A quick update on life

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here.

In this post, I would like to share a quick update on my life.


First of all, I secured, kind of, my next job.

I will work as free lance for a project in China first and hopefully that can lead to a full time job in the consulting company.

I will need to travel a lot and face much more stress, but that is what I was looking for, at lease the second part. So that is ok.

The money is good. However, with China tax and expense I have to incur, I will be quite a bit worse off financially. I guess I will have to live with it and hope that I will eventually be better off in the long-term perspective. That of course depends on how well I can extract value from this experience and improve myself to a point where I will be good enough to make my next leap in my career.

One thing is for sure - the experience is going to be tough and heavy, as I am not the only one paying for it. My family is paying for it as well because my wife has to take care of my two kids, which is already touch with me around, while I am absent and I wont be able to spend as much time with my kids. I just need to always remember that professionally, I need to keep growing; and family wise, I need to make up for lost time as much as I can.

However, that is no reason why this experience cannot be enjoyable as well. With good planning, I can achieve the professional development I seek and at the same time be as present with my family as possible.

I need to keep the right cadence, which is critical. Even though I need to achieve professional development, preferably in a fast manner, I wont be too eager or trying too hard. I have increasingly realized that cadence is important and it is necessary to prove my worth before asking for anything. Keeping learning and being alway vigilant, deeply involved and energetically committed is key. The rest I guess I have it leave to time.

Keeping the cadence will also prevent me from being burnt out, which will help with my presence with my family. I will save enough energy so that I can be fully present with my family when I am with them. Now that I can only spend limited time with my family, I will make sure that the quality makes up as much as possible.

So how do I view this new chapter of my life?

I cannot say that I am looking forward to it. It represents a worse-off reality for me and my family in the short term, both from the financial and quality of life perspective. However, it does bring the opportunity for self-improvement and potentially can prepare me for bigger and greater opportunities in the future. And frankly, I do not have any other options in sight right now.

I will go and make the most of the opportunity.


Secondly, I realized that I needed to care more about people.

I felt quite depressed yesterday, partly because I was not looking forward to the new chapter of my life and partly because of the 300KSGD offer I lost.

My wife was really supportive and encouraging which helped a lot.

In the evening, I was browsing through my old Facebook posts and found a few surprises there. The discovery that really strike me was that how much I cared about my friends in the past.

There was this case where I saw a picture of a friend where he looked sad and I sent him a message asking how he was and whether anything happened. Of course, he replied with a very warm message, not only explaining what happened but also expressed his sincere appreciation for my attention.

Looking back the last few years, I was either busy with feeling superior due to my "success" or busy with feeling the "anxiety" because I always believed that I should have progressed even faster and I was doing what I thought would help. I really did not manage to care much about my friends, even close ones or those who used to be close.

I should start caring about others more. After all, we all live in the network.

That would be the change I will embed in every thing I do in the new chapter of my life.


Thank you for your attention.

Till the next time!