I’m alive!!! Sorry for the radio silence these past two months. Each time I wanted to blog, it was out of deep frustration and I felt those accompanying thoughts were best kept to myself. I just got back from a mini brain detox, where little wi-fi, little work, little stress translated to a whole lot of perspective.

I’ve only confessed this to one person: I’ve been feeling pretty disheartened the last few weeks. There wasn’t one specific incident that made me feel this way, but rather multiple road bumps that happened one after another. It felt like we kept running head first into slammed doors. There were times I felt like I wasn’t doing enough despite working 24/7, times it felt like we had made zero progress and many times I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life/time. We weren’t doing anything wrong, but we weren’t exactly doing anything right either.

So when my dad told me he was going to Seoul for business, I leaped at the chance to digitally escape. I needed to disconnect and reflect on the maddening thoughts stirring up a sh*tstorm in my head.

On my flight to Seoul, I finished my copy of “By Invitation Only“. Racing through each chapter, I felt myself oscillating between feeling irritated (raising money is “…more an art than science”) to lazy (A&A emailed over 20,000 people inviting them to join Gilt) to sympathetic (at one of their investor meetings, the firm’s partners “muted the volume and continued their conversations, obviously more interested in their BlackBerrys and in cracking jokes to one another than in hearing about Gilt”) to obviously inspired. I took down notes as I absorbed all the little details of Gilt’s journey. Anything I thought we could apply to ZAOZAO, I quickly turned into a “task” on Redbooth (our online collaboration tool).

Not only did the book provide me with new ideas, it also injected a healthy dose of optimism in me. I realized at the end of the day, no matter how hard your work or how dedicated you are, perseverance and grit are what really makes a difference. There will ALWAYS be trying times but those moments, like everything else in life, will soon pass. Nothing worth having ever came easy.

Sketch from Sophia Amoruso’s book #GIRLBOSS.

A few nights ago, the same friend I confessed these feelings to asked me, “If you knew what you know now back then, would you still do this?” My answer was immediately, “Yes”.

xx Ling