I'm walking into heavy traffic, and you can too 🙂↔️
The biggest shock / learning curve living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam hasn’t been the heat, or the language, or anything cultural.
It’s learning how to cross the street 🤪
The safest way to cross the street here is NOT:
1️⃣ look left / right / left
2️⃣ wait for a gap in traffic
3️⃣ then go
…you know, the thing we’ve literally been trained to do since we were toddlers.
(I have a crystal-clear memory of my mom teaching me this on my childhood street when I was like three.)
In Ho Chi Minh City, there is no gap.
The traffic is too dense and too constant.
So to cross the street, you literally have to
JUST WALK SLOWLY INTO HEAVY TRAFFIC‼
And the only way I can convince my body to ignore 32 years of training is to not overthink the traffic and just step out.
And once you've started, it's actually unsafe to
speed up
slow down
change your pace
dart around like you’re playing Frogger
Why does this work?
Ho Chi Minh City traffic is mostly motorbikes, and none of them are really going that fast. Over time, drivers have been trained to clock your speed and flow around you.
So if you walk at a steady, predictable pace, the bikes adjust.
The result is a very surreal feeling of hundreds of motorbikes moving around you like a river.
I literally have to hum to myself the whole time so my nervous system doesn’t short-circuit.
And when I make it to the other side, I kind of get a high from the adrenaline.
✨ I realized that there’s one other place in my life that feels a lot like walking into traffic.
2017 & the terror/excitement of starting my first business.
And honestly, the same feeling still pops up a few times a year, any time something big shifts in my biz.
It feels like stepping into traffic.
You can’t see how it’s all going to play out.
You don’t know which “bikes” will move, or when.
But the biggest lesson from crossing the street is this:
You cannot hesitate.
You have to trust that things will flow around you.
Because if you hesitate at all…
The motorbikes can’t predict what you’re doing; things get dangerous.
Business is the same.
When you don’t trust yourself and start to waffle… people can feel it.
It shows up in:
your marketing plan
your sales copy
the way you talk on coffee chats and calls
the way you make (or avoid) decisions
There’s one more part of this that matters: you still have to go slowly.
You can't sprint into the street.
And if you jump into business decisions and big pivots out of panic, the results are really risky.
I’ve watched:
businesses grow REALLY quickly in the first year… then collapse because they never learned how to pivot or manage change
visionary founders burn out because they rushed into “solutions” from fear and urgency, not clarity
The ones who make it long-term step out firmly and at a steady, sure pace.
They keep going, even when their nervous system is screaming at them to run back to the sidewalk.
👉 So here's what I'm bringing into 2026:
No hesitation.
Trusting that things will move around me as I move forward.
Choosing steady over frantic.
You do not have to sprint. You do have to step out.
If you want support while you’re “stepping into traffic” in your business next year…
Schedule a discovery call and let’s talk through what you’re building and where you’re hesitating.
Here’s the link to grab a spot:
https://client.devinlee.com/public/appointment-scheduler/688d164b5db3da3b4046baf6/schedule
