August Progress Recap

Yunzhe Zhou
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

“Cities are painted by our experiences, thoughts, the people there.”

This month, I was in Bali for a week and Shanghai for three weeks. On paper, it sounds amazing. In reality, the experience was quite mixed. In Bali, I experienced such a high — surfing gentle warm waves at sunset 🌊. And such a low — getting sick and not being able to eat for a couple of days, with effects lasting about 1–2 weeks carrying over into the Shanghai trip.

It’s the first time that I felt so sick and weak that taking steps to walk was really difficult. It’s also made me realize how lucky I am during the times that I am healthy, and being able to eat and having things to eat.

In essence, the simple things.

The things that are so ingrained into your life that you take for granted. Whether it’s good health, a clean place to live, or people who support you.

The last two months has also emotionally and physically drained me. I’m pretty happy to be back in the Bay area and getting back into a routine! During traveling, I’ve missed eating home cooked meals, meditating in the morning and stretching + dancing at night ✨.

High level overview:

  • Highlights: Spending a lot of time with my little brother (a 9th grader in a couple of days!) during our family trip to Shanghai. I’m really grateful for how close we are and how much closer we got whilst accumulating more inside jokes and keeping each other company on long subway rides + large family gatherings.
  • What could’ve been better: Creating a routine. Everything was out of schedule and last minute. It felt like I had no control over how my days were spent, and during the time I had control, I did not use it well.
  • August project: Unfinished. I kept on delaying looking up Jay Chou songs, because it was easier to look at other song lyrics instead on this new song app. Even though I studied other lyrics as well as started reading a Chinese novel, I’m not counting that towards the project because there wasn’t an element of habit creation or deliberate practice.
  • Major update: Language opens up worlds — feeling inspired and more confident in my Chinese speaking skills from mentoring at Meta School (summer program for Chinese students to learn critical life skills), I took more initiative in conversing with my extended family this time rather than staying quiet when I went back 6 years ago. It made such a huge difference! I got much closer with relatives, made friends with my cousins and it feels like a newfound discovery of a big family presence in the Shanghai area :)

Lessons

On life:

  • Discipline is a muscle — when you don’t practice it, you lose it. (as evidenced by my starting to work at 5pm in the first couple of days when I got back to the US).
  • In the amidst of darkness, at night, when there’s nothing else but you + your thoughts. Hard questions come up like: Are you happy with the life created? Are you happy with who you are? esp. when devoid of material possessions and superficial achievements.

On business:

  • When taking a look at ways in which people can find out about One Month Projects, I realized how sparse the places are. Finally realizing the importance of getting my material out there when before, all I wanted to do was focus on creating content for the sake of itself. But that’s like birthing a baby and not taking care of it when it’s born.
  • 1:1 coaching sessions feel so so fulfilling.

On careers:

  • You create the life you want to live. After a certain point, money doesn’t matter much. Then you think about: how much value am I creating? Questioning meaningfulness at the core of all of this (even though I know that there’s no meaning, we attribute meaning to things).

Favorite discovery:

  • I’ve always thought other languages felt like music to my ears. For the first time in my life, Chinese felt like such a beautiful language. And I’m really happy I feel this way.

Books I’m reading this month:

  • Moments We Shared: a short story in Chinese for written for those people who left us, those people who accompanied us, and the mountain and ocean in every person’s heart (←a direct translation)

Next month’s goals:

  • Connective experiences: reconnecting with friends + going down to South Bay 💕
  • Growthful impact: Dance is really dear to me, and it also feels scary to start again (what if I don’t remember anything? what if I regressed too much?).
  • Self-expression: Letting emotions come as the way they are and being fully expressive with how I feel (not exactly sure how to do that yet, so if you have any ideas, please let me know in the comments below)
  • Monthly project: Make a dance video each week to document progress, and practice + exercise at least 2 times a week. #processbasedgoals!

Thanks for reading! This is #14 of my monthly progress reports, as inspired by the One Month Projects program :)

Life Projects

Your life is your most important design project.

Yunzhe Zhou

Written by

Designing life through monthly action plans. For how you you can get started on a side project, get the toolkit here: bit.ly/12sideprojects ✨

Life Projects

Your life is your most important design project.

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