The Road to Self-Improvement

It’s been a while since I last posted. With twitter so popular, who actually blogs nowadays? No matter. It’s been a busy few weeks getting adjusted to my new life at FreshBooks. It’s been going well. Everyone is so very welcoming and brilliant, sometime, I feel like I’m the one with the least experience in the room compared to everyone else. It’s great though, to be feeding off the energy at work — there’s such a good vibe there, and no days are ever dull. Just take a look at the photo above for example. Who gets to sumo wrestle at work?

Adjusting to the working life has surprisingly been more difficult than expected. I’m constantly finding myself “bored” during the evenings. Not a good thing, bored means unproductive times, and unproductive at the age of 22 doesn’t sound at all appealing. I figured it’s time I started investing more time into self improvement, but I couldn’t quite think of a place to start. There are all sorts of things I could improve on, say, learn how to program again (learn a whole new language while I’m at it), but I almost fell backward on my butt from being dazed and confused when I went to the bookstore the other day trying to find a tutorial book. That’s just say there are a lot of books about programming out there.

Out of frustration, I went back to my favourite past-time — the piano, and started jamming. Half an hour into the session I tapped myself on my forehead and said “duh!”. Clearly, what I needed at the moment was not to learn a new set of skills, but to built upon what I already know, and I was already doing it for half an hour. I decided that for the next few months, my goal is to get my groove on the piano back. Learn a new challenging pieces and expand my repertoire, all the while research a bit into what I would like to work on non-musically.

So that’s the plan I stuck with. I ended up purchasing the “Kingdom Hearts Piano Collection” book (shipped all the way from Japan!). The pieces are quite challenging, yet fun, and will hopefully be enough for me to tackle for the next few months. Currently I’m working on the piece called Kairi. It seemed to be an intermediate piece out of the entire playlist, so I figure I’d start from there and see where it goes.

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Until then, if anyone has any great reads in terms of business and marketing, or any interesting reads in general, feel free to suggest them to me. I could use some guidance in picking out some books out of the millions in stores.