My 4 Life focus 💡
Nowadays we lose focus easily because of a lot of factors especially the social media, which is not so bad by the way but it has to be limited and we should keep our eyes on what are the most important things based on everyone's priorities. In this article I’m talking about my own focus and could be inspiration for yours.
4 things I focus on in my own life now:
🏋️♂️ Self development
🏃♂️ Health and religious duties
👨👩👧👦 Family and my role
Self-development
I’m working as a software engineer and if I’m not reading, exploring, or trying out new technologies and techniques every single day I’ll be behind not in the same level as yesterday, keeping that in my mind makes me feel that I have a duty to keep my self ahead and keep developing for the best or my career 📈.
Yes it’s exhausting being a developer, your entire life learning new stuff specially in the Frontend part, as you read this article some one in somewhere on the earth is writing a new lib for JavaScript 🤷♂️
So I keep my self updated by following some good resources of the new techies on Twitter accounts and on Feedly as I’m a big fan of RSS feeds instead of just going around randomly to read new stuff, (and BTW here on my site there is a syndication link as well you can use to keep yourself updated with new posts here 😉).
Input to the community
I always have the feeling that I owe someone something, back in the days when I was in the colleges like 12 years ago I was having the feeling that I always need to do everything myself so I don’t have to payback to anyone and that was absolutely wrong we are in this life together to help each other and transferring the knowledge is one big thing that we should work on so we have a new quite better generation that us, and I actually owe the community a lot as I learnt from it through some books , articles, video, or conferences ✋
For that I’ve talked before about an initiative I started in my last year in the colleges named “Devmix Team” which I built to transfer knowledge to computer science students and it's completely based on volunteering, luckily it’s still alive checkout their Facebook page ✊
I’ve also started making video on my Youtube channel in the late 2017 in my spare time and surprisingly it gets more attention that what I expected till couple of months ago it has reached more than 10k subs 🔥 you can check it out from here Medhat Dawoud | YouTube, and recently I decided to make a separate channel for the Arabic programming tutorials and named it Semicolon Academy, and in less than 2 months it gets more than 3.5k subscribers Semicolon Academy | Youtube, I keep make and publish tutorials in web development from time to time to help enhance the Arabic community in programming as far as I can.
I’ve also created some open source projects that could help other people by using them or at least learn something from it and encourage everyone to contribute, checkout my Github account, and specially the react-highlight-change library that I created for usage in my employer and then open source it and contributions as so welcome 👨💻
The bottom line here is that you owe that community something and you need to pay back by training others and transfer your knowledge to the new generation somehow, find your way and start doing it now 💪
Health and religious duties
My guilty habit is that I love food, specially the Egyptian cuisine may be because I grow up eating it, I don’t know but my biggest problem is that I gain weight easily, I always feel jealous to the people who can eat what ever they want and never get fat 🙈, for those of you who are like that, Enjoy it to the max Food is the best pleasure in life.
But I have to take care of my health, I’m growing up fast as I suddenly found myself 30years young, and I hear you who are saying you are still young but in fact the more I grow the more my metabolism becomes slower and slower, so if I didn’t train my self from now to follow a good life-style dieting system 🍎 I would never do it later based on examples I see.
Good to mention that I following almost all ways of diets and some of them worked out but most of them didn’t, 🎬 in August 2019 I decided to give Ketogenic diet a try for real this time and guess what in 4 month I lost 19kg 🎉 and it was a big success that I never felt proud of myself like that, but unfortunately I gained like 10kg back 😕 because I was not so serious after stopping it on 1st of Jan 2020 (Ketogenic cannot be a life-style as it has some bad side effects on the longterm), and also the quarantine make it worth 🌭, staying home always makes me eat a bit more if I'm not so careful, BUT I decided 2 weeks ago to follow intermittent fasting again + low carb and so far good results and hopefully I will follow it for a bit longer time.
Also I'm a runner 🏃♂️, I started running about 3 years ago and participated in about 5 running events 2 of them I ran 10mils which are about 16km, never expected that I can do that before doing it, that was a great thing that I'm trying to put back to my life nowadays 🤞
Regarding the Religious part, first of all I’m a Muslim 🕌 and the main part of being a Muslim is praying on daily basis 5 times on specific times, I was not so strict on the timing of the prayers but it’s important to pray on time, and I was feeling guilty about it until I trained myself to do it on time, to be honest I found that like a great refreshment as well for me and kind of a great break from work, and still working on it for being a better Muslim and that will be covered maybe in a later article later isA.
Family and my role
For those who don’t know me I’m Married and have 2 kids 👨👩👧👦 to be honest most of the efforts towards the kids are on my wife 🧕 who is doing a fantastic job that I cannot neglict it and without her I could not even do any of the other 3 focus points mentioned above properly or even write this article that you are reading right now, may allah bless her ❤️ and I know that fathers will relate to that 😄
My big role in the family is to protect them from anything and also spend time with them which is quite challenging to be honest to find enough time for them but whenever I have some extra time I try to get the kids a bit away from my wife at least to give her a break from the moaning and shouting all the time ⏸ also I’m trying in the weekends to get the whole family out in spite of the corona situation we take all the measurements adviced by the Dutch government so we can all have a good calm break from the stress of the whole week 🚶♂️
Also I’m trying to have at least one meal with my family a day alltogether, this is psychologically very important for all of us, and sometimes trying to teach my daughter some stuff and always playing with her hide and seek and she loves it so much 👧 (To be precise I love it more 😄), my son is quite too small now for such stuff but I put some time for him as well.
Conclusion
This is my main focus in my life nowadays and I hope to keep it like that for a bit some more time, try to find your focus, I wrote this article as inspiration for others and to always remind myself with the most important thing other than the trivial stuff, write them down and engage the people around you in your goals so they can help you achieve them easily until it becomes a life-style.
You can always checkout my Twitter account for more shares like this one, and also please share your opinion with me on twitter or maybe share your focus as well there to inspire others.
Tot ziens 👋