I gave myself a B+ for the quarter. I might have given myself an A- or A if I hadn’t ignored language learning.

Some highlights:

• 🏡 I moved! I now live in a nice lofted studio apartment in Taipei’s Da’an district (featured image), where I can now see the iconic Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall from the roof of my building, and can walk to Da’an park (Taipei’s version of New York’s Central Park) in ~15 minutes.
• ⏳ I’ve wound down my consulting obligations and have almost completely recovered my time. My recent client, Karat Financial Technologies, left me a very positive testimonial to share with potential future clients. I continue to coach a few students through The Spike Lab.
• 👨🏻‍💻 I’ve started working on Midana, my first independent project of the year, and am excited to report that the project is gaining traction with over 250 people on the waiting list and more signing up every day!
• 🤗 I’ve made a few new close friends in Taipei, having finally had more time to invest in relationships here.
• 👨‍👦 My Dad and I have reconnected and our relationship is improving. We’ve been playing Factorio together this year, and it’s been a surprisingly effective way to enjoy quality time together in a non-threatening way.
• 💃🏻 My girlfriend and I are celebrating a year together on Monday, April 5! Technically next quarter, but close enough.
• 🔓 The lock-up period on my Palantir stock options ended, and I’m now fortunately looking at a financial windfall. This has me starting to think about my work and finances in new ways.

Next quarter:

• ⛵ Smooth sailing for most goals. Just need to keep things up!
• 🇹🇼 Committing to pick up Chinese studies more actively again, but time-boxed to <60 minutes per day. I’ve added a fair number of new habits to track based on the Refold methodology.

Table of Contents

• Quarterly Review 🔍
  • Qualitative Review 🎨
    • Reflection 🤔
    • Moving 🏡
    • Midana 💡
    • Factorio with my Dad 🎮
    • Romantic Relationship 💑
    • Palantir Options 📈
  • Quantitative Review 🔢
    • Summary 💯
    • Break Down 🧨
• Quarterly Planning 🗓️
  • Goal Modifications ✏️
  • Risk Mitigation 🛠️
    • Language Learning 💬
    • Improv 🎭
  • Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Quarterly Review 🔍

Qualitative Review 🎨

Reflection 🤔

Q1 of 2021 turned out to be a great quarter! Despite feeling tired coming into the end of 2020 and some of that fatigue carrying over into the beginning of 2021, I seem to have rallied and am generally feeling and doing great!

The main things that happened this quarter are:

• 🏡 I moved! I now live in a nice lofted studio apartment in Taipei’s Da’an district (featured image), where I can now see the iconic Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall from the roof of my building, and can walk to Da’an park (Taipei’s version of New York’s Central Park) in ~15 minutes.
• ⏳ I’ve wound down my consulting obligations and have almost completely recovered my time. My recent client, Karat Financial Technologies, left me a very positive testimonial to share with potential future clients. I continue to coach a few students through The Spike Lab.
• 👨🏻‍💻 I’ve started working on Midana, my first independent project of the year, and am excited to report that the project is gaining traction with over 250 people on the waiting list and more signing up every day!
• 🤗 I’ve made a few new close friends in Taipei, having finally had more time to invest in relationships here.
• 👨‍👦 My Dad and I have reconnected and our relationship is improving. We’ve been playing Factorio together this year, and it’s been a surprisingly effective way to enjoy quality time together in a non-threatening way.
• 💃🏻 My girlfriend and I are celebrating a year together on Monday, April 5! Technically next quarter, but close enough.
• 🔓 The lock-up period on my Palantir stock options ended, and I’m now fortunately looking at a financial windfall. This has me starting to think about my work and finances in new ways.

Some of the above deserve elaboration, but before I do that here are a few other high-level things that did (or didn’t!) happen this quarter:

• 🏋🏻 I’ve found a new CrossFit gym closer to my new place and have been consistently going 3-4 times a week.
  • I was having persistent shoulder issues continuing through the beginning of 2021, but am now feeling fully healed!
• 🌅 I’ve been consistently waking up at 6:30am on week days since moving into my new apartment.
  • This is at least in part because the convenient CrossFit classes are so early (7:20am!) and I no longer have client meetings to worry about in the morning.
• 🧘🏻‍♂️ I’ve been consistently meditating every day since moving into my new apartment.

• ✍🏻 I’ve been consistently journaling every day since moving into my new apartment!
  • I’m experimenting with a new journaling system I’ve created for myself in Notion, and am really enjoying it so far.
  • This is probably the longest continuous streak of journaling I’ve ever had despite having wanted journaling to become a more regular habit for years.
• 📆 I’ve been playing with a new habit of planning the next day at the end of the current day along with actually blocking off chunks of time on my calendar to do everything I plan to do.
  • So far I’m finding the exercise allows me to wake up each morning with a sense of purpose and momentum.
  • I’m also really liking how this exercise makes it easier for me to zoom out on my day and realize that I have too much or too little of certain things happening so I can re-orient around my macro goals.
  • This is also a habit I had been wanting to implement for years, and this is my first successful go at it!

• 🍳 I’ve been cooking a lot more since moving into my new apartment!
  • I’m now making my own yogurt, my own flour tortillas, my own pasta, and all kinds of other fun things!
  • It helps to be paying $$$ for my new place and my new kitchen, so I feel guilty not using it haha.
  • I’m really enjoying how cooking for myself on a regular basis (believe it or not, I’ve never had to do this before!) is upping my culinary game by encouraging me to exercise my intuition and improvisational skills to whip something up using orphaned ingredients in my fridge.
  • On average, this has meant that I eat healthier and I eat less. I actually lose ~5-8 lbs of weight shortly after moving into my new apartment.
  • However, the trade-off is that I haven’t been as strict about any particular dietary rule set. Sometimes if there’s a particularly large amount of, say, rice left over my body metrics balloon for awhile haha.
• 🏝️ I’ve continued to be on an extended break from Anki and serious language learning.
  • I haven’t made a lot of progress on Chinese, so much so that one of my uncles bluntly told me “Your Chinese hasn’t improved much since last time” which was hilariously awkward and hurt to hear, but was definitely true. I am planning to start back on this in a limited capacity with some new methods in Q2, so expect to see more about this in the Q2 planning section.
• 🎭 I haven’t really made time to go back to Improv.
  • Improv used to be a 10-minute walk from my old place, and is now a 10-15 minute metro ride plus a 10-minute walk. For much of Q1 I was too busy either searching for a new apartment or setting up my new apartment to feel like I had much extra time for this outside of work.

Moving 🏡

It was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster getting myself to start the moving process. Despite years of being nomadic, for whatever reason I got stuck in a mode here in Taipei where the uncertainty and upheaval required to move places terrified me. I was extremely resistant to the idea, so much so that I dragged my feet on looking for a full 6 months last year. (In my defense, I also got really busy with client work and decided it wasn’t a good idea to start searching.)

When I finally did find a place I liked, I agonized about the cost. Ultimately, I landed on something significantly more expensive than what I had originally set out to pay (by nearly 20-40%), but as I searched around and started to clarify what I actually wanted out of a place, I began to realize that I needed to be willing to fork over more cash if I wanted to land in a place I was really excited about. By the end I was looking for:

• Somewhere with an obvious working area with lots of natural light (since I primarily work from home)
• Centrally located in a nice part of the city and very close to a metro hub (<5 minutes walking).
• At least a basic kitchen, if not something bigger or better equipped to satisfy my cooking cravings.
• Enough space to host friends for small events like dinner parties and board games.

After some intense budgeting, I’ve realized that I can stay mostly within my original budget if I re-balance in a few places (e.g. cooking more at home vs eating out all the time).

Now that I have moved, though, I’m super happy with the decision and I don’t regret the added expense. I don’t think I realized it while I was there, but at my old place I seem to have essentially compressed myself emotionally to fit the lack of physical space. I also don’t think I realized just how much the environment I had chosen was holding me back or promoting negative patterns as a result.

Moving was like making a clean break and flipping a switch. The first day I lived in my new apartment, I found it easy to establish a new routine that included many of the habits that I’ve been struggling to implement for years. Things like meditating every morning, or journaling, or taking time at the end of my day to plan the next day. It’s been over a month in this new place now, and I’m still going strong on all of them.

It’s absolutely crazy. The only explanation I have for it so far is that, before, the self-denial that went in to continuing to live in my old situation was subconsciously communicating to myself that I wasn’t worth or deserving of more or better. I’d guess that that seeped out into other things, and that believing that it wasn’t worth investing in making my living situation better meant that maybe it also wasn’t worth investing in myself in other important ways like self-care or self-improvement.

What’s more, in the process of setting up my new place I feel like I’ve been re-discovering and re-experiencing parts of my identity that have been gathering dust on a shelf since I turned nomadic. As I’ve been designing my new space, I’m becoming re-acquainted with the version of me that once lived in Palo Alto and enjoyed entertaining through lavish dinner parties and late nights playing games with friends. I’m re-discovering the joy of being able to arrange small details like the plates I use to serve my guests, or the shelves for my pantry, or my new office space.

True to my word in my 2020 resolutions, I’ve been investing time and money into making this place comfortable. Given the increased expense in my living budget, I was initially a little squeamish about spending extra money on things like a nice office chair or new furniture or a small oven. By degrees, I began to realize that many of these things are worth the expense—at one point I turned to my girlfriend and asked “If you knew your ass was going to be sitting in that chair for 70-80% of your waking hours for the next year, you’d buy a nice chair, right?!”

A few weeks (and a few thousand dollars 🤕) later I’m now very settled in. My set up here includes things like: an almost dangerously comfortable office chair (my ass is, indeed, very happy); a standing desk (hand cranked); fiber internet service; a Chromecast so I can play movies on the TV; a mattress top and pillows that make my bed sleep (almost) like a luxury hotel bed; a large dining table that can be extended to accommodate more guests or a particularly large dinner spread; an oven that heats hot enough to tackle culinary endeavors like pizza, bread, or pastéis de nata (Portuguese egg tarts); an instant pot; and a fledgling herb garden on my balcony complete with planters that hang over the rails.

In fact, I’m so settled in here now that my friends here have all taken to telling me that I’m “nesting”—a word that the nomad in me is finding hard to accept. And yet, though I still haven’t figured out whether or not I intend to stay here in Taiwan past the one year term of my lease, I’m finding myself more and more excited by the prospect of finally having a place to call “home” again and increasingly resistant to the idea of giving this place up. Lately I’ve become fond of telling people that, while I’ve known for a while now that Taipei was going to become a home base, I’m still feeling out whether or not it’s going to be the home base. (Though I still have no idea what it means for a place to be a home base without being the home base!)

If this is what “nesting” is, apparently I like it.

Midana 💡

Midana is my first independent project this year. As advertised on my landing page, Midana will be Taiwan’s first real English receipt lottery app.

For those who don’t know, the Taiwanese government has an incredibly clever receipt lottery system, which turns every receipt issued by any vendor into a lottery ticket. The system (successfully) aims to increase internal tax revenue by incentivizing consumers to ask merchants for receipts, which then creates a paper trail for income that must be reported to the government. Every two months, several receipt numbers are drawn and winning receipts can win as much as 10 million Taiwan dollars (~340k USD). Anyone—even foreigners and tourists!—can play and it costs nothing to participate—you simply need to keep your receipts and check them against the winning numbers every two months.

In tandem, Taiwan has a government-run electronic invoice system that aims to reduce paper waste and decrease the cost of the invoice process. Using this system, consumers can register for a mobile barcode which they can then show to vendors when they check out. Vendors equipped with a compatible system (which is 70-80% of them these days) can scan the barcode to upload the receipt details directly to the cloud instead of printing things out. This system is still relatively new all-considering (started in ~2006), so the government is also incentivizing people to use it by artificially inflating the prize winnings odds for electronically issued receipts.

While there are actually a few existing (crappy) receipt lottery apps out there in English like Colibri, Midana will be the first to offer access to the mobile barcode system and will aim to make major improvements over the user experience of other apps (and holy crap is the bar low, even for the ones designed for native Chinese speakers 😅).

Midana represents the first of a set of problems that I’ve personally been dealing with here in Taiwan: navigating processes and systems like a local despite not (yet) being fluent in Chinese. This is a problem that I know isn’t unique to me, and, actually, I’m confident isn’t even unique to Taiwan (my nomadic travels have taught me as much, though when I was nomadic I likely had less incentive to invest in figuring some of these things out than I do now). While I’m still not 100% confident that I’ll be able to monetize Midana yet, I am pretty confident that something in this space will generate revenue.

I had been slowly preparing to start Midana as early as January, when I started applying for access to the relevant APIs. Now that my consulting work has spun down, I’m working on Midana full-time and have been for the last ~6 weeks. Progress on the app itself has been slower than I would have liked (I originally thought it would take me 2 weeks to build haha… oh the hubris), and I’ve been slowed down by all of the tasks related to Moving 🏡 (so many trips to IKEA and Nitori haha).

Things are progressing steadily, however. Every now and then I have a slower or less productive day, but this tends to be more because I didn’t sleep well that day than because I’m feeling afraid of failure or rejection.

In recent weeks I’ve learned a lot about React Native and NestJS, and have finished some big features including QR code scanning, lottery result matching, push notifications, and manual receipt entry. There are still a few important things I need to finish before the app feels complete enough in its basic functions that I (and my beta users) are actually likely to switch to using it as my primary app:

• iOS and Android home screen widgets for easy access to showing a user’s mobile barcode when they’re checking out
• A more useful summary view for all collected receipts, including a place in the app where winning receipts are displayed
• Better documentation and resources for completing common tasks like resetting one’s mobile barcode password or collecting one’s winnings
• At least one play at potential monetization (without ads!!), and hints at a few others so I can start gathering data around demand

All of the development progress is nice, but the real breakthrough with Midana is that my landing page and Facebook ads are crushing it 🔥. Right now I’m advertising to people who speak English and either live or have lived in Taiwan, and I’ve already collected over 250 email sign-ups (and am continuing to collect sign-ups at a rate of ~20/day).

Even better, my acquisition cost right now is stupidly cheap. Each of these email addresses is costing me a little less than $0.10. That means 250 email addresses has cost me in the range of $25. This is by far the clearest signal I’ve ever received when marketing any independent project I’ve worked on.

I also checked, and in the past ads for products like Serenity (GTD task management) and Strive (goal actualization) were costing me ~$0.45 just to get someone to click on the ad!! Right now I’m getting people to not only click on the ad, but then to take action on the landing page for a fraction of that cost.

All of this is to stay that I’ve clearly stumbled upon something that people want and the market is actually way more underserved and much larger than I originally thought, though I may quickly need to expand in a direction I hadn’t originally planned to build for my MVP.

I’m very excited about what’s happening here, and really excited about some of the other products and services I’m already thinking about building up around Midana. Whereas before working on products like Serenity I constantly battled against the fear that I was building something that nobody but me wanted, I’m now building my product with complete confidence that once I finish it, people will gobble it up. My biggest worry now isn’t that I’m completely wasting my time, it’s that I won’t be able to convince my users to pay for any value-added features and services. All-in-all, a very good problem to have 🙂.

I want to say a huge thank you to my friend Richard who kept pushing me to put my idea in front of actual potential users, and also for introducing me to no-code tools like Carrd*, which have helped to take most of the thinking (and time cost!) out of putting up a simple landing page.

After my first experience putting up a landing page by designing something in Figma and then translating it into code by hand, I’ve been extremely resistant to setting up landing pages for new projects. This resistance has definitely hampered me, and it’s pushed me away from the original intention to sell first before thinking about designing and building a product, a piece of advice that one of my mentors, John Vrionis (then at Lightspeed Venture Partners), hammered into my head long ago, but which I had been tricking myself into ignoring.

No more!! With Carrd, it took me ~30 minutes to put up the first iteration of my landing page. When I came back to polish it a little more, it didn’t take me more than ~an hour to clean up the messaging and arrive at the current version of the landing page, which is getting something like 40-50% conversion on page. I’m definitely taking this learning and these tools with me for future projects!

For those curious / interested, I’m currently doing an experiment where I record a stand-up video every day recounting progress, plans, and blockers for Midana. I post these videos on Twitter every day.

* Full disclosure: this is my referral link for Carrd, and I earn 30% of any amount paid toward an upgrade or renewal from people who sign-up through it. That said, I’m only mentioning Carrd because it helped me make a major breakthrough in building beautiful single-page landing pages stupidly quickly.

Factorio with my Dad 🎮

My Dad and I have had a pretty shaky relationship over the last few years. There hasn’t been a lot of trust, and there’s definitely been a lot of emotional baggage making it hard for either of us to talk about, well, anything to each other in any kind of non-threatening or productive way.

I’ve written about this extensively before, probably most prominently in the journal I kept during my stay in Plum Village in 2018. It’s been over 2 years since then, and my relationship with my Dad hadn’t improved much. Things had been very up and down. I kept searching for ways to reconnect, but often found myself drained by the attempts. In some extreme cases, my attempts left our relationship even worse off than before.

Things got so bad that in 2020 I sought the help of a therapist (who I’m still seeing on a regular basis). Improving relationships with my immediate family became a major goal in 2020. All through 2020, though, I failed to make any real breakthroughs in my relationship with my Dad.

I almost didn’t get my Dad anything, but last-minute for Christmas 2020 I got him a copy of Factorio. I was inspired by a Reddit post I had seen months ago about a Redditor who was able to spend quality time with his Dad because of Factorio. I’ve been looking for a way to spend time with my Dad that might be fun and relaxing for both of us. Playing Factorio with a friend is something I imagine I might otherwise want to do on a random Sunday afternoon anyway.

For about a month I didn’t hear anything from my Dad about the gift, and I didn’t bother pinging him or reminding him about it. Then, one day in January I decided to check up on it. A couple of weekends later, my Dad and I had our first Factorio session.

I was hopeful, but I wasn’t sure this was going to work. The first time I had the idea of playing a game with my Dad (The Lord of the Rings Adventure Card Game back in maybe ~July of 2020), I shared a project idea with him, which led to a conversation that essentially shut our relationship down for the next 6 months. We didn’t even get into the game we had planned to play that day before both hanging up the phone in a huff.

This time, I skipped the small talk and we got directly into the game. The first session was a little tough—the game is quite complicated, and video game controls have never come naturally to my Dad. I think he’s always been a little self-conscious about this, which is probably why he never played video games with me much when I was a kid.

My Dad also has a habit of being defensively non-communicative, which means that any time he perceives that he might be threatened, attacked, or criticized, he defaults to being non-verbal. It’s a perfectly reasonable defense mechanism that he’s developed through decades of coping with some of my Mom’s defense mechanisms, but which has also extended itself to interactions with me because, well, let’s just say I’m like my Mom in more ways than I sometimes care to admit.

Practically what this meant in the game was that, sometimes I’d be trying to help my Dad, or I’d say something and he just wouldn’t acknowledge me. At times, it made it very difficult, if not possible, for me to teach him concepts he needed to know or for us to collaborate on things in the game.

I put myself in teacher / coach mode and, with a little bit of patience, we persevered! I explained the basics, and my Dad started to pick things up. Over the now, ~10 hours we’ve spent playing the game together over several weekends, we’ve almost finished researching all of the red and green science technologies. We’ve progressed from mining and moving things by hand to now having access to cars and trains. My Dad has started communicating with me more when we play, and we operate more like a team. We’ve had a surprisingly large amount of fun along the way!

I think a huge turning point in our time playing the game together came a couple of weeks back when I needed to hop off to go to an exercise class. I asked my Dad if he wanted me to leave the server on so he could finish what he was doing, and he seemed to like the idea.

Fast forward 2 hours, I’ve just come home from my class and taken a shower and am sitting back down at my desk. I unlock my laptop and Factorio is still running. I can see little flashing power symbols indicating that a lot of our machines are unpowered. Curious, I walk around to investigate and I quickly realize that our main power supply has disappeared. Naturally, my first thought is “Holy crap, what in the hell did he do??” My second thought is “Uh oh, did we get attacked?”

Then I check my phone and I see a series of panicked messages from my Dad where he’s frantically typing “DANIE, ACKKKK! HELPPPP!!!” Turns out while I was gone, my Dad figured out how to get enough working that he started generating enough pollution to trigger our game’s first few waves of enemy attacks, and he got himself killed in the process.

I laughed for a full few minutes after I saw that. In that moment, I realized that both me and my Dad had started investing in the game and, through it, in each other again. We’ve been able to create some positive memories together. In turn, I think that’s created a more positive atmosphere for our relationship to start regrowing in. One moment that really stuck with me was when, after a few hours of playing Factorio with my Dad with my girlfriend in the room, my girlfriend said to me “The way you and your Dad talk to each other has changed a lot. You both seem calmer and happier.”

This is all still very early, and there are, of course, many deep emotional wounds that will require much time, much patience, and much love to heal. I expect that there will be setbacks and obstacles still to come. But for now, I’ve already started to notice that the positive emotions associated with playing the game together have begun to leak out into other areas of our relationship. Random messages my Dad sends now carry less of a default negative connotation. I’m more likely to read them and at least respond with an emoji.

My Dad and I also seem to, more and more, be able and willing to ask each other questions or engage in small conversations about other things. For example, for a very long time I haven’t wanted to ask anything of my Dad because I often feel like he’ll hold any favor he does for me over my head as a way to make me guilty for not doing more for him. Recently though, I feel comfortable reaching out to ask random, simple, stupid things. Things like questions about finance, or even just how to save one of the plants in my fledgling herb garden.

I can’t explain exactly how or why this all works where other things like book clubs or conflict resolution techniques from self-help books, or attempts at regular phone calls and dinner conversations have failed. Jane McGonical, an expert in game design, claims that parents who spend more time playing games with their children tend to develop closer and more resilient relationships with those children, and I have to say that so far I believe her. If I had to guess, I imagine it has something to do with allowing us both to let our guard down a little and actually see each other and interact with each other as human beings rather than as personifications of our demons.

Whatever it is, I can’t express how nice it is to finally be able to look forward to something involving my Dad rather than dreading it. I used to worry that I’d never have a chance to reconnect with my Dad before it became too late. Worse, in the past I’ve even considered whether or not cutting off contact with my Dad would be the most emotionally healthy thing for me to do in the long-term. For the first time in a long time I feel like we have time and a path forward. That’s a precious thing, and I very much hope that it continues into the future!

Romantic Relationship 💑

Ting Wei and I are celebrating a year together! It’s been awhile since I came back from my emergency Okinawa visa run. She was there for me to help me quarantine, bringing me treats and snacks to make the 14 days of isolation a little warmer. She and I got together not long after that.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my relationship with Ting Wei is now my longest relationship since college—I dated someone for about 3 years in college, and most of my relationships since have been ~a few months at most. There have been a variety of reasons the relationships before this one have stayed short, but one of the bigger themes for me is probably a fear of commitment. So, for me, a year with Ting Wei is no small feat! And though every relationship has its problems, on the whole I’m quite content with ours. Ting Wei makes for wonderful company—I think we experience a lot of play and laughter together—and, more and more a potentially wonderful partner.

Some problems seem solvable with effort and intention. For example, the language barrier can make it tough to connect as deeply as I would like as frequently as I would like. There was a point of some contention earlier this year, when I told Ting Wei honestly that if learning English to a high level wasn’t something she could imagine herself wanting to commit to, then I’m not sure I can imagine a future together. It sucks to say, and it wasn’t meant as an ultimatum—it’s just a fact: most of my life is and will continue to be in English. Just as most of her life is and will continue to be in Chinese. If we expect to be able to fully experience each other and participate in those parts of each others’ lives, we’re going to need the language skills to do so. She’s now taking English classes regularly, and I’m gearing up to dive back into my Chinese studies.

As being with Ting Wei begins to feel like being “at home”, I’m also realizing that many of the deep patterns programmed into me by observing my parents through childhood are starting to surface. For example, I’m starting to catch myself responding to Ting Wei with the same harsh judgement and criticism that my Mom often employed with my Dad when I was growing up. On more than one occasion, Ting Wei has, rightfully, gotten upset, telling me that I’m being unnecessarily mean about something that probably shouldn’t matter that much. More and more I’m realizing that, terrifyingly, the only template I have for an adult relationship is what my parents had. Despite knowing that their relationship is, in most ways, not the one I want to emulate, the behavioral patterns can be hard to control. I hope that with time, practice, and intentionality, I can rewrite these patterns rather than subject my romantic partners to them… Awareness is the first step toward transformation.

Other problems are harder to deal with, but potentially not insurmountable. For example, there’s are definitely parts of me that I’m not sure are 100% ready to be done with never being single again. Those are the parts of me that are afraid of commitment, and the parts of me that believe there is still more to learn, explore, and challenge with respect to women, relationships, and my deeper insecurities there. I still haven’t figured out what (if anything) I can do about that. It’s an open question to me whether or not one ever fully feels “done” being single, or if one must, at some point, simply accept that what they’ve found is good enough to be worth the sacrifice of not experiencing more.

On a more macro level, I do also sometimes worry that my relationship with Ting Wei might be missing something important for me. I think it may have to do with how I believe love and authenticity are related—loosely summarized, I believe that love is meant to help us inspire each other toward authenticity. I think my concept of this is similar to what some people have described as a feeling of “being inspired to be the best version of myself” when in certain relationships. (I’ve been meaning to write about “Ideal Love Theory” for ages now to elaborate on my philosophy here… one day!)

In our case, I think it’s hard to say. I feel like Ting Wei is in a place in her life where she’s still discovering what authenticity means to her and finding the courage to express it. The coach in me is happy—excited, even—to be a guide to her on that journey. But in the meantime, until we hit a certain nebulous milestone that I can’t fully articulate (is it a moving target??), I think I only intermittently experience a sense of inspiration from and through her.

Nevertheless, part of what keeps me excited and motivated in the relationship is the prospect of finally getting to that place, and what I can potentially learn from being a part of Ting Wei’s journey. I am however, aware of, and cautious about, the fact that this is a significant amount of pressure to apply to a person or to a relationship… and that it sounds like I’m asking for a certain kind of fundamental change or a shift in a person’s behaviors in order for the relationship to be successful long-term. I know that these are ingredients for a potentially unhealthy relationship dynamic, and that needing or wanting someone to change is a common relationship pitfall.

I suppose my rebuttal is that what I want from her isn’t that she fundamentally change, but rather that she have the courage to be and express, in as many ways as she can, who she fundamentally already is. In the small glimpses I get to see of that person when her guard is down, I have an inkling that that person is really quite a beautiful being.

So far, she is making progress! And I’m excited about the direction she’s heading in. I think that, despite being afraid of the possibility of disappointing herself (and me?), a very real and authentic piece of her is cautiously excited, too.

Even when things are going well it can be tough though. It’s important to me that she ultimately do all of these things for herself and not because she wants my approval. I think romantic relationships muddy the waters on that question—we can’t help but want our partners’ approval. Within those murky depths there’s an extremely fine and dangerous line between influencing someone to become who you want them to be versus encouraging them to become who they themselves want to be. I can only hope that I’m navigating this quagmire with grace and self-awareness.

At the end of the day, though, most of the problems I’ve elaborated on here are, well, me overthinking things rather than me being present with the relationship moment by moment, day by day. The truth is, when I stop thinking and instead just be, mostly what I experience in my relationship with Ting Wei are feelings of playfulness, contentment, and appreciation. Despite my hyper-active logical mind, I think in order to be experiencing all of those things so regularly, we must be doing something right 🙂. Only time will tell.

Palantir Options 📈

As I think most people reading this probably know, I’m a Palantir alumni. I worked there between 2015 and 2017 right after graduating from college and before quitting Silicon Valley and the US more broadly to become a nomadic entrepreneur.

I am fortunate to be sitting on a non-trivial amount of employee stock options from my time there. To be honest, after leaving Palantir I kind of felt like these options were a scam, and I strongly regretted choosing to earn more equity over more salary while I was there. Most of this was because, before I left, Palantir had a strong anti-IPO stance (they’d commonly say things like “this is an advantage we get by staying private”), and while they were a private company they made it notoriously hard to liquidate any of those options or, frankly, even to understand the current value of those options so that I could make an informed decision around exercising.

I fully expected that those options were going to expire before Palantir ever went public, and since selling options on the private market is complicated (or, at least, I personally don’t understand how that works), I never expected to see a cent from my options.

All of this is to say that I’m pleasantly surprised by Palantir’s recent IPO and the timing of it. These kinds of things are never over until they’re over, so I’m cautious of counting my chickens before they hatch, but the prospect of receiving a decent windfall from my options has recently pushed me to think about my finances and my wealth a little more critically.

For example, lately I’ve been looking more into what FIRE actually is and how FIRE investment strategies work. It may surprise some to know that during my nomadic travels I never much cared what FIRE was, nor really understood it. Now that I’m educating myself about it, I’m pleasantly surprised to find that my lifestyle for the last several years has been very well-aligned with FIRE principles—not because I wanted to retire early, but because I was anxious to find ways to preserve my runway so I could continue my entrepreneurial pursuits in perpetuity.

I’ve learned a few important things from FIRE:

1. The average person doesn’t need nearly as much money as they probably think they do to retire.
   1. In my head, the typical retirement goal had always been at least a million dollars. I’m realizing more and more that I need significantly less than that to maintain my current lifestyle without ever having to worry about doing things I don’t really want to do to make money. (Obviously, your milage may vary depending on your life style.)
2. There are multiple models for early retirement, and some of them involve supplementing investment income with regular part-time income.
   1. Since I work as a coach through The Spike Lab and already have regular part-time income through that, my baseline early retirement numbers are significantly lower so long as I can continue to depend on that job (though, obviously, this isn’t the smartest thing to assume).
3. There are some clever and perfectly legal ways (without excessive taxes or penalties) to convert existing retirement accounts for incremental withdrawal inline with early retirement.

Of course, all of these calculations are being done against maintaining my existing lifestyle. I’m not at all accounting for the idea of having a wife and kids or other future life expenses. Still, though, especially with everything I mentioned in the section about Moving 🏡, the notion that I could perpetually maintain my current lifestyle with minimal stress is incredibly liberating to consider. Given that I don’t intend to actually retire, I think it’s reasonable to expect that my wealth will continue to grow—just primarily through more independent means rather than through e.g. consulting or full-time employment.

All of this is to say that, while I don’t consider myself rich based on my Palantir options (and neither should you), I may have enough. I’m finding myself in a really fortunate place where, at my current spend level, in the worst case scenario I may be financially independent while maintaining a small amount of monthly part-time income from coaching, and in the absolute best case, I may be financially independent even without my part-time gig (though I’d likely keep doing that part-time gig because I honestly really enjoy it and it’s extremely mission-aligned for me).

Potentially being in a place where I don’t have to work to maintain my lifestyle has had me thinking a lot more about the question of “What would I do if money weren’t a problem?” Interestingly, and happily, I’m realizing that nothing much changes for the foreseeable future—I still want to improve my entrepreneurial skills by tackling a series of smaller projects. As I develop my skills (and my confidence), I expect I’ll naturally finding myself wanting to tackle larger and larger and more and more mission-aligned problems.

These recent revelations have also taken a huge weight off my shoulders. Others who have walked the entrepreneur’s or artist’s path can probably empathize with how stressful it can be to watch your life’s savings dwindle from month to month as you struggle to keep yourself on task to launch and monetize a project. There’s so much space for self-doubt and other demons to creep in when you know a lot rides on your ability to execute and some amount of luck that you chose the right thing to execute on.

If things continue in the direction they’re heading, I may never have to worry about that problem ever again. I’m finding that, so far, removing that stress has made it much easier to stay optimistic, excited, motivated, and productive while working on things like Midana 💡, likely because I can be more equanimous since I no longer feel like I’m staking my future on the success of the project.

Quantitative Review 🔢

Summary 💯

I’m going to give myself a solid B+!

I think that this quarter could have been an A- or even an A if I hadn’t completely ignored Chinese. I’ve been cautious about reintroducing language studies as I’m worried it will pull other things out of balance, but I definitely need to play with that in Q2 to improve this score.

Break Down 🧨

Habits ✅:

• Daily
  • Wake up early
  • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
  • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
    • I’ve been OK about this, but not always amazing. My new habit of planning tomorrow today has been working really well for me! But sometimes leaves me needing to finish planning and clearing inboxes before I can get to sleep on time. Right now I do this around 9:30pm for a 10:30pm bed time, so I probably need to do this a little earlier in the night.
  • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
    • Lately not so great about this. I keep wanting time to play some video games before bed, but I don’t quite finish work early enough… so I end up just losing sleep instead ☹️
  • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
  • Journal for at least 10 minutes
  • Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
  • Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
  • Clear Anki reviews
  • Learn 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards
• Weekly
  • Exercise at least 3 times a week
  • Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
• Semi-monthly
  • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
    • My sister is surprisingly hard to reach haha. But the good news is that the outcomes are coming regardless.
  • Attend an improv workshop
• Monthly
  • Attend a networking event
    • I went to one? Maybe two this quarter?

OKRs 🎯:

• Maintaining a healthy mind and body
  • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
  • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
    • This has been all over the place so far this year. I’m currently ~13.5% on my scale, which is probably something like 15-17% in actuality.
• Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
  • Free up time to work on my own projects
    • Stop consulting full-time by February
    • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
    • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
  • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
    • Marking green because this is on track to happen, though it hasn’t happened yet. I anticipate I’ll have at least one product launch in Q2.
  • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
    • Marking yellow because this is on track to happen, but isn’t guaranteed. I anticipate I’ll have at least one potentially monetize-able product in Q2, but it’s hard to say if my monetization strategies will bear fruit.
  • For inspiration and tactical advice:
    • Read Make by Peter Levels
    • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
  • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
    • So far pacing isn’t on target, but I’m feeling good about the progress I’m making and the things I’m working on, so I think I’m following the general spirit here.
• Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
  • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
  • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
    • I think I’m on track to make at least 2-3, and there are at least a few other people that I’d love to invest more deeply in so far!
  • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
    • I got to know one other Spike Lab coach really well this quarter and I’m really enjoying that because she’s awesome 🙂. Still on my todo list to reach out to the others and potentially start playing a more active role in that community.
• Learning Chinese
  • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
  • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
• Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
  • Find an apartment of my own

Quarterly Planning 🗓️

Goal Modifications ✏️

So far 2021 has been relatively smooth sailing (*knock on some serious wood*). So far, there haven’t been any major upheavals that would necessitate my drastically changing 2021’s goals. I’m pretty happy to continue committing to the existing goals in Q2 of 2021. I also, for once, feel like the work load is pretty sane, though adding language learning back into the mix may temporarily throw some other things out of balance.

Risk Mitigation 🛠️

Based on my Q1 review, I think I’m doing pretty well on the whole. There are, however, two areas where I think I need to intervene:

1. Language learning. I’ve been on an extended break from Anki and most other serious forms of language learning for all languages.
2. Improv. I haven’t been going despite saying I would go approximately every other week.

Language Learning 💬

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been on an extended break from most language learning activities since probably November or December of last year. Language learning (for Chinese) is a part of my 2021 goals, however, so analyzing and course correcting here is important.

The main reason I haven’t returned to language learning is Anki trauma. I had a lot going on in Anki before and was finding it stressful to keep up. I’d often feel behind or pressured to get my Anki cards done every day, and that pressure would sometimes affect my work or social lives. I also don’t think I have quite that much time to spend on language studies given all of my other priorities—for Q2 of 2021, I’d like to keep things to ~30 minutes a day if possible.

Since I was mainly just doing Anki to learn languages, learning languages was also becoming a chore. A lot of the joy and excitement of learning new words, grammar, and concepts got lost in the monotony.

Now that I’ve been on a break for ~4 months, I’m actually reaching the point where I’m naturally missing language learning and feel motivated to get back into it again. I think I need to make some adjustments to avoid having things to the same way as last time, though.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and doing some research, particularly on the Refold language learning methodology.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Follow the fun. Language learning is most efficient and most maintainable as a habit when I pursue methods that bring enjoyment.
• Corollary: prefer spending time consuming natural language media (books, TV, movies, video games) to rote memorization tasks with Anki.
• Be judicious with what I add to Anki. Aim for quality over quantity, meaning more sentence cards and fewer vocabulary cards.
• Use Anki to learn new things quickly, not to retain things forever.
  • I had been using Anki as a sort of second brain, expecting that my Chinese Anki deck might one day include every word I’ll ever want or need to know in Chinese. This is not realistic, and does not play to Anki’s primary strength which is scheduling the repetitions required to acquire a new word or concept in the first place. For long-term retention of fluency, regularly consuming natural language media is likely the way to go.
• My previous Anki settings were actually slightly wrong. The way I had the ease set up likely led to more reviews in the short-term, and my lack of a cap on review interval likely meant that I had less reviews in the long-term.
  • The new settings will probably be less overloading upfront, and carry less risk of forgetting information over long periods of time (though with the trade-off that every piece of information will need to be reviewed at least once per year).

On the whole, I really like Refold! I think there are some super interesting ideas here that I’m excited to try. I also love their emphasis on keeping things fun and interesting. I am, however, in pretty strong disagreement with Refold on one major point: Refold doesn’t even want you to think about producing (speaking or writing) in your target language until you hit Stage 3.

From the Refold website:

You’re ready to move to Stage 3 when you have level 5 comprehension of slice-of-life TV shows intended for adults, without using any significant supports.

Refold defines level 5 comprehension as near-complete comprehension of words, grammar, and ideas but without a native-level understanding of the nuance behind the wording. (E.g. In “We’re quite normal, thank you very much” someone at level 5 comprehension might not grasp that thank you very much communicates an emphasizes a sense of dismissal or obstinance.)

A “slice-of-life” TV show is something like Friends or How I Met Your Mother where the topics, vocabulary, and slang closely mirrors what you’ll likely encounter in everyday life and conversation.

In other words, Refold essentially wants you to be able to fluently comprehend a large part of the domain of everyday language before you even think about writing or speaking. They have some OK reasoning for why this is, namely that all of the input you’re consuming is actually helping your brain to build subconscious patterns for how natural language is pieced together which will then get leveraged when you try to output the language. Refold thinks that if you build-up a really solid foundation for comprehension, all you need to transition to production is a little bit of time to connect the dots.

I see their argument, and I think it’s interesting, but I still think that waiting this long to speak or write in a language is absolutely nuts. Specifically I think this is nuts for a few reasons:

1. For many language learners the barrier to speaking is emotional, not knowledge-based. This is, for example, the primary reason why my girlfriend struggles to speak English—it’s not that she doesn’t know and understand quite a bit of English, it’s that she’s afraid to sound stupid or make mistakes around native speakers (especially ones whose opinion she cares about, like me).
   1. Refold is targeted at pretty hardcore language learners, however, so it may be fair to assume that this isn’t the primary problem for this particular demographic.
2. Speaking a language is one of the most effective ways to internalize patterns in natural language. Both because you’re forced to use them until they become second nature and because the act of conversing in a language provides a ton of level-filtered natural language input, especially since language partners tend to automatically adjust their grammar and diction to match your perceived proficiency level. Writing in a language has similar benefits, but lacks the immediate feedback and added comprehension practice that normally accompanies conversation.
   1. The risk, though, is that without a solid foundation for comprehension, you may internalize some bad habits that you’ll have to unlearn or re-learn later. Personally, I think this is an acceptable risk if it means achieving the goal of being able to communicate weeks, months, or even years faster.
3. There’s no faster or more motivating way to learn to converse than to have actual conversations. Watching yourself succeed (or struggle!) in a conversation with native speakers is incredibly motivating.
   1. To be fair, people have a wide range of reasons for wanting to learn a language, but if I had to guess, being able to converse in a language probably ranks near the top.
4. For more difficult languages, it could easily take months or years to reach level 5 comprehension for a significant portion of everyday language. Particularly for a language like Chinese, this is a long-ass time to not even consider speaking or writing.
   1. I can, however, imagine this being an acceptable upfront investment for languages more similar to English like French or Spanish, where this process might be achievable in 3 to 6 months of intensive study. To be fair, Refold is also recommending that learners spend at least twice as long each day for more linguistically distance languages like Chinese or Arabic, so it may be reasonable to expect ~twice the speed of progress (though I personally don’t think language progress scales linearly with time input).

Essentially, I think Refold’s model for language acquisition and build-up of comprehension is brilliant, and I want to give that a try. I have an inkling that their methodologies for production and building up confidence and competence are also brilliant, so I’d like to finish reading up on that. In my humble opinion, however, the production should be incorporated earlier in the language learning process in tandem with comprehension activities potentially as early as Stage 2A.

Anyway, my personal gripes aside, I’m still going to try templating my language learning habits around many of the suggestions made by Refold. Specifically, I’m going to work generally around the guidelines from Stage 2B, which I think approximately matches my current Chinese comprehension level.

At Stage 2B, Refold pretty much recommends:

• ~2 hours of focused immersion every day : 30 minutes intensive (really trying to understand everything), and 90 minutes free-flow (still focusing, but not bothering to break flow to understand everything).
  • Active immersion should be spent on content aimed at adults.
  • Free-flow immersion can be spent on content for children and adolescents, but at least 50% of this time should be spent without subtitles if watching TV.
• Immersion time is spent “reading” TV or comics, since these are media sources that come with a lot of extra contextual clues (visual, aural, textual).
• At least half of the free-flow immersion time should be spent without subtitles.
• Refold also recommend that most of this time be spent on immersion through TV, usually accompanied by subtitles because this provides language input with 3 channels for cues (video, audio, text). Comics or webcomics are also recommended at this stage.
• Create Anki cards for comprehension only. Refold doesn’t want you to mess with production at this stage.
  • Cards should primarily be one target sentences captured from immersion.
  • Refold’s baseline recommendation for number of Anki cards to add per day is 5, where the rule of thumb is that 5 new cards per day will lead to 7 times that number, or 35, reviews per day at steady state.
• Clear Anki reviews daily.

To fit my specific needs, interests, and goals, I’ll be modifying the following:

• I will be creating production Anki cards for all new grammar and vocabulary in addition to comprehension cards. Since I’m already speaking Chinese daily, it’s often not terribly useful for me to learn a new word, but then not be able to recall it in conversation.
  • Refold doesn’t recommend this until Stage 3.
• I want to make sure there is a component of regularly speaking or writing (or both!) in my target language.
  • Since I live in Taiwan, have a Taiwanese girlfriend, and am constantly immersed in my target language, I don’t actually need to plan for this. My normal everyday immersion and conversation is enough on this front, though the added supplement of Improv will provide even more opportunities.
  • Again, Refold doesn’t recommend this as a regular activity until Stage 3.
• I’m only really going to be able to intentionally schedule ~30 minutes a day for active immersion, and won’t be scheduling much free-flow immersion time.
  • I think Refold’s recommendation of 2 hours per day is good here, but I honestly don’t have that kind of time to commit to language learning at the moment. I can do ~30 minutes a day, and am willing to increase that if I manage 30 minutes a day while balancing everything else.
  • Since I live in Taiwan, though, I think I’m likely to get exposed to a lot of extra unscheduled free-flow and passive immersion. I’m hoping this ends up balancing itself out.
  • I will try to do some free-flow immersion during mealtimes, but won’t plan to obligate myself to do so.
• I’m going to start reading much sooner than Refold otherwise recommends.
  • Refold seems to generally recommend a combination of active and free-flow immersion primarily through TV shows in Stage 2B. Reading comes up more in Stage 2C. However, being able to read some of my favorite books (e.g. The Alchemist) is a big (and motivating) goal for me, so I’m going to mix in some reading earlier on.
  • I plan to primarily use graded readers for this for now, as I think trying to work through The Alchemist directly is going to be too challenging and not time efficient.

With all that said, here are the habits I’m committing to for language learning this quarter:

• Daily
  • Learn 5 new Chinese cards in Anki.
  • Corollary: Add an average of at least 5 new Chinese cards to Anki.
  • Complete Anki reviews.
    • At a rate of 5 new cards per day, I should end up with ~35 reviews per day. Assuming a rate of ~20 seconds per card (which I think is generous), this should take me about 15 minutes per day to clear. That sounds manageable.
    • Since I have a huge number of overdue reviews from everything I haven’t done for 4 months, I’m actually going to move all of my existing cards into a backlog and potentially add those back in slowly over time. The most important thing is to clear the way to being able to quickly learn cards I add through my new language input channels.
  • Spend 30 minutes actively immersing myself in Chinese.
    • Loose high-level plan is to divide this across: reading, TV, and podcasts. Where I expect to read 2 days a week, watch TV 3 days a week, and listen to podcasts 2 days a week. I intend to give myself flexibility to play with this ratio, however.
    • For reading, I plan to use graded readers purchased through Pleco, my Chinese dictionary app.
    • For TV, I’m planning to use the Bruce Lee TV series on Netflix.
    • For podcasts, I’m planning to use ChinesePod’s upper-intermediate episodes, which are all taught in Chinese only.
• Weekly
  • Spend 30 minutes free-flow immersing myself in Chinese.
    • I’m primarily planning to use TV aimed at teenage audiences without subtitles for this.
    • I’ll most likely watch Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix since it’s reasonably easy to understand, and I’ve already watched it many times in other languages.
• Semi-monthly
  • Go to Improv and participate in at least the bilingual groups, if not the Chinese-only groups.

Improv 🎭

The main obstacles preventing me from going to Improv are:

• How far it is from where I live now (i.e. activation energy is high).
• The fact that Improv happens on Mondays when I normally also have CrossFit. The two don’t conflict, but having two large extracurricular commitments in the same day tends to sap away the work day.

I’m going to do the following:

1. I’ve gone ahead and added the workshop to my calendar on a recurring once every two weeks basis. This will help me catch and plan for the event when I plan my Monday on Sunday night.
2. On weeks when I have Improv, instead of attending Monday morning CrossFit, I will instead attend Thursday morning CrossFit. I’m also notating this in my calendar now to make this clear to myself.
3. On days when I have Improv, I will work out of a cafe closer to Improv in the afternoon and buy dinner in the area.

I’ve also invited my girlfriend to Improv and dinner before Improv for added accountability. Since she lives close to where Improv happens, I think this could easily turn into a regular date night activity for us, which will further cement the habit.

Summarized Habits and OKRs 🎯

Red is for subtractions, green for additions.

Habits ✅:

• Daily
  • Wake up early
  • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
  • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
  • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
  • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
  • Journal for at least 10 minutes
  • Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
  • Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
  • Clear Anki reviews
  • Learn 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards
  • Learn 5 new Chinese Anki cards
  • Add an average of 5 new Chinese cards to Anki
  • Actively immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
• Weekly
  • Free-flow immerse in Chinese for at least 30 minutes
  • Exercise at least 3 times a week
  • Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
• Semimonthly
  • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
  • Attend an improve workshop and participate in at least the bilingual groups
• Monthly
  • Attend a networking event

OKRs 🎯:

• Maintaining a healthy mind and body
  • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
  • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
• Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
  • Free up time to work on my own projects
    • Stop consulting full-time by February
    • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
    • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
  • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
  • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
  • For inspiration and tactical advice:
    • Read Make by Peter Levels
    • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
  • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
• Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
  • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
  • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
  • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
• Learning Chinese
  • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
  • Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
• Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
  • Find an apartment of my own

2021 is going to be the first year in a long time where I know from the start where I’m going to be for the entire year. This year’s goals and resolutions will aim to take advantage of that as much as possible.

Additionally, this year I’m going to experiment with more aggressive prioritization. Not every goal is created equal. Rather than aim to cram as much as I can into the year, I’m going to focus on just a few of the most important goals, and then trust myself to fill the remaining time with whatever I need or want to in the moment.

I’m doing this partly because I’d like to try creating a mental environment for myself that has more space and less pressure and partly because I worry having such a long list of goals makes it easy to work on the less important things at the expense of the more important things.

Most of the items I’ve chosen have shown up in some shape or form across multiple iterations of my annual goals, and I’ve made inconsistent progress on them. That’s why this year I’ve asked myself “What goals would actually change my quality of life if I accomplished them this year?”

Here’s my high-level answer:

1. Maintaining a healthy mind and body.
2. Overcoming my fear of failure.
3. Working towards financial freedom.
4. Overcoming my fear of rejection.
5. Living a balanced life full of friends, family, and non-professional interests.

Here’s what’s situationally important given that I’ll be spending the next year in Taipei:

1. Reaching native-level fluency in Chinese.
2. Establishing deeper friendships and expanding my network.
3. Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for an extended period of time!

That’s it. Everything else is secondary. And everything here is aspirational–when I say “reaching native-level fluency in Chinese” I don’t mean that I expect myself to be fluent by the end of the year. I simply mean that I expect myself to regularly commit some time and make a real effort to move in that direction. (Though I will give myself a more realistic target for just this year further down in this document.)

In going through this exercise, I actually tried to keep myself to three things, but failed. However, while it may still look like there’s a lot here, there’s actually a ton of overlap in the goals that I’ve chosen. For example, the vehicle for overcoming my fear of failure is still my entrepreneurial pursuits, which are also aimed at generating revenue for financial independence. Likewise, my fear of rejection probably affects my friendships just as much as it affects my romantic life, so putting in the effort and taking risks to meet new friends and deepen existing relationships will push me to confront some of those fears. I plan to be intentional about seeking out overlaps between these goals to reduce the risk of overload.

Of course, there are a bunch of other things I’d like to do, and I could commit myself to some of them, but this year I’m choosing not to. I think my fear is always that, without a granular roadmap for how I should spend my time, that I’ll end up doing nothing. And, yes, when I’m feeling really tired I know I can, for example, binge video games for literally days on end.

But I think the thing that I usually forget is that, inevitably, when the dust settles and I leave my metaphorical man cave feeling recharged, I find myself bored by the idea of continuing that existence. Once that happens I tend to naturally look for things to learn or ways to improve myself–that’s just who I am.

For example, this past holiday break I initially spent a lot of time playing video games. But after that, I went on a trip, and on that trip I found myself spending the down time learning about how to grow plants, or watching Garry Kasparov’s MasterClass on chess, or alternating reading The Alchemist in Chinese and English with my girlfriend.

I think the truth is that so long as I create a balance, a routine, and an environment for myself that constantly charges me up instead of draining me, I can trust myself to do what’s best for me in the moment. If that sometimes means that, hey, I really do just need to play video games until I’m feeling OK again, then I need to be able to give myself the space to do that without feeling judgement, guilt, or shame.

Even though there are a million things I want to do and life is short, this year I’m going to try trusting myself a little more by giving myself the space to pursue or not pursue some things as I feel fit.

All that said, I am still going to be neurotic about the things that I’ve decided are important–I’ve chosen these things because even if I accomplish nothing else this year, these are the things that I think will really keep me moving in the direction I want to go. Making sure I have a handle on what attacking these goals means is important, especially because I chronically avoid some of them because, frankly, they scare the shit out of me.

Breakdown

Maintaining a Healthy Mind and Body

To me, this includes:

• Daily habit: Wake up early
• Daily habit: Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
• Daily habit: Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
• Daily habit: Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep

• Daily habit: Meditate for at least 10 minutes
• Daily habit: Journal for at least 10 minutes
• Weekly habit: Exercise at least 3 times a week
• Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80%+ of the time
• Stretch OKR: Reach ~10% body fat

I’d also add that I don’t want to be exercising more than ~6 hours/week max. I’m not planning to train for anything crazy this year–though I do want to maintain a high standard of fitness, competing in events or completing other athletic feats isn’t a priority this year.

While I do want to continue working on lowering my body fat and maintaining a healthy weight, I also don’t want to see myself going super out of my way–in terms of time–to support this. If I can make this happen semi-passively by establishing and sticking to a fairly low-effort diet, great. If I need to go out of my way to make it happen beyond that, it’s not a priority if it’s going to detract from important goals.

Some of these habits continue to hint at the desire to create strong morning and evening routines that will support long-term well-being and productivity. I do still think that’s important, and want to work toward finding a routine that works for me, and which I can reasonably tweak as I learn about new things I want to try. I’m going to leave some of the ultra-specifics out, though, to give myself flexibility to determine e.g. what the right wake-up and sleep timing is for my body / workflows.

Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom

The primary lens for this is going to be my entrepreneurial pursuits. The primary problem in those pursuits so far has been a resistance to launching and putting a product out there (rejection) and then watching it die (failure). If I continue to find excuses not to launch, I can keep tricking myself into believing that I didn’t really fail because I never really tried.

So this year I need to focus on getting things out the door. Which means the following things potentially need to matter less:

• Finding the perfect idea
• Creating the perfect product
• Having a perfect marketing strategy or business plan
• Alienating the potential customer base

The thing that really matters, is launching something because that’s where all the learning is for me.

Fortunately, after consulting for so long in 2020, I’ve got a long runway. It’s time to start using it.

The high-level goals, then, need to be:

• Free up time to work on my own projects
  • OKR: Stop consulting full-time by February
  • OKR: Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
  • OKR: Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
• OKR: Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
• OKR: Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
• For inspiration and tactical advice:
  • OKR: Read Make by Peter Levels
  • OKR: Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
• Stretch OKR: Launch 12 projects in 12 months

At first glance, the OKR of launching just one project may seem a little… unambitious. However, after a few years of finding this journey daunting (and finding ways to get distracted from it), I’ve decided to really chunk this down and try to keep myself focused on the smallest scale version of the success I want to see here. I’m hoping that after I launch one project, or after I find one paying customer, it won’t be as hard or as scary to scale my efforts from there.

Somewhat contradictory, I am also loosely going to aim for launching 12 projects in 12 months this year. After a few years trying to get myself to do this and failing, I’m realizing that I’ve stopped believing in the idea of being able to launch a project in a month–a month isn’t a lot of time, and things have to stay small and pretty tightly scoped to fit into a 1-month time span.

When I started this journey, though, 1-month projects were the intention. I generally want to work on things that are fast to validate and fast to fail so that the majority of the time is spent gaining entrepreneurial experience rather than just straight-up building things (which is always the engineer’s instinct). However, I don’t expect myself to follow the letter of “12 months 12 projects” as much as the spirit.

In the past I’ve struggled with self-motivation in this area–often the fear is strong enough to keep me from being productive. I’m optimistic that this year will be different because:

• I’m more focused. I won’t be moving around. This year I expect to plant some roots and really focus on this. I’m even willing to invest in creating a real home office environment for myself to boost my productivity.
• My support network is stronger. I have quite a few friends now who are on a similar journey, some of whom are also pushing themselves to launch for quantity over quality. I expect to chat with them frequently, and hope that these interactions will help to keep me accountable.
• My runway is longer than it typically has been in the past. This doesn’t shove away some of the existential, career-oriented fears that this path has always presented, but it certainly does relieve some of the time pressure and stress of feeling like I’m “pissing away my life’s savings.”

Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network

I expect that launching my own projects is going to, itself, be a form of rejection therapy–there’s often a fear that what I’ve created isn’t good enough, that people won’t like it, or even that people simply won’t care. In that sense, making good on the goals in the previous section will also do wonders here.

However, I’d also like to push my rejection comfort zone through the lens of deepening my friendships and expanding my network, specifically with people here in Taiwan. This pairs well with embracing the experience of living in Taiwan for a longer period of time and improves my sense of balance and well-being by strengthening my support network out here.

For this goal, I’m also going to try something new: I’m getting a coach. Well, sort of. I’m going to be working with my little sister on this one. I think the advantage of having a coach is that I get to learn from someone else’s experience, and I get to benefit from that experience to avoid needing to struggle to find the best strategy to accomplish this goal.

The goals here are as follows:

• Bi-monthly habit: Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers
• OKR: Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
• Monthly habit: Make time to attend a networking-like event roughly once a month
• Bi-monthly habit: Make time to attend improv workshops twice a month
• OKR: Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
• OKR: Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches

Last year I wondered if I had regressed a bit, since I’ve recently found myself pretty uncomfortable at networking events. I’ve told myself that it’s because I don’t love how networking events are always so focused on “what you do” and “how you can be of value to me” as opposed to “who you are” and “what I can learn from you.”

I think there is an element of that, but I think a lot of it is that I’m afraid. Especially when the crowd at a networking event is older and more traditionally “accomplished”, it’s easy to feel a sense of “I don’t belong here” or “I’m not enough.” I think at networking events it’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing myself to others… and that combined with not having the deeper conversations sometimes leaves me feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

I don’t know that I’m ever going to love networking events, but I do think that this could be a good environment to challenge my beliefs around self-worth and self-value that likely sit at the root of my fear of rejection.

The improv workshops I’ve referenced above are actually conducted in Chinese and English, so this synergizes well with improving my Chinese fluency. Usually they break activities into groups of English speakers, bilingual speakers, and Chinese speakers. I’ve always been intimidated by the idea of doing improv in Chinese, so when I’ve gone I’ve usually gravitated towards the English groups. I want to challenge myself to finally try the bilingual and, ultimately, the Chinese-only groups.

In the past, when I’ve brought up fear of rejection, women and dating have been common focal points. While those areas do remain important challenge areas for me when it comes to rejection, since I’m currently in a relationship I’m not planning anything specific in that direction. I am, however, puzzling over whether or not there are ways to continue pushing past my fears even in the context of a relationship. I’m not sure what that might look like, but those are conversations that I continue to have with my girlfriend, who is aware of my desire to continue growing in this area. When it comes down to it, though, even if I weren’t in a relationship right now, I think that if I had to choose between focusing on my entrepreneurial pursuits and focusing on this, my entrepreneurial pursuits are more important.

Living a balanced life full of friends, family, and non-professional interests

This one is coming as a reaction to re-discovering in 2020 that, under the right conditions, I will sometimes drive myself way too hard, to the point where I start suffering from balance issues like feeling too tired or stressed to see friends. It’s also all too easy for me to end up in a place where I’m “always on” and even a small disruption in my day can lead to a feeling of constantly being behind.

Now, I’ve only ever had the opposite problem while working solo on projects, but to head this off anyway, here’s the plan:

• Daily habit: Aim never to obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
• Weekly habit: Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends

My hope is simply that this will create enough space in my life that I won’t feel as stressed, and that I’ll then naturally make time for friends, family, and hobbies. Additionally, rather than see myself work 10, 11, 12+ hours per day, I’d rather see myself finding ways to be more focused and efficient in 8 hours.

If there’s nothing else going on and I feel like it, can I work more than 8 hours a day? Sure. At the same time, I don’t want to find myself stressing myself out to do this on a regular basis, and especially not at the expense of health or well-being. Life is more than just work.

Learning Chinese

I want to try something a little different this year. I’ve been using Anki for a couple of years now, and it’s a great tool, but lately I’ve been finding language learning has become a chore rather than a hobby I look forward to.

Last year, I pulled a lot of vocabulary from the Taiwan official vocabulary lists. This wasn’t always very effective for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s not terribly motivating.
2. The words don’t come with a lot of context.

I’m finding that Anki is also potentially weak as a long-long-term memorization strategy. The hope has been that, over time, the Anki reviews will monotonically decrease in number, eventually approaching 0. In reality, though, I’m finding that there’s likely always going to be some leakage, especially for Anki cards that aren’t scheduled to show up for e.g. years. 

Additionally, the progression down to 0 is taking… much longer than I had hoped it would. After nearly 2 years of maintenance on French cards, I still have ~50 cards to review a day. It doesn’t take that long (5-10 minutes), but combined with all of the other ~50-100 reviews I have to do each day across other categories, it tends to add up to a solid hour of slogging through Anki reviews.

After some pondering, I think the real goal is to reach a level in each language where maintenance of the language can be done through normal daily activities like consuming media. At that point, Anki ceases to be necessary, since frequent words will continue to reinforce themselves.

For that reason, this year I hope to focus more on functional fluency, with special attention to reading and conversation. For now, I’m still expecting to use Anki to help me memorize new words, but I hope the motivation to memorize those words will be so that I can fluently read a book or immediately use new grammar and expressions in conversation! I expect this to be a much more interesting and motivating experience.

Here are the goals:

• OKR: Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
• OKR: Successfully participate in an Improv activity in Chinese
• Daily habit: Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
• Daily habit: Clear Anki reviews
• Daily habit: Add 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards each day

Not strictly a goal or a habit that I intend to codify, but since I’m not committing myself to a reading goal this year, a lot of my passive listening time can potentially go to podcasts! Lately I’m re-discovering that I’m a fan of ChinesePod for level-focused content in coffee-break-sized episodes.

I explicitly plan to not add any new cards for any previously studied languages this year, but will likely try to maintain the existing cards for now. The focus is on Chinese at the expense of all other languages. If I find myself wanting to study other languages in my free time, I’m welcome to do so informally so long as it doesn’t start detracting from what’s been listed here as important.

Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time

Since I’m going to be in Taiwan for the next year, I think it’s finally time to leave travel mode, at least for a little while. My current living situation has always been kind of temporary, in part because much of 2020 I wasn’t sure what might happen with my visa situation. After a year in a place more equipped for a stay of a couple months… I’m starting to feel the pain. I think I’m ready to make steps to fully embrace being here for a full year.

For now, this is more of an intention for the year than anything concrete, but I will put down:

• OKR: Find an apartment of my own

I’m also prepared to put some money down for this to make myself comfortable. Things like: real office equipment (a nice chair, some extra displays?), small kitchen appliances, and furniture to host people for small gatherings.

I’m not ready to commit to staying beyond a year yet, however, so I am still thinking about these things as semi-temporary, and do want to avoid accumulating too much unnecessary stuff.

Summarized 2021 Goals, Habits, and OKRs

Habits:

• Daily
  • Wake up early
  • Reserve the first hour after waking for self-care
  • Reserve the hour before bed for self-care and relaxation
  • Go to sleep early enough to get ~8 hours of sleep
  • Meditate for at least 10 minutes
  • Journal for at least 10 minutes
  • Aim to never obligate myself to log more than ~8 hours of work a day
  • Read in Chinese for ~15 minutes
  • Clear Anki reviews
  • Add 10-20 new Chinese Anki cards each day
• Weekly
  • Exercise at least 3 times a week
  • Always make friends, relaxation, and extracurricular activities the priority on weekends
• Semimonthly
  • Call my sister and debrief on progress and blockers around deepening friendships
  • Attend an improve workshop
• Monthly
  • Attend a networking event

OKRs:

• Maintaining a healthy mind and body
  • Pick a set of dietary rules quarterly and stick to them ~80% of the time
  • Stretch: Reach ~10% body fat
• Overcoming my fear of failure and working toward financial freedom
  • Free up time to work on my own projects
    • Stop consulting full-time by February
    • Wind down consulting to the bare minimum by start of Q2
    • Don’t take on more students for The Spike Lab unless I have to
  • Launch at least 1 of my own projects to the general public this year
  • Secure at least 1 paying customer for one of my own projects
  • For inspiration and tactical advice:
    • Read Make by Peter Levels
    • Read about other peoples’ experiences doing 12 projects in 12 months
  • Stretch: Launch 12 projects in 12 months
• Overcoming my fear of rejection, deepening friendships, and expanding my network
  • Complete any homework assignments given to me by my sister
  • Make at least 1 close friend in Taipei this year
  • Schedule some time to get to know the other The Spike Lab coaches
• Learning Chinese
  • Reach an upper intermediate level in Chinese (B2, ~3000 words)
  • Successfully participate in an Improve activity in Chinese
• Embracing the experience of finally living somewhere for a longer period of time
  • Find an apartment of my own

Summary

On the whole, 2020 was a decent year. Did I accomplish everything I set out to do? Well, no. There were a few unexpected detours (*cough* COVID *cough*) but, to loosely quote one of my favorite books, if the journey is what really matters, not the destination, then perhaps the occasional detour should be celebrated for keeping the journey interesting.

Regardless, given the circumstances, I’ve been extremely fortunate:

• My consulting business did very well. I worked with 3 different clients and gained valuable experience and $$$
  • I had a chance to exercise my engineering leadership skills with Karat, where I’ve been setting engineering direction for a small team
  • I earned enough money that I can now safely focus on my own projects for a good long while, regardless of what the pandemic does to the economy from here
• I started working as a part-time innovation / entrepreneurship coach for high school students through The Spike Lab, which provides a purpose-driven way to further cushion my runway long-term
• I volunteered as a section leader for Stanford’s Code in Place
• I volunteered 44 hours to Vote Forward, a non-profit doing work related to the 2020 US election
• I received a Taiwan Employment Gold Card, granting me residency in Taiwan for up to 3 years
• I’ve been in a relationship for most of this year, making this my longest relationship since college
• I lost 10-15 pounds and several points of body fat
  • I gained a lot of weight over the holidays though haha
• I completed a half marathon
• I reached an intermediate (B1) level in Chinese and am now working my way toward conversational fluency (~B2)
• I learned a good amount of Japanese
  • I’m starting to be able to pick out words and phrases from anime, though I’m still a long way from full comprehension
• I read 50 books, just shy of 52, but still a personal record
• Earned my PADI Advanced Open Water and Enriched Air scuba diving certifications
• I traveled around a lot of Taiwan! I feel like I’ve now at least briefly visited most of the major destinations on the island

Reflections

Admittedly, progress on my goals unraveled quite a bit coming into the end of the year. My big takeaway from Q4 is that I’m working too much and putting too much pressure on myself, which probably isn’t a big surprise to anyone but myself haha.

Work-life balance has always been a struggle for me. During my self-employed life, I’ve occasionally needed to institute rules to help me feel like I get enough done on a daily basis and allow myself to feel guilt-free about putting work down for the day. In the past, this had primarily been a reaction to having placed myself in such uncomfortable situations (e.g. living alone in Morocco while convalescing from a breakup and severe food poisoning) that I struggled to get myself to do anything other than employ escapist tactics (like binging video games) to avoid the discomfort. Back then, I sometimes had enough trouble staying focused that I needed to give myself a tangible daily goal, hence my trusty “6 hours a day” rule.

I now ironically have the opposite problem: I probably work too hard. This year, I had long periods where I logged an average of 10+ hours/day plus time over the weekends. I’m beginning to realize that the sheer amount of time / pressure / effort is adversely affecting my well-being. This has primarily manifested itself in two ways:

1. A general lack of energy / motivation to do things outside of work. (And, therefore, a slump in progress towards many goals.)
2. A sense that I don’t have time or can’t make time to spend with friends on a regular basis.

I don’t really have anything or anyone to blame but myself, however. Yes, my workload can sometimes be challenging as I continue to consult full-time for Karat and coach part-time through The Spike Lab, but on average the unbalancing factor seems to be the pressure I put on myself and a lack of good boundaries between work and life.

I expect finding new balances will be a major theme in 2021.

Zooming out, though, here are some things I felt worked well in 2020:

• Quarterly reviews
  • It was like getting a new lease on my year every 3 months!
  • I liked that I could adjust and adapt my goals as the year played out
• Focusing on small, chunked daily habits and routines
  • I had trouble keeping up with weekly habits, but I liked having the daily habits as a touchstone for a regular routine I was trying to establish
  • I also really like how daily habits create a quantifiable piece of data that can be used to measure success / adherence

Here are some things I think need to be improved:

• Overload
  • While I could maintain many of the goals, it became difficult to do so sustainably over the entire year, especially as my workload increased.
  • Often there would be so little time / space left over that even a small unexpected event could easily push me behind, leaving me stressed for the whole day (or even multiple days).
• Establishment and maintenance of routines
  • I really like the idea of having a morning and evening routine / ritual and tweaking it over time to maximize well-being
  • However, I had trouble maintaining consistent work boundaries that would allow this. Particularly around going to bed at a fairly set time and waking up at a set time since I’d often want to finish “that one last thing” before going to sleep

Upon reflection, I think that in 2021 I’m going to try to give myself more space to relax or be creative with my time. I expect that I’ll significantly reduce the number of goals I explicitly commit to, focusing instead on just the most important things. I also expect that I’ll be trying to find a reasonable cap on the number of hours I work each day to help maintain a balance.

Detailed Review

I think I’d probably give myself a D for Q4. There were a few areas where I did well, but for the most part I stagnated in Q4, and wasn’t able to continue making forward progress.

For wider-context, since this is also a year-end review, here are all of my quarterly grades for 2020:

• Q1: B/B+
• Q2: C/C+
• Q3: C
• Q4: D

Unsurprisingly, the trend is downward throughout the year haha… but on the whole, I think it balances out to earning something like a C/C+ for the year, which isn’t half bad!

More granularly, here’s how I did against 2020 Q3’s final list of goals and OKRs:

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
  • OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
    • I think I ended up with something closer to 80, but feel that I accomplished the goal here.
  • OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
    • Taiwan E-Invoice / Receipt Lottery App for Expats
    • Serenity, GTD
    • I have a few smaller ideas that I could work on but probably need a little more scoping
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
    • This included client and coaching work this quarter, and I destroyed this without trying.
• Grow my consulting business
  • OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • Ended up not making consistent progress with these books this quarter, though I did read one or two others.
• Language learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
      • With the Japanese Core 10k flashcards I’ve already added, I’m pretty sure I’m just about at the bottom of this range.
    • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
      • I added new cards to Anki only very sporadically in Q4
    • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
      • I never ended up finishing this in Q4 :/
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
    • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
      • I didn’t add a lot of new Chinese vocabulary in Q4! Too busy with work to think about this.
    • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
      • Added new cards only very sporadically in Q4
    • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
  • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
    • I was doing well with this right up until about mid-December. I’m on a long hiatus from Anki currently, and am re-strategizing around how to use it for my language studies long-term
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Reach 10% body fat
        • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
          • Actually stopped weighing myself consistently this quarter, too! Probably at the point at which I knew it was bad…
        • Definitely regressed a bit this quarter haha…
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
        • Hardly did this at all this quarter. Another thing I stopped thinking about as I got stressed with work.
    • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
      • Started CrossFit in Q4! Really enjoying it. Still recovering from a shoulder injury from before CrossFit, though.
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • I was on the slow-carb diet for Q4, and don’t feel that I really stuck to it well this quarter.
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
      • For the most part, I was at CrossFit 3 days a week. There were probably a few weeks here and there where I missed a day, though.
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
    • I made it to 50 at the end of the day! Reading fell off a lot in Q4, along with everything else. I had a 3-4 book lead, and ended up with a 2 book deficit :/
  • Learn to speed read
    • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
    • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
    • I didn’t end up finding more time for this in Q4 as I had hoped I would
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • This didn’t really happen. Bedtime routines got wrecked by not keeping good boundaries on my work schedule
  • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
      • I hardly did this at all in Q4, but I will give myself credit for doing decently on this earlier in the year
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
    • I was good about this for the first few quarters, but dropped off a lot by the end of the year
  • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
    • I do have a therapist, and we do talk approximately weekly, but we don’t always stay focused on family relationships (for better or for worse)
  • I don’t feel like I moved the needle a huge amount on this this year. My relationship with my mother is reasonably stable, but still sometimes tenuous. My relationship with my father has gotten worse, if anything, and I haven’t had the emotional energy to try and reconnect.
• Become more politically active
  • Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd
    • I actually ended up stopping this mid-October, as The Big Send event for VoteForward happened around then. I was supposed to make time to do some phone banking after that, but ended up failing to do so.
    • I still accomplished a good amount, though, and am proud of having taken steps to be more involved! The election also ultimately went well :).

This is a routine review of my progress toward my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions. I engage in this review process quarterly. You can find Q1’s review here, and Q2’s review here.

Summary

For Q3, I give myself a C:

• Started consulting for Karat
• Took on 2 students for The Spike Lab
• Logged 44 hours of volunteer work for Vote Forward
• Completed the Duolingo Chinese course
• Learned between 450 and 500 new Chinese words and phrases, putting me now fairly solidly in the lower intermediate (B1) band of proficiency
• Reached ~650 total Japanese words, bringing me within reach of N5 proficiency
• Read 12 books, bringing my total up to 42 / 52 for the year
• Mostly maintained a weight of ~145 lbs with body fat hovering between 14-15% while making gains in the gym
• Continued exploring a relationship with my Taiwanese girlfriend
• Obtained a Taiwan Employment Gold Card, granting me a 3-year residency visa and open work permit in Taiwan
  • I suspect I’ll stay for at least another year given the pandemic, so I am starting to consider longer-term living arrangements, but I haven’t yet committed to staying for the full 3 years.
• Started a new herb graveyard on my roof. RIP plants :’(.
• Did a short voice acting gig for an upcoming game related to the Slam Dunk anime series

Lessons and observations:

• I need to be more disciplined about stopping work for the day early enough to give myself space for everything else in life, including friends, a little bit of sanctioned play time, and a more general sense of wellbeing.
• Sometimes, when you can’t see or feel the progress you’re making, it’s because you’re examining it with too big a magnifying glass! Step back and look at the big picture on a longer timescale.

In Q4:

• Likely staying in Taiwan for the next ~year as the world shows no signs of normalizing anytime soon.
• I have decided to put Tribe on hold indefinitely due to the pandemic and to step back and think more about how my projects connect to my purpose.
• I’ll be continuing to consult for Karat this quarter.
• I’ll be continuing to coach students for The Spike Lab this quarter.
• I’m scaling back my volunteer involvement in politics, as the 2020 US Presidential Election comes to a close on November 3.
  • My obligations to VoteForward will end by October 17.
  • I plan to do a little bit of phone banking for key political races through Swing Left.
• Will be focusing on balance, and trying to create enough space in my life to get lots of work done while also maintaining friendships and personal wellbeing.
• Will also be focusing on purpose, and identifying a number of projects to potentially start exploring beginning in 2021.
  • I’m dropping many of my other goals to make room for this!

Q3 Reflection

I started out this quarter telling people that my life is very full, but also very fulfilling–my way of saying that, though I have a lot on my plate with a full-time consulting client, a part-time job, and a volunteering gig, I am quite happy to be doing everything I’m doing. On the whole, I am still glad that I’m doing all of these things, but I think now, 12 weeks later, having worked part if not all of most weekends, I’m finally willing to admit that a part of me is just plain tired. Coming into this review, I feel a little like an old train just barely making it into station on momentum after running out of steam halfway through the journey.

What’s more, though it’s been a very productive quarter–I logged close to 60 hours/week many weeks, with single-day logs typically falling somewhere between 8 and 10 hours, maxing out at around 11 or 12, all excluding the ~1.5 hours of additional unlogged time I spend each day clearing my Anki reviews–I simultaneously feel a lot like I didn’t make much progress on my goals. There hasn’t been a lot of mental space to pursue many of my personal goals, so there’s been a lot of fall off, especially in the latter half of this quarter: I definitely haven’t made it to the gym regularly; progress learning Chinese has slowed to a crawl; and a lot of the things I originally hoped I’d spend time on the weekends doing, like writing, or calling my family, or honing my engineering skills through books and exercises, just have not happened.

I have also clearly not been getting enough rest this quarter, and am starting to feel like I’m not getting my social needs met. Some of this is likely my own fault, and can’t solely be blamed on my workload–I’ve historically been pretty bad at balancing work and life, and I’m pretty sure I’ve inherited some of my mother’s workaholic tendencies and habits. These days I find I tend to either over-work (when I have clients) or over-life (when I struggle to keep myself as accountable for my own work).

Over the course of the quarter, I’ve tried to resolve this by consolidating weekend work onto Sunday as much as possible so I can feel comfortable taking Saturday off. Sunday has also turned into a “lazy work day”, wherein I plan to work, but, since most of Sunday’s work is typically volunteer-related, I put less pressure on myself to avoid distractions. Over time, I’ve also gone from aiming for a full day of work on Sunday, to aiming for closer to a half day of work sheerly out of necessity. Nevertheless, since Sunday remains a “work day”, and since Saturday has mostly been reserved for my girlfriend, I haven’t made much time to make new friends here in Taipei, or deepen my existing relationships, a fact which is starting to contribute to a sense of social isolation or alienation, and a contraction of my comfort zone wrt to social engagements (i.e. I’m naturally tending to become more introverted / hermit-like, which I don’t love). If you’re a friend reading this and wondering why we haven’t hung out in awhile, this is why, and I sincerely apologize :(.

It also doesn’t help that, towards the end of this quarter, some friends convinced me to get back into League of Legends (LoL), a video game that I played a lot in high school. I sometimes say that I was addicted to this game back then, though, given that I still got into college I’m not sure it’s totally fair to say that. What I can say for sure, though, is that with the hundreds (hopefully not thousands) of hours I spent playing LoL in high school, I probably could have picked up a new skill, learned a language, or completed a fun and interesting independent project.

I largely quit the game when I got to college because of its huge suck on my time (and because I was dating someone who clearly didn’t approve). I steered clear of it for a nice long time and, since the game changes quickly, I never felt a strong desire to get back into it, knowing how much time it would take me to get back up to speed. Now that I’ve been re-introduced to LoL, and paid down much of the time to get caught-up, much of the non-work time that I might otherwise spend on my personal goals or social visits has instead been spent playing the game.

I am, however, currently more inclined to believe that LoL is a symptom than a cause–in the past, I have found that video games have been an escape / pressure release mechanism for me when I am in a state of extreme distress or discomfort (e.g. I was going through a lot when I lived in Morocco, and I experienced a similar bout of video game escapism back then, combined with a sense of stagnation wrt my goals and personal growth). I imagine this is my version of trying to find a semi-mindless escape from pain or crisis, much like the stereotypical instinct to plop down in front of the television after a long day of work…

The fatigue and a growing concern that I may be stagnating outside of work has sometimes left me feeling less than great these last few weeks. I am therefore very much relieved to be taking some time off to do this review, and to push the giant red “reset” button in time to re-strategize before the end of the year.

As usual, though, in reviewing the goals set out at the beginning of last quarter, I clearly vastly overcommitted myself. I think part of the problem here is that, while I knew I would consider taking on a new consulting client in Q3, I didn’t actually have one when I did my Q2 review. Ironically, the act of posting my Q2 review and making known that I’m open to more consulting work this year is what led to my quickly closing a consulting contract in the second week of Q3.

I had to quickly re-adjust at the beginning of Q3 after landing a new consulting contract, being accepted as a volunteer senior software engineer with Vote Forward, and being pushed into an accelerated timeline to take on my first student for The Spike Lab. My first indication that something might not be right was when, during a trip to Taichung with my girlfriend, I found myself stressing out about the time commitment the workout plans I had selected were requiring (~1-2 hours/day), and how that might affect my ability to deliver quality work. I ended up changing my exercise plan to something more manageable–~1 hour 3 times a week.

As I look through a lot of these goals, some of them seem somewhat redundant with having an active consulting client, and that’s something I should likely have tried to realize ahead of time. For example, spending time trying to join TopTal or preparing for any kind of engineering interviews is completely unnecessary while I have an active client since these are things that are geared towards improving long-term dealflow for my consulting business, and nothing improves long-term dealflow more than building my reputation through strong execution.

On the personal side, relationship-wise things have been going well! At ~6 months, my current girlfriend is now the longest relationship I’ve been in since college. That’s been coming with its own set of fears and complexities, but we’ve been working through them together, and I’ve enjoyed what feels to me like a very mature approach to our relationship and exploring whether or not we’re right for each other. I think the jury is still out on a number of things, and she and I have talked about them, but at the moment I feel pretty positively about the relationship. I also think that, given how understanding she’s been of the pressure I tend to put on myself, and the workload I’ve taken on this quarter, if anything she’s made my life better, and helped to stabilize my mood.

All-in-all, I think I left Q3 feeling like I might be failing to meet important metrics on my goals, and my initial gut feeling is that I probably earned a D+/C-, but given that some goals should have moved around to accommodate the new reality, perhaps I did better than I realized. I’m also probably falling victim to recency bias since I better remember the latter half of the quarter and how rough a ride that was, and I’ve mostly forgotten that the first half of the quarter actually mostly went OK.

Q3 Quantitative Review

Based on the below, I’m giving myself a C for the quarter.

Here’s a categorical breakdown:

• Consulting / Productivity: A+
• Reading: A-
• Language Sudies: A
• Health / Fitness: B
• Become more politically active: B
• Improving relationships with family: C-
• Meditation / Mindfulness: F
• Independent Professional Development: F
• Writing: F

Here’s a detailed breakdown:

Launch a successful project

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
    • Q2: Added this OKR.
    • Q3: On track to exceed this, and will likely only not exceed if the status of my contract with Karat changes. I’m not expecting any changes here between now and the end of the year.
  • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
    • Q2: Added this OKR.
    • Q3: Unlikely to accomplish this unless the status of my contract with Karat changes, and I throw the remaining time this year into Tribe. I’m not expecting the status of my contract with Karat to change between now and the end of the year.
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
    • Q1: I’d give myself 50-60% compliance. I’ve had a number of days where I felt like I didn’t quite hit the 6 hour goal, and then never made-up the time. Hoping my new implementation plan will help me to stay focused and motivated.
    • Q2: I crushed this most of the time. Doing client work this quarter has helped me to realize that I can actually do close to 9 hours a day of work and still get all of my other personal goals done so long as I’m really focused about it. I still struggle a little to apply this same work ethic to my own work, but when client work is involved it’s never an issue.
    • Q3: Absolutely crushed this. I logged close to 60 hours/week many weeks, with single-day logs typically falling somewhere between 8 and 10 hours, maxing out at around 11 or 12. I expect the trend to continue for Q4, since I will be maintaining a similar workload between clients and coaching. If anything, I actually need to work less at this point haha.

• Grow my consulting business
  • OKR: Join TopTal
    • Q2: Added this OKR.
    • Q3: I haven’t spent any time thinking about this. With an active consulting project, I probably shouldn’t have to.
  • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
    • Q2: Added this OKR.
    • Q3: I haven’t spent any time thinking about this. With an active consulting project, I probably shouldn’t have to.
  • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
    • Q2: Added this OKR.
    • Q3: I was doing this for the first few weeks, then as work picked up I dropped this because it was requiring an hour a day and I couldn’t spare the time.
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
    • Q3: I’m about halfway through this book, but most of that progress was made long ago.
  • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
    • Q3: Started reading this book, but haven’t gotten very far.
  • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
    • Q3: Started reading this book, but haven’t gotten very far.
  • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
    • Q3: I’ve spent 0 time on this this quarter.
  • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
    • Q3: I spent 0 time on this this quarter.
• Language learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
      • Q1: I haven’t started a concerted effort to take words off this list yet. So far, I’m mostly farming vocabulary from Duolingo, which I think is preferable.
      • Q2: I still haven’t purposefully started this.
      • Q3: I haven’t been doing much for this other than my Japanese Core 10k sentence flashcards, but I just did a vocabulary check based on JLPT vocabulary lists, and found that I’m hovering around ~650 Japanese words right now, with nearly 80% coverage of the N5 level (lowest recognized proficiency). My actual command of the language feels like it’s lagging, however, since I still have not done a lot of studying around grammar.
    • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
      • Q2: Added this habit.
      • Q3: I was pretty good about this! 3 new sentences a day is a pretty small commitment, so I never felt like doing this was a big burden.
    • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
      • Q2: Added this habit.
      • Q3: I didn’t do this one virtually at all. I quickly realized that doing this would push me from 50 Japanese reviews a day to 100 Japanese reviews a day, and I was nervous about making that jump because I felt it would add a lot of extra stress.
    • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
      • Q2: Added this habit.
      • Q3: I started this, but dropped off as my workload ramped up. There are still 17/42 Duolingo lessons that haven’t been converted into flashcards. This is still do-able by the end of the year if I put in a little effort.
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • I’ve spent literally the entire year in Taiwan haha…
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
      • Q2: I haven’t been doing this at all this quarter.
      • Q2: There are about 17 “skills” left to complete on Duolingo. For Chinese, the average number of lessons per skills is ~3. This means that I should be able to easily finish this at a rate of 1 lesson per day for ~51 days.
      • Q3: Complete!
    • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
      • Q2: Added this OKR.
      • Q2: I did a self-diagnostic based on vocabulary lists published by Taiwan for the TOCFL, and I’m at about ~2000 words now, where ~8000 are required for “fluency.” (Note: A “word” is a combination of Chinese characters. One can know vastly more “words” in Chinese than one knows characters, since different combinations of the same characters can form different “words.”)
      • Q3: A similar diagnostic put me at ~2500 words and phrases in Chinese for an improvement of ~450-500 words this quarter, and this despite not always adding a full 30 new cards each day. I think I’m on track to reach in the range of 3000 words by the end of the year if the trend continues.
    • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
      • Q2: Added this Habit.
      • Q3: I fell off on this a bit as work picked up, but was adding between 10 and 30 cards most days.
    • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
      • Q2: Added this habit.
      • Q3: Finished Duolingo’s Chinese track!
  • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
    • Q2: I had a week or two where I was behind due to client work, but I’ve caught back up, and I’ve gotten into a pretty good cadence for this. I’m finding doing ~100 cards in the morning when I wake up, then ~50 before lunch and ~50 after, then ~50 before dinner and ~50 after, puts me in a pretty good place where I never reach the end of my day panicked that I haven’t started studying (which usually leads to losing sleep, and is kind of a vicious cycle that leads to Anki burnout).
    • Q3: I’ve had a couple of days here and there where I was too exhausted to finish everything, but I haven’t had any long stretches where I just haven’t done my reviews. This quarter, in addition to the trick I discovered Q2 around distributing reviews throughout the day, I found that doing reviews while walking on a treadmill often keeps me focused (and allows me to get some exercise!). Doing reviews in 25-minute pomodoros also helps, since I can usually expect that it will only take ~3 pomodoros to finish my Anki cards for the day.
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Reach 10% body fat
        • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
          • Q1: I’ve barely missed a day of doing this.
          • Q2: Still going strong here.
          • Q3: Going a little less strong, but generally doing this 80-90% of the time.
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
        • Q2: I did pitifully on this, with only 2 measurements recorded this quarter. Normally I do this over the weekend, but I think I got thrown off track by working a few weekends in a row.
        • Q3: I did better on this, with 6 measurements recorded this quarter, but am still generally failing to do this consistently. I think the issue now is that Saturday is cheat day, and often kind of a weird day for me. If I don’t do this first thing in the morning on Saturday, I lose the opportunity to do it for the week because I eat so much on Saturdays that it would actually skew my data haha. I think the solution here might be to move my measurement day to Friday, when I’m less likely to get distracted.
    • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
      • Q1: I chose this program and stuck to it pretty closely.
      • Q2: I chose a half marathon program and stuck with it closely, with the exception of one week where I went on a long vacation. I’ll be completing my half marathon “race” the weekend of this review :).
      • Q3: I started out doing the Warrior Elite Workout Program, but quickly had to switch to Stronglifts 5×5 to save time. Sustained two minor injuries this quarter, likely due to not properly warming up, and generally fell off on this toward the end of the quarter.
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • Q1: I would give myself a 60% compliance rate with my diet haha…
      • Q2: I would give myself a 70-75% compliance rate with my diet, and things seem to be working well!
      • Q3: I would give myself a 60-70% compliance rate with my diet. No significant gains this quarter, but no significant regressions, either.
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
      • Q1: I’m easily doing closer to 5-6 days a week.
      • Q2: I’m still doing closer to 5-6 days a week and crushing this.
      • Q3: I was aiming for closer to 3 days a week, and probably made it to the gym 3 days a week 60% of weeks this quarter. I suppose if I average this out with Q1 and Q2 I’m still doing OK?
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
    • Q1: I’ve caught myself kind of tempted to download these once or twice, but on the whole I’m finding I’m quite happy without them.
    • Q2: I’m in a relationship right now, so this isn’t really applicable :P…
    • Q3: Still in a relationship. Still not applicable.
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
    • Q1: 17/13 books
    • Q2: 30/26 books
    • Q3: 42/39 books
      • Highlights
        • Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
        • The Dichotomy of Leadership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
        • Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
        • Money: Master the Game by Tony Robbins
        • Start with Why by Simon Sinek
  • Learn to speed read
    • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
    • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
      • Q1: I had very high compliance with this for 2 months. Then dropped off.
      • Q2: I spent no time on this this quarter.
      • Q3: I spent no time on this this quarter.
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress

• • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Q1: I was good about this for about a month, then started to totally blow it off.
    • Q2: Was also pretty bad about this this quarter, though I have recently picked up the habit of reading a few pages before bed again.
    • Q3: Despite my good intentions, this barely happened this quarter.
  • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
    • Q2: Added this habit.
    • Q3: I haven’t actually been putting it on my pillow, but rather by the side of my bed, where it’s actually much easier to forget about it.
  • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
    • Q2: Added this habit.
    • Q3: Definitely wasn’t disciplined about bedtime. I often worked right up until it was time to sleep. I’m not sure I can say that doing so significantly changed my work outcomes. In fact, doing so probably just contributed to my feeling more tired through the week–I was probably even less efficient / productive as a result.
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
      • Q1: Near 100% compliance
      • Q2: Near 0% compliance. I missed a few days early in the quarter, and then kind of abandoned the habit :/.
      • Q3: Near 0% compliance. I go through small spurts where I do this, but usually forget. Lately I’ve been feeling like I really need more practice being present and mindful–there have been times where I’ve felt deeply, deeply distracted or stressed out.
• Write more
  • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • Q1: I still owe the world a blog post about Mexico City, which I’m still drafting.
    • Q2: I still haven’t taken the time to finish up my Mexico City post :/. Perhaps I’ll try to spend some time on that this weekend if I finish my review quickly.
    • Q3: No movement on this :(.
  • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
    • Q1: I’ve done this most weekends, though again the last month of Q1 I started to fall off the cart.
    • Q2: I haven’t been intentional about doing this lately. Some of this was that I was working weekends for about a month.
    • Q3: I’ve also been working weekends this quarter. No movement here.
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
    • Q1: Good adherence.
    • Q2: Haven’t done this nearly as much lately… also, currently taking some time away from my father.
    • Q3: Haven’t done this a whole lot this quarter. There was a period where my sister had COVID-19 and I was calling regularly, but I’ve generally been too busy on the weekends to maintain this.
  • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
    • Q1: My therapy sessions have been kind of all over the place. I’ve maybe talked about my family in 2 or 3 out of nearly 10 to 12 sessions. I guess I have lots of other things to talk about :P.
    • Q2: I’ve had a lot more time with my therapist to discuss my family relationships now, and I feel like I’m really starting to examine the deeper issues. There hasn’t been a tangible change in my family relationships yet, but I’m excited to be doing the hard work.
    • Q3: No big changes… therapy sessions haven’t been super focused on this this quarter. I’ve been distant from my father for a little while now. I do think I’ve learned things about how to deal with my parents, but I haven’t had much time / opportunity to practice them lately.
• Become more politically active
  • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
    • Q2: Added this habit.
    • Q3: I did something closer to ~4, maybe a little less each week for Vote Forward. This was as much as I could manage.

Q4 Planning

How do I plan to address all of this in Q4? If I were to choose two words to serve as the theme for the rest of 2020, they would be purpose and balance. In fact, I would not be surprised if these two words ultimately become the theme of 2021, since that’s just around the corner now.

Purpose

Now that I’ve been coaching students for a few months through The Spike Lab (TSL), I’m starting to zero-in on a new theory for why I’ve had such a hard time staying focused in my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

Through TSL, much of the early work I do with my students centers around helping them understand their identities, and begin to communicate purpose. We do this because we ultimately want students’ projects to be an expression of their identity, and in service of a purpose that affects other people. Why? Because working on projects that are closely aligned with these aspects tends to be deeply meaningful, and contributes to self-motivation, excitement, and perseverance despite the challenges (and, yes, often early failures) we expect students to experience as their projects progress.

Up until now, I’ve had a loose sense of purpose, but I don’t think I’ve ever really taken the time to communicate it very clearly, or to explore other possible avenues of purpose that energize me. I think that this lack of clarity, and potentially an overly self-centric (rather than others-centric) sense of purpose could be the reason why I’ve often had so much trouble getting myself to focus in and stay self-accountable in my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

As I’ve been running my students through various exercises, it’s occurred that I, too, might benefit from going through a version of the program I’m creating for them. To that end, I’m going to make it a priority in Q4 to explore these questions, and brainstorm projects and ideas that connect to my identity and purpose in meaningful ways. I’d like to come into 2021 with a number of new interesting ideas that I’m excited to explore!

Balance

From reflection on this quarter, I think the need for balance is obvious. I likely need to either: 1) come to terms with the sacrifices I’m making, grit my teeth, and just hold out until November 3 (i.e. Election Day, when I can finally, in good conscience, drop my volunteering gig and fully reclaim my weekend) or 2) potentially drop some commitments and make some tangible changes to my schedule, habits, and mindset to promote a more holistic sense of wellbeing.

Since option 1 doesn’t really require any change (just suffering haha), I’ll instead examine option 2. If I’m thinking about what (if anything) to drop, I think it’s important that I list things out in order of priority:

1. Maintaining existing learning through Anki
   1. Non-negotiable. There’s just too much sunk cost here to give this up. Though I gripe about it sometimes, and even joke that I’m a “slave to Anki”, it has definitely accelerated my learning and improved my retention.
   2. Time commitment: ~1 hour/day
2. Maintaining health and fitness through exercise
   1. Non-negotiable. Nothing else really matters if I’m not healthy or fit enough to enjoy my life and hobbies.
   2. Time commitment: at least ~3-4 hours/week (~3 1-hour sessions)
3. Maintaining enough space in my life to build new friendships, and honor and strengthen existing ones.
   1. Non-negotiable (?). This is something that probably should be non-negotiable, since failing to honor this tends to have an outsized negative impact on my wellbeing. However, this is often the first thing that falls off when I get busy, and usually gets prioritized far below work, sometimes for extended periods of time. Being too busy to see people for a couple weeks at a time? Probably acceptable. Being too busy to see people for most of a quarter? Not so much.
   2. Time commitment: ~2-3 hours/week
4. Coaching for The Spike Lab
   1. This work connects very tightly to my sense of purpose, is extremely fulfilling, and is giving me an awesome practice ground to learn more about what it means to discover purpose and express authenticity. It’s also giving me an awesome new avenue for honing my entrepreneurial skills (i.e. by providing advice to students on how to unblock / validate their ideas)
   2. Time commitment: 4-5 hours/week with a caseload of 2 students, though I know TSL wants me to take on closer to 3 or 4 in an ideal world. I have some control over this, however.
5. Ongoing consulting work for Karat
   1. Karat is dealing with some very interesting engineering problems around architecture and team scaling. I’m finding I’m really enjoying finding solutions to these kinds of problems, and am learning a lot in the process!
   2. Time commitment: ~40 hours/week.
6. Learning Chinese
   1. This tends to be an important goal for me, and is especially important because I live in a country where the native language is not English.
   2. Time commitment: at least ~30 minutes/day
7. Volunteering ahead of the 2020 election
   1. Time commitment: ~4 hours/week
8. Other 2020 personal goals

I think things are really coming down to a trade-off between volunteering and having just a little more time/space to work on my other goals and priorities. While I continue to volunteer, I think I can reasonably expect that I won’t have time for the following goals:

• Improve my software engineering skills:
  • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly

Continuing to consult for Karat also comes with some trade-offs:

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
• Grow my consulting business
  • OKR: Join TopTal
  • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
  • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily

Though it should be noted that likely the single best thing I can do to grow my consulting business at any point is to knock the ball out of the park for any existing clients. Many of the other things I had wanted to do here are only relevant when I don’t already have an existing client.

Both my volunteering work and my consulting work are also incurring a trade-off against having more time and space to be social. Volunteering work has an outsized impact here, since it takes an obvious chunk out of my weekend that would otherwise be spent on relaxation, friends, or personal goals. Nevertheless, it is worth considering that I also haven’t entirely figured out how best to balance my needs during the week with a demanding job, either (this was true at Palantir as well).

In planning for Q4, both my volunteering work and my consulting work present major decision points. Bringing either to a close would free up time for important goals or personal projects respectively.

Volunteering

For the last quarter, I’ve been contributing time to Vote Forward as a volunteer senior software engineer. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to apply my professional skills to an issue that’s important to me. It’s also been interesting to work with Vote Forward’s codebase–as an organization that’s built up its code through the patchwork contribution of many volunteers and a few core full-time staff, their codebase faces some unique and interesting challenges.

However, as I’ve increasingly been finding, I don’t have as much energy and bandwidth to contribute here as I had hoped. Vote Forward’s big election-related event is their Big Send on October 17, at which time all handwritten letters that volunteers have been writing will be sent out to voters around the country. Since I’ve only ever really been able to contribute to Vote Forward on Sundays, I think that this leaves me with one more Sunday with which I can contribute to their cause before this major date. After that, if I’d like to continue volunteering to support 2020 election outcomes, I’ll need to do so through a different avenue.

I’ve decided that starting the weekend of October 17 I’ll switch from volunteering for Vote Forward to making calls for campaigns in Super States through Swing Left. There are a couple of factors involved in this decision:

1. I’ve already sacrificed to put time into finding ways to help with this election cycle. Even if I haven’t been able to put in as much time as I initially thought I could, and even if I can’t put that much more time into this going forward, I still think I should see the election through in some capacity.
2. Relatively speaking, writing software requires larger and less predictable chunks of time to make meaningful contributions than I imagine making calls (or other similar forms of volunteer) will.
3. I am somewhat curious to just experience what it’s like to make calls for an election.

I think I’ll leave the actual amount of time I contribute after October 17 flexible, however. It is my hope that I can start reclaiming some time and energy to begin recovering some semblance of balance in other areas.

Consulting

Last quarter I opened myself up to more consulting work, with the idea that I’d potentially build a larger safety net to weather the pandemic and any economic fallout it may bring. At the same time, I set myself a financial limit on the amount of money I’d allow myself to earn in service of that goal. I also told myself that I’d find time to finish a version of Tribe, my previous personal project.

Right now, I’m set to exceed my stated limit significantly in the coming quarter, so long as the status of my current contract doesn’t change. I’ve decided to let that happen for a few reasons:

1. I’ve decided to put Tribe down indefinitely.
   1. Based on the way the pandemic has been going, I don’t foresee travel fully re-opening anytime soon, and the effort required to adapt Tribe to today’s world would be colossal, given that the pandemic essentially wiped out Tribe’s original reason for existing. (Most digital nomads are hunkered down somewhere, and aren’t considering large or frequent moves.)
   2. I think I’ve identified that my desire to finish Tribe was really more me falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy than me making a sound business decision.
   3. If I ever do pick Tribe up again, I’d like to make sure I have a good handle on how it relates to my purpose! I have some ideas here, but I think I need to clarify my purpose statements first.
2. Based on where Karat’s technology and technology team are right now, I think it makes sense for me to stay for a little while longer. At the very least, I’d like to get them to a relatively stable place where they can thrive without my help, or potentially help them hire someone to replace me.
   1. In the meantime, there are lots of opportunities to learn and grow in my role with Karat!
3. My previous employer, Palantir, just went public. I still have some stock options that I’m deciding what to do with… if I choose to exercise, I may require some additional liquidity to do so.
4. If I do end up with extra income this year, I can still reduce my taxable income by making some large and soon-necessary business purchases like upgrading my technology.

This is subject to change, but my plan for now is to continue to work with Karat through the end of the year, provided they continue to need me that long. At the same time, I’m hoping to spend time thinking more about purpose and brainstorming ideas. The goal will be to be ready to return to my own work by the beginning of 2021, though exactly when I transition from consulting to my own work will depend a lot on the situation on the ground.

Since I struggle with balance, it’s worth my reflecting a little bit here on how I’m going to be more intentional about this in conjunction with my continued consulting work. My approach this quarter is going to focus on a few ideas:

1. Stronger boundaries around when I start and stop working on a given day.
   1. This is intended to ensure that I don’t miss my bedtime in order to push to complete something that isn’t urgent. Missing my bedtime to get more work done in a day, tends to just leave less time or energy available to work the next day. It’s usually a net negative, even if it feels like outcomes are produced more quickly.
   2. I’ve elaborated more on this in the Risk Mitigations section, below.
2. Feeling more comfortable stopping after a certain number of hours, rather than pushing to maximize hours each day.
   1. This is the opposite of a problem I once had in keeping myself focused to do personal work, where I needed to impose a lower limit on how much work I needed to do to feel OK about what I accomplished in a day.
   2. Now, I need to impose an upper limit on how much work I need to do to feel OK about putting things down until tomorrow.
   3. I think something in the realm of 8-10 hours of logged time each day feels OK to me. I probably shouldn’t be logging 11-12 hour days without good reason to–working this much is probably incurring latent costs to future productivity, and overall sense of balance and well-being.
3. Giving myself the freedom to spend a few hours a week on social visits during the week without feeling guilty.
   1. E.g. Getting coffee or lunch with a friend, or catching up with someone over video chat. Normally doing these things makes me feel “behind” because I sacrificed work time to do it. In the interest of balance, I think I should flip this, and consider time not spent doing these things in a given week as bonus work time rather than sacrificed work time.

Changes to 2020 Goals

Here’s how my goals are affected by changing conditions in Q4:

• Launch a successful project / Grow my consulting business
  • Given that I plan to continue work for Karat through Q4, I’m reasonably going to expect that I won’t have time or need to work on my own projects or to do any kind of outside professional development geared towards improving consulting dealflow. (e.g. TopTal and HackerRank)
• Become more politically active
  • Vote Forward’s Big Send happens on October 17.
  • The election will be over by November 3rd.
  • I plan to scale down my political activity past these dates to return to focusing on other things.
• Purpose-driven focus
  • To give myself time and space to think about purpose and identity, I will be pairing down or dropping goals that don’t support this, and adding a few goals / OKRs to track this.
• Exercise
  • I’ve sustained a few minor injuries in the gym. I think it’s time that I considered getting some real coaching for weight training.

Here’s how I’m adjusting my goals to compensate (items in green are being added, items in red are being removed):

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
  • OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
  • OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
  • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
  • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
• Grow my consulting business
  • OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat, my current client
  • OKR: Join TopTal
  • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
  • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
  • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
• Language learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
    • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
    • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
    • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
    • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
    • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
    • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
  • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Reach 10% body fat
        • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
    • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
  • Learn to speed read
    • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
    • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
  • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
• Write more
  • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
  • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
  • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
• Become more politically active
  • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
  • Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd

Risk Mitigations

Of my remaining habits and OKRs, the following have been identified as at risk in this quarter’s quantitative review:

• Improve my software engineering skills
  • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
• Read more
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
  • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.

I’ve intentionally tried to prune many of my goals to make more space for these things, and to clear some space for purpose work:

• I’m scaling down my commitment to political activity between now and November 3
• I’m putting writing down entirely for the rest of the year. (With the understanding that the purpose work will likely involve a lot of writing, however.)
• I’m going to stop expecting that I’ll have 2-3 hours each weekend to work on a growth-related engineering project.
• I’m taking myself off the hook for adding even more Japanese cards each day, since my current method seems to mostly be getting me where I want (i.e. an increasingly large vocabulary in Japanese so that I can hopefully start to have a contextual net for understanding basic conversations)

As I begin to reclaim my weekends, I’m hoping that time to call my family and time to read software-related books also begins to return.

Otherwise, I think getting back on track for meditation and reading physical books is going to require that I get much more disciplined about building a consistent morning and evening routine.

So far this year, I’ve kept my routine pretty flexible, and especially since I’ve stayed up late working, I’ve also tended to start waking up later and later. Together, these two trends mean that I don’t consistently end up having time in the morning to do self-care habits like meditation, and I also don’t end up consistently having time in the evening for reading.

This probably isn’t the first time I’ve said it, but I think I need to get to a point where a set of habits in the morning and a set of habits in the evening become near-automatic. I also need to be disciplined about not letting work (or play, but more often work) bleed into bedtime, since allowing this to happen is almost always a trap that just leaves me feeling more tired and less productive the next day, even if it does lead to my wrapping something up “sooner”.

Here’s a concrete sample of what my ideal morning routine looks like, assuming that I need to start work around 7:30am:

1. Wake up at 6:30am semi-naturally after 7.5 – 8 hours of sleep
2. [10 min] Meditate for 10 minutes
3. [15 min] Use the bathroom, brush my teeth, wash my face
4. [5 min] Weigh myself and take my morning vitamins
   1. [10 min] Friday only: take body circumference measurements
5. [5 min] Make my bed, get dressed
6. [5 min] Grab tea and water before sitting down at my desk
7. [10 min] Time-boxed journaling with a particular focus on:
   1. Anything I remember about my dreams
   2. Gratitude
   3. Any particularly complicated thoughts or emotions that need deeper exploration
8. Start clearing inboxes and catching up on any potentially urgent messages or requests

To match that, my minimal evening routine should generally look something like this, assuming I need to be in bed by 10:30pm and asleep by 11:00pm:

1. [10 min] By 10pm at the latest, review the day and plan for tomorrow
2. Shut down my laptop
3. [5 min] Brush my teeth and wash my face, put on pajamas
4. Get in bed
5. [10 min] Read in bed

Here’s an outline of what a typical work day might look like for me this quarter:

1. 6:30am: Wake up
2. 6:30am – 7:30am: Complete morning routine
3. 7:30am – 11:00am: Morning work session
4. 11:00am – 11:30am: Daily Anki review session (1 of 3)
5. 11:30am – 12:00pm: Lunch
6. 12:00pm – 12:30pm: Daily Anki review session (2 of 3)
7. 12:30pm – 4:30pm: Afternoon work session
8. MWF:
   1. 4:30pm – 6:30pm: Exercise + Shower (Potentially a 5pm CrossFit class)
9. TTh:
   1. 4:30pm – 6:15pm: Extended Afternoon work session OR use this time for lunch / coffee with a friend or to catch-up with someone via video chat.
   2. 6:15pm – 6:30pm: Shower
10. 6:30pm – 7:00pm: Daily Anki review session (3 of 3)
11. 7:00pm – 7:45pm: Dinner
12. 7:45pm – 9:00pm: Evening work session
13. 9:00pm – 10:00pm: Free time, or extended evening work session as needed
    1. I suspect I will sometimes swap this up into the afternoon, to play a round or two of games with a friend during evening PST before he goes to bed.
14. 10:00pm – 10:30pm: Complete evening routine
15. 10:30pm: Get in bed
16. 11:00pm: Sleep

Outside of the morning and evening routines, this is more meant to be a guideline than a strict schedule, so I at least have a sense of how my day should generally fit together.

This gives me a total of ~8.5 hours of work on days with exercise, and ~10.25 hours of work on days without exercise for an average daily load of 9.2 hours, which feels more than reasonable, and should leave me with enough time during a typical week to satisfy my consulting obligations and my coaching obligations. When work is busier, I can use the ~hour of free time each day to get a little more productive time for an average daily load of 10.2 hours, but for sanity’s sake, and so that this entire schedule has some buffer most days, I should aim to avoid that in the general case.

Adjusted Method: Exercise and Diet

Last quarter I stuck to the Slow-Carb Diet and was doing StrongLifts 5×5 ~3 times/week. I also started regular supplementation with vitamins (multi-vitamin, fish oil, magnesium, vitamin C) and creatine.

So far, SCD is still generally working well for me, and I think I’ll plan to keep it around for at least the next quarter. I’m super used to this, and I think it provides me a generally good, and generally healthy balance that doesn’t leave me feeling deprived.

I did, however, not make a lot of gains wrt my weight and body fat this quarter. I suspect the real difference here is going from burning a huge amount of calories in cardio virtually every day while training for a half marathon to being relatively sedentary, and just lifting heavy 3 days a week.

I’m also concerned that I’m getting injured in the gym a lot more lately. I haven’t had any major injuries, but this quarter, I had a brief issue with my knee, and twice strained one of my shoulders. I’m 95% sure that the issue here has been that I’ve been too lazy to properly stretch and warm-up before lifting heavier, but I think it would be good to have some form of coaching to help me ensure I’m lifting with proper form.

To solve both problems, I’m thinking I may finally spring for CrossFit this quarter, and give that a try for a few months. In the past I’ve been a little stingy about jumping for this, since it is a little on the expensive side–$300+ for coaching before I can join group classes at a rate of ~$200/mo.

Since I’m generally spending $60/mo or less on the gym, this is a pretty big price hike… but my previous experience with CrossFit in Colombia was very positive, and I do feel like CrossFit offers a good mix of weightlifting, HIIT, and endurance cardio, which is exactly what I’m looking for. The workouts are also super time efficient–done in an hour and I never feel anything other than super accomplished for finishing the workout.

Summarized Q4 Goals

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises for myself
  • OKR: Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
  • OKR: Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
• Grow my consulting business
  • OKR: Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
• Language learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
    • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
    • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
    • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
    • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
    • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
  • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Reach 10% body fat
        • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
    • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
  • Learn to speed read
    • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
    • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
  • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
  • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
• Become more politically active
  • Habit: Spend 1-4 hours each week on political activities until November 3rd

Summarized Q4 Habits and OKRs

Habits:

• Daily
  • Work on projects 6 hours a day
  • Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Anki
    • Complete Anki reviews
    • Add 30 new Chinese Anki cards
    • Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences
  • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
  • Make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo Japanese lesson
  • Read 2 pages a day
  • After I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow
  • Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages
  • For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed training software
  • Measure body composition
• Weekly
  • Exercise at least 3 days a week
  • Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week on Friday
  • Call each family member
  • Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist
  • Spend 1-4 hours on political activities

OKRs:

• Launch a successful project
  • Complete The Spike Lab purpose and identity exercises
  • Brainstorm at least 100 project ideas related to my purpose, identities, and interests
  • Identify 2-3 projects to explore and prototype starting in 2021
• Grow my consulting business
  • Obtain a glowing review / referral from Karat
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
• Learn Chinese
  • Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
  • Reach 3000 words in Chinese
  • Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
• Learn Japanese
  • Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
• Get back into shape
  • Reach 10% body fat
  • Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
  • Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
• Read more
  • Read 52 books
  • Eliminate subvocalization while reading
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues

This is a routine review of my progress toward my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions. I engage in this review process quarterly. You can find Q1’s review here.

Summary

For Q2, I give myself a C/C+:

• Not a huge amount of progress on my own projects
• Completed consulting projects for AVID Center
• Served as a volunteer section leader for Stanford’s Code in Place
• Received an offer for a part-time innovation / entrepreneurship coaching position with The Spike Lab
• Completed a half marathon, despite the heat and humidity of Taiwan’s summer
• Lost ~4.6% body fat, and about ~20 pounds since the start of the year
• Started dating someone in Taiwan
• Earned my PADI Advanced Open Water and PADI Enriched Air scuba diving certifications

Other lessons and observations:

• Now that I’ve been in Taiwan for 6 months, this is actually the longest I’ve spent in one place since college. So far I’m enjoying the ability to focus that this stability has been providing.
• It’s possible that dating someone affects my goals less when there’s no hard time limit on how long I’ll be in a particular place. There’s less of a feeling of “we only have so much time to spend together, so we’d better do everything we can as quickly as we can.”

In Q3:

• Travel plan is still to stay in Taiwan through the pandemic. I’m currently applying for longer-term visas so that I don’t get kicked out in September.
• I’ll be taking on a few students for The Spike Lab
• I’m making it a priority to get involved in politics in advance of the 2020 US Presidential Election
  • I have applied to be a Volunteer Senior Software Developer for VoteForward, and if selected plan to spend ~8 hours a week on this until November
  • If I don’t get the VoteForward position, I plan to spend ~4-8 hours a week making phone calls and sending text messages for key political campaigns
• When available, I am going to prioritize taking on new client work over working on my own work this quarter so that I have more than enough liquidity to weather the COVID-19 economic recession
• When time allows, I will be working on Tribe, and am aiming to get a new version released with trip recommendations, third-party travel information, and some kind of update to address COVID-19
• I’m going to slowly prepare to qualify for TopTal to improve lead generation for my consulting business
• I’m planning to set aside time every weekend to improve my software engineering skills, with a particular focus on architectural patterns, algorithms, and machine learning / AI

Q2 Reflection

Qualitatively, I feel pretty good about how 2020 Q2 went. Did I hit everything I had hoped to? No, not quite. For example, I barely touched the ukulele at all this quarter, despite having asked myself to practice for at least 10 minutes a day, and I lost the habit of meditating every day this quarter. I also can’t say that I made a huge amount of progress on my own projects.

I did have other professional breakthroughs this quarter, however. In particular, I completed the interview process and received an offer for a coaching position with The Spike Lab, a service which provides innovation coaching to high school students, helping them to explore their strengths and passions, ultimately culminating in a self-directed project that they can use as a focal point for college applications (and, hopefully, life direction in general). Since helping people self-actualize is a major drive for me, I’m very excited about the culture and mission alignment. This position will be part-time, and I’m hoping to take on a few students starting in August.

I also took on a couple of new clients this quarter. Specifically, I worked with AVID Center, a non-profit focused on closing the privilege and achievement gap in education, to produce AVID Open Access and AVID Discover. I also briefly served as a security consultant for My Dental Key, a startup out of Harvard Dental School aimed at disrupting online dental education, and I retained my position with I’m With Them, a non-profit focused on reducing work-related sexual misconduct.

My current personal project, Tribe, was on hold for much of this quarter. Since the product focuses on helping Digital Nomads figure out where to go next, and since it isn’t clear when international travel will really pick up again, it’s been hard to predict if and when testing new product features will be possible. Financially, this initially made me a little worried–I had been following standard financial advice to keep about ~6 months liquid, with the rest of my assets in longer-term investments like ETFs and Mutual Funds. With the advent of COVID-19, and the downturn of the stock market, I watched ~15% of my wealth evaporate in a matter of weeks, all while my current personal project looked unlikely to be able to produce revenue for a year, possibly longer. The desire not to realize stock market losses is what ultimately drove me to take on consulting work this quarter.

Though the future of Tribe remains uncertain, I started to pick things back up at the end of Q2. Ultimately, I think COVID-19 presents an opportunity: now that employees across several industries have been 100% remote for some time (with some larger tech players like Twitter and Square declaring that they are now permanently completely remote organizations), I expect that the trends of remote working and, in turn, nomadism will continue to rise in the eventual wake of COVID-19. Additionally, in the same way that COVID-19 seemed to spread at alarming and unexpected rates, I think that travel will actually thaw a lot more quickly than we expect. Many economies and businesses rely on travel and tourism, which means that, realistically, it is a priority for some governments and corporations to find safe and creative interim solutions that allow travel to re-open in some capacity.

Things probably won’t look the same for a while, and I expect COVID-19 will continue to affect travel for quite some time (likely the next 1-2 years at least), but this added complexity also creates new gaps in information resources. For example, there aren’t a whole lot of reliable sources that can help you understand based on 1) your recent travel history and 2) your passports where you can evenly potentially travel to, and with what kinds of limitations and restrictions. I’m hoping to finish up a version of Tribe this year that can start to address some of these needs.

On the personal side, it’s been interesting being in Taiwan this long. I was thinking about it recently, and I realized that this is actually the longest I’ve stayed in one place anywhere since college. Even when I worked at Palantir, I traveled so often that the longest uninterrupted period I had at home was probably about 6 months. So far, I’ve been enjoying the longer time horizon quite a bit. I like that I don’t have to worry about where I’ll go next, and it’s nice not to have to spend energy thinking about how I’m going to establish myself in a new place (i.e. where am I going to live, how am I going to make friends, etc.). I quite like how I’m able to think longer-term about my goals, and really have time to just focus on getting things done. I do miss traveling, though, and I’m starting to worry my Spanish will languish the way my French did… TBD as to whether or not this means I’m done traveling for good, but for now I’m hunkering down with the expectation of staying in Taiwan until at least the end of the year, if not longer. Most of the Taiwanese visas I’ve recently applied for are valid for between one and three years.

The stability of staying in Taiwan this quarter has contributed to successfully completing a half marathon training program, staying on track to hit my reading goal of 52 books this year, and doing a good job of sticking to my Anki flashcards habit, which powers my language studies (and, increasingly, my review of concepts from math and ML, and long-term maintenance of skills like scuba diving). I also made good progress toward my body fat goals, dropping as low as 11.9% on my scale, down 4.6% from my starting point of 16.5% in January. (Note: my actual body fat as reported by an InBody machine is closer to ~14.8% right now–I mostly use my own scale to help me measure the trend so I know whether or not my diet and exercise plan is working.) I now weigh the least I’ve weighed since high school at around 145 pounds!

Further down the personal side, I started dating someone this quarter. Ordinarily and historically, I’d have expected a new relationship to have an outsized negative effect on my goals. However, that hasn’t been the case with this relationship, which has been a pleasant surprise. I’m pretty happy with how much time, freedom, and independence I still have to pursue my own things, and how supportive she’s been. Given that COVID-19 has essentially forced me to settle in Taipei for the foreseeable future, this is the first time in a long while that I’ve had a relationship with no time constraints. It’s hard to say how much of my success in balancing the relationship with my personal goals is a function of her, a function of not feeling like we have to frantically every moment together because time is short, or both. Recently we took a trip together down to Kenting, in Southern Taiwan, where she received her PADI Open Water and I was able to finish my PADI Advanced Open Water and PADI Enriched Air scuba diving certifications, which, though it wasn’t something I had expected to do this year, is something I’m proud of :).

Where my goal around improving my family relationships is concerned, I feel I’m making progress, but in terms of actual outcomes I’ve potentially stepped backward rather than forward. My father and I had a bit of a falling out this quarter, and I’ve decided to take some time away from that relationship to regroup, heal, and strategize around how to try reconnecting with him again. My conversations with my therapist are finally focusing on my family relationships, and even though things haven’t improved yet I feel satisfied that I’m doing the hard introspection work on my end.

All-in-all, I feel like I accomplished a lot this quarter, even though I haven’t made much progress on my own projects.

Q2 Quantitative Review

Quantitatively, based on the data below, I’d give myself a C/C+ this quarter.

• Language learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
      • Q1: I haven’t started a concerted effort to take words off this list yet. So far, I’m mostly farming vocabulary from Duolingo, which I think is preferable.
      • Q2: I still haven’t purposefully started this.
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Japanese program
      • Q2: I’ve been completing 1 lesson a day. I have about 90 “skills” left to complete on Duolingo. If we assume each skill has an average of 5 lessons… I’d need to complete 2.5 lessons a day for the rest of the year to finish this. I’m pretty far off track on this one.
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
      • Q2: I haven’t been doing this at all this quarter.
      • Q2: There are about 17 “skills” left to complete on Duolingo. For Chinese, the average number of lessons per skill is ~3. This means that I should be able to easily finish this at a rate of 1 lesson per day for ~51 days.
    • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
      • Q2: Doing OK on this. I won’t add new cards on days/weeks where I’m feeling behind, or where I have extra reviews to do, and there were a fair number of those this quarter.
    • Q2: My girlfriend essentially only speaks to me in Chinese, which has been helping a lot :).
    • Q2: I did a self-diagnostic based on vocabulary lists published by Taiwan for the TOCFL, and I’m at about ~2000 words now, where ~8000 are required for “fluency.” (Note: A “word” is a combination of Chinese characters. One can know vastly more “words” in Chinese than one knows characters, since different combinations of the same characters can form different “words.”)
  • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
    • Q2: I had a week or two where I was behind due to client work, but I’ve caught back up, and I’ve gotten into a pretty good cadence for this. I’m finding doing ~100 cards in the morning when I wake up, then ~50 before lunch and ~50 after, then ~50 before dinner and ~50 after, puts me in a pretty good place where I never reach the end of my day panicked that I haven’t started studying (which usually leads to losing sleep, and is kind of a vicious cycle that leads to Anki burnout).
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Reach 10% body fat
        • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
          • Q1: I’ve barely missed a day of doing this.
          • Q2: Still going strong here.
        • Habit: Track the foods I eat every day so I can correlate diet to fat loss
          • Q1: I started out strong doing this, but then fell off the cart toward the end of the quarter.
          • Q2: I didn’t do this at all this quarter, in large part because I’ve been following the Slow-Carb Diet, one of the main advantages of which is that I don’t have to track calories or macros.
    • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
      • Q2: I did pitifully on this, with only 2 measurements recorded this quarter. Normally I do this over the weekend, but I think I got thrown off track by working a few weekends in a row.

• • • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
      • Q1: I chose this program and stuck to it pretty closely.
      • Q2: I chose a half marathon program and stuck with it closely, with the exception of one week where I went on a long vacation. I’ll be completing my half marathon “race” the weekend of this review :).
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • Q1: I would give myself a 60% compliance rate with my diet haha…
      • Q2: I would give myself a 70-75% compliance rate with my diet, and things seem to be working well!
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
      • Q1: I’m easily doing closer to 5-6 days a week.
      • Q2: I’m still doing closer to 5-6 days a week and crushing this.
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
    • Q1: I’ve caught myself kind of tempted to download these once or twice, but on the whole I’m finding I’m quite happy without them.
    • Q2: I’m in a relationship right now, so this isn’t really applicable :P…
• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year.
    • Q1: Presently, potentially a little off-track to hit this.
    • Q2: This goal is currently at risk, and given other commitments I’m expecting to make, along with an increased priority given to client work due to COVID-19 economic recession, I’m not sure if I’m in a position to bring this one back on track.
  • OKR: Take on no more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
    • Q1: It helps that I haven’t had any leads this year yet.
    • Q2: I spent probably ~2 months of this quarter working on consulting work, though I suspect that I will take on more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
    • Q1: I’d give myself 50-60% compliance. I’ve had a number of days where I felt like I didn’t quite hit the 6 hour goal, and then never made-up the time. Hoping my new implementation plan will help me to stay focused and motivated.
    • Q2: I crushed this most of the time. Doing client work this quarter has helped me to realize that I can actually do close to 9 hours a day of work and still get all of my other personal goals done so long as I’m really focused about it. I still struggle a little to apply this same work ethic to my own work, but when client work is involved it’s never an issue.
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
    • Q1: 17/13 books
    • Q2: 30/26 books
      • Highlights
        • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
          • I especially appreciated the parts where he challenges traditional economic theory by comparing actual human behavior to model “econ” behavior and the parts where he discusses using statistics to better understand the happiness and success of societies.
        • Atomic Habits by James Clear
        • Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
        • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
  • Learn to speed read
    • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
    • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
      • Q1: I had very high compliance with this for 2 months. Then dropped off.
      • Q2: I spent no time on this this quarter.
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Q1: I was good about this for about a month, then started to totally blow it off.
    • Q2: Was also pretty bad about this this quarter, though I have recently picked up the habit of reading a few pages before bed again.

• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
      • Q1: Near 100% compliance
      • Q2: Near 0% compliance. I missed a few days early in the quarter, and then kind of abandoned the habit :/.
• Write more
  • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • Q1: I still owe the world a blog post about Mexico City, which I’m still drafting.
    • Q2: I still haven’t taken the time to finish up my Mexico City post :/. Perhaps I’ll try to spend some time on that this weekend if I finish my review quickly.
  • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
    • Q1: I’ve done this most weekends, though again the last month of Q1 I started to fall off the cart.
    • Q2: I haven’t been intentional about doing this lately. Some of this was that I was working weekends for about a month.
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
    • Q1: Good adherence.
    • Q2: Haven’t done this nearly as much lately… also, currently taking some time away from my father.
  • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
    • Q1: My therapy sessions have been kind of all over the place. I’ve maybe talked about my family in 2 or 3 out of nearly 10 to 12 sessions. I guess I have lots of other things to talk about :P.
    • Q2: I’ve had a lot more time with my therapist to discuss my family relationships now, and I feel like I’m really starting to examine the deeper issues. There hasn’t been a tangible change in my family relationships yet, but I’m excited to be doing the hard work.
• Learn to play the ukulele
  • Habit: Practice at least 10 minutes a day for at least 3 months
    • Added Q2
    • Q2: Basically 0% compliance.

Q3 Planning

Risk Mitigations

As identified above, the following OKRs and habits are at risk:

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year.
• Language learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Japanese program
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
• Read more
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
• Write more
  • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
  • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
• Learn to play the ukulele
  • Habit: Practice at least 10 minutes a day for at least 3 months

I’m going to address most of these in the “Changes to 2020 Goals” section, but I’ll discuss a few of them here. Particularly, I want to strategize around how I’m going to recover a few of the habits listed above, specifically body circumference measurements, reading, meditating, and writing.

For body circumference measurements, the issue is really just remembering. I’m adding a weekly repeating task in my task management system, as well as a weekly morning reminder to my Google assistant. Ideally, I’ll take care of this each week as one of the first things I do on cheat day (before the debauchery begins ;).

For reading, I’ve been having a lot of trouble establishing the habit of reading a few pages before bed each night. The issue here is mostly that I haven’t been disciplined and consistent about bedtime so sometimes I get to bed and it’s already so late that I don’t feel like I have time to read. I also sometimes forget to keep my Kindle charged and ready to go. I’m going to try to establish two adjacent, supporting habits:

1. Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
2. Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.

I think I fell off the cart on meditation because I shifted my sleep schedule for a California-based client for a couple months this quarter. I went from being an early morning riser to waking up around 9 or 10am and sleeping around 1 or 2am. When I wake up as late as 9 or 10am, I often don’t start working until 11 or 11:30am, which already feels quite late to me. As a result, I fall into the trap of feeling like I can’t spare the 10 minutes required to meditate in the morning. I think staying on an early morning routine and making sure I get plenty of sleep each night will help to rectify this. I’m already back on an earlier schedule after coming back from diving in Kenting, and I think a 7 or 7:30am wake-up time will leave me feeling like I have enough time to take care of this.

Writing is a tougher habit to crack… this really requires that I set aside some time when I know I’ll be high energy and able to do creative work, which is usually the morning after a nice, full sleep. Normally I set aside some time on the weekends, usually first thing Sunday morning. This quarter, I think I struggled to do this for a few reasons:

1. Half marathon training this quarter usually left me with a really, really long run to do on Sundays, which tended to leave me feeling like I didn’t have time and energy for much else on Sunday.
2. My client project this quarter was pretty urgent, and I worked a fair number of weekends in a row
3. Initially, my new relationship messed with my weekend schedule and routine a bit, since when I did actually have time on the weekend, I felt like I needed to carve out some time to make up for my relative absence during the week.

Fortunately, half marathon training and urgent client work are both over. My girlfriend and I have also settled into our relationship a little more, and are able to keep a fairly good routine. Lately, she and I have actually also been setting aside ~2-3 hours on the weekend to go to a cafe for a work session. I’m planning to use this work session for a new goal I’m adding, explained below, but I think it could be feasible to spend the first ~30 minutes on writing.

Changes to 2020 Goals

Here’s how my goals are affected by changing conditions in Q3:

• Exercise
  • Since I currently live in Taiwan, it should be fairly safe to return to regular weight lifting at a gym.
• Become more politically active
  • The 2020 US presidential election is coming up fast. If I’m going to get involved, now is the time.
• Launch a successful project
  • As COVID-19 continues to push signs of global recession, now is a good time to double-down on opportunities that will give me more liquidity to weather a bear economy, and potentially even give me extra cash to invest into the down market so I can see greater return as things eventually recover.

Nothing too surprising here.

Here’s how I’m adjusting my goals to compensate (items in green are being added, items in red are being removed):

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year
  • OKR: Take on no more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
  • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
  • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
  • Habit: Work on projects at least 6 hours a day
• Grow my consulting business
  • OKR: Join TopTal
    • This will make it easier for me to find leads for high-end consulting work with prestigious clients
  • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
    • I have these skills from my Machine Learning / AI Master’s degree, but haven’t used them much since college. I’d like to brush up on them and start offering these services to clients, and incorporate them into my own projects.
  • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
    • This will help me improve my algorithms skills and prepare me for TopTal’s engineering interview process
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
    • I don’t generally have a need for DP in my day-to-day engineering work, but this is an area that I always felt weak at, and which used to scare me a little. I’d like to push past that fear and master DP.
  • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
    • This can be reading one of the books I’ve listed above, or doing extra problems on HackerRank, or playing with machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science projects on Kaggle.
• Language Learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Japanese program
    • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
    • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
    • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
    • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese.
      • This will roughly correspond to slightly exceeding the “B1” level outlined by TOCFL, and is also commonly the number of words people say you need to know in order to be able to read a newspaper. (I’m still skeptical, but for context, 8000 is supposed to be ~fluent.)
      • At a pace of 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day, I should be able to accomplish this with the 6 months I have remaining in the year
    • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
    • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Reach 10% body fat
        • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
        • Habit: Track the foods I eat every day so I can correlate diet to fat loss
          • I’ll consider re-adding this in a limited capacity as a supporting habit, if necessary, but for now the current diet plan doesn’t really require this.
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
    • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
• Read More
  • OKR: Read 52 books
  • Learn to speed read
    • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
    • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
  • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
• Become more politically active
  • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities
• Learn to play the ukulele
  • Habit: Practice at least 10 minutes a day for at least 3 months

Trade-off: Launching a Successful Project vs Growing My Consulting Business

Very notably here: I’m laxing the restriction on client work this year. I’ve been debating this, especially since coaching for The Spike Lab promises to bring a fairly steady part-time income, but I think that given the state of the economy right now, if I can get people to pay my consulting fee, I should take the opportunity.

Each consulting project tangibly contributes greatly to my longer-term financial security, not just because of the infusion of cash it brings in, but also because each project helps me to build up my portfolio and allows me to collect positive testimonials that make it easier to passively catch leads for new clients.

Since time is finite, removing my 3-month maximum on consulting projects this year and adding ~half a day to a day of politically-oriented volunteer work means that I can’t commit to launching a second product this year. I do still hope to find time to finish out the next phase of Tribe, however.

Explaining the new dollar limit imposed on my coaching and consulting work requires a quick note on taxes: as an expat, I am able to exclude my earnings from US federal income taxes (but not CA state income tax and self-employment tax) each year up to a specified maximum. The relevant tax exclusion is the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion, and the annual exclusion limit for 2020 is $107,600. This means that I will pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes for every dollar I earn above that amount, which makes spending time away from my own work significantly less attractive.

New Goal: Improve My Software Engineering Skills

This goal is newly appearing here, so I’m going to write out my motivation for pursuing it.

Personally, I’ve always seen software as a means to an end. At times, I’ve cringed at being referred to as an “engineer” or a “programmer” because I hated how those labels sometimes felt like pigeon holes for my identity. I see myself as more of a problem solver or an entrepreneur who happens to have software in his toolbox.

That said, I do love writing software. I’ve always found the process enjoyable and interesting, and by now, having earned my 10,000 hours and then some, I think I’d be doing myself an injustice if I failed to recognize that software engineering is an important part of who I am.

So that said, I’d like to improve my software engineering skills for a couple of reasons:

1. Boost my confidence in engineering decisions I make on independent projects, or for client projects where I’m in a leadership or architectural position.
2. Gain experience in new and adjacent skills which I can then apply to my own projects or offer as services to clients.

Regarding the first point, I think every software engineer probably experiences some amount of self-doubt around certain design decisions we make in larger projects. Sometimes that self-doubt manifests in the form of severe tech debt. Worse, sometimes it manifests as an immediate need to entirely rewrite or re-design a piece of code (at the cost of days or weeks of time). Other times, it just creates a gnawing sensation at the back of our minds, that decreases confidence and, in turn, productivity going forward. I think reading more about how others think through some of these decisions and building more recognition around common patterns will help give me more perspective so that I can both make better decisions, and feel more confident in my decisions.

Regarding the second point, there are a couple of skills that I’m technically qualified in, but haven’t had much experience with since college. Chief among these is probably machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science. I actually have an AI and Machine Learning Master’s degree from Stanford, which should make me qualified to do work in these areas. However, since I don’t use these skills a whole lot these days, I can’t say I have a huge amount of recent experience or confidence in them. Developing these skills will make it easier for me to apply them to my own projects, or to offer them as services to clients. In this sense, improving my software engineering skills supports both launching my own businesses and growing my consulting business.

I’m also recently realizing that there’s actually a decent amount of fear holding me back in some of these areas. For example, with ML / AI, a lot of the theory is built upon some very complicated math (linear algebra + calculus). If I’m being honest, I think I’m a bit insecure about my math abilities. In reality, I’m probably decent at math. In fact, I’m probably well above average in terms of proficiency. However, growing up in the gifted and talented crowd and then going to Stanford where there were always a bunch of people who were naturally way better than me at math or who possessed a more intuitive understanding of some of the concepts, I’ve grown to become a little intimidated by math. This fear also exists for certain other areas of computer science like algorithms and dynamic programming in which I didn’t feel terribly proficient in comparison to my college peers.

Now that I’m more “mature” and I’m outside of the pressures of a traditional learning environment, I find that I have a desire to face those fears and prove to myself that I really can get better at these things. Throughout Q2, I’ve found myself beginning to experiment with reviewing these concepts on my own using tools like YouTube and HackerRank. Adding this to Q3, is really more formalizing how I spend that time than anything else. I’m excited to see where I can go now learning at my own pace!

New Goal: Become More Politically Active

I talked about this last quarter, so this isn’t exactly new, but since November’s presidential election is coming up fast, I think it’s time to formalize my desire to get involved.

I recently applied for a Volunteer Senior Software Developer position with Vote Forward, and am waiting to hear back. If they select me, I think the opportunity to apply my professional skills to a cause I’m passionate about is a perfect outlet for this goal.

If not, my plan is to use Swing Left to choose a few key races and start making phone calls or sending text messages, probably a few each day before I start working or in the evening before I go to bed (for optimal time zone overlap).

Adjusted Method: Exercise and Diet

Now that things have returned to normal in Taiwan, I plan to start visiting a gym regularly again.  I had a lot of success with weight loss and fat burning in Q2, but in the process I do feel I’ve lost some muscle mass. I’m beginning to realize that endurance running may not be something I want to focus on too much going forward. Yes, I have challenged myself with running in the past, but ultimately I’m not excited about having a distance runner’s physique. I’d like something more well-rounded with good amounts of lean muscle everywhere, but with a focus on function over aesthetics (though aesthetics are still important).

I’d like a more balanced routine that incorporates weight training, HIIT, and endurance cardio. The goals remain to:

1. Maintain a level of fitness that promotes a healthy body and mind
2. Create a functional fitness that I can apply to more physical activities and hobbies
3. Reach my body aesthetic goals

Though I don’t want to look like a distance runner, I also don’t want to be one of those muscle bodies at the gym who look huge, but then can’t run 3 miles to save their lives…

I’m finding that the training plans that fit me best are often oriented towards the military. Most other programs I find interesting are heavily weight-lifting-oriented, and I’d need to incorporate cardio on my own during off days.

Right now, I’m thinking I’ll get a membership at a real gym here in Taiwan, and then execute some combination of these 3 programs:

• Warrior Elite Workout Program
  • Probably do this one for the first 4 weeks, then switch to one of the other programs.
  • I like that this is 5 days a week so I can take the weekend off.
  • I like the combination of lifting with cardio.
  • I like that this looks challenging, so I can feel like I accomplished something if I get through it
• Chris Evans Workout Program
  • Chris Evans is a decent aesthetic role model for me ;).
  • I’d have to incorporate an extra day of cardio each week, probably 4-6 miles on Wednesdays or Sundays?
• Phase 1 Special Forces Prep
  • I did this one for a while while I was in Mexico. It really maxes out on “functional” and pushes the limit on strength, intensity, and multi-disciplinary endurance (running, swimming, and biking!).
  • Not sure I’ll have all the equipment needed to do this, but I can probably fudge it.
  • I’d likely substitute long-distance running for rucking.
  • This is the highest time commitment option of the 3… I’ll have to see how I feel time-wise after the Warrior Elite Workout Program.

Diet-wise, I’ve decided to stick to the Slow-Carb Diet, since I’m used to it by now and it’s working well. I really like the cheat day aspect of this diet, as it leaves me feeling non-deprived–I can have anything I want one day a week–and doesn’t seem to hamper long-term progress much. My only complaint is that, when combined with hard running, it tends to leave me feeling tired during workouts, so I’ve observed that my running performance isn’t great. I’ve solved this somewhat by allowing myself to cheat a little and eat some simple carbs (e.g. noodles or rice) on days with especially long or especially hard workouts.

I’m likely to combine SCD with tracking a daily protein goal of ~145 grams per day (~1 gram per pound of body weight), to help support my weightlifting efforts. Additionally, I plan to continue casually cutting with this diet until my body fat percentage dips below at least 13%, though more ideally something closer to 10%. Once I reach that point, I’ll start consciously increasing calorie intake to lean bulk and try to add more muscle.

Adjusted Method: Learning Japanese

I did the math, and it looks like I’d need to do about ~3 Japanese lessons on Duolingo each day to make this OKR. In abstract, 3 lessons on Duolingo isn’t a huge deal–on average, that takes probably 15-20 minutes. However, I have found recently that I don’t have the bandwidth to add a whole lot of new Anki cards for Japanese, at least not without sacrificing bandwidth to add new cards for Chinese, or risking being unable to get through my cards daily long-term.

I’ve also noticed, as I’ve noticed in the past with other Duolingo language programs, that my actual competence in Japanese is not tracking well against the perception of progress that Duolingo’s gamification leaves me with. Have I been exposed to a lot of new words and sentence patterns? Yes. Have I really internalized virtually any of them? No. In order to internalize these new concepts, they need to find their way into Anki… and if I can’t keep up with 3-lessons-a-day worth of Anki Japanese cards, it’s unlikely that going through the wrote task of completing the Duolingo Japanese program is going to help me much on its own.

I think the solution is, instead, to drop the Duolingo Japanese program OKR, and instead focus my efforts on:

1. Getting Duolingo grammar points and sentence examples from my existing Japanese lessons into Anki
2. Catching up on my already collected Duolingo Anki vocabulary
3. Memorizing my first ~600 words based on frequency with the assistance of the Core 10k Anki deck I already have loaded.

The new habits I’ve added are aimed at accomplishing all of the above:

• Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
  • Core 10k is a deck of 10,000 sentences where each sentence introduces a new high frequency Japanese word. If I get through the first ~600 sentences, I’ll have been exposed to my goal of the first ~600 most frequent Japanese words. 3 new sentences a day for the rest of the year should put me on track to hit this target.
• Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
  • This number has been chosen strategically to keep Japanese reviews at about 50 or less so that they stay manageable and don’t cut into bandwidth reserved for Chinese.
• Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
  • There are about ~26 Japanese skills that have grammar tips that I’ve completed, which means I only need to spend ~26 days doing this at a pace of one skill per day.

Dropped Goal: Learn to Play the Ukulele

I added this for Q2, but then hardly followed-through on it. I think I’ve discovered that my motivation to learn the ukulele is likely either not strong enough or not clear enough to myself. Given that I expect to add a load of new commitments in Q3, it seems natural to cut this, or at least put it on hold. Right now, this doesn’t feel more important than anything else on the list, and also doesn’t feel more important than even just giving myself 10 extra precious minutes of downtime per day.

Summarized Q3 Goals

• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600).
  • OKR: Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
• Grow my consulting business
  • OKR: Join TopTal
  • OKR: Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
  • Habit: Do a practice problem on HackerRank daily
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • OKR: Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • OKR: Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • OKR: Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • OKR: Master dynamic programming (DP)
  • Habit: Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
• Language learning
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
    • Habit: Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences each day
    • Habit: Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards a day
    • Habit: Every day, make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
    • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
    • OKR: Reach 3000 words in Chinese
    • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
    • Habit: Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson daily
  • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
• Improve my health
  • Get back into shape
    • Get lean
      • Reach 10% body fat
        • Habit: Measure body composition every day so I can tell if current efforts are working
      • Habit: Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
    • OKR: Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
  • Learn to speed read
    • OKR: Eliminate subvocalization while reading
    • Habit: For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software each day
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
  • Habit: Each morning after I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow.
  • Habit: Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages.
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more (aim for once a day; consistency matters more than duration)
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
• Write more
  • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
  • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
  • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly
• Become more politically active
  • Habit: Spend 4-8 hours each week on political activities

Summarized Q3 Habits and OKRs

Habits:

• Daily
  • Work on projects 6 hours a day
  • Do a practice problem on HackerRank
  • Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Complete Anki reviews
  • Add 30 new Chinese Anki cards
  • Complete 1 Duolingo Chinese lesson
  • Add 3 new Japanese Core 10k sentences
  • Add at least 5 new Japanese vocabulary Anki cards
  • Make grammar and example sentence flashcards for 1 already-completed Duolingo lesson
  • Read 2 pages a day
  • After I make my bed, make sure my Kindle is charged and place it on my pillow
  • Every evening, get in bed 30 minutes before my actual intended bedtime. Before I remove my Kindle from my pillow, make sure to read a few pages
  • For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed training software
  • Measure body composition
• Weekly
  • Exercise at least 3 days a week
  • Take a full set of body circumference measurements once a week
  • Every weekend, spend 2-3 hours working on something that hones my software engineering skills
  • Every weekend, write at least 100 words
  • Call each family member
  • Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist
  • Spend 4-8 hours on political activities

OKRs:

• Launch a successful project
  • Release a new version of Tribe with updates for COVID-19
  • Earn no more profit from coaching and consulting than the annual Foreign Earned Income Tax Exclusion limit ($107,600)
• Grow my consulting business
  • Complete a professional project related to machine learning / artificial intelligence / data science
  • Join TopTal
• Improve my software engineering skills
  • Read Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
  • Read Design Patterns by The “Gang of Four”
  • Read Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler
  • Master dynamic programming (DP)
• Learn Chinese
  • Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
  • Reach 3000 words in Chinese
  • Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
• Learn Japanese
  • Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
• Get back into shape
  • Reach 10% body fat
  • Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it unless body composition results show I’m not moving toward where I want to go. Re-evaluate programs every ~12 weeks.
  • Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
• Read more
  • Read 52 books
  • Eliminate subvocalization while reading
• Write more
  • Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
  • Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues