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Marcus's Friends and Family Update #5
Welcome to Friends and Family Update #5!
🌏Life Changes
- Snowboarding in Hakuba: Spent 2 weeks in Japan, 5 days on the mountain — levelled up from red to black runs.
- Quit Updoc and turned down my Atlassian return offer: After a year of building and shipping at Updoc, I finished up in February to pursue building projects with Sameer and Darcy.
- 10-Day Meditation Retreat: Spent 10 days at Wat Buddha Dhamma. I spent 5 days there last year after my Atlassian internship and really enjoyed it. This time the first week was a personal and spiritual struggle but the last 3 days were incredibly cathartic and enjoyable.
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- Relocated from Sydney: Packed up my life in Surry Hills — sold all our furniture, gave away plenty of books and said goodbye to many awesome friends.
- Currently in Malaysia at The Network School for the next 2 months where I will be locked in on gym and building.
💡Lessons I've Learned
On my 25th birthday, a friend asked me the most important lessons I'd learned in my life so far. Here they are:
- Things are only as meaningful as you make them.
- Assume positive intent
- Everyone fundamentally wants the same things.
- Life is Asymmetric, Play for the upside.
- You can't take it with you.
- "Perfection and power are overrated."
- Happiness = Reality − Expectations. → Learn to enjoy the little things.
- This is only a test.
🧭Frameworks for Living
Given I have a Product Manager brain, I am very fond of frameworks. I feel like they help solidify how to think about the important things in life. Below I've tried to describe visually how my life system has evolved over the last few years:
V1: framework: pyramid of needs or 4,3,2,1 system
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V3 — Health, Wealth, Relationships are interdependent — the empty middle represents flow
Health
Wealth
Relationships
Health 💪
Health to me means one thing: freedom of movement throughout the world. I often take for granted how lucky I am to even have a body capable of taking me wherever I want to go.
At the same time, this body is impermanent — as the Buddha taught, form is fleeting, we don't own this house we only rent it. Knowing I'll one day be decrepit and immobile makes me want to achieve the highest physical prowess I can while I'm young.
"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
"In order for man to succeed in life, God provided him with two means, education and physical activity. Not separately, one for the soul and the other for the body, but for the two together. With these two means, man can attain perfection."
Sleep 🛏️
Sleep is the foundation of health — my true goal in life is to be a professional sleeper. I have spent an egregious amount of time and money trying to optimise my sleep. For me the three biggest levers are:
- Waking up and going to sleep at the same time every night (also the one I struggle with the most)
- Eating earlier in the day
- Quiet, cool & dark bedroom
Some people requested my research on sleep — here is my full sleep system. My 8Sleep measurements below: (note the resting heart rate 😉)
Exercise 🥋🏋️
For me, exercise used to consist of really only two activities: going to the gym and playing basketball. I had always enjoyed going to the gym as it reinforced both the Health & Relationships aspects of living, but I wasn't really genuinely curious about it — for the last year I was more going through the motions. As you can see by my workout tracking below, having a full time job provided a solid foundation to build an exercise routine around.
Thankfully, at the end of last year I discovered BJJ and have been training 2-3x per week for the last 3 months (even when in Japan). This cross collar choke video by the goat of BJJ I have watched more than 20 times.
"The principles of Jiu Jitsu can be applied to every endeavor in life. You have stay calm when you are in bad situations...You need to prioritize your focus of effort. You need to train until you trust yourself to move intuitively, without having to think. You need to move at the right time. You have to defend critical areas. You should not attack your enemy's strongpoints. You must utilize leverage. You cannot let your emotions drive your decisions. You have to establish a good base foundation to build upon. You cannot be overly aggressive, but you can't just allow things to happen. When you make a move, you have to believe in what you are doing. You have to be mentally strong. You have to keep an open mind. You have to continuously learn new techniques while always reinforcing the fundamentals. You have to adapt your plan if circumstances change."
Diet 🥗
As Hippocrates says, all disease begins in the gut. This year I'm really just focused on eating a lot more than I did last year. In June of 2025 I did my first DEXA scan to set a baseline of my body composition. 6 months of gym later I did another one, only to discover that despite lifting heavier and increasing my bone mineral density, I had put on no mass. They advised me this is due to chronic underfeeding. Therefore my goal for this year is to eat massively and consistently. Here are the macros I'll be trying to hit:
Wealth 💰
Wealth to me means three things: Financial, Time and Location Independence. It's my belief that accumulating enough capital unlocks all three.
Why I'm Quitting Updoc
Despite having a great year at Updoc, working with some amazing people and learning a bunch, I've decided to move on to pursue other opportunities. The fundamental reason is: I won't be able to buy a house in the next 3-4 years working as a wage slave at Updoc's current pace.
💼 Learnings from Updoc
- Effective, then efficient, then elegant - First make it work, then make it fast, then make it beautiful. Most people skip straight to elegant and build nothing. Ship the ugly thing that works.
- Revenue covers all sins
- Ruthlessly prioritise - Work based on the biggest constraint to the business.
- Hire only when it hurts
- Don't Hire Greg - Antipatterns to look out for: low agency, high narcissism, basically anything in the CIA field manual for general interference with organisations and production.
Relationships 🌱
If meditation has taught me anything, it's that the only 'real' things that are truly valuable are my relationships. For me, my relationships with people determine so much of how I show up in life, they remind us that we are interdependent in the world and connected to it.
John Donne
No man is an island,
entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friend's
or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind;
and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.
"You are not what you think you are. You are not what they think you are. You are what you think they think you are."
Some of the best resources for relationships:
- Sue Johnson — Hold Me Tight and The Knowledge Project Podcast
- Never Split the Difference
- Adam Lane Smith — Unconditional Positive Regard
Enlightenment ✨
To me enlightenment is really captured by a pervasive and persistent feeling of flow, of oneness and of wisdom. In terms of how enlightenment manifests day to day I refer to the following koans:
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
"What changes when you become enlightened: less than you hope, but more than you think."
The primary way to achieve enlightenment I believe is through having a consistent meditation practice. My journey to meditation:
- Started in High School in 2018 with Headspace
- Found Dr K in university — watch this and his meditation module for a good overview of Meditation and Raja Yoga.
- Now primarily a fan of Michael Taft and his meditations, particularly his Doing Nothing Meditation (shoutout Hugh for putting me on)
📖Books Read This Year
"If you know it exists, it knows you exist. The more you know about it, the more it knows about you. If you can see it, it can see you. And you can see it. You've been looking right at it all afternoon."
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams
Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No by Henry Cloud
"Remember that a boundary always deals with yourself, not the other person."
The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
"The rich get the assets, the poor get the debt, and then the poor have to pay their whole salary to the rich every year just to live in a house."
The Wisdom of the Buddha by Anne Bancroft
Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba
Morning Star by Pierce Brown
Berserk by Kentaro Miura
Breathe: A Life in Flow by Rickson Gracie
The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
That's all for now! Looking forward to sharing more adventures in the next update.
— Marcus
— Marcus