Simple does not mean easy.

I catch the sunbeam!

🐈‍⬛ Life

Hi friend! How’s the week going for you?

I’m finally back in the Bay Area!! Yay! Beepbeep and Boop were very angry with me because they probably thought I abandoned them. But then they wrapped their tails around my legs for hours. 🥺🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

(๑*ᗜ*) Anime

The first thing I did when I got back home was binge-watch ALL THE ANIME. I watched all of Horimiya, which is a very good teenage romance anime. It’s really well done, although I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if I were younger haha. Cuz now I’m a tad jaded. 😶

I also started watching Spy x Family, which is now my most anticipated anime every week! Like most other shounen, it’s totally over the top - but in a good way! It’s about a spy known as “Twilight” who is assigned to missions to prevent extremists from sparking a war with a neighbouring country. In a new mission, Twilight is assigned to investigate this politician, which involves him infiltrating the guy’s son’s super fancy school: Eden Academy.

A spy, a telepath, and an assassin are all living in the same house and hiding their identities 🧐

To do this, Twilight has to get married, have a child, and act as the father of a loving family. The goal is to get the child into the same school as the son so Twilight can have access to the politician. So this is all well and good, but it just so happens that the woman he decides to marry is an assassin and the child he found at an orphanage is telepathic… Trust me, it’s really good. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

📖 Books

This week’s book is The Simple Path to Building Wealth by JL Collins. It’s a personal finance book that I’ve been meaning to read for years and I’ve finally gotten around to it!

The premise is that people complicate how to build wealth, mostly because if you make things more complicated, then you can sell more complex solutions and make more money. It’s kind of like weight loss. It’s actually quite simple. Note simple does not mean easy. But people make it out to be really complex and there is so much money being made by selling a variety of different products and services.

The book was originally a series of blog posts written by the author to his daughter.

The entire strategy:

💰 Spend less than you make. Collins advocates for saving 50% of your income.

💸 Don’t have debt. Even the “good debt” like real estate, be careful about it and understand what you’re getting yourself into.

📈 Invest in index funds. Don’t get confused by all the gurus out there that are trying to sell you a variety of expensive solutions.

There’s no revolutionary new strategy here, which is the whole point. So far, I think it’s a quite comprehensive beginner-friendly book that helps people get started, which as we all know, is the single biggest hurdle.

Building wealth is like a bumpy trail. It’s simple - you just have to keep going. But it’s not easy.

There are just a couple of things here that I don’t 100% agree with:

🛒 Only buying stock, then some bond.

IMO holding some crypto makes sense. This is not the author’s fault because the book was published in 2016 when crypto was not really a thing yet. I also personally hold some gold and silver just because I’m paranoid. BUT I think the core concept of not bothering with a bunch of asset classes and starting out with just stock index funds, then some bond index funds when you’re living off your investments, is great. It’s simple and effective.

😩 Cutting costs to save and invest.

I have to agree with The Millionaire Fastlane on this one. Living super frugally to keep saving and investing diligently for decades sounds awful. I’d much rather start my own business, make more money by creating more value, and use investments for wealth preservation as opposed to income. Of course, this is different from reckless spending!

This also doesn’t invalidate Collins’ whole investment strategy! I just prefer to invest by making more money, as opposed to cutting costs.

As always, disclaimer that this is #notfinancialadvice k. All investments carry inherent risk blah blah blah. But seriously, I’m not a professional or an expert. Not even close. Most of what I know is just from reading books and trying stuff out myself.

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🌻 Learning & Productivity

I started doing brain dumps last year as part of my weekly planning routine. But tbh I stopped for the 2 weeks I was travelling. You know how it’s often when you stop/lose something that you realize how important the thing is? Yeah, I felt so much more anxious and ended up neglecting a lot of important things that came back to bite me in the ass.

A brain dump is when you write all the stuff that is floating around in your brain onto a piece of paper (or iPad paper in my case). You’ll be surprised by how many things there are. It feels so refreshing to have it all written down.

I knowwww my handwriting is horrible. Should have been a doctor.

What I do next is:

1️⃣ Remove anything that isn’t actionable. Stuff like “what if people stop watching my videos.” 🥲

2️⃣ Categorize items into priorities 0, 1, 2, and dependents. Dependents are things that are not in your court but you can’t just forget about them eg. waiting for a response to a business proposal.

3️⃣ Highlight things that can be done under 2 minutes and do them immediately.

4️⃣ Take the P0s and assign a max of 2 per day throughout the week (I aim for 1). If there’s too many P0s then move some to P1s.

5️⃣ Throughout the week, do the P1s if there’s extra time. There usually isn’t. 😝

If you haven’t tried a brain dump before, I highly recommend it! It’s one of my favourite productivity/planning things. Lmk in the comments how you find it!

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👨‍💻 Coding

I still haven’t had the chance to do much coding this week, except to quickly review the project I was working on before I went to Arkansas. I did this to ease myself back into coding and reduce some of the friction I always get when I come back to a project and realize I forgot everything. 😬

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💻 Today’s coding challenge (SQL/Python)

⚠️This one is a tad difficult.

Find the price that a small handyman business is willing to pay per employee. Get the result based on the mode of the adword earnings per employee distribution. Small businesses are considered to have not more than ten employees.

Head on over here to answer the question!

Do you like the mix of difficulties or prefer easier or harder? Lmk in the comments!

*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 ❤️

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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