Personal growth

YNAB

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While I did not come from a privileged background, I have been lucky enough to be born in a family where all my basic needs are met. My family supported me as much as they can so that I can pursue my interests. Every now and then, they would buy me luxuries like the Playstation or a Nokia phone. Beyond this however, my family was always conscious of how much we were spending. We did not eat out often. We never really travelled outside of our city. We never really bought clothes often. The only reason I would attend an elite school from the Philippines is that I received a full scholarship with stipend. The only reason I would go to graduate school in Europe is that I was granted a scholarship from the EU.

Not coming from a rich family, I always have to budget what I spend my money on. Even now that I am working in a top business school, I still have to save and plan so that I can buy a house in the future.

To help me with this, I have been using the app You Need A Budget (YNAB) for the last 5 years. It is a personal finance app that lets you track where you spend your money so that you can save and invest more. It’s based on this philosophy that you have to always dedicate every penny to something. For example, if you end up spending on restaurant, you have to divert that money away from your clothing budget.

Expenses in the last 3 months

I’ve stopped taking down notes

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I’ve been taking down notes for the longest time using physical notebooks and OneNote. In college, I used to have a large notebook divided into sections for each class. During graduate school, I just printed the relevant papers and organized them into different folders. If I ever needed to, I just wrote my thoughts directly on these papers.

Reflecting back on this approach, I realize that I am prone to never looking at them ever again. In college, after I’ve taken the final exam for a course, I just typically just keep the notebook somewhere, forgetting that it even existed. In graduate school, once I’ve finished writing a paper, I just keep the relevant papers somewhere, never to be seen again. My rationale was that I was not going to use my knowledge in that specific class again. At the same time, my thinking was that I can easily find things when I need it through Google anyway. I have not been able to get much return from taking down notes. That is why I have stopped taking down notes.

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the potential of spaced-repetition systems (SRS) in augmenting learning. Michael Nielsen from Y Combinator wrote a great article of how he used it to dig deeper into machine learning. SRS is just a fancy word for flashcards. A famous app that facilitates this is Anki. You can create your cards in this app based on whatever information you come across. Dates, names, equations, pictures, mental models, frameworks… whatever information that you think will be important down the line. Everyday then, you review your cards, marking them as easy or difficult to remember. Anki facilitates what cards to show you based on how easy it was for you to remember the card in the past.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been using Anki to learn different fields. I’ve made cards from data science, pharmaceutical sciences, econometrics, sociology, history of management and decision sciences. I’ve written down interesting quotes from speeches, insights from videos and fascinating stories from podcasts.

Since I’ve started, I have added 3,047 cards. It’s become a habit at this point. I spend around 30 minutes per day, reviewing around 80 cards. In my opinion, Anki has really augmented my process of learning new things. It helped me prepare for my PhD defense. Now, it is helping me in my knowledge journey.

Anki stats

Boss as a service

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In a famous story in Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses and his crew had to sail past an island where the Sirens lived. These sirens were known to sing so beautifully that listeners would lose control of themselves, ultimately luring them to their deaths. Ulysses wanted to hear how the Sirens’ sounded like. However, he knew that he would not be capable of thinking clearly once he was bewitched by their beautiful voice. Thus, he instructed his crew to block their ears with wax. Ulysses also asked his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast so that he would not be able to do anything stupid, once he is under the Sirens’s charm. He also told them to not change the course of the ship whatever happens and even, to attack him in the worst case that he escapes.

This tale is instructive on how we can pursue habits that are just too difficult to achieve with our limited willpower. It’s easy to plan that we will stop eating sweets and start exercising. However, when we are already in the moment, when the temptation is already in front of us, it may just be too difficult to resist.

Thus, we need to find a way to tie ourselves to the mast. In my case, I have resorted to this app Beeminder. It allows you to track your goals for free. The catch is if you do not reach your goal, that is when you have to pay them. The first time you break your pact, you pay $5. The next time, it then becomes $10 and so on.

Three years ago, I was able to lose a lot of weight from the service. However, I’ve regained it since them. I’ve restarted my journey again.

Beeminder weight loss (Oct 2020)

As seen by the plot, I’ve lost weight since I started in the beginning of August. I started at 81.3 kg and now am at 77.3 kg. On my way, I’ve broken my promised rate of losing 0.7 kg per week, two times. I’ll periodically update my blog how it is going.

Low risk, high reward

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Before I started my PhD, I came across this wisdom that would change my life forever. I don’t remember anymore from whom I got this tip from originally but I’ve heard it many times since then from various outlets like Jordan Harbinger show, the Serendipity Mindset book, etc. Ever since I have started applying this advice to my life, it has opened up to great opportunities that I would not have gotten otherwise. I won’t keep you waiting any longer, the wisdom is simply this: don’t be afraid to reach out to strangers.

As an introvert and a naturally anxious person, it was difficult for me to initiate in the past. But then, imagining the worst case scenario made me realize that the worst thing that can happen is that the recipient ignores my email, never to remember my name ever again.

I’ve gotten internships, opportunities to travel and speak, met fascinating people just by this small advice. I typically just message people either on LinkedIn or email about something that interests me about what them or what they have done recently. If I read an interesting paper, I message the author. If I see somebody giving a fascinating talk, I contact the speaker.

I was doing it on and off. I never really made it a habit to message people religiously. I also never tracked the number of positive responses I’ve received.

As an experiment, I’ll start doing this more consistently and systematically from this point onward. I will message one person every weekday. I will be tracking my results in this blog.

Public Speaking

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As an aspiring academic, I know that it is important to be able to communicate my research not only to colleagues but also to the society at large. To improve my public speaking, I have signed up in a Toastmaster club. A few months ago, I challenged myself to describe my PhD topic in such a way that the general public would understand.