2024 Weekly Journal 02

The week indeed passed quickly, and this Monday marks another three-day weekend in Japan, coupled with the Lunar New Year, creating a somewhat lazy feeling.

In recent counseling sessions, the counselor and I together established a new practice plan—aimed at preventing myself from being “startled” by others’ objections, I should speak up more in my daily life, making myself more accustomed to rejection or accepting different opinions.

Later, I came across an article discussing how women tend to use different contexts to describe things, and assertive communication styles in women are often perceived as too aggressive.

Being a woman in the workplace. More specifically, how assertive communication from women is often perceived as aggression. –Emily Pick

And I’ve written before, my Indian classmate directly said, “Your problem is not being assertive, you often say everything is fine.”

Assertive— decisive, overly confident. In Mandarin, these translations have a slightly negative connotation, but in the English context, it is a very positive personality trait, a manifestation of confidence.

Although I don’t think it’s a bad thing to say everything is fine, and I even think it’s a manifestation of strong empathy in some respects, during the counseling process, I also realized that indeed, to practice being rejected, I also need to practice pushing back. This is not to turn myself into an annoying person but to practice the process of being assertive.

I mentioned that I actually don’t care about most things, so if a waiter brings the wrong dish, I would first think if I ordered it wrong, and if the other party insists, I would just accept it and eat it. The counselor said, “Then start practicing now. Try saying, ‘The soup is too cold!’ How about that?”

We both laughed, and the reason it was funny is that this kind of thing really happens to me, but I never mind.

Also, this week, we finally found a place to live. It is said that the difficulty of foreigners finding a house has increased again. It used to be difficult to have a guarantor, and now, although a guarantee company can be used, it is still a bit unfriendly for foreigners who have just obtained a visa.

We were lucky to find a real estate agent who was very helpful in all aspects. He even managed to convince the management company to evaluate a house beyond my salary budget using only my own salary.

But this is also the first time I need to purchase home appliances and large furniture from start to finish, which is both interesting and stressful.

I once started writing about how my Swedish mother-in-law decorated the apartment with a perfect blend, turning an open space into a Nordic style. Her arrangements are both open and clever in storage, filled with items with an Oriental flavor but without any sense of barrier.

For this post, I even sketched the apartment, but later I found that I couldn’t integrate any principles, and I could only attribute everything to her personal talent.

How she manages to discover good things while window shopping, I still can’t learn it anyway.

(Perhaps I’m just not patient enough to do shopping…)

In terms of work, I feel anxious about my limited knowledge of data. Seeing the data graphs of my Stanford colleague made me willingly start to review the Python course that has been lying there for a year.

Although I should be able to accept continuous learning of new things now, the ambition of always forcing myself to compare with others is still unstoppable.

I might need to find a new entry point to slow down the pursuit of skills in my work. (Not stop completely but SLOW DOWN…) Even though it is generally beneficial for me, I also want to find time for knitting and binge watching dramas, without stressing myself out.

My another translated book has been published this week- “The Job Revolution in the AI-Generated Era.”

Recently, my self-developed product projects and full-time job have become overwelming to me, so my translation work may take a temporary pause for a while.

I cherish the time when I can translate freely and miss the translation process where my mind is clear of thoughts. However, I really need a bit more sleep, time for knitting and watching dramas (repeating it once again), and engaging in some genuinely useless activities, such as playing Royal Match 🤣.

I’m glad to have the opportunity to work on this book. With heavy use of AI in my recent work, I’m constantly exploring novel experiences with AI applications. This book serves as an excellent introductory guide, and reading it might reduce some anxiety about being replaced by AI.

My new translated book：The Job Revolution in the AI-Generated Era

In the end, I’ve started daily updates on Thread. Although this blog has provided me with a stable space for output and learning, I also want to get closer to the audience.

In the meantime, it’s a way to cultivate patience and see how long I can keep up with daily updates.

Feel free to find me there.