Two valuable skills which took me years to perform well

Priority setting

Priority setting is the process of determining which tasks are most important. While it's not hard to be busy and crank out the tasks on my to-do list, it's difficult to choose to do the important things - to live my life by priorities.

Compared to some suggestions of setting daily priorities, I consider a long term target to be more important and useful. First, a long term target can help us focus and achieve a not easy target during a long time. Second, with a long term target in mind, it is easy and natural to know what I need to do in a daily base. For example, when I entered financial engineering program at the University of Illinois, I set my first semester’s target to be building knowledge base of quantitative finance. This easily led me to focus on my coursework and FRM exam every day during that semester.

The other important thing in priority setting is throwing away those unimportant work. If we spend too much energy on those unimportant activities, we will have less time to finish those important ones.

Emotion control

Emotion control is the ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks like thinking and problems solving. Every person may face some unwanted situations and have unhappy mood. We do need an effective method to handle these situations to make us happy again.

I do think looking forward and always asking myself “what should I do now?” to be useful for me to recover from a bad mood and start to act.

The other important attitude is to calm down no matter what happened. This is in fact not very hard, I just tell myself “so what?” or in Chinese “这有啥大不了?” when facing a challenging or unwanted situation. I know a problem will never be solved when I am too emotional on it.