Re-aligning

It’s crazy to say, but the world has changed a lot in the 3 months since I wrote and published my 2020 goals. Two rather large events have affected my world and, I think, the world at large:

• The acquittal of Donald Trump by the US Senate, and Trump’s apparent subsequent emboldening of his–as I view them–democracy-eroding behavior.
• The advent of COVID-19, and the entirely world essentially shutting down for the first time because of it.

I will need to revise a few of my goals in light of these happenings.

Getting Politically Involved

First, regarding Donald Trump: I am very, very concerned about what it means about our government that Donald Trump was acquitted without considering the full range of evidence and testimony. I am also very alarmed by Trump’s subsequent actions, which seem to indicate that he sees his acquittal as a free pass to double-down on many of his already concerning behaviors.

In particular, I increasingly feel that the government and the system that runs America today does not reflect the Constitution upon which the country was founded. Much of the Constitution was framed with the hope that honor and duty to country and to its founding ideals would trump–pun not intended–personal and partisan interests and loyalties. I believe that the Senate’s vote to acquit Trump without reviewing the full range of evidence and testimony is a clear sign that the Senate has failed to perform its intended function. It also says to me that many members of our government aren’t in office to uphold the ideals of our nation, and are instead clearly working in service of something else, likely their own personal thirst for wealth or power.

Additionally, Trump’s actions following his acquittal have me concerned that he sees this as a condonement of his already rather alarming behavior, and an invitation to be more even more flagrant in his abuse of power. We’ve watched him remove “disloyal” government officials and employees, and continue to attempt to consolidate power in the executive branch. Combined with the knowledge that many members of our legislative branch have shown themselves to be self-interested, I now worry about the idea of collusion between these two corrupt branches to permanently consolidate this power in ways that can only be fundamentally counter to what democracy–and particularly American democracy–is meant to be.

In short, I worry now that American democracy may be reaching the end of its life, and that time is truly running out to save it. I worry a little that Trump will find an excuse to stay in power, even against the will of the people. I worry very much that a national or international crisis like, for example, COVID-19 is all it might take for some people to willingly handover power to some of these more subversive government elements.

If what I’m saying seems alarmist or extreme, then, well, I very much hope that I am wrong and that I am overreacting. Because if I’m right, we may already be fucked.

How does all of this relate back to my goals? I cannot, in good conscience, ignore what is happening back home right now. This year’s presidential election is going to be pivotal, and I’ve come to realize that I will regret it if all that I fear comes to pass and I sat by and did nothing. I have been very seriously considering returning to the US in July to volunteer and participate in campaigns as much as I can. As a nomadic individual, I have a degree of mobility that most people do not, and I see this as an asset I can use. I could, for example, pick a few battleground states to live in and continue “nomading” within the US while doing important political work. Doing so will have a significant effect on my goals, as many of them will become unrealistic and will need to be revised.

COVID-19

However, as COVID-19 spreads and the world essentially shuts down, I am less and less convinced that it will make sense for me to return to the States to participate in campaign season in person, particularly because I doubt very much that it will be a good idea to have people traveling from state to state knocking on doors or congregating in large political rallies. Regardless, I do expect to devote some of my time to the political fight between now and November, though I’ll likely have to find ways to contribute remotely.

Of course, COVID-19 affects a lot of my other goals adversely as well. Realistically speaking, I foresee that I won’t really be able to travel for at least the next 6 months, if not for the rest of 2020. I think there are only two conditions that lead to the world opening up again: 1) we reach a point where expected case counts are within the tolerances of what our healthcare systems can handle, even with laxed containment measures or 2) a vaccine is approved and widely distributed. Since a vaccine isn’t realistically going to become available for at least 12-18 months, condition #2 isn’t something I think we’ll all end up waiting around for. (Plus, you have to consider that even after a vaccine is developed, tested, and approved, it will take a significant amount of time and resources to produce it en mass and distribute it to the populace.) So, realistically, condition #1 could start to happen in the next 6 months, but likely only in countries that handled their initial response well.

An unfortunate, and likely less-oft considered side-effect of all of this is that anti-Asian racism will also likely limit my ability to travel outside of Asia, potentially for a long time after COVID-19 is no longer public enemy #1. Already, I’m hearing reports of discrimination, and sometimes even outright physical assault against Asians even in Europe and the United States. I can only imagine what things will look like in less progressive parts of the world like Central and South America or Africa.

Changes to 2020 Goals

The reality of the situation is that I need to be prepared to hunker down somewhere, and likely for as long as a year. Right now that place is Taipei, Taiwan, where I just completed 14 days of self-quarantine. Depending on the situation, I am considering the idea of pursuing a 1-year entrepreneurship visa in Taiwan so that I can legally stay here to weather COVID-19.

So, realistically speaking, I won’t be doing any of the following this year:

• Spend 3 months in Japanese-speaking countries
• Attending the olympics in Tokyo, Japan
  • In actuality, I also wasn’t able to secure affordable tickets anyway, but now I feel less bad about not going haha…
• Spend some time at a Plum Village location in Asia
  • I actually had planned to go to Plum Village in Thailand in March, but my retreat was cancelled by the monastery due to growing concerns over COVID-19

The following goals are likely to be harder to execute this year:

• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • Dating and social interaction isn’t exactly encouraged during these strange times
• Learn French
  • I am a strong believer in immersion and, while I can continue to practice French here in Taiwan, I don’t know that it makes sense to make it a focus for 3 months the way I had intended to before
• Exercise
  • I’ll still be able to exercise, but due to COVID-19 I will likely need to find alternatives to going to the gym and lifting weights for a while.

Otherwise, though, most of my goals look to be location-independent, and perhaps don’t require that much extra adjusting. I don’t think I’m going to add anything drastically new to make up for what COVID-19 has made impossible, but since a few of my language goals have been affected, and I’m likely to end up with an extended stay in Taiwan, so I think will redouble my efforts in both Chinese and Japanese, though without modifying the existing OKRs too much.

Here are the edits I’m making to my OKRs (red items are being removed, green items are being added):

• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Create and complete a 30-day challenge for myself with challenges sourced from friends
  • OKR: Complete the challenges from Rules of the Game
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
• Deepen my mindfulness practice
  • Meditate more
    • Habit: Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • OKR: Spend some time at a Plum Village location in Asia
• Learn French
  • OKR: Pass a B2 language test in French
    • I’m thinking I might take this in Hanoi, where official French language tests can be found at a discount
  • Spend 3 months focused on learning French
    • OKR: Log at least 4.5 hours of conversation or class time each week.
      • If I like this model, I may consider implementing it in other countries for other languages. Thus far I’ve been hesitant to sign-up for classes due to cost and concerns that classes might move too slowly or fail to fit with some of my existing language learning workflows.
• Learn Japanese
  • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
  • OKR: Spend 3 months in Japanese-speaking countries
  • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Japanese program
    • Add all new words and sentence patterns  introduced by this program to Anki
• Learn Chinese
  • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
  • OKR: Complete the Duolingo Chinese program
    • Add all new words and sentence patterns introduced by this program to Anki
  • Habit: Add at least 30 new Chinese Anki cards a day for the duration of my stay in Taiwan
• 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
      • 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.
• Learn to play the ukulele
  • Habit: Practice at least 10 minutes a day for at least 3 months

I am cautiously adding the ukulele to this list of goals because I’ve been traveling with a ukulele for a while now, and feel I haven’t been making good use of it. I’d like to see if I can get to a point where I feel good about my ukulele skills so I can decide whether or not to continue to bring it with me on my travels. This also feels like a fun skill to pick-up now that I’m dropping most of my previous social commitments due to COVID-19. It would probably be better to practice 20 minutes a day, but I’m going to make the requirement lower than that just to get myself to dedicate mental space for it every day. My guess is that most days I’ll be having fun and end up practicing closer to 20 minutes each day anyway.

For exercise in Q2, I’m going to complete a 12-week half marathon program. My rationale is that, since I can’t really go to the gym, running is a natural fallback for me, since it’s always been my primary sport. Running will hopefully also pair well with my fat loss goals, since running long distances at slower speeds supposedly helps to burn fat. On average, training for a half marathon isn’t too time consuming (generally less than an hour per day, except for one longer day a week), and the program I’ve chosen has a good mix of intensity balanced with distance, so I’ll still feel like I’m working myself hard.

For cross training days while I follow this program, I plan to do some bodyweight HIIT targeting my upper body, since I won’t be working it as frequently as I had been this quarter. On rest days, I’ll likely also make sure to do a short abdominal workout routine so all my bases are covered.

For diet this quarter, I would like to try to stick to the slow-carb program and see how it works for me. Q1’s diet plan was based on calorie restriction and macro counting. It worked pretty well, but I feel like I’ve plateaued, so I think it’s time to change things up.

Review

How did I do in Q1? I’d actually give myself a B/B+ for my work this quarter. I fell off a bit in the last month of Q1, but for the most part I was pretty focused and hit a lot of what I wanted. A B/B+ is actually one of the highest ratings I’ve given myself so far, so it’s exciting to see early indications that some of my changes may be working :)!

Quantitative

• Language learning
  • Learn French
    • OKR: Pass a B2 language test in French
    • Spend 3 months focused on learning French
      • OKR: Log at least 4.5 hours of conversation or class time each week.
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Japanese-speaking countries
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
      • 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.
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
  • Habit: Complete Anki reviews daily.
    • I’ve missed a couple days here and there, but always end up making them up promptly.
• 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
          • I’ve barely missed a day of doing this.
        • Habit: Track the foods I eat every day so I can correlate diet to fat loss
          • I started out strong doing this, but then fell off the cart toward the end of the quarter.
    • 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.
      • I chose this program and stuck to it pretty closely.
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • I would give myself a 60% compliance rate with my diet haha…
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
      • I’m easily doing closer to 5-6 days a week
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Create and complete a 30-day challenge for myself with challenges sourced from friends
  • OKR: Complete the challenges from Rules of the Game
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
    • 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.
• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year.
    • Presently, potentially a little off-track to hit this.
  • OKR: Take on no more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
    • It helps that I haven’t had any leads this year yet.
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
    • 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.
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
    • 17/13 books for Q1
  • 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
      • I had very high compliance with this for 2 months. Then dropped off.
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • I was good about this for about a month, then started to totally blow it off.
• 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
  • OKR: Spend some time at a Plum Village location in Asia
• Write more
  • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • I still owe the world a blog post about Mexico City, which I’m still drafting.
  • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
    • I’ve done this most weekends, though again the last month of Q1 I started to fall off the cart.
• 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
    • 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.

Qualitative

Qualitatively, I feel like I did pretty well. I spent the entirety of the quarter in Taipei, fulfilling my “Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries” OKR. I’m generally able to have conversations with locals in Chinese, though there are still a lot of words I won’t recognize, and I’ll often need them to either explain or re-express themselves using different words.

Work-wise, I did OK, but not great. I didn’t release anything new to users this quarter, which is a little disappointing to me, but I have made a good amount of progress towards some new features for a product that I’m excited about. I realized too late that my work this quarter had been a little unfocused due to the lack of a real scoping/planning session to ensure that I knew what was important and why. As a result, I had a lot of days where I felt kind of frustrated that things weren’t moving more quickly, or where I felt a little lost in the process. I’ve now taken the time to really write out a plan that outlines the what, the why, and the how of my work for the next couple of months, and so far I think it’s been helping a lot. In the future, I need to remember to set aside a couple days to do this at the beginning of every major chunk of work.

I do think, however, that I need to be a little more disciplined about work time and vacations. I feel like I didn’t work nearly as much this quarter as I had intended to, in part because I had some unexpected time off, and in part because some days I just struggled to get my full 6 hours in.

Health- and exercise-wise, I feel pretty good about my efforts. I exercised pretty much 6 days a week for virtually the entire quarter. I didn’t do as well about following my diet, on average, and I do partially have 14 days in home self-quarantine to blame for that, but my results on the scale have been promising nevertheless. I’m down over 10 pounds this quarter, and my body fat looks to have dropped somewhere between 2 and 3 percent. It’s been hard to get accurate body fat measurements, so I don’t really know exactly how close I am to 10% at this point, but I’d guess I’m somewhere in the range between 13 and 16 percent, which isn’t a bad place to be.

Meditation has been going well. I have actually meditated every day for at least 10 minutes. I’ve found that 20 minutes sometimes feels too long and starts to mess with my morning routine, so I’ve started to allow myself to do shorter sessions so that I don’t feel tempted to skip the sessions entirely.

Reading is going very well. I’ve already ready 17 books this year, so I’m way ahead of the 13 I needed to stay on track for 52. I think all of the books I’ve read have so far been audiobooks, however, so I’m still struggling to make reading physical books a real habit. I’ll take what I can get, though, and I do feel like the audiobooks have had the intended effect of forcing me to learn and think about interesting topics, and generally philosophically engage with the world around me.

I did also do a good amount of speed reading this quarter, though I started to peter out after about 2 months. If the speed reading tests in the app I’m using are accurate, my reading speed has increased from ~250 words per minute (average for someone who subvocalizes) to something closer to 375 words per minute. I’m starting to learn what it feels like to read with less subvocalization, but I certainly haven’t eliminated it yet.

Therapy has been going well. I found a therapist I like, and she’s been helpful in pointing out some of my patterns, validating my own thoughts and ideas around my weaknesses, and occasionally giving advice to push me to think more deeply. I don’t know that I’ve necessarily witnessed a tangible change wrt to my relationship with my family, but I do feel like we’ve been getting along OK, and I have been good about calling every week. (I’ve maybe missed one or two weeks here and there.)

Conclusion

On the whole, I feel like things are going surprisingly well with my goals, and I don’t feel I need to take a whole lot of corrective action. I will, however, want to pay special attention to the last month of Q2, when my habits are more likely to fall off, and I’ll need to make sure I take the time to scope out and plan my work so that I stay on track.

Happy New Year from Taipei, Taiwan!!

For quite a few years now, I’ve been writing out my annual goals and publishing them here on this blog. I’m going to skip the usual preface, as it’s getting repetitive, but suffice to say that it’s been a good exercise to force me to really think about how I’m spending my time each year, and whether or not I’m moving in a good direction.

2019’s theme was habits. Since 2019’s goal set was more-or-less a continuation of 2018’s, I decided to change the execution a little bit. The reasoning behind a habit-driven approach was that many long-term macro goals require habitual adjustments on the micro level. I wrote a deeper reflection on 2019 elsewhere, but at a high-level I think this approach was correct. However, I asked myself to do a little more than was realistic in 2019, and there were probably a few periods where I experienced burnout without realizing it.

2020 is also largely going to be a continuation of 2018’s goal set, with a few changes and additions. I am still going to focus on building good habits. However, I am also going to intentionally make some of these habits a little easier to accomplish so that it’s more likely I feel I can complete them all in a given day.

At the end of the day, I think a lot of what makes habits work is consistency, not magnitude. A common tactic I’ve seen is to trick yourself into doing more by committing yourself to doing less. For example, by asking myself to read just two pages every night rather than to nebulously read before bed, I create an easily accomplishable, quantifiable, and well-scoped goal that I’m more likely to create space for. Odds are once I’ve started the process of reading, I’ll likely read for longer than just two pages.

I am also hoping to create a little more space in my life for flexibility and spontaneity. I think letting myself have some free time left over to reinvest however I situationally see fit is important–a lot of my best ideas actually come during times when I’m not “supposed” to be doing anything else.

Regardless, as time goes on and I feel comfortable with my load, I can always make things a little tougher. To that end, this year I’m going to be better about taking some time at the end of each quarter to really evaluate my progress on these goals and whether the load needs to be adjusted in either direction. This will be a period of 2-3 days each quarter where I release myself from obligation to do anything else (work included) so I can really think critically about my goals. Here are the dates I’ve blocked off on my calendar to do this, since I’m pretty sure if I don’t block these dates off now, I won’t make space for review:

• Q1: April 3rd to April 5th
• Q2: July 3rd to July 5th
• Q3: October 2nd to October 4th
• Q4: December 28th to December 30th

TBD as to whether or not I’ll publish each of these reviews, since polishing pieces for public consumption does take extra time and effort, though I will publish end of year reflections as usual.

In deciding on my goal set this year, I examined last year’s progress in combination with a rough “bucket list” of things I want to do and things I’m still afraid of.

Here is the bucket list, which is in no particular order and by no means comprehensive, since it was written off the top of my head:

• Attend Le Cordon Bleu in France in French
• Learn to make sushi in Japan in Japanese
• Go to law school (?)
• Run for public office (?)
• Get licensed to fly planes
• Get licensed to sail larger boats
• Go on some cool, unique adventures
  • Grand Canyon rafting
  • Alishan, Taiwan climbing
  • Yushan, Taiwan climbing
  • See Ha Long Bay in Vietnam
  • Explore the Amazon rainforest
• Attend the Olympics in a country I love
• Learn to build successful products, businesses, and organizations
• Study all kinds of philosophies and gain a deep intellectual understanding of lots of academic disciplines that underlie human behavior and the world around us
• Be able to communicate and create a connection with people from all around the world, in their own language, and without using my own
• Cultivate an abundance mentality around women and sex
• Write a book
• Write more about philosophy and life on my blog
• Reach and maintain a level of fitness where I feel happy, healthy, and confident with my body and abilities
• Learn martial arts
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
• Perform in an improv show
• Create my own thesis for the goal of life and what it means for individuals, societies, and governments
• Find my own way to make the world a better place

I probably won’t be touching most of the above this year, but a few are of interest:

• Fitness and health are going to be an important focus this year
• Cultivating an abundance mentality around women and sex will also be an important focus this year
• I will continue working on my own business, and consulting for startups this year
• I will continue to work on my language studies this year
• I’m planning to attend therapy sessions and hope that insights and learnings from those will help to improve my relationship with my immediate family
• If I’m lucky, I’ll find some affordable dojos to learn martial arts in Asia
• I am hoping to attend the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, though I need to decide whether or not any remaining tickets are interesting and not cost prohibitive
• I will likely have some cool adventures in Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan this year
• In the unlikely case I find I have a lot of free time, I may purchase X-Plane 11 and start teaching myself the basics of aviation

Things I’m still afraid of:

• Rejection
  • Talking to attractive women, especially women I don’t know already
  • Feeling isolated and alone; unloved/unlovable
• Regret
  • Feeling like I wasted my time
  • Feeling like I missed opportunities I should have taken
• Commitment
  • Getting trapped in a relationship that doesn’t help me become who I want to be (or trapping someone in a relationship that doesn’t help them become who they want to be)
  • Getting trapped in an unhappy relationship
  • Choosing a career path or job that bores me or leaves me feeling unfulfilled
• Death/Aging
  • Letting my youth slip away
  • Not doing certain things before I get too old to do them

With the exception of talking to attractive women, most of the above can probably only be dealt with through time, contemplation, and maybe a little therapy. Since I do intend to find a therapist this year, perhaps I’ll unpack some of this.

Finally, here are 2020’s goals:

• Language learning
  • Learn French
    • OKR: Pass a B2 language test in French
      • I’m thinking I might take this in Hanoi, where official French language tests can be found at a discount
    • Spend 3 months focused on learning French
      • OKR: Log at least 4.5 hours of conversation or class time each week.
        • If I like this model, I may consider implementing it in other countries for other languages. Thus far I’ve been hesitant to sign-up for classes due to cost and concerns that classes might move too slowly or fail to fit with some of my existing language learning workflows.
  • Learn Japanese
    • OKR: Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese.
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Japanese-speaking countries
      • Realistically, this means spending 3 months in Japan
  • Learn Chinese
    • OKR: Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
      • I’m unlikely to go anywhere other than Taiwan to do this
  • 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: Track the foods I eat every day so I can correlate diet to fat loss
    • 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.
      • Ideal program includes HIIT, weightlifting, and endurance cardio; has 5 workouts a week; and does not take longer than ~60 minutes per workout on average
    • OKR: Find a diet plan and stick to it long enough to evaluate results.
      • In the past I haven’t been consistent about this to really evaluate, and I haven’t had access to a way to measure my body fat
        • This time, I’m traveling with a digital scale that can measure my body fat 🙂
      • In the past it’s also been time intensive to prepare my own meals, which sometimes causes me to fall off the cart
        • This time, I’m also traveling with a sous vide machine, which, aside from just being a fun chef’s toy, promises to make cooking certain things (e.g. chicken breast) super low effort and actually really tasty
      • Things I’d like to try:
        • Calorie restriction and macronutrients
        • Slow carb diet
          • This one is attractive because of its “cheat day” concept, which keeps me from feeling deprived of my favorite foods, and because it doesn’t strictly require me to log what I eat
        • Keto diet
    • Habit: Exercise at least 3 days a week
• Learn to talk to attractive women
  • OKR: Create and complete a 30-day challenge for myself with challenges sourced from friends
    • This should force accountability similar to my rejection challenges back in the day
  • OKR: Complete the challenges from Rules of the Game
  • OKR: Delete all dating apps, and don’t use them for the entire year
    • This will force me away from outlets that might make me feel like I’m making progress when I’m really not
• Launch a successful project
  • OKR: Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year.
    • This number is down from last year, as I’m realizing the time it takes to really test a complex idea and reach product market fit is closer to 3-6 months than it is to 1-3 months.
  • OKR: Take on no more than 3 months of consulting work this year.
    • This should be sufficient to fund my lifestyle for the year
  • Habit: Work on projects 6 hours a day
• Read more
  • OKR: Read 52 books
    • There are actually specific topics I’d like to see myself delve into further, but… for now I’ll just settle for increasing volume.
  • 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
      • I purchased a license for 7 Speed Reading awhile back, but never really made use of it
    • Habit: Take a reading speed test every week or two to measure progress
  • Habit: Read at least 2 pages a day
    • Keeping the number small so I can develop this into a habit and feel like this is easy to accomplish
• 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
  • OKR: Spend some time at a Plum Village location in Asia
    • Hong Kong and Thailand are both good ideas
    • I’m currently registered for one week in Plum Village, Thailand, from March 6 until March 13, though this is still cancellable
• Write more
  • OKR: Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
    • ~Approximately once every 3 months
  • OKR: Finally write the blog post I’ve been meaning to write about “ideal love” theory
  • Habit: Write at least 100 words every weekend
    • Again something small just to force myself to find time to sit down and write regularly
• Improve my relationship with my immediate family
  • OKR: Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships
    • I’m going to try BetterHelp for a little while and see how I like it
  • Habit: Call each family member weekly
  • Habit: Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist weekly

Here are the habits extracted from the above for my own convenience:

• Daily
  • Read 2 pages a day
  • Use Headspace to meditate every day shortly after waking up
  • Complete Anki reviews
  • Measure body composition
  • Track foods I eat
  • Work on projects 6 hours a day
  • For at least 3 months, spend 10 minutes using speed reading training software
• Weekly
  • Write 100 words every weekend
  • Call each family member
  • Discuss progress on family relationships with a therapist
  • Exercise at least 3 days a week
  • Take a reading speed test to measure progress
• Quarterly
  • Review these goals and adjust load as needed

And here are the OKRs:

• Pass a B2 language test in French
• For 3 months, log at least 4.5 hours of conversation or class time in French
• Memorize the first 600-1000 most common words in Japanese
• Spend 3 months in Japanese-speaking countries
• Spend 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries
• Find a training program I feel I can trust and stick to it
• Find a diet plan and stick to it
• Create and complete a 30-day challenge for myself with challenges sourced from friends
• Complete the challenges from Rules of the Game
• Delete all dating apps and don’t use them for the entire year
• Launch at least 2 projects of my own this year
• Take on no more than 3 months of consulting work this year
• Read 52 books
• Eliminate subvocalization while reading
• Spend some time at a Plum Village location in Asia
• Write one blog post per new city/country I live in
• Write a blog post about “ideal love” theory
• Find an online therapist I like to help me navigate difficult emotional issues involving family relationships

Most of these goals aren’t new, and I’ve written extensively about why I’m pursuing each of them in the past, so I won’t rehash them all here. Rather, I’ll just cover the ones that are new or feel like they continue to require explanation.

Improve my relationship with my immediate family

Relationship with self and relationship with family have been rising themes in my life for awhile now. I grew up in a household where my parents seldom got along. Neither of them ever really seemed to know how to deal with their own emotions, let alone with each other’s. As a result, I don’t think my parents were ever really capable of teaching me how to do these things for myself–after all, it’s difficult teach things that you haven’t yet mastered yourself. My lack of aptitude in these areas lent itself to a lot of struggle, particularly in my high school and college years. I never really had a template for healthy relationships. For a very long time, I don’t think I had a particularly healthy relationship with myself.

These are difficult issues, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who never felt equipped by their parents to deal with them. There are a lot of unhappy and unhealthy relationships out there, and I think a lot of the insecurities, emotional issues, fears, and biases that people have probably stem from the effect that familial issues had on them. What’s particularly alarming about these kinds of issues is that in many cases they can become generational. Without conscious examination and practice, people tend to become emotionally deficient in similar ways to their parents. This means that that hot temper one of your parents has, or a tendency to be physically, emotionally, or verbally abusive may actually be an outgrowth of similar issues that their parents had, and even their parents before them. It also means that if we’re not careful, and we don’t work on ourselves, we will tend to pass these deficiencies to our own children in turn. (I think this is the source of the common aphorism “people tend to become their parents.”)

In my case, because home life was always so turbulent, I’ve done my best to learn from my parents’ mistakes and shortcomings. I now feel I’ve overcome a lot of the issues I started out with–a tendency for self-loathing expressed as extreme judgment towards self and others; mild social anxiety; a fear of trusting my own instincts and following my own path.

But the fact remains that my parents and sister still struggle with some of the things they’ve always struggled with, both with themselves, and with each other. And the fact remains that when I’m back with them, I tend to revert to old habits without realizing. Despite the progress I’ve made for myself over the years, I am ashamed to admit that my relationship with my parents–with my father, in particular–is often shaky at best.

I’ve wanted to resolve these issues with my parents for a long while now and the first time this entered my thoughts was in 2017 when I lived at home in San Diego for 6 months before starting my journey as a nomad. The first time this entered my writing, was in 2018, when understanding and healing my relationship with my parents became a major theme of my stay in Plum Village.

So why is this finally becoming so urgent as to make its way into my annual goals? Well, I had a girlfriend in Mexico City, and my parents came to visit over Thanksgiving. Naturally, I felt it made sense for my family to meet my girlfriend and vice-versa, so that I could ideally spend quality time with all of them without losing out on time with any of them. Unfortunately, even without me in the mix, a day with my family can be a stressful endeavor… and when I enter the fray without the right mindset, I tend to just make things worse.

Suffice to say that after a few days with my family, my girlfriend told me one night that she was extremely disappointed in my behavior toward both my mother and my father, despite my feeling like I had been on relatively good behavior. She also felt somewhat unwelcome by my sister, who likely felt like my bringing my girlfriend along detracted from quality time I could be spending with her. My girlfriend and I had a small fight over this all of this, and not without reason from her end. All of this is to say that for the first time in my life, I realized just how negatively my relationship with my family and the relationships within my family might affect my own romantic relationships.

If I didn’t have enough reasons to take action on this before, here arises yet another.

Learn to talk to attractive women

One of my biggest fears when I make this goal public is that people will think I want to sleep around, so I continue to feel the need to clarify that this goal isn’t really about that. Yes, this is part of a larger desire to have a more abundant mindset when it comes to women and sex, but I don’t actually need that to mean that I have lots of sex, just more to feel like it’s not far out of reach if I did want it, whether or not I actually act on the impulse. (And for the record, my existing experience with more casual physical intimacy without emotional intimacy has already left me not so desirous of more.)

This goal also isn’t really about finding a girlfriend or eventual life partner. From where I’m sitting right now, I’m not even sure if I want to be in a relationship. If I were to get into a relationship, it would have to be one where I feel the relationship actually pushes me to grow, rather than just taking time and energy away from my own growth efforts. More on all of that when I eventually write about love…

Instead, this is really more about establishing a mindset that allows me to be confident I’m making dating decisions from a place of excitement/love/abundance instead of a place of anxiety/fear/scarcity. A clear example of the difference here would be someone who chooses a partner because they feel inadequate or insecure, fearing that they can’t do any better than this partner and should just settle for what they have now versus someone who chooses a partner because they are confident and whole, but think that this partner is someone extraordinary that they’d like to have in their lives, and truly stands out above all of the other options, including the option of being happy on one’s own. I don’t know about you, but I’d like to be the latter, thanks.

Where I am now, I think there are still lingering feelings of inadequacy or insecurity that trigger a deep fear of talking to some women. I think getting over this will help me to feel like, while not everyone is going to be a good fit for me, nobody is “out of my league” so that I can feel confident that whoever I ultimately choose, I chose them because I actually love them and want to be with them, not just because I was secretly or subconsciously afraid I couldn’t do better. It will also help me to learn to just treat people like people, rather than putting certain people on pedestals.

Now, this is a goal that has been appearing in some form for years. And anybody following these goals from year to year would be totally justified in rolling their eyes and asking me what in the hell is going to be different this year. Part of the difficulty has been that traveling makes this even harder by adding a language barrier that often all but guarantees I’ll make a fool out of myself. Most of it is really just that I’ve been dreading addressing this and have been avoiding it.

I’m hoping a couple of things are going to be different. Firstly, I’m going to find a couple sources for challenges to execute for this goal. Two obvious sources for challenges will be: 1) friends who want to see me suffer 😛 and 2) the book Rules of the Game by Neil Strauss. Regarding #2, say what you will about the pick-up community–I, myself, do not support many of the pick-up communities practices after having read many, many books on the subject–but they do have a good handle on what it takes for a guy to push his comfort zone in this area, which is exactly what I need right now.

Secondly, I’m mentally committing myself to pressing forward with this even given that language barriers are an added challenge. Am I going to make a fool out of myself I’m forced to speak e.g. Chinese during some of these challenges? Probably. But then, that’s actually sort of the point–put myself out there, fail if I have to, and get comfortable with all of the emotions involved.

Sometime this year, I’ll be making these challenges a priority and will be holding myself publicly accountable for them. I likely won’t be videotaping any of this as I did last time, but I likely will write about some of the challenges. Stay tuned.

—

That’s it! To anyone out there reading this: I hope this was helpful, thank you for taking the time, and I wish you a fantastic 2020! Good luck moving towards wherever it is you hope to go.

If you’re looking for my 2020 New Year’s Resolutions, you can find them here.

Without looking at my goals, I want to say that qualitatively 2019 has been a decent year. I spent time in 6 countries (including my brief stays in the US), made a few new good friends whose stories I hope to follow around the world, learned enough Spanish to feel generally comfortable in Mexico, and made significant progress on a few projects. I’m feeling like I’ve finally got a good handle on balancing my nomadic lifestyle with productivity.

Considering my goals, I feel like I did as much as I could have (while remaining relatively sane) but still came up short on a few things. In particular, I completely fell off the cart on reading this year. Additionally, I worked on ~4 different projects this year, but it’s hard to say how many of them I finished. (One of them is a long-term, ongoing engagement with a client, another is a startup where we’re still searching for product market fit, but do have users playing with it.) Optimistically, I could say that out of 4 projects I finished 2.95, where the partial finished project is a client contract that is mostly complete but has a couple small things left, and the unfinished project is, once again, Serenity, the productivity tool I’ve been wanting to create. (The irony here is not lost on me.)

One of the bigger themes this year was habits. The idea was that any goal tied to a permanent lifestyle change really needs to be built into my life in some habitual way. I think that this was directionally correct. However, I struggled to internalize all of the habits that I wanted to solidify this year.

A few of the important ones have stuck well. For example, I do have a pretty solid habit around studying flashcards in Anki, which has powered learning Chinese and Spanish both to pretty reasonable levels considering the time investment. I also feel the habit of 6 hours a day of work has been ingrained in me deeply, leaving me feeling antsy if I’m not on track to accomplish it (for better or for worse). I’ve also generally been pretty good about exercise.

However, I don’t think any single habit has had a 100% success rate, and some have had close to 0%. For example, I haven’t been great about reaching inbox zero everyday, and I always seem to forget to take a little bit of time at the end of my day to plan for the next day. Reading has also suffered a lot this year, which pains me greatly to see since in the past reading has been an important engine for growth and inspiration.

So what happened this year? And what lessons can I take into 2020?

Language Studies

The biggest thing that comes to mind is that my language studies are taking a huge amount of emotional bandwidth as well as just sheer time. I’ve likely spent 2+ hours per day studying, and this mixed with work and exercise often seems to produce days where I don’t feel like I have much time available for anything else. I’m a little concerned that language studies are consuming too much of my time… though it should be noted that there have been places/times when I’ve felt like getting everything done was easy.

I think it’s necessary to examine a few things:

1. If I didn’t have to spend time on language studies, how would I spend the time?
2. What was common about situations where I felt like it was easy to get everything done vs situations where I felt like it was hard to get everything done?
3. How can I make my language studying process more efficient overall so that I feel like getting it done is easy more often, regardless of the situation?
4. How can I lower the long-term cost of maintaining languages?

How would I spend language time if I had it back?

If I didn’t have to spend time on language studies, I think I would probably spend more time working on average. I’d probably be able to comfortably increase my daily work hours from 6 to 6.5 or 7. Though I think I get a reasonable amount done in 6 hours, I have sometimes felt like devoting more time to work would speed up the process of becoming financially independent and building a stable business.

I’d also probably have more time to read on average. Right now I feel like I’m barely reading. I have some occasional spurts, but this hasn’t been very consistent this year. According to Goodreads, I only read 16 books this year, which is the lowest so far in recent years and trending further down from 2018’s 18 books read. To be fair, I do a lot of my reading through Audible while in transit or multitasking, so it may not be realistic to expect that time would be gained for that sans language studies. Reading actual books on Kindle is still not a real habit for me.

I’d likely feel like I have more time on average to hang out with people or optionally go on dates. I’ve learned that friendships and a healthy sense of community are important to my well-being, especially while on the road, so I shouldn’t discount this. On the dating front, I might also feel like I have enough bandwidth to push myself in this realm, and start learning to approach and talk to women I might want to go on dates with.

Without language studies I’d probably be able to prioritize exercise more. Right now my priorities are roughly work, language studies, and exercise in that order, mostly because I worry about running out of time and energy by the end of the day to finish my language studies. If I weren’t worried about time, exercise would likely become a top priority because I would know I can do it without sacrificing time for work.

If I weren’t learning languages, I’d likely end up spending the time learning something else. For example, something I’ve wanted to do for awhile now is read more academic papers, both in fields that I studied in school (e.g. AI, machine learning, computer systems, and computer security) and in fields that interest me. I have this idea that each year I’d try to really take the time to understand why the work of each Nobel prize winner is really so groundbreaking. Unfortunately, due to time constraints I don’t think I’m realistically going to start doing any of this anytime soon…

Situations where fitting everything in felt easy

In Taiwan, there were days that were easy and days that were hard. On the days that were easy:

• I didn’t have to exercise.
  • I was on a workout schedule that had me exercising roughly 4 times a week, and the extra hour or two earned back from not exercising always made me feel like there was abundant time to do everything.
• I didn’t have social commitments.
  • I could easily spend the entire day working on various things at my own pace and not worry about having to finish something later when I’d have less energy to do it.

I remember feeling like getting everything done was pretty easy while I was in Colombia. I think this came down to:

• Feeling like my community needs were easily filled by the 3 friends traveling with me
  • The time we’d spend together was also typically pretty predictable around lunch and sometimes dinner, and then occasional days off to explore, leaving me plenty of time to do my own thing
• Eating out was super cheap, saving me time and energy on cooking for myself day-to-day
• Everything I needed and cared about was really close to where I was living
• Crossfit was taking care of most of my exercise needs very efficiently since workouts would take ~an hour but still felt like an excellent workout
• The mental load for studying languages actually decreased significantly because I went from studying Chinese flashcards (relatively time consuming, since I was also practicing hand-written Chinese characters) to Spanish, which is similar to French and English

Situations where fitting everything in felt hard

In Taiwan, I also sometimes struggled. I think I’d mostly attribute this to:

• High mental load from Chinese. Handwriting cards, especially full-sentence handwriting cards, take a long time per card.

There were still some situations where I felt a little overwhelmed even in Colombia:

• Primarily when I discovered that I had a deficit of nearly 2000 Chinese flashcards due to an error in my review settings…
  • This deficit has continued consistently through the end of the year, and I never resolved it, mostly because of how long it would have taken for me to do so (probably a good two days of dedicated studying, at least)

In Mexico, I sometimes felt like it was a struggle to fit everything in. I think this was because:

• There were a few occasions in Mexico where I started using video games and other entertainment as a multitasking vehicle to motivate myself to do my flashcards. I ended up paying more attention to the entertainment than the flashcards, resulting in inefficient studying
  • e.g. I can often do flashcards while watching a TV show, and I was experimenting with playing certain low mental bandwidth simulation games
• I had a girlfriend in Mexico City, and I’m realizing that I actually don’t have a lot of practice with maintaining my routines while also spending time with a significant other
  • This was challenging, and often a source of stress… towards the end of my stay in Mexico I decided to de-prioritize exercise and language studies to make time to spend with her, so I clearly still haven’t figured this out
• My weekends were a lot busier in Mexico City, as a result of having so many things to see, do, and eat there, and having a girlfriend I wanted to spend time with
  • This meant I didn’t do a lot of things I might otherwise do on weekends like reading, writing, and exercising

How can I make language studies more efficient?

I’m not totally comfortable giving up on language, though… yes, some of this is sunk cost, but I actually do want to become fluent in a number of languages, and I think putting this aside would be a mistake. So the challenge is really more: how do I make my language studies more efficient?

For starters, I could reduce the number of cards I study per day… if I cut the new cards in half to 30, then I’d likely not have to study more than 150 cards per day in my active language. I’m still going to end up with 50-100 review per inactive language per day, however. I think all-told, this could bring me down to an hour of language studies a day, if I’m focused. I’m not a huge fan of this, though. 60 new cards a day is a reasonable number in order actually learn a new language at a decently fast pace. With 60 cards a day, I learn ~30 new words each day. In a month of daily studying, this means 900 words in a new language. It takes ~10,000 words to reach a native-level vocabulary in a language… so even at this rate it would take almost a year to memorize that much vocabulary. If anything, I actually need to find a way to bring this number up without killing myself, not down, since I’m probably at 5000 words in Spanish, 3000 words in French, 3000 words in Chinese, and 100 words in Japanese…

Part of what’s slowing me down on language studies is that I tend to couple this activity with something time wasting that actually steals my focus and attention away from the cards. This certainly slows me down, though it makes the process a little more pleasurable (so I don’t feel like it’s a total slog). There might also be a longer-term effect where I remember certain cards less well since I wasn’t paying total attention… not sure. This would be hard to measure.

I could break my overall language studies into two or three 30-45 minute super focused sessions each day. Or even three to four 20 minute sessions. These sessions might be short enough that I won’t feel like I need to do something time wasting during them, and the learning process won’t feel like such a slog.

I think “feeling behind” has a very real psychological effect on the study process. I’ve been more than 1000 cards behind on Chinese since I left Taiwan earlier this year. (This was due to an error in understanding how many cards I’d need to review per day to keep up with the number of cards I was adding a day. At the time I was doing 60/200 when I needed to be doing 60/300.) Clearing these reviews and getting this back to a place where everything feels manageable could help before I start studying new cards again. I think it’s worth investing a few days to a week to just get this under control so I don’t lose the habit. I’m not sure this is going to happen during the holidays, but it could be acceptable to spend the first week of the New Year doing this.

How can I decrease long-term maintenance for languages?

One additional concern I have about my current language studies approach is whether or not I’ll really be able to retain language knowledge after a long period of not actively studying (but perhaps constantly reviewing) a language. While I was in Colombia and Mexico learning Spanish, for example, I felt like my French disappeared. Some of this is likely that French and Spanish are similar enough to confuse the mind… but part of me also wonders if this is an early indication that my review methods aren’t keeping language in my head long-term.

I think I could potentially increase the “memorability” of my flashcards to help with this–this would mean making sure that as many of my cards have images and audio recordings as possible. The idea here is that a multimedia experience is more likely to lead to the card “sticking” in my brain long-term.

I also think that much of the long-term maintenance for languages needs to start shifting away from Anki flashcards and more towards consumption and use of languages in their natural contexts. This means more conversations with people, more TV and movies in a language, more books, etc. 

Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a way to do this while also keeping time costs down… one cool idea I had that I may need to experiment more with is writing in my journal every day, then translating one paragraph of my entry into every language I’m maintaining. This helps me to keep “producing” the language, so I don’t forget how to think in each language. (Pro tip: you can also get native language corrections using a service like Lang8.)

I can also turn typical entertainment modes into chances to re-expose myself to languages. For example, it’s not so hard to change the language of a TV show I’m watching to a different language and then turn on English subtitles, or to change the language of a video game. Methods like this can help me to continue consuming a language so that common constructions and vocabulary stay top of mind.

Burnout

Somewhat related to my language studies, but probably relevant to my entire goalset is the concept of burnout.

I was browsing on Reddit the other day in the subreddit about Anki, the popular spaced repetition flashcard system that I use, and came across a post referencing the concept of “burnout.” This was the first time it occurred to me that burnout might be an applicable concept in anything other than just my career and my work-life balance. (We, of course, talk a lot about burnout in Silicon Valley, where, particularly in start-ups, it can be common to overwork people until they “burn out” like bulbs.)

Looking back on the year, I now realize that a lot of the times I felt overwhelmed by everything I had to do I was likely experiencing some form of burnout on one or multiple habits. Burnout is dangerous because it leaves me feeling tired and constantly stressed, ultimately lowering my overall productivity. Worse, it’s sometimes hard to detect burnout when I’m in it–when I’m there I don’t really feel like I have the space to step back and reflect on why things are so stressful.

I think going forward I need to be more careful to look out for burnout, especially where my language studies are concerned. To proactively head off burnout, I also likely need to rework some of my habits so that the focus becomes consistency rather than magnitude.

For example, if I tell myself to “read before bed every night” versus tell myself to “read two pages of a book before bed every night,” which of these feels more defined and accomplishable? Obviously the former is nebulous, and if I’m feeling particularly tired I may not feel like I have the energy to really devote to doing this. On the other hand, the latter sounds very easy, so I’m more likely to just do it even if I’m tired. At the end of the day, the goal is really just to force myself to create space for a habit, which the latter does. If I really sit down to read two pages each night, odds are I’m going to want to spend more time reading once I’m done with those two pages. Yet, it’s less mental load and pressure to know that if I only want to read a couple of pages, that’s OK, too.

Travel

The other obvious factor affecting my goals is constant travel. While I build up a new routine in each place I go, some habits live or die based on where I’m living. For example, much of my reading in a given year will come from audiobooks, which I normally listen to in transit from place-to-place, but in a country like Colombia where safety is dependent on awareness, I’m not always able to do this.

I think it’s therefore necessary for me to ask myself:

1. What am I getting out of traveling right now?
2. How would my life be better or worse if I decided to stop traveling?
3. If I continue traveling, how can I mitigate the negative impact on my ability to pursue my goals?

What am I getting out of traveling right now?

I think each place I’ve lived in has given me an opportunity to be someone different. I’ve discovered lots of different expressions of myself through the lens of travel and learned more about what feels right, and what kinds of places foster that. In this sense, travel has been and continues to be a vehicle for self-discovery and growth.

Through immersion, travel provides me one of the most effective ways to accelerate my language studies. In turn, my language studies are an effective way to understand new cultures, which changes my perspective of the world, and of people. Mark Twain once wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness…” and my experience has certainly matched his. I think about things like poverty and opportunity differently from how I used to and I’ve become more tolerant of and interested in various cultures around the world. I look forward to how travel may continue to transform my perspective and personal philosophy.

To me, there’s also something gratifying about feeling like several places around the world are “home”. I think there’s a part of me that might go crazy with the monotonous routine of life stuck in one place–even if that were one place I really liked–so I find that my lifestyle continues to keep my life interesting and varied enough that I never feel bored or trapped anywhere. In a way, I think this also helps to keep me from getting complacent and forces me to take a fairly consistently active role in my life. Since leaving the States, I haven’t felt that creeping sense of “is this it?” or “damn, I’m too comfortable” that I used to have at my old job in Silicon Valley.

Being placed in a myriad of different, new situations trains me to get good at a few sets of problems sedentary people don’t normally have to deal with more than a couple of times in their lives. For example, I’ve gotten much better at establishing myself in a new place–making friends, finding outlets for hobbies, finding and attending events I might enjoy. I’m much more comfortable with uncertainty now than the average person, having dealt with lots of unexpected circumstances. I can be comfortable and productive almost anywhere, with just a few exceptions, and I know a lot more about what it takes for me to be comfortable and productive. If I ever do decide to stop traveling, I think all of these learnings will help me to feel more comfortable wherever I decide to settle, if I do decide to settle.

It is worth noting, however, that the more I see, the less it feels like there is left to see. Of course, the world is a big place, but it has been my experience that there are fewer and fewer novel experiences or dazzling sights to see as I cover more of the world. Once you’ve seen enough ruins, or enough cathedrals, for example, you start feeling like you’ve seen them all.

On the whole, though, I still feel like I’m getting a good amount out of traveling.

How would my life be better or worse if I decided to stop traveling?

As I’m sure I’ve noted before, traveling does have its advantages and disadvantages. A few of the key disadvantages are:

• Close relationships can be harder to develop and maintain
  • This is especially true for romantic relationships
• Some hobbies and activities can be very hard to maintain from place-to-place
• Important long-term habits and routines can be harder to establish

If I were to stop traveling, it would be nice to build a strong, consistent sense of community around myself in one place–”putting down roots” as they say. I’ve learned much from my travels about how to do this more effectively. The flip side of this, of course, is that instead of community in one place, my travels have me building community in several places. Though each community is potentially shallower than one consistent community, it does help to contribute to the sense of “home wherever I go.”

My lifestyle also has a strange effect on romantic relationships. Firstly, of course it can be difficult to find someone who is open to the possibility that the relationship may only last a few months. But secondly, if I do find someone open to it, the knowledge that there is only so much time we have to spend together actually changes the dynamic of the relationship. For example, knowing that I only had 3 months with my girlfriend in Mexico made it feel way more selfish to say “actually, I can’t hang out today, I really need to work.” On average, I think this effect probably means I’m more likely to sacrifice time for my personal goals in favor of maintaining and strengthening the relationship. Additionally, the time limit can affect the depth of the relationship either positively or negatively–a partner might keep me at arms length knowing that I’m going to leave, or a partner might decide to pull me closer for the time we do have, leading to either a shallower or much deeper relationship in the same period of time as a normal relationship. On the whole, I haven’t decided if this is a good thing or a bad thing, though I think I feel slightly negatively about it.

If I stopped traveling, I’d have the opportunity to pursue a little more depth in certain hobbies and activities I enjoy. I’d love, for example, to have more consistent opportunities to sail, to rock climb with some of my old buddies, to dance salsa, or to train for triathlons again. There are also some things I can’t really cook without equipment that won’t fit into my suitcase (I miss my standmixer and my blowtorch T_T!!). The tradeoff here, though, is that I’ve had wonderful opportunities to experience new hobbies and activities everywhere I go! I was never so into salsa before learning to dance for 3 months in Colombia. And some of these things do end up being skills I get to take with me from place to place (e.g. Taiwan actually has a pretty large salsa scene!)

I also wouldn’t mind having a more stable environment to pursue some of my goals and establish good habits. On the other hand, travel is a unique outlet for many of my goals, including my desire to learn languages, my desire to confront uncertainty, my desire to expand my perspective and refine my philosophies. Heck, travel is even a good vehicle for working on my own businesses given that my runway abroad is easily doubled or tripled compared to what it might be in the States.

It’s hard to say one way or the other is strictly better. Both clearly have their advantages and disadvantages… and speaking wholistically, I think the advantages of traveling currently outweigh the disadvantages.

How can I mitigate the negative side effects of travel?

I actually feel like there isn’t a whole lot I can do here. The places I pick do sometimes affect my routine, so an argument might be made for being more careful about where I go and only choosing places that I think will support my habits and routines well, but… it’s often hard to tell in advance if a new place is going to be a good environment or not. Since part of the point of travel is to go to experience new places, it would a bit contradictory to declare that I’m only going to places I already know where the environment was good.

I can, however, choose to spend some of my time in those places. For example, I’m back in Taipei, Taiwan right now and I know this is a good place for me and my routines. I won’t be spending the whole year here, but a good few months can still go a long way.

Beyond choosing a place, I can try to make sure my life is set up in each place to best fit my needs. Judging by some of the analysis in the sections about my needs for well-being are:

• A nice, private room to myself that’s insulated from sound so I can sleep has plenty of light so I can wake up
• A good gym or other good exercise outlets very close to where I’m living
• A sense of community and friends to hang out with
• Cheap (relative to my standard of living) and healthy places to eat most meals so I don’t have to worry about cooking OR easy, low-effort meals to cook during the week

Otherwise, I think I likely just need more practice following a good routine under more situations. Similar to how I was on the learning curve in 2018 for how to balance my business with travel, perhaps I’m still on the learning curve for habits and routines. I think I may find 2020 will be a better year for many things without my putting in much extra active effort, but if I had to guess I have the most room for improvement in balancing flexibility with the rigidity of habits. For example, a rigid routine can make it hard to meet social commitments. If I have to be in bed by 10 every night to wake up at a certain time, I can’t hang out with friends on a Friday night. If I’m strictly on a diet all the time, it’s also difficult to meet friends for meals. I still have a lot to learn about how to effectively balance my social needs with my personal growth needs, especially in the context of romantic relationships.

Detailed Review

Here’s a more detailed review of my goals this year:

• Running my own business
  • Launch 4-6 (more ideally, 8-12) different projects this year. These don’t all have to be of the same magnitude or significance, but they should all have some monetization plan from the beginning. Learn to scope projects well, learn not to be afraid of throwing something over the fence before it’s perfect, and really get the process down to a science.
    • I got to 2.95 here with 2 client projects and a business of my own.
    • I think I’ve underestimated how much time a single project would likely take to earnestly see through. I’ve wanted to be careful about terminating projects too early just to hit these numbers, which suggests to me that something is off about this metric.
  • Limit consulting work to only what’s necessary to a) maintain the business so it remains a viable fallback strategy and b) pay my annual living budget plus some money to invest in retirement. (~$30k)
    • I made significantly more than $30k this year in consulting (though we’ll have to see after taxes…), but I’m going to give myself full credit here because I actually turned down a consulting project this year that could have paid $15-30k on its own. It was scary for me saying no because I felt worried that opportunities like this would never come up again, but I had another project of my own that was just spinning up that I would have had to put on hold to take the consulting work.
• Reach conversational fluency in Chinese
  • Spend at least 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries. Push to have a natural language conversation every day.
    • Spent 4 months in Taiwan!
    • My Chinese still has a lot of holes, but I can speak reasonably, and understand enough to make conversation with Chinese speakers I meet elsewhere in the world
    • I gave a presentation to high school kids in Chinese!
• Reach conversation fluency in Spanish
  • Spend at least 3 months in Spanish-speaking countries. Push to have a natural language conversation every day.
    • Spent 3 months in Medellin, Colombia followed by 3 months in Mexico City, Mexico
    • My Spanish has reached a reasonable level, probably B1 approaching B2 with some deficiencies in my ability to communicate myself fluently
    • I’d guess my Spanish is about as good, maybe better than my French was last year
      • I should note, however, that the process of learning Spanish has left me feeling like my French has disappeared…
• Travel
  • Meet new people and have new adventures wherever I go. Don’t get so singularly focused on running a business that I become a shut-in.
    • Some highlights:
      • Hiking through Taroko Gorge in Taiwan with a buddy from home
      • Observing the Lunar New Year celebrations for the Year of the Pig in Taipei
      • Befriending the chef of my favorite restaurant in Medellin, Colombia
      • Observing Day of the Dead and Mexican Independence Day in Mexico City
      • Road tripping to Oaxaca City from Mexico City with my then girlfriend and two friends
• Mindfulness
  • Meditate for at least 20 minutes every day.
    • I’ve just plainly fallen off the cart on this. Interestingly, though, I’ve also had very few moments this year where I felt strongly like I needed this to help me deal with what I was going through.
• Reading
  • Read or listen to 52 books
    • I read 16 books this year. Highlights included:
      • The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
      • The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin
      • Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
      • Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
• Learn to start conversations with women I’m attracted to
  • Start a conversation with at least one woman I’d like to talk to each week
    • I started out doing this a bit while I was in Thailand and Taiwan, but quickly lost it… I think if I’m going to tackle this I’m going to need something more structured to help light the way
    • I did have some romantic experiences this year, so perhaps that should count for something here, but admittedly none of those women triggered the deep-seated fear that this goal was meant to address.

Here’s an analysis of the habits:

• Daily
  • Wake up early, and at the same time each day, without the snooze button
    • I still feel best when I wake up early, but I didn’t adhere to this.
    • Surprisingly, I found that this mattered less than I thought for actually getting everything done in a day, though the extra time in productivity in the morning does tend to leave me feeling less stressed.
  • Exercise
    • I was pretty good about this most places I went.
      • I was weightlifting in Taiwan
      • I did a mixture of Jiujitsu and CrossFit in Colombia
      • In Mexico I had a gym membership and was doing a mix of weightlifting and cross-functional training
    • I took a bunch of time off of exercise in Mexico after Thanksgiving…
  • Meditate
    • Barely did this. Haven’t been feeling urgent about the need, and am back in a place where it feels hard to fit 10-20 minutes of meditation into my day.
  • Complete my Anki reviews
    • Did pretty well on this. Sometimes had trouble on weekends, and occasionally had periods where I didn’t review, but would usually get back on
    • Currently on a longer hiatus which I’m hoping I’ll fix before I start working again in the new year
  • Review tomorrow’s action list and meetings at the end of the day
    • I think I did this a couple of times, but on the whole I failed to make this a regular habit
  • Reach inbox zero every day, but never do email first thing in the morning
    • I’m only saved on this one by having not reached inbox zero every day… but the days where I did, I think I typically did it first thing in the morning.
  • Log at least 6 hours of productive work
    • Not every day had 6 hours of productive work, but on the whole I think this habit has stuck and I had a decently productive year.
  • Read before bed
    • Don’t have a good reason for why this didn’t happen.
  • Get 8 hours of sleep every night
    • Haven’t been good about establishing the nightly routines that I need to do this.
• Weekly
  • Reach out to family and friends
    • I was good about this for awhile, but fell off the cart in Mexico where my weekends were busy enough that I’d forget
  • At least one language exchange in all languages I’m actively studying
    • I don’t think I was super deliberate about this, but due to immersion this worked out OK anyway
  • Review next week’s action list and meetings at the end of the week
    • Did not do this at all.
  • Spend a few hours optimizing a process in my life or working on something important but not urgent
    • Hardly did this at all… this is something that I probably needed to build into my weekend.
• Monthly
  • At least one language exchange in all languages I’m passively maintaining
    • I was horrible about this. My French is in shambles, though my Chinese is still OK. Worried I’m going to lose my Spanish.
  • Review my personal budget and finances, and re-strategize for the next month as necessary
• Quarterly
  • Make sure my business finances are up-to-date
  • Self-review on progress toward annual goals
    • I actually didn’t even do a mid-year review this year :(. Don’t have a good excuse–I think at the time I felt behind on writing because I was trying to catch-up on blogging as well.
• Annually
  • Review these goals and formulate new ones.

Conclusions

To wrap everything up, 2019 was a decent year–I learned a lot, saw a lot, and accomplished much even though I didn’t hit everything I had hoped to. I had some experiences with burnout that I’ll need to monitor for in 2020 to keep myself operating at peak efficiency.

I think I’m still getting enough out of traveling to continue in 2020, though I hope to take some of my learnings about what does and doesn’t work for me to start more proactively designing my environments in 2020, where possible.

I also intend to continue a similar goal set in 2020, though I think some adjustments are in order, particularly in the realm of language learning. I’m going to start by clearing out all of my existing flashcards from 2019 so I can start with a clean slate. Then I’m going to reduce the new flashcard threshold for a little while while I get used to studying in a few concentrated sessions each day (rather than multitasking with entertainment). I’ll have to see how this works, and will start to increase the new flashcard threshold slowly as I feel the process is sustainable.

On the whole, I’m going to rework some of my habits to create more of a feeling of space in my life, rather than a feeling of constant pressure. In practice, this means that rather than tell myself to “read every night before bed”, which is nebulous, I may tell myself to read just two pages of a book before bed. While two pages isn’t a lot, it’s enough to force myself to carve out time for the habit, and the odds are once I get started I’ll want to keep reading for a little while.

I think I can follow this approach with a lot of my habits in 2020, turning down the “difficulty” or magnitude in favor of promoting consistency. Of course, if after awhile I feel like I can handle more, I can always turn up the difficulty incrementally, but I think the goal is to always keep myself in a place where I feel like everything is manageable. Over time, I’m sure the threshold of what I think is manageable will also increase.

Since 2016, I’ve been writing down my annual goals and sharing them here to keep myself accountable. Since then, the process has evolved and a good number of these self-promises have been fulfilled–like completing an Ironman, taking a more authentic tack in my career, or challenging myself to get over my fear of rejection.

This year, my goals are shaped by the insight that I don’t intend to travel the way I am now for the rest of my life. I’ve had plenty of great experiences, and I’ve learned a lot, but I’m not certain this lifestyle is sustainable for me. In some ways, I’m already quite tired of moving around so much–constantly uprooting is fast losing its appeal and taking its toll. I’m also starting to see the benefit of longer stays, as they allow me to settle into a routine, engage in communities, and form deeper relationships with people. Eventually, I can see myself picking a few places to spend most of my time. I’m not quite ready to give up traveling, however. There are a few things that are easier to do while on the road that I’d like to accomplish first:

• Reach conversational fluency in French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese.
  • A continuation of my goal to become a polyglot, motivated by a desire to more deeply experience foreign cultures and mindsets.
• Attend culinary programs in France and Japan, ideally in native language.
  • I just really enjoy the experience of food and cooking. I see food as a way to experience new cultures, bring people together, and express myself. I don’t really have plans to become a professional chef, however.
  • I have my eye on Le Cordon Bleu and Tokyo Sushi Academy, but admittedly don’t know much yet about how actually attending them would work or what my alternatives are.
• Spend a few months volunteering in a developing country.
  • To continue furthering my understanding of the problems facing the underprivileged and begin to understand how I can best be of service.
• Experience what it’s like to live in a multitude of different cities, countries, and situations.
  • So when I’m ready to pick somewhere to settle down I have a better idea of what I’m looking for and why.
• Generate profit of at least $5000/mo from independent business ventures (consulting does not count!!)
  • While it doesn’t sound like a lot, this is potentially enough to pay my living expenses plus a small amount of disposable income almost anywhere in the world.

I don’t think it makes sense to divert my attention towards hobbyist culinary pursuits before I have a stable income source, so this year I’ll be focusing mostly on my business ventures while attempting to pull my Chinese and Spanish levels up to where my French is now.

My overall goals therefore don’t look much different from how they did last year, though they are once again slimmed down to concentrate on what I think is really important:

• Running my own business
  • Launch 4-6 (more ideally, 8-12) different projects this year. These don’t all have to be of the same magnitude or significance, but they should all have some monetization plan from the beginning. Learn to scope projects well, learn not to be afraid of throwing something over the fence before it’s perfect, and really get the process down to a science.
  • Limit consulting work to only what’s necessary to a) maintain the business so it remains a viable fallback strategy and b) pay my annual living budget plus some money to invest in retirement. (~$30k)
• Reach conversational fluency in Chinese.
  • Spend at least 3 months in Chinese-speaking countries. Push to have a natural language conversation every day.
• Reach conversational fluency in Spanish.
  • Spend at least 3 months in Spanish-speaking countries. Push to have a natural language conversation every day.
• Travel
  • Meet new people and have adventures wherever I go. Don’t get so singularly focused on running a business that I become a shut-in.
• Mindfulness
  • Meditate for at least 20 minutes every day.
• Reading
  • Read or listen to 52 books.
• Learn to start conversations with women I’m attracted to
  • Why
    • This is a continuation of previous goals of mine to become more comfortable dating and learn not to turn into a nervous puddle around women I’m attracted to. I think I’ve actually made a lot of progress on this–dating for me is now less about scrambling to figure out how to nervously impress a woman simply because I think she’s a woman or because I think she’s pretty, and more about investigating whether or not she’s actually someone I’d want to spend more time with.I think overall, I’m settling into to two realizations: 1) that I’m a good guy, and a rare kind of guy whom plenty of women would be lucky to have in their life and 2) the kind of woman I’m looking for is likewise pretty rare, and most women I meet aren’t going to be a good fit, so there’s no need to get so emotionally invested until I assess the fit. The one place where I still have a lot of trouble, though, is actually meeting new women and asking them out on dates. I’m not really sure I’m ready for another go at a serious relationship, but I think I am ready to get over my anxieties around approaching and starting conversations with women.
  • Key Results
    • Start a conversation with at least one woman I’d like to talk to each week.
      • The goal isn’t  necessarily to land a phone number or a date, but rather simply to gain more experience feeling the desire to talk with someone and then following through on doing it. It also doesn’t matter what I say, or how long the conversation lasts, just that I make the leap to start it. The rest, I think, will take care of itself with reps.

Since I failed to make as much progress as I’d hoped to last year on a similar goal set, I’m making a few changes this year.

First, in order to promote the conditions for focus and general well-being, I’m slowing down my travel rate. Last year I thought that one month in a city or a country would be a long time. The truth is, with only a month, I get about a week to get my bearings, a week to start feeling at home, and then by the end of two weeks I start emotionally divesting because I realize I’m already leaving again so soon. My solution is to increase my typical stay to three months instead of just one or to spend shorter stays in places where I’m already familiar and already know people. Specifically, I’m already scheming to spend three months in Taiwan, where I hope to practice my Mandarin and connect more deeply with my cultural heritage, and loosely planning to spend 6-ish months in South and Central America (potentially Medellin in Colombia and Mexico City).

Second, in addition to my typical OKR style for goals, I’m defining a set of habits I’d like to develop this year to support my goals. As the famous quote goes, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” (Fun fact: this quote comes from American philosopher Will Durant, but is often apocryphally attributed to Aristotle.) The importance of habits is several fold: they lend themselves well to routines, which I’m realizing are important for creating a sense of structure, normalcy, and continuity despite how often I change my setting, and despite whatever emotional state I’m in; additionally, for longer-term goals that can’t be accomplished in just a day, a week, or even in a month, or a year, habits are the most effective way to make consistent progress. Self-motivation, I found in 2018, can be really fickle, especially because I’m an impatient person prone to becoming discouraged when I perceive a lack of progress. Self-discipline through habits is my new strategy–I trust that if I can muster the discipline to maintain my habits, then I am making certain progress towards where I want to go even if I can’t see a daily difference.

Here are the habits I’d like to establish this year, and keep for life:

• Daily
  • Wake up early, and at the same time each day, without the snooze button
    • I find that I operate best when I’m up early enough to take care of all of my self-care habits and still feel like I’m getting to work early. Conversely, if I wake up too late then I feel constantly behind for the rest of the day, which usually just results in me skipping my morning routine.
  • Exercise
    • Likely some combination of running, cycling, swimming, weightlifting, and martial arts.
  • Meditate
  • Complete my Anki reviews
    • These are my self-made spaced-repetition flashcards for a variety of topics, including language. This is my primary engine for learning and remembering information with the lowest overall effort.
  • Review tomorrow’s action list and meetings at the end of the day
  • Reach inbox zero every day, but never do email first thing in the morning
    • My best energy is always in the morning. I want to reserve it for things that really require it.
  • Log at least 6 hours of productive work
    • This translates to two 2-4 hour working sessions each day, one before lunch, and one after. On busier days each session can be longer, and an additional session can optionally be added before dinner.
  • Read before bed
    • While this also builds reading as a habit into my day, this one also ideally pushes out other bad nighttime habits which sometimes result in unplanned loss of sleep, which tends to unravel the entire routine. For example, I’m often fond of winding down through Netflix or video games, both of which I sometimes have a hard time stopping.
  • Get 8 hours of sleep every night
    • Feeling too tired to function is also something that commonly unravels my daily routines. Coffee only solves the problem so much…
• Weekly
  • Reach out to family and friends
  • At least one language exchange in all languages I’m actively studying
  • Review next week’s action list and meetings at the end of the week
  • Spend a few hours optimizing a process in my life or working on something important but not urgent
• Monthly
  • At least one language exchange in all languages I’m passively maintaining
  • Review my personal budget and finances, and re-strategize for the next month as necessary
• Quarterly
  • Make sure my business finances are up-to-date
  • Self-review on progress toward annual goals
• Annually
  • Review these goals and formulate new ones.

Most of these are habits that I’ve had at various points, but haven’t kept consistently. In order to avoid overwhelming myself, I’ll be introducing these habits in phases, perhaps a few at a time every 15-30 days. An ideal outcome this year is that all of these things become reflexive habit, and that they guide me towards success in the larger goal set. I’ll be searching for or creating software to help me with these things when I struggle.

This year I’m also giving myself a few deep thematic questions to ponder, as I think it’s imperative to continue developing my personal philosophy, and I’d like to start doing so intentionally. Here are some questions on my mind:

• What goal for individuals, governments, and societies does the present day American ethic implicitly or explicitly espouse? How does this differ from other nations?
  • Whether or not we consciously know what motivates us, our behaviors stem from our motivations. I’d like to dig deeper into the motivations that drive the American ethic, and begin to compare them to what I’ve observed during my travels.
• What is the relationship between happiness, meaning, and purpose?
  • I started to explore this while at Plum Village this year, but I think there’s something we look for beyond just happiness. I don’t think happiness and joy don’t exist without pain and suffering anymore than light does without dark. I think someone can feel happy, but still feel like something is missing. I’d like to explore this further.
• What does the philosophy of ethics have to say about the goal of life and how to realize it?
  • Exploring this question led me to insights from Stoicism and Buddhism, but I’m far from having as deep an understanding of them as I’d like, and I haven’t familiarized myself enough with other ethical frameworks to see where I do and don’t agree.
• What is value, really? And how does currency capture it?
  • In Silicon Valley, we used to like to talk about creating value for people, and I’m realizing that I understand this phrasing intuitively, but when I dig into it it’s hard to define exactly what “value” is, why people pay for it, and how we quantify it. It seems to me that we purchase things in order to help us achieve certain aims, so the economic value of a thing is somehow tied to how well it helps us to achieve those aims. As other questions on this list have suggested, I have a lot of questions about what people aim for and why, and I have a hunch that these questions are related.

I’ll let these questions loosely guide my travels, my conversations, and my reading this year. Perhaps I’ll find time to write essays about my findings.

I’m optimistic that 2019 will be a good year. I learned a lot in 2018, and I’m excited to apply those learnings, and feeling ready to face some new challenges. Wish me luck!

Reflections

Truthfully, I’ve struggled with what to say about 2018. It’s been a strange and challenging year, less certain and less structured than any to date. I didn’t exactly accomplish what I set out to–2018 wasn’t the year that my business ventures took off, nor the year I qualified for the Boston marathon, or even the year I finally read 52 books. In fact, where my annual goals are concerned, 2018 has felt less fruitful than previous years–I probably deserve a D+ or a C- at best for my efforts.

Yet I hesitate to classify 2018 as a failure. I may not have accomplished everything I had hoped to, but it was nevertheless a year full of adventures–of new places, new people, and new experiences. It was certainly a year full of learning, both about myself and about the world. It was the year I learned to become versatile and adaptable in the face of unpredictable and sometimes uncomfortable circumstances. It was the year I developed a deep faith in my ability to calmly deal with whatever life throws at me. It was the year I confirmed my life won’t spontaneously combust if I step off the well-paved career path.

Goal-wise, I did accomplish a few things worth mentioning this year, however. Though I failed to bring a product of my own to market, I ended up spending a lot of time on consulting projects. I’ve had five different clients of varying sizes, ultimately bringing in more annual income than I expected to. In the process, I’ve learned that even in the absence of a full-time employer, my skill set is valuable enough that I can do just as well as a consulting Chief Technology Officer working remotely as I did as a career software engineer in Silicon Valley. I have discovered I have the power to create the job I had always hoped I’d have at Palantir–learning new languages while working from interesting places around the world, picking and choosing impactful projects that suit my interests, and gaining experience and exposure working on many different things in a single year.

Additionally, after nearly 6 months in French-speaking countries, I’ve gone from too terrified and embarrassed to buy necessities at the local pharmacy–you would not believe how many ways there are to misunderstand someone asking you if you’d like a bag–to conversant with occasional comments that my accent is good for a non-native speaker. In the process, I’ve also practiced techniques for learning and maintaining languages that I’m preparing to apply to Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish. There’s still a long way to full fluency, but I now understand enough of what’s said to me to carry on conversations with French travelers I meet on the road, can watch some French television without being totally lost, can read simple books like Le Petit Prince and L’Alchemiste, and can usually communicate myself without too much stumbling. What’s left is mostly expanding my vocabulary, which I can now do in natural language by consuming books and movies, and more practice expressing myself, which I can do through conversation and writing.

On top of all of that, I have had the good fortune to live in more countries this year than some will have the opportunity to visit in their entire lives. I explored the mountains and jungles of Thailand; I fell in love in Vietnam; I ate gourmet meals in France; I wandered the deserts of Morocco; I enjoyed the beaches of Bali; and I visited the temples and monuments of India.

But perhaps more important than what I’ve seen and what I’ve done are the new insights and perspectives I’ve gained.

I have a better understanding of what it means to love and be loved. I fell in love unexpectedly this year, and that love taught me that my theories about love and authenticity don’t have to just be theories. That love also taught me about how to practice the compassionate love that we often associate with figures like the Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, and MLK. There was no happy ending, unfortunately, but in the process I learned about forgiveness–how difficult it can be, but also how important it is.

I have a better understanding of the effects of tourism and globalization on the world. I’ve been to places (cough Marrakesh cough) that seem to have sacrificed their authentic cultural identity for profit from staged tourism. Having visited expat and tourism conclaves in various countries, I’ve seen the effects of gentrification–sometimes positive, sometimes negative–on faraway lands. I’ve seen entire local communities and cities change their lifestyle to serve expats and tourists. I have mixed feelings about a lot of this. I’ve begun to wonder if the emigration of the privileged is a form of modern colonialism.

I have a better understanding now of how privileged I am. I’ve lived in deeloping countries and witnessed their growing pains–the poverty and hardship of people as they and their nations struggle to find their place in rapidly evolving local and global economies. I’ve met people in many countries who could never even dream of traveling the way I am now. Sometimes it’s because they’ll never have the wealth–a decade of honest hard work and savings in Indonesia may barely purchase a month of shoestring travel in Europe. Other times it’s because their passports won’t open the doors mine will–for many Vietnamese citizens, acquiring a visa to visit Europe or the United States is little more than a diplomatic and bureaucratic pipe dream. I’ve met brilliant, talented people who deserved opportunities their families couldn’t afford to give them, even with significant financial assistance. These inequities, often a result of simple birth lottery, are hard to stomach. What did I do to deserve what so many will never have?

I have a better understanding now of what it means to be American and how being American has subtly influenced my worldview. I think many Asian Americans, and probably other minorities, too, grow up with a sense of identity dispossession–a feeling of half belonging to a here that may never fully understand you, and to a somewhere else that may never truly accept you. I have to admit, though I know it’s unpatriotic, that at least in part because of that dissonance, I’ve seldom felt deeply proud to be American. It’s been through conversations with people around the world where remarks that an expression, an idea, or an ideal was rather American that I’ve started to become more aware of what that means, both to them and to me. For the most part, I find that I’m proud of these things, and that they’re very core to my personal ideals–things like a belief in self-determinism, a strong work ethic (though some may argue the American work ethic is a bit all-consuming, and I’d agree), and an imperative to have the freedom to choose one’s own path and follow one’s dreams. Perhaps a sense for the deeper American cultural identity has gotten lost in today’s divisive, entrenched, and embittered political rhetoric. It’s taken leaving the country to recognize that that identity is undeniably part of my own, and that I am, in fact, proud of it, even if I don’t completely agree with every manifestation of American ideals.

Goals be damned, I wouldn’t trade precious learnings like these for anything. They and my travels have changed me; I am not the same person I was when I left Silicon Valley and in time I hope that will prove to be a good thing.

Of course, all of this is not without its own great cost. The freedom to travel demands certain sacrifices, and comes with assumed hardships. I’ve had to leave family and old friends behind to pursue this lifestyle, and as is always the case with physical distance, it can be difficult to stay in touch and participate in their lives the same way. I’ve had to put many of my hobbies on hold–cooking, sailing, improv, and triathlons, for example–since outlets for them have been inconsistently available around the world. I’ve had to endure periods of isolation and loneliness, sometimes starved for real, meaningful connection given the often transient nature of friendships between travelers and nomads.

In my darkest moments this year, I’ve felt anxious, depressive, and alone. I’ve worried that I’m wasting my precious time and youth–that instead of deepening relationships, furthering my career, or building long-term financial stability, I’ve squandered my opportunities for some high-minded, pointless, and never ending quest for freedom, truth, and authenticity. And I’ve asked some really tough questions this year like what is the deeper, overarching goal of my life? Of anyone’s life? Of society, and humanity at large? Given that our lives are short and we take nothing with us when they end, what really matters? Everything? Nothing? I’ve gone through my own version of a “crisis of faith”, an ordeal I’ve become fond of calling a “crisis of meaning” as someone close to me used to say.

I don’t have answers or even substantiated opinions to many of these questions yet, and in the darker moments that honestly scares me–I personally struggle to function in a vacuum of meaning or direction. Yet I have conviction that these are, at least, the right questions, and that they’re not asked often enough. These are the questions that define our individual motivations and, more broadly, the motivations of our governments and societies, which exist–or at least, in my idealist mind, should exist–to collectively protect and advance the interests of their individual constituents. If we cannot clearly communicate what we are striving for, and why we are striving for it, I don’t think we can ever hope to attain it. For now at least, I am content to explore these questions. Maybe that’s as much as anyone can ever hope for.

All of this–the goods, the bads, the ups, and the downs–has been an important part of my ongoing journey. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Things may not have gone exactly the way I wanted in 2018 with respect to my goals, my romantic life, or my career, but I think I’m better for the wear, and I’m certainly not ready to give up in 2019.

Review

• Running my own business
  • As hard or as scary as it gets, stick with it for the entire year. Don’t take on consulting projects unless they’re actually really interesting, or I somehow really need the money (I shouldn’t this year).
    • Haha yeah, this didn’t happen. I didn’t really need the money but I spent more than half the year consulting. A few of these projects met the “really interesting” criteria.
  • Launch 4-6 (more ideally, 8-12) different projects this year. These don’t all have to be of the same magnitude or significance, but they should all have some monetization plan from the beginning. Learn to scope projects well, learn not to be afraid of throwing something over the fence before it’s perfect, and really get the process down to a science.
    • If we allow for consulting projects here, then my count reaches ~5. Some of these were multi-week projects, others were multi-month projects.
      • Two of these projects are currently in their final stages and should wrap up in early 2019.
      • Two of these have been for non-profits with causes I wanted to support.
    • I didn’t complete a single project that wasn’t client-related this year.
• Travel
  • Meet new people and have adventures wherever I go. Try to spend every weekend doing something exciting, new, or terrifying. Don’t get so singularly focused on running a business that I become a shut-in.
    • I didn’t exactly follow this to the letter, as toward the end I started to feel burnt out by traveling and FOMO. By October, all I really wanted was a quiet weekend to myself. That said, I feel comfortable saying that obeyed the spirit of this. If anything, I think I could have stood to focus more on my business this year.
• Mindfulness
  • Attend a 2-week mindfulness retreat.
    • I went to Plum Village summer retreat!
  • Complete the Headspace Pro series in one continuous streak.
    • I completed the Headspace Pro series, but didn’t exactly do it in one continuous streak. It sort of got broken into several long chunks…
  • Meditate for at least 20 minutes every day.
    • As usual, this happened a lot when I felt it was needed, and less when I felt it wasn’t. I need to work on incorporating this more consistently into my life.
• Reading
  • • Read or listen to 52 books this year.
      • Compared to previous years, I barely did any reading. I read ~18 books this year. Highlights included:
        • Hyperion by Dan Simmons
        • Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
        • Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
        • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
        • The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday
        • The Game by Neil Strauss
          • This one’s controversial, I know. I don’t really agree with the ethic of the pick-up community, but it was an entertaining and interesting read.
• Compete in the Boston Marathon
  • Complete Hal Higdon’s Intermediate 2 marathon training schedule.
  • Complete Hal Higdon’s Advanced 1 marathon training schedule.
  • Complete a marathon in 3.5 hours. (If I’m lucky, I’ll qualify for Boston this year and race next year. Will need to see how training goes, though.)
  • None of these happened this year. Self-motivation problems aside, I found it surprisingly difficult to train for marathons while abroad. In Asia, the air quality and traffic is often too bad to run outside. Additionally, my running shoes wore out and I started to get injured. As I’m very particular about running shoes, I had a hard time replacing them while traveling.
  • While I intend to continue running and maintaining fitness, I think the Boston Marathon may have to wait.
• Become conversationally fluent in French
  • Spend at least 3 months in French-speaking countries in 2018.
    • I spent 3 months in France, and 3 months in Morocco, where French is also reasonably prevalent.
  • While in French-speaking countries, actively push to have a conversation in French every single day, no matter how uncomfortable, awkward, or broken my spoken French is.
    • I’m not sure this exactly happened, but I made a strong effort and had some fun interactions in French.
      • One very early morning in Bordeaux, I was stuck trying to explain to taxi dispatch over the phone where I was because I was worried my 20-min away Uber would make me late for my bus to Lyon.
      • I taught a kid to play chess in French while at Plum Village.
      • Communicating with my Sahara desert guides in (their) broken French and (my) broken Darija (Moroccan Arabic).
  • I’m not quite conversationally fluent, but I can make conversation in French and, depending on the topic, I can come across quite fluent for a non-trivial amount of time.

If I had to sum up, I think the major blockers this year were a lack of focus, and a sense of either social, financial, or career insecurity. The lack of focus comes from moving around too much, sometimes spending as little as a couple days or a couple weeks in a place before moving on. A lot of my energy went into traveling, and past that a lot of my energy went into dealing with the occasional sense of social isolation. (There were long periods of this in both France and Morocco in cities where there aren’t a lot of nomads and I couldn’t find a sense of community. Breaking up with my ex around when I left for France probably also didn’t help.) I’ve found that there is a threshold beyond which too much discomfort makes it difficult to self-motivate, though where exactly that threshold is likely depends on the individual and how much practice they’ve had gracefully weathering hardship.

In overly uncomfortable situations, my career- and ego-related anxieties got the better of me and I found refuge in consulting work. I’m finding that the security of the consulting work does lessen the discomfort, however–for an entrepreneur, it’s refreshing to have the certainty of building something someone expressly wants and will pay you for. There’s likely a place for consulting in my life, but I hope to do less of it overall in 2019–no more than a couple months out of the year for now, and then only when the project and the pay are interesting.

In 2019 I’ll need to focus more, both by further slimming my list of goals so I don’t spread my energy too thin, and by spending less time moving around. Where possible, I should spend more time in places where I already have friends or know that I can find a strong community to combat a sense of isolation. Co-working and co-living spaces are a good potential solution to this, so I plan to be less stingy about shelling out money for them–the real value of a good co-working space is in its community.

It will also pay in 2019 to solidify some habits and routines that will keep me productive. Especially with the discontinuity of moving around, creating a sense of continuity, structure, and normalcy will be crucial.

Being honest with myself, I think I missed the mark in 2017–and that’s OK! I had some pretty ambitious goals and I had a lot of goals. I stretched myself attempting to complete them, and learned a lot in the process. A lot of great things also happened as a result of the intention behind this set of goals, even though I didn’t even come close to hitting them all. There were some confounding factors like deciding to leave my job earlier than I thought I otherwise would (I had hoped to go to Paris through work, but those opportunities didn’t materialize, so I advanced my timeline), but even so I think I’m willing to admit that I bit off more than I could chew. I’ve learned that there are only so many things I can effectively focus on at once, that I should define my plans for goals in terms of sustainable habits rather than just one-off events, and that I could give myself a little more flexibility to adapt and improvise. All-in-all, I’d have to give myself a D+ this year. I’m not quite comfortable giving myself a passing grade, but quitting my job was a big deal and all the work I did conquering other fears definitely helped me get to that point. I’m taking my learnings into 2018 so I can keep improving the process as I go forward :)!

Detail

• Conquer my fears and insecurities by cultivating courage.
  • Do at least 150 things total that scare me this year. (Does not have to be 150 unique things if appropriate level of fear is still present.)
    • Honestly, I did a terrible job of keeping track of this. I’d guesstimate that I did on the order of 75-100 of these, but didn’t keep a good record. Off the top of my head here are some memorable ones:
      • Quitting my job. I could probably argue that this counts as multiple since this has regularly exposed me to a lot of fear, which I’m still learning to process effectively.
      • Learning to lead climb. This is a form of rock climbing where the rope comes up behind you as you clip it into the wall to save your progress. When you fall, you can fall as far as 10-15 feet. It took me awhile to get over the fear of falling.
      • Scuba certification. Open water still scares me, and the idea of vulnerability while diving worried me. At this point, diving in a group doesn’t scare me at all, though I’d probably shit myself diving alone.
      • Completing an Alcatraz swim. There be sharks in these waters ._.
      • Rejection. There was a decent amount of rejection this year :). Those double count here, but I’ll leave a longer accounting of them for below.
  • Conquer my fear of failure.
    • Figure out what I would do if I weren’t working at Palantir.
      • I’m now doing it :)! It’s not entirely clear exactly how long I’ll continue to do what I’m doing now, or what I’ll do after this. Most likely I’ll continue for as long as what I’m doing now feels like the best way to grow, or until my priorities change.
    • Stretch: Take a leave of absence from work or quit and do my own thing for 3-6 months or leave my current job to work on something more risky.
      • I ultimately couldn’t get Palantir to send me to France on a timeline that made sense to me, so I went with the last option and left. What I’m doing now is much more risky, and much more self-directed, which is both amazing and terrifying. Can’t say I’ve totally beaten my fear of failure yet, but definitely on the right path.
  • Conquer my fear of rejection.
    • Get rejected at least 100 times trying 100 different things.
      • I didn’t do a great job of tracking this one either. I probably hit ~50 with scattered rejection challenges earlier in the year, and then 30 challenges in November.
    • Complete at least Foundation Level 2 improv at BATS.
      • I got this one done real early! And I’ve fallen in love with improv in the process. When I left the Bay Area, one of the first things I did was find a new place to go to continue improvising. I’m not sure how I’ll keep it up while I’m abroad, but someday I think it would be really fun (and frightening) to participate in an improv performance.
  • Conquer my fear of sharks.
    • Go swimming in a shark cage.
      • This didn’t happen. Logistically this was difficult as there weren’t many local opportunities for this in the Bay Area, and most of the services I found were prohibitively expensive. If I can find an opportunity for it, I may end up doing some version of swimming or diving with sharks while I’m abroad in South East Asia though!
    • Unfortunately, didn’t do much for this despite some risk mitigation steps outlined during my mid year review. The Alcatraz swim ended up being the closest thing I got to facing my fear of sharks.
  • Conquer my fear of spiders.
    • Hold a tarantula in my hand without freaking out.
      • I got nowhere close to this.
    • Unfortunately, didn’t end up doing much for this despite some risk mitigation steps outlined during my mid year review. I still hate spiders :/.
  • Conquer my fear of falling.
    • Go bungee jumping.
    • Go rock climbing outdoors.
    • Stretch: Go lead climbing outdoors.
      • Lead climb certified! Never logistically got around to organizing a group to climb out doors, let alone lead climb outdoors, though.
    • I didn’t end up getting to all of the key results here, but I honestly don’t feel that irrationally afraid of falling anymore. The idea of going bungee jumping or sky diving doesn’t really bother me. I know there’s inherent risk in doing things like this, but I’ve learned not to overly worry about things like equipment failures, which are unlikely and relatively out of my control. (By contrast, the first time I went sky diving I mentally prepared for that day to be the last day of my life :P.)
  • Conquer my fear of open water.
    • Complete an Alcatraz swim.
    • Complete scuba certification.
    • Stretch: Go on 2 additional dives after certification.
    • Hilariously, I completed all of the key results for this one, but am definitely still irrationally afraid of swimming in open water. I think this is because the fear wasn’t properly defined here: it’s becoming more and more clear to me that I’m afraid of swimming alone in open water, but most other cases are fine.
• Become confident around attractive women.
  • Ask out at least one woman I find attractive each week in person.
  • Go on at least one Tinder date.
    • This is a terrible key result. But I did go on a Tinder date this year, and I did go on a Coffee Meets Bagel date this year. In the bigger picture though, I’ve pretty much completely divested from dating apps at this point–would really prefer that I learn to get comfortable approaching and talking to women I find attractive. Plus, I honestly suck at texting strangers and kind of don’t see the point.
  • I noted in my mid year review that the key results for this goal weren’t planned well. I still believe that’s true. I did go on a record number of dates this year, but I think that was 5 or 6 dates total. All first dates–for either logistic or compatibility reasons I didn’t really ask for second dates.
  • I think I could have done a lot better on this. I did learn a lot this year, and my anxieties around going on a date have mostly disappeared now that I’ve experienced it a few different ways (ask me about the time I crashed a sailboat over a beer sometime :). I won’t argue that I’m amazing at dating, but I do think I’ve gotten a lot better at listening to how I’m feeling during an interaction with someone and acting authentically based on that (rather than feeling like I need to act like I’m having fun, feeling like I need to impress them if they’re not also making an effort to impress me, or feeling like I should do this or that at a particular point in the date). I still have a lot of approach anxiety, though, and the idea of making a special effort to put myself in situations where I have to approach and talk to a stranger I find attractive with the intent to get to know them and maybe ask them out still scares the crap out of me. I think I should have done more to force myself out of my comfort zone for approach anxiety. This is something I’ll need to continue to actively work on, perhaps by doing some dating-oriented version of my rejection challenges. Technically, this falls under the umbrella of “fear of uncertainty” for 2018, but I’m not sure how realistic it will be to pursue romantic interests while abroad.
• Read more
  • Learn to speed read.
    • Read a book about speed reading.
    • Watch speed reading lectures I have saved.
    • I failed to make practicing speed reading a consistent habit, despite recognizing mid year that this was what was needed. I have some decent software which, if I used regularly, I’m fairly confident would get me to where I want to go. I just haven’t.
  • Read at least 40 books.
    • Looks like I actually only read 39 books this year -_-. I think I got complacent here–I expected that my normal reading habits would easily get me to 40 books, but apparently not. I did start and not finish a record number of books this year, which doesn’t help. I have also been doing less reading since being self-employed, in part because I accidentally broke my Kindle… now that I have a new one, I need to get back into the habit of reading at night!
    • My top books of 2017:
      • The Book of Joy by Dalai Lama XIV, Desmond Tutu, and Douglas Carlton Abrams
      • Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
      • The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
      • Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
      • Little Princes by Conor Grennan
      • The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee
      • Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson
• Become a polyglot
  • Become fluent in French.
    • Spend at least 1 hour each day learning French.
      • Definitely didn’t make this! I did have some regular French habits for awhile, but they fell off when work got busy, and I definitely didn’t re-establish them when I became self-employed.
    • Earn the DELF B2 French language qualification or higher.
      • Didn’t end up registering for a test or making a concerted effort here. This fell off the priorities list once I became self-employed, and I also realized that I’m trying to learn the language so that I can communicate with real people, no so that I can pass a test. As noted in my mid year review, I did pass a diagnostic claiming to be rated at a B2 level, however (by the skin of my teeth).
      • Stretch: Earn the DELF C1 French language qualification or higher.
    • Read Harry Potter in French.
      • I have the first book in both French audio and on Kindle! I don’t have a good excuse. I can’t quite read all of it without pausing to look up some words on a regular basis, but most of the gist makes sense. I just never got much further than the first chapter. I think my weakest areas in French are speaking and listening, however, which is maybe why I de-emphasized reading.
• See the beauty and strength of which my body is capable.
  • Qualify for the Boston Marathon.
    • Injuries earlier in the year, and then after I became self-employed I decided to double-down on the gym since I don’t know if weight-lifting will be a real option while I’m abroad. Ultimately, I could probably have made progress toward this, though actually qualifying for the Boston is going to take at least a few attempts. I think after my injuries I mentally knew this wasn’t going to happen this year and let myself slack. I’ve recommitted for 2018, however!
  • Develop a 6-pack.
    • Not much progress here from mid year. Still 4 up top, and no sign of the other 2.
    • Get down to 9% body fat.
      • Closest I got was 13%, which is pretty laughable since I think I started at ~14% or 15%. Palantir fed me 3 meals a day and I had trouble getting myself to be disciplined about macros and calorie restriction. I tried meal planning after I left Palantir, but keep finding reasons to cheat which sink me. The meal plan did seem pretty effective however–I think if I really committed to a well-designed plan for 3-6 months, this would happen. I just like food a lot >_<.
    • Do an abdominal workout three times a week.
  • Stretch: Lift weights three times a week.
    • I lifted weights regularly when I got back to San Diego, but can’t say that I did this often enough to give myself credit. This wasn’t really the priority.
• Improve my ability to regulate and compartmentalize thoughts and emotions, especially negative and anxious thoughts and emotions such as fear or insecurity.
  • Meditate for 20 minutes every day.
    • I definitely didn’t get every day, but I think I did this enough to feel that it made a difference, which is good.
  • Write in a journal at least once a week.
    • Once a week is pretty excessive–I don’t always have anything useful to journal about on that schedule. I do have a decent number of journal entries from 2017, but there isn’t a consistent pattern to when. Sometimes I’m very regular, other times I’ll go months without thinking to write.
• Become more politically active.
  • Become more politically informed.
    • Read at least 2 books about healthcare issues.
    • Read at least 2 books about global warming and environmental issues.
    • Read at least 2 books about education issues.
    • Read at least 2 books about immigration and globalization.
    • Read at least 2 books about economics.
    • Read at least 2 books about political theory and political philosophy.
    • This is something I’d like to do, but I keep not actually taking the time to read books that get me closer to it. I think it’s not the highest priority right now–when trying to figure out how to feed oneself, one doesn’t worry as much about politics.

Reflection

2017 was another interesting year for my goals. I can’t quite call it an equivocal success, but it certainly wasn’t a total failure, either. In the first half of the year, I accomplished a decent amount of what I had set out to do, and was looking reasonably on track to hit the majority of my goals with a little bit of extra effort. In the second half of the year, however, I shook everything up by quitting my job and starting to actively work on my broader fear of failure. Doing so has, inevitably, led to a bit of a slow down on the rest of my goals.

Interestingly, this is the second year in a row where, in the second half of the year, I’ve decided to take a major leap toward a larger goal that I hadn’t otherwise been planning to tackle in the current year. (2016’s leap being making an attempt at an Ironman triathlon many months earlier than expected.) In both cases, I took action because I recognized that my largest growth opportunity lied in a direction that perhaps didn’t completely align with my yearly goals. While I’m proud of both of these steps, I think that this trend is symptomatic of my goals not being focused enough, my motivations not being clear enough, or not having enough flexibility allowed by the set of goals I’ve chosen.

I also wonder if I really would have been able to complete everything on my goals list had I been more committed to doing so. Last year I argued that I probably would have. This time I’m actually not so certain.

Most of my goals are not things that are immediately achievable, so they require longer-term, consistent effort. For these goals (e.g. learning a language, speed reading, running a marathon), it’s less about big pushes and spurts of effort, and more about the little habits that slowly but surely push me toward where I want to go. Ultimately, my ability to create sustainable habits is integral to accomplishing these goals.

If I’m being totally honest with myself, I think in 2017 I struggled to create and maintain new habits in support of many of my goals. I’ve had success with new habits in the past, so I definitely know how to do this under certain conditions. Training for my first marathon, and later for an Ironman, for example, required that I build the habit of exercising 5 or 6 days out of the week.

So why did I struggle this time? I think one of the major factors here was focus. I had a lot of goals this year, and there were times when I think I probably threw too much at myself at once. Creating new habits isn’t too hard if I have just one or two to focus on, but I overwhelmed myself a little with the sheer number of habits I wanted or needed to create all at once. I think I might have been more successful if I had chosen a smaller number of things to focus on or if I had organized my goals into “phases,” giving myself a couple of new habits to focus on at a time until each had set. Willpower is finite.

Another factor was my environment and a failure to either change it or adapt to it. When I was working a full-time job, there would sometimes be busier periods where I wouldn’t have the time or mental bandwidth to keep up a habit, so my progress would be lost. Adding in a frequent coast-to-coast travel schedule also made it challenging to establish habits and routines without more thought or effort. Again, here I think focusing on one or two things at a time could have helped. I trained for my first marathon despite traveling coast-to-coast every week by running on treadmills in NYC hotels after work. I was able to make this happen through the establishment and prioritization of a single, very important habit. When the shit hits the fan, it’s much harder to do the same with 5 or 6 different things.

There are two other major factors differentiating some of my past successes from the goals I’ve been struggling more with: 1) a sense of consistent, measurable progress and 2) a plan which, when followed, provides relative surety of making it to the goal. When training for an Ironman or a marathon, it’s hard not to notice myself getting stronger each week as the workouts get harder or longer and I still manage to complete them. This feeling is exciting and motivating in and of itself. I’m also usually following a workout plan put together by someone else whose had experience with the event, allowing me to reasonably safely assume that if I can complete the workout each day, then I’m on track to actually complete the goal. I’ve found it harder to establish both of these conditions when working on a goal like learning a language, for example. Sure, sometimes I have a sense that I’m a bit more fluent, or can understand a little more, but this is nowhere near as measurable or granular as having completed a 10-mile run last week and 12-mile run this week. I’m also finding that plans for many of my non-fitness goals are much less cut and dried–at the end of the day 3 miles is 3 miles no matter how fast or slow you run it, but what’s the equivalent metric for language training?

Despite the struggle to establish habits, I did learn a few useful things to carry into the future. I was having only sporadic success with rejection challenges before I decided to crowdsource challenges from friends and publicly commit to doing one challenge a day for 30 days. From that experience, I was reminded how helpful it can be to get friends involved in goals–they can serve as both an accountability check and a support network. I was also reminded of how powerful it is to have a “streak” doing something. After 10 days of doing rejection challenges, the momentum was enough to keep me from quitting even as the challenges got increasingly uncomfortable.

All-in-all, I think my big takeaways from 2017 goals were to focus more on a few things at a time, to re-frame my goals in terms of sustainable habits I can create that will ultimately get me where I want to go, and to leave myself the flexibility beyond that to pivot when necessary–committing to the spirit behind a plan is sometimes more important than following the exact letter of the plan. I’ve incorporated these learnings into my strategy for 2018, where I have notably fewer different goal threads, and have left things a little bit more vague. There are still some strong themes for growth areas, and while there are a few key results I intend to hold myself accountable to, I was overall a lot less specific this year, hopefully giving me a little more space to adapt and improvise.

At the end of each year I take some time to reflect and to write out new goals and resolutions for the coming year. This exercise is about more than just the goals themselves, though–it’s about really taking a moment to check-in on my growth and to find alignment between my values, how I choose to spend my time, and my overall life direction. These words were written to inspire a future, struggling version of myself to stay the course and keep pushing to grow despite bouts of discomfort or laziness (both of which are natural parts of the journey).

I’ve been doing this for a few years now, and for the last couple I’ve chosen to make my goals public here on my blog. I don’t publish these to show-off, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers–if you spend 20 minutes reading this blog you’ll quickly realize that, while I have some strong convictions, I’m very much a work in progress. In fact, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that not every goal I’ve ever written down here has been accomplished. (Fortunately, though, many of the really important ones have.)

I publish these in the hope that, if I’m lucky, my journey to improve myself and an account of what I learned along the way will inspire or enlighten even just one other person. I hope that by writing about living my ideals and leading by example–with all of the bumps, blemishes, and bloopers left in–I may lend someone else the courage, the discipline, the perseverance, the authenticity, or even just the awareness to start living their own. Life is about the journey, and this is how I make the most of mine.

* * *

2016’s theme was discipline, concluding in an Ironman triathlon. 2017’s theme was courage, culminating in leaving my job to pursue my own path. 2018, in a sense, is going to be a combination of the two. There are two main areas that I really want to work on:

1. Learning to deal with uncertainty, and to fight against my instinct to plan and control everything.
2. Learning to identify, trust, and follow my authentic inner voice.

Learning to Deal with Uncertainty

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”
–The Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr

We spend the first two decades of our lives with an abundance of externally-defined structure. Grade school, high school, and college all provide relative rigidity with our parents, our teachers, or our majors delineating a path forward and giving us a definition of success to strive for. Then we graduate, and suddenly all of that structure evaporates. In the vacuum, the game becomes about defining meaning, purpose, and success for ourselves, before learning to apply them in the face of life’s fundamental uncertainty.

There are two primary ways we learn to cope with uncertainty: 1) creating, finding, or borrowing structure so that we have control over what we can control and 2) learning to let go of the need for control over things we fundamentally cannot control. Both methods are important, and they involve different and opposite skills: the former requires that we learn to be a proactive and creative force in our own lives, the latter that we learn to go with the flow and not burden ourselves with what we can’t control (e.g. the past, the vast majority of the future, how others think and act).

In my limited experience, most people I’ve met excel at one of these strategies, but not both. In fact, in a funny way, those who naturally excel at one strategy are often awful at the other–when you have a hammer, everything kind of looks like a nail. Personally, my hammer has always been proactivity and control (that’s why I started writing these goals in the first place); acceptance and going with the flow has always been a weakness. Ideally, one masters both of these strategies. Once that’s done there is a third challenge: learning when to apply each strategy for maximum effect.

In the past, I’ve written a lot about courage and discipline. In fact, last year I wrote, “I believe that I need two main virtues in order to accomplish everything I want in life: the courage to dream, and the discipline to execute.” I don’t think I realized it then, but those virtues map pretty well to the methods of dealing with uncertainty I just described: discipline involves creating and following through on structure, while courage requires a learned acceptance of the things we cannot control so we can function despite fear.

Though I still have a lot to learn about both courage and discipline, and though I’ve made a lot of great progress in the last couple years, I’m realizing now that a piece has always been missing from my thesis: learning how to use courage and discipline together, and when to apply one over the other. As it is, my instinct is still very much to control, plan, and analyze. I think in 2017 I learned a bit more about how to let go, but I still struggle with when to let go. Finding or creating opportunities to practice this skill is one of my top priorities in 2018.

Learning to be Authentic

Learning to deal with uncertainty is a little like learning to sail a boat: you have to learn how to trim the sails and weather different conditions at sea. Ultimately, though, you could be the best sailor in the world and never get where you’re trying to go without some means of navigation. Authenticity is our means of navigation on the capricious sea of life; it’s the compass needle subconsciously guided by our deepest values, and the north star that lights the way to who we’re meant to be and what we’re meant to do. I believe authenticity is one of the highest pursuits in life, not because there’s some pot of universal truth or meaning at the end of the rainbow, but because it’s the path that maximizes individual long-term happiness realized through integrity and self-actualization.

Sometimes, however, the compass spins or the night sky is cloudy, and we can’t seem to find our way. This is because the concept of authenticity is complicated–certainly more complicated than “just being yourself,” as the platitude goes. There’s a multitude of different influences in our lives–our parents, our peers, our significant others, the culture or environment we grow-up or live in–that can passively or actively push our internal compasses away from true north. Completely avoiding any of these influences on our lives is impossible, and not entirely desirable: sometimes pieces of external influence create resonance, shedding some light on what we truly value. Other times, though, our internal compasses point us in directions that lie in direct conflict with where external influences would have us go. When this happens, one of two things occurs: we choose to go someone else’s way, thereby learning to wear a mask; or we follow our inner voice, moving us closer to our authentic selves.

That process is, of course, also not as easy as it sounds. The more external voices there are and the louder they are, or the meeker our inner voice–if, for example, we aren’t very secure about ourselves–the harder it can be to identify, trust, and listen to our inner voice. Ultimately, I think the goal is to be able to remain true to self especially in the presence of strong external influences. Personally, this is something that I’ve struggled with quite a bit in my life to date, and there have been a few key points where I’ve caught myself walking a potentially inauthentic path, not the least of which led to my leaving Palantir and Silicon Valley.

I’m very much still learning to trust myself, to feel internally rather than externally secure in who I am and who I choose to be, and to follow my internal compass. I think that these are among the most important things I can learn in life, both because I believe it’s the path to truly internalized happiness, and because life is full of stories about the archetypes played out by the alternatives: the entrepreneur or creative who regrets never believing in herself enough to take a chance; the ego-driven playboys, businessmen, and politicians who believe attention or money lead to happiness only to find themselves feeling hollow inside; and the go-getters who climb the corporate ladder in a desperate desire to “get ahead” without ever stopping to wonder what it really means to be ahead.

Goals

How will I pursue the two priorities outlined above?

• Running my own business
  • Uncertainty
    • As I’ve been learning for the past few months, trying to get a business off the ground is sometimes overwhelmingly uncertain. By continuing to pursue this path, I think I place myself in an environment where I have no choice but to apply both courage and self-discipline, and where I must learn to accept the occasional inevitable negative outcome that I cannot really control.
  • Authenticity
    • Being self-employed means that I’m solely responsible for setting my priorities, giving me the freedom to pursue work, growth, and meaning the way I want and at my own pace.
    • Learning to create value on my own will help me to learn to trust myself (or, perhaps, require that I learn to trust myself). I think there’s also no baser sense of personal security than knowing that if I have to fend for myself in this world, I can.
  • Key results:
    • As hard or as scary as it gets, stick with it for the entire year. Don’t take on consulting projects unless they’re actually really interesting, or I somehow really need the money (I shouldn’t this year).
    • Launch 4-6 (more ideally, 8-12) different projects this year. These don’t all have to be of the same magnitude or significance, but they should all have some monetization plan from the beginning. Learn to scope projects well, learn not to be afraid of throwing something over the fence before it’s perfect, and really get the process down to a science.
• Travel
  • Uncertainty
    • I’ll be moving around a lot in 2018, and I think doing so will help to create an environment chock-full of uncertainty. I expect to encounter situations I couldn’t predict, and I think this will challenge me to learn to find the balance between acceptance and proactivity.
  • Authenticity
    • Traveling around to new places, meeting new people, and encountering new perspectives will give me opportunities to learn more about what I’m drawn to.
    • Pulling myself away from past influences, including my parents, my college peer group, my existing friends, Silicon Valley’s culture and environment, and all past and current romantic interests will help to turn down the volume on the external voices that sometimes drown out my own voice.
  • Key results:
    • Meet new people and have adventures wherever I go. Try to spend every weekend doing something exciting, new, or terrifying. Don’t get so singularly focused on running a business that I become a shut-in.
•  Mindfulness
  • Uncertainty
    • Mindfulness has and continues to be one of my most important mental tools for learning to deal with uncertainty. My mindfulness practice has taught me skills to accept my thoughts and emotions, as well as other external situations that I can’t otherwise rationalize away or control.
  • Authenticity
    • Many of the same mindfulness practices useful for accepting external situations are also very useful for accepting myself. The more I accept myself, the stronger my inner voice becomes.
  • Key results:
    • Attend a 2-week mindfulness retreat.
    • Complete the Headspace Pro series in one continuous streak.
    • Meditate for at least 20 minutes every day.
• Reading
  • Uncertainty and Authenticity
    • Books exist for pretty much every topic imaginable. Some books I’ve read have addressed topics relating to uncertainty and authenticity directly. Others have characters and plots that explore questions and themes that are central to my own life, and so are inspiring, or instructive, or at least thought provoking. Still others, simply introduce me to new ideas and new perspectives I might not have otherwise considered (and some of which I’d never have found by just meeting people). The more of these I’m exposed to, the more I get to see what I do and don’t resonate with, refining my internal compass.
  • Key results:
    • Read or listen to 52 books this year.

I have just a few other goals unrelated to this year’s primary objectives:

• Compete in the Boston Marathon
  • Why?
    • Exercise is an important part of my health and happiness, but I’ve found that I honestly don’t do well with just exercising 30 minutes a day to stay healthy. I need something larger than that to work toward, or I don’t end up putting my heart into it. I’ll also be moving around a lot next year, and though other exercise equipment may not always be readily available, running is pretty much always an option. As a runner in high school, and now a post-college amateur endurance athlete, qualifying for the Boston Marathon represents a huge accomplishment in speed, not just endurance. (Qualifying times for my age and gender require running a full marathon at an average pace of 7:00/mi.)
  • Key results:
    • Complete Hal Higdon’s Intermediate 2 marathon training schedule.
    • Complete Hal Higdon’s Advanced 1 marathon training schedule.
    • Complete a marathon in 3.5 hours. (If I’m lucky, I’ll qualify for Boston this year and race next year. Will need to see how training goes, though.)
• Become conversationally fluent in French
  • Why?
    • This is part of a larger desire I have to learn several foreign languages. This time, though, I actually have a one-way ticket to France in May 2018, and I’m going to need to work on my French both before and during if I want to survive/thrive while I’m there.
  • Key results:
    • Spend at least 3 months in French-speaking countries in 2018.
    • While in French-speaking countries, actively push to have a conversation in French every single day, no matter how uncomfortable, awkward, or broken my spoken French is.

I’m purposefully trying to keep my list of goals leaner and more focused this year, so I’ve cut several threads from 2017 that weren’t totally completed. Rather than overtax my focus and willpower, this year I’ll narrow in on a few larger things, and will consider throwing in more if I seem to be totally crushing it with lots of time left in the year.

The two biggest myths of language learning are that it takes years to learn a language and that you need a lot of time to do it. In fact, many languages can be learned in a year or less with a time investment of no more than an hour a day, but this doesn’t happen learning languages the way most of us have been taught.

As an aspiring polyglot, I’ve tried learning languages in just about every imaginable way: I took Latin classes in grade school, I tried night school Japanese at a local university, I’ve had private Chinese tutors, I completed the Duolingo tracks for both Spanish and French, and I even spent an entire summer at a Chinese immersion program run by the famed Middlebury College. Some of these things worked better than others, but most have either felt inefficient or unsustainable; classroom and self-taught curriculums often require large time investments and don’t emphasize real-life conversational fluency, and immersion, while great, doesn’t teach strategies to retain hard-earned progress long-term.

If, like me, you’re a busy person without all that time and energy to spare, you can’t afford huge time investments with low long-term returns. Fortunately, there are strategies and techniques used by successful polyglots that can take you to fluency quickly and maintain that fluency with minimal effort. I’ve personally been able to use many of them to get myself from beginner to intermediate/upper-intermediate in French in under a year.

Disclaimer: as a fledgling writer and aspiring digital nomad, I do sometimes receive compensation for sale or use of products and services mentioned on my blog. I do, however, only mention products and services I have used personally and strive to always provide my honest opinion positive or negative. I will never compromise the integrity of the content on this blog for financial gain.

The Shortest Path to Conversational Fluency

Trying to speak a new language can be embarrassing! (Image Source)

When it comes to conversational fluency, the real problem with most approaches is that they don’t force you to confront what’s really holding most people back in foreign language conversations: fear of rejection and sounding stupid. Instead of challenging themselves in a difficult and potentially embarrassing situation, most people retreat into book studies, telling themselves that if they just memorize a little more vocabulary or if they just keep studying those conjugation tables, they’ll be ready soon. Except that soon almost always turns into never, and even when it doesn’t no amount of book studying can save you when you panic and your mind goes blank. (If you read last week’s post, you may recognize this as a form of emotional inertia: talking to people in a new language and risking sounding like a lobotomized second grader is terrifying, especially for recovering perfectionists like myself, so it’s easier to just avoid that situation altogether.)

When you force yourself into real conversations with native speakers, you start to overcome the anxieties that make these situations scary. As a result, you begin to open yourself up to more opportunities to learn by speaking to people in new and different contexts. Furthermore, the quickest way to learn the vocabulary and phrases you actually need to carry on conversations is, well, trying to have conversations. (Captain obvious saves the day!) Each time you have a new conversation, it highlights new areas for directed growth toward your weak areas. (Contrast this with the sort of shotgun approach taken by most structured curriculums.) Didn’t know how to say “hello,” “thank you,” or “how are you”? Go memorize them. Couldn’t figure out how to express a thought or opinion? Figure out how to say “I think that…”. Struggled to answer a certain question about your life? Prepare an answer offline that you can practice and deliver the next time someone asks. Your conversations may last as little as 10 seconds before switching to English, but over time you should be able to push this further and further until you’re having full and rich conversations in your target language.

Learning Mindset

It’s all about the mindset. (Image Source)

With the right mindset it’s almost never too soon to start talking to people in your new language. In fact, Benny Lewis, an accomplished polyglot and author of Fluent in 3 Months, encourages people to start having foreign language conversations in their first week of learning. The trick is to remember that the goal is to understand and be understood without reverting to English for as long as possible, and that failing and making mistakes is totally OK. In the beginning, everything is fair game–pointing to objects, bizarre and convoluted hand gestures describing abstract concepts, or interpretive dances–just try not to revert back to English in fear or frustration. Don’t let yourself get caught up on the mistakes you’re making–the words you mispronounced, the grammar you botched, or the vocabulary that left you when you metaphorically shit yourself–instead remind yourself that perfection takes time and practice, and that even native speakers make mistakes sometimes. Your speech may be broken, and you may sound like you were repeatedly dropped on your head as a child, but so long as the gist of your meaning is somehow getting across, you’re doing great. You don’t need years of classroom instruction, you just need, as with most goals, a few ounces of courage to get started, a dash of discipline to consistently keep at it, and a pinch of perseverance to help you through the most embarrassing moments.

Immersion programs work so well because they give you no choice but to fall into this mindset, and then force you into uncomfortable situations where you don’t know what to say or how to say it. Conversely, some of the more popular language learning tools like Duolingo aren’t as helpful because they give you the illusion of progress without actually dragging you into real conversations. This isn’t to say that things like Duolingo don’t work–if you spend enough time with a tool or set of tools, you’ll eventually reach a certain level of fluency, but then, if you spend enough time trying to crack a coconut open with toothpicks, you’ll eventually succeed. (Don’t quote me on that–I’ve, uh, probably, never actually tried this.) Don’t get me wrong, I love Duolingo–I think what they’re doing is great, their product is moving in the right directions (chatbots are beginning to help close the conversational fluency gap), and I love their mission of providing free language education for all, but having graduated from two of their language tracks, I can attest that it never took me to a sense of real fluency in either language. Tools like these are great supplemental resources, but they’re not going to get you where you want to go on their own.

Language Exchanges

If we’re on the same page at this point, you’re probably thinking, “Great, thanks Daniel, I get that having real conversations is important, but I don’t know anybody who speaks Klingon, so what gives?” Fortunately, it’s a wonderful time to be alive and we have this amazing thing called the Internet (maybe you’ve heard of it?). The primary mechanism I use for having conversations with native speakers is called a language exchange, wherein I connect with someone on the other side of the planet who speaks the language I’m trying to learn and is trying to learn English, so we’re able to trade competencies. There are a lot of websites out there to help facilitate language exchanges, but the one I currently use is called italki. (Disclaimer: this is a referral link, so I do have a small incentive to advertise here. You and I would both receive $10 in italki credits if you take a lesson with one of italki’s very affordable–sometimes as cheap as $10/hr–community tutors. That said, I primarily use italki for the community, not for the tutoring, though both are great.) Through italki, I’ve connected with native French speakers in Europe and Africa. It honestly still freaks me out every time, but doing more of these was one of the improvement areas I identified for my French-learning goals during this year’s mid year review. Aside from italki, I’ve also found that there is a wealth of language-related meetups, so it’s usually not hard to find other language learners to practice with. If you’re feeling really brave (or really desperate?), it can be surprisingly easy to find people to practice with spontaneously in the real world as evidenced by this video of a couple polyglots speaking 12 different languages with random strangers in Ohio of all places.

Efficiently Learning Everything Else

If having real conversations is the strategy for getting us past our anxieties and identifying our areas for improvement, the next natural question is: what’s the best way to improve once we know what we need to improve? And how can we maintain our language gains with minimal effort?

Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition allows you to review information efficiently. (Image Source)

The answer to both questions is a memory technique called spaced repetition, which is actually already in use behind the scenes in some popular language tools like Duolingo and Memrise. Spaced repetition involves reminding yourself of a piece of information at an interval that optimizes your likelihood of remembering it without overexposing yourself to it, theoretically resulting in better long-term retention of the data each time you review it, while minimizing the number of reviews.

In practice, if you’re using spaced repetition with a deck of flashcards, rather than review those cards every day, the first day you would review all of your cards. Then tomorrow, you would go back and review your cards again, and you’ll save the cards you remembered correctly to review again in two days. The cards you didn’t remember correctly, you’ll review again the next day. Each time you successfully remember a card, its review interval increases exponentially (so if it had been two days since you saw this card, now you’ll snooze it for four days), and each time you fail to remember a card, it starts over in the process. Eventually, you won’t need to review some of these cards for months or even years. In order to avoid having to study hundreds of cards at a time, you can also break the deck up and just learn a few cards every day to keep things manageable.

There are a few software tools out there for automating the spaced repetition process, but the main two I’ve come across are Memrise and Anki. I personally prefer Anki because it’s more flexible and customizable and virtually every polyglot I’ve ever talked to uses it. It’s also free so long as you can get away without it on your mobile devices. It is however, a lot less sexy and modern-looking than Memrise. Of note, Gabriel Wyner also has a Kickstarter out for a new language learning app, which promises to be a solid competitor to these existing options. (In fact, many of the tips in this section originate from Gabriel’s book Fluent Forever, which likely does them better justice than I can.)

So what is it we’re actually using spaced repetition to memorize? Well, truthfully, you can use this to memorize anything (I’m looking at you, future doctors and lawyers), so long as it comes in small, quizzable chunks. That said, for learning a language, the main things you’ll want to memorize are vocabulary and grammar, and primarily you’d be doing that through flashcards.

Memory Hacks for Flashcards

(Image Source)

To get the most out of each flashcard, you’ll want to abuse a few memory tricks. First, every flashcard should have an image. We have visual memories, so associating a foreign language word with an image is much better for you than associating a foreign language word with an English one (which would more-or-less sets you up for translating word-by-word in your head later on). It can be fun to Google image search foreign words because sometimes the subtle differences in the connotation of the word as it’s natively used and its English translation become apparent. (Gabriel Wyner calls this “spot the differences” in Fluent Forever.)

Second, choose an image that is really provocative. Our minds tend to remember things that are really out there: really strange, really funny, really sexy, or really violent. (No joke, I have some pretty racey flashcards–it doesn’t help that a non-trivial number of French words turn up unexpectedly sexual image search results.)

Last, if you can, write a word or short phrase that reminds you of a memory you have that is somehow associated with the vocabulary in question. When this card comes up, try to remember what this phrase was as well. Since our memories operate as sort of associated networks of information, the more connections you’re able to make between a new word and other new or existing memories in your mind, the easier it will be to remember.

Learning Vocabulary

When it comes to learning vocabulary, you need to get yourself to the point where you’re picking up new vocabulary words in the wild–as opposed to from a list–as quickly as possible. This ideally means finding new words and sentences to learn from in their natural contexts–from easy reading, from watching YouTube videos in the target language, or from playing video games in the target language, for example. Unfortunately, the shortest path to getting to this point does involve memorizing vocabulary from lists, but not the lists you’re used to finding in your textbooks. Instead, you’ll want to grab a list of the most frequently used words in your new language. This works because the most frequently used words in a language appear disproportionately often in context so, for example, by learning the 600 most frequent words in a language you can actually learn most of the words you’ll expect to see in the wild, which will typically leave you able to guess at the meaning of most simple sentences, even if you don’t recognize all of the words.

It’s typically not terribly hard to find a list for your language free and available on the Internet, but I personally bought a frequency dictionary for French and don’t regret the investment. I’m also a big fan of Gabriel Wyner’s frequency lists, as they offer a more visual and thematic experience.

When it comes to vocabulary, one of the really important points is that you make your own flashcards. There’s an abundance of existing flashcard stacks on the Internet for any language you could want to learn, but the experience of creating the flashcards in the first place, if done right, is a valuable first step in establishing a concept in your memory. For each word, you’ll want to create at least a couple of flash cards using as little English as possible: 1) picture of something on one side, word itself and other info (like gender, pronunciation, similar words, or relevant memories) on the other side; 2) word on one side, picture and other info on the other side.

If you use Anki, check out Gabriel Wyner’s Anki card templates and use Forvo to grab native speaker pronunciations for words and sentences you make flashcards for.

As a bonus tip here, for languages with those pesky gendered nouns, you can actually shove this information into your visualization centers by associating a descriptive verb with each gender. For example, I like to use “freezing” for feminine words and “burning” for masculine words, so if the word is “farm” and it’s feminine, I’ll picture the image of the farm that I have on the card, but with everything frozen over. Anything that creates a provocative image when combined with the images on your cards will do–melting, shredding, eviscerating (disemboweling? ._.)–let your imagination run wild :).

Learning Grammar

The mechanisms behind learning grammar are similar to that of learning vocabulary. Use all the same memory hacks, but generally use sentences rather than words now. For grammar, it’s easiest to use a sentence you’ve either written yourself or found somewhere and create a blank in the sentence that you have to fill. For example, if I’m trying to learn a verb conjugation, rather than make myself a flashcard for the second person singular of that verb, I’ll just create a sentence flashcard that implies second person singular and leaves a blank for the verb form. I’ll usually give myself the verb infinitive, since the goal here isn’t to test if I know the word, but rather the form of the word that fits here. You can also do the same thing for other grammatical constructs like learning which preposition to use. Eventually, you can also use fill in the blank sentences to learn vocabulary words.

Again, I would check out Gabriel Wyner’s Anki card templates for this if you use Anki.

Learning Pronunciation

Some example minimal pairs difficult for English learners. (Image Source)

Some languages have pronunciation systems or just consonants and vowels that are really different from English. For example, Mandarin Chinese has a tonality system that English speakers find excruciatingly confusing, and French has some very, very subtle pronunciations that sound similar. Sometimes you’ll find yourself staring dumbly at a native speaker who insists that two things that sound exactly the same are actually completely different words or phrases. (Fun fact: these words/phrases are actually called minimal pairs.)

Don’t worry, you’re not dumb. You really can’t hear it. When we’re young, our brains automatically learn to cluster the sounds of our native language into vowels and consonants we recognize. Some languages have slightly different sound clusterings that other languages get easily confused because they get lumped into a sound clustering that we do recognize. But don’t lose heart, it is possible to train one’s ear and one’s tongue to hear and say these sounds.

I recommend checking out Gabriel Wyner’s resources for minimal pairs. He even has Anki-based pronunciation trainers for most languages, which I’ve found helpful for French.

Keep it Fun

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho in French.

When it comes to learning a language, don’t forget to be creative and keep it fun! Search for new and interesting ways to immerse yourself in the language. I try to read easy books, I watch TV, and I play video games in French. I’ve even changed the native language of my phone to French–Siri now only does things for me when I talk to her in French and my pronunciation is sufficiently non-shitty–and have gotten used to things like navigating app interfaces in French or having Google Maps tell me how to get where I need to go in spoken French.

Don’t stay chained to a textbook or to flashcards! Your ultimate goal is to be able to function in your new language the way you function in English–don’t forget to find pleasurable ways to do that. Just remember to occasionally make yourself a flashcard or two when you encounter a new word or sentence structure you didn’t know before ;).

Conclusion

I spent my whole life learning languages the wrong way, and up until recently have always felt frustrated by the slow pace of progress or the inability to hold on to a new language over time. Much of that has changed for me after discovering the techniques described in this post, none of which any of my language teachers in school ever bothered to teach me.

With regular conversations in my target language, I’m able to get a better sense of how actually fluent I feel, and with all of the memory hacks I’m able to download a huge amount of information into my brain pretty quickly. While I can’t guarantee the same results for everyone, and you definitely get more out of a language the more time you put into it, I’ve personally put less than an hour a day on average into learning French this year and, though my written and spoken communication still lag behind a bit, I’m able to pass diagnostic tests placing me into intermediate and upper-intermediate French levels. By the time my spoken French skills catch-up–hopefully in the next few months–I expect I’ll be fairly conversationally fluent!

I hope this information will help inspire you to pick up a new language or finish learning a language you started in the past. It doesn’t take years, and it doesn’t require chaining yourself to a textbook for multiple hours a day!

* * *

This was just an overview of some of the language learning methods and hacks I’ve learned this year.

If you found this fascinating or helpful, please consider taking a moment to react to this post on social media, or even share it with your friends.

If you have questions about any of this, please leave a comment on the post, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Lastly, you can expect more posts on this blog outlining smart ways to accomplish common goals in the near future. Become an email subscriber to be among the first to know when new posts come out!

Further Reading

Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World breaks down a lot of the barriers that people run into when trying to learn languages: fear of jumping into conversations, the belief that they just don’t have a talent for language learning, and the idea that one has to fly halfway across the world to really get exposed to a new language. This book is the basis for this blog post’s section on “The Shortest Path to Conversational Fluency,” and also contains a number of cool memory hacks and language learning tricks that I didn’t have space to cover in this blog post. I’d also recommend checking out Benny Lewis’ website and blog.

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It is an excellent and comprehensive resource for language learners. Many of the memory hacks and techniques outlined in this post under “Efficiently Learning Everything Else” come from this book. It’s also worth giving Gabriel Wyner’s website and blog a look, and checking out the Kickstarter he’s running for the Fluent Forever App.