2026 - Reflecting on Q1 and Planning for Q2

At the beginning of this year, I told myself I would focus the year on 2 primary goals: holding the momentum in my career and the musical.

For the past 3 months, those 2 goals have largely been accomplished. However, I will say that most of my progress is being made on the former and not the latter. It's not too difficult to understand why this ended up being the case, once you hear how I felt about the past 3 months.

Realizing I enjoyed product work

One of the biggest conclusions I came to after the past 3 months was realizing I enjoyed product work, but specifically product operations. It's not a decision I came to lightly. It was one that I made after making bets on how I wanted to spend my time in the future, what would be the most fulfilling and fun, and what would unlock the most opportunity.

Fundamentally, 1 week after joining my current project, I instantly knew I would enjoy it– that this one would be very different to my past. It was a "0-1, 1-n" type effort. Despite coming in as an "outsider", I was able to show the product sense I had and apply learnings from books I'd read outside of work over the past 2 years. For the first month or two, I would be fueled with so much adrenaline that my sleep schedule was super wacky at times. I would somehow consistently wake up early, solely because I was so hyped up about the work I was doing– making sure I was responding to emails and pings and keeping customer relationships alive and getting stuff done.

I became a sponge. I observed how my client teammates were doing their work and made mental notes on how I could mirror their decision making and tactics to improve my own abilities. The speed at which things were happening was super exciting to me, and I really enjoyed being in close (albeit, virtual) proximity to such talent density.

In any case, I realized that the shape of work I ultimately took on as my role and responsibilities naturally evolved was something that I could see myself doing for a long time. Perhaps not for the exact same product forever, but that this "0-1, 1-n" type thinking was something that I found easy and fun. That's the key point here. There are some things I find easy and not fun, some things I find hard and fun, but this... this was easy and fun. Most specialist jobs don't fit me. This opportunity allowed my systems-thinking, pattern-matching brain shine at its full brightness.

So engaged that Duolingo was the break in my day

I had never been this engaged at work... until now. So engaged that when I look back at my Toggl Track records, my Duolingo sessions would be the only other logged time that broke my day up from thinking about work. The work-life ratio went out the window because I actually started spending up to 8 hours (and maybe more) thinking about it. For comparison, in the past, I would only spend at most 6 hours during the day thinking about my day job.

Having that much adrenaline and hype isn't sustainable, so I did eventually (starting only 3 weeks ago) manage to finally context switch away from work during the day to engage in some of my other hobbies and projects– made more possible given the remote arrangement.

So What About the Musical?

The musical was always in the background. I decided to wrap up my voice lessons after running out of songs I wanted to learn, and ended up attending an open mic hosted by my vocal coach where I was able to connect with some other singers and musicians. Every connection I make is a potential future supporter or collaborator.

I personally didn't spend much other time on it because, as you can clearly see, I was so engrossed by product. It's still a goal of mine to help my friend finish this project and get this as far as it can go, so I did start posting on Instagram about it. I posted, hopefully, the first of many reels about the project, in an effort to find more collaborators and mentors.

What's Up in Q2?

For Q2, I will split up the themes a bit more and throw Duolingo back in the mix to set a language learning goal.

Execute not just Ideate

• I realized that during the past 1-2 months, I had cooked up a lot of ideas and pitched them at work to my manager. This is great when it shows long-term thinking and presents trade-offs to consider. However, part of the work is also navigating the politics and optics of executing and putting process in place. So, in the next few weeks, I will carry forth the ideas that just formed this past week to present new process ideas while executing on them in parallel. I sometimes feel like I'm speed-running the entry level -> mid-career ProdOps path.
• I also had an idea to create a new file format for handwritten digital notes. This will likely be a random Github project where I ask Codex to help me do a few things: 1. create and define the specs for the file format, 2. create the handwritten digital notes app for my tablet to test the file format. I'm not sure how long this will take because work and musical take precedent.

Get Better at Languages

• I handled a work call where the team I was talking to was based in China and was speaking in Mandarin– a language I understand conversationally, but not professionally. They had a translator, but as is with translations, a lot of context gets dropped in the process. I was able to pick up most of the context that someone else would have dropped. Duolingo thinks I'm at high B1 level for Chinese, but I don't think so. I want to finish the rest of the available Chinese course in the app and get my language score to 99 by the end of Q2.
• I want to improve my French and get it to B2 level by the end of the year. This means that this quarter, I hope to make progress on my language score and get it closer to 80 by the end of the quarter. It's currently at 65. In the efforts to improve this, I will need to investigate more ways I can read and consume French. Anyone have book recommendations?
• For Korean, my score is currently 34. I want to get it into B1 by the end of the year.

As my proficiency improves across my most proficient foreign languages, I am noticing it becoming harder and easier to speed run through the Duolingo course. At an early intermediate level for Korean, I'm slacking in vocabulary recall. So it's very difficult to speed run Korean. For Chinese, I've hit the peak of my pre-existing proficiency, so once again, it's a vocabulary issue. For French, I can do maybe one or two lessons in a unit, and then take the test at the end to skip the rest of it. So, my speed-run abilities have improved for that language.

Spend More Time Being Creative

In practice, this means taking PTO to go on creative retreats (not just vacation). It also means, working from home away from home on chill weeks to make space and time for creativity.

I want to spend more time thinking about the story for this musical project. The song makes the story, but the story can also prompt the songs. Songwriting may not be my forte, but my ability to connect the dots also applies to narratives.