Out of the subconscious realm, I hand-picked a couple of personal “qualities” [2] as the (three or five) pillars of my life [1], the most important pillars since 2007. 2007 is the /watershed year/.
These are the pillars for my past, present and my future, immigration plan, family housing, retirement plan, … There’s possibly nothing new here, but this blogpost provides another perspective into the “making” of my career and the foundation of my entire life. As such, this is not a worthless reflection. Still, avoid over-thinking as there are other worthwhile reflections.
I think everyone can consider the same question — “Using words that are as specific as you can find, name 2 or more personal survival capabilities, hopefully the most important ones.”
- AA) IV prowess — (since Chartered). Compare CSY’s experience.
- self-renewal to stay relevant — lifelong learning. Am rather successful so far
- my reflective blogging is actually part of the my career way-finding, motivation…
- absorbency — of dry, theoretical, low-level domains. /continuous/ plow-back without exhaustion
- theoretical complexity — aptitude and absorbency
- lower-level — overall, i’m stronger than my peers at low-level
- BB) my capacity to keep a well-paying dev job (not as “unique” as the other 2 capabilities). Even in the three Singapore cases, I was able to hold it for about 2 years, or receive a transfer or severance.
- figure-things-out speed? Not really my strength but my competence
- camp-out, extra hours
attention to details- getting the big picture?
- [G3] personal burn-rate — important to my feeling of long term security.
- See the Davis chat on old-timers.
- — The following factors are less “unique” but I want to give credit to
- [G3] my healthy lifestyle and bread-earning longevity — in the long run this factor would prove increasingly important. It enables me to
keep working long past retirement age. - [G5] my bold investment style [2]
- my education and self-learning capabilities including English skills
- [G3 = a top-3/Group3 factor]
! benchmarking — AA is a single-winner competition, whereas BB is about staying above minimum standard in the team.
! strengthening — I continue to plow back and build my AA/BB 内力, focusing on localSys + coding drill. A huge amount of energy, absorbency, continuous effort and dedication needed (cf. XR,YH, CSY…), though since 2018 I have noticed the ROTI is not as high as before 2012.
[1] to some extent, my family’s life also rests on these same pillars, but I tend to under-estimate the capabilities of my family members and over-estimate my earning power.
[2] in this post I don’t want to include my financial assets since I want to focus on personal qualities
