The second half of 2025 was an intense low period Raymond Hou (Raymond) documented publicly, spanning autumn and winter. In issues 166 to 168 of Raymond Weekly and social posts from the same period, he reviewed the experience in stages: first a family death and further family upheaval, then a series of life and work accidents arriving one after another, and finally a “restart week” in December that brought the arc to a close. The newsletter titles themselves form the arc: issue 166, “How Can Someone Who Fell into the Water Not Be Wet? It Just Takes Time to Dry”; issue 167, “Learning from One Misfortune After Another”; and issue 168, “From a Low Point to a Restart.”
Cluster of Events
The blows during this period were not a single event, but many arriving in close succession. Raymond publicly reviewed one roughly thirty-day window as a list: a traffic accident, his father’s death and the arrangements that followed, and a family member being scammed by someone they trusted.1 He also took a digital-nomad trip to Chiang Mai to change his mood, but instead encountered a series of problems: a rare torrential rain unseen in decades, malfunctioning equipment while releasing sky lanterns, an entire accommodation building losing internet and forcing a weekly livestream course to switch to a mobile hotspot at short notice, and equipment getting wet or breaking.2 The specific amount of money involved in the scam is private financial information and is not included here.
It is worth distinguishing the different nature of the blows. His father’s death and the family scam were major life events, while subsequent travel and equipment accidents were mostly small but mentally draining hassles. Raymond described the period as having “pressed pause” and as being like working as his own personal assistant, repeatedly contacting insurers, customer support, and service providers in different languages to handle the aftermath.
How He Recovered
The recovery methods Raymond described publicly were behavioral rather than psychological reassurances, consistent with his usual methodology.
- Find the smallest action that restores a sense of control: He began with the simplest things in life that gave him the most control, such as tidying the home and clearing out things he no longer used, so life could first be “reset.”
- Maintain self-efficacy through minimum viable tasks: During the low period, he did not aim for high output. He completed “minimum viable” tasks and recorded what he had done to confirm that he was still moving forward.
- Set a ritualized time to reply: He reserved a fixed period each morning to reply to readers’ letters. He deliberately set aside the anxiety that it was rude to leave a message unanswered for more than three days and rebuilt external connections at a slower but steady pace.
- Use outside activities to regain a working state: He accepted livestream and annual-gathering invitations he had originally wanted to decline, partly because conversations with substantial content could help him return to work more quickly.
Raymond also cited two external touchpoints for support: psychologist William James’s story of recovering from depression (first assume that life has meaning, then act to test it), and his friend Manny’s metaphor of a “dark room.” The latter led to a change in attitude: he stopped forcing himself to become someone who could feel at peace with everything and accepted that he had limits. He wrote, “You don’t need to force yourself to be benevolent; you only need to be honest with yourself,”3 connecting this to why he chose a company of one and the Super Individual model: if he did not want to build something very large, it was all the more important to preserve his ability to choose.
Restart Week and Its Significance
Raymond called December “restart week” or “debt repayment week”: he picked up work postponed during the low period, reviewed team workflows, and handed off tasks that could be outsourced to people or tools. One by-product of this period was that he began using AI to write small tools and Automation workflows—Zoom attendance tracking, batch PDF renaming, a prize-drawing tool, and a sales-demo page—because he “didn’t want to do repetitive chores anymore,” and wanted to reserve focus for important work. During the same period, he launched the first mini-course line (“Using Heptabase Effectively in 24 Hours”) as a counter-experiment to his own courses being “too long and too comprehensive.”
For Raymond’s independent business, the low period became a point at which he redefined his priorities and view of scale: do not maximize audience size and scale; preserve flexibility and the right to choose. This position aligns with his long-term Business Thinking and his preference for Launching Paid Membership Subscriptions from the Brand’s Earliest Stage. It also foreshadowed the following year’s shift to AI Agent collaboration and further delegation of repetitive work (see The Super Individual and AI Agent Era (2024–2026)).
Handling the Public Narrative
Raymond chose to publish staged reflections while the events were still unresolved, framing them with “if you also feel like this year has been awful, perhaps my experience can give you some comfort.” He deliberately retained an optimistic but unsentimental tone, repeatedly summarizing events as “the silver lining,” and broke down each accident to find a small piece of good fortune as a form of public emotional processing. This practice of “documenting while recovering” also echoes the way he discovered he could maintain self-efficacy during a low period.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “A Simple Review of These 30 Days,” public Facebook post, 2025-11-17. View original ↩