Key learnings of 2021 & Goals for 2022
The year is about to end. Spent a lot of time with myself, learned a lot this year, lost a lot, and did many things. Twitter has played an integral part in my learning, it has exposed to me some great peeps with vast knowledge and yet so humble. I regret not using Twitter early on in my life.
Some key learnings this year.
Change is only constant: Nothing ever lasts, be it good days or bad days. I learned this the hard way but I made peace with it. Enjoy the moment at present.
Learn to let go. It’s a beautiful thing to miss someone or something in memory because memory is where purity resides. ~unknown
Learning how to learn: The world is evolving rapidly, to be able to keep up with the ability to learn new things faster and more efficiently on your own has become integral. To be honest I suck at learning new things but I am constantly trying to improve myself.
Caring less: Yes, I have actually grown quite thick-skinned. Nothing much matters these days, although I try to maintain the balance. But still gotta long way to go. but there does exist a line between when to care and when not to care. I still don’t know where is that line.
Quitted Instagram and Snapchat: Got fed up with the Snapchat streak so uninstalled it ( I don’t even remember when was that). Uninstalled Instagram too and tbh It didn’t even feel like I was missing something. They both are waste of time and energy. I get nothing from it in return. Scrolling through reels unconsciously I felt guilty and it was highly stimulating.
Started reading again. I invested a good amount of money and time in books this year. With an abundance of highly stimulating reels and youtube shorts. I used to lose track of time. This in turn decreased my attention span drastically. Like believe me on this but it’s next to impossible trying to focus with these things in mind. Doing low-stimulating activities during my break would be a much more efficient use of my time. It improved my ability to focus on tasks.
Exercising: I have no intentions of telling you its physical benefits, everyone already knows them. Although it did help me physically what I am happier about is its mental benefits. I exercised for 189 days in total this year. It felt good. I drastically decreased eating processed and oily food. Also reduced my sugar consumptions. All these happened because I didn’t want to null down the effect of exercise on my body.
Kill the notification: Subtle but very effective in the long run. Your time and attention are precious. It’s okay to use mobile as long as you are doing it consciously. Notifications will sure shut interrupt your workflow. It’s better to live in denial until it’s time to use the phone. only my WhatsApp notifications are turned on. Actually, I don’t have any social media app on my phone other than WhatsApp. I use chrome for Twitter and telegram, which is very laggy and isn’t the best experience. This limits my time there too. If anyone wants my attention they need to tap on my shoulder( or schedule it).
Writing/journaling: I started journaling in mid-November. After reading warikoo’s 90days challenge I was deeply inspired by it. And took up writing as a challenge to do it for 90days. It helps me structure my thoughts and see where my time is going in a day.
Now some habits I am trying to inculcate.
Patience & consistency: I read an article about how to be able to learn something fast people generally tend to be in a hurry, but that is what then takes up most of the time. if we don’t take our time to understand we would have to reference it again and again later. That is inefficient and time-consuming. What if we go slow and patiently take our time to understand things? we will be unbeatable. With patience comes consistency. These two combined together can become a superpower.
Quality over Quantity: Instead of relying on the vanity metric of numbers, I want to focus more on the quality of everything I do. numbers of books read, numbers of hours studied, numbers of lectures watched, numbers of projects created, etc. Our mind has limited attention span and every book/lecture/subject requires a different amount of attention span on different days. So instead of saying I will watch 2 lectures of core CS every day say I will do 4 Pomodoro sessions every day to study my core subjects. This also implies focusing on one thing at a time. Multitasking might seem convenient but is not ideal for me. [do less but do it fully]
Exercising: As stated earlier it’s helping me in many ways that I can’t imagine or think of. so this is definitely something I will keep doing.
Procrastination: consistency is not about doing it every single day. You are allowed to take a day or two off but then never going back to it can be a problem. Thanks to exercising but now I know when I am procrastinating and when I am genuinely in need of a break. Breaks are okay as long as you know what you are doing. A number of days might be a vanity metric but building a system is what I seek more.
Boredom: All my life this is what I have run away from. The hours of boredom tried to fill in with reels, youtube shorts, mindless scrolling( I am not saying this is hardcore bad things but anything you doing mindless seems bad to me), youtube itself took away some precious boring time in which I could lay low and think about stuff. Everyone will agree we have great ideas when we are in the toilet. Why is that? Coz we are bored there and we have nothing to do so the lack of things to do there forces our mind fill in. Don’t try to fill in boredom with anything, sit and enjoy it. Don’t force away from it. find peace in silence.
Listen to your inner-self: I have been in countless situations where I am trying to seek outer help when from inside I know the answer. I am just seeking validation. Before trying to make sense of others’ points of view, I should make my own views and points and then try to understand what the other person has to say on this. This will be helpful in me not being totally dependent on others’ points of view.
Distraction: we can only remove the physical distractions, but what about the constant distracting thoughts I have when I get down to do some focus work. I can think of only 2 ways to be able to solve this. One is meditation and the other is a framework, The Distraction Notebook. Thanks warikoo for the wonderful framework but it’s incomplete. it’s simple and doesn’t take up too much time to execute. Whenever distracted by something write it down into a notebook and after completing your work take out time and think about them. Simple yet effective.
Writing, teaching communication skills: I am still a novice when it comes to writing or being able to express myself clearly. My communication skills are really bad to the point that many times I was unable to express my thinking or thought process. Writing helps in knowing how much you know and how well you know it. It helps structure chunks of thoughts here and there and helps see the bigger picture. Besides writing, another thing I can do to improve my communication skills is to use The Feynman technique. Not only it will help me in my studies but will also improve my English. Yes, my English is shit. Being able to express what I am thinking in simple words is dope. too dope.
Go out more often and learn everyday skills: I am getting comfortable staying at home. My immune system has become shit, I am exhausted sooner these days. The problem here is I have no one to go with and besides I know only a couple of places. I need someone to go with. I also want to learn to drive, manage money(which I don’t have any right now).
Show your work: Instead of telling them about how good you are at something, show them your work. Show your work by Austin Kleon talks about showing your work, putting Yourself out there. This amazing video by Ali Abdaal explains it well enough.
If you create it for others, it’s content. If you create it for yourself, it’s an art.
whatever you write/draw/record do it for yourself. That is what going to be keep you going constantly. All-day long we take consume stuff in different forms. Lectures, Bootcamp, tutorials, books, articles/newsletter, podcasts, youtube videos, memes, reels, and the list goes on. Basically speaking we are just constantly consuming and not producing something. This in my opinion is not something I wish to be. Being able to create something can help you in many ways. What can we do? We can write our learnings from the book we have been reading, maybe write a summary of the completed book, write about your day, write about how you are feeling, draw something, doodle, make a video, etc. It can be anything, doesn’t matter if it’s good or worse none care either way. Anything is fine as long as you are creating something.
I started making visuals and one of them blew up and none other than warikoo appreciated my work.
I read atomic habit which inspired me to make a system of habits to follow. These habits might seem subtle and unimportant but small unimportant habits over a long consistent period of time makes all the difference.