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October update

Climbing up while feeling down
3 min read. This was written on October 2, 2020, 7:00 pm. The Mowgli's have split up and I'm sad about it.

This entire section was awfully quiet this last month of September, and I figured I'm already due for an update.

I have recently realigned my personal plans on how to bounce back this year and have made significant headway. I'd tag a couple of learnings here from my notes repo, but here's a list of things that worked for someone so demotivated as I:

  • Take stock of your own situation as honest as possible, emphasis on honest — most decisions you'll need to make aren't so clear cut nor straightforward, and most often than not, involve trade-offs across a set of considerations. Not approaching your current situation with honesty makes it harder to establish a baseline for said decisions.
  • Take all the time you need to resolve any lingering emotions that do not serve this endeavor. Letting emotions run their course frees you up cognitively to make better decisions. By resolve, this doesn't mean you should let yourself get carried away by it — get to the root of it and find what triggers said emotion, what cancels it out.
  • Spend time thinking of it. Of course you're thinking about it, sure, but are you thinking of it unconsciously, e.g. in the shower? I've found that spending time consciously at it works complementary with spending time just sleeping on it, letting it stay on the top of your mind unconsciously.
  • Find something actionable to start things off, if you're still uncertain about the whole thing. I myself work best when most action items have already been laid out, but for long-term scenarios, this may prove to be both impossible (if you're still trying to figure it out) and inflexible (setting too much into the future may actually prevent you from adapting.)
  • Stick to it, but consider being flexible about the whole thing. You may find one day that your goals have changed, or there's a better way of doing things, and that's fine.
  • Finally, it doesn't hurt to get second opinions about your plans. Just remember to take them with a pinch of salt — at the end of the day, it's still your plan. Make sure you've taken their opinions into account only after thinking them through.

Your mileage will obviously vary, but for me, who can't help but plan for every detail before committing to it, just the act of being honest about what's within my control and what's not helped me a lot.

As for projects, I'm currently working on two right now, for fun: one that's trying to capture some fun of working with desktops, and the other tries to capture a key spirit seen on Internet forums. I hope to share more about both of these once they've hit first release.