Life Lessons – Marlo Yonocruz

What Happens When You Let AI Interview You for Two Days

Shadow work, processing an experience, and love letters to the people I call my daughters — all with a little help from Claude.

Personal Reflection · May 2026

Hello friends, followers, and various people on the internet 👋

So this is a different kind of post. It’s personal in a way that even my yearly reviews haven’t quite been. And honestly, I wasn’t sure I was going to publish it. But I think the process I went through over the past couple of days was genuinely valuable — both for me and potentially for anyone else who’s been using AI tools and wondering how deep you can actually take them. So here we are.

Fair warning: this is long. There’s a table of contents below. Feel free to skip to whatever section interests you most. 😅

Table of Contents

2025 Life Lessons: Love, Health, and Success

What 2025 has taught me about health, success, and love.

Me looking at the people about to ruin my photo
📸: Alanis

At the end of every “Year in Review” mega-post, I compile a list of all the major Life Lessons I’ve learned that year. A few years ago, I started the tradition of separating this into a separate post from the main 2025 Year In Review post.

In compiling these lessons, I noticed they fell into 3 major categories. I have grouped them accordingly:

Love & Relationships
Success & Happiness
Health & Well-Being

Feel free to skip to the sections most interesting or relevant to you. Or just go through them all if you’re in the mood.

A Year in Review: 2025

Blessings, achievements, goals, and life lessons of 2025.

Me thinking about why I’m holding this balloon 🎈🧐
📸: Bonnie Tan

Hello friends, followers, and various people on the internet 👋 Happy New Year! 🎊

2025 was such a year of discovery and growth for me personally. And in the spirit of keeping up with my new tradition of getting this published exactly on January 1st, I started writing this blog post in mid-October 💪🏼 Fortunately, I was massively productive during the summer (July-Sept) and was able to catch up with my backlog of to-do items. Once I finished everything else, I was able to start early on this and not stress out about getting it done on time. Also, it’s crazy to think this is the 10th year in a row I’m doing this yearly review! 🎉

Table of Contents

Money Mastery: 10+ Years of Personal Finance Wisdom Distilled From 3 Essential Books

Money Mastery: 10+ Years of Personal Finance Wisdom from 3 Essential Books

Companion article to One Thousand Gurus Podcast Special Episode #60

The Books That Changed How I Think About Money

Over the past decade, I’ve read dozens of personal finance books. Some were helpful, many were repetitive, and a few were downright misleading. But three books stood out as absolute game-changers—books that I wish someone had handed me when I first started my financial journey.

Today, I’m going to share the most powerful insights from these three books and show you how they work together to create a complete personal finance system:

I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi = The SYSTEM (the how-to mechanics)
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel = The MINDSET (the behavioral foundation)
The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins = The PHILOSOPHY (the long-term strategy)

By the end of this article, you’ll have a complete roadmap for building wealth—not just tactics, but the psychology and philosophy to back them up.

Why These Three Books?

Here’s what makes this combination so powerful: Most financial advice focuses on only one dimension. You’ll get books that are all tactics (“open this account, buy that fund”) or all philosophy (“money is energy, abundance mindset”).

But real financial success requires three things working together:

The mechanics – You need a system that actually works
The mindset – You need to understand why you make the money decisions you do
The strategy – You need a long-term plan that compounds over decades

These three books, when read together, give you all three dimensions. Let me show you how.

2024 Life Lessons: Love, Health, and Success

What 2024 has taught me about health, success, and love.

At the end of every “Year in Review” mega-post, I compile a list of all the major Life Lessons I’ve learned that year. A couple years ago, I started the tradition of separating this into a separate post from the main 2024 Year In Review post.

In compiling these lessons, I noticed they fell into 3 major categories. I have grouped them accordingly:

Love & Relationships
Success & Happiness
Health & Well-Being

Feel free to skip to the sections most interesting or relevant to you. Or just go through them all if you’re feeling in the mood.

A Year in Review: 2024

Blessings, achievements, goals, and life lessons of 2024.

2024 was me trying to be present and enjoy the moment
📸: Marco Flores @marco.2am

Hello friends, followers, and various people on the internet 👋 Happy New Year’s Eve! 🎊

2024 was such a wild ride. In the spirit of constantly improving, for the first time in my Yearly Review history, I’ve managed to get this published right on December 31st 🥳💪🏻 (1 day better than last year haha)

Table of Contents

Why Am I Writing This?

This post allows me to simultaneously:

Self-reflect on my past year
Share personal highlights with those who are curious or interested

These year-end reviews give me the space to recap memorable events, express gratitude, compile my personal statistics, and examine how much progress I made on my personal goals.

My Tradition Since 2016

Since 2016, I’ve been doing these posts mainly for my own records. However, these reflections may also be beneficial to others, so I write them with the intention of a public audience reading them.

For those who don’t know, I do 3 other types of journal reflections: daily, weekly, and monthly. This yearly reflection is somewhat of a compilation of those reflections but formatted in a more digestible way for the public.

Past Years In Review:

In a separate post, I’ve compiled all of the 2024 Life Lessons I’ve learned this year. My hope is that sharing my own hard-earned lessons will benefit those who may encounter similar challenges. I also want to compile these into a book one day, since it’s my long-term dream to become a published author.

How to overcome a negative self-image and self-talk

Overcoming negative self-image.

As part of a bingo fundraiser for my dance team, a friend of mine requested some thoughtful advice on a specific topic:

“How to overcome negative self-image and negative self-talk, and being hypercritical about myself”

I thought this was an excellent topic because I think many of us struggle with the same issue at some point in our lives, myself included.

When I think of what causes negative self-talk or having a negative image of oneself, two ideas come to mind:

Comparison
Perfectionism

2023 Life Lessons: Love, Health, and Success

What 2023 has taught me about health, success, and love.

In compiling these lessons, I noticed they fell into 3 major categories. I have grouped them accordingly:

Love & Relationships
Success & Happiness
Health & Well-Being

Feel free to skip to the sections most interesting or relevant to you. Or just go through them all if you’re feeling in the mood.