In 2017, during a quiet and difficult chapter of my life, I sat down with a sketchbook and a pencil. What unfolded on those blank pages was never meant for an audience. It began as a bedtime story for my children, but in truth, it was a lifeline for myself. Life had not gone according to plan, and writing was a way to soothe my own spirit, a quiet mechanism to manifest a path out of my own misery.

It worked well enough that once the season passed, I tucked the manuscript away and forgot about it.

It was only years later, in the wake of the pandemic, that the story resurfaced. The architectural world had taken severe blows, and many practices did not survive the drought. Enduring that period demanded an extraordinary amount of resilience, patience, and love. Just when I needed that reminder most, the manuscript reappeared. Reading it again, I realized that while the story had saved me twice, its message did not belong solely to me.

The Lone Wolf and the Drafting Board

On the surface, Jesse’s Life Tree is a simple tale, but its foundations mirror my own life closely. In the story, Jesse’s childhood carries an unspoken solitude; we never learn where his original home or family went. That quiet abandonment echoes my own early years. Growing up as a lone wolf, I learned to rely on prayer. While I am not religious and belong to no church, I have always possessed an unshakable belief in higher guidance, a quiet inner faith that the tree instantly recognizes in Jesse.

Jesse enters the forest at age seven, which is the exact age I discovered my calling to be an architect.

I was never a naturally gifted academic student. I attended multiple schools and struggled with focus until I entered boarding school at thirteen, which gave me the structure I desperately needed. While academic subjects were an uphill climb, drawing was my sanctuary. By the time I reached university, the hours spent with Rotring pens at drafting tables paid off. I was so comfortable with technique that I used to sketch humorous cartoons in the margins of my assignments, hoping to give the lecturers grading dry physics papers a reason to smile.

Yet when I finally stepped into the professional realm at an admired firm, reality hit hard. The repetitive, slow-moving pace of junior architecture felt stifling. Like Jesse growing impatient waiting for his tree to grow, I lacked the discipline to wait. I wanted impact immediately.

The Cubby Houses: A Dance Floor Detour

Craving instant gratification, I wandered into a cinema by myself one afternoon and watched a film featuring ballroom and Latin dancing. The energy on screen struck a chord. Almost immediately, I decided to take it up. By day I drew buildings; by night I danced.

In the dance world, reward was immediate. My coaches saw potential and pushed me into competitions. I won my first, then another, quickly turning professional. Over the years that followed, dance took me across the globe. I eventually became the South East Asian Professional Champion and the Rising Star Professional Champion of Australia, even designing and building my own dance academy using my architectural training.

In the book, Jesse builds elaborate cubby houses in the forest to distract himself from the tree he abandoned. Those cubby houses were my dancing career. But there is a crucial detail here: Jesse did not abandon his tree out of laziness, nor did he lack love for it. He poured his heart into the tree, but when he couldn’t see immediate results, he channeled that exact same love and grueling hard work into building his cubby houses. He was not sitting idly, waiting for life to reward him for doing nothing. He simply wanted to see something grow, and he was willing to put in the immense effort to make it happen. My dancing career was exactly the same. I worked relentlessly at it.

Still, that detour taught me the most profound lesson of my career.

Teaching beginners to dance requires immense empathy. Stepping onto a dance floor makes people feel intensely vulnerable. I learned quickly that you cannot simply show off your best steps; if your partner cannot follow, they feel small and the dance fails. Your only job is to adapt to their pace, support their movement, and make them look magnificent. That simple principle became the foundation of how I run WOLF Architects today. Architecture is not an exercise in showing off what the designer can do; it is about listening, supporting, and making the client’s life sing.

Branches Without Leaves

Every detour eventually runs its course. Approaching the natural retirement age for competitive dancers, I looked around and realized my old university friends had built established practices and settled into life, while I was drifting.

I tried property development, painting, sculpture, and graphic design. I bought tool belts and tried my hand at amateur carpentry. None of it felt whole. I had become a tree with many sprawling branches, but no leaves to show for them. When Jesse stumbles back upon his forgotten tree, finding it grey and lifeless in the desert sand, that was exactly how my life felt.

Yet those dark seasons were not wasted time. They were roots.

From the outside, bare branches look lifeless. But a tree in winter is not dead; it is merely waiting. Beneath the bark, energy is stirring. Beneath the soil, roots are searching deeper into the earth, anchoring the trunk for what is to come.

There is a profound truth I learned from this period of my life: when you add love to anything you do, it always returns to you in some shape or form. Even if you pour your heart into something that turns out to be a detour or what feels like a mistake, that “mistake” will eventually love you back. The love and hard work I poured into dancing did exactly that—it returned to me years later, giving me the empathy and spatial awareness I needed to finally succeed in architecture.

Growth does not always look like blooming. Sometimes it looks like patience. Sometimes it looks like a dead end. But if the foundation is intact, and if you have operated from a place of love and hard work, renewal is never a question of if, only when.

The Yin, the Yang, and the Return

The moment Jesse begins his journey out of the desert arrives in the form of a skipping child. For me, that catalyst was the birth of my first daughter.

Returning to university to finish my Master of Architecture degree at that stage of my life was daunting. I was an older student with a family to provide for, trained on physical drafting tables while the modern studio had shifted entirely to computers. I worried my tree had died and that I was starting from zero. Instead, I graduated with First Class Honours, reunited with my original first-year mentor, and stepped back into the discipline with entirely new eyes.

The artist and the dancer never left me. They gave my buildings rhythm, proportion, light, and movement, things no textbook can teach.

This balance between the dark and the light is etched into the very cover of Jesse’s Life Tree. If you look closely at the pencil drawing, the tree is split down the center. The left side is in magnificent, full bloom. The right side is bare, stark, and quiet, representing the desert season. The two halves mirror the philosophy of Yin and Yang. You cannot erase the hardship without losing the strength that allowed the blossom to exist. You need the dark to appreciate the light; sometimes you must wander far from home to realize where you belong.

Jesse’s Girl

There is one final, quiet truth tucked inside the title.

Growing up, I loved Rick Springfield’s 1981 song, “Jessie’s Girl.” Later, while working through late nights in architecture school, I used to watch reruns of the television show Full House, where the character Jesse was married to Rebecca. I always held a soft spot for Becky, jokingly wishing I could find a girl like Jesse’s.

Years later, while out on a dance floor, I met the woman who would become my wife. Her name is Rebecca.

After all those years of wandering through deserts, detours, and dance halls, I found her. That is why the boy in the forest bears the name Jesse.

Jesse’s Life Tree wears the clothes of a children’s book, but its heart speaks to anyone who has ever felt behind, lost along a detour, or worried that their best years were left in the dust. Designing a life, much like growing a tree, is not an overnight endeavor. It is about patiently nurturing deep roots through every dry season, until you have built a canopy wide enough to shelter the people you love.

The original edition, featuring my hand-drawn black and white pencil illustrations, is currently available through the studio. Early next year, I will be reimagining the story in full watercolour, but these original pencil sketches represent the story in its rawest, most personal form.