april 2025: finding a state of flow
pondering on goals for the year
When my mind wanders, I often start wondering “I wonder I could do X”. If it’s fleeting, then it’s not important to me. But if it keeps coming back, it feels like “life debt” that weighs on me. Maybe by tackling it, things might feel a little lighter?
There was a fun one that I’ve been wondering for a while. I wondered if I could do a triathlon. It weighed on my mind to a point where I just needed to get it done. So on a recent day off, I completed my first olympic triathlon! It was a difficult challenge because it was long, it was on a stationary bike with no music, and because I’m a terrible swimmer. It didn’t help that I didn’t train for it. But it’s definitely increased my self-trust for challenges in the future.
These days, I wonder if I’m able to train for a marathon while pushing limits at work. I don’t want to compromise work for a marginally better time, but I do want to hit my fitness goals in parallel. Last year, I was able to do both in separate periods—fitness in the first half and push limits at work in the second half. Both were fun. Combined feels like a triathlon—possible, but harder.
Days in this rhythm feel mundane. On most weekdays, I get up at 7:30AM, run around GGP for 30, and then bike to the train. A good day means running past E at the Panhandle, yelling “morning!” to Y while biking on Page st and dapping up J on 8th and Folsom. I then focus on the train for 45, work till 9:30, Uber home, and go to bed. On weekends, I’ll read or write at my local coffee shop, go on a longer run, eat brunch while catching up on anime, tackle fun work tickets in the afternoon, and then hopefully see friends in the evening.
The fun weeks are really fun thanks to the meaningful connections I make. I’ve been finding time for meals and coffees with people I like. They’re great breaks to the week, chunking my weeks into parts instead of a whole, making months feel like a journey instead of one long sprint.
I like this because my default days are productive. Occasionally, social plans get made and I’ll have my treat for the week on a weekday evening. In other words, my worst weeks are productive, and my best weeks are both productive and socially fulfilling. Structuring the worst case scenarios to be fulfilling is a way to guarantee a high amount of fulfillment.
Constraints are the best impetuses to evolution. That’s what makes basketball clutch time so exciting—players need to step up. The main lever I’ve been pulling for the last year to do better at work is to work more. However, I’m hitting a ceiling on how much I can work on a regular basis. I’d like to not burnout. Given this constraint, I’m most interested in finding ways of making my existing time more efficient so that I can do more.
To be more efficient requires understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses. One recurring pattern in my life is that my skillsets are the Pareto principles in practice. I’m good at a lot of things, but expertise isn’t my forte. At work, I love leaning into engineering, design and product. It complements my team because many of them have the capacity for that depth.
A challenge I’d like to push myself in this year is to find more depth. I could’ve sworn I’ve made that goal before, but life took turns as it always does. I’d like to anchor myself back to that goal and escape any local maxima I find myself in. Depth will enable efficiency which allows me to do more with the fixed amount of time I have.
So many of these little challenges I’ve given myself like the olympic triathlon are the pieces of evidence that my mind needs to be convinced that my longer term challenge is feasible. After all, you can’t run if you can’t walk. You can’t do a triathlon if you can’t run a 10k. A large portion of preparing for a race is also mental, not just physical. I’d like to believe that the fun challenges I’ve tackled until today have given me the tools and confidence to achieve my goals for the year.
Tangibly, this means a few things:
Digging deeper into the tech stack at Windsurf by working on projects in new parts of the tech stack while raising the bar of Windsurf’s design engineering.
Breaking my 5k PR (summer)
Breaking my marathon PR (EOY @ CIM)
I’ve only cemented this end of year goal recently. The idea of this keeps coming back as “life debt” and I’d hate to feel like I never tried. These are also goals fully within my control and have very little random variables in their path to completion. The only random variable may be the amount of time I have and if plans goes smoothly (which it never does), time shouldn’t be a problem. On the other hand, if a goal involved something out of your control, no credit is given to doing the right things when the outcome isn’t desired.
Goals are important, but the most important piece to this is designing routines that align with your goals. What I love about extreme challenges is that kind of good becomes great and sort of bad becomes terrible. This makes decision making easier because when options are of higher contrast, clear priorities emerge. With priorities becoming clearer, routines then become easier to design. Through experimenting with routines, I feel excited about my current one and hope to grow as a runner and a design engineer.
Thanks for tuning into this one!