On being intentional with my life

After years of putting head down and hustling, I'm back to writing blogs, fantasy fictions and even random Facebook posts.

I thought I’d kick off my new blog by sharing all the stories about the wedding planning, the wedding day, and just being surrounded by loved ones and having the perfect excuse to bring family and all the old friends together.

However, I still haven’t received all the wedding videos and photos from the photographer. So I figured I should start by reflecting on why, after many years, I’ve decided to start blogging again.

In the past few years,

After graduating from Cornell Tech in 2020, I moved to the SF Bay Area and began my software engineering career. Everything just fell into place. I worked hard and my efforts always paid off — whether it was the dopamine rush after solving hard technical problems, receiving recognition from my team, or even more practical rewards like salary increases and promotions.

Outside of work, life was also busy. Especially in 2023, Alice and I spent the whole year preparing for our wedding in Taipei, remotely while we lived in the Bay Area. It was again all worth it. Revisiting the photos last week, I still relish every moment of that day (except for the last 20% of the day after I was just drunk 🙂)

In short, everything over the past few years has been simple: I put in the effort, and reap the rewards.

To make things even easier, I did not even have to make the decision to put in the effort. Life just chased me, to make money, to finish the “important projects“ for the team, and to host the wedding now that COVID is no longer a concern. Things just come up to eat up my time.

Then, in our first 1:1 this year, my manager asked (again)

“Hey, what do you want to do next?“

At this point, I’ve just been promoted for the second time in the first 3 years of my career, and just married. This time, the question finally hit me.

It was not the first time my manager threw this question at me. She’s a great manager who just keeps on encouraging me to be intentional with how I spend my time.

But I didn’t get that.

How could I?

I didn’t have the time. I had just always told myself that. I already have that 4-week project to finish in the next two weeks, one more wedding video to edit (yes, Alice and I filmed and edited our own wedding videos!), and a few more phone calls to make sure our teacher from the middle school would come to our wedding.

But now, I’ve finally run out of excuses.

Then I got scared by the potential future where in 10 years, I’d still be a software engineer who just earns money. And that would be the only thing I can give to my children. Not the interesting stories of interesting things I’ve done in my life to convince them that life is going to be interesting, and that growing up would be a worthwhile journey to look forward to.

That is exactly what my parents did for me.

And I want that for my children.

So, I told my manager (and more so also myself) that this year, I want to learn to become more intentional with my life.

Be intentional with life

I started to list down the things I wanted to do:

• Write a fantasy novel.

• Exercise more.

• Learn Japanese.

• Design and build a board game.

• (And some more random things that I’m not ready to share with the Internet 😛)

And I just read more about intentionality, annual plans, and building writing habits (highly recommend the books Build the Life You Want, Atomic Habits, and the podcast series How I Write).

As I start making plans for the next month, the next week, and every tomorrow. There are a few things I noticed for myself quickly just changed:

1. I just started to look forward to tomorrow. There are so many things that I want to get to, that I know I can get to do tomorrow.

2. And almost like how tech founders wear the same clothes every day to reduce cognitive load, making plans have freed me from thinking about what to do and streamlining the process to “just do the next exciting thing on my list“.

3. Because I’m getting more things that I want to do, that just brings me joy from seeing the progress. This to me, is a lot like writing a novel where the protagonist is myself. Readers (and writers themselves too) just enjoy seeing progress made by the protagonist.

This blog

And because I’m reading more, and starting to record voice memos while I read to capture my thoughts, there are just more thoughts that I need to write to distill.

This post for example, just helps me solidify the concept of living a more intentional life and how I got to this action item myself.

Also, I just enjoy writing.

The keyboard feedback when I type something, whether it’s machine code, English, or Chinese when I write a novel or a blog post like this, is just satisfying.

So here I am, after a few years when I used to write blog posts about my journey in learning to code, I’m back to what just feels natural for me — writing on the Internet for fun and capturing my values. And just hope that while doing that and having fun, I’m also producing stories that may be interesting or useful for the strangers on the Internet (or perhaps, my own children in the future!).