The future kept knocking on my door. I just kept ignoring it！ 2013. I was 14 when I first heard about BTC. The guy telling me about it looked like he needed money himself. I didn't take it seriously. 2015. Over dinner, a friend from the Columbia Business School told me that one day we wouldn't need wallets. Just scan a QR code on WeChat. I thought it was cool, but still, forgot about it. 2018. A friend was approached about investing in Bitcoin mining. He passed. I didn't think much of it either. 2021. I took a risky bet with my tuition money on vaccine stocks and crypto. Caught the Dogecoin craze, made some money, cashed out, and stopped paying attention. 2023. I started using AI at work. While others spent hours gathering information, I used it to help produce five company research reports in a day. Yet I was still treating AI like a search engine. Constantly asking "why?" instead of "how?" or "can you do this for me?" Fast forward to today. QR payments are everywhere in China. Crypto has gone mainstream. AI is changing how we work and live. Looking back, the signs were everywhere. Some opportunities I didn't recognize. Others I saw but never followed through on. The lesson? The future rarely announces itself as the future. It often starts as something weird, overhyped, or easy to dismiss. So here's a reminder: Stay curious. Try things before judging / defining them. And don't confuse knowing about something with actually doing something about it. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. And keep climbing. ⛰️