Month: December 2018

In Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, houses play a central role.

There’s the protagonist’s own home, the setting for his separation with his wife. Murakami uses this house to explore the protaganist’s evolving emotions about his marriage.

The protagonist then moves to a rural mountaintop village. He occupies the vacant house of a deceased famous artist. He discovers the artist’s secret work, Killing Commendatore. That house and painting remains the principal setting for the rest of the novel.

There’s also a Jay Gatsby-like character. He lives in a huge, beautiful mansion across the valley from where the protagonist is staying. This mysterious mansion is a key plot device in the story.

In the novel, each house represents something that was lost. The houses reflect their inhabitants’ lives and stories. It channels the charaters’ emotions as they search for meaning in their lives. (The grand theme of all Murakami novels). As the characters interact, they experience different expressions of the houses.

This week, I encountered that for myself.

I stayed in my in-laws’ for two nights this week. Both nights, I worked late, typing and scribbling away as dawn beckoned. Sitting in the living room alone, I felt like an unannounced guest borrowing the place. Like someone who pops into a neighbourhood hotel lobby to use the wifi.

My parents were traveling in Shanghai. One night I stopped by my parents’ house at 10pm to borrow my dad’s car. I had spent twenty years growing up in this house. The house was dark and quiet, no signs of life. The house was on hold, paused while its inhabitants were away. I moved out two years ago. The house had wiped all traces of my presence. It had no space left for me.

On Wednesday, I spent a night in my own house. My wife and daughters stayed put at my in-laws’. The condo was quiet, lacking its usual inhabitants. There’s something unsettling about entering a quiet empty house, especially at night. Like I’m intruding, disturbing the peace. Without my family, it doesn’t feel like my own house. It looks the same, but feels less solid. Like an alternate reality inside a mirror world.

Last Saturday was Winter Solstice. A big day for the Chinese. I spent it with my grandma. My father built three houses next to each other. My grandma stayed in one and we stayed in another. It’s a big and empty house. It was built to house a new generation of memories. But it housed empty artifacts and dust for more than 300 days a year. Meanwhile, old memories disappeared. They aged and rotted along with the hardwood timber frames at my grandpa’s old shophouse. Chipped away by weather and termites.

As an architect and builder, we only ever provide up to half of the complete picture. An empty container, like Tupperware made of bricks and concrete. People fill in contents and change the container forever. Gives it a patina of human connection and individual meaning.

Why did early AirBnb users prefer staying in strangers’ houses? Before the explosion in cookie-cutter instagram designs and professional property managers. Is everyone so lonely, craving for the chance to glimpse into the window of another soul? Searching for a human connection in this ocean of manufactured modernity?

 

There’s nothing like real pain to make you reflect on your mistakes and wise up. We raised five hundred thousand ringgit in debt October 2016 to grow our business. 

In the months that followed, we made all the standard business mistakes and more. The upshot of it was that, by June 2018, all the money was long gone. The business that resulted is not big enough to service the debt when it comes due. The time left to grow our business to the required level is running short.

What followed was a period of demotivation and deceleration. It added a significant amount of stress and pressure on to us. Towards the end of June we welcomed a second child to our family. That drove it home to me that we had to change and change fast.

I believed we screwed up because we had poor work habits, processes and systems. Habits appeared to be the limiting factor. The fundamental unit underpinning both processes and systems. If you have poor habits, you have poor everything else. So I started by fixing that.

Changing habits is a long process. It may take years or more before it becomes a part of you. But the key thing to remember is that results take much faster to materialise. It will take years before it becomes second nature to prioritise important tasks. But the benefits appear in weeks and months. 

One thing that has struck me is that you can’t solve today’s problems today. Today’s problems are a result and consequences of actions in the past. Since the causes are in the past, there is no way to fix today’s problems without inventing time travel.

What you can do today, is to change your future. What you do today will not solve today’s problems, but it will affect your life a few years down the road.

For example, maybe you are struggling financially. You could use an increase in your salary. But your current job and pay grade is a result and consequence of decisions in your past. Decisions resulting in your current network, education history, previous experience, et cetera. 

There is almost nothing legal and ethical that you can do today that increases your income now. But you can do a lot today to increase your future income.

Put another way, what you do today will affect your life three years down the road. Whether you think about it or not. Whether you care about it or not. Whether you want it or not. Whether if you’re even aware of it or not. 

Seen this way, it’s only common sense to invest the time and effort to do the right thing today. It may seem like just another day, another 24 hours. But this 24 hours will compound. Your future you will either thank you or hate you for it.

Hence my commitment to changing my habits. My belief is that only with good habits can we create better systems and better processes. That, in turn, will allow us to make the right decisions. And over time, the right decisions will create the desired results.

What is the right thing you should do today?

I was feeling pretty demotivated and down when I wrote yesterday’s post. Seeing that I wrote it at 3am, and that the post started with “I couldn’t sleep”, you might have figured that out.

Writing always calms me down. After getting it off my chest, I felt good enough to go to sleep. (I was quite wired and buzzed before that, with caffeine, stress and adrenaline).

When I woke up today, I was still feeling demotivated. I spent the first hour of my day editing yesterday’s post. Over breakfast, I finished reading Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout. And then I summarised the last two books I had read in my Bullet Journal. Positioning was one of them, finished minutes ago. The other was Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. Both great books packed with insights and good advice. I learned a lot while reading them. During the journaling I scanned through both books again. I wrote short notes on everything I thought was interesting.

I read that many people take handwritten notes not to refer to them later, but to remember them better. That’s exactly what I do. I have been taking notes forever that I never refer to, starting from preparing for high school exams. But the act of writing them down by hand leaves strong impressions in my memory. Also I write them in my own shortform sentences. It doesn’t always make sense but it’s okay because nobody reads them, least of all me. Before I can write anything down, I have to understand the concept in my mind. I do a lot of my learning this way. 

After all that, I went out for a work-related errand. Bought a coffee on the way back. By the time I was ready to start doing “real work”, it was already sunset.

But doing all the writing and journaling put me at ease. I had calmed down. Stopped feeling so out of control. I was ready to put in some serious work.

We had an early dinner. Then I spent the next five hours in a productive marathon work session. I stopped for several minutes-long breaks play-breaks with my daughters. 

My early posts talked about which habits I chose to incorporate and why. I never got around to Habit 3, which was to post four blog posts a month on this website. The objective of the habit was to get me writing on a consistent schedule.

And the above story illustrates the power of writing for me.

Another 3am night. Can’t sleep. On July 1, 2018 I started a journey to reset my life. The 18 months prior to that had been extremely tough. I was struggling, but I kept it from everyone else. Only my wife knew, and her sacrifice was bigger.

My strategy to get things on the right track was to replace bad habits with good ones. I took pains to track the habit changes as best as I can. It went well for the first four months. As the initial positivity boost wore off, it got harder to stick to the new routines. The low-hanging fruit was gone. It was getting harder to see the effects of my efforts.

As I tackled the harder obstacles we were facing, I could see the bad habits relapsing. Data doesn’t lie. I continued to track every day. Patterns of habit relapse correlated with general challenge indicators.