briantliao

I like David Patterson (RISC Turing Award/RAID/Google TPU)'s model of 5 year plans [0]. What he's realized is you need to invest enough time into a project to do something that might be successful, but also give yourself many opportunities in life. Here are his 5 year projects: https://i.imgur.com/FjfnEmG.png

We can see not all of them succeed but if you "swing for the fences, nobody remembers the failures they remember the homeruns."

I like this model and break up things I want to do into 4 year plans (just mirroring college years). Here, I set out goals of what I want to do. One example is learning Chinese. I make a measurable goal like being able to hold a 15 minute conversation. To reach the goal, I try to a do a bit of practice, in total 20-30 minutes everyday. This includes conversational practice, vocab, etc. Sometimes I feel I'm not being effective enough and will readjust my practice, like changing from apps to flashcards or from flashcards to actual conversation. I think I'll reach my goal but if I don't, my conversational fluency is much better than at the start, when I made the goal. I'll still be pretty happy with that. I make a couple of these goals like career, investing, travel, relationships, etc and make them measurable so I can review and adjust along the process. I think I'll start setting one goal as really ambitious next time to "swing for the fences."

Hope that helps!

[0]: https://youtu.be/TK6EPvrmcBk?t=2354

There’s been some discussion on Paxos and Raft on Hacker News [0] so I thought I’d share a write up from Designing Data Intensive Systems that help explain them!

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27831576