Chai's Blog

Ear­li­er this year I blogged about The Project 1 I decid­ed to exe­cute for 9 weeks. I am glad to have “done” that.

Here is the result:

Here are the scores that helped me earn State­ment of Accom­plish­ment with Dis­tinc­tion:

These are the rea­sons why I chose to do this:

[1] I did this to prove to myself that I can decide to do some­thing and indeed do it.
[2] I want to prove myself that being a dad does­n’t have to be an excuse to not to do things you love.
[3] I want­ed to have the priv­i­lege of learn­ing from a Stan­ford pro­fes­sor.
[4] I want­ed to be part of MOOC.
[5] I want­ed to work and improve on my Data­base fun­da­men­tals and con­cepts.
[6] I want­ed to do some­thing dif­fer­ent and new this year. Esp some­thing I have been pro­cras­ti­nat­ing and duck­ing.

Some after­thoughts:

[0] I first came across this course in the Fall of 2011 but just dodged it. So feels good to be able to fin­ish it at least in the Win­ter of 2013.
[1] It is cool to do some­thing nev­er­the­less.
[2] I real­ly enjoyed solv­ing chal­lenge lev­el exer­cise sit­ting late into the night. I can’t describe how love­ly it feels once you crack a ques­tion. Being unable to solve feels equal­ly awful too, if not more. Imag­ine deter­min­ing if a Rela­tion is in BCNF or 3NF at 2 am in the morn­ing!
[3] I equal­ly missed my wifey and baby as much as they wait­ed for me to open the door of my room every evening.
[4] I became sleep deprived but well worth it.
[5] The point is not to miss pre­cious time with my fam­i­ly and also not to give that as an excuse so I made most of these times: (a) Late into night after my baby goes to bed. (b) Ear­ly in the morn­ing before he wakes up. © 1 – 2 hour win­dows dur­ing his week­end day­time naps.
[6] (a) and (b) men­tioned in the pre­vi­ous point are not sus­tain­able. You can’t sleep late and wake up ear­ly day after day for long. So plan­ning is cru­cial.
[7] Oth­er than time at work and time with fam­i­ly, I became focused on this work.
[8] I did­n’t com­plete­ly quit News,Blogs, Face­book and Twit­ter but just ensured I did­n’t waste too much time on them.
[9] I got to prac­tice “doing 1% every­day” and “liv­ing in the NOW”.
[10] Focus and momen­tum are indeed crit­i­cal to do any­thing of any sig­nif­i­cance in any area of life.

What next: After a month of relax­ing (Read­ing cou­ple of books, Watch­ing some videos and spend­ing com­plete evenings and week­ends with fam­i­ly), NOW is the time to suc­ceed on to The Project 2. It makes sense to talk after I walk.