Internalizing your vision ❤️
🐈⬛ Life
Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?
I’m busy catching up on things. That’s pretty much it. 😶 I've gone back to my gym routine and still doing intermittent fasting though!!
(๑*ᗜ*) Anime
AND I ALWAYS MAKE TIME FOR ANIME. I finished Horimiya and then Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness.
Deaimon: Recipe for Happiness is about this guy who returns to his Kyoto home after his band disbanded (heh) and his father was hospitalized. He decided to take over his family’s traditional Japanese sweet shop but then discovers that this girl is poised to inherit the store. The story focuses mostly on how he becomes a father figure to the girl. It’s honestly not that good. Wouldn’t recommend tbh.
Go watch Spy X Family instead if you haven’t already!!
📖 Books
I’m halfway through reading Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin’s Most Dangerous Hackers. Thanks, Ken for the recommendation! For those of you who have read/watched Dune, this is what it is referencing.
Back in 2014, a series of cyberattacks targeted American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe. As time went on, the strikes became more and more daring and it was discovered that the seeds of the attack had been sown for years, spreading silently throughout the world.
By following Dune references left on the cybercrime scenes, the attacks were traced back to originating from Russia. Specifically, researchers are pretty sure that it’s a coordinated effort backed by the Kremlin. The group was subsequently named Sandworm, after the huge worms that live on the desert planet of Arrakis.
It’s truly a bit eerie reading this book since so much of it is about how Russia has been using Ukraine as its guinea pig for cyberwarfare. It seems that Russia also has a long history of instigating stalemate wars with neighbouring countries. This book was published in 2019 and in a lot of ways foreshadowed what we see today… It’s a really good book - highly recommend it!
🌻 Learning & Productivity
It’s been 6 months since I did my vision book back in November. I go through it a lot and have been slowly modifying and adding more things. It kind of hit me how much has changed in just a mere 6 months.
I’ve achieved some of my goals faster than I expected, while others have turned out to be far more complex than I had imagined. My career goals, in particular, have drastically shifted. I hadn’t expected to have started expanding my business so soon. On the other hand, I realized that my financial goals are more complex than I expected. It’s actually more of a psychological thing because I first had to truly internalize my vision of what I wanted my life to look like. It just seems so big and grand that I could hardly dare to say it, let alone plan out the details of how I’m going to seriously work towards it.
There’s a psychological phenomenon in which if you repeat something enough times, you’ll start believing it. This is what needed to happen for me. I want to be able to spontaneously travel to different places and focus on what I find the most impactful work without worrying about making ends meet. To do this, I need to be fully remote and have “financial freedom”, which for me means being able to live off time-independent streams of income and my investments.
What about you? Do you have a vision for what you want your life to be like? I think being able to seriously internalize it is the first step. ❤️
👨💻 What I’m Learning
I’m changing this section to ‘What I’m Learning’ because I decided what is most important right now is to learn and implement more personal finance stuff. The state of my personal finance right now is alright but I don’t feel completely happy with how things are set up, especially given the economic climate these days. In particular, I would like to have a clearer plan and tracking system, as well as automate more things.
I shall embark on v2 of getting my personal finance in shape, specifically in terms of how exactly I’m going about achieving financial freedom. I do have an additional criterion where I don’t want to be tied to a particular location. So the idea of purchasing real estate with a mortgage does concern me. #notfinancialadvice
💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)
🪟 Yay a fun window function question!
Find the median inspection score of each business and output the result along with the business name. Order records based on the inspection score in descending order. Try to come up with your own precise median calculation. In Postgres there is `percentile_disc` function available, however it's only an approximation!
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
The part where 'you wanna travel spontaneously and invest time on work which are impactful' really resonates with me and it's true that internalising is the key step. And in order to make the vision more concrete, having financial autonomy also plays a crucial role. Hmmm...
This is great 👍 👍