My 2021 in review
Last year seemed to be the most unproductive year of my life. I finished study in December 2020 and spent 2 months afterward looking for an office job. I got one but then I was caught up into it and I really didn’t have a solid answer for what I did for the rest of the time. It sounds like I have waisted my year so much but I was wrong. Looking back, I did achieve some invisible milestones that have had great impacts on my life.
Thinking transformation
Last year I spent a surprised amount of time thinking. What did I think about? It’s hard for me to tell you now but I always felt things were wrong or shouldn’t be the way I thought It should be. Yea, that sounds vague. Let me tell you few things I have learnt from this absurd amount of thinking.
Fear: I have so much fear. It’s funny to say it out loud because I was fearful even talking about it. Fear silently interrupted my decision making, my thoughts process and what I wanted to do. For example, I’ve wanted to build a blog since 2019 and I have had a couple of different websites for myself, but none of them worked for long. The reason behind it is I was so afraid of getting my posts published. I am not so proud of my writing and I felt embarrassed just thinking about how people would criticise it. Another example, I’ve always liked startups. I think many people like startups too, it can be a hype. But I don’t think I like startups that way. I love solving problems. I would be bored to dead if I have to spend hours working on something that was created by someone else. But, I couldn’t get myself moving into that path. I was terrified by not having a good idea, not having a founder, not having enough skills and knowledge. I fear of being a boring person, not hanging out with friends enough, or not making enough money.
Being introspective: I think a lot, but most of the time I think about stuff in retrospective. I’d like to find the root of the story, why it happened that way and why I didn’t do it differently. You might say well it has passed, what’s point of being reiterating it again. Well it’s just how my brain works.
Still fighting my monkey mind: while being introspective definitely helps me form my thinking process, it does trigger my monkey mind. I constantly found myself rehearsing a conversation with … myself. If you haven’t experienced it, you are lucky. Rumination drained me so much. I often felt exhausted because my mind was too active all the time. Sometimes I had trouble getting sleep because my mind couldn’t stop thinking. It sounds like I am telling you all the negativities in my life but I am not. These are my realisation for the year and I will work on them.
Career path and my life-long goals
From last year, I’ve wanted to be free from office work more than ever. I am saying that not because I hate my current job. I love it. I have a supportive and opened working environment. I have enough room for self-development and contribution. But deep down, I always know that the job is not for me. I would trade anything to work for myself or run my own company and that thought only gets stronger and stronger everyday.
I also know what kind of lifestyle would suit me the most. In an ideal scenario, I would like to live in a farm with chicken, ducks, horses, fruit trees and vegetable. While I can take care of my little farm, I can still work online, have a source of passive income and can do whatever I want with my time.
Reading
Last year, I didn’t read a lot of books but I read a huge amount of blog posts, to be more exact high quality blog posts. How do I know if these blogs are high quality, well, they are highly successful people and they write for the love of writing, not for the money. Their posts have either shifted my thinking or directed me to other valuable sources that help transform my life. The blogs from Paul Graham, Nat Eliason, or Tim Urban also have influenced my writing style in a very good way. If I usually felt cringe whenever I wrote something before, I have overcome it now and felt much more comfortable writing pages without feeling like I am a fraud. It doesn’t mean I am good at writing though. I just have a leverage to keep learning writing and practice the craft of writing in my own way.
