B-san's Blog

Hello everyone! And a happy new year to all!

Looking Back at the Last Year

2019 was a year of change for me. A year ago today, I was looking for a job. I had made up my mind to re-apply to Automattic as a Happiness Engineer, but was still learning all I could before I re-applied. I had been doing some renovations on my blog. And I had set a goal date as to when I would apply again. (You can read more about all that here: Bsans Blog 2.0 is here!)

I had around 15 people following my blog then – and I remember being blown away at how global the audience was! In 2018, I had viewers from 14 countries looking at my blog. It was a personal project, and I wasn’t trying to grow the audience. But the likes I would get on my posts was an encouragement to keep on doing what I was doing.

Fast forward a year to today. I now have a job at the company I was aiming for then. I have 86 followers who are reading my posts. And my audience now come from 56 countries. Wow!

2019 was a year of personal growth. The hardships along the way brought me to my knees, praying to God for His wisdom and direction. Looking back, I can see each event that happened in my life was for a purpose. The change of career path was the biggest decision I had to make, but it was also a year where I reevaluated my personal priorities, standards and goals for life.

Thoughts for the New Year

Growing up, my parents taught me to always choose the path that would leave me with the most opportunities in the future. That’s a very wise standard to live by while you’re young and enthusiastic. If I hadn’t chosen to live by that, I probably would have jumped at whatever opportunity came to me and felt “fun” at the moment – not thinking of the long-term percussions that decision would have. It was a good default thought pattern to fall back to when I really had no idea what I should do.

This year, my goal is to seek out and seize opportunities in life. Now that (I believe ?) I’m an adult, I want to grow away from the primarily responsive decision making I have had, to a primarily proactive one. My thought is, “Now that I have all these opportunities in front of me, which am I going to choose and explore?”

While in school, one’s life is sort of pre-decided for you, to an extent. There is a set time schedule (set by the schools) I must live by and fit my other activities around. (Having attended uni for 10 years, that pre-scheduled life lasted until just a couple of years ago!) Living at home, there is a community of parents and siblings I live in, which naturally puts some constraints on the freedom I have as an individual. (Again, this was the case for me until I got married just a few years ago.) And so until now, much of my decision making was done within these constraints. I would be put in a situation, and then asked to decide what to do from there – responsive decision making.

But now, I don’t have those constraints. Even the new company I work for puts very little constraints on me… (I sign up for hours I can work and then I am responsible to be there for those hours. How I learn and develop my professional skills is totally up to me, too!) I have been living my life up to this point to create maximum opportunities. And this year, I want to start selecting those opportunities and exploring what lies at the end – proactive decision making.

Wrapping Up

My core belief is that God has a plan and a purpose for me. Growing up, He would show me His plans partly through the constraints He would naturally place in my life. As those constraints are lifted, more freedom is given to me in my decision making, and I must seek His plans through other means. My strengths, my weaknesses, my likes, my dislikes, my experiences, my opportunities… how do those combine with the ultimate plan He has for me? That is what I look forward to exploring in the new year and sharing with you all!

Thanks for Reading!

P.S. One of my new year resolutions is to blog more frequently! No more 6-week intervals between posts, so stay tuned to read more about how my life goes this year ??