More planning, more writing, more organizing and more ambition: the goals ahead for 2024

This will be an intense one, in a good way, so brace yourselves!

Working for my website, realizing all the cool stuff I've done in the past and writing about it has made me realize something: for the last ten years I have been far too unambitious, too shy, too afraid of failure, and all because I had a single point of weakness. And the weakness wasn't very relevant in the big picture but I let it define my life. That was: a failure to succeed in tech interviews, a lack of ability to excel in leetcode-style conversations. It's not a measure of man, it's not even a good measure of an able engineer. It measure the ability to stay focused for one very specific subset of skills needed for a career, in many ways quite irrelevant to the job at hand. If a six-month lesson (at most) can mean the difference of 3x in salaries, and that lesson being irrelevant to one's everyday job function, it's quite clear we're getting back to the Chinese system of imperial exams. I didn't want to work at the Imperial Court. It was a mistake, should have sucked it up and risen up along the rank of courtiers. Oh well, the studying process made me miserable and I didn't do group studies.

Thanks to working on the website, I've learnt to affirm myself and appreciate what I have to offer. I've learnt the power of planning, to think ahead before executing, and how to go about actually 'doing things' and not just plan endlessly. I hope to use this clean and methodological technique at work as well: collect information, write everything down, motivate myself, and be aggressively ambitious career-wise. I need to use writing and evangelizing to get myself a promotion, that's the goal: a rise in the ranks in the next 9 months or so. I will make lists for everyday at work (just like for my personal life), get them down, check them, spend an hour writing for various causes, spend an hour doing things that will get me a promotion, and spend the rest of the time in 'core work' -- my everyday tasks. That's 10 hours weekly to do something work-related but not team-related. Shouldn't be awful.

I like my current work situation, the goal is to get better at it and get paid more for it. It's within my reach, what remains is to actually act on desires, to execute the plans.