trykondev
I try to define very achievable monthly milestones. Over the past few years I have learned to love the feeling of focusing on just this month's set of milestones and accomplishing them in time.
For anyone that's interested, I'll share a link to a sample of my progress tracking spreadsheet [0] -- nothing complicated, but it can be helpful to have a predetermined structure in place. Feel free to make a copy for your own use!
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13G9L1t82BtIggxEqeFUV...
I usually start thinking sometime in mid-November about what goals are most important to me for the upcoming year and try to finalize them by the last week of December. I think about what matters to me personally, what matters to my family, and what matters to my career.
I like to choose about 3-5 key goals to focus on and then figure out how to measure progress. For things like "Lose 30 Pounds", it's very easy to track. For more nebulous ones like "Invest Time in my Marriage", it can be hard to quantify progress, so for that one I created a monthly relationship survey that my wife and I both fill out to score each other numerically on things like "I feel my partner listens to me" or "I feel my partner is spending enough time with me". It may sound weirdly clinical, but it actually became a fun ritual to evaluate each other every month and was really helpful to pinpoint where my partner felt things were great and where things could be improved.
It's also interesting to look back on the data and see how progress (or lack thereof) toward one goal often impacted another -- for instance, as we were in the thick of closing on our house, my progress on my book editing stalled. In a challenging month between my wife and I, I gained weight instead of losing it.
A big part of this is choosing good goals -- specific, measurable goals are important. It's also been important for me to choose goals that I feel really confident I can achieve in the course of a year, rather than choosing goals which are too ambitious. For 2022, I was tempted to make my goal "Lose 50 pounds" instead. I'd actually had the goal of "Lose 50 pounds" in prior years and failed badly in trying to achieve it. I think because it's such an ambitious goal, once I fell behind, it felt impossible to catch back up. The more modest and achievable goal of losing 30 pounds was perfect for me -- meaningful enough for real progress, but realistic enough to allow for some slowdowns or screw-ups along the way.
Tracking progress also helps with reflecting on the previous year -- in my case, one of my goals in 2022 was to release another game, but I'm not going to accomplish that one. It's really helpful to look at what I earnestly thought I'd be able to achieve this year, figure out what went wrong, and make a better plan for 2023.
[0] For anyone that's interested, here's a sample of my progress tracking spreadsheet -- nothing complicated, but it can be helpful to have a predetermined structure in place. Feel free to make a copy for your own use: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13G9L1t82BtIggxEqeFUV...
For several years I've been working as an evenings-and-weekends indie game developer. I love it -- it's such a joyful mix of technical and creative tasks. It's stimulating and challenging and expressive, and makes my heart feel so full when I've finally finished something that another person can play. If I could ever reach a point where I could properly fund it, I could spend every day for the rest of my life making games. I launched my first game in 2018, a challenging puzzle game called Omnicube [0], and am having a blast working on a few new projects now.
On the writing side of things, I've been writing stories since I was a kid in one capacity or another. I think it scratches the same creative itch as game development, just though a different medium. I'm actually in the final stages of publishing my first book -- a memoir about my experiences playing competitive chess [1].
[0] trykon.itch.io/omnicube
[1] mychessmemoir.com
Feel free to reach out, email is in my profile.
I started a new habit back in 2016: anytime I felt bored or felt an impulse to just open a browser and navigate to a news site, I would instead tab to my word processor and write little character scenes or plan out the plot of a new chapter in my book.
I actually finished an entire manuscript for a murder mystery book this way.
Particularly if you have the skillset for mentoring, it's likely this would be a great fit for you.
If this is the kind of thing you (or anyone else reading this) might be interested in, send me an email and I would be happy to talk further about it! My email address is in my profile.
I think overall it's yielded mixed results. For me, part of choosing the money meant being committed to a full-time job, and that challenged me in ways I don't think I would have been able to simulate had I not chosen that path. The main value was the growth in a variety of soft skills -- leadership, ability to critique products and maintain high standards for quality, communication skills, overall discipline and professionalism. I think those areas of growth were a lot more valuable than the actual money.
I'm very proud of being able to financially support my family, and I probably take for granted the fact that we haven't really had to worry much about money for half a decade. So there are certainly upsides to choosing the money.
I do feel envious of my peers that have chosen their passion and been successful going down that path -- I feel like they've gotten to experience the best of both worlds and I wish I was in that group. But there are probably a lot of my peers who tried to choose their passion and failed, and I feel lucky that I'm not in that group. Ultimately, in my case, choosing the money was a bit of a hedge to ensure a middle-ground -- I didn't have to worry about failing but I eliminated my chance to get the best of both worlds.
If I could go back in time right now and do things over, I would probably try to find a way to instead choose passion, but do so with some form of strong mentorship in place to help support me from the start. Easier said than done to find the right mentorship structure, but I think that's what I'm hoping to transition toward for my next 5-6 years.
In terms of your situation, I'd encourage you to question whether the MSc is really necessary -- if your goal is to code or be an awesome SWE at a cool startup, the MSc is probably not a good use of your time.
I also want to strongly second the others in here giving the advice to not count on equity & not trust the projections they gave you. Any actual money you hope to get out of that might only be realized years away at best, and never realized at worst. You might still want to make that bet, but make sure you do so with a full understanding of how risky a bet it can be.
I actually work in technical interviewing and technical hiring so please feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat more about this topic. Email is in my profile. Best of luck with your decision!
It turns out there is another very impressive move white needs to spot: after 1...Rh8, white needs to find 2. Rf8! and now black has to either trade into the drawn king and pawn ending, or take the rook and give back the tempo that's just been saved. Now the white king is in time again. Quite a move, that should be listed as a sideline in the puzzle for sure!
If this is the kind of thing you (or anyone else reading this) might be interested in, send me an email and I would be happy to talk further about it! My email address is in my profile.
You and me both, friend, but I think there's a lot of us that aren't doing 40hour/week because we want to, we're doing it because it's hard to find a part time gig that lucrative which is also reliable.
My email is in my profile -- looking forward to hearing from you!
On move 9 it is a simple exchange of pawns and since the material remains equal after the resulting sequence of exchanges we would not refer to that as offering a pawn.