One of the lessons I learnt from work is to identify specific skills that you want to work on, and then put yourself in situations where you can practice those skills. There’s no time to wait for opportunities to present themselves. If you have the means to create those opportunities, that is a luxury that should not be squandered.
The purpose of this page is very simple:
Practice and improve my writing, learn how to focus my thoughts better, and share useful information about topics that I am familiar with.
So what is my motivation for writing?
One of the things that I struggle with frequently is that I often find myself distracted. There’s so much that I want to do, but so little time, and everything is so difficult to prioritize – a classic first world problem.
In this day and age we’re inundated with things that vie for our attention. Companies innovate and sell their new products at a pace that is too fast for the consumer market to keep up with (but still too slow for the stock market). And with the amount of free social media and content platforms available today, even the everyman can generate content faster than every man (and woman) can consume. There’s always another shiny ball.
I have many hobbies that I genuinely enjoy, but I’m not particularly excellent at any of them. I have many responsibilities at my job, yet I’m not specialized in any of them. I have many friend circles but I always feel that I don’t get to hang out with each of them as much as I would like to. I think I’m reasonably knowledgeable about a variety of topics that I’m interested in, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert in any of them.
All of that, while slightly disappointing, is ultimately fine. I still enjoy my hobbies, do my best at work, hang out with my friends as often as I can, and continue to learn more about the topics that interest me. But what pains me, and annoys me, is that I think the root cause is I’m not very good at focusing. I can’t become excellent at running because I also like to spend time on my bike. I can’t become an expert on web authentication because I need to fulfill my accounting and finance responsibilities. My mind always does a stellar job of wandering and going off-path when I try to focus my thoughts – a problem that I’m sure is relatable for many others as well. Maybe I’m a slow thinker, maybe I have a short attention span, but maybe I can also improve this.
As you can see, by this point I’ve already done a poor job of staying focused, but I will get back to the point now.
My motivation for writing is I want to improve my ability to focus, because writing, by nature, must be focused and coherent, for the writer and for the reader.
And what am I going to write about?
Firstly I must admit that I’m not a writer, and that this is primarily an exercise to help myself learn to focus and gather my thoughts better. In the process, I hope to also learn more about topics that interest me, by writing about them.
These interesting-to-me topics include personal finance, productivity, product design, sports and fitness, and technology. If my exercise goes well, hopefully I will be able to share some useful knowledge and thoughts about these topics.
Tl;dr:
My ultimate goal is to be able to use writing as a mechanism to improve my focus and learning process while sharing some thoughts and info. Basically, welcome to my blog.
