How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
🐈⬛ Life
Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?
Luke has been teaching me how to speak Southern. So for the Southerners out there, what do you think??
*in response to my friend asking me to get his bike chain*
‘I done did it! Look this here your chain! It not done got tooken!’
(๑*ᗜ*) Anime
I watched Youjo Senki (Saga of Tanya the Evil) this week!
It’s about this guy who challenged a self-proclaimed God and so was reincarnated as a little girl into a world of warfare that is like a cross between WW1 and WW2…but has mages and magic. 🪄
She becomes a child soldier and resolves herself to ascend the ranks of her country’s military and win the war to prove this self-proclaimed God wrong. It has good character development AND good plot - highly recommend!
📖 Books
This week, I did something that I almost never do - I stopped reading a book midway. I stopped reading Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential by Barbara Oakley. She’s also the creator of the course Learning How to Learn, which is why I had high expectations. But it’s a pretty useless book IMO because all it talks about are these inspirational stories of people who successfully “uncovered and developed new talents” aka learned new things. Like yes? People can learn new things?? 🤦♀️
I mean nothing about it is wrong, but it’s just old recycled information presented in the form of inspirational stories. She also promotes her course like every 2 pages, which was very annoying.
After I was thoroughly disappointed, I picked up Barking up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong by Eric Barker. I instantly felt better just reading the author’s name lol.
As its name suggests, this book evaluates the advice that we’re generally told about success and how to achieve it. I really like that the book is evidence-based!
Pretty early on in the book, he talks about why valedictorians rarely become millionaires. The argument is that the traits that make you successful at school are traits that make you a good employee, not ones that change the world. This was by design and can be traced back to the industrial revolution when companies wanted good employees who are diligent, followed the rules, and are generally well-adjusted and well-rounded. It hasn’t changed much since then.
On the other hand, people who change the world are often those who are obsessive about a single thing and are generally NOT well-adjusted and well-rounded. Many of these people are so eccentric that working with them is a nightmare. You have your classic examples of Harvard drop-outs that go on to become tech billionaires, musicians that are useless at everything else, and politicians that make revolutionary changes like abolishing slavery.
What I like the most about this book is that it doesn’t just leave it at that. He encourages people to understand themselves and try to maximize their strengths. If you’re someone that does well in school, then you should accentuate that and go on to get the best jobs and become the top executives. For people who are not inclined towards being well-rounded and well-adjusted, then you should accentuate your unique traits and go on to do something out of the box!
A note: Obviously not doing well in school does not mean you’re gonna change the world lol.
🌻 Learning & Productivity
I'm doing the Homework for Life exercise from Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling where you take 5 min/day to write down the most story-worthy moment of your life in a sentence. Check out last week’s post for more context!
06/04/2022: went to library and noticed the youth studying, made me remember simpler times
06/05/2022: street festival with PJ
06/06/2022: anxious about filming but did it - I think it's good I always get this feeling because it means I care
06/07/2022: gave boop catnip
06/08/2022: really scared about posting the video about quitting my job because it becomes real
For those of you who did it with me, what did you think? I think it’s been amazing because I actually remember more of my days! Maybe I can put a spreadsheet link of these entries in future editions of the newsletter? Thoughts?
If you don’t mind, I’d love to see yours too! ❤️
👨💻 What I’m Learning
Since last week, I MADE PROGRESS! I’m proud of myself 😊
My personal finance study plan is based on a very simple formula:
Net Income = Revenue - Cost + Investments
My primary driving factors for each are:
💸 Revenue
business
💰 Cost
budgeting
hiring good accountants and lawyers
📈 Investments
precious metals (for when shit hits the fan)
stocks & bonds (majority of assets)
crypto (for the future)
From these things, I prioritize studying business and stocks & bonds investing since these are the things that I think are my weakest links.
The second piece is Net Worth, which is something that is more long-term and is what I focus on later because it’s a VERY lagging metric.
In addition to figuring out a vision for yourself, I realized that it’s also very important to develop a sense of what it is that you like and don’t like for revenue, cost, and investments. This will help you determine what are the driving factors for each category. For example, some of my likes and dislikes:
I like using business as the major revenue generator
I don’t like to focus on cutting cost, I'd rather focus on increasing revenue
I don’t mind not having the most optimized cost-saving method if that means it frees up my time
I don’t like the idea of debt, including ‘good’ debt eg. real estate
#notfinancialadvice and I am not an expert k. This is just my plan, which prioritizes simplicity and the ability to iterate so it forces me to have a bias towards action.
💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)
🍔 This is a currently active Amazon question!
You are given the table with titles of recipes from a cookbook and their page numbers. You are asked to represent how the recipes will be distributed in the book.
Produce a table consisting of three columns: left_page_number, left_title and right_title. The k-th row (counting from 0), should contain the number and the title of the page with the number 2×k2×k in the first and second columns respectively, and the title of the page with the number 2×k+12×k+1 in the second column.
Each page contains at most 1 recipe. If the page does not contain a recipe, the appropriate cell should remain empty (NULL value). Page 0 (the internal side of the front cover) is guaranteed to be empty.
cookbook_titles:
Head on over here to answer the question!
*Btw if you’re prepping for data science interviews or just want to keep yourself sharp, Stratascratch is a great platform with 10k+ real interview questions on SQL and python coding, probability, product sense etc. You can use my code ‘tinahuang’ at checkout for 20% off ❤️
PS: Reply to this email about what you’d like to see in future editions of Boop’s Keyboard! I’m super new to writing a newsletter and I know there’s a lot for me to learn. ALL constructive feedback is greatly appreciated :)
-Tina
Have you checked out Eric’s new book? Do you keep a list of the anime that you particularly liked? If you haven’t watched it already, I highly recommend violet evergarden. I’ve only watched the series so far but I’ve heard the movies are fantastic too.
Your southern isn't half bad for a beginner :D