I think I’ve spent most of my life trying to make my world a little bigger.

When I was 16, I packed two suitcases and left home.

I grew up in Kunming, in southwest China, and I loved my childhood there. But I had already started to realise that the world was much larger than the one I knew. My family had been fortunate enough to take me travelling when I was younger. Australia, America, Japan, Singapore… Every trip left me with the same feeling:

There was so much more to see.

So I left.

I came to New Zealand, went to university, and found myself studying two subjects that seemed very different on paper: statistics and marketing.

In hindsight, they were probably the most predictable combination for me.

I’ve always liked taking something that exists in one world and making it understandable in another.

I did that first with language. I grew up speaking Chinese and eventually learned to think and work in English. But somewhere along the way, I realised I was doing the same thing with ideas.

That translation, between the analytical and the human, is probably the thread that runs through everything I’ve done.

My first job took me deep into the analytical side. I worked in electricity demand forecasting, learning how to make decisions when the future is inherently uncertain. I loved the intellectual challenge, but eventually I found myself looking beyond the numbers. I wanted to be closer to the part where decisions actually become experiences: what a customer sees, clicks, feels, and ultimately chooses.

So I did something that made very little sense if you were looking at my career as a straight line.

I started an e-commerce jewellery company.

For almost two years, I got to be everything: founder, marketer, buyer, designer, ecommerce manager, customer service, operations, finance. Sometimes all in the same day.

I travelled while I built it, and somewhere between running the business and seeing more of the world, I learned two things.

The first was how much I genuinely enjoy solving problems across different disciplines.

The second was that doing everything yourself is not the same as building something great.

You can learn a lot by being the person who has to figure everything out. But eventually, you learn that the best things are built by people who know when to go deep themselves, and when to bring someone brilliant alongside them.

That brought me back to corporate life, but I came back differently.

I no longer feel the need to try everything.

I want to go deep. To become unusually good at solving difficult problems, particularly the ones that sit between disciplines and therefore don’t have an obvious owner.

And I still have the same instinct I had at 16.

If something doesn’t make sense, I want to know why.

If something is unnecessarily difficult, I want to know whether it could be simpler.

If someone tells me something can’t be done, I usually want to understand the reason before I accept it.

Maybe that’s just curiosity.

Maybe it’s restlessness.

I’ve never been entirely sure of the difference.