Eid Mubarak on the Sunday Surprise [16th June 2024]

It's that second "Islamic Xmas" for the year

Eid Mubarak to you!

There’s 2 every year: one after Ramadan/Fasting and then this other one. This is the one where everyone able goes on a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. I’ve started to realise that many don’t realise where the phrase “it’s a Mecca for xyz” actually comes from!

How are you going this fine weekend? Please do let me know and remember to share the newsletter to any friends or family that might find it interesting.

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Weekly update

This week felt long even though it started with an extra day off on Monday. After hardly doing any clincal work, I had started to relax a bit too much! 🤣

Some quick updates:

• updated the yearly clinical stats and it’s finally up on my website.

• caught up on a bunch of small tasks that I’ve been meaning to do

• finally saw what a “quiet” on-call was like in the country hospital

• celebrated Eid!

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Creative update

randInt Podcast - Boat Life & Japanese Toilets - After a short hiatus while Chandra settled into boatlife, we’re back with a catch-up episode. Discover Chandra’s favourite sail and why I’m anxious/excited these past few weeks and more! You can find the podcast by searching “randint” or “raffy chandra” or hitting the links here.

Unboxing Art - James Jean: Descendent | Lucid Dreamer - One of my favourite artists, James Jean, released a statue collection, most of which were prohibitively expensive! One of the releases was in my budget so I ended up ordering it sometime last year. It arrived a few weeks ago and since I’ve never ordered something like this before, I thought I’d do a quick unboxing to show how fancy art pieces are delivered.

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Interesting things

• Hi Ren - Ren - This was featured in this weeks newsletter by Tim Ferriss and it’s too interesting not to share. Not my kind of music for sure, but do watch til the end. If nothing else, it shows just how prevalent imposter syndrome is everywhere and also how people create amazing thing even WITH so many challenges in life.

• How Gawx creates Hollywood in his Bedroom - To be honest, I had no idea who Gawx even was prior to this video, but it turns out he’s a 20-year-old Youtuber, but don’t let that fool you. This video dissects JUST the first MINUTE of one of his videos and the amount of thought and effort put into it is simply amazing and explained in a way that non-film makers, like myself, can understand.

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Cool finds

• Microsoft Surface Pro 11 (X Elite edition)* - This is going to be super niche for almost everyone but this is something that I’ve been waiting nearly 4 years for. I’m a windows user and was blown away with what Apple managed to do the M1 and onward chips with power and battery life and now, windows is going to have similar thin and light laptops in my favourite form factor! I’ve pre-ordered and just WAITING for it to arrive on Tuesday.

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Actionable thing

Even if a task is big, just do 5 minutes.

I have always struggled with keeping all the various projects in check. It always feels like I have too much to do and not enough time. However, yesterday I DID actually have a lot of time since I was on call but not much was happening. I noticed that because I couldn’t get out of the headspace that I MIGHT be called in, I procrastinated from doing a lot of things because I thought that they would take a very long period of time.

Eventually I realised that this was just plain silly: I was not doing anything productive and also not spending the time relaxing. I went through my to-do list and convinced myself to do just 5 mins on any task and eventually managed to get about 30-40% of the list done AND enjoyed a nice afternoon work.

So maybe next time you’re procrastinating, set a 5 min timer and just get the momentum going?

There’s similar advice to this in the book “Someday is Today” by Matthew Dicks*. Check it out if you’re interested

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Quote of the week