End of Year Review 2023

At the start of 2023, I wrote this in my journal that…

I’d be more focused on creating than consuming

It pretty much summarised what I’ve been doing (or, trying hard to do) throughout this year.

Tim Ferris has a strategy called “Past Year Review“. Instead of setting new year resolutions, a past year review involves looking through the past year’s calendar, writing down the activities that make you feel ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. Your only goal is maximising the ‘positive’ activies and minimising the ‘negative’ ones in the upcoming new year.

From my own review in 2022, I knew that I’m the happiest when I do activites such as learning and creating things on my own. Thus, in 2023, I spent more time on writing codes, learning by doing and working on new projects, than just reading and watching tutorials.

Books I’ve read

Chinese

  1. 一個瑜伽行者的自傳 Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
  2. 兩種心靈 Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry by Tanya Luhrmann
  3. 萬萬沒想到 by 萬維鋼
  4. 科技想要什麼 What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
  5. 洞悉市場的人 The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman
  6. 無住之島 : 給臺灣青年世代居住正義的出路 by 廖庭輝
  7. 在大腦外思考 The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul
  8. 當大腦開始崩壞 In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer’s by Joseph Jebelli
  9. 化學課 Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
  10. 機器如我 人類如你 Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
  11. 踏實感的練習 The Practice of Groundedness： A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds–Not Crushes–Your Soul by Brad Stulberg

English

  1. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
  2. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
  3. $100M Offers by Alex Hormozi
  4. $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi
  5. Digital Millionaire Secret by Dan Henry
  6. The Great Rat Race Escaped by M.J. DeMarco
  7. The $1,000,000 Web Designer Guide by Rob Anthony O’Rourke
  8. 10 Pillars of Wealth by Alex Becker
  9. DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson
  10. Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson
  11. The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson
  12. Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz
  13. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
  14. My Inventions and Other Writings by Nikola Tesla
  15. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

Things I’ve Created

Web Development

  1. 找室友 HiRoommates – A housing platform, been working on this project since late December 2022. The first version of the website was published in January 2023. I’ve added functionalities like “591 Scraper”, “Map” view and “LineBot” service during February to April. The platform was left untouch after August since I didn’t have spare time to work on it. The website was created using Next.js.
  2. 吃貨 Eaters – Data curated from google map, a platform that shows information for restaurants and cafes in Taiwan. The site was done in June and July, and remained untouch after that. The performance was, surprisingly, getting better and better after a few months. There’re around 100 people visting the site per day. The website was created using Astro.
  3. GoalFish – Just a hobby project, practicing AWS SES (Simple Email Service). The site was abandoned after completed in February
  4. A landing page made for a client in February

Projects

  1. Learned Arduino, and used NodeMCU to build a automatic cat feeder
  2. A WordPress based website selling historical futures price – – The website was up in late February, but the first sale came in November lol. I’ve never thought about selling the historical price as product before, I was just luckily figuring out a way to scrpe valuable data at the time.
  3. In May/June, I fall into this “Digital Real Estate” rabbit hole. At the time, autoblogging using AI was a hot topic.
    • So I’ve started two blogs with purely AI-generated content. One with the topic in international students studying in the Netherlands, another one in spirituality.
    • The spirituality blog ended up turning into an Instagram account with AI generated content. I was curious to see if I can intentionally grow an account from scratch.
    • The spirituality Instagram account then turned into a business idea – starting a website course teachs people in this domain how to make a website for their business. (See point 4)
  4. My website online course – I started the course pre-sale in August, and aimed to release the course in late September. In total, I’ve made over 20 sales for the website course.
  5. Joined a cheminformatics releted open source project in November. I started to learn things from my mentor in cheminformatics.
    • Curated a list of new psychoactive substances from EU and converted them into SMILES format. It was planned to then utilise RNN to predict new substances. But the project was put on hold since my mentor and I were working on the LLMs.
    • I’ve learned how to use LangChain, OpenAI, ChromaDB, Chainlit…etc to build an application to train documents and let the language model be able to answer things on the information they trained on.
  6. Made a telegram reminder bot to remind myself all the deadlines from school.
  7. I was still in the middle of developing a machine learning model for my day job. The ML project started from September, it’s been three months.
  8. Pei in Progress youtube channel
    • Upload videos weekly
    • I want to document everything in my life until I reach the “freedoms”

Articles

Would like to write more stuff next year, especially tutorials. Also, I’d like to be more consistent in publishing posts/newsletter for my business EgoTree.

Major events

  • Jan – Moved back home to my parents’
  • April – Dad got diagnosed with cancer
  • May – The whole family moved from north to south of Taiwan
  • June – Started a Youtube Channel
  • August –
    • Broke up – the 1.5 year of relationship has came to an end
    • I moved abroad to the Netherlands to study chemistry
  • September – Changed my full-time day job ro part-time
  • November –
    • I joined an open-source project “Global-Chem” and started learning cheminformatics
    • I started volunteering in OPEN foundation

Reflect on Work and Life

  • Working as a commodity data analyst
    • I’ve been in this company for 4 years. Wow. I’ve never thought I would be in the same company/position for so long. My favourite part of the job is I can work remotely. Plus I have a very supportive boss.
    • The job is the main source of my income. Which, was something I really wanted to change at the beginning of the year.
  • Working on a few side hustles
    • Started a few “Digital Real Estate” (eg. HiRoommates, Eaters) with the aim that one day I can monetise the platforms to have income. But up until this point, nothing. (Good thing is, I paid nothing for hosting these websites)
    • Tried to sell a few digital products (like ebooks, price data… etc) and even dropship. But none of them made it.
    • Freelanced and made websites for clients. A good price, given I didn’t have to do much works. But it’s not significant.
    • Made an website online course and had 20+ students. The performance was not too bad. But the income was not significant enough to replace my job.
  • Bad habits
    • Not exercise regularly
    • Have too much sugary snacks
    • Too much screentime
    • Too late for bed (partly due to too much screentime)
  • Good habits
    • Walk more
    • Journal
      • Though not everyday, at least three times a week
    • Weekly reflections
      • School, Life and Work
    • Record day-to-day life in an Excel sheet
      • A good way to keep track of everything I do everyday

Health is a part that I neglected the most in 2023. In general, I had a very low energy level, didn’t feel much rested every day. I ate too much snacks, mostly because being stressed about projects and deadlines. I’ve noticed that I tend to get junk food when I need to do something that was not completely enjoyable. The same situation applied to the screentime. I reached out to instant gratifications while avoiding tasks.

Recording day-to-day life in an Excel sheet and Journaling are two habits that I have had for a long time. They turned into something like brushing my teeth before bed, a habit that I would never ‘not-doing’.

Improvements for 2024

Habits

  • Be more physically active
    • Walk at least 30 minutes per day, 5 times per week
    • At home weight training 3 times per week
  • Consistent sleep schedule
    • Wind down from 10pm, bed at 11pm
    • At least 8 hours of sleep
    • Replace digital device with paperback books for bedtime reading
  • Spend more time reading
    • Follow the tips from Naval
    • At least 30 mins per day
    • Read great books, read multiple books, quit books that I don’t enjoy

Actions

  • Have at least one conversation every month with strangers, discussing ideas, similar interests, industries…etc
  • Write at least one piece of content for either EgoTree posts/newsletter, blog or tutorial

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