Things to live by in 2024
This past Christmas and new year season has been the most restful for me in recent memory: coming off the backside of the pandemic, making a career change, and moving across the country has occupied me the last few years. In this time, I've been trying to take better care of myself, seeing the doctor, etc. on things that have been bothering me but I've been putting off.
During this time, I've been reading a lot of essays that get shared on Hacker News that I've been finding quite insightful and inspiring. One in particular was written in the form of a letter to their younger self with a lot of advice and introspection that I found extremely relatable, and partly inspired me to write this up; instead of a letter to my past self—I don't think I'm quite there yet—I thought I would write this up in the spirit of new year's resolutions, and serve to remind myself of more mindful times as the year inevitably picks up.
Without further ado, things to live by in 2024.
Look after yourself
If it hurts, take the time to make it better for yourself. (Un)fortunately, you're at an age now where your health—for better or worse—takes compound interest and your current state will propagate years down the line. When you were younger, you could brush stress, anxiety, and pain off and bounce back, but things like bad ergonomics are going to ruin you down the line if you're not careful. Do your best to exercise every day, take your Vitamin D, and fix your posture. It's not all that bad.
Spend more time on the foundational, not the sensational
FOMO has been the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to stress and anxiety; you work in a fast moving field and there's just absolutely no way anybody can remain up to date with everything new that comes out. This includes reading new papers, and especially getting force fed by recommendation engines (you're probably doom scrolling your Google feed). Cool new research, libraries, and "stuff" pop up at an hourly rate, and balancing between what you do for your job, your own personal interests, and your sanity, it's probably better for you to focus on moving averages as opposed to individual data points. \href{https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829907}{This discussion} was particularly inspiring. In other words, the vast majority of what you read about in 2024 are likely going to be one-off things, so try and look for things that are going to be here to stay and spend your time and effort there. You'll always have more ideas than time.
It's okay if things go slowly, don't go to plan, or even spiral out of control
We do things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy. I have no idea who to attribute this to, but evidently it's a mutation of JFK's Moon speech. Whoever it was, they were pretty cynical. Consequently, things are inevitably going to be harder and take longer than you originally thought; that's perfectly fine and just be patient with yourself. It's okay to reduce the scope of things, and it's okay to not know how everything will pan out from the get go: if rules were made to be broken, then plans are made to go wrong. If there's one thing academia taught you is that projects—actually your whole damn year—will rarely go the way you thought it will.
OKRs are good and all, but like all other models, it works for some things (e.g. business targets) and not others (e.g. long term, dynamic projects). You can easily spend all of your time trying to meticulously craft OKRs to ensure you have the right scope, the right degree of ambition, but KRs and objectives can come crashing down when circumstances inevitably change. Life finds a way, so be fluid and be flexible.