When the new year dawns, we all want to start fresh or revive our plans. A significant part of this is the new year's resolutions. While making a list and plan is easy, the secret to success is in the execution.
Ideas are as good as how much you can execute on those.
Whatever the resolutions for the new year are, it is a
clever idea to start with a review of what happened in the past year and what happened
to the past year's resolutions.
For me, 2022 was a success in terms of what I wanted to do.
I wanted to spend more time on myself, reading, planning, relaxing, and exercising.
All those plans were met to my satisfaction.
I spent a lot of time reading and reflecting on myself. And
that was extremely useful for recollecting and reflecting. The feeling of flow and transcendence
was great. I completed a bunch of books. I made many notes and made a lot of
enhancements to my lifestyle.
One of the key things that I adopted last year was to take
it slow. Spend more time on reflection and let go of the personal deadlines that I used to live by for many years. I made it feel timeless and did not
bother anymore about the clock or what day it is. This made a major change in
my life and reduced a lot in the level of stress I used to have.
In the middle of the year, I connected with the
Avinya Foundation. The reason I wanted to join was that I did not want to do
another job but wanted to align with my Ikigai of empowerment of people who need
it the most. Ironically, Avinya Foundation ended up naming the 6 months program
“Empower”, and I used to run a program named Empower after I left WSO2 in 2018.
With my personal Empower program, I reached more than 20,000 people on various
engagements to help enhance their lives. This includes leadership training, entrepreneurship
training, programs to help students with online learning with free data, free
books I wrote on growth subjects that I distributed free both in digital and printed
forms, and many more. If I look back and reflect on the impact I made, I am so
content and feel that I did something meaningful with my life post-WSO2 life.
Coming back to resolutions, my personal Empower programs did
not happen without planning or resolutions. I spent lots of time reading
material, driving around the country, collaborating with people, talking to
people, and understanding what they wanted and needed to improve their lives. The upliftment in average people’s lives would come not by
donating piecemeal material here and there to the less privileged but by educating
and empowering them to build themselves up. Education is a key part of this
empowerment. The other critical factor is opportunity.
When I set goals, targets,s and resolutions, I had to learn how
to make them objective rather than subjective. For example, how many do I want
to reach? How many lives do I want to inspire and connect with? The number-based approach
was helpful. I also used to have a plan for a million meals. With my work on
empowerment, how many people would be able to have how many meals? Being able
to be tangible about your resolutions and goals is a useful criterion to help make
sure you can gauge and see for yourself that you are making progress. Happiness is not countable or measurable. The impact is also hard to count or
measure. However, when you touch 1000 people vs 10,000 people, you know the impact
is not just a mere 10-fold multiplier. So, the numbers indicate the avalanche
effects, which lead to a greater feeling in life.
The first half of this year will be spent mostly on the inauguration
of Avinya Academy. We are getting 120 students. However, they will have a great
impact on society. And if we can scale this model as we are planning to,
there would be a much greater impact, and every year, we will be able to empower
at least 10% of the students who do O/L every year (that is nearly 30,000
students every year). This is a massive empowerment project, and I am so glad I am part of the team.
In addition, in 2023, I want to spend more time on
my Ikigai. While I have an overall idea of my Ikigai, I am still early in
the journey.
I also want to spend more time observing and studying the trends alongside the advances in AI and ML this year around technologies such as ChatGPT. In the last 6 months in my CTO role, I have been involved with many technologies, architecture, and programming models. I already see that tools such as GitHub Co-Pilot are making many of my software skills outdated and irrelevant. I also see that I can do 50% or more productive work with these tools as opposed to what I could do in the past. This also means I also do not want to hire those two additional engineers anymore that I would have hired without Co-Pilot. I also see that ChatGTP can do a far better job than some of the QA engineers, project managers, tech writers, and support engineers could do. In fact, I use ChatGPT to do lots of that rather than hire hands for me to do those. This indicates that the software engineering landscape is fast changing as never before. This will happen to other professions as well. As an educator of vocational IT, the other role I play in addition to my CTO role at Avinya, I want to develop a novel and advanced curriculum for the new breed of software professionals who are going to be empowered with all these latest intelligent tools. This would be far different and far better than the curriculums out there done by the institutes and courses.
While some people strive to understand and build AI, I think the
majority need to learn and learn fast how to effectively use AI for their
profession and career lives. I see from the CEO to the janitor, the jobs are going to
drastically evolve this year, thanks to tools such as ChatGPT. Buckle up
and get ready.
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