2017 has ended, and everyone is excited about 2018 and new year resolutions.
Resolutions, as definned by Cambridge English dictionary:
a promise to yourself to do or not do something. 1
Year end is usually, the time when companies are doing performance evaluation of its employes, and projects. For companies own evalutation, time cycle is usually not gorgian calender but mostly fiscal calender but can vary. But, in the end however, you measure your travels through time-space continuum. It is still important to evaluate the performance. Repeatetive evaluationp provides a chance to improvment of goals & processes.
We are not stiatic, niether our goals and resolutions should be.
So, a promise, a show of resolutness should be followed by a evaluation.
How many promises were kept, not to others but to yourself.
But here we need to remember not to fool ourselves. As, Richard. P. Feynman would say:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and
you are the easiest person to fool.
As, this is probably my first time to even try such an evaluation. I do need to google around and find out how to approach it. So, first place to look at it would be how to honestly do self-apraisal (which is usually cutomary at companies). Here, I found nothing but **BS** because when you tie monetry benifit with an evaluation everyone tries to game the system. Keep in mind, we must not fool ourselves. So, what I found out was important was **lessons learnt** and *gerneral feeling* and remember as economics says, we overvalue what we have. Thus, most probably our end feeling would not be very rational, but here we are not looking for accuracy. What we are looking for is using the lessons learnt in past year, and use them to futher develop ourselves, to get nearer to our long term goals.
So, this brings me to at the very least identify the short comings and failures encountered in 2017.
In no purticular order, I list down my failures (insead of accomplishmend):
- CFA Level 1: As, having no background in finance, everything was super wierd and kinda boring for me. I tried to learn because, I would be gain much deeper understand the stuff for which I build services. I do have much better understanding for how financial markets work, how to identify financial frauds and work on financial forensices. But, still I failed to achive the level of comprehension needed for level 1.
- Avoided FOMO: Stayed away from the fear of missing out (from cryptocurrencies) and not I am feeling left out. But for some reason, current usage for token as comodity doesn't intrigue my interest despite being very interested in them on technical baises. I do like the cyptocurrencies, but I do want to use as currencies. I don't want people to be sad because 2 years ago they bought a pizza using bitcoins, instead of hoarding them.
- FP: once again failed to comprehend category theory. Most of people would say, its nothing special. Probably I don't even need it. But, I am very facinated with the work of logicians and pholosopher in field of mathematics and want to undersand these things.
- Seven Databases in seven weeks: I read the book but didn't got around to try stuf to get hands on. So, will consider it failed attempt.
- 52 research papers: I a mnot a research student but, while reading someones 2017 resolution, I also decided to read a paper weekly, to get a shallow understanding of where world is moving to. For this I started reading the papers which got awards. But a paper a week even with shallow undersanding was a bit more than I could chew. I didn't even read half.
- Failed to give enough time to networking and keeping old connection well watered: This is something which is crzay for introverted and expats, you want to travel, see new places, meet new people, and also you want to keep existing connections alive and you are too shy to even talk to your own family. And, you hae kind ADHD, such social interaction filled with drama (oh, yeah you need to watch south asian soap operas to understand some of it), give you anxity.
- Tried compittive prgramming and found out, the things I had on tip of my head while being a student have all gone. All, those fancy algorithmic techniques are replaced by simple PERL and SQL. Because using anything facy meant more work for maintainer. I know writing maintainable code is good, but depricating all the fancy learning you did by giving up more than half decade of life is not good.
Now, for the lessons learnt:
- Take everything slow, but with persistance. Use Kiazen for difficult things.
- Try things out of your confort zone
- Have a creative hobby (other than programming)
- Get some time of the damn screens
- Do some Fast from electronic, not just food
