Life Through a Financial Lens · Chapter 1
Hello, I’m Jai. Welcome back to my blog.
Today’s story is a little different from the others. Instead of sharing another trip, another running experience, or another book that inspired me, I want to invite you into a different part of my world—the way finance has changed how I look at life.
Over the past few years, finance has gradually become more than just a field of study. It has become a language that helps me understand decisions, opportunities, risks, and even myself. While studying financial statements one day, I suddenly asked myself a question that made me stop for a moment:
If my life were a company today, what would its balance sheet look like?
At first, I laughed because it sounded like the kind of question only a finance student would ask. However, the more I thought about it, the more meaningful it became. A balance sheet does not tell us whether a company is successful or unsuccessful. Instead, it simply records what the company owns, what it owes, and what remains after everything has been accounted for.
Perhaps our lives are not so different.
Assets
When I look back at my twenties, I don’t see a perfect journey. I see unexpected opportunities, painful failures, moments of uncertainty, and countless decisions that shaped who I am today. Although I cannot list every asset I have accumulated, I know I have not reached this point empty-handed. Some of the most valuable assets in my life cannot be measured in dollars, yet they continue to generate returns every single day.
The first asset I would record is curiosity.
Curiosity was the reason I decided to leave Ho Chi Minh City, where I had a stable full-time position as a legal consultant, and move to Taiwan to start over. Looking back, that decision probably did not make much sense from a traditional perspective. I was leaving behind familiarity, stability, and certainty for a future that I knew almost nothing about. Yet I kept asking myself one simple question: What else could I become if I gave myself the chance to begin again?
Curiosity pushed me to step outside my comfort zone and accept the uncertainty that came with every new beginning. It led me into a different culture, another language, and eventually into the world of finance. More importantly, it taught me that every decision carries responsibility. Every investment comes with risk, and every opportunity has a price. I have never considered curiosity a guarantee of success. Instead, I see it as the courage to accept both the rewards and the consequences of my own choices.
The second asset is discipline, and strangely enough, running gave it to me.
A few years ago, I hated running. Even five kilometres felt impossible, and I could never imagine myself spending hours training for a race. When I first arrived in Taiwan, I suddenly had more free time than I had ever experienced before. I began running simply because I wanted to stay active, never expecting it to become an important part of my life.
As the months passed, running slowly changed from an exercise into a habit, and eventually into a teacher. Through winter mornings, summer afternoons, and days when I wanted to quit halfway, I learned that discipline is not built through motivation. It is built through showing up, even when you don’t feel like it. Running taught me to keep moving forward regardless of whether life was treating me kindly or not. Happiness comes and goes. Difficult moments do the same. Yet every time I lace up my shoes, I remember that progress has always been made one step at a time.
Another asset I value deeply is my health.
If I had to describe health using a financial concept, I would compare it to compound interest. Every workout, every healthy meal, every good night’s sleep, and every small decision to take care of myself may seem insignificant on its own. However, when repeated consistently over many years, those tiny investments quietly multiply into something incredibly valuable.
People often ask me when the best time to start exercising is. To be honest, I don’t think there is a perfect answer. Looking back, I simply feel grateful that I started somewhere in the past. The health I enjoy today is not the result of one extraordinary effort but thousands of ordinary decisions made consistently over time. Just like compound interest, the greatest rewards often come from patience rather than intensity.
The final asset I would like to include is language.
One of the biggest reasons I chose Taiwan was because I wanted to improve my Chinese. Ironically, I have never considered myself a perfect language learner. There were many days when I should have studied harder, and I often felt guilty for not following my study plan seriously enough. Yet language has a funny way of growing. It slowly becomes part of your life through conversations, work, mistakes, and daily experiences.
Recently, I took a Chinese proficiency test and was genuinely surprised by my result. It reminded me that not every investment grows in obvious ways. Some assets appreciate quietly while we are too busy focusing on how much further we still have to go. Looking back after almost three years in Taiwan, I realised that language had quietly become one of the most valuable assets I had earned from this journey.
Liabilities
Every balance sheet has another side.
Mine includes fear, uncertainty, and overthinking.
Although I have always been willing to begin again, the fear of failure has never completely disappeared. Before making an important decision, I often imagine the worst possible outcome and ask myself whether I would still be able to accept it if everything went wrong. Surprisingly, that question has helped me more than it has scared me. Once I accept the worst-case scenario, moving forward becomes much easier.
Alongside fear comes another familiar liability: overthinking.
I often question whether I am capable enough, whether I have made the right decision, or whether I will eventually regret the path I have chosen. There were times when these thoughts prevented me from moving forward. However, instead of trying to eliminate overthinking completely, I gradually learned to manage it.
Finance gave me an interesting perspective on this.
When a company borrows money from a bank, debt creates pressure because interest must be paid. However, companies borrow because they believe those funds will help them build something even more valuable. Borrowing itself is neither good nor bad. Everything depends on how wisely the money is used.
I began to realise that fear works in a similar way. Fear can become a burden if it controls every decision we make. At the same time, it can also encourage us to prepare more carefully, think more critically, and appreciate the risks we choose to take. Just like managing cash flow, life requires balancing confidence with caution. The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty but to manage it responsibly.
Equity
Accounting tells us that equity is what remains after liabilities are deducted from assets.
Life feels slightly different.
To me, equity is not what remains after removing fear from my life. It is who I have become because I chose to carry that fear instead of running away from it.
The person writing this article today is completely different from the person who first arrived in Taiwan. Along the way, I gained knowledge, lost certainty, built new relationships, experienced failures, celebrated achievements, and discovered parts of myself that I never knew existed. Some investments generated wonderful returns. Others became expensive lessons. Yet every transaction, whether it resulted in profit or loss, has quietly contributed to the person I am today.
That, to me, is equity.
It cannot be measured on any financial statement, but I feel its value every day. Confidence, resilience, gratitude, and perspective are not things I can touch or calculate, yet they are among the greatest returns I have received throughout this journey. Every person who entered my life, every person who left, every challenge, and every opportunity has become another transaction recorded in the company called my life.
Closing the Balance Sheet
This article is not about finance. It is not about accounting. It is not about proving how much I have achieved in my twenties. Instead, it is simply a different way of looking back on my journey.
Perhaps each of us is running our own company. Our assets are the values we continue to build. Our liabilities are the responsibilities we choose to carry. Our equity is the person we become after every decision, every success, every failure, and every lesson life teaches us along the way.
That balance sheet will never appear in an annual report. Yet I believe it may be the most important financial statement we will ever prepare.
If there is one lesson I have learned from writing this article, it is that the greatest investments in life are often invisible. They are found in curiosity, discipline, health, relationships, courage, and the willingness to begin again whenever life asks us to.
Thank you for taking the time to read my balance sheet. Perhaps after closing this page, you might take a moment to think about your own. If your life were a company today, what would your balance sheet look like?
Thank you for being here. And I’m here as your listener (jailee145@gmail.com).
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