Get Things Done has a new mission
Starting from February, Get Things Done will become a platform for product developers and data analysts to write about their learnings on those topics. Topics may include “how to better develop an X product in Y language” or “How to start competing in Kaggle?”. To start out, I will post a long article monthly on a topic of choice.
Why I am doing this? 2016 I tried out in the open water, putting myself into a new environment(San Francisco and sort of my own company) and get lost. My whole career has aimed to be able to work in the Bay Area / Silicon Valley. After the experience, I was kind of lost motivation and wondering what is my next move should be. I then started a new venture with one of my best friend and one of his best friends. The topic is wine. It has been quite an experience.
The experience is a shocker to me. My ideal is to work with them and build products people want and company people want to work in and work with. We design, we do marketing, we experimented with facebook ads and stuff. But I am not ok. I am not ok because of a ton of reasons. The most important reason of all is I am not able to keep a clear mind. A clear mind of me first and foremost requires me to have a stable income or a sizable reserve. For the size of reserve, I have underestimated the cost of business and the cost of my family. The cost of my family is an important issue. It is important because I am the eldest son. I have to take up responsibility and prepare for the retirement of my parents and possibility of a new family. This parameter has become my top priority. I have to go more conservative.
The next mind blocker is that I resent the role I am evolving into. I am going from 100% engineering to doing NO technological work at all. Such dramatic change has a reason. It is for me developing new application is not challenging enough. To challenge myself, I must find something else. But I went too far and decide to drop software engineering completely. It is huge mistake. Software engineering has been my most honed skill. Software engineering is my mastery. Software engineering is the value I can confidently provide. But I am now required to put it down totally to design, marketing, logistics, negotiate and drink. The drinking part is the worst. It is surprisingly hamper my cognitive ability, so great that it made me depressive. The depression, with the financial situation, doesn’t help me at all to see things clearly.
Things is not clear for another reason. We are not well connected. Well connected means we are lacking a lot of expertises in different critical areas in this field. We need to make a lot more friends in order to succeed. But in this kind of state, I am not able to provide meaningful value to my partners, let alone others.
But I am not ending my venture. I am taking a different look on this venture. This venture is a 5-year project. So as CODE4HK, so as my goal to build a health/fitness product. All I have to do is building such profile, now not only for myself, but also with others. I am picking back up my software engineering, with a new focus on data analytics. So my own article will be focusing on that. So Stay tune on the monthly article.