For some reason, I felt like writing a monthly summary for the month of January 2023. I‘m a little late for this, I hope the international monthly review committee will forgive me.
The month, overall
This month was a rough start to the year. A lot of exhausting stuff happened, most of which I do not want to write about in public. It‘s not so important what exactly happened though, but how I reacted to it. While I got stressed out by those things, I also worked on changing my attitude.
I noticed that these are rougher times, which was a good first step. Then I could take it as a chance to learn. This will not be the last time in my life I will be struggling. There certainly will be even tougher times in the future. So the least I can do is learn from it.
To be more concrete, I hope to learn to be more relaxed and think clearer in such situations, as well as not to fight it but accept it for what it is and deal with it.
Additionally, nothing is „only bad“. For example, I learned that my workplace is very supportive in those times, so this takes away a big burden for the next time things go horribly wrong: At least I know I‘m trusted to do my best and can take some time to deal with things.
The good stuff
While the month wasn‘t great overall, I still did some things I‘m proud of:
- I launched my new Website (this one)
- Went out to the city to do street photography for a few times and started an Instagram account to publish my pictures
- I made good progress on a new side project for using the Notion API as a CMS for a next.js page
- I read almost every day
- I did Journal every day this month (mostly just a few bullet points and some checkboxes checked, but I did it)
- I published 4 posts on this site if you count this one (I do)
Reading
I feel like for the time I put into reading, I did not finish much. However, I wanted to focus on reading more in terms of time and understanding than just quantity of books finished.
My RSS feed grew as well and I spent a lot of time reading blogs again. Feels nice that people go back more to writing on their own sites again.
Books
Finished The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
More or less a collection of tweets, excerpts from his blog posts and quotes from interviews with a little moderation in between. Very compact, not a lot of fluff. I read some reviews of people not liking this, but I prefer this style of writing to endless stories that have barely any information to it.
Started Letters from a Stoic & The rational optimist
Around the web
I guess that‘s it 🤷♂️.