{"id":6149,"date":"2015-08-19T07:37:20","date_gmt":"2015-08-19T14:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/?p=6149"},"modified":"2018-04-03T08:06:12","modified_gmt":"2018-04-03T15:06:12","slug":"im-27","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/2015\/08\/19\/im-27\/","title":{"rendered":"I’m 27"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every year, on my birthday, I write a post reviewing the past year in my life and my plans for the future. You can see<\/a> all<\/a> the<\/a> previous<\/a> ones<\/a>, starting<\/a> with<\/a> my<\/a> 18th birthday<\/a> shortly after I began writing this blog over nine years ago.<\/p>\n

Unlike most my other articles, where I try to extend an idea with a useful takeaway or insight, this one is going to be pretty self-indulgent, so feel free to skip it. I\u2019ll be back with my more usual writing next week.<\/p>\n

A Year Back Home<\/h2>\n

This year has had a lot more time for self-reflection than many of my previous ones. Near the end of my year without English<\/a>, I promised myself I wouldn\u2019t start planning a new year-long project for at least twelve months. Part of the reason was to catch up on business projects. It turns out that spending an entire year traveling and learning languages full-time has a negative impact on one\u2019s income.<\/p>\n

But part of the reason was also that I was burned out. Korea was country number four and the second Asian language in a row, meaning it wasn\u2019t until the third month where even having simple conversations were relatively fluid. In retrospect it\u2019s not surprising that I was exhausted near the end of the trip, but perhaps somewhat surprising that I didn\u2019t feel tired until country number four. I guess the lesson is that I can do three languages in a row, but not four, without going crazy?<\/p>\n

This year, in contrast has been largely free of such stresses.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t been lazy, though. For this business, I\u2019ve been working hard on two new courses. One, a course teaching deliberate practice for your career with Cal Newport. Two, a learning course to supersede Learning on Steroids. I also redesigned the website and did numerous smaller back-end projects that most readers won\u2019t see but make my job a lot easier.<\/p>\n

Despite this, however, my work has felt so easy that I\u2019ve struggled more with feelings of guilt about not working hard enough than stress from working too hard.<\/p>\n

I think there are two factors that have made this year feel so easy. First, since the inception of this website I\u2019ve rarely done it full-time. I was a high-school then university student. After I graduated, the MIT Challenge<\/a> and the year without English. This is the first time I\u2019ve ever had an entire year where there wasn\u2019t some other full-time project demanding my attention.<\/p>\n

Second, because of my other projects, I\u2019ve effectively four-hour-workweeked my business accidentally. When you have months, or years, at a time when you can only devote several hours to keep everything maintained, that forces you to eliminate and simplify everything so that the habitual maintenance required is quite low.<\/p>\n

Which Goals Should You Set When You Don\u2019t Want Anything?<\/h2>\n

A lot of the earlier writing of this blog focused on goal setting. It\u2019s hardly a ground-breaking idea\u2014that if you clearly conceive of the things you want and take action towards achieving them\u2014you\u2019re more likely to get it. And, no, I don\u2019t believe the method isn\u2019t without some drawbacks or complications. But good goal-setting and planning methods were a big part of me succeeding in becoming a full-time blogger, doing the MIT Challenge and learning many subjects.<\/p>\n

That being said, I\u2019ve had a lot harder time using the same philosophy from my current vantage point in life. I think that\u2019s largely because I already have all the things I want.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m earning a more than comfortable income, doing what I love with complete freedom and autonomy. I have great friends, a fantastic girlfriend and I live in a beautiful city. I\u2019ve even gotten into better shape, having had less-than-perfect exercise habits while traveling.<\/p>\n

This definitely wasn\u2019t always the case. I think most of my life I\u2019ve felt something was incomplete, to a certain extent. My career wasn\u2019t well established. I was in a new city without friends or a relationship. I rarely felt unhappy, but there was usually something I could easily point to as a goal I could set that would improve things.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t feel that way any more. I\u2019m not sure whether it\u2019s just having achieved most of my past goals, or simply having put myself, often intentionally, through enough struggles to realize how few things are actually necessary for happiness.<\/p>\n

That being said, old habits die hard and the desire to use well-practiced tools outside of their domain of usefulness is strong. I definitely spent a lot of time this past year a bit lost, not sure what the replacement philosophy should be.<\/p>\n

Future Ambitions<\/h2>\n

Despite my feeling that there isn\u2019t much more I want, I definitely don\u2019t want to retire. I still want to pursue exciting, ambitious projects, I just might not be able to approach them from the mindset that I had used before.<\/p>\n

One of my big challenges has been trying to decide what the general direction I\u2019d like to move my career into. As a writer and blogger, there are three main adjacent career trajectories I could push myself towards, all with some characteristics I like and some I dislike.<\/p>\n

One path is of building a large business. I already have a business selling courses related to learning. This would mean expanding along that vector. An example of someone who has done this exceptionally well is Ramit Sethi<\/a>, who took a one-man blog to become the CEO of a 60+ employee company with revenue in the millions.<\/p>\n

The entrepreneur in me likes this path. I\u2019ve always enjoyed building things that people like enough to pay for them. Having a large business also enables you to take on projects with budgets and scope that I can only dream of.<\/p>\n

The downside of this path is that having a business sometimes has poor incentives on developing good ideas. It\u2019s hard to be both an expert at the business and of the subject matter you teach. Even if you could manage both, the business constraints of selling a product and the intellectual constraints of finding the truth often conflict, so there is a greater tendency for charlatanism than in journalism or academia.<\/p>\n

Another path is trying to become a serious author. I\u2019ve already written a number of self-published ebooks, but going the path of trying to write a popular book with a compelling thesis for a larger audience also interests me. My friend Cal Newport<\/a> has done quite well on this path, starting with college how-to advice and moving to well-received big idea books.<\/p>\n

The writer in me likes this path. Writing, when done well, changes people\u2019s minds and lives. Writing also has potentially the greatest reach, creating ideas that extend their reach far beyond the people who actually purchase your books.<\/p>\n

The downside is that a lot of popular book theses simply aren’t true. Even at the apex of this career direction has people like Malcolm Gladwell largely being dismissed<\/a> by people who study the topics he writes about.<\/p>\n

The third path I\u2019ve been considering is more academic. Going to grad school and studying some topic deeply. The intellectual in me likes the idea of rigor in thinking and being surrounded by a community of people much smarter than myself. The downside is that academia can often be bureaucratic, overly specialized and irrelevant to the lives of regular people.<\/p>\n

Of course, the illusion is that these choices are discrete. I could probably pursue some combination of these paths, or a fourth one which manages to avoid some of the worst drawbacks I dislike in each, while preserving the best. Still, I haven\u2019t figured out what that is yet.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Next?<\/h2>\n

My next year will probably be similar to this one: a combination of business and smaller learning projects. I\u2019ll hopefully be releasing the two courses I mentioned in the next several months. I\u2019ll also be setting aside a non-trivial amount of time to do more research regarding the possible future directions of my career (particularly academia, since it\u2019s the one furthest from my current trajectory).<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been learning a lot of cognitive science recently. I\u2019m working my way through these set of textbooks<\/a> which cover the subject from the lens of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and computer science. I\u2019ve considered making a smaller, part-time challenge related to that which would give me more to discuss on the blog related to learning.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also eager to travel again, albeit for a shorter duration. I\u2019d love to return to China or Taiwan, to continue practicing my Chinese<\/a>. I already have some shorter trips planned in Spanish speaking countries, so I can broaden my linguistic abilities.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve started toying around with some new programming projects. My recent language project made it harder to work on anything programming related that wasn\u2019t just simple script. Hopefully if other priorities don\u2019t overwhelm, I\u2019ll have some new things to show in that area as well.<\/p>\n

Given that I spend a lot of time learning things that don\u2019t explicitly turn into big, year-long, well-documented projects, I\u2019ve been mulling over possible ways to integrate that more in this blog. Especially since smaller side-projects for learning are probably a more replicable example than the bigger ones I undertake.<\/p>\n

Regardless of what happens in the next year, I\u2019ll be continuing to write here and share what I find with you. Thanks again to everyone who has accompanied me on this last year, and I look forward to sharing more with you in the future!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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