Why movement is key

How You Can Benefit From Change [19]:

Chaotic Plans for My 20s - Part II. This is a series where I discuss my growing pains and the uncertainty of the first half of my 20s.

I love movements. Say walking, sprinting, jumping, stretching. I played sports from elementary until middle school, picked out from the last row of the class by the basketball coach out of a class of 50 kids. I had the honor to represent my elementary school in its first year competing. Middle school found myself dabbling in basketball again, albeit no good athlete material was uncovered. I, solemnly and truthfully, could not stand still.

Nomad, vagabond, uprooted, moving fuels my soul. When I was in Hanoi, I couldn’t go a single day without being out of my abode. I would be at a supermarket, a cafe, at my friend’s, an event. I wrote about my love for travelling and understanding different lands and people in my college personal statement.

We are all well aware that exercise has many, many health benefits. I love exercising. In fact, I will instantly like a new friend if we can take long meandering walks. I also have an affinity for life transitions, which depends on how you look at it can be unnecessary or admirable. My best friend told me I would never stay in a place past six months and was exuberant when she learned that I’m *still* in my job. I love new ventures, new jobs, new mode of creative expressions. A curse and a blessing in one. Movement however has brought me greatest of joys and learnings.

I) Friendships

Ever heard of a thing called difficulty in making friends as an adult? Yeah, me neither. Making friends outside of the context of the educational system is… different. Now you don’t have built in activities and mandatory shared time with your classmates and peers anymore.

You go to work (for me, it’s merely flipping my laptop open) and come back home, a predictable routine. Your co-workers might be your parents’ age, have a family and three kids, planning their next vacation at Orlando’s Disneyland and discuss summer grilling with uncontained enthusiasm. Meanwhile, you are a fresh face to the city, eager to try all the new and shiny things and being truly untamed for the first time.

Loneliness is objective and very personal. No one has ever told me that being an adult is lonely. More likely, it would hit you like a truck, or creep in when you are most unaware. When it is Friday night, and you are in your shoebox room writing your next newsletter or calling with a friend to catch up at work because you don’t understand what the f is going on, you connect the dots and realize: “Hmm… May be I am a bit lonely.”

Moving has given me an interesting glimpse into how to make friends in different geographic regions, ages and background. Making friends in university in Minneapolis is not the same as befriending colleagues in Sai Gon and now meeting strangers turned friends over social apps in Austin. My favorite youtuber Katherine Berry made a great video on making friends in a new city. I also discussed making friends in my podcast here.

For me, making new friends is not impossible but not unlike building any new habit, requires intention and consistency. You need to put your thoughts into that new relationship and be very intentional about when you are going to hang out with that person. For me personally, it’s so easy to glaze over the thought of asking them to hangout because we barely know each other. But let me tell you, as time spent with a person increases, it is almost inevitable that your closeness rises proportionately.

In a study on friendship by the University of Kansas, it takes 40-60 hours to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, 80-100 hours to become friends and 200+ hours to become good friends. Use this as a baseline to develop and maintain your new friendships.

II) Creativity and Serendipity

Do you know that walking can boost creativity by 60%? Moving around give me this benefit because when I’m travelling, I usually walk, and I walk a lot. Lots of cool ideas have been born out of my literal movements: this newsletter for one, multiple of my podcasts episodes, work solutions and spurts of personal decisions.

I would highly recommend you trying out walks: long walks, short walks, around your neighborhood, a looping trail overlooking a lake, botanical garden or a construction if you are in suburban America like me. See below for my view a couple of weeks ago at the UW Japanese Garden. Walks are magical and I advocate wholeheartedly for everyone to do it.

walks = food for thought

IV) Growth

And atlas, we need to cover a metaphorical move and growth: your career. If you are in America (and admittedly many other countries), you might be aware with the familiar case of switching jobs to boost salary. Especially in the current economic climate with rising inflation and volatile (if not downward) stock market, the thought of whether your job can keep up with all changing forces might have crossed your mind.

From this article, we learn that 49% of people receive a pay boost after their job switch, with women especially benefiting from this action even though we still earn less than our male counterparts. I can write an entire essay about negotiation gosh but I digress. CNBC wrote about how 24% of Americans agree that switching jobs is the best way to boost income. There is a clear basis on why this is necessary.

In addition, I also want to mention pivoting your career to a completely different field/role to gain new skills sets and explore your strengths. It might be scary to jump ship and become intimidated by sunk costs fallacy: not wanting to change because you have invested X amount of time in your current career path and directions. But think about your 40-50 years of working ahead, reasonably it would be more logical to make the switch in your 20s or early 30s then later, when you have liabilities to take care of.

An honorary mention to the T career growth model, which denotes the horizontal of the T (variety and breadth of skills and knowledge) and the depth of the T (deepness of one’s skills in a discipline). You should not only go down in the T but also needs to expand the your T horizontally to be a ‘valuable’ employee.

T shaped model for skills (pic from CFI)

As a restless Gen-Z (who feels more like a millennial), above are some of the reasons why I adore making literal and metaphorical moves. What are your thoughts on it? Do you like to move around or want to really spend time in a place or a job? Do let me know.