Life

My personal life stories.

Inward

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Are you more of an Inward or Outward person? I know for sure that I’m an Inward person.

How do you know this? I realized that I talked to myself a lot, I ponder about a lot of things, I can go very deep in thought, I’m usually harder on myself vs waiting on my peers to give pressure to me.

Most of the time, I don’t care about what people think, I care about what I think about myself.

There’s a question that sounds like this: “Do you prefer: to look handsome/pretty when people see you but when you see yourself in the mirror you look like an ugly person OR people see you as an ugly person but when you look in the mirror you’re handsome”

I think I’m the latter. I don’t confirm to people’s expectation or standard, I usually try to build my own. Two sides of coin for this type/personality is you are very sure on what you’re doing but it’s very hard for you to take people’s advices at times.

Ignorance is Bliss

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This post will sound like a humble brag or even plain bragging so please skip if you might get offended.

The more you know, the more you have the potential to suffer. What this means is that as you have more education, you know that there are potential out there. As you get more informations, you know that there’s a chance of success out there that you can make.

On the other side, it can be something more personal indulgence. Like, if you’ve been eating street side food and suddenly you get a chance to enjoy a steak. Now, you’ll start to compare and miss eating those tender meat.

If you’ve been staying at budget hotels and you got a chance to enjoy a stay at 5 star hotel, now the stay at budget hotels feels so ‘painful’ and ‘suffocating’

If you’ve been riding economy/coach and doesn’t even dream to ride in a business class, and yes — you get it — found a way to fly in business class. Suddenly flying economy feels so excruciating especially for long haul.

This is why ignorance (not knowing) is bliss and at the same time, crazy how humans can adapt to luxury that fast.

Parent as a Service

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It might sound crazy, in fact, it is crazy to think about this. But, hear me out, 10 years from now, it might even be the norm. Parent as a Service.

Look around us, if you see (pre-COVID) in the restaurants, in the malls, most of the little childrens are in front of screens from their early age. They are used to smartphones and tablets, you’re even not laughing anymore if you saw kids trying to ‘swipe’ a TV.

This shows us that technology, and in it AI, is already affecting children growing up. Why not making it even ‘formal’ or ‘integrated’? As life cost grew, we’ll see more and more parents having to juggle multiple jobs just to survive and we’ve seen a lot of child having to deal with loneliness.

I’d predict that we will have Parent as a Service product as we saw more technology introduced to our life. We are already seeing Amazon with its Alexa being all around your home. Why not have an AI making sure our kids do their homework by disconnecting the WiFi to our childrens phone?

Childhood

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Watching ‘Dark’ on Netflix has been making me think a lot about my own childhood and its impact on my adult life. I did have a beautiful and amazing childhood up until I was 9 or 10? I remembered going on a holiday almost every 6 months whether it’s to Malaysia or Singapore.

Then, it all sort of went downhill from there. My parents fought almost every other day, they eventually got divorced when I was in my first year in junior high (SMP). I grew up during my pre-teens until now with my dad and I guess it affected my relations with woman as well.

I remember in my high school years, my pocket money was only enough for one food and that’s it. Whenever I went to the mall with my friends, they would buy music albums, buy shirts in Giordano, and I was just there sitting with envy.

When you grew up always feeling “not enough” it created an ‘anger’ of trying to prove to everyone that I have it. I guess I was lucky that it turned into a positive fire inside of me to be successful. At the same time though, I’m a super egoistic person, as I always believed that I have to fend for myself and I created my own luck.

I don’t know if I would change anything in the past but it’s just interesting to see how our childhood really shaped us as a person.

Adulting

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I realized (for a while now) that I live in a privileged bubble where I don’t have to pay for rent, electricity, internet, water, and gas. In fact, the term ‘personal finance’ wasn’t in my head until the last few years of my life.

One of the first thing that I did was realizing that I didnt even have saving nevermind investing. I didn’t even have a personal health insurance. I didn’t even track how much I spend each month.

Today though, I’m on my personal health insurance despite being insured by my company. I started to invest in mutual funds and directly to stock markets. I’ve been meticulously tracking my daily spending over the past 18 months.

I guess that’s what Adulting feels like..

Dinner Roulette

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Choosing what to eat for dinner has been first world problem over the last couple of decades. The addition or innovation of food delivery app isn’t solving this instead it gives you even more options to pick from.

I’m quite lucky that I still live with my dad and sister. We are also “subscribing” to a “dinner roulette” aka catering where all we do is cook rice and we’ll have a decent dinner with an element of surprise every day.

 

Exercise COVID

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Drenching in sweat and can’t wait to shower and eat dinner definitely was the feeling I miss when I was able to go to the gym and properly exercise. Post COVID, people switch into HIIT or watching home exercise videos and follow them.

Unfortunately for me, I’ve never been a fan of exercising at home. I still remember getting Xbox and Kinect just to exercise using it, didn’t last few months. I also tried subscribing into an exercise app, same thing.

Post COVID, I actually found a substitute: walking. I know it doesn’t burn as many calories as you’d in the gym but I’ve been averaging 7-8k steps per day and compared to my weight 6 months ago I went from 74kg (because of my trips to Korea) to 65kg (It can go as low as 64 on a Monday morning pre-breakfast)

Walking also allows me to consume tons of podcasts, with 2x speed, I can consume 2 hours worth of podcast in 1 hour walk. Despite most of content talked about COVID or post COVID, I’ve also listened to things like macro economics, interviews with very smart entrepreneurs.

I’m adapting and I’m liking it so far but I’d definitely go back to the gym sometime next year.

Weekend

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My weekend is changing over time as my role changed in life. I realized that during my Talenta days, I barely have a weekend as I’d probably always need to do something. Even if I didn’t do anything, I would always be thinking about doing something for Talenta.

Then I did my sabbatical, and it turns my weekend into a similar weekdays. I didn’t see a clear difference between any single day to the others. Weekends aren’t as fulfilling.

Nowadays though, I feel more thankful of my weekend. It’s the breather I’d need to continue working on weekdays. But, a big but here, I use Saturdays to collect my thoughts and write. If possible, write possible ideas to improve process or even a new product for the company I’m working for.

How has your weekend changed? Especially during COVID?

Living in a Bubble

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Lately, I have been thinking that I’ve been living in a bubble. At first, perhaps it’s organic, but as it goes on, maybe it’s deliberate.

When I look around, most of my friends and close friends are working in tech and or owns a business in some form. Creating an echo chamber of first world problems and sometimes, superficial thoughts.

When I watch (yes I know it’s a scripted reality TV) series like Terrace House, I found myself being envious of the situation or opportunity of actually making friends with people in various jobs and backgrounds.

Lately, I’m becoming more afraid that I live in a bubble that I created on my own. And feeling a little bit trapped.

Documentation

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When building a product, we all hear this all the time. A great developer is someone who will do a great documentation whether it’s their code, building an API, and so on.

I’d like to expand this thought into a larger perspective. Why don’t we document our professional life more? Whether you are a founder who just started a company, an employee inside a fast growing or even a unicorn company, or a business owner who have been doing a business for a decade or more.

I think why people don’t do this more often is they feel: I have to write publicly, and if I did, what if no one reads it or someone doesn’t like it?

My thought: documenting our professional life (progresses, challenges, problem and what I did to solve that) will help you compare how much you have grown over the past 1,2,5,10 years.

Creating a documentation also helps when you became a mentor and realizing that one of the problems that is being faced by people you coach is something you’ve faced before. Documenting more things also help to create clarity as we are absorbing unlimited information than ever before. We can’t rely 100% on our brain.