31 Oct 2025, Friday

I feel like a weight has been lifted off my back. I came in with the mindset this semester that I'll carry the weight of everything. It's doable, but the pressure and responsibility that comes with it is immense. Especially when I have a tendency to procrastinate. The type where I leave myself enough time to complete things. It creates this sensation of impending doom if I were to fail, high stakes high rewards I guess.

However I changed my mind yesterday. I wanted to control everything in order to maximize my grades, but did that really matter？I attached my self-worth to something so arbitrary, especially when I started to feel that a degree was starting to feel like a waste of time and money. Rather than attaching any meaning to a final grade or score, I should focus more on the skill growth aspect of things. This would probably make the process smoother.

Next, onto my fitness. I feel great, no more joint pain, I'm making progress, and maybe growing？But something bothers me greatly, the training doesn't feel as painful as it used to, like I had to dig into the darkest depths of my psyche to push the weight off my body. Now it's more technical and internal focused. I pay mindful attention to how my body feels as I execute each motion. I guess this is how training is supposed to be, but it does feel boring and to a certain extent disappointing. To me training used to be let's kill it, all out pain and suffering, like what RP used to show on their channel. But I guess it's not sustainable. Maybe at around 12 weeks, I would overreach and squeeze every last drop out. The 12 week number came from Lyle Mcdonald. Or maybe I should maintain the same pace, and see how long it would take for me to hit the point where I need a deload.

So what do I really want at this point in time? I have no clue, do I want a job? Probably. I need the money to fund my lifestyle. I don't spend much, but having more money is nice. I should probably get through my stack of library books and then read through Dave Ramsey 7 baby steps. It's nice to achieve financial freedom, and for me it's probably very doable.

That's all for today.

28 Oct 2025, Tuesday

 Here marks the start of my hopefully daily check in. I say hopefully since I procrastinate a lot, and I tend to forget things.

What's going on in life currently:

• Trying to grind through my uni projects with a decent amount of procrastination
• Cutting(fat-loss) to get more visible abs and a thinner skin effect around my waistline
• Joblessness, by choice, but starting to bother me
• Reading hopefully

What I did today:

• Clocked at least 10000 steps
• Did some data-cleaning for my geospatial analytics project
• Ton of procrastination
• Youtube
• League Videos
• Fitness Videos

Let's reflect a little:

My approach to doing projects in uni is to think of something relatively ambitious, bordering just outside the comfort zone, and potentially undoable. This time it came back to haunt me, since my initial plan was to use data from Google. But it was free up till a certain point, and there was no way that I would spend any money on this. So for the past few days I pondered a lot while on my walks, listening to podcasts of other analysts. Then looked at the free datasets in Singapore, and I finally arrived on my current idea, although the team seems to be reluctant to change to my dismay. But at least, it's something that I find doable and that can mesh with the initial idea if it ever comes to fruition. I don't know why others are so inflexible. I'm like "Hey, I think we need to have a backup idea, or even just change the idea since it may not be feasible." And the vibes I got back were, I don't really care if the quality is bad because we only have partial data, or like let me still try with the initial idea.

On job finding, I actually had the idea of creating a script that mines for job listing based on my skillset then uses it to craft my resume with ChatGPT. However, I came across the same tool the next day on Reels. It was by Google, and used Gemini. So I guess I'm not creating this script but I would explore this app. 

I came across a few interesting ideas. The first one from Dr.K, the happier ones are those that spent time pivoting multiple times, from job to job in different fields or adjacent fields at least. I guess this happens because it satisfies the grass in greener on the other side urge. Many people just stick to the same place, because of reasons, then they don't really seem happy, they give of the vibe of being resigned to fate, and waiting it out till retirement. I don't think it's that bad now that I've left the place, but at the same time I think it's kind of disappointing. This means that there is a large subset of people out there that are stuck in places where they don't feel fulfilled. I find that being fulfilled brings more out of a person, and allows them to produce more work. In a sense it's a waste.

Next idea, from a clip of Jim Rohn talking about the 7 killers of success. "Learn to put everything you've got into everything you do". This makes sense, since it accelerate progress in what ever direction you choose. Then there's the argument that, I need to hedge my bets, this may not be the right thing for me. But, if we push it hard enough, we come to that conclusion earlier, we hit that imaginary wall and then make the pivot. If we don't try, we would just be stuck ruminating at the starting line, without going anywhere. At least when we hit the wall, we can choose, do I want to u-turn here? What about going left or even right? And along with that change in direction, we carry along the experience that we've gained. It's not starting from scratch, but bringing a different skillset into a different space.

Then relating to different skillsets in new spaces, I remember reading somewhere about some innovation building in MIT, or some other university. It housed teams from different fields, this allowed new ideas to bud easily from the exposure to seemingly unrelated fields, and also fostered creativity. You don't get inspiration from staring at the same thing all the time. You get it from staring at your thing for some time, then going for a stroll and looking at someone else's thing. Then you get that moment of "Hey, that looks interesting, what if I did this to my thing?"

I guess that's all for this entry. Hopefully I pick up a book on writing and get better at this. Or just get better through practice.

Why am I writing this blog?

I read somewhere that writing is good for you. And that it helps me to organize my thoughts and make me a better speaker, so here I am. I've been meaning to journal, but writing pen and paper wasn't really my thing. And with a blog I can just create a list of topics that interest me and save them as drafts. Similar to an index of ideas that I have, similar to Zettelkasten, if you are reading this, you should take a look at "How To Take Smart Notes' by Sönke Ahrens.

It goes through this index card method of creating a second brain, I think many apps do this, Notion and maybe Obsidian? But I don't really like it too much. It feels a little too rigid for my liking. I prefer to just write freely, and maybe leave some tags to refer back to down the line.

I guess that's all for now.

The First Post

Hi There

I just randomly decided to start a blog. Why Paper Airplanes? I thought they were cool once. There was this book on paper airplanes, Paper Airplanes Handbook by Nick Robinson. It was cool as kid, when I had nothing much to do, and making paper fly as far and as long as possible was interesting.

The format of this blog will probably be a mind dump. Just like a diary. It may change down the line.

Nowadays, in 2025, my interests have shifted. Let's talk about my journey, I started off studying Psychology, because I thought it would give me an answer to myself, but that led me no where, it was more of research and surveying people. 

Then I moved on to culinary science, I though hey, we all need to know how to cook, and it's an easy way the graduate, so why not? I breezed through most of it, except the internship, because I knew deep down that this wasn't what I wanted to pursue. It was a saga on its own, the head chef was awful, being kept afloat by his strong team. Eventually he failed out of his business. Imagine getting a Michelin star after one year then disappearing.

After that it was National Service, working as a regular, then onto my current venture: A part time degree in Business Analytics.

My interests:

Fitness, Reading, Learning how to learn