The Beginning of Everything

Welcome to my (newly revamped) Beehiiv newsletter!

You’re probably wondering why I’m on here, again. If you were one of my super OG followers, you remember I did a 10-week sprint last summer 2024, documenting my life and sharing weekly learnings along the way.

It was fun, until I became too scattered with my priorities.

But now, I’m officially bringing it back - all because of one tweet that changed my life:

Needless to say, everything changed from there. (And yes, I landed the role with Alex :) I actually wrote the full story on my Substack - you can check it out here.

After chatting and hopping on calls with some of my new friends, many expressed interest in learning more about my journey as a former international classical pianist breaking into the world of entrepreneurship.

So here we are.

I’m (re)starting this Beehiiv newsletter because I want to share weekly lessons on everything I learn in my business journey. I’ll be taking you from 0 to 1, as an ambitious 19 y/o college student building his legacy from scratch.

And if you’re reading this, you’re part of the OG fam. Cheers! 🍻

This newsletter will resemble a lot like my Twitter. Relatively short posts, but value-packed with actionable insights to level up your life or career.

If you want long-form essays, travel posts, or detailed personal stories, my Substack is the way to go.

Brief Origin Story

If you’re new here, here’s a brief introduction about me:

I spent the first 18 years of my life practicing 3-4 hours a day to become the best classical pianist I could possibly be. Credit my mentors along the way to helping me achieve that goal - forever grateful <3.

I did very well during high school, traveled around the country doing competitions + intensive music camps during summer.

Highlight of it all? Definitely the time I performed Beethoven’s 5th “Emperor” Concerto with the California Youth Symphony during my last year of high school. That was incredibly surreal.

While I could’ve continued that into music school and beyond, I decided to take a step back, went for a typical university path (UCLA), and reconsidered what I actually wanted to do with my life.

Here’s the funny thing, though: when you leave the very thing you’ve spent so much of your life wrapping your identity around, you become fragmented.

So, I fell into a dark hole during my first year of college.

Didn’t know what I wanted to do, had zero support system, and hated the path I was walking down - uninspiring, traumatizing, and misaligned with who I craved to become.

While I don’t look back with a fond eye, it was settled:

I never want to stoop this low ever again.

Here’s the thing about hitting your lowest point: there’s only one to go, and that’s up. So I spent last year, 2024, rebuilding myself one brick at a time.

• Ran my first marathon at Santa Rosa, PRs in 5k and 10k

• Started a podcast hosting 20 episodes + guests with 250k+ followers

• Doubled down on music films, premiered 2 official movies + 2 albums

• Became an operations partner for Peter Yang’s newsletter with 100k+ subs

• Cold DM’ed into Andrew Yeung’s exclusive tech event, Lumos House in Bel Air

And from there, I stumbled across a niche corner of Twitter - the tech and business world.

For the first time, it felt like I found my “people:”

• Those who radiated high agency, curiosity, and collaboration

• Those who weren’t willing to settle for something mediocre

• Those who were working on interesting projects, jobs, or opportunities

And now, you can say the rest was history. Currently dabbling with permissionless apprenticeship working under my favorite entrepreneurs and falling deeper into the rabbit hole of business, startups, VC - all that jazz.

What will happen next? Stay tuned to find out, and you heard it first from me:

This is just the beginning of everything.

That’s it from me.

I’ll see you in the next!

Cheers,

Jeston Lu

Thanks for reading! If you have anything you want me to cover, fill out this form here. What did you think of today’s edition? Would love to hear back from you: just hit “reply” or reach out to me on X/Twitter.