#026 | Everywhere is Nowhere

Weekly newsletter on Natural Language Processing (#NLP365), Entrepreneurship, and Life Design content!

July 04, 2021

Hey friends,

6 months into 2021. What have you accomplished?

As I reflected on my first 6 months of 2021, I learned a lot.

Personally, I followed the 12 Week Year timeline, which means every quarter I will reflect, reevaluate, and readjust if necessary. Each quarter, I have a list of words to represent the key themes of the quarter.

The first 12 weeks (Q1) has been on Focus, Leadership, Zeroton, Youtube, PhD, Delegation, Automation, and Outsourcing. Q1 was a huge success. Everything was on point. I managed to publish 12 youtube videos, 12 newsletters, read 26 books, not to mention PhD and Zeroton’s progression. Gym hit rate was 92%. Most importantly, I finally learned delegation and outsourcing. It wasn’t easy and they do come with a new set of challenges but it was a good personal growth journey to be able to let go and trust others.

The second 12 weeks (Q2) has been on PhD, Zeroton, and Personal Growth. Q2 was not a bad quarter. PhD front was good as I submitted my first short paper to the EMNLP conference and passed my 1st year PhD presentation in June. We had a strong start in April 2021 for Zeroton but experienced slow progress in May and June 2021. Gym rate dropped to 88.67%, attended 133 out of 150 sessions so far this year, of which most of the missed sessions came from the last two weeks of June as I had a wrist injury from bouldering. Youtube videos stopped mid way through May due to unexpected situation but newsletters is still going strong. Only read 14 books in Q2. No, wrong mindset. I read a total of 4 books last year. 14 books is more than 300% increase and is fucking great!

So, the third 12 weeks (Q3). What now. Upon reflection, Q3 is going to be surrounding the theme of FOCUS and COURAGE to FAIL BIG. I am pausing Youtube for the rest of the year. I will be reading less books (or rereading more) so that I can make more notes for Zeroton. One big change this quarter would be the gym. I have just reached my 6 years mark of training consistently for the gym, hitting on average more than 5 days a week. The last day of August would mark the end of this training. It doesn’t mean that I would stop going to the gym, it just means my training programme won’t be focusing on weightlifting anymore but rather on bouldering, which will start in September 2021 so more on that in the future. Another change would be the structure of this newsletter, starting from next one onwards. I am removing the Youtube section and the AI research section and focus solely on personal development / lifestyle design content and the documentation of my journey.

The second half of 2021 starts now. Reflect, Reset, and Attack!

This week I am reading:

  1. Effortless (28th May - In Progress)

  2. The Art of Learning (28th June - 4th July)

Total: 40 / 26 books | 3 / 26 level 4 notes | 2 / 12 actions

❓Question of the Week

What’s your plan for the second half of the year? What are you going to do differently this time?

Share your thoughts by replying to this email. I would love to hear from you! 👻 👻 👻

🐦 Tweet of the Week

💡 Quote of the Week

Everybody is different. Some employees are extremely sensitive to feedback while others have particularly thick skin and often thick skulls. Stylistically, your tone should match the employee’s personality, not your mood — The Hard Thing about Hard Things

🔥 Recommendation(s) of the Week

Polar H10 — New addition to my fitness, heart rate, and mental training. I love it so far and already recommended to few friends. Try it out :)

That’s it for this week! I hope you find something useful from this newsletter. More to come next Sunday! Have a good week ahead! 🎮

😈 Find me on:

🎬 YouTube for AI and Actionable Knowledge videos

🐦 Twitter for daily thoughts and sharing

👨🏻‍💻 LinkedIn for professional connections

🌍 Website for 2021 projects and Natural Language Processing

📸 Instagram for fitness content - Gym 🏋🏻 and Bouldering 🧗🏻‍♂️