Category: Personal Development
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Gold nuggets on developing self confidence
Developing confidence is an area that I naturally find myself gravitating towards. I find the whole topic fascinating and ironic because I feel confident in some areas in my life while feeling insecure in others. What’s up with that? Confidence: A non transferable skill and domain specific I recently finished a book titled “Mastery: The…
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Vibing with Xinobi’s “Searching for” song
I’ve been listening — on repeat – to the song “Xinobi – Searching for”, one that was suggested by Spotify. It’s not only the melody and harmony but it’s the lyrics, the lyrics cause me to turn inwards, to introspect. Just so many beautiful lines including: Another reason I love this song is that this…
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Human limits and the 40% rule
I was on the phone yesterday with my sister and during our chat, she shared one of her beliefs: that we (as humans) can achieve whatever we set our mind to — that we were “limitless.” It’s a growth mind set, one that I myself subscribe to. Generally speaking, I agree with the spirit of…
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Stretch Log
Day 173 of stretching and flexibility journey Date: November 5th, 2024 Target muscles: hamstrings During the hamstring (lunge) exercise, I hold and prop myself with my arms, my tummy constantly making contact with my (target) thigh. I notice that when I try to deliberately relax my upper body and arms, the intensity of the hamstring…
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Conveying one’s dance musicality ability with gestures
Like many others, I watch and study lots of house dance videos. I’m still very much a beginner when it comes to the craft — at the time of this writing, about 14 months into the journey — however I’m noticing an increased ability within myself to tease out what highly skilled dancers are trying…
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Stretching and Flexibility Log
I’m still feeling a little under the weather, my throat feeling a bit when swallowing, the discomfort starting Sunday evening when I got home from an event. I programmed my current block 6 weeks ago and today I’m on the second day, which focuses on hamstrings and quadriceps. I’m definitely pushing myself a bit with…
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On being liked: Being yourself vs betraying yourself. A four quadrant analysis
All the time, we all hear the following: “Just be yourself.” On the whole, I concede that these words form sage and sound advice. In fact, as someone who historically shaped shifted throughout his life in order to conform to social expectations, I mindfully practice being myself every day. The act of being oneself is…
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Harry Mack on mastery, art of practicing, and flow state
I recently listened to a podcast episode by Harry Mack — a very gifted freestyle rap artist — named “Flow State” and I want to share a few key insights I took away regarding the art of practice. Though the discussion around his beliefs and advice revolve around freestyle rapping, I believe the principles can…
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House Dance Private with Ani
I took a private house dance lesson with Ani and below is a 30 second clip condensed version of our 1 hour private. I had originally reached out to her and asked for a private lesson after struggling in her House Beginner/Intermediate class. In particular, I fumbled with the pas de bourree torso isolation as…
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House Dance Reflection and Review: Jevan (August 15, 2024)
Took the class yesterday night and while still fresh in my mind, brain dumping. Best part of the class for me was witnessing my freestyle classmate light up with joy midway through her freestyle round when she went for a move, caught a groove, and her face beamed up. Note: As usual, I’m recalling the…
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House Dance Class (August 13, 2024) – Review and Reflection
Below is a short review and recap of Ani’s house dance class (beginner/intermediate) that takes place in London every Tuesday night at 6:00pm over at Pineapple Studio. Though I enjoy taking this class every Tuesday, this instance of the class was special because my friend Will (from Seattle, who was visiting London) joined me and…
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House Dance Class Recap – Review and Reflection
Class Details Location: Base Dance Studios (in London, by Vauxhall station)Date/Time: August 08, 2024 @ 5:30pm-6:55pm (85 minutes)Overall class difficulty: 5 out of 10Combo difficulty: 6 out of 10Freestyle exercise? Yes Overview This blog post serves multiple purposes. First, it helps me experience gratitude. Attending this class is one of the ways I squeeze in…
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Top 5 Zettelkasten.de forum posts
I’m obsessed with personal information management (PIM) and as I learn more about the discipline, one concept continues to repeatedly crop up: Zettelkasten. I first learned about Zettelkasten after reading one of my favorite books “How to take smart notes”, and since then, I’m sold on the idea and continue to tweak my digital workflow…
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Failure: I want more of it.
Students in the Georgia Tech program collaborate with one another — and collaborate with professors and teacher assistants — through a platform called Piazza. But at the end of the semester, this forum shuts off to read only mode, meaning we all lose connection with one another. Because of this, I recently created an e-mail…
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20s for education, 30s for experience, 40s for career.
In my mid twenties, I was blessed to receive some of the best career, and quite frankly, life advice. During that period of my life, I was working as a director of technology, leading a small group of engineers. But I was getting ready to throw in the towel. I lacked both the experience and…
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Don’t break the (writing) chain … has been broken
This week, my cumulative “write every day” streak has been broken (almost 2 months of consistent writing every day), thanks to one of the roughest weeks at work. I normally start every day off with some light blogging — even if its for 5 or 10 minutes — but almost every day this week I…
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Distancing oneself from a difficult problem
I fixed a silly bug just now and wrote working code that can pin multiple virtual CPUs to the physical CPUs. Identifying the bug in my code was another classic example of how I needed to distance myself from the problem. Instead of staying up late into the night (late is now 09:30 pm on…
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A snapshot of my understanding before beginning project 1 (scheduler, memory coordinator)
Project 1 was released last evening at 08:59 PM PST and this morning, I decided to start on the project by reading through the overview and get the lay of the land. For this project, we’ll need to deliver to operating system components: a scheduler and a memory coordinator (not even sure what that means…
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A No-Excuses Guide to Blogging – Excuse #5 – “I don’t want to be wrong”
Many people (including myself) fear that we will be perceived as a fool if we publish on a post blog that contains a mistake, a public mistake. Nobody wants to be humiliated publicly. This fear is encapsulated inside of a quote that Sacha shares: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to…
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Waiting for one day …
“If you want to be successful, find out what the price is and then pay it.” Scott Adams I agree with that Scott Adams wholeheartedly. I also think this rule can be more broadly applied: “If you want something — anything — find out what the price is and then pay it.” This quote reminds…
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Almost half way through M.S. in Computer Science
I’m almost half way through the OMSCS (online masters in computer science), last week marking the end Spring 2020, my third term in the program. And although I’m looking forward to taking compilers next semester, my mind often wanders into the distant future , my mind fast forwarding to the time in which I’ll be…
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Tennis serve in slow motion
Last week, with just my iPhone and a camera tripod, I recorded myself hitting tennis balls launched by the ball machine and recording myself smacking a few serves. The idea of recording myself was inspired from several articles that I had read from tennisplayer.net. To elaborate, I wanted to objectively analyze my tennis strokes —…
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Blistered fingers
When I first started playing ukulele, about six months ago, I would occasionally wince when lifting my fingers off of the nylon strings. Because in the beginning, the flesh of my fingertips were fresh, no callouses. But slowly, over time, after repeatedly striking down on the strings, my fingers gave birth to a new layer…