighborhood WhatsApp group. Read international news. Talk to people from different countries. Travel. Learn about different cultures and why people think differently. 🤜 Learn marketing, sales, communication, and the art of staying calm. The highest-paid people in many industries are often not the smartest in the room. They are the people who can explain complex ideas clearly, persuade others, negotiate, present, and build trust. Your degree can open the door. Communication determines whether they keep you inside the building. Half of career success is just whether can this person explain things without giving everyone a headache? And staying calm is part of the skillset. Because the person who stays emotionally stable while everyone else is spiraling in meetings, negotiations, deadlines or startup chaos, automatically looks more competent, trustworthy, and leadership-ready. 🤜 Take care of your health NOW. Sleep. Walk. Lift weights. Eat like you really care about every single cell in your body. Stop romanticizing burnout. You cannot biohack your way out of 4 hours of sleep, processed food, stress, no movement. You just can’t. 🤜 Learn how to learn. The ability to sit down, think deeply, learn properly, solve problems, and stay mentally present without checking your phone ten mins is starting to separate people very fast. When people say they want success, I observe their attention span. Manage your focus, cause it manages your future. Anything I’m missing?

well. people who are neither young nor fully remote workers had a lot to say about this quite narrow claim.

Have you ever had a job where you thought, “I really don’t care about any of this. None of this feels purposeful or meaningful. None of this actually matters.”