T + 5

What a day has it been. I messed up something at work, leading to 4 hours of damage control by several people across teams. And now most of the day tomorrow would go in restoring sanity so that rest of the team can get back to work. Needless to say, I haven’t had the chance to spend time on the piano today. But since I am writing, I will take this opportunity to discuss something else.

After I graduated from college, I realised how much free time I used to have there. And how much I could have done in that time. Taking piano, for example, if I had learnt during those four years, I would have been a decent player by the end of college. But I didn’t. So I started learning after college, but gave up soon. Then after a break of couple of years, started again, and gave up again. Now I wonder, what if I didn’t give. What if I had continued learning since the time I left college. It’s been six years. I would have been able to play pretty well by now.

This brings me to the realisation that for most things in life worth achieving, you need to look at least 5 years in the future, and think whether you would regret not starting to work on something from today onwards. Because that’s the least amount of time need to gain something which sets you apart from the crowd. If it takes any less effort than that, then probably a lot of people are already doing it. There are very few who persist with something for so long, unless they absolutely have to.

When I look at 5 years in the future, I want:

1. To be a good systems architect
2. To be a good pianist
3. To be good at machine learning
4. To have good knowledge about how various teams work in a company
5. To have good product ideas
6. To be able to write music
7. …

But to achieve all this, I need to start today. I don’t want to look back at T + 5 and wonder what I could have done, had I started learning these things in 2017.