The Week I Flew (Back) To Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

This Week:

The first thing I did when I got back to Kuala Lumpur.
My routine the past week and what it’s felt like being back here.
The cost of living, pros/cons, and what the people are like.

February 2025

Su	M	T	W	Th	F	S
26	27	28	29	30	31	2/1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	3/1

Where In The World Was I?

🇹🇷 Kadıköy (Istanbul), Turkey
✈️ from IST To KUL
🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Metrics From The Week

Back To Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 🇲🇾

WE ARE SO BACK

I landed on Monday morning, dropped my bags at the hostel I’m staying at (same one as last year), then walked around Avenue K and Suria KLCC malls, KLCC park, and went down to the Pavilion mall. It’s all coming back.

My first priority 😂: Food City at Avenue K to get a boba ($1.43) and vietnamese noodle bowl ($3.37).

I wrote last week’s blog post/newsletter in the afternoon.

Then my second priority 😂: Went back to the Pavilion mall food court to get a pad see ew with chicken (+ extra chicken) and thai tea ($5.83)

I LIVED at these places last year. Ahhh I love this place.

So for some context, I was here a year ago for about 2 months:

The Week I Settled Into A New Home In Kuala Lumpur (January 7, 2024)

The Week I Reassessed The Direction Of My Business Venture (January 14, 2024)

The Week Of Expanding Perceptions, Niche Research, and Incredible Food (January 21, 2024)

The Week I Did My First-Ever VO2 Max Test (January 28, 2024)

The Week Of Intentional Incremental Improvements (February 4, 2024)

The Week I Stopped Ideating And Started Coding (February 11, 2024)

The Week Of Routine, Thai Food, And Tangible MVP Progress (February 18, 2024)

The Week Of UI Work, Rainy Season, And A Familiar Hostel (February 25, 2024)

The Week I Finally Left Kuala Lumpur And Flew To George Town, Malaysia (March 3, 2024)

And very weirdly, it feels like nothing has changed…

It feels like I never left…

I really feels like February 2024.

I can’t quite put it into words, but it’s such a strange feeling.

Maybe something with the environment being the same, combined with being here for a while and solidifying so many memories, I dunno.

Back To The Routine

I found a co-working space this time, just a short walk from where I’m staying. So most of the week looked like this:

7am – wake up, brush/prep
~730am – walk to co-working space
~750am-12pm – work

12pm-1pm – get two meals from Agrain takeout

1pm-4/430/5pm – more work
5pm-645pm – run to Anytime Fitness, work out (or run at KLCC park), then run to a mall (Avenue K)
- I found a new Anytime Fitness that’s closer and doesn’t require the crazy run crossing streets from last year 😂

~7-8pm – dinner and wander around the malls

830pm – back to hostel to Duolingo, post to Instagram, bed
~930/10pm – bed

What It’s Like Here

Cost of Living

I was trying to come up with a word or phrase to describe my experience living in Kuala Lumpur.

The best way I can describe it is that it’s just… efficient.

The cost of living is insanely cheap, it still doesn’t compute in my brain.

But the city has all the amenities of any first world city: metro, big shopping malls, tons of restaurants, high quality gyms, hospitals, dental clinics.

That’s not to say it’s perfect. The air quality generally sits between 50-100 AQI and there are definitely not the same standards as first world country cities. I was walking down the street and all of a sudden thick white smoke started billowing out of a sewer vent right by all these people eating outside of this cafe who started running away (I think it was from a construction site nearby) 😬

But besides that…

Oh and making sure you don’t get hit by a car while most of the way through a crosswalk crossing a street 😅

Besides those… It’s great.

The People

It’s a very working/corporate/business type of city. I go out to grab lunch and the malls and food courts are filled with people dressed in their business casual attire, walking in groups, with their name badges around their necks.

It’s also very diverse and pretty much everyone speaks English.

Malays: 45–50%
Chinese: 40–45%
Indians: 7–10%
Others: Around 2–3%

So anyways, most people are of that same type of “just doing their thing living and working” mindset. BUT, I find that people generally are much more nice and friendly here.

SALA Burrito Guy

I went to SALA (vegan place) after a workout and on Tuesdays they have buy one taco get one free.

The guy said, “you like tacos?”

“Yeah, but…”

and he kind of finished my sentence “you look like you want something more” 😂

I ordered a burrito.

Then I came back either the next day or the day after.

I ordered another burrito and I thought he gave this kind of skeptical look on his face, so I laughed and said “you think it’s not enough?”

He chucked and said, “No, can can!”

Halfway through making it he said, “you like tofu?” and I said “sure”

He finished the burrito and said “I added some extra tofu for you” as he gave it to me. No extra charge, no special request, nothing.

Anytime Fitness Coaches

And I’ve been to Anytime Fitness now 3 times and there’s usually a couple fitness coaches working with people and some other staff around.

Almost every time, I see the staff laughing with each other, messing around, play boxing, just having fun.

It feels weird to have to write this out, but it’s not something I’m used to seeing, but it brings a smile to my face when I’m in there.

Business Update

Most of my time went to editing this past week’s video demoing my software, scripting my next video, and recording my next one.

However, I did some prioritizing of the long list of feature ideas I have for my software and knocked out some small things in between: emailing me when jobs fail, parallelizing things, and tweaking/improving the strategy recommendation algorithm.

I was also finding (and got some feedback) that some of titles weren’t adhering to my visual title much anymore, so I added this new style tweaking layer to my video idea algorithm that takes generated titles and tweaks them back to the creator’s style.

Thoughts From The Week

Strategy Planning

Macro-wise, I’ve been slowly shifting my focus away from adding stuff to my software and more on the personal branding side. My perceived bottleneck right now is that I need a little more social proof traction with my own YouTube audience.

This would help me validate that my software doesn’t just solve what it solves now, save creators time researching and give them video idea inspirations, but actually gets to what people really want: more subscribers, more leads, more money, more conversions, etc. I’ve been able to show that it can save time but not that it can get the underlying results that people want, which is more valuable.

But maintaining with my theme and brand, I don’t want to make my channel always and only about YouTube growth, getting views on YouTube, being a YouTube creator and always pushing and funneling people to sign up to my software. I’m in a fortunate position where I don’t have to do that, but that’s also just not at the core of me and not only what I want to be known for.

I’m leaning more towards a step above, an umbrella where my not only my software fits, but also I can speak about my life, share insights, share learnings, and document this journey I’m on.

Doing this shifts my “niche” away from the target customer of my software to be either a subset or an overlap, though. Maybe that’ll be a mistake and it will almost definitely make it take longer to get traction, but it might be the most sustainable route for me. At the end of the day, I am trying to build long term and build sustainably, so ~~maybe it’ll work out~~ I’ll make it work out.

Novelty As Rest

Something about Kuala Lumpur is that the main social hubs are malls, kind of like Singapore.

What I realized being back here was how wandering around malls is such a good way to disconnect and rest on the micro.

This is something I realized I didn’t get the opportunity to do in Porto and Istanbul, where I guess you could say things are more “spread out.” It just feels funny to say that because the U.S. is the king of being “spread out” 😂

I dunno, it’s something about the sensory stimulation – multiple levels of shops and signs – combined with the natural… entropy? randomness? variance? of having a lot of other people also walking around, shopping eating, etc.

Chapter Close, Chapter Open

A good way to describe how I feel right now is what I wrote in The Week I Made It To The Other Side (September 29, 2024) when I finally got up into the Colorado mountains with my van:

Up until this point I had been focused on getting things done and set up administrative-wise. But now I can finally focus on just living, working, and enjoying this experience.

Life is finally back to the now. Back to locking in, getting intentional about my routine, working out, learning, and growing.

Does that mean I’m done driving around? No, I’ll continue to move around, but now with the focus of living and working and NOT trying to get somewhere. I do have some rough plans for the next couple weeks/months, but it’s all within that focus.

I’ve found myself in these transition periods every so often, where I’m not fully in the present because I’m working towards something different (driving across the country, flying somewhere new in a couple weeks/months, etc.).

But it’s these moments when that closes, when I just like to appreciate the gratitude for “making it” before I inevitably starting looking forward to what’s next.

Much of the past couple months had been moving with the intention of getting back to SE Asia.

And well, now I’m here.

And for that, I’m grateful.

“Alignment” is probably the best word for this feeling.

My Message To The World

I was standing outside KLCC watching the water show when a guy with a little handheld mic approached me. He asked me some questions (where I’m from, what I like about KL, what I do, etc.) and that he’s just interviewing people for a YouTube video.

At the end he said “if there’s one thing you would want to say to the world, what would you say.”

I thought I’d capture it and share it here as well.

202502191950 If I had one message to share to the world what would I say

#motivation #self-confidence 

Just got approached by a guy making a YouTube video interviewing people outside Suria KLCC.

He asked me how long I've been in KL, what I like the most about it, what I do, and then, if I had one message to share to the world, what would I say?

I said something like:

Learn about yourself, self-awareness.

Everyone online tells you how you should live your life, based on what worked for them.

But, that might not work for you.

So find out what you resonate with.

Social Exchanges

202502201757 If they don't look up then maybe it's not even worth saying anything

#socialskills 

So I had the thought today...

See I've been trying to push to start more social exchanges.

And I've been working at this co-working space the last 3 days. It's places like these where they are literally THE places for meeting people for me.

I've been trying to smile at people at the very least. 

And I noticed some people just don't look up at me as I walk by.

I think of that "waiting for permission" thought.

But I thought today, if someone doesn't look up at you, maybe they're just not the type of person to have an exchange with, ya know? Like they are showing you that they aren't receptive to someone saying something to them...

So just move on, don't beat yourself up about it.

Food From The Week

Bunch of repeats so I’ll just share one from each:

Agrain – bowls ($11.21, $12.37)
- I’ve been getting double lately for lunch, eating a keto/veggie around 12/12:30/1pm, continuing work, then eating the second around 2:30/3pm, it’s been working well!
SALA – vegan place, burrio ($5.77)
Food City (clay pot place) – chicken and shiitake mushrooms with rice ($3.12)
Food City (vietnamese place) – chicken rice noodle bowl ($3.37)
The Fish Bowl – salmon poke bowl ($6.46)
Pavilion food court (thai place) – chicken pad see ew, extra chicken, thai tea ($5.83)