A Nu Start / A Time and Place / California Winter

Currently writing from the Long Island City WeWork.

The floor is mostly empty. There’s a girl sitting across the floor from me. Asian, wearing Bose headphones.

For the past minute she’s been picking her nose. Aggressively. Like a miner digging for gold.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone pick their nose so aggressively in public.

Every now and then she glances around (I’ve been spacing and out only occasionally looking in her direction) and lowers her hand below the table. Once her hand is under she brushes the booger off her fingers… Absolute pro.

A NU START

I’m back in NYC after three weeks(!) in California.

It feels like a new chapter

I’m on a new team at work. I’ve never been an overly career-oriented person but I want to hit the ground running and not get too lost
The activities I did last year have ended. I’m a little concerned I won’t have enough to do during the week and get bored. On the other hand I have nothing I particularly want to do besides going to more open mics and trying to finish my next album.
- I have one more class of jazz piano.
- No more improv II
- Starting musical improv soon

I can’t place exactly why I feel this but it feels like a transitory time. I think Aastha (very into horoscopes) mentioned something similar.

I don’t have a big plan in place but I want to stay on track and not lose myself. I am somewhat concerned that transitioning back to NY life I might fall back into habits I don’t want (e.g. bingeing on TV, staying up way too late, eating shitty) but I have a plan for that.

Life Report Card

I finally finished Atomic Habits and in a spurt of motivation decided to revamp my life. The following is a work in progress project to help me do that.

Some intermeshed ideas

My current life philosophy is that it’s every person’s God given mandate to reach their fullest potential.
- It’s not the best answer to life but it’s working for me currently
- I’ve regretted wasting so much time wasting my potential. This is the year it stops
If I choose the right habits I can reach my fullest potential
Spurts of motivation don’t last forever. I need a system to track this consistently. Preferably automated so there’s as little human input as necessary.

Objective
Build a report card and automation that helps me stay on top of my habits and not forget.

Previous Works
I’ve tried similar efforts in the past (e.g. wydbot) but they waned over time. Likely because these past projects required manual input. Unless it’s automated you will forget.

How it works
Again note this is a WIP. More changes coming.

I rely on Habitify to track habits. Working on automating the habit tracking but I also require some manual input here.

I set up a group with Harry so every time either of us accomplish a habit we get an automated message with

how much progress we’ve made overall
how much money we’ve earned. We’re able to earn up to $25 a week. So if we hit 100% of our habits for the week we’d get 25%.
1. At the end of each week whoever’s earned less pays the other the remainder

Each week we also get a report card sent to our emails that’ll tell us how we did for the current week (and past weeks). A good visualizer for how on track you are for each habit over the year.

How I built it
Not going into the deep specifics but I built this using

Lambda
Habitify API,
Airtable
- using it as the database
Pandas
- used to generate report card

Why it works
Time will tell if this system actually works. Here are the reasons why I think it will

Social pressure to succeed
- Since I’m competing against my brother I don’t want to give up too much money
- Also being alongside someone who’s trying to succeed is a motivator
Automations make it seamless
- If I rely on manual willpower to track everything I’ll forget over time
The pride of improvement
- By EoY I wanna see row after row of A’s. Just like my school days a reminder of how well I’m doing and what I should be striving for
- I’ve lamented the loss of structure post graduation. The first few years after college was a process of getting lost and trying to find structure. A tool like this should help.

A Time and Place

More self improvement thoughts…

Got a Wework membership. I love my apt but I hate doing everything in this studio apartment.

There has to be a time and place for everything.

I also rearranged my apartment so I have dedicated places for every activity. I used to do everything on my sofa. Eat, work, watch tv, etc.

But now I just relax there.

Desk is for work. Put my piano on a stand next to the closet to have a music zone.

Feels pretty good.

California Winter

Forgot to write about my winter break so here’s a recap:

The family’s original plans to meet up in Oregon for break were cancelled because of the winter storm. Ended up staying with Gomo’s house in Jersey. Got to hang with the cousins and even went out to a pocha with Dove and her friends on Christmas.

Got to California the day after Christmas. Did a family road trip

this mf never misses a chance to flick me off

Ended up in San Diego. A big highlight in San Diego was getting one of the best california burritos of my life at Colima's Mexican Food

On the way back to Oxnard we swung by Garden Grove. Was astounded by how Vietnamese this city was. Never seen a thing like this in America before.

Saw old friends. Caught up with Yang, Glo and ToAnnie. Yang and Glo are pretty much the same. Tony and Annie bought a new place in LA and live there with their dog. Domestic bliss.
Had several dinner guests over this time around. Minh (dad’s coworker) came by to celebrate the Christmas season since his family was across the country. Mom’s friends came over for dinner which was interesting because they’d grown up in America and spoke better English than Korean.

Overall had a super comfortable time in California. Loved being home with family. If LA had better public transit I’d move in a heartbeat.