A year of embracing curiosity & intentionality
About a year ago, I stumbled on a wonderful developer portfolio, kg.dev, and one of their posts really stood out to me. In the post "Year of embracing curiosity", Kash talks about setting a theme for the year, instead of a list of goals. After trying this for a year, I'm eager to do it again for 2026. So, for this year, I'm going to be embracing curiosity and intentionality.
2025: Do the hard thing
Inspired by Kash's post, I set out to create my own theme for the year of 2025. As 2024 came to a close, I was just wrapping up my Bachelor's degree in computer science, and was feeling incredibly anxious and overwhelmed with the job market. I wanted something to keep me motivated, a single axiom to try my best to stick to.
Thus, I set out to do the hard thing for a year.
To me, this meant when presented with two options, I would choose the one that would get me out of my comfort zone. It helped be the little push I needed, like applying for jobs even when it felt hopeless, or going out with friends when I felt like staying home.
Even though it's such a simple principle, I love that it got me to spend more time with friends and loved ones. My hard work paid off applying for jobs too, and at the time of writing, I've been working for 6 months, and love the work I do!
I feel like my 2025 was a little bit more lived, and I'm thankful for the memories I made instead of forging forgotten moments.
2026: Embracing Curiosity & Intentionality
After some reflection of the past year, and my hopes for the upcoming year, I want to focus on curiosity and intentionality. It's kind of a two-parter, and I kept toggling back and forth between the two. Together though, I think they're a powerful combination.
Curiosity
I feel like I am a very curious person, but I also find myself limiting some of my curiosity with phrases like "that would be a waste of time to learn", or "it would be better if I learned X instead of Y because that's more 'valuable'".
So, I really want to shed the ego and detach thoughts of "value" from what I learn, as I think learning about anything has some sort of value to it.
As an example, everything I do programming-wise nowadays could be double-dipped. I could do a project that hits all of these points:
- Have fun!
- Makes me money
- Builds my skillset
- Expands my client portfolio
- Pads my development portfolio / resume
- Gives me an ego boost (if it's challenging)
- Grants me a little bit of recognition (even if minute)
As a result, I find myself often trying to do a project that does actually hit all of those points. But, because those projects are intensive, it ends up losing the fun aspect, becomes a chore, or just never gets finished.
When I was younger, programming was just something I loved to do. I would make projects like a voice activated assistant that would generate an outfit for me to wear, or programming games in Pygame.
I still love to code, but having the ability to do more impactful projects has sucked a lot of the joy out of projects for me. Moving forward, I want to fully embrace doing things just for the sake of doing them. For example, my pizza tracker site which was quick, fun, and impactful.
Part of embracing curiosity means to just do something solely because I like it, and knowing that that is a sufficient reason to pursue it.
Intentionality
To me, intentionality means that when it comes time to doing a thing, I want to give it my all. Whether that be talking with a friend, programming, reading a book, or learning a new language, I want to fully be there in that moment and giving it my full attention.
I've come to notice that so much of my day to day life is completely ephemeral; so easily forgotten. The daily bus rides. Cooking dinner. My morning routine. My mid-day walk. My attention is so often split: thinking about a project while talking to someone, the urge to check my phone while working, scrolling instead of doing the thing I spent all day looking forward to, or listening to an audiobook while cooking (and ultimately only being half-there for both mediums).
I don't seek to cut all of this out, as I feel that to be an unrealistic expectation for myself. Instead, I want to do more things with intention. For example deciding what to do on my computer before turning it on, carving out time to do nothing but read a book, or focus solely on writing down a thought.
Essentially, I want to live less distracted, embracing the mundane, and being mindful of the moment.
Putting it all Together
I want to focus on a few items that I think will be fun! These are just a few tidbits, and I'm not dead-set on finishing any of them (the beauty of theme over goals!):
- Learning Latin: I've read a few books that are heavily inspired by Rome, and the history behind it all is fascinating. I'd love to be able to learn some Latin and enjoy learning about the history behind it as well!
- Origami: After discovering Origami tesselations, I knew I had to give this a go. It's something for my hands to work on and keep my mind busy with the process.
- Rubik's cube algorithms: I've already got most of the final layer algorithms memorized, but a few keep slipping my mind. I want to keep up with the learning and maybe even get down to an average of 15 seconds by the end of the year!
- Writing: So many things to write about, and yet I find it so hard to do so. Just want to put some time into working that writing muscle in my brain. This includes blog posts, journaling, short stories, or poetry. Any writing is good writing!
- Web Projects: I really want to make a website all about time and death inspired by "Memento mori". You plug your birthday in and I do some math and as you scroll you see your lifespan.
- SELF-HOSTING: I'm so excited for this one! At the time of writing I finally spun a VPS last weekend and have already started hosting my own websites. Going to learn as much as I can in this regard, and I'm already planning on turning my old laptop into a home media server with NixOS. Can't wait to see what I come up with and learn along the way! Surely I'll do some blog posts about this ...