Hey guys, sorry if I haven’t been writing and posting stuff up on my blog. Lately I have been feeling somewhat overwhelmed by a lot of past memories. Yes, I’m talking past regrets here. Lately, it feels like my mind just keeps dwelling on all those past mistakes, things that I sometimes wish I could go back in time to undo, yet I also know that no matter how much regret I feel right now, it’s not going to change a thing. It’s the past. I needed to find a way to let it go and to move forward.
So, for nights on end, I would keep sitting on my bed, praying and asking God to help me to forgive myself for some of those past regrets (if I haven’t forgiven myself), and also to ask Him for help when it comes to moving past those regrets.
Anyway, moving on…
For the last few weeks, almost in a consistent fashion, I have been sending out lots of job applications. And to take things one step further, I started posting something on my LinkedIn feed yesterday:
And then earlier this evening, I did the same thing, I initially tried to comment under my post thinking it might help to increase the number of views, but that did little to affect the views. So instead, I just copy-and-paste the same post and reposted it onto my feed.
My Top Priority Right Now…
That leads me to what I want to talk about in today’s entry. After some careful thoughts, I realized that I simply do not have the bandwidth needed to focus on my passion for UX right now. It doesn’t mean that I’ll be abandoning my passion. It just means that I’m going to put it aside for now, while I take the time to focus on what should be a greater priority – finding a job. In my view, having a stable monthly income is way more important than being able to follow my passion. Once I have taken care of the top priority stuff in my life, I would have a greater peace of mind to continue pursuing my passion.
Talking about my current priorities versus the things that I want to achieve in the mid-term to long-term, I was reminded of what I read from the book “Grit”, written by Angela Duckworth. It is my favourite book as you can imagine. Within the book, there was this illustration of what our low-level goals versus our top-level goals should look like. And then ofcourse, there would be some mid-level goals. In my case right now, this is what my low-level and mid-level goal looks like (in a simplified way):
- Low-level: Finding a job with a stable monthly income.
- Mid-level: Once my finances are stable, I can start to provide more UX-related freelance consulting.
Clearly, there are a lot more mid-level goals for me before I can finally reach my top-level goal of being an elite Experience Architect by 2028. But you get the gist.
So yeah, guys, I’m going to take a break and unplug from the whole “passion” and “purpose” thing for maybe a month or two. Hopefully it won’t be that long, but I’ll be back to it once I’ve taken care of what matters most.
P.S. I’m curiously wondering, how many of you actually leave your email inboxes so full of stuff that you never delete, and then suddenly one day, you’ll be in like this mood, and then you’d just sit down for an hour or two and you would start clearing all those emails. Yeah, as part of my effort to distract myself (i.e. not to think so much about things I can’t control), I have started to declutter my Gmail inbox. I literally deleted 1.6K+ emails yesterday. Then earlier today, I started clearing out my WhatsApp chat history too. All the useless group chats that are no longer active and people that I’m no longer in contact with. DELETE!! LOL. I’m thinking of doing the same thing with my LinkedIn PM history and also my other free Outlook mailbox.
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