Yesterday, I updated my page about my project Timelines that tried to recap some things I did manage to do in the non-trivial amount of time I spent on it, despite giving up eventually.

This morning I announced that I’ll be stepping down from the co-president role at UBC Launch Pad after finally getting it following several years as a lead in the club. Funny because not too long ago I wrote a rather optimistic post about Launch Pad, and now I’m stepping away from it for the foreseeable future.

There’s a term I learned during my time with Riot Games: bandwidth. Up until recently I haven’t really considered this an issue - I was certain I would have the bandwidth for everything I wanted to do, everything I wanted to learn. It has been taking a bit of a toll, and I think I’ve found the reach of my bandwidth this summer. There’s a lot I want to explore, and I probably need to manage my time better.

The matter of giving up is something I’ve found myself becoming more and more okay with - on a interpersonal level, on things like side projects and extracurricular involvements, and in a professional setting. I sometimes have a fear that doing things and giving up on them is a waste of my time - for example, I hear about students kicking off startups that become successful, or building stuff that gets a lot of attention, in a way that makes me wonder if I should have been putting my efforts into things like that. But giving up doesn’t mean undoing everything you’ve achieved - it’s a bit of a reprioritization, maybe temporary and maybe not, that takes the things you’ve learned and accomplished to make your next endeavour more successful. I’ve grown and learned so much during my time with Launch Pad and my work on Timelines for example (and in hindsight every project I’ve worked on) that has helped make me the engineer and person I am today that I don’t care that I’ve given up on some things in a way might make my work a “waste of time” - if I had to do it all again, I would.

So here’s to the next big things, and more lessons learned.