You shower. You get dressed. You grab your coffee. You head out the door — but your heart is not in it.
If this sounds like your life, this book is for you.
Tom Pham has worked in hospitality for twelve years. He moved from Vietnam to Canada at fifteen. At the time of writing, he is an in-room dining supervisor at a five-star hotel in Toronto. On paper, his life looks good. He is also quietly bored. So are most of the people he works with.
Alive After Hours is his honest account of building a second income on the side of a full-time job — and a fuller life along with it. Learning a new language as a working adult. Using credit card travel rewards to give his family experiences he could never have afforded outright. Investing small amounts steadily, without pretending to know more about money than he does. Finding hours in the day he did not know he had, and spending them on things that actually matter to him.
This book is not a guide to quitting your job.
It is a guide to building something on the side of it, while still showing up for your shift, and being grateful for it.
It is written for shift workers, hospitality workers, retail workers, and anyone with a full-time job who has started to feel that the job alone is not enough — and who is not interested in pretending otherwise.
Tom does not claim to be a guru. He is not financially independent. He still works the night shift. He is honest about being early in the journey, and the book is honest about what is working and what is not.
Alive After Hours is his second book. His first, Pursuit of Success in a Foreign Land, is the story of arriving in Canada as a teenager and finding his footing. This one picks up years later, with the same voice, asking a different question: now that you have a stable life, what do you actually want it to feel like?
If something in this is starting to sound familiar, you are not alone — and you are not stuck. This book is one shift worker's record of how he started building a way out, while still showing up to work.