To your involuntary perceptions, a perfect faith is due
Company building + standup comedy in China
This is Will’s Dispatch, a weekly update separate from my essays.
My Latest Updates
Another week in Kunming, China, building the company by night and doing Chinese standup each evening. Some updates:
Company
We’re amped to have officially signed our biggest B2B course-building client on Wednesday. In November we ran a one-day Claude Code workshop for Every. It went great. We’ve now signed on to build monthly programs with them in 2026, starting with another Claude Code workshop in late February. This is a major partnership for us, and we’ve already started executing on the upcoming courses. As we ramp up that project, we’re working hard on our B2B site launch, the first public-facing presence for that side of the business. It’ll debut around Feb 1st…can’t wait for that.
We also announced Cohort 2 of Act Two earlier this week. We’ve revamped the site and also shared the Cohort 2 Version Notes (all the improvements we’ve made based on student feedback). Last Monday we had our first official team meeting (Dan, Linart, and me). It’s been all 1:1 meetings up til now. It felt official to debut our internal systems, ways of working, and weekly sprint cadences. One year ago Dan and I were brainstorming business ideas in a Google Doc. Now we have a proper company.
Chinese
Had an absolutely rocking set on Friday night at my home club. 15 min on the main stage, I opened the show. Crowd was loving it from start to finish, applause breaks, new jokes hit. It was my best set since at least last summer. An indescribable feeling. Left the stage riveted and hungry for more.
The day before I performed an open mic with the rival (bigger) club across town. Right before I hopped on stage, the club owner pulled me aside and told me I’d been “passed”. I’m now allowed to perform on their main stage weekend shows. It’s a big moment. I’ve wanted this ever since I started comedy here in Kunming eleven months ago. Given that it’s China, there’s some paperwork to handle first, and I’m leaving the country next week. But sometime this spring I’ll be on their main stage performing sets in front of hundreds of people.
Earlier tonight I saw one of the biggest comedians in China perform at a huge theater, 1,000+ seat venue. He smashed it. I even chopped it up with the opener for a moment during his crowd work, got the place laughing for sec. He was shocked to have an American in attendance. It was inspiring seeing this side of the Chinese comedy scene, my first theater show. Comedy has exploded in popularity in recent years. I felt that viscerally tonight.
As God is my witness, I am going to headline theaters as a comedian in China.
One Thought: Emerson
Every single day I film a video.
It used to be a daily Chinese video. For over two years, I filmed a ~30 min vid practicing my newest Chinese vocab. Recently I’ve switched to English. Each day I read out hand-written notes that I’ve made from my favorite authors. For the start of January I was on a Neville Goddard kick. This past week has been back to my all-time favorite, Emerson.
Ralph Waldo Emerson is my trusted mentor through time and space. He has changed my life. It’s hard to believe I can feel such kinship with someone who died in 1882, but I do. I’ve read his essays. I’ve read “A Mind on Fire”, the best biography about him. I’ve read his journals. In some cases I’ve read his best essays dozens of times.
Emerson spearheaded the 19th century American transcendentalists. In simple terms: American thinking at the time was held back by Puritanism, rationalism, and over-reliance on Europe. We didn’t think for ourselves. Emerson’s essays were an intellectual declaration of independence. He rejected external restrictions and gave permission to look inward and trust your intuition as a source of truth and authority.
“Trust yourself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
“Insist on yourself. Never imitate.”
Another way to put it: Emerson gives me irrevocable permission to be myself. To build a company. To pursue standup comedy in China, in Chinese.
I film my daily video to keep his ideas in my “context window”. Similar to an LLM, if an idea is in your consistently in your “window” of consciousness, you can reference it quickly. It’s more likely to influence your behavior and attitude, in both overt and subtle ways.
There are hundreds of ideas from Emerson I could share, but below are seven favorites. Beneath that you’ll see a page of handwritten notes from Self Reliance, his top essay, the single best things I’ve ever read.
“A man of character is conscious of being an agent and playfellow of the original laws of the world.
“To your involuntary perceptions, a perfect faith is due.”
“Poetry is joyful and strong. Men write their names on the world as they are filled with this, the majestic manners which belong to him alone.”
“The sadness that man ascribes to the events of society is his own. It is disgraceful to fly to external events for confirmation of your truth and worth. Society is frivolous, and shreds its days into scraps.”
“When the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life.”
“Character reminds you of nothing else: that magnetism which all original action exerts.”
“Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest possible point of view. The soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul.”
To end, here are some photos from the week:
Great updates. The most glorious Emerson passage I've been meditating on recently:
"A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise."