I came across Irina Nica’s post on the 100 things that made her 2023 and felt inspired to do the same. In her article, she mentioned that gratitude didn’t come easily to her, which I relate to. I commonly am able to say “thanks” in the moment, but in my tendency to always drive forward, I hardly pause to reflect on the gratefulness and thankfulness I have for things that happened more than a day earlier.

I didn’t finish it, but at least I have 11 things I’m grateful for in 2023.

1. My wife Eunae supporting me in countless ways, from my drastic move to Chicago and making us long distance, to my career choices and late night workaholism.
2. My manager at ClickUp Jeremy being ok with me working for 1 month in Korea on normal Korea time zones
3. My Korean teacher 이지선 challenging me to speak with more Seoul dialect and adopt extremely clear pronunciation. Thanks to her I’m now able to speak quite conversationally, though I still sound like an elementary school student.
4. Pinkfong’s follow-along YouTube reading of Korean books for kids.
5. Fresh seafood in Udo island
6. Chicago Booth coming in clutch and accepting me off waiting list with a big scholarship in R2.
7. My niece Sum Sum’s reaction to our rabbit baby backpack. It was the most adorable fit of pure excitement I’ve seen in my life.
8. AI allowing me to supercharge my coding skills.
9. Emilia K for inspiring me to test out and pursue no-code programmatic execution
10. Sammy’s WordPress programmatic series that I religiously followed along to build my MVP
11. Derek Sivers for his extremely contrarian & inspirational blog. I’ve read every article and many of them several times.