Taking Fun Seriously: The Tea Letter in 2024

This year is shaping up to be the most fun yet.

Hello, tea friends, and welcome to 2024.

It's the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese Zodiac. I was discussing this with a friend of mine recently, and he told me not only is it the Year of the Dragon, but this year is a wood sign from the five elements (五行, wǔxíng). He told me, in traditional Chinese thought, wood represents growth, change, and movement. By this wisdom, we can bet 2024 is going to be a dynamic year.

Looking at what I have planned for the year, I can tell he’s right.

Every year I pick a theme word to sum up my hopes and aspirations for the year ahead. Some examples of themes from previous years are: equanimity, focus, and service.

This year’s theme word is “fun”.

Along with this year’s theme is a mantra:

“Take fun seriously.”

That’s what I’ll be doing in 2024.

2023 wasn’t a very “fun” year. My brain, upon receiving news of the baby, decided its job was two-fold: clear all obstacles and establish safety and security. As I had left the project that was paying me, I needed to start from scratch to provide a financial foundation for my family.

Fun didn’t weigh heavily in that equation.

The good news is I succeeded. The bad news is I gave up more or less everything other than work to succeed. I don’t regret the decision at all. That said, I’m going to do some things differently this year by letting fun and curiosity guide me.

The things I'm most curious about this year are: experimenting with living part-time in the US and in Japan, building a business that supports that lifestyle, and allowing myself to explore tea in a way I've always wanted to but have never allowed myself to do before.

I’ll talk a bit about my plans for each of these in this newsletter and explore each area more in-depth in future editions. If you’d like to follow along and aren’t a subscriber, now’s a good time to jump in so you don’t miss a beat.

Japan

Yoshiko and I have been talking about our ideal lifestyle for a couple years now. What sounds most fun to us is something like this: live part-time in Japan and the US until our daughter Elena is roughly three years old (we’ll hopefully have child number two by then, as well). Then, move to Japan until she’s about seven years old, when she’s ready to begin elementary school, and come back. 

We’re putting the plan to the test this year, starting with spending three months in Tokyo from April to July. We planned to live on our own somewhere in Tokyo, but that has proven challenging.

It’s been somewhere between difficult and impossible to find a short-term rental in an area we’d like to live that’s of a size to support our family without paying a fortune. Plenty of awesome and affordable places to rent on a traditional lease, though. 

Herein lies trouble with Japan: it’s not set up to easily support lifestyles outside the default path.

If you’re a tourist, no problem. If you’re a traveling businessman and you need an apartment to shack up in temporarily, you’re covered. Anything beyond that is vanishingly rare, which is the problem with Japan when you try to do anything outside the norm. Unlike some of the more typical “digital nomad” destinations, Japan is not yet ready to support flexible lifestyles like the one I am envisioning for myself.

We plan to circumvent this by simply buying a cheap house. More on this in future newsletters.

A brief call for help: I don't know anyone who lives this way. If any of my readers are doing something similar in Japan–or know someone who is–I’d love to talk. Please reach out!

Business

As for business, last year I accidentally got back into the business of influencer marketing.

It started off rather innocently–I was on sabbatical after selling the marketing agency I co-founded and decided to start writing down and codifying my marketing knowledge. I started with the influencer marketing playbook I developed during my time at Discord, where I built the influencer program into a multi-million dollar operation from scratch in 18 months.

As I met people around Austin and told them about the project, the level of excitement I saw surprised me. I could tell I was onto something and decided to lean in. I finished my playbook and, after debating whether I should charge for it or make it free, I put the whole thing on the internet available for everyone to read. I decided there was a real lack of quality, actionable information on the subject and I didn’t want to keep that knowledge behind a paywall.

You can read it in its entirety at my personal website, here.

(Fair warning: it’s 12,000 words of text. I got busy with consulting projects and haven’t had time to go back to polish it up with a better design and visuals. It’s on the roadmap for 2024, I promise.)

What’s fun for me about the work isn’t the influencers themselves. Rather, I love to learn, teach, and share. This work allows me to do all three and I don’t believe I’d get the same joy from doing this in-house at some company.

Being independent is hard and scary, but ultimately quite fun.

Tea

Tea, to me, is pure fun.

After spending years relegating my love for tea to hobby status, I’ve had enough. There is no interest or passion I have in life that lights me up as much as tea does. For years, I’ve come up with excuses as to why I can’t or shouldn’t make tea a bigger part of my life. No more.

I’m putting real time and money into furthering my tea journey this year by investing into education, experiences, and travel centered around tea. It sounds incredibly fun for my pursuit of tea to become my full-time endeavor at some point in the future–the sooner the better.

As things are today, there is no path into tea as anything other than a tea vendor or an employee of a vendor. I will blaze that trail for myself as best I can. To that end, I will spare no effort in bringing all my passion, skills, experience, and ideas to bear.

I don’t know what happens when I make tea a priority of this magnitude. I’m sure it will be fun as hell to find out.

Conclusion

The Tea Letter turns seven this February. I’d like to thank all my readers, new and old, for being with me on this journey–it’s been a long one. There are almost 500 of you now, including a few paid subscribers. I’m grateful for the support you’ve given me over the years.

2024 is going to be a big year. I plan to document as much of it as I can and share it here, with all of you. 

If you think you know of anyone who isn’t a reader that might be interested in following along, please consider sharing this newsletter with them. If you’re a Substack user, hitting the like or repost button will also help The Tea Letter reach new readers.

I wish for many blessings, prosperity, health, and safety for all of you in the Year of the Dragon. 

And of course, let’s drink a lot of tea. I think we’re going to need it.