Urgent vs. Important?

Submitted by chaky on Mon, 05/13/2024 - 09:05

urgent-important

Most of us work on “Urgent + Important”, but successful people will always think about the “Non-urgent + Important”.

The key word is “Understand, plan and execute” (UPE).

To plan well, you need to have clear vision of your purpose of life.   For example, mine is:

  1. Spiritual fulfillment - because I feel it’s the only way I can get true happiness.
  2. Personal fulfillment and growth - because I want to improve as a human being both in knowledge and life wisdom
  3. Financial freedom for me and my family - because I want to be free of worries and concentrate on what I love doing instead
  4. Nurture young talents - because I just dislike seeing people living their life in such a stupid and sad way.   I want everyone around me to be better.

You cannot have purpose of life without thinking.   You need to constantly think over 5-10 years to know what’s important to you.To achieve 2-4, I need to first know that :

  • - I am a professor

Then, here is what I can do in my circle of influence:

  • Persuade my lab members to publish top-tier papers, so our lab is doing meaningful advancements to the world, not just graduation bullshit
  • Advance my teaching to MIT/CMU/Standford level so my students can self study all top-tier papers and githubs
  • Engage in industry by opening companies, so I can get two things:  (1) projects to nurture my students,  (2) money to provide financial freedom to me and lab members

Here is an example how I plan daily - I always give myself 1-2 hours free thinking time:

  •  Working on research guide and projects almost every day, constantly thinking what’s good direction for students and the lab
  • Constantly refining and thinking about research process almost every day, so I can lead my lab to be top-tier nationally and internationally
  • Taking notes how I can improve my NLP course next year and start discussing with TA
  • Planning my ML course and jot down what I should do better this year
  • For my companies, I am constantly thinking what’s blocking the acceleration of the plan,  what my students don’t have / don’t understand, and try to read books or talk to other people to get advices
  • For my companies, I am constantly thinking what products will bring us to success, and what products do not
  • I am constantly reading books on communications and relationships and startups,  because I know a geek/nerd like me have a lot of problems in this area, so I can be what I want myself to be.

TLDR:   Try not to do things in the last minute.   You can design your own life.  This is a very powerful sentence.   Design your own life.   If you do not design,  people will design for you.    Do you want that?

TLDR2:  Fate will control your life 30-40%, based on your past karma (it’s basically your DNA and your mother/dad that you got).  60-70% of your life depends on your present situation.   Never blame anyone or environment.  Help yourself first.   Once you can stand firmly, start helping others.