The highlights of 2024 were a few long-term goals coming together, both in my personal life and career. On the flip side, there were also matters that I was underprepared for, which led to harsh life lessons. Overall, the past year was a challenging but productive experience.
Why bother writing about the recent past?
- Writing about the 45%–65% of my awake time is a meaningful practice for the year’s finale. Like many others, I dedicate a lot of effort to the yearly performance reviews for myself and others at work. However that only represents merely 40–60 hours per week (~35%–55% of the 112 hours of non-sleep active time). Ignoring the rest 45% — 65% seems silly.
- It’s worth noting down the list of pitfalls so my future self can deal with the stuff with lower learning curves. Each year’s resolution seems to repeat itself: stepping out of the comfort zone, more exercise, attempting some sort of second revenue stream, and then the big bucket of typical career growth items. It’s possible that the same set of struggles were listed 5 years ago and will repeat in another 5 years. Writing about them so my future self can laugh about life running in circles.
For the fun of it, I’m listing things out as if I’m writing the work performance review: What Went Well vs What Didn’t Went Well. They should consolidate a set of bullet points.
What Went Well
- I’m married. Yay!
- Leveled to Staff Engineer; +50% team growth at work.
- Traveled out of the States after 6 years.
- Adopted a Britsh Shorthair. Meow.
- Upgraded dark-themed man cave.
Once on a sunny Saturday morning, after the gym, my wife and I randomly put together some breakfast: yogurt, fruits, smoked salmon, and two coffees. We were either in the living room or sitting out in the backyard, I was in a great mood.
Suddenly I started imagining how things would be like in 40 years when we are in our 70’s.
Are we traveling all the time? Are we still working on side projects? Are we still able to challenge each other, are we in good physical strength and being active? Sometimes I had further thought about how it feels when one of us may have passed, which left me a flash of sentimental moments in my mind. Though she would argue that statistically speaking women live longer than men so it’s all good, nothing to worry about ;)
Coming back to reality, I realize these 2 minutes of daydreaming would just reflect the current state of my relationship, and it’s a pretty happy state.
Getting married was a major milestone for me. I had a cliché but catastrophic relationship before this. Any major relationship success afterward carries much more weight. I’m 2x more appreciative of what we achieved as a couple and understand what it means to be the right person for each other. In short, I think we have a good thing going.
On the work front, the promotion marks a stepping stone towards long-term career goals.
With a pretty solid foundation of personal life, I have been laser-focused at work and worry-free for 4+ years in this company. Don’t get me wrong — we have multiple anchors in work-life balance, which usually take place in the form of traveling or snowboarding. With that, I went all in at work.
Statistically, I actually have little to brag about. My wife has reached the same rank 3 years before me so the staff engineer title was nothing new in my household. Due to numerous excuses and career decisions, I was always catching up with my peers — as of the writing of this, I still am.
Nevertheless, this was still a moment to celebrate! We talked about when would be more comfortable with living costs in the Bay Area, different life choices with career progression, and our long-term goals together. Being able to hit a specific mid-point milestone (despite being late for 3 years) is a tiny sparkle of proof that things are heading in the right direction.
Oh yes, having two Bay Area bread owners in a household has its perks. Check the Man Cave section of this blog to understand more.
What Didn’t Went Well
- Observed a lawsuit and I was resourceless to help.
- The weight loss plan went south.
- The podcast didn’t pick up speed and the Youtube side hustle stopped.
The most critical lesson I learned: there are moments in life that will suck and out of my control, but I must let go of my ego and be able to accept shitty situations and move on; otherwise it’s just digging myself into a hole. Without getting into details, here is a TLDR: I was forced into positions where I was resourceless and could only observe a sinking situation at a lawsuit; I felt small, guilty, and depressed for not being able to help my family. As much as I wanted to grow and improve things in life, there were just imperfect situations and others’ decisions that I couldn’t alter. It’s a particularly sad experience because I had first-hand observation of how money and power (which I frankly lack both) can influence things in others’ favor. I had many moments of realization: what if I had already made hundreds of millions? Would that dissolve some of these situations where money could help?
These life situations will happen regardless of my will but maybe I can choose which way it sucks? Maybe I can counter this with happy memories despite being in a bad situation. Now almost a year later and it was all done, I had many rounds of after-thoughts beyond just the money factor. Sure accumulating more wealth will build a stronger backbone for the family, but that’s just one factor; there are things like health or family relationships that are also fragile. I lowered my expectations that life should continue to spit out bad moments; hopefully, I could navigate optimistic paths to counter them.
Man Cave
I had the mentality of not throwing things away, so getting my desk to a sustainable and optimized state was pretty challenging. It started a year ago:
- getting a dark desk
- painting the wall black
- getting a monitor stand + cable management boxes to hide things
Since then, I have made more changes this year:
- replaced the giant Intel iMac with the new Mac Mini. YO!
- found the perfect corner lights
- dark-themed keyboard + touchpad
- finally reduced my desk to 1 monitor only
Ultimately, he and I both find the man cave soothing; so I’m calling this project a success. He typically wants to participate in the late-night coding hours and provides emotional support (snoring). In return, we took care of his diet, poops, and jumping jacks.
This gentleman officially joined our household in September. I had never personally raised a pet but always wanted to so this was an interesting jump start. Getting to know the habits of another little being, attending to his needs, and being able to co-exist — these felt like the necessary human training that I always lacked.
Some of this stuff—the man cave setups, the quality of life items, a little cat, are all made possible with the both of us making progress towards our long-term goals in careers. Otherwise, I would not be mentally or financially flexible enough to do all on my own. To that, I’d love to note down some gratitudes.
Gratitudes
One special thing that my team does regularly and loudly is celebrating success and thanking each other for their extraordinary work, oftentimes about the extra little things we did that supported or accelerated each other’s progress. Imagine 20+ people writing down their special little thanks to a few individuals for last week’s highlights — this little team culture thing was magical.
Growing up in an Asian family, that’s a major culture miss and I still don’t express enough gratitude outside of work, so here are some makeups for that.
- I’m thankful for the life lessons I experienced that made me mentally tougher in dealing with bad situations. Knowing that life isn’t always sunshine and rainbows, I appreciate how much my parents have provided for this family.
- I appreciate the long-term goals finally coming together — having a family, a career, and a little being to take care of — a lot of which I own my wife pushing us or supporting me to do. Some call that persona a strong independent woman; I just know that it’s extremely rare to find someone smart, competitive, respectful, and sharing goals alike in life. Meanwhile, it’s also pretty unusual for someone to bear with your shortcomings and past failures, and still plant faith in you. This is something worth cultivating and protecting.
- I cherish the friendships I reclaimed this year. I reconnected with multiple school friends — some have long migrated to the next stage of life. They reminded me of the priceless memories we shared.
- I appreciate the good people I came across and a lot of these folks are from work. The challenges and big moments we experienced together allowed me to observe their sparkles: some were extremely good at articulating and navigating hard situations; some were super resilient in dealing with complex situations; some were just dead-fast efficient. These strong personal traits pulled me closer to what I want to achieve in personal growth.
With all that said, I’m looking forward to a badass 2025!
