Osmond Wu

To my dearest friends,

I believe our friendships are the greatest investments we’ll make in our lifetime. Beyond the good vibes and degeneracy, we decide to invest in each other's core values and souls. We see the bud that will blossom into its full fledged beauty and choose to commit ourselves to doing whatever we can to realize that reality—even if that means confronting the hard truths.

So, for the shareholders that have been here since day 1—thank you for your continued belief through the best of times and the literal grimmest. For the new one’s who’ve just joined the adventure—it’s the collective belief we make in each other's lives that gives all of us the strength to take the risk, seek the discomfort, and to explore the world. So, I hope you’ll spot your influence in the stories I’m about to tell—this year wouldn’t have been the same without you. Love ❤️

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2024 has easily been the best year of my life. Action packed. Reflective. This year, I’ve traveled 80,834 kilometres—roughly every six days, visited a new city every sixteen, and set foot in fourteen countries, six new. It’s a year defined by radical exploration—around the world and within myself. When I wasn’t sleeping in the Athens airport for our dodgy 6AM flights, I was exploring Copenhagen's every crevice. It was the simple act of waking up with no destination and just the intent to explore…where I found myself.

The cultures I met, the Tutto Passa, chillaso, way of the Milanese; the fiery energy of the Moroccans; to the timid, reserved, but lowkey demonic Danes; taught me that despite the world trying to tell us that there is a right or wrong, an answer to all our prayers—there isn’t. The only answer is what we make of what we have. And I was inspired by nature.

Nature made me realize my freedom; from that freedom bred conviction. I listened to the sounds of children playing along the Copenhagen canals; smelled hints of the salted sea breeze from the vast Mediterranean; marveled at the northern lights as they danced across the starry night; and felt the wind brushing the fine Saharan sand along my skin. In these moments when I surrendered my racing thoughts and just observed and embraced, I felt purely present. Like physically plugged into nature. Everything goes silent, your mind goes silent. Then suddenly, a million emotions wash up— namely gratefulness and regret. The sheer beauty of this world, yet its fleeting nature just lights a fire up your ass. You feel this deep conviction and clarity to stop giving a fuck about the things, people, and thoughts that don’t matter. You just want to be free.

The longest lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose. Marcus Aurelius.

By loving myself I was better at loving the people around me. I'm proud to have strengthened existing relationships by choosing vulnerability and truth; to have been invited to the homes of my closest friends; and to have also embraced them into mine.

I’m proud to have forged new life-long relationships through chill brews outside of Cafe Nexus; a serendipitous meeting at Osteria Da Fortunata; and along the Newport coast over some juicy ahi tuna at Bear Flag…cream.

I am proud to have diversified my reading from being a self-help merchant to tapping into Murakami, Hawking, and Liu Cixin; proud to have hosted my first Living Room, marrying my life from abroad to our senior year; proud to have wrote; proud to have absolute degenerate spontaneity. Skiing from France to Italy? Fuck it we ball; and most importantly, I’m proud to have been a great son to my dearest mama.

This year, though, wouldn't have been perfect without the fair share of challenges. I started the year off with a messy fight with family; a weird African fungus on my leg that made me think I was going to kiesh; a moment where the past heinously crept up and pushed me to be the most vulnerable I’ve been to the people that matter; accepted that ships will sail; experienced USDA-prime FOMO amid my quest to find the wife; and struggled hard to merge the life I had abroad to my life in LA.

Struggling to adjust back to LA felt like organ rejection. I couldn’t focus and lock in. I felt like I was floating aimlessly in a limbo trying to throw shit on a wall and see if anything would stick. Like mate, I was going to arb nail extensions from China and genuinely thought that selling bottled-water face wash was my founder moment.

But everything has its silver lining. Floating aimlessly in a limbo exposed gaps that I wouldn't have otherwise caught if I kept moving fast. I was able to realize 1) what I need to deeply work on and 2) my life’s mission I think

Radical accountability. I must be a man of my word—do as I say, say as I do. Too many times have I caught myself saying things that I don’t mean to evoke a certain reaction. More importantly, too many times I say things to myself, promises, that I break. Confidence is derived from competence. If we aren’t even able to honour our own words, how can we trust ourselves? Yes, I’ve found my confidence but to sustain confidence requires radical accountability.
Education? I recently read somewhere that to label our ambitions is to constrain them, so I’ll try not to. But I believe everyone’s purpose in this world is to, in some capacity, better humanity. As a product of the system, I feel strongly about how broken the education system is—with the symptom being lack of curiosity. I want to solve this problem. Just imagine a world where every kid lives up to their full potential and has the ability to genuinely understand what is that they want to do. I don’t have immediate answers so I will spend this year testing how I can somehow reform the way we think about education.

With this, I’d like to share a few important realizations you’ve probably heard me yap about.

Curiosity

The curiosity to formulate a hypothesis and the agency to validate it. We must have both the horizontal breadth to ask questions and the vertical depth to focus and put in the work to validate it. A child-like curiosity breeds confidence, conviction, and colour. It allows us to engage in first-principles thinking, where the fractal nature of knowledge continuously pushes us to explore and master the fundamentals. By understanding the fundamental building blocks of our lives, we can then construct, own, and operate in our unique world view.

How do we systematically grow curiosity?

Knowledge plants: Curiosity serves as the seed, agency acts as the water that nurtures it, and the soil—our chosen environment—determines how well it can thrive. A shift in environment shows us the habits, people, and thoughts that dampen our curiosity.

Confidence

Confidence stems from competence, which stems from conviction. Conviction can only be formed through direction, which is found through information, generated by action.

Our Senses

Nature heals us. How we take in information is how we see the world. Most of the time we use a few of our senses. We drown out a lot of our senses with day to day tasks (music, phone, talking with people). We rarely pay attention to the minute fluctuations of nature. Through deep sensory meditation we are able to deeply encode the present and feel alive.

Stop stressing…

There are two ways I’ve learned to go about dealing with irrational desires and stress.

Life is so beautiful, the fact that we can breathe, see, speak to the ones we love and hear their voices while being healthy is all we need. We are so incredibly lucky to be alive, everything else in life is a gift––stop asking for more.
No challenge we go through is really that deep, or hard. There are literal children being blown up in Gaza so stop bitching and focus on what we already have and who we strive to be––lock the fuck in.

Life is meaningless

This is a strong opinion loosely held. Within this vast cosmos, humans are infinitesimally insignificant. We are literally random, probabilistic, particles that float around in the universe. Camus tells us that by staring at the meaninglessness of life we are able to derive meaning on our own. By accepting this void can we begin to realize our power to shape life to what it wants to be. Time is only linear because we make it to be. Aside from the few natural laws that seemingly govern our universe, everything is up for grabs.

Entropy of Ideas

Using the concept of entropy as an extended metaphor to human minds and ideas. The nature of entropy eventually erodes passive ideas and minds into stagnation and complete uniformity. Humans, however, are inherently negentropic systems (opposite of entropic) that take in complex, disordered, information to build ordered, structured, thoughts. To ensure that our ideas and minds do not succumb to entropy, we must constantly reinvent, refine, and reflect—powered by the curiosity and agency to build and validate hypotheses.

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What was beautiful:

Anfield with parents; Greece -> CPH pipeline; The Italians; The skiiiiii; EGGS FROM SEKS; The Ruby; TATA bar; Duck and Cover; Playing for CBS!; Certain obsessions with someone, or someplace…; Getting lost in copenhagen; magical Morrocans; apres; a pint of fockin Guiness; The Louisiana museum…magic; noma; The routine: workout, steam, focus, read, journal; Running hk/sh with the boy; dining room convos at 1350 w 37th; Realizing that someone that exists in life; breaking 80; Cayucos beachfront; The. Fucking. Living. Room; The attempted schemes; Inventing a new beach sport with the boys; calixina island; Daniel’s subtle rhetorical allergy question at Prime Seafood Palace; Running the 6 with the bros…egg; lola’s xmas dinner; seeing mom babysit Karl.

What I’ll continue to wonder about:

Ways to sustain hyper-accountability; How to index our success not on a result; how is my sense of humour and am I serious about it; what will my first hypothesis be in education and community building; how did the greatest minds throughout history (Franklin, Tesla, Da Vinci) think and live; design with AI; my obsessions; history of Ottomans; the labels of our beliefs.

Wrap.

So…this is it. This concoction is actually an amalgamation of many many different pieces of writings into one. Every sentence has a greater story that I’d love to tell you all more about, perhaps in person over some drinks and food at…The Living Room. I am eternally grateful for every single soul that I can call my dear friend. I love you.

2024 has been the best year of my life. But without a doubt, 2025 will top it easy. I know it. As I'm thinking about the proverbial “turning the page” as many of us are approaching graduation, all I can think is honestly fuck that. Every day is a gift to live life to its maximum intensity, whether its heads down focused on mastering our craft or vigorously traversing around the world. Lets focus on the present and let the world be ours.

With maximum love,

Ozzy

written in Markham, Ontario and Brooklyn, NYC

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