Urgent vs. Important?
Most of us work on “Urgent + Important”, but successful people will always think about the “Non-urgent + Important”.
The key word is “Understand, plan and execute” (UPE).
To plan well, you need to have clear vision of your purpose of life. For example, mine is:
- Spiritual fulfillment - because I feel it’s the only way I can get true happiness.
- Personal fulfillment and growth - because I want to improve as a human being both in knowledge and life wisdom
- Financial freedom for me and my family - because I want to be free of worries and concentrate on what I love doing instead
- Nurture young talents - because I just dislike seeing people living their life in such a stupid and sad way. I want everyone around me to be better.
You cannot have purpose of life without thinking. You need to constantly think over 5-10 years to know what’s important to you.To achieve 2-4, I need to first know that :
- - I am a professor
Then, here is what I can do in my circle of influence:
- Persuade my lab members to publish top-tier papers, so our lab is doing meaningful advancements to the world, not just graduation bullshit
- Advance my teaching to MIT/CMU/Standford level so my students can self study all top-tier papers and githubs
- Engage in industry by opening companies, so I can get two things: (1) projects to nurture my students, (2) money to provide financial freedom to me and lab members
Here is an example how I plan daily - I always give myself 1-2 hours free thinking time:
- Working on research guide and projects almost every day, constantly thinking what’s good direction for students and the lab
- Constantly refining and thinking about research process almost every day, so I can lead my lab to be top-tier nationally and internationally
- Taking notes how I can improve my NLP course next year and start discussing with TA
- Planning my ML course and jot down what I should do better this year
- For my companies, I am constantly thinking what’s blocking the acceleration of the plan, what my students don’t have / don’t understand, and try to read books or talk to other people to get advices
- For my companies, I am constantly thinking what products will bring us to success, and what products do not
- I am constantly reading books on communications and relationships and startups, because I know a geek/nerd like me have a lot of problems in this area, so I can be what I want myself to be.
TLDR: Try not to do things in the last minute. You can design your own life. This is a very powerful sentence. Design your own life. If you do not design, people will design for you. Do you want that?
TLDR2: Fate will control your life 30-40%, based on your past karma (it’s basically your DNA and your mother/dad that you got). 60-70% of your life depends on your present situation. Never blame anyone or environment. Help yourself first. Once you can stand firmly, start helping others.
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I am an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Information Management Program,