What happened in 2009 for me?

2009 to me was a lucky year. I got by this year without any trouble. Nothing major that is. I achieved what I needed to achieve in my studies. Graduated with the diploma and grades I desired to get from the start. Now, I am stuck in a buffer period of my life, army, which isn’t tough at all. In between all that, there were many times I was happy and other times I was kind of disappointed with myself. Whatever happened, happened for a reason, whether it was a result of my decisions or just going with the flow of things. However, I am truly grateful (as I am every year) for the things that happened and the people who influenced whatever happened in one way or another. Just some highlights…

Graduation: A summary of 3 years in 1 paragraph.

3 years flew by pretty quickly. 2006 to 2009 seemed so much faster than the years before. Thinking back, I kinda missed those times. Missed them a lot. I rarely felt uncomfortable during the 3 years in Poly. Even if I did, I always knew that things will eventually turned out right, and most things did. The only time I felt uncomfortable was before entering poly. I always seem to feel that way before embarking on anything new. After meeting the people I envisioned meeting, everything else kinda fell right into place. I know a lot of my friends who had problems which were derived from meeting rubbish people (no offence). I am glad I was part of their journey too. Learning from them, sharing stuff, doing projects together and most importantly, making friends whom I knew I would have made for life. It is indeed the people you mix with that will influence how you improve and what you become. With them, studying business became fun and I really felt that I did pick the right course which I did enjoy btw. So what did I gain in the 3 years in poly? In summary, best Friends, basic business knowledge from school which came with a diploma, first working experience by working overseas and characteristics and values that I think about more than ever. I felt that I did improve a lot during the 3 years there but also realize how much more work I have to put in to gain the skills to truly become successful in the work space in the future. I have 2 years to not play catch up but radically improve. Make that 21 months.

Traveling

2009 was a good year to travel, the pricing of travel tickets were at an all time low because  of the financial crisis. However, I did not travel as much I would have liked to because of a few things. Firstly, I don’t have the income to afford to travel. If not, I would have taken the chance to go to at least 3-5 countries with the amount of free time I had. Secondly, I did not know when I was going to the Army. The indefiniteness of my enlistment date made me hold back on embarking on many new things. I did travel far out once though (let’s not count traveling to Malaysia), sponsored by my dad. We thought about traveling to England together once again ever since I was about 10? Finally we did and this time to his updated residence up in a village called Whytham in Oxford for 4 weeks. I did a blog post about this trip but unfortunately it disappeared along with the hacking that happened. Well, I will just summarize, again. I felt super emo during the first week there. Culture shock maybe? Even though it was infinitely better than conditions in China (people, culture, food etc.), I felt out of place. Maybe its because I just prefer privacy and living in my “own” residence (hotel or rented space). The fact that I had to cycling miles out to town also seemed troubling at first. My dad promised a good bike, but instead gave me one that made my balls hurt because the seat was rock solid hard and badly adjusted. I kept thinking of how nice it would be to have everything on my own and not rely on the people and place I was living in, the restaurant my dad was working at. As usual, my dad pissed me off with his usual unusual antics of buying useless stuff and collecting rubbish and storing them in the barn at the restaurant. It was like house nightmare version 2.0 in England. Just that he did not own the place, which made me feel guilty that my dad was doing that -.-. Despite all that rubbish feelings that I felt, even falling sick for 1/2 the time there, I still managed to have a great time and did a great trip to places of interest in Oxford as well as traveling and touring London. On a budget of course =). I am grateful that I even got to travel to England again and I am sure it will not be the last time there. I love the culture, people and whole experience there. Not to mention, Summer there is definitely awesome, since it was a great summer.

All the other things in between (or lack thereof)

I lost my blog posts. I lost my 2009 resolutions. But you know what? I didn’t keep a hardcopy of it but I do remember certain details and things I wanted to achieve and realize that I did not achieve any of those fully. If I am not wrong, there were about 10 resolutions. I did put in the effort to start on a few but never following through. This is certainly a bad habit of mine, the lack of focus. I start on something, do it halfway and then leave it aside, move on to another thing. I realised that my attention span has grown extremely short after I left school.  External influences isn’t helping me much with that also. I could be doing 1 thing for a few minutes and then move on to do another thing and another for the next few minutes or hours. For examples, I shall share some of the things that I have set out to do or achieve but did not.
 

1. Courses. These included Toastmasters, Qigong and Archery. I remember telling myself that I would join a few courses during the course of the year but I realise that I never did for some and for those that I did, I dropped out halfway. The thing is, I have no excuses for dropping out. Only my lack of motivation to continue. At least I am still continuing with driving which I must pass since I am paying a hefty sum just to get it.
2. Blog & IM (internet marketing). Wanted to make my blog readership soar to new heights. Like 10,000 people reading it at least once. That did not materialise despite getting a cool blog domain name that I supposedly am able to brand myself with. Well, that least there’s a new year to get it up and running again. This time doing something about it. Giving frequent and great content that can reach out to a bigger audience other than my friends. Insightful and useful posts galore! I wanted to start out on internet marketing proper with affiliate marketing but that was a failure too. I failed mainly because I did not plan and take proper action as I should have. In fact, its my lack of planning that led to lack of action that led to projects being left halfway. I realised that I was overambitious also which affected me quite a bit.
3. Helping my dad out. I set out on the year thinking that I could have helped my dad with his branding as a professional massage therapist but realised I did not have the skills to do that. Not even to create a simple logo, namecard or brochure to market him. Second thing I wanted was to make money using his spare money. We considered certain options that we could have taken advantage of but did not do so. Being skeptical about things held us back but I realise that we should have just trusted out gut. Besides, the risks were pretty low. Third thing was to clear out his shit in my other house to make it more rentable. Obviously that was an Epik Phail (epic fail) goal that I set. In fact, my dad brought more shit (mainly used items that hold no value for the house or for his life) and the house has literally become a slum. HDB slum.

I am sure there are a few other things that I left out but those were the major few that I wanted to accomplish for this year that I did not. I am sort of disappointed at this year end because of these unaccomplished goals that I set myself out to do. I could have at least completed half of them with the time I had (about 7 months) had I put my heart, mind and soul to it. I did not.

So… What did I learn? (at least I learnt something =P)

With all that being said about what I did not achieve, I did realise a few important things about myself that is worth reflecting upon at this point of the year. The way I think about things, the way I do things and my priorities in life. When I did have a lot of free time (in this case 7 months of freedom), my weaknesses seemed to creep out and expose themselves. Great self discovery I think.

The way I thought about things and other thought processes, these were not clear. It is something related to attention, in my case the deficit of attention to carry things out. It’s like with the lack of attention or short attention span, my thinking processes were curtailed and not proper. For example, I struggled to think through and combat information overload that led me to learning things slowly. It’s a simple reasoning that information overload will hinder thinking and planning but yet I did not even think through to combat it properly. So what happened? I get flooded with information, some useful others useless and waste a lot of time splitting my attention among them. I don’t usually cover just one area of an industry but many areas from many industries. That’s another problem altogether. Spreading too many things that I want to learn too thinly, not focusing learning one thing in depth and then move on. My priorities were all over the place because of this and thus, I rarely could get anything completed.

Well then, I guess this is one thing that carries forward to 2010 as a bad habit that I have certainly developed. What to do then? If I were to improve in the many areas that I want to, I will have to regain or develop the lazer guided focus. Most probably, I will be taking smaller steps to achieve greater things. Don’t put too much pressure but yet adequate pressure to be able and willing to learn and execute my many ventures that I want to go into. I would keep track of my progress and look back and assess myself realistically so that I will know how far I have come and how much harder I have to work to radically improve.

So to end 2009 on a higher note (despite my disappointments), I will carry forward some of the things I did not achieve in 2009 to 2010 and strive to achieve them with the spare precious time I have. I also want to let all my friends and others know that reflecting is important. We don’t usually do it during the course of the year but I think it’s a good time to do so (end of the year). Give yourself feedback and make the future year a great one.

Good Luck and Never Give Up!

Love,


Kelvin “Kaizen” Koh