@keni asked me in her post: 

“If you had to identify 3 skills you want to focus on in 2020, what would it be?”

Great question. Perfect for reflection at the end of the year. I think I’ll go with these 3 skills, for now. But who knows, things might unfold and change in the new year!

Product monetization

I seriously suck at this, and need to quickly get much better at it, if I want to have a shot at making a living as an indie maker. Like how I realised just recently that making something that someone would use is waaay different from making something that someone would willingly PAY for. I’d always had an aversion to selling and marketing, especially getting people to give me money. Looks like much of the subconscious and negative money narratives that I picked up from young still at play. Need to really work on untangling that, and also dig into monetization strategies, growth hacking, content marketing, building acquisition channels, marketing and conversion funnels!

Coding

Being able to make software from scratch is a superpower these days. And even though nocode is all the rage and I enjoy using it, there’s still limits to it, and use cases are contextual. Plain old code however, has (almost) no limits. Moreover, someone still needs to code those nocode tools, isn’t it? Like they say, during a gold rush, the one’s who sell the shovels are making the real money, not the gold diggers? In fact, sometimes nocode can feel like a distraction from learning to code (at least to me). It’s so easy to use and fast to launch, that I get tempted out of learning to code. So, in the next year, I definitely need to get back into more hardcore coding, like Rails, Javascript, Gatsby, React.

Listening to my body

This is the cumulation of all the lessons from my health issues the past few years. The body is my harshest teacher. And if only I listened better, I wouldn’t be worse off today. But I hear it loud and clear now. Recognising you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Sometimes I still forget, or get distracted or tempted by other voices in my head. The challenge is, the body always whispers first, and it’s hard to hear. And it keeps whispering, till you gave it enough critical mass of beatings. Then it screams. That’s when I suffer, bodily. Pain is the only way a body teaches. So, moving from recognising that the body whispers to fine-tuning my hearing sensitivity to my body would be a skill I want to focus on next year.