Over the last three years, I’ve learned so much since coming to Penn. The people, the presence, the courseload, the food, and everything in between has taught me a lot about what makes me happy and the kind of person I want to be. This year especially has been a turning point for me in terms of how many things I’ve developed newfound appreciations for.
But with everything I’m learning, it seems like I’m forgetting things faster than I want to. It also feels like this knowledge really isn’t really going anywhere. While it’s fun knowing how to think through distributed systems concerns, for example, part of me feels super daunted by the thought of ever actually doing anything with the things I’ve learned. Most of all, sometimes I’m super scared that my learning might be completely emotional, and that I really haven’t learned anything yet.
To clarify what I mean by emotional learning, picture this. You watch a really touching movie about inequality in some country X, and you leave completely moved, feeling like you are a fundamentally new and improved person with a new perspective on life. Two weeks pass by, and you’re back to work and it’s almost like the movie never happened. Did anything even happen?
After a little soul searching and a couple google searches, it seems like the reason this happens is the inaction that happens right after this moment ends. The motivation is there and window of opportunity for you to translate this into action only lasts so long before it becomes just another passing moment. Obviously, some things were meant to be good memories and other things were never meant to work out. But before my passion for X ends, I want to use this blog to fully explore everything on my mind now.
I hope to use this blog to create a habit of doing, and also take accountability for my thoughts.
A Habit of Doing
In the spirit of doing, I want to tackle doing from a completely analytical perspective, in order to make sure I stay on track. From observing the do-ers around me, and the thinkers alike, I think the metric I really want to optimize is my producer/consumer ratio. It’s an inevitable that some YouTube video you’ve seen a week ago is probably irrelevant now, but a mile you ran or a video you shot in the same time would last much longer in your immediate and long term memory. So, while there are many hard ways I could go about this, cutting my consumption (even the “necessary” things) and increasing my production by half the amount would up my P/C ratio by almost 3x! (3/2 / 1/2 = 3).
Measuring consumption would be really easy, since phones now automatically measure how much my usage, and production could be pretty accurately be estimated since I could revisit the code I wrote, or thing I did. Hopefully we can come up with better metrics as we learn more about the advantages/pitfalls of this ratio.
Mindful Accountability
Mindfulness is a state of awareness, that comes being completely aware of what your feeling/experiencing in this present moment without any interpretation or judgement.
I’ll probability talk about this more later, but the reason I love this word so much and why I tied it to accountability is because I want to use this blog to allow my thoughts to be public material, and take full responsibility without judgement of others for their opinions about my views. I want my words to be taken for their present value and stand by them or (hopefully) learn from them. In a world where everyone thinks they’re right, while I do want to be right, I really want to get in the habit of detaching myself from right and wrong, and focus more on unique perspectives that people have so I can continue to learn. Hopefully by being more public with my opinions, I’ll be forced to realize where I’m dangerously wrong and potentially turn this into behavior change for good.
Conclusion
If this is my only entry, I’m actually a clown.