This year review came to me earlier than the previous years. Vicky and I went to a café that was apparently not our type, but we find an amazing corner when we’re about to leave. A quiet spot with the view to a pine forest, which is ideal for reading and thinking. This corner gives us the reason to visit this café again when we just thought we would not come back here for the second time.

It’s a natural philosophy that was coded in my gene that I should do thing that would probably make me fail hard rather than choosing a safe way and think about the path that I didn’t choose. Vicky and I are thinking about making our last trip to visit our hometown for her sister’s wedding before the baby comes out. It’s a voice from inside me to tell me to make that trip, to not regret about not making it.

In the review of the last year, some big plan has been actualised:

  1. I’m going to have our first baby in the next two weeks ✅
  2. I moved to Dalat with Vicky, settled down here ✅
  3. Vicky and I have invested 80% of what I planned, however, the market is not in a good condition as we planned ⚠️
  4. I didn’t fix my schedule to go out for a weekly thought ❌

My life in this year is a different story. At some point, my confidence of creating disruptive things when I just came back Vietnam has vanished in the thin air. My whole time and concentration have completely paid to the work to earn my living but drawing my time and energy from actualise my dream - something that I have been trying to picture and visualise.

I know there are problems in me that I need to solve. It’s like the table in your house with a broken leg. If you don’t fix it or delay the task, the other legs would soon be the same. But I haven’t paid enough time and effort to fix them, or I have tried to do it inefficiently. As Mo said, the time that I invested in the work did not produce the same amount of value to the company. So the problem here is not that I am not aware of my issues, not I don’t know how to fix it, but I did not pay enough attention and did not actually try to fix it.

Life is a chain of decisions that you make daily. These decisions are made based on what you have learned from life and coded in your brain to react to different contexts and situations from the environment. The issues that I have in my life are just the results of these decisions, or going deeper, it reflects the core principles or habits that I have formed. As what I learned from a book about habit, the first step to solve a problem is to identify and acknowledge it.

To open up deeper layer of the issues, we can identify them in layers. Here is an example:

  • Layer 0:
    • I don’t have enough time for reading
    • I don’t have enough time for studying new courses
    • I don’t have enough time for my family
    • I spend too much time on YouTube and news
  • Layer 1:
    • I don’t manage my time well
    • I don’t isolate myself from distractors
    • I open the news when I wait for something or feel bored; I don’t ask myself about the purpose of that action and making it a habit
    • I don’t try to finish the task within the day and drag it to tomorrow
  • Layer 2:
    • I don’t weigh the tasks that I need to do in the day by the impact of each
    • I don’t arrange them to see what come first and how long it take
    • I don’t aware of the time I spend on a task
  • Layer 3:
    • I should form a habit of time-consciousness: foresee how long does it take before enter the task
    • I should consistently identify blocks of daily tasks that consumes my time and work toward optimizing it
    • I should plan ahead my day in the morning while doing exercise

One of good lesson that I learned from my company product is that we should focus on building a good monitoring system and metrics in the first place even the product could be shitty. When you can measure how shitty it is, you can improve it consistently from there. The same lesson that I should apply, I should make the plan tangible and measurable.

Some issues with the legs of my table that I need to fix, together with the action points to make:

  • Communication:
    • Find a book about skill and trick to make you good at telling a story smoothly, summarize it and taking notes
    • Take the chance of the company showcase to drill the story telling skill. Making your slides before Monday.
    • Jot down ideas and write a good summary for every task that you take.
  • Hard skill:
    • Read at least one book a month, fill up the reading list, try to stop early if the book does not fit you and move to a new one
    • Go out on Sunday noon for reading, thought, review and plan the week

Apart from the plan, it’s my little angle who will come out soon. My life would be probably messed up a bit with him, but I believe that being a father is one of the best experience that I should have :)

Hello 2023!

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