tompham.ca

Author: Tom Pham

  • Four in the Morning

    The shift ended at eleven. I was home by midnight. I should have slept.

    Instead I opened the laptop and went back to Amazon.

    The manuscript is finished. The cover is finished. What is left is not writing. It is the part nobody told me about — the part that has nothing to do with sentences.

    KDP — Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing — asks you to fill in three boxes before you can publish.

    The first is the price.
    The second is the keywords — seven slots, each up to fifty characters.
    The third is the categories — three of them, picked from a list of hundreds.

    That is what I was looking at when I noticed it was four in the morning.

    I do not know what to charge for the book. I sat with the Kindle price dropdown for a long time. $4.99. $5.99. $6.99. $7.99. A dollar between each one. None of them obviously right. Pick too low and people may think it is cheap. Pick too high and they may not click. There is no formula. There is no one who tells you.

    I do not know what keywords readers will type. There is no way to know. I sat there typing phrases, then deleting them, then typing them again. By four in the morning these were the seven that stayed:

    shift worker self help
    bored at work
    life after dream job
    building wealth working class
    immigrant memoir Canada
    work life balance memoir
    honest career advice no fluff

    Seven slots filled. Each one a small guess about who might be searching.

    The categories are worse. There are hundreds of them, nested inside each other. I picked three. Biographies and Memoirs. Self-Help. Business and Money — Job Hunting and Careers — Job Hunting. Each one a slightly different guess at what kind of book I had written.

    It is a strange thing to choose how a stranger finds you.

    I wrote the book. The harder part is the things I did not know would be part of it — the formatting, the cover dimensions, the trim size, the bleed, the back cover blurb, the metadata, the categories, the keywords, the price.

    None of this is writing. All of it has to be done.

    At four in the morning I picked numbers. I picked words. I clicked Save.

    I do not know if I picked the right ones. I do not know if anyone will find the book. The book goes live on May 25 either way.

  • The Airport Lounge in Hanoi

    It was late evening at Hanoi airport. Five of us were moving through the terminal — my parents, my twin brother Jerry, my young niece, and me. We had just been through check-in and security. We were tired. We had a domestic flight to catch down to Da Nang — a coastal city in central Vietnam often called the Miami of Vietnam — where we were going to spend a few days together as a family.

    If you have ever traveled with family in a busy Asian airport, you already know how the next part usually goes. Crowded waiting areas. Long lines for overpriced food at the gate. A toddler getting fussy because she is tired and hungry and confused about what is happening. The parents trying to keep everyone calm. The adults trying not to lose their patience.

    But instead of heading toward the gate, I turned to my parents and told them to follow me. I had a small surprise.

    I led the five of us to a different door, tucked off the main terminal corridor. At the entrance, the staff member checked my card. She looked at the others behind me, then at me again. She told me, gently, that she had never seen five people come in together on a single membership. It was the first time, she said. Then she smiled and waved us all in.

    We spent the next two hours inside an airport lounge.

    Comfortable chairs that did not have armrests digging into your sides. Quiet. A hot buffet that nobody had to count or apologize for. Drinks in real glasses. A small play space my niece could wander in without bothering anyone. Wi-Fi that actually worked.

    My parents kept saying they could not believe it was free. They kept asking me if I was sure. They kept looking around the room like they had been let into a place they were not supposed to be allowed in.

    And I had not paid a single dollar extra to give them that experience. The lounge access was simply included with a card I was already using to pay for groceries and my phone bill.

    This piece is about that card, and the other one that took me to Seoul a few weeks earlier, and what I learned along the way about a tool I had spent years being afraid of.

    The misunderstanding I had for years

    When I first arrived in Canada at fifteen, credit cards felt scary to me.

    My parents had always warned me about debt. My friends talked about credit card debt the way people talk about a trap you fall into. The story I absorbed, without really questioning it, was that credit cards were dangerous things designed by banks to take advantage of regular people. The smartest move, I assumed, was to avoid them completely and just use my debit card for everything.

    That was a mistake.

    Let me be careful here, because the warning is partly true. Credit cards used badly will ruin your life. The interest rates are brutal. If you spend more than you can afford and carry a balance from one month to the next, the system eats you alive. My parents and friends were right to warn me about that side of it.

    But credit cards used carefully are something different. They are one of the most powerful tools a working person has to get more value from money they are already spending.

    The key word is carefully.

    The rules I live by are simple, and I want to put them right at the top of this piece before I tell you anything else.

    I only spend what I would have spent anyway. I pay the full balance every single month. I never carry debt from one statement to the next. If you cannot trust yourself to do those three things, you should not read the rest of this post as a recommendation. It is not.

    For those who can, here is what changed for me.

    The Marriott Bonvoy Amex

    The first card I signed up for is the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card.

    I signed up because I love travel, and I knew that one day I wanted to take my family on nicer trips than my paycheck could normally cover. The card earns points you can redeem for free hotel nights at Marriott properties around the world. Like most travel cards, the biggest single burst of points comes from the welcome bonus — a large amount given to you when you sign up, as long as you spend a certain minimum in the first few months.

    In my case, the welcome bonus was 65,000 points. That alone was enough to cover several free nights at a decent hotel.

    But there is a second benefit I did not fully appreciate at first. Every year on my card anniversary, Marriott gives me a free night certificate. One voucher, good for one free night at many of their hotels around the world, simply for keeping the card active.

    On its own, an anniversary night is not life-changing. It is one night a year. But year after year, those certificates add up. A free night in a city I had been wanting to visit. A free night to spoil my parents or my brother when they come to visit me.

    The rest of the points I earned slowly, simply by using the card for expenses I was already making. Groceries. Phone bill. Gas. The small purchases at the convenience store that add up quietly over time. Nothing I would not have bought anyway. The only difference was that instead of swiping my debit card and watching the money disappear into the void, I was paying with a card that was collecting points in the background.

    Then I paid the balance in full at the end of every month. No interest, ever.

    A year or so later, I had enough points for a real trip.

    Five free nights in Seoul

    I had been dreaming of visiting Seoul, South Korea for a long time. I had been learning Korean on my own. I wanted to see the country in person, hear the language spoken around me, eat the food at the source, experience the culture I had only seen through a screen.

    When I started looking at hotels for the trip, the prices made me pause.

    A decent hotel room in Seoul was running around two hundred and fifty dollars a night. Five nights would have meant well over a thousand dollars on accommodation alone, before I had even paid for flights, food, transit, or anything else. For a supervisor working steady but not luxurious shifts at a downtown hotel, that was not a small amount of money. It was the kind of number that would have made me think twice about going at all.

    But I did not pay it.

    I remember sitting at my kitchen table one evening, my laptop open to the Marriott rewards page, staring at my points balance and the booking calendar side by side. I had to do the math twice. The points I had been quietly accumulating — mostly from the welcome bonus, topped up by months of normal daily spending — were enough to cover all five nights at a Marriott in the middle of Seoul.

    I could not believe five nights in Seoul would be completely free. I sat there for a while just looking at the screen.

    The only real cost was the annual fee on the card. Once you compare that fee to the value of five free hotel nights in a major international city, the math is obvious. The card more than paid for itself on a single trip.

    And I had not changed my life to make it happen. I was not spending more than usual. I was not skipping meals or cutting corners. I was paying for the same expenses I would have paid for anyway, but with a card that gave me something back for it.

    The money was leaving my bank account either way. The only question was whether anything came back.

    If after reading this you decide the Marriott Bonvoy American Express Card might be useful for your life, I have a personal referral link that gives you a larger welcome bonus than the standard public offer — at the time of writing, that is 100,000 points after meeting the spending requirements, compared to 75,000 from the public offer. Credit card offers change over time, so please verify the current terms on the American Express website before signing up. If you are approved through my link, I receive 15,000 points as a referral bonus.

    You can find my referral link here.

    If using a referral link from a stranger on the internet feels strange, the public offer is easy to find on the American Express website. The card is the same either way.

    The Scotiabank Passport Visa Infinite

    The second card gave me one of the most meaningful experiences of the last few years.

    It is the Scotiabank Passport Visa Infinite. It earns travel rewards, like most travel cards. But it comes with something I did not fully appreciate until I used it for the first time.

    Complimentary airport lounge access.

    If you have never been inside one, let me describe it. A lounge is a separate area inside the airport where you can wait for your flight in a much nicer environment than the crowded gate. Comfortable seating with space around you. Quiet, or at least quieter than the terminal. A buffet with hot food, drinks, desserts, snacks. Clean bathrooms. Wi-Fi that actually works.

    Normally, to get inside, you either need to be flying business class — which costs thousands of dollars more than economy — or pay a day rate at the lounge itself, often fifty to one hundred dollars per person.

    With this card, I get free access to hundreds of lounges around the world. And I can bring guests with me for free.

    I did not understand how powerful this was until that night in Hanoi.

    After my trip to Seoul, I had flown back to Vietnam to spend time with my family. We had planned a short trip down to Da Nang together. All five of us. And we were now at Hanoi airport, waiting for our flight, with all the tiredness and noise that comes with traveling as a family at the end of a long day.

    When I led them to the lounge that evening, what was happening inside me was something more than satisfaction. My parents had spent most of their lives working long hours. Fourteen-hour days. The kind of work that does not leave room for luxuries. They had sacrificed a lot to send me and Jerry to Canada when we were fifteen, with the hope that we would build a different kind of life there.

    And now, more than a decade later, in their own country, in a busy airport, I was the one leading them into a quiet room where everything was already paid for.

    That experience is worth more to me than any dollar figure I could put on it.

    Being honest about the costs

    I want to be honest about the other side of all of this, because any real advice has to include the full picture.

    Both of these cards have annual fees, and the fees are not small. They are in the range you would expect from premium travel cards. If you never travel, never stay in hotels, and never fly, these cards are probably not for you. The annual fee would cost you more than you would ever get back.

    But for someone who uses them intentionally, the math is overwhelmingly positive. The five free nights in Seoul paid for the Marriott Amex many times over. The airport lounge experience with my family was worth more than the Scotiabank fee for years to come. And in the meantime, both cards continue to earn points from my everyday spending, which means the next free trip is already being built in the background.

    Let me put the three rules again, more firmly this time.

    Never spend money you would not have spent anyway just to earn points.

    Never carry a balance month to month.

    Never sign up for a card if you cannot trust yourself to pay it off in full.

    The moment you start paying interest, the entire system breaks. All the points in the world cannot outweigh what high interest rates will do to someone carrying a balance.

    Used wrong, credit cards will ruin your life.

    Used right, they will quietly add experiences to your life that you could not otherwise afford.

    The difference is entirely in how you use them.

    The bigger lesson

    Credit cards are just one specific example of a much bigger idea.

    There are countless ways to use the same money more intelligently. Most people never look for them because they are busy, tired, and focused on getting through the week. Most people assume money only flows in one direction — out of their hands, gone forever, with nothing left over.

    But once you start asking the simple question — is there a smarter way to spend the money I am already spending? — you will start finding answers in places you were not looking. Reward programs. Cashback offers. Loyalty bonuses. Membership discounts. Off-season pricing. Free experiences you are already eligible for but did not know about.

    Almost no one teaches you any of this. You have to go looking.

    Every time I paid for something with my debit card, I was handing over money and getting nothing back. Every time I paid the same thing with a rewards card and then paid it off in full at the end of the month, I was getting something back for the exact same purchase.

    The money left my bank account either way. The only difference was what came back.

    This essay is adapted from my book, Alive After Hours. If it spoke to you, the book goes deeper.

  • The Day My Shift Got Cancelled

    A couple of years ago, on a beautiful fall day, I was supposed to go to work. I had already prepared myself for the shift.

    Then I got the call. Business was slow. The hours were not needed. The shift was cancelled.

    I had been in hospitality for years by that point. I was a supervisor. I was financially stable in the way someone in their late twenties can be — I paid my bills, I had savings, I was investing every month, I was not living paycheck to paycheck anymore. On paper, I was fine.

    I want to describe what happened in my chest in that moment, because it surprised me.

    I felt panic.

    Not a small inconvenience. Not a “oh, that is annoying” feeling. A real, physical sense that something had been taken from me. My breath got shorter. I sat with the phone in my hand and felt my mind start running calculations.

    Here is the part that stopped me. I had savings. I had an emergency fund. The cancelled shift was not going to make me homeless. I was going to be completely fine. And I still felt the panic.

    That afternoon stayed with me for a long time. Not because of the lost hours. Because of what the panic told me about the life I had built without realizing it.

    Why the panic happened

    The panic was not really about the dollars.

    It was about a quieter realization that had been sitting in the background of my life for years, and finally surfaced.

    The income I had been counting on every month was not actually under my control. Someone else got to decide whether I worked that day. Someone else got to decide what my month looked like. I was the one absorbing the consequences of their decision.

    I had already counted that money. I had not consciously decided to count it. I just had. Somewhere in the back of my head, before the shift was cancelled, I had been doing the math that anyone who works for hourly wages does without thinking. This week I will work this many hours. That is roughly this much. Out of that, this much goes to rent. This much to bills. This much to investing. This much to food.

    The shift cancellation did not just remove a few hours of pay. It removed a number that had already been spent in my mind. The rent did not change. The bills did not change. Only the pay had changed. And I was the one who had to close the gap.

    You can be paid well. You can be valued at work. You can have savings. The shift can still get cancelled. The hours can still get cut. The economy can still slow down.

    As long as your entire income depends on one company deciding to give you hours, that fragility is in your life whether you admit it or not.

    The boring foundation

    Before I tell you what I did about this, I want to back up and talk about something boring. The thing that made the panic survivable in the first place, even if it did not make the panic disappear.

    An emergency fund.

    If you have read any book on personal finance in the last twenty years, you already know what this is. If you have not, here is the whole concept in one sentence. An emergency fund is a specific amount of money, kept in a separate savings account, that exists for one purpose only — to protect you when life goes wrong.

    Your car breaks down. You lose your job. You have a medical bill insurance does not fully cover. A family member gets sick and you need to fly home. Your hours at work get cut. Your laptop dies and you need a new one. Your shift gets cancelled.

    These are not rare situations. They happen to almost everyone, eventually.

    Without an emergency fund, every one of these becomes a crisis. With one, every one of these becomes an inconvenience. Annoying, but manageable.

    The number most books point to is six months of basic expenses — rent, groceries, utilities, transportation, insurance — kept in a separate savings account you do not touch unless something has actually gone wrong.

    I want to say this plainly, because the books often skip past it. Six months is a lot of money. The first time I read that number, I closed the book and laughed. It felt impossible. Like advice written for someone in a different life than mine.

    So I will tell you what I actually did instead.

    How I actually built it

    I broke the mountain into pieces.

    Six months sounded impossible. One month sounded a little less impossible. One thousand dollars sounded almost doable.

    So I started there. One thousand dollars. That was the first goal. Once I hit it, I let myself feel proud of it for about a day, and then I set the next one. One month of basic expenses. Then two. Then three. Then six.

    Each milestone was small enough that I could see the next one. I never let myself think about the whole climb. I only thought about the next step.

    The way the money actually moved was simple. Every payday, before I saw the money in my main account, a portion went into a separate savings account. I did not have to decide each time. I did not have to summon willpower each time. The transfer happened automatically. By the time I noticed, the money was already gone. I lived on whatever was left.

    I want to be honest about one thing. There were many times I was tempted to dip into that money. A new restaurant was about to open in my neighborhood, and I had been excited to try it for weeks. Each time I felt that pull, I had to remind myself why the money was there.

    It was not for now. It was for the day I would need it.

    It took me months and months of discipline. Not the heroic kind. The boring kind. The kind where you keep showing up paycheck after paycheck even when nothing visible is happening.

    The day I finally crossed the six-month mark was one of the most powerful days of my life.

    What it actually feels like

    I want to take a moment to describe what changed in me on that day, because I think it is the part of the story most people do not talk about.

    Before I had the emergency fund, every shift at the hotel carried a small invisible weight.

    Every day before going to work, I felt a quiet worry that I might do something wrong. A small mistake with a guest. A detail my supervisor noticed. The mistake would affect my performance. A bad performance review would mean my hours could be cut. The hours would affect everything else in my month.

    I came to almost every shift carrying that pressure on my back, even when I never said it out loud.

    If business slowed down, my hours could be cut without me making a single mistake. If the economy went into a recession, the whole industry could collapse. I did not consciously think about these things every day. But they were always there, in the background, shaping how I felt about my work and my life.

    After I built the fund, that weight disappeared.

    If my manager called me into his office tomorrow and told me I was being let go, I would not panic. I would shake his hand, say thank you for the opportunity, walk out of the building, and know with complete certainty that I had at least six months to figure out what came next. Six months to apply for new jobs. Six months to take a breath, think clearly, and make good decisions instead of desperate ones.

    This is the difference between living in fear and living in freedom.

    Most people show up to work every day in a state of quiet fear, even if they would never admit it. They are afraid of losing the one income source that holds their entire life together. That fear shapes everything. It makes them tolerate disrespect from bosses they should not tolerate. It makes them stay silent when they should speak up. It traps them in jobs they have outgrown.

    A six-month emergency fund changes the relationship completely. You still go to work. You still do your job well. You still treat your guests, your patients, your customers with care. But you do it from a place of choice, not fear.

    That single shift, more than any specific dollar amount in your account, is what real financial peace feels like.

    A note if you are stretched thin

    I want to take a moment to talk to you directly, because I know what some of you are thinking.

    Some of you are thinking, “Tom, that is great for you, but I cannot afford to do this. I am barely paying my bills as it is.”

    I hear you. And I want to be honest. Saving is harder when you are stretched thin. There is no clever trick that magically makes more money appear in your bank account.

    But I would also gently push back on the idea that you cannot start.

    The amount you start with does not matter as much as the habit of starting. Even ten dollars a paycheck is a beginning. Even twenty. Even fifty. The number is not the point. The point is that you are building a system, and you are training your brain to think of yourself as someone who saves.

    When I started, the amount I was putting in was small. The kind of amount that felt almost pointless. Embarrassingly small, honestly, compared to what I have been able to save since. But the habit was the same. The system was the same. The discipline was the same. And the system grew with me as my income grew.

    If you wait until you have “enough money to start,” you will probably wait forever. Life always finds a way to consume whatever you earn. Rent goes up. Food gets more expensive. New temptations show up every month.

    The only way to break out of that cycle is to pay yourself first, before life has a chance to take it from you.

    So even if all you can spare right now is a small amount, start. The habit matters more than the amount.

    The quiet thing nobody talks about

    An emergency fund is not exciting.

    It does not multiply your money. It does not make you rich. It does not earn you bragging rights at parties. Nobody is going to write a viral post about it. The interest it earns sitting in a savings account is small enough to feel almost insulting.

    But it gives you the one thing that nobody talks about, which is also the only thing that actually matters.

    It gives you the ability to make choices from a place of safety.

    To leave a job that is hurting you, instead of staying because you need the paycheck. To take a week off when a family member is sick, instead of working through it. To say no to something that is wrong for you. To say yes to something that scares you. To negotiate. To wait. To rest.

    The shift can still get cancelled. The hours can still get cut. The unexpected can still arrive at the wrong time.

    You will just feel different about it when it does.

    This essay is adapted from my book, Alive After Hours. If it spoke to you, the book goes deeper.

  • Why Korean?

    When I tell people I have been learning Korean, the most common reaction I get is surprise.

    “Why Korean?”

    “Are you planning to move there?”

    “Is it because of a girlfriend?”

    I understand the questions. Most people assume that if you are going to invest time learning a new language, you must have some big practical reason for it. A partner from that country. A job that requires it. A family connection. Something that justifies the time.

    For me, there was no big practical reason. I just wanted to travel to Korea one day, and I thought it would be meaningful to experience the country in the language of the people who live there.

    On top of that, I had been enjoying Korean dramas for a long time. Late at night after shifts, I would put one on to unwind. Over time the sound of the language became familiar.

    That was the whole reason. A travel dream, plus a quiet curiosity about a language I had been hearing for years.

    The night I finally paid

    I started with YouTube.

    I told myself this was the smart way to go. Free tutorials, plenty of them, taught by people who clearly knew what they were doing. The Korean alphabet, hangul, is unlike anything in English or my native Vietnamese. It looked impossible at first. I told myself that with enough hours of YouTube, I would figure it out.

    I would put a video on after a shift and fall asleep ten minutes in. The next morning I would feel guilty and tell myself I would do better tomorrow. Tomorrow would come, and I would put another video on, and the cycle would continue.

    After a few weeks of that, I switched to Duolingo. For months, I opened the app a few times a week, memorized the occasional word, and let it congratulate me for showing up. I felt like I was making progress. But if I am being honest, I was not actually learning the language. I was checking a box.

    Months went by. I still could not say a basic sentence. I still squinted at the alphabet. The excitement I had felt at the beginning, when I first decided to learn Korean, had quietly faded.

    I had Korean friends who tried to help. But there was no proper structure to it. I did not know what to learn first, or where to start, or how. I was going nowhere, very slowly.

    And then I realized one thing.

    There was no one holding me accountable. No tutor. No class. No deadline. Just me and a screen and an internet connection. And when there is no one holding you accountable, the part of you that wants to give up always wins.

    One evening after a long shift, I was scrolling on my phone and found a tutor who taught Korean online. She offered a package of private one-on-one lessons. The price for the full course was five hundred and fifty dollars.

    I stared at that number for a while.

    It was not going to ruin me, but it was real money. A significant chunk of a paycheck. I thought about what else that money could be. A weekend trip with friends. A nice dinner out a few times over. A new pair of shoes I had been looking at. Things I would actually enjoy.

    The familiar voice in my head started to push back.

    Maybe just try Duolingo harder. Maybe watch more free videos. Maybe wait until you are sure Korean is really the language you want to learn. Maybe next month, when things calm down at work.

    I sat with it for a few minutes. And then I asked myself one honest question. Had the free resources actually worked for me? No. Months of them had barely moved me forward. If I kept going down that road, where would I be a year from now?

    Probably in exactly the same place I was right now.

    Before I could talk myself out of it, I paid.

    The moment the payment went through, something in me shifted. I had spent real money. I had committed. And committing changed everything.

    Paying unlocked discipline

    This lesson turned out to be bigger than Korean.

    For a long time, I believed discipline was something you either had or you did not. Disciplined people could wake up early, stick to a routine, finish what they started. Undisciplined people had good intentions but kept giving up. I had quietly accepted I was somewhere on the undisciplined side.

    Paying for that Korean course taught me something different.

    When a resource is free, there is no cost to abandoning it. You close the app. You stop watching the video. Nobody notices. Walking away is almost easier than showing up.

    But when you have paid real money, walking away has a cost. Every lesson you skip is money wasted. The undisciplined part of you, which was lazy but not stupid, suddenly has a reason to show up. It does not want to lose the money. And so it finds energy you did not know it had.

    Paying is often how you unlock discipline. Not always. Not for every person or every situation. But for many of us, putting real money behind a thing is what finally makes us take it seriously.

    Even with a tutor, Korean did not get easier.

    Many evenings, I would come home from a long shift, exhausted, and want to do nothing but rest. The last thing I felt like doing was Korean homework.

    But the next class was tomorrow.

    If I did not do the homework, I would walk into that class with nothing to show. My tutor would ask. I would have to tell her I had not done it. And I would have wasted another lesson I had already paid for.

    So I would sit down and do the homework. Tired, half-awake, sometimes for an hour or more. Not because I wanted to. Because the class was tomorrow.

    That is the principle made concrete. Discipline did not arrive as a feeling. It arrived as an obligation I had paid for and could not afford to waste.

    If there is something you keep meaning to start but cannot stick with on willpower alone, ask yourself honestly. Can I put real money behind it? Not as a waste. As a commitment device. Sometimes the cheapest way to move forward in life is to spend a little money up front and use that spending to hold yourself accountable.

    The discomfort of being bad at something

    If you are an adult with any level of expertise in your job, being bad at something is a strange feeling.

    At work, I know what I am doing. Twelve years in hospitality. I know how to read a room. I know how to solve problems. When I walk into the hotel at the start of a shift, I feel capable.

    Sitting through my first Korean lesson felt like the opposite of that.

    I did not know the alphabet. I did not know how to say hello properly. My tutor would say something, and I would repeat it back, and the sounds coming out of my mouth would be clearly wrong. She would correct me kindly. I would try again. Still wrong. She would smile, say it one more time slowly, and wait for me to try again.

    The first few lessons were exhausting in a way I did not expect. Not physically exhausting like a long shift. Mentally exhausting, in the way that happens when you are concentrating hard and still not quite getting it. I left most early lessons feeling a little embarrassed about how slow I was.

    But here is the thing.

    I had forgotten what that felt like. I had spent so many years being good at my job that I had lost the memory of what it was like to be genuinely new at something. To not know. To have to ask. To struggle with the most basic things. To feel humbled in the best possible way.

    Being a beginner again woke up a part of my brain that had been asleep. And once it was awake, it made the rest of my life feel more alive too.

    What I actually gained

    I am not fluent in Korean. I want to be honest about that. I cannot watch a drama without subtitles. I cannot follow a fast conversation between two native speakers.

    But I can have simple conversations. I can introduce myself. I can order food. I can ask for directions. The first time I successfully had an exchange with a convenience store clerk in Seoul entirely in Korean, I walked out feeling like I had done something that five years earlier would have been impossible.

    If you asked me what I have really gained from learning Korean, though, I would not say the ability to speak Korean. That is the most obvious answer, and it is not really the most important one.

    What I actually gained was this.

    I gained the memory of what it feels like to be bad at something and keep going anyway. That memory is useful in every other part of my life. When my writing is not coming together, when my shifts at the hotel feel heavy, I remember what it felt like to sit through those first Korean lessons. I remember that I kept going. I remember that I got better.

    I gained the habit of showing up for something just because I committed to it. Not because it paid me. Not because anyone was making me. Just because I said I would.

    And I gained a reason to look forward to something in my week. For one hour every week, I get to do something that is completely mine. Not for work. Not for money. Not for anyone else. Just for me, because I wanted to do it.

    That alone has changed how my weeks feel.

    Korean is not the point

    You might be reading this and thinking that this is fine for me, but you do not want to learn Korean. You do not want to learn any language. This does not really apply to you.

    That is completely fine. Korean is not the point.

    The point is that adults stop being beginners. We get good at our jobs, good at our routines, good at the things we already know how to do. And then we stop. We stop starting new things. We stop being bad at anything. We stop being stretched.

    When that happens, life starts to flatten out. Not because anything is going wrong, but because nothing new is going on inside you. You are not growing. You are just maintaining.

    Learning Korean was my way of remembering how to grow again. For you, it might be something completely different. A musical instrument you always wanted to play. A cuisine you have always admired. A sport. A pottery class. A new kind of writing.

    It does not matter what the thing is. What matters is that you are deliberately choosing to be bad at something again.

    Most adults never do this. They get better at what they already do, and they stop trying to be new at anything. The ones who keep trying new things are the ones who stay young in a way that has nothing to do with age. They stay curious. They stay interesting. They stay excited about the next week.

    There is probably something you have been meaning to start for a long time. You know what it is. You have thought about it more than once. You have told yourself you will get to it when things calm down, when you have more time, when the timing is right.

    The timing will not get more right than it is right now.

    Start it this week. Pay for it if you have to. Let yourself be bad at it for a while. You will thank yourself later for the discomfort.

    That is why I learn Korean. Not because Korean is magic. But because starting something new as an adult is one of the most powerful things a person can do.

    This essay is adapted from my book, Alive After Hours. If it spoke to you, the book goes deeper.