~*~ Hung's Journal ~*~

⛰️ Một người nọ lên núi tìm đại sư để thỉnh giáo. Đại sư hỏi: "Có hai con quỷ muốn ăn thịt ngươi. Quỷ đỏ 👹 chỉ cần một mũi tên là bị tiêu diệt. Quỷ xanh 😈 cần tới tận hai mũi tên. Nhưng trong tay ngươi chỉ có hai mũi tên. Ngươi làm sao để sống sót?"

Người nọ nhìn thẳng vào mắt đại sư, gằn giọng nói: "Đơn giản thôi, tôi sẽ bắn con quỷ xanh một mũi trước. Mũi tên còn lại, kẻ nào dám tấn công tôi, tôi sẽ bắn kẻ đó!"

🎯 Khi bị dồn vào đường cùng với nguồn lực hạn hẹp, đừng cố tìm cách an toàn tuyệt đối. Hãy dùng đòn phủ đầu để răn đe kẻ mạnh nhất. Giữ lại con bài cuối cùng để kẻ thù khiếp sợ mà không manh động. 🛡️

Jeff Bezos was 30 when he founded Amazon; the next year, his parents invested about $245,000.

1. [LIFE] Be patient: most people (myself included) want immediate results, rewards, satisfaction. You are literally capable of achieving virtually any goal on a 1-2 year horizon. Play the long game. Do today what the "you" two years from now would want you to do.

2. [LIFE] Start small: habits are the key to behavior change that produces lasting results. Stick to the 2-minute rule: force yourself to start a habit with just 2-minutes a day, every day. Even if it feels useless - just do it.

3. [LIFE] Points #1 and #2 are my biggest takeaway from reading dozens of books. Don't fall in a "self-help" book spiral. It's a whole ass industry. It's mostly well-intentioned, but it can be easy to read too much and not DO enough. Don't let these resources become another thing you procrastinate.

4. [BODY] Physical wellness is foundational to all wellness. Focus on sleep. Go to the gym. Don't know what to do, or where to start? Pick 1 workout per day from here: https://musclewiki.com/

5. [MIND] Understand your mind and its weaknesses. You aren't special, we all fall victim to universal "thinking traps." Identify cognitive distortions and recognize how they can influence your thoughts, beliefs, and actions: https://ddlamm.itch.io/thinking-errors

6. [MIND] "You feel like shit. An interactive self-care guide": https://youfeellikeshit.com/

7. [MIND] Start a reflection / journaling habit today. There's so much evidence about the productivity and well-being benefits that it's cliché at this point. Remember what I said about #2? Start small - use this for 2-3 min daily reflections after work: https://blossom.team/ (note: reflection app is free but the coaching is paid $)

8. [WORK] There's no 1 "magic" solution to productivity and discipline. Try a bunch of different approaches and mix and match what works for you. Here's 11 techniques to experiment with: https://www.taskade.com/blog/supercharge-team-workflow-classic-productivity-methods

Source: I learned these after college from a now-lost post; not my original credit.

Big updates: I was admitted to the UT Austin MSAI program. Excited to keep building toward deeper AI systems and bring that momentum back into the projects here.

Hit some solid numbers this week. Tricep pushdowns at 80lbs x 5, lat pulldowns 175lbs x 3. The cut is going well — intermittent fasting is actually making me feel sharper in the morning sessions.

Also been grinding on the OMSCS application. Three years of production experience building cloud ETL pipelines should count for something, right? GCP, BigQuery, Dataflow... let's see if Georgia Tech agrees. 🤞

There's something about writing code at 2am with lo-fi playing in the background. The world is quiet, the terminal is humming, and Spring Boot is actually cooperating for once.

Working on a new data pipeline at work. Processing terabytes through BigQuery and Dataflow — it's like watching water flow through a river system. Each transformation is a bend in the stream. Maybe I need sleep...

There's a Vietnamese saying — "mưu sự tại nhân, thành sự tại thiên." We plan, but heaven decides. Doesn't mean we stop planning though. It means we plan harder, and hold the results loosely.

90-day cut plan is on track. The OMSCS apps are submitted. The code keeps shipping. Now we wait, and we keep grinding.