#70: 10 short lessons learned in life, in business & everything in between
Solve the problems in your head to win the ones in your life.
Around time last year, I became a mother for the first time. To say that it was the most challenging transformation I’ve ever had thus far is an huge understatement.
Transformations are these scattered moments in your life that define you, your character, your destiny and your future. It doesn’t happen often but once it does, its effects would be too remarkable, too great that there is a ‘before’ and there is an ‘after’. It’s a tectonic plate moment, or a series of moments to be more exact.
I spent the first year of my motherhood contemplating deeply on this. If I can turn this whole experience into a journey map, it would probably be the craziest—my own career map would like and feel like a breeze in comparison (it wasn’t a breeze).
Prior to all of this, I’ve done some fairly difficult things in my 30+ years of existence: quit my writing aspirations, nearly left the design industry, survived layoffs and personal financial uncertainties, joined brutal industries such as the advertising and tech startups, moved abroad, lost friends—I started from scratch on a lot of things. Every single one of those experiences transformed me. What’s even weird is that at that time, I had no idea, no clue on how much it’ll affect my future. I never saw anything coming, including the good things— especially the good things.
While the surprises were good and I was completely present in all of this, I started feeling like I missed an opportunity, which is to build a story, my story.
See when life happens, it is not enough to just be a passive observer like everyone else, otherwise you’ll miss it like I did. It will haunt you in the form of nostalgia and that’s not good. At least for one’s peace of mind, it’s not ideal. Instead, for me anyway, the best way to deal with transformations, the good and the bad kind, is to capture learnings and document them.
Writing about things not only keep your brains sharp but it also helps you clear your mind. I am a true believer of this since day one.
So, in line with that, I’m happy to share a shortlist of those learnings that I’m pretty comfortable sharing publicly. They are not written in order of importance:
Protect your time fiercely. In both personal and in business, say no a lot but leave room for surprises & luck. Pay attention to your energy.
Celebrate nerds, you as a nerd, other people as nerds. Nerds are the most interesting people you’ll ever meet.
Create an environment where good work happens, and happens often. 8 hours is too important to spend doing the work you hate or you perceive as useless. This is not about ‘passion’ or anything like that. It’s not even about loving work more than your personal life (that is also not healthy!). It’s about finding meaning to all the things you do and you pour your time/energy into.
Question a lot of what you do everyday, assess thoroughly every 3 months, and make necessary moves every 6. Remember that doing nothing counts as making a move for as long as you do so intentionally. We can’t control a lot of things but for the things we can, including our actions, attitudes and habits, we certainly should.
Execute on your experiments well but abandon boring ones often.
You always have time to read, no matter what Instagram parents say.
Behind every good thing is an uncomfortable trade off. Seek worthy discomforts. They can lead to things worth having.
Walking is the unspoken gateway to solving a lot of the problems in your head. (And eventually, in your life) Solve the problems in your head to win the ones in your life. Thank you, Stoicism.
The best way to address envy is action. Possibly the worst way? Instagram.
Parenting has a way of exposing all of your strengths… and all of your weaknesses. Self-reflection and self-development aren’t just a nice-to-have now. They’re essential to success, in life and business, in everything. This should be glaringly obvious but incredibly hard to pull off in real life: Don’t lose yourself, physically, mentally, emotionally etc.
I was still am, in a different way, a dreamer, undeniably so but even with my big hopes and an appetite for public displays of (now cringy) affection to my bucket lists such as this one—I just never saw any of this coming. My life now is so radically different than what it was a decade ago. If you were to tell me then that this is where life will take me, I would never have believed you.
And this is a good thing, a very good thing.
The gift of content creation
I’ve been writing on the internet for as long as I can remember. From the playful playground of geocities to the fast-lived but memorable vox, that in my opinion paved the way for Tumblr. I’ve seen it all. It’s the most natural thing in the world to me— sharing my thoughts & opinions publicly. I feel like it is an incredible gift to be able to do this, to get a lot of satisfaction and intrinsic motivation out of this.
Despite how “crowded” the internet may feel like, from a content creation POV,—especially with long form creative nonfiction writing—it is actually quite the opposite. Not a lot of people can do this, want to do this and most importantly, is even humble and brave enough to do this.
This alone gives me a lot of pride, in days where I feel like it’s all slipping away. I’m driven by a mission. In spite of constraints, I am compelled to carry on because I am convinced this will all lead to good things, as did most of the experiments I’ve done in my life.
This substack is not my first but it’s the first one that truly feels like it mattered. My words, matter. I am grateful to you, my readers, for sticking with me. You have no idea of how much this all means to me.
Thank you for being here today.
Nikki
Worth sharing:
Amy Santee is giving a talk/Q&A about Designing Your UX Job Search Strategy with UXPA-New Jersey. Don’t miss it, she’s awesome!
For the intellectually curious creatives and makers, Ten Bullets - For The Obsessed 🏴
Writing to think from FS - great as always
30 Useful Principles (Autumn 2023) from
The most important skill in the 21st century from
- don’t let the clickbait-y title fool you, this is a good stuff, highly original and thoughtful piece of workTech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster from
- BRILLIANT, made me think for days
A raw, unedited note from my private notes:
From September 31 2023:
‘I like books that give me permission to do things, to start things. Not that I need it.
As someone who has always been a reluctant creator of anything, writing has always been and always will be the fuel and the source of my drive to a lot of my work. It’s the strongest medium my brain responds to.’