Daily Blog for today and yesterday 6/20/24

Sorry for the improper title notation, wanted to get this out before I sleep. I've been hihgly critical of myself this week and not without proper reason. My productivity is slowing down and I'm not learning as many technical skills as I want, which is making me feel agitated because I want this summer to be my catch up period. Onto actual business.

These past two days, I've been working on two mini papers. The first is an overview on market shock therapy and the failability of economists and the second is about metrics and what we should keep in mind about it. I don't think these will be done until this next week because I want these papers to be good. I want them to be long enough to encapsulate my full thoughts and I want those thoughts to be original thoughts. I want these papers to be substantive pieces, not fluff pieces, which is why I'm taking my time with them.

I'm continuing to learn more about statisitics and have gotten past the first two chapters of my statistics textbook. I've had a blast using demorgan's laws to find probabilites as well as utilizing the fact that probabilites go from 0-1. Math textbooks are always a joy to go through as all you need is in the textbook, but a surface lookthrough gives you nothing you need for the problems.

I'm reading more about past economic events, with two books from Barry Eichgreen. The first being a book about the financial crisis in South Korea and how they handled it, and the second one being an analysis on South American banking. I like these types of books as they provide a different level of analysis and help me get a better feel for how I want my own research to look like.

Onto my own personal feelings about growth.

Not to discredit my growth, but I feel like I've been a bad student these past 3 years and that I've been a passive participant in my own life. I feel like that I was expecting that I'll learn these things naturally, which is I want to change and am in the process of changing. I've struggled this past year immensely and have learned so much about myself and how to learn, but not without incredible low periods where I feel like I've sabatoged my GPA. I don't want to put too much stock into my GPA as I think it's only one metric of success and only one way to tell a story, but I don't have much to show in terms of actual hard skills from my past three years of college. I've grown and matured as a human being and my general skills of analysis have grown significantly, but I'm not able to translate that gift into more producive avenues.

These things take time however, and I can't increase the rate of my personal growth with the same ease that one does with the rate of tap water. In terms of habits, I've gotten much better. I start my day much earlier and I get more accomplished each day. I'm learning to allocate my time more efficiently and to make my learning more efficient. I'm starting a process that will span my entire life and I want to be able to enjoy that I'm starting, but the feeling that I should've done this earlier persists. This will take time, and I think the feeling will leave once I've accomplished more substantial things. I'm getting better at learning things, and my hope is that the more that I learn, the better (and hopefully faster) I get at it.