Life Goals
Twas a late night chit-chat when my friend asked me, what are your life goals. So here goes!
Develop and polish skills in field which I am interested in.
In many ways, life can be boring. In my nature which like to do things, I find great enjoyment and satisfaction from polishing skills and techniques in sports, music, and management. There is literally unlimited combination for you to change to polish your things. For sports, I had written an article on how much I love it and what makes it so exciting here: https://medium.com/@samueltjan94/about-me-1631f7738c9b
While sports is something that by and large becomes harder to do as you age, I think that music is always something that can be explored. Perhaps in my retirement I would like to go to a music school, studying blues and gospel music something like Sam Smith or fun classical songs like: Why am I blue, Light and Blue. Music touches me deeply, it is a source of consolation during hard times and a source of encouragement in the face of great challenge.
Management is an interest I developed during university time. I read many books about management and was fascinated by it because of how noble and critical it seems to me. I love reading cases and brainstorming ideas on how to tackle the problems. Recently I am slightly more focused towards financial management, which is something very critical to develop your wealth (which leads to financial freedom) while previously I had been reading about marketing, strategy and general management skill. My favourite book thus far is Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker, the father of modern management. He is a man beyond his time, full of great insights.
Having a meaningful career.
I think this one is quite common especially among millennials. Somehow our generation wants their career to not only provide for their living. Maybe this is also partially because I have always been a value-driven person. I had never really been one to care much about livelihood (maybe I should) and focuses more on my interests, how it will impact the society and reaching my fullest potential.
When I was in high school (or Junior College as we call it in Singapore), I loved Physics (and Basketball, but that is not so much of a career path for 1.76m Asian dude) because of how much value it could bring to society when applied and also General Papers because I like the deep underlying philosophical concepts about humankind. These two interests made me really want to study Industrial and Systems Engineering because it is a more generic engineering degree where I can get involved in management (something related to maximising human potential). However, I failed my interview to get the scholarship and instead got into Aerospace Engineering (More on this next time). Ultimately until now (1.5 years of working) I still strongly believe in how engineering adds value to society and would like to be more involved in management role.
Discovering and living by the truth.
Somehow I had always wonder about what is right and wrong, and I believed that there must be the ultimate truth in life. I still believe so but to a lesser scope. Now I believe there is an ultimate truth which encompasses the whole world, but there is a lot of freedom within that truth in the terms of life choices. What I mean is that there is ultimate underlying principles behind everything and that there are so many variables interacting on that principles which do not invalidate the principles themselves, but totally result in many different ways. For example, people have the freedom to pursue certain aspirations and prioritize accordingly: perhaps to be a basketball player or a musician or potentially both if you are a superb genius, the two are so called the right choices in accordance to certain principles such as talent, interest and livelihood. Another ultimate truth that I believe strongly is that the need of men for God (but that is for another story).
So those are my life goals, what are yours? Let me know below or send me an article about yours!
