What a week it's been!

Prom, graduation dinner, and graduation ceremony – all within the last 9 days 🙉

So many things happened but I'm glad I remember each moment so vividly.

Oh, and this is the quirky speech I gave during the ceremony 🤣 (the entire speech goes until 46:00).

Today's technically the first day of my gap year, and honestly, it feels like the first day of a summer holiday when you're asking yourself,  "Hmmm, what should I do now?"

And while writing this blog piece with my second bowl of Bún Bò Nam Bộ in front of me, I'm feeling a slight joy and a little bit of nostalgia. Just thinking about the many memories that I'll cherish (and the millions of photos, videos, and files I'm going to store in this little machine).

But I think what makes today different from a summer holiday is the fact that there's no "next year" planned out for me. I'm the one determining (to the extent that I can) what my future will look like.

And with that kind of freedom comes a lot of responsibility! It feels like the past few years of hectic time management have only been preparing me for this moment.

After posting about my graduation, a bunch of friends asked me what I was going to do during my gap year.

Well, here are my overarching goals:

• Create Mohe (a local experience-recommending app) and make a considerable profit out of it (maybe incorporate it as an LLC – a real company).
• Explore the world – immerse myself in diverse cultures, environments, and lifestyles through world travel.
• Master Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) as a way to build my own personalized education.

Alongside, these are the things I want to try/learn/explore/do.

Life skills

• Cooking
• Budgeting
• Investing (in stocks and assets)
• Buying special gifts for others (having a curated list of stores/shops to buy from)
• Speaking and writing in Vietnamese

Health

• Morning runs
• Going to the gym once/twice a week
• Playing volleyball on the weekends

Art

• Playing/making music (with a keyboard, launchpad, and loop station)
• Exploring IxD (Interaction Design) and creative coding (examples here)
• Writing slam poetry (listen to this masterpiece)

Tech

• Making a VR game (or building a DIY AR headset)
• Building a drone with an FPV camera
• Building a vending machine (I'm telling you – they're the future)

Reading

• Reading books on design, psychology, theology, linguistics, phenomenology, microeconomics, and self-development (maybe fiction too?)

Now looking back, I wonder, "Was the IBDP worth it?"

If you take away the IOs and insane numbers of papers, then "Yes," I think it was worth it. But in the end, a curriculum is what it measures, and in the IBDP, I felt like it was memorization, regurgitation, and checking boxes for writing the right set of answers.

I demanded something better. That's why I probably won't let my children take the IBDP – I'd likely teach them myself or find a much better curriculum for them.

But to those who have no other options (like I did), I'd say that anything you feel that made you really grow – whether it's the knowledge you acquired in/out of class, the relationships you've built with your friends and teachers, a new discovery you made about yourself – these are what you're going to take away in the end.

And I know – it's stressful. You've got tons of assessments, extracurricular responsibilities, and the pressure of university applications lurking in the back of your mind every day. Pressure coming from parents, teachers, and friends too.

But take a moment to zoom out; look over the horizon. Where are you going with this after all? Are you merely conforming to the path that's set in front of you, or are you actively pursuing the one that you believe is true?

Peter Thiel writes in his book Zero to One, "What important truth do very few agree with you on?"

I think it's a good question to ask yourself.

And I'll ask that to myself too.

(Let's see what I'll make out of this gap year!)

LIFE UPDATE

Starting in August, I'll be interning at Cornerstone Solutions for one year while working on a farm-mapping app. It'll be a chance for me to learn how a software company is run and how production-level software is made. Afterward, I'm planning to travel around the world :)