It’s May 6th here in Hong Kong International Airport, but it’s still May 5, Groundhog Resolutions Review Day back in Boston! I’ve got to board a flight to Taiwan in about an hour, so this will be a quick post. In summary, the last month saw the crumbling of my daily scheduled goal work and the discovery of live streaming as another way to motivate myself to work on tedious and time-consuming supporting tasks for my 2024 goals. The last post I wrote on the subject, Recovering from Goals Crashing does a pretty good job of summarizing what happened, so with that I’ll get on to a shortened version of the review and get us up-to-date.

But first: HAPPY BIRTHDAY DAD! May 5th happens to be Dad’s birthday as well as other fun holidays! Ok, on with the posting!

LAST MONTH

As I mentioned, I crashed my goal process last month, and have not been working on them very frequently. This is because I’ve been very pre-occupied by the Taiwan Trip for 2016, dealing with various childhood insecurities about not fitting-in to the culture or being able to speak/read the language. I was very sensitive to this as a child, and I’m still sensitive as an adult, but I’m learning to “not take things personally” in this regard. I think instead of thinking of myself as someone who has failed to adapt to my ethnic culture, I can think of myself as just being who I happen to be. By coincidence, this also was the theme of the movie Kung Fu Panda 3, which I watched along with Tomorrowland on the flight from Boston to Hong Kong. I’m still trying to think of a lesson to pull from Zoolander 2…maybe it’s just that it’s ok to be silly and make the movies you want to make…still working that one out!

Not working every day on goals allowed me to goof off more playing the game Rainbow Six: Seige with my cousins Jason and Brian. We have a Google Hangout set up where we can talk as we’re learning how to play the game, which is a squad-level counter-terrorist first-person shooter. I’ve put about 90 hours into the game over the past four weeks playing, and the night before I left we played one of the first scenarios that we’d failed at early on. To our surprise, it went very smoothly and we got through it without much problem. I think the lesson to pull from this is that practice and communication does really help mastery develop. We’re not competitive players yet, but it is heartening to see that we’ve all improved so much.

THE MONTH AHEAD

I’ll be in Taiwan for an entire month, picking up from last year’s trip by spending time with Dad. Hopefully this time I will muster the courage to start getting around by myself and develop some conversational fluency. A big block to that has been anxiety about appearing stupid or incompetent because I look Taiwanese but can’t speak or read it, and I worry about getting lost and being unable to find my way home. There were a few childhood incidents that have empowered the automatic fear response I have to such situations, but as an adult I should be able to rationally deal with worst-case scenarios and not expect the world to end. My friend Kayla says that I should think of it as an adventure, and my cousin Ben says I can just be an American tourist. So why not? That will be part of my project!

Another aspect of this trip is to test my digital nomad travel skills, figuring out a way to work on-the-road and be productive on my existing projects. How do I set up my own work boundaries? How will my daily schedule work?

There are also new skills to master, like “how do you meet new people as one travels, as an introvert?” How do I teach myself the language systematically? There are a million ways to do it; I just have to pick a few and shake-off the feeling that I’m screwing up and being deemed some kind of failure as an Asian American.

QUICK WRAP UP

That’s it for now…I’ve got to find my gate now. I might be offline for a couple of days as I get my bearings, but will likely post on my newly-reactivated Instagram account.