A roadmap to paying my bills and building my projects
Doubt- that was my emotional state for most of December. What should my next steps be? Should I look for a full-time job like what all my peers did? It did not help that the tuition industry is very dormant during the December holidays, when most students have not chosen to look for additional classes.
What is most interesting about doubt is that it festers more and more due to inaction and a lack of commitment- when we continue to question ourselves, the doubt grows. When we choose to commit to a path, the doubt largely vanishes. Instead, it is replaced by questions of ‘how do I reach my goals?’. Inactivity is replaced by productivity, because we now have a plan. At the very least, we know what is our next step.
A few nights ago, I took to my Twitter to state what my next steps are. A brief summary:
2021 will be a ‘gap year’ of sorts. I used quotes because it is a gap year more by societal definition- we tend to define a gap year when we do not follow the conventional path. I honestly do not see myself ever following the conventional path of employment in Singapore (I can write about my reasons another day); instead, I will continue to develop myself and my projects into thriving businesses along my own rhythm.
I’ll make money to pay my bills via tutoring and coaching. I love to teach, and I have taught SAT, programming, and math in the past. I’ll love to get into coaching, perhaps for fitness?
The tuition industry in Singapore is among the highest paid if you only consider the hourly pay. However, this does not mean that I should limit myself to the Singapore market. Instead, I think there is tons of potential in expanding my services to the US and China market.
If I take up a full-time employment, the main reason is likely to be that that’s what my peers did. And following the herd has never been a sufficient reason for me to do things.
When I did badly for my A Levels and got rejected by NUS, SMU etc, I decided to retake my A Levels after National Service. Was advised against it by my peers because there was 'no guarantee' I would have done better. Eventually managed to get into NUS CS (4As course when I was applying) after retaking As.
When my final year thesis was going badly, I decided to redo the thesis (which takes 2 semesters) with another professor. My new professor Bryan Hooi turned out to be a fantastic mentor, and I got an excellent, but undeserved, grade for my thesis.
Part of the narrative of my life has been doing things at a different timeline/manner than my peers. And I think the results speak for themselves thus far.
Doing things differently requires conviction. But it is also easy to realise that many people do not have conviction on why they are doing something, aside from that they are mirroring other people.
How will I organise this year then? I foresee myself working on 3-4 projects. I’ll alternate between writing and coding (media/building).
I’ll assume that I have 6 hours of productive cognitive work during the day. The question then becomes- how should I use this time available to me?
70/20/10 split seems like a good plan to me- roughly 4 hours on the big task, 1.5 hours on the medium task, and 0.5 hour on the small task.
For this ‘semester’ (I love college so much that I follow the academic calendar), my big project will be Cryto: Zero to Hero newsletter (business and technical analysis of cryptocurrencies), improving my engineering skills (perhaps Flask/node.js), and PyJamas Pillow Talk.
The core of my projects involves using the principles of code and media as leverage. I also discussed with NUS Computing career advisor Zachary Zhou possible options, and he has given me immensely useful advice. I will be writing about those advice in the next post.