My three Cents off 2020?-?COVID, Content, and Character

Year-end review — A constant battle to get things done!

It’s only in hindsight that you can tell how your decisions and action plans have turned out.

I am a big-time consumer of self-help content — books, podcasts, blogs, newsletters, I have been intoxicated with nearly all sorts of resources. 

I enjoy making new year resolutions but I never deeply examine the gross outcome of this habit of mine. So, here I am looking over my failures, achievements, and struggles of 2020.

Where am I in my career?

Before I start reviewing the year, it’s important to set the context and for you to have an idea of where my thoughts are coming from.

I left my first and only job in August 2018.

I have been self-employed for the past two and a half years now. I write data science and engineering courses, conduct workshops, and mentor students for the most part. 

My job makes me happy. I make enough to get going but there is a lot of room for improvement. Besides work, I am a fitness enthusiast who is exploring the world of mindfulness through meditation, reading, and breathing techniques.

At the end of 2019, I knew I was at a saturation point. I had to scale and execute ideas to contribute to the societies and communities I am a part of.

What I had in mind at the start of 2020

I believe there is a stage in your life when you educate yourself just enough to understand that what you know is just a tiny fraction of what you intend to master. It’s at this point that I realized that I’d never reach there and that it’s a lifelong voyage that gives meaning to life.

With that thought, I decided to dedicate 2020 to learning. There were three categories of personal growth that I focused on:

1. Physical health
2. Mental health
3. Cognitive health

I’ve explained the three in one of my blogs here. 

I decided to make my journey public by sharing daily lessons on Instagram through short videos and informative posts.

On a professional front, 

• I wanted to collaborate with 3 more organizations/publishing houses, 
• Publish at least 3 courses
• Conduct at least 3 workshops a month, and build a small data science community by end of the year.
• Write a research paper
• Contribute to open-source projects.

Goals were set, had a somewhat executable plan in hand, it was time for execution.

Impact of COVID on my path

2020 is the darkest of years I have witnessed in my life so far. I am sure many millennials would agree with me on that statement.

I am very fortunate to have a job that was not affected much by the economic breakdown due to the lockdown. The pandemic didn’t have any dire impacts on my action plan but there were a few mental challenges that I faced in the latter half of the year.

I did my last college workshop just before the Indian government announced the nationwide lockdown. So, that stopped happening.

Apart from the adversities, the pandemic also gave rise to a lot of confusion. With all the major businesses going remote, I was also pondering over the ideas and areas that would sprout up. Roughly put, below are a few of my thoughts:

• Remote work would allow people to move to sparse and beautiful locations with good basic amenities like internet, transportation, etc.
• A big boost to online creators/apps/streaming platforms with increased viewership. I planned to tap into this thought.
• Tools that help organizations work asynchronously.
• People spending time to pursue their hobbies and exploring new activities and courses to educate themselves.

I decided to go with a plan that was more in my control. I was already writing blogs, uploading pictures and videos on Instagram but it was time to utilize my experience in the ed-tech world.

Mental Challenges

I have been working from home since late 2018. For the first few months of the lockdown, I was comfortable and focused on what I had planned for my channel. I was ticking tasks off my to-do list daily, published quite a few tutorials and blog posts. I was coursing seamlessly.

It was after September when I realized that my productivity and willingness to work was dying. Everything else was going fine. I enjoyed going out for long runs, was regular with my workouts, was eating healthy but there was something wrong with my head and I was in denial for a long time.

I needed a break but I didn’t want to believe that I did. What do I mean by that?

I used to find myself either reading or watching something on YouTube or NetFlix. Started playing Call of Duty with a few friends for a few hours every night. Working hours went down to 3–4 hours a day. I was constantly struggling with myself, couldn’t push myself to do much. I was lax. 

I was enjoying those activities but psychologically, I was “struggling to work” which made things worse. At that moment, I was under the notion that cutting down on my watch time would get things back on track. It was deeper than I thought.

This took a toll for a while but I addressed it by segregating my working hours/days from my personal time off. I started catching up with friends over calls on weekends, picked up work from clients with tight deadlines so that I can’t back out. Tried to train my mind to learn to live with these constraints.

It is an ongoing process but it’s gotten better now.

Content

So, in March, I decided to start my YouTube channel on Data Science. I planned to create tutorials, interview scientists/engineers, and educate myself along with a handful of my subscribers and viewers.

Published my first video on How to Learn Data Science. Got a decent response for a brand new channel on a niche topic. Received a lot of valuable feedback. I was excited and wanted to make the most of this lockdown time.

Now the struggle was to manage time between the contractual work(my bread and butter) and the newly launched channel. I was rolling out content every week but people needed more and I was somewhat failing to do that.

Up until November, I have

• published 30 YouTube videos
• helped 3300++ Subscribers
• got 3500 hours of watch time(not that good)
• conducted 20+ workshops(online + colleges)
• published 5 courses with platforms like LinkedIn Learning and O’Reilly Media.
• mentored over 30 students with web dev and data science projects.
• designed an entire engineering career track for an ed-tech company.

What I couldn’t do

Following are the professional goals that remain a distant reality to me:

• I had plans to give talks at cloud and AI-based conferences. I failed to do that.
• Failed to make open-source contributions.
• Write/Reproduce an ml-based research paper(more of a dream than a goal)

Character

To be honest, the reason why I couldn’t achieve a few of my goals was I prioritized money over those projects. I struggled to choose between contractual paid work and not-for-profit content creation.

The other reason was the uneducated execution of tasks. I overestimated myself and as a result, lost two months of my year.

I was running on willpower but it is a limited resource and needs to be replenished with both internal and external motivations. External motivation is not validation from others but the people you surround yourself with.

I didn’t use it judiciously. Neglected the changed external factors and my limitations. Or maybe I didn’t know about my limitations that led to me finding out the hard way. In any case, I am happy that this happened and now I’d be correcting it by putting myself in order with regards to my work and personal routine. 

Being self-driven is a hard task. I used to consider myself an ambitious, thick-skinned optimist. Not even close, I have a long way to go. Mental toughness needs constant work and patience. It also makes a case for you to dive deep into yourself rather than looking out.

I strive to be less wrong about my notion of “know thyself” with each day passing.

Conclusion

Here are a few points, I’ve taken away from this year:

• Don’t get carried away with your ambitious goals to compromise your mental health, especially in a constrained environment.
• Don’t be in a shell. Reach out. Have more conversations. Discuss. Involve people where you can.
• Take a break. Introspect. Calibrate. Resume — It’s part of the process.