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Year 22

This week is fitting to be my first official blog-style post on this new website as I celebrated my 22nd birthday this past Tuesday. I feel that this next year will have a lot of changes for me. I have developed a tremendous amount these last 12 months, and thinking of how much I know now, and what my expectations for the year were a year ago really puts it all in perspective. A year ago this week I celebrated my 21st birthday on Super Bowl Sunday with no thoughts of a global pandemic or taking a gap year. It is fitting that my first weekly post on this blog lands on Super Bowl Sunday as well. A year ago today I was not yet the President of an eating club, knew significantly less about the stock market, and had not really read a book cover to cover in nearly a decade. Now I am a day away from running for re-election, have had almost a year of learning about markets through an extended internship, and have read nearly 50 books. 

Life Updates

This past Tuesday I celebrated my birthday, and it did in fact occur to me that I was turning 22 on Tuesday 2/2. This week I also conducted a virtual bicker process for my eating club, the first such process for which I was on the administrative side. As for my professional development, I was able to make some new connections with professionals in a few different industries. Now I have an exciting week ahead of me with a lot of potential for change and growth. I will wait until next week to discuss what I mean but compared to a week where I was largely snowed in, unable to even go to the gym, this next week has a lot of promise to shake me out of the routine I have gotten into. I feel I have mentally been tethered to NJ due to some eating club-related activities that will be handled come Monday. I am hoping that after this next week my life will transition to making more memories and taking advantage of the unique situation I have for the next several months.

Books/Podcast

This week I read Good to Great, Thinking in Bets, The Tipping Point, and Flash Boys. Those four books were completed over just 5 days as I had a lot of time stuck inside. I very much enjoyed each book, and am excited for some of the other books I have on deck for the coming weeks. Thinking in Bets I think was my favorite of the four. I was anticipating enjoying it as Annie Duke spoke of the book on the primary podcast I have been listening to. Speaking of the podcast, this past week I also broke into 2020 for episodes of TIP's We Study Billionaires. After Christmas of 2020, I started on episode 1 that was released in mid-2014, and have listened to just about 300 episodes that they have put out weekly over the past 6 or so years in which they discuss market conditions, various books, and different investing concepts. I was excited to catch up to a place where I have actually been actively following the market as I was this past year. I have learned a tremendous amount from the podcast directly, but also through the myriad of resources that they link to. I am excited to discover different podcasts over the next couple of months as I will definitely need a filler to listen to on long drives or trips to the grocery store.

Gratitude

This is my first ever gratitude post, so I am not really sure how I want to structure it. I did not want this to be something that I do daily because I did not want to force myself to come up with things if nothing specific was on my mind. I feel I would just default to more general things, and so the weekly structure would give me enough specific examples to discuss. As this is my first post and I am not restricted to the most recent week, I think I will take advantage of the limitlessness. The absolute biggest thing I am thankful for is the ability I have had to take this gap year. I know that it came about due to a pandemic, which was something I was extremely upset about for disrupting a lot of the plans which at the time seemed important to me. The number of opportunities that have come about since March of last year has been many and varied.

To start, I was able to get the internship for which I am still doing work for. I was confronted with numerous challenges in running my eating club that would not come about in any other circumstance and which have helped me develop my leadership skills. I was able to make and develop relationships with a number of people whom I would not have been able to otherwise. I found myself trapped in a sort of cycle of focusing on athletics and academics, really moving week to week, and not thinking of the bigger picture. Taking some time away and having the ability to step back has made me reevaluate a lot of the decisions I was making of how to spend my time. The knowledge and perspective I have gained in the last 6 months alone I believe has changed the course of my life. 

I know there are countless things that I could mention in my first gratitude post, especially with such a general frame not isolated to the past week. I could talk about how thankful I am for my friends, family, health, and all of the privileges I have been given in my life in the form of opportunities through academics, athletics, and my social life. I think those things will definitely materialize in future gratitude posts, but I would rather them come from specific instances in which I was forced to think about how fortunate I am for those more general concepts. I think being able to take something that was very negative close up, and then view it from a broader lens and seeing some of the good that has come about will help me in my life to handle adversity. I now have first-hand experience learning that sometimes what might seem to derail your life at one time could really be setting you on the right track.

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