In my late teens and early twenties, it was difficult for me to stick to anything. Fortunately, my relationships were the complete opposite, and I’ve only had long-term relationships since those days, but when it came to doing things with my time, I chased the high of new ideas. It was frustrating, and my first successful business was pure luck while dealing with this hindrance to my focus. Before going to university, I worked on a mod for a game for around 8 months. Half of the summer went by, and we failed to grow a community in our game, and 10 weeks before starting my freshman year in college, I quit. Fortunately, my co-founder hit me up two weeks later and told me to look at our PayPal account, and boom, I came running back.

Sticking with the business for a total of two years before leaving, I continued to throw time and money at ideas that I’d give up too easily on. Frustrating partners and not even finishing the initial launch of an idea, I struggled to commit to business hardships. I believe this was due to a lack of understanding my sporadic motivation and where it was coming from. As a founder, that notion becomes one of the most important things to understand for yourself and others. 

The first two businesses, which together lasted almost 5 years with an 18-month gap in between, I chased my passion for engineering software so blindly that I had no clue where it would take me. And that passion attracted people to follow due to the immense amount of time, effort, and natural excitement that comes out of my love for what I was doing. Not understanding that requires a lot more luck for it not to destroy yourself accidentally.

I was driving my life by the thesis that others will do good for you in return if you do good things for others.  I was fortunate to have only encountered great humans online on the internet, which evolved into in-person after graduating from university.  I was hungover the day after graduation when I packed all my belongings into a Uhaul and drove to Baldwin Park, California which was a 3-minute walk from where In-n-out Burger was founded.  Baldwin Park is a city that historically was not known as the safest place in the world.  Before that day, my new roommates had been online strangers that I worked on a 3D mobile game with for the past 6 months. Not long later, the household became great friends.

Now, how the F did I make that decision? I had conversations going at Netflix, Facebook, Google, and a 6 figure job offer at a prestigious government lab and I chose to sleep on a cot in a kitchen to make games in a shady part of town with someone I have never physically met. Maybe because it was a backhouse that cost $600 a month with all-inclusive utilities…? When I look back at what led to that decision, it again came down to the potential fairytale that if I did good things and nothing bad would come to me. Later in life, I learned that this was the concept of karma and it doesn't exactly work all the time. I’ll throw in that my mother nurtured me into believing that I can do anything if I set my mind to it. So far, my life has been proving positive when I did just that and, at that time, I believed that I can go make some good money someday building my own games. And the funny thing is I was not thinking about making a ton of money. I just wanted to build something amazing with a talented group of people from the games industry. But this decision was also driven by the desire to commit to something of my own for many years. I hated myself for my noncommittal ways and HourBlast Games was the first project where I’ve destroyed that part of myself and stayed committed until the company decided to go into a direction that I was not to be a part of.

Something to mention here: I must have spoken to people for advice, and they must have thought I was crazy?  I had a girlfriend going on for 4 years, parents who care, and some great childhood/university friends in my tribe. No one said no or gave me any warnings, probably because I said, “I’ll give it a year and see how it goes.” Without me knowing it, this automatically defuses most things that people want to say.

Moving on, my time in Los Angeles transformed my decision-making in many ways. After meeting my EGO for the first time to inevitably lose my long-term girlfriend due to these changes and selfishly choosing an 80-100 hour entrepreneurial lifestyle, I had a rude awakening of needing more in life than just passion.  One thing led to another, which had me land to my life mantra: Time is the most valuable currency. All my decisions for the remaining twenties were made solely by the effort of spending invaluable time well. This mantra became so ingrained that I didn’t even have to think about “is this the right way to spend it?” I simply just knew what would be the right way to spend it, and the problem was how could I make it possible to spend it in that exact way!

This all leads to one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. A girl I was dating and madly falling in love with was not from Los Angeles and informed me that she would have to move back to Hong Kong for family reasons. Within a few seconds, and I mean 3-5 seconds, I responded, “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” She surprisingly responds, “What do you mean?” and I said something along the lines, “Well, let’s not worry about it. I can be flexible. I just need to think about it.” In reality, I genuinely was saying, “No worries, I’ll come with you, but I have to figure out how.” This is the best example of great real-time decision-making solely based on spending my invaluable time the way I wanted to.

Although, at this particular stage in life, I again prematurely shared that “I’ll give Hong Kong a year or two,” which defused some of the most concerned people in my tribe from expressing their true thoughts about my crazy path to leaving the country. And oh, how wrong I was. I got my 1st passport, hopped on a flight, and have been here ever since, visiting the states multiple times a year, but America has no longer been my home for almost 7 years now.

A big question that I can better answer today and could not answer in my early twenties is: When is it the right time to spend your time? This took marriage, having a kid, and prematurely exiting a high growth startup during its hay days to start my own to truly live the following answer. There will never be a right time. I’m sure people can disagree with this because, at times, the sun does peer through the clouds onto your body for a brief moment right after coming out of a deep meditative savasana (true story), but I beg to argue; why wait to spend your invaluable time to do what you desire, love, hope, dream, and truly give a damn for? Now there are rules to this, and I’ll share only one unless people ask for more. Never put yourself or anyone in a dangerous or uncomfortable situation. For example, don’t do something that ends up putting you in the streets, homeless, or something. Spending time well does take some strategic thinking!

With that said, I got married because I wanted to. Things just kept getting better and better, and we were nowhere near reaching the “peak” of our relationship, so I did it. It was one of the most nerve-wracking things I did, but I knew that all my time would be best spent with this person. That went from knee to the ground to throwing, hands down, one of the top 3 best days of my life and frankly (or biasedly?) the best parties I’ve experienced on this planet—another excellent decision for Coop.

For Orion, my son, I solely made him during one of the “worst times” possible. My startup, KintoHub, was nearing its death, and I realized that I would never become a father if I kept waiting for financial freedom and the right time. I gave it a shot, pun intended, and entered another great decision: One of the best gifts that humanity can give to anyone, the gift of continuously learning how to spend your time even better! Not to mention, KintoHub secured its first venture capital check a few weeks after knowing that he was alive and coming and continued running for two more years!

Now, we’ve arrived at today and how I hope to make decisions moving forward. Making great decisions comes with carefully crafting the balance of:

• being selfish

• being patient

• being optimistic yet realistic

• being a good listener to your peers, mentors, and loved ones

• being brave

• being confident when you cannot be brave

• being conscious of everything in and outside of you

• being responsible

• being comfortable that this decision may be wrong

With the above in mind, I’m trying to plan on spending time well in the future versus just today. Not that I’m a Jeff Bezos fanboy, but he’s got something right with the idea of investing in things that don’t change. Why? Because it’s really easy to make plans around things that you can predict! The next evolution, or attempt, ensures I look further forward at the requirements of continuously spending my time well as I move forward in time versus only spending time well today. The next few years will be more strategic and less selfish in the balancing of the list above.🤞🏼 Fingers crossed it works!

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This article has been brought to you by a triple shot coffee at 2 PM after almost not drinking any caffeine for 45 days. Coop will try his best not to drink caffeinated drinks again, but this caffeine deserves this shout-out, along with how this psychoactive substance has revolutionized the world in this awesome audible-only book, Caffeine by Michael Pollan.

Kudos + shoutout to my brother, Jordan, for proofreading this one!