Excerpts from 2020
For me, 2020 was a dent in space-time continuum, a chapter of homecoming (literally!), a period when I realized how many time I’ve wasted in previous years filling the book cabinets instead of emptying them. It was an epiphany.
I spend more of my time and bank credits for books. I adjusted my morning schedule a bit to incorporate book reading. When I wake up at 4:00 AM, I’ll brew my coffee and read at least one chapter of a book before I take a bath and go downtown for my exercises.
I am a better reader now, and it was such a blissful revelation. Books impart messages that resonates with my life, some has grim undertones, while the others are brimming with hope and redemption. Here are some snippets that struck chords with me and my takeaways of them.
Commitments vs Quick Gratification
It’s like mountain climbing. You climb a peak, you think you’re at the top-and then you notice there is a bigger peak right beyond it, and you’ve got to climb that one. That’s what popular struggle is like. And that’s lacking. Our quick-gratification culture is not conducive to that kind of commitment.
“Power Systems” by Noam Chomsky, Chapter 1 : The New American Imperialism. Noam is being asked about his opinions on Arundhati Roy’s position on popular struggle.
Chomsky wrote it in a politically-imbued context, but the part about seeing peaks after peaks relates to me very well. Whatever you aspire to be during your life will be a lifelong journey, and it takes a strong commitment to be able to see the finish line.
You have to have a habit of investing time and resources, because it is the most vital ingredient for us to get things done and achieve our personal goals. It will be a commitment that should be unmarred with ‘kudos’ and ‘likes’ ; They are nudges for life’s detours.
Your life is like training for a marathon, it takes a significant amount of dedication to wake up early in the morning and working through the repetitions.
On Beating Expectations
The last best experience that anyone has anywhere, becomes the minimum expectation for the experience they want, anywhere.
Bridget Van Kralingen, SVP of IBM Global Industry Platforms, on her thought about Enterprise Design Thinking.
The adage of any competitive racing events in the world : You are only as good as your last performance.
You set a PR on your last marathon? Good, now beat it the next time around.
You managed to finish that project, by yourself, in shorter time than required? Great, now would you be so kind to take up these new two projects, in half the time?
With higher achievements, comes higher expectations. However, looking from human evolutionary perspective, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Collectively, it turns the wheel of civilizations forward.
On Focus
Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind.
“Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight, Chapter “1969.” Buck was talking about the similarities and differences between him and Bob Woodell on doing work.
This sentence is my workplace mantra for 2020 and beyond.
I was inclined to multitask. I liked to work on multiple tasks concurrently. I believed that multitasking makes me a more effective workforce.
I have had a tendency to stop working on my current task when a new email notification pops up. It wasn’t without a benefit, coworkers in my previous employers always praised me as a “fast responder.”
However, many studies conclude that “context switching” takes a toll on productivity. Borrowing terms from computer science, it takes a while for your brain to “interrupt” from one task to another, and it forces you to pay a mental price that accumulates over time, just like it increases time and space complexity for a code to run to the finish.
I find that ending my workday by creating a mental image of what needs to be done, and break it into detailed to-do list for the next day is a more productive endeavor. And in fact, it’s not necessary for me to clear all the checklist in the following day! As long as I can mark at least 70% of it, and left the rest with some notes marking some kind of progress, I am a happier engineer in the night.
Going Through Changes
Factfulness is … recognizing that many things (including people, countries, religions, and cultures) appear to be constant just because the change is happening slowly, and remembering that even small, slow changes gradually add up to big changes.
“Factfulness” by Hans Rosling, Chapter 7 : “The Destiny Instinct.”
Have you ever think that you will not become a great software engineer in your life because you are stuck with that out-of-memory issue?
You are not alone. I felt the same thing.
You worked hard, your brain got squeezed, and your caffeine intake went through the roof, yet at the end of the day you decided to sleep on it.
Next morning, suddenly you were able to solve the issue by adding just one tiny function in the code.
Fast forward a couple months, your more senior colleagues at work invites you to a call asking you to explain the logic of your code because they find it cool and could be useful in their projects as well.
It’s always a plateau before you reach a new height.
I can say that the above writing summarizes my 2020. It’s a year with many facets, and I’d like to be flippant about it. But for many others out there, it’s a period of hard struggle. I do not want to take anything away from it.
Time is a created thing, and this time we are getting it served. Yes, 2021 still looks bleak, but a glimmer of good does still exist somewhere. We still have to find it, but it feels good already just to know that it’s still there.
