On not taking yourself seriously

The quietest discipline in business is forgetting your own importance for an hour.

By Sovandarapor (James) Kong · 2026-04-01 · Life

The owner walks the Moo Moo farm in the same shirt every week. One of the men at the BRM mill in Kampong Thom does the count himself when he wants to be sure of it. The woman who runs operations has never raised her voice in my hearing.

They are the strongest people I work with in Cambodia and they have one habit in common. They do not perform themselves. They are quiet because they are busy.

I do the opposite whenever a meeting goes sideways. On the drive home my mind starts rehearsing what I should have said. It drafts the email I will send tomorrow, builds a small case for the defence, runs the whole thing again with better lines. None of that is work. The work was the meeting, and the meeting is over.

The nondual lens earns its keep here. There is no separate person in here who needs defending. There was a meeting, it went the way it went, and there is a next step. The story about how I performed gets added afterwards, on top, and it costs an hour I could have spent on the next step.

I still care, probably too much. I lose sleep over the rice harvest and the Atlanta sell-through and the next round of investor calls. The caring no longer rests on a fragile idea of who I am, so it can go into the thing itself.

After a hard call I ask what I would tell a friend in the same position. The answer arrives clean and fast, almost boringly obvious. Then I ask what I am telling myself. That one comes out tangled and takes twenty minutes. The gap between those two answers is the tax.

Most weeks I still pay it. Less than I used to.