I'm finding it quite challenging to maintain momentum with my thesis lately. Externally, I'm facing a 5-month deadline, working part-time, recovering from a knee injury, and dealing with news about the war in my homeland, Iran. Internally, I've reached a point where external motivators have lost their effectiveness. I aim to cultivate intrinsic purpose to keep myself going. Over the past year, I haven't nurtured my internal desires and aspirations enough. Instead, I've become trapped in a cycle of fulfilling daily responsibilities and seeking dopamine-releasing activities in the evenings. For this reason, I’ve decided to introduce some transformation in my life, internally and also externally and write about them in this blog post.
First off, before going somewhere, I need to understand the internal state that I am at, then I need to picture where I want to go.
Internal state
I am relatively peaceful these days. Even though, there are some external situation such as my knee injury (that might take more than 6 months to heal), or the war in my home country Iran that might seems challenging, I don’t feel stress on a daily basis. Being meditative and the wisdom that I cultivated had a great impact on my emotional state compare to chronic depression that I experienced in my early 20s. However being peaceful doesn’t equal “perfectly in control”. I mean there is some friction between what I think I should do and what I actually do. That means that my body, habits or addiction sometimes take the wheel.
I’ll dive deeper into addiction in another blog post, but here’s the gist: for me, it’s all about tackling the root issue—getting comfortable with my emotions. I try to spend a little time each day just sitting with the urges and discomfort they stir up in my body. The goal? To feel okay doing nothing sometimes and creating some space between myself and my thoughts.
External state
To describe the external state I need to break it to different category:
1. Recovery from ACL injury
I will have a consistent PT to recover from the ACL injury that I writing about it here: My ACL recovery journey.
2. Thesis
I have officially 5 months to submit my master thesis. But I am planning to finish it in two months as I have started some of the work unofficially. I am going to write about this in My Thesis Journey.
3. Driving Licence
Even though I have the driving licence from Iran, this is not eligible in Germany. And to get one here, I need to invest a good amount of money and time. As there weren’t any English speaking driving school nearby I am about to make it bit challenging and prepare for the theoretical exam in German. That means I am planning to improve my German in parallel.
For this I will leverage ChatGPT to practice important words and phrases I need.
4. Work
I'm working remotely as a software developer for CheckMK. I spend about 20 hours a week tackling whatever ticket I pick up, always trying to improve and learn along the way. On the side, I’m planning to release a Python package when I can squeeze in some extra time. It’s a good balance between my main job and a little side hustle.
Basically, I want to get better at judging myself honestly and improving how I write and document stuff. My big goal is to smoothly switch from academia to industry while sharpening my skills to handle life more gracefully and effectively. By building wisdom, I hope to focus on what truly matters to me and make a real impact in those areas.