Personal Top Priority

dennyzhang

URL: https://quantcodedenny.com/posts/personal-top-priority/

🌟 Vision

Live a healthy, confident, and wealthy life — balanced across family, personal growth, and financial freedom. Focus on high-leverage actions and eliminate noise.

🎯 Key Objectives (FCM)

1. Family — Build a Healthy and Happy Family

  • Stay emotionally connected with kids and spouse
  • Maintain routines for health and stress management

Daily / Weekly Goals

  • 15–30 min 1:1 focused play with kids (3x/week)
  • Evening family meal without devices (2x/week)
  • Weekly 30-min sync with spouse to review week and connect
  • Exercise 2–3x per week, sleep 7h/night
  • Plan 1 weekend activity per month with family
  • Avoid overthinking or struggling too long in dead ends

2. Confidence — Strengthen Personal and Professional Growth

  • Increase professional market value
  • Improve appearance and communication skills
  • Build meaningful, positive connections

Daily / Weekly Goals

  • Attend design reviews weekly
  • Practice 5–10 min daily communication exercise (storytelling, presentation, or elevator pitch)
  • Weekly self-reflection on appearance or communication improvement
  • Publish or present 1 idea per quarter
  • Avoid overthinking or setting too many small, fragmented goals

3. Money — Grow Wealth with Leverage

  • Earn through smart, sustainable investing
  • Focus energy on high-return opportunities

Daily / Weekly Goals

  • Track key financial metrics weekly and lessons learned
  • Delegate or outsource low-value tasks
  • Avoid over-optimizing trivial details

⚙️ Guiding Principles

1. Prioritize What Truly Matters

  • Focus on high-impact tasks
  • Say no to low-value work or non-essential goals

2. Evolve Mindset Continuously (E6 → E7 Upgrade)

  • Think in systems and first principles — solve root causes, not symptoms
  • Apply growth mindset — treat mistakes as learning opportunities and embrace ambiguity
  • Create leverage — empower others, clarify processes, and automate repeat work
  • Lead through influence — align people and decisions without authority
  • Default to reflection > reaction

3. Spend Smartly to Earn More

  • Buy time and energy via good services

4. Build systems and habits that compound over years, not weeks

local notes

make informed decision - identify the better way

skills: identify the key challenges, historical context and incentives behind

skills: drive executions with conflicts

skills: have deep conversations

skills: identify and sell the business values of your work

skills: know when to say no

skills: talk in a way people want to engage and help

habits: don’t set small goals

habits: don’t talk without clear goals or actions, as nothing will change

habits: focus on key challenges and bottlenecks

habits: stay curious - engage in learning new context and knowledge

habits: talk and learn from others

mindset: dare to challenge the status-quo

mindset: focus on busines wins; focus on feedback of stakeholders of performance review.

mindset: mostly you need to make trade-off; you can’t have them all

mindset: focus on the progress for key problems

mindset: everyone has their own situations and desires

habits: avoid vague yes - either yes or no

XXX was owned by A team in 2024, and jointly owned by A & B in 2025.

If A is not working in this area for 2025, call it out

habits: avoid asking lazy questions, as you usually get surface answers.

habits: know your customer, before you build solutions

TODO habits: critical thinking - examine the truth, challenge the status-quo

avoid jumping too fast

have lots of energy

need to solve real and critical problems

understand and set the approriate-and-high expectation

there are too many problems - how does this problem impacting us

lots of smoke in coroprate env; need to dig into fundmentals

lots of half-done efforts

lots of unowned area

capacity saving: A team owns, then re-org/SME attribution, then B team owns part of it.

skip talking about common sense

be very clear for your boundary and responsiblity: avoid uncessary & big maintainance cost

expectation shaping: how to avoid over-commit

Your manager and TLs may claim you know something or responsbile for something, which you are not.

If you don’t clarify it immediately, it will become expectation on you. Then you need to spend energy to catch up this expectation.

Is it very common in tech company? What are the good practice on this? I don’t want to be seen as too conservative. I don’t want to be over-commit for things I’m not comfortable neither

Why this happens:

  • Ambiguous domains → Managers or TLs project expectations onto the person who seems most capable.
  • Silence = implicit agreement → If you don’t clarify immediately, they assume you “own it.”
  • Teams move fast → People fill gaps by assumption, not by confirmation.
  • High performers get loaded → If you’re competent, people assume you can take more.

Good patterns to respond

  • Mirror + calibrate: Let me repeat back my understanding to make sure we’re aligned …
  • Capacity framing: Here is what I can take on, given the priorities we agreed on.
  • deinf your boundary explictly :My role is …, ownership of … sits better with … because … I can support by …

Unaligned Priority Injections

Seniors & Leadership: Can we quickly add this? It’s important.

If we take X, timeline for Y shifts by Z.

expectation drift

Always clarify: “I can explore, but not drive/own.”

Credit-Responsibility Imbalance: you become “support function”, not the “impact owner”

You get repsonsiblity for an area, but another team gets credit for the sucessful otucome