A few months ago, I bought a domain name called TeluguNotes.com. The vision behind this purchase was that I wanted to create high-quality resources for learning the Telugu language, geared towards heritage language learners. That is, people who might have a passive understanding of Telugu, or may be conversational in it, and want to improve their own understanding of the language.
Three technical skills I want to learn in 2023
Here are some skills I want to learn in 2023, based on the informational interviews I’ve done so far. I’ve also included resources for each of them.
SQL
What it is: programming language used to query data from relational databases
You should learn it if: you want a role that deals with data (business analyst, data analyst), or a role in which data-driven decision making is important (product analyst, strategy/operations, many consulting roles)
How to learn it: The Mode SQL tutorial came highly recommended by someone who works in data analysis.
Full-stack development
What it is: Full stack development refers to the skills needed to build modern web apps.
How to learn it: A free resource is https://fullstackopen.com/en/.
GIS
GIS refers to geographic information systems, a tool used in urban planning and environmental roles to work with spatial data.
The contacts I spoke to in the urban planning world made it seem like GIS is a good way to get an entry level role in the field, which you can use to advance within ~1-2 years.
The industry standard GIS tool is ArcGIS, but its windows only and is paid. There’s an open-source alternative (QGIS), and their tutorial is a good way to get started.
Binge-reading productivity articles: The Cut
I love reading about ways to be more productive. Here are a bunch I read from the Cut that I think others would find interesting:
- Everything Always Takes Longer Than You Think
- Humans are really really bad at planning. Like, we exceed our worst case expectations bad
- This is called the planning fallacy. One solution is to use a “pre-mortem”, detailed in the next article
- To Reach Your Goals, Imagine You Already Tried and Failed
- One way to get around that is to do a “pre-mortem”, pretend its some point in the future and the plan you put in place went horribly wrong – and write a retrospective detailing what happened and why
- How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym
- Exercise is really good for you for reasons other than physical health. It can increase your ability to handle discomfort, and improve your ability to self-regulate
- Also see this podcast about dopamine, and how pain is necessary to feel pleasure
- You Need a Schedule
- You need structure – a schedule gives you peace of mind through order and predictability
- People who use to-do lists get more things done, organized paper lists are better than digital or unorganized lists
2023 Goals
In this post, I covered my language goals for 2023. But I realized that I have a lot of other goals I want to pursue, so I want to outline them here.
At a high level, here’s what I want to do this year:
- Plan better
- Identify who I want to be and judge myself by those criteria
- Have strong and healthy relationships in my life (of all kinds)
- Be healthier (mentally and physically)
- Do something constructive towards fighting climate change
- Pursue my interests in cities and urban planning
- Pursue my interests in languages, linguistics, and related topics
- Make progress on a career that fits well for me
- Write and publish things – ideally that are helpful to others
- Read – and try to read things that expand my worldview
1:10 to Yuma
Since updating my language goals on January 3rd, I’ve made some progress:
A grand total of 1h 10mins of progress, that is. At least, that’s how much time active time I’ve spent on my Telugu studies. I have done more hours of passive work, like reading some news articles, listening to music, or watching TV in a target language (such as Spanish, French, or Telugu), but my goal is to increase the amount of active study I do. Active study is the hard stuff that pushes you outside your comfort zone and ultimately improves your ability.
Some observations I’ve made so far:
3 hours is a lot of time 🙁
To reach my goal, I would have to do between 2 – 3 hours of study a week. That’s a lot of time. It’s been nearly 4 years since I was a full-time student, which was the last time I was sitting down to really study something. It’s really hard! I forgot how hard it was. My brain hurt after 10 minutes of trying to read Telugu.
Breaking down my language goals
In my previous post, I outlined a new set of language goals. In this post, I’ll outline my plan to reach them.
My plan was to spend 30 hours on French, Telugu, and Hindi, and 15 hours each studying Bengali and Punjabi. That totals 120 hours of studying by the end of the year.
Updating my language goals
In a previous article, I outlined two goals I wanted to accomplish by summer 2024. The first pertained to languages, and the other was about writing. Much has changed since then, and I’d like to update this blog to reflect that. In this article, I’ll update my language goals, while in a future article, I’ll update my writing goals (and add some new ones).
Pre-mortems: A solution to the planning fallacy
In the process of trying to plan better, I realize that I end up underestimating the amount of time that it takes me to do something, and overestimating what I can get done in a given period of time.
From talking to friends and colleagues, this appears to be a common observation, including by people who we might consider as successful.
The name for this is Hoftstadter’s law, or the planning fallacy. We tend to consistently blow past not only our best case scenarios for how long things take, but also our worst case scenarios.
What’s the solution? One option is to try a ‘premortem’. Assume things have already gone wrong and you missed your deadline. Ask yourself what happened and what went wrong, and then plan accordingly.
My fascination with North American French
In the winter of 2018, I studied abroad in Paris, France for 6 weeks as part of the CIEE Open Campus Program. It allowed you to live in 3 different cities over the course of a semester, with 6 weeks in each. I studied in Paris, Madrid and Berlin.
When I chose my arrangement of cities, it was actually Madrid and Berlin that I really wanted to go to. Madrid, because it was the only Spanish speaking city, and I had been studying Spanish in school at that point and wanted to practice. Berlin was because I was interested in Cold War and WW2 history (the former was mostly from playing Call of Duty).
Back on my grind
This is about – you guessed it – the LSAT. I just got back to New York. Here’s the progress I’ve made:
- Did the logic games section of the LSAT PrepTest 72
- Tried doing a blind review (where you go back and re-do questions you didn’t get to / weren’t confident on during the timed section and review them) but I circled a lot of the answers and didn’t feel like going back through them all. I checked my results and got 11/23 on the timed section (i.e., whatever I completed under 35 minutes). I did most of three games, but didn’t get to the fourth one