I’m reading a great little book called The Practice Of Not Reacting: Zen Wisdom For A Happy Life by Ryushun Kusanagi. The publisher is Portfolio Penguin, the same publisher for my 2027 book, Your Children Will Be OK.
One of the core concepts is that all of us want to be recognized for our contributions. At work, at home, at school, by our own parents. When the recognition doesn’t come, we feel disappointed and bitter.
But Buddhism believes that desire itself is the source of all suffering, and the desire to be recognized is just one form of it. Let go of the wanting and you live a happier life.
That was a revelation moment for me.
In Asian culture, respect is the currency. You give it to your elders, your teachers, and your bosses, and you absorb an unspoken promise in return: do good work, behave honorably, and respect flows back to you.
So for too long, I unnecessarily wanted recognition for things I’d done. And not just the big things.
Here’s a recent one. I took both kids out for eight hours on a Sunday so my wife could have the house to herself. Fed them, taught them sports, read together, drove them all over the city, brought them home tired and intact. Then I walked in the door with dinner for her and waited.
Nothing extravagant. A standing ovation. Some trumpets and balloons. A short speech about my sacrifice, delivered through tears of appreciation and joy.
What I got was a thank you and a question about how long they napped in the car to get a better idea of when she should plan for bedtime.
And I felt disappointed.
That’s when it clicked. Wanting the recognition was pulling attention away from the only thing that actually mattered, which is spending time with our kids before the golden window closes.
Now I’m working to let it go.
The FIRE Movement I Helped Start, According To Nobody
I started writing about escaping the corporate grind and retiring early in July 2009, the year I launched Financial Samurai.
Go dig through the archives. Aggressive saving and investing. Getting promoted faster so you can leave sooner. Negotiating a severance so you don’t walk away from five years of deferred compensation. Beating one-more-year syndrome and amassing F U money.
I did it myself in 2012 at age 34, walking away from a 13-year equities career in banking.
Then the FIRE movement took off as people became disenchanted with work post the global financial crisis. And Financial Samurai got referenced a lot less than I thought was warranted.
For a while, that was annoying, as I was passed over for writers about the topic who started years later, but who looked like the journalist writing the story.
Since coming to America in 1995 for high school, I’ve been acutely aware that it’s harder to get recognized as a minority here. It was a strange thing to absorb, having spent my childhood in a few Asian countries as part of the majority, or at least part of a very large minority. You don’t notice water until someone takes you out of the pool.
And the math is understandable.
If you’re part of the 60% majority, you simply have more chances to connect with people who share your background. People hire, promote, quote, and platform others who remind them of themselves. And more people in the majority are in positions of power.
It’s why your management team looks weirdly homogenous. It’s why neighborhoods in every American city skew one way or another. It’s why award winners look like their award granters. And it’s why podcast guests are similar to the hosts.
Nobody has to be a villain for the outcome to be lopsided. It just is the way it is.
The Market Share Challenge
Let me put this in terms an old equities guy can appreciate. Market share.
Say you’re part of the 60% majority. You need to win just 10.1% of your own group to reach 6.06% of the entire country. A tenth of your natural audience. You can be mediocre and still get there.
Now say you’re part of a 6% minority. You can win every single person who looks like you. One hundred percent market share. Total domination, zero competition, nobody left to convert.
You end up at 6.0%.
You lose. To a guy with a 10% share who is not on your level of expertise or effort. How demoralizing.
This isn’t a metaphor. Non-Hispanic white Americans are roughly 58% of the U.S. population. Asian Americans are roughly 6%.
The math explains why “just build within your own community” is a structurally losing strategy for a small group. It’s why the ceiling feels low even when you’re doing everything right. And it’s why the guy who gets quoted in every FIRE article doesn’t have to be better than you. He just has to be legible to more people.
So the minority operator has two options. Accept a capped market, or refuse the category entirely and compete for everyone.
I picked the second one. Financial Samurai has never been an Asian American personal finance site. It’s a personal finance site. But that choice has a cost. You’re competing head-on against people with a 10x tailwind, which means you have to be dramatically better just to draw even.
Fine. Be dramatically better.
Or stop comparing altogether, find your intrinsic motivation, and keep going. That’s what I’ve tried to do as I enter my 18th year of publishing three posts a week.
Bought Rental Property To Capture The Growth
Because I recognized this market share reality early, I decided to build a rental property portfolio in San Francisco. If I couldn’t get hired at the tech companies driving the boom, I could at least own the housing their employees needed.
The irony is thick. Every one of my tenants is white. Every one of them has a job I wasn’t going to get in tech. And one set of them will likely be able to buy a dream home on a big lot the moment their AI company goes public and the shares unlock. I’m grateful for their on-time payments.
We’re all doing fine. Sometimes participating in the boom is better than being invited to it.
Over time, I made peace with not being credited for helping kickstart the modern-day FIRE movement. The more I wrote and the more I enjoyed life, the less I cared. Besides, if recognition were the goal, I would have stayed in finance, made Managing Director so I could update my LinkedIn profile.
Then Time Magazine gave me some great perspective, in the form of comedy.
Time’s 100 AI Left Off The Guy Who Makes AI Possible
On August 27, 2026, Time released its fourth annual TIME100 AI list.
Obvious names made it. Dario and Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, currently in its quiet period before its blockbuster IPO. Sam Altman of OpenAI. Elon Musk. Larry Ellison.
Also on the list: Bernie Sanders, Paris Hilton, Ben Affleck, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Interesting.
Do you know who wasn’t on it? Jensen Huang. The co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA, the company whose chips make essentially every frontier AI model possible.
NVIDIA had just reported $96.2 billion in quarterly revenue, including $89 billion from data centers, up 117% year over year. This year, NVIDIA’s sole representative on the list is its head of sustainability. AMD’s Lisa Su got cut too.
I chuckled internally. If two Taiwanese-American chip CEOs who literally built the physical foundation of artificial intelligence can get bumped for Paris and Joseph, why on earth should I care about not being credited for a personal finance movement that has impacted millions of people for the better?
Jensen has a $150+ billion net worth, a wife, two kids, his health, and a role in business and society almost nobody will match this century. He probably chuckled too and got back to work.
Here’s the thing. Zuckerberg, Nadella, Hassabis, and Karpathy got cut too, so it’s not just Time’s editor in chief, Sam Jacobs and British senior editor Ayesha Javed, cutting two Asian Americans. This is a story about what gatekeepers actually optimize for, which is narrative freshness, not contribution.
The 23-Year-Old Who Went From $50 Million To $2.5 Billion In Four Months
While Time was deciding who was influential, Noah Shinn was quietly making the point moot.
Shinn is a 23-year-old founder who registered Spear Street Technology in April 2026 after leaving Sierra. His product, Instinct, is a personal AI agent you text or call. No app to learn. It handles your calendar, your email replies, your travel, your subscriptions.
The funding timeline is wild. Early backers valued it at $50 million. Kleiner Perkins led a $75 million Series A at a $500 million valuation in early August 2026. Several weeks later, on August 26, Index Ventures and Benchmark co-led a $250 million Series B at a $2.5 billion valuation. Total raised: $350 million.
Four months from company registration to $2.5 billion. For a product still in invite-only private beta. That’s wild.
Do you think Noah Shinn is hoping for recognition from Time or any publication that curates a list of influencers? At 23, he built something people are using to plan weddings and cancel hundreds of dollars of subscriptions before it has even publicly launched.
The market recognized him in four months. No committee required.
Rejected By 16 Colleges, Hired By Google
Then there’s Stanley Zhong, who I introduce in my upcoming book,Your Children Will Be OK.
Class of 2023 at Gunn High School in Palo Alto. A 4.42 weighted GPA. A 1590 on the SAT. Founded a free e-signing startup called RabbitSign as a sophomore. Scouted by Google in coding competitions at age 13.
He was rejected by 16 of the 18 colleges he applied to. Not just Stanford and MIT, which almost everybody gets rejected from. UC Davis. UC Santa Barbara. Cal Poly. University of Washington. University of Illinois.
He and his parents were distraught, as any family would be. What is the point of grinding for four years to get into the top 0.1% of academics only to end up with two acceptances? Why couldn’t he get recognized for his academic and entrepreneurial excellence?
Then Google hired him straight out of high school as a full-time software engineer, into a role his family’s court filing says typically requires a PhD or equivalent practical experience. In 2025 he received an “outstanding impact” performance rating, higher than the majority of Google engineers, according to his father.
The Zhong family does care about recognition for the sake of their youngest and future Asian American kids. The Zhong family sued for racial discrimination, using AI to build the case after no law firm would take it.
Recently, Judge James Robart denied the University of Washington’s motion to dismiss Stanley’s Title VI claims (major media will not write about this). His father points out that Stanley has something almost no plaintiff in these cases has: he never enrolled anywhere, so he keeps his legal standing indefinitely.
A kid who was told he wasn’t good enough for UC Davis, a school with a 45.8% acceptance rate, is now the one with leverage.
Choose Results Over Recognition
Life is unfair. You can complain about not being recognized, or you can accept that people tend to favor people like themselves and plan accordingly. If you’re not part of the majority, the mountain is steeper. That’s not a victim statement, it’s a topographical one. You still have to climb. Recognize reality for what it is.
But notice the pattern across all three stories.
Jensen Huang doesn’t need recognition, because NVIDIA prints $96 billion a quarter. Noah Shinn doesn’t need a magazine, because Benchmark and Index wired him $100+ million. Stanley Zhong didn’t need an admissions officer, because Google had already watched him win coding competitions at 13 and hired him.
Every single one of them was validated by a system that measures output instead of subjective vibes.
That’s the whole lesson. Gatekeepers control lists, awards, admissions, promotions, and media mentions. They will almost always favor their own, and they will always chase whatever narrative is fresh. But they do not control results. Results compound whether or not anyone claps.
So build a body of work so undeniable that being left off a list becomes funny instead of annoying. You don’t need an invite if you’re producing great results.
The One Arena With No Gatekeepers
There’s one place in American life where nobody screens your name, your face, your school, your race, or your surname.
The public markets.
You can buy the S&P 500 today with $10 and no interview. You can own a piece of the same companies that rejected you and let them work for you instead. Every quarter the company you couldn’t get hired at grows, your shares grow with it. No committee, connections, or borrowed credibility.
And there’s no 10.1% versus 100% math here. A share of VOO returns exactly the same to the guy with the 60% majority tailwind as it does to you. It’s the only arena I’ve found where the playing field is genuinely, mathematically flat.
That is the great equalizer, and it’s the reason I’ve spent 17 years telling people to build financial independence instead of waiting for permission. Money doesn’t check your last name. It just compounds.
If you’ve ever been passed over for something you clearly earned, don’t waste the frustration. Metabolize it. Rejection is the cheapest fuel available and it never runs out.
But burn it for the right reason. Use it to build something undeniable, not to prove a point to people who were never going to clap.
Because here’s where Kusanagi was right. The world will not bend to your desires. So you can chase the recognition and stay disgruntled, or you can drop the wanting and get on with the work.
Readers, I want to hear from you
Have you ever been overlooked for something you know you deserved? Did you decide the system was rigged, or did you use it as fuel? Do you think being excluded from lists and awards actually costs you anything financially, or is it purely an ego tax?
In the meantime, pick up a copy of Millionaire Milestones: Simple Steps To Seven Figures, my USA Today bestseller. The book gives you the step-by-step framework for building real wealth, in the one arena where no gatekeeper gets to decide whether you’re worthy.
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Financial Samurai began in 2009 and is one of the largest independently-owned personal finance sites today. Everything is written based on firsthand experience, because money is too important to be left up to pontification.
