One night after a few bottles of beer, a friend asked me about finding your passion or mission in life: “Do you search for it or does it just stumble towards you one day?“. I said to him that I think it will eventually stumble on you, but in order for this to happen, you need to keep moving.
Steve Jobs once said in a speech:
In my first job we used Emacs as our main text editor. However, I have no idea how to use it properly so I just used it more like Notepad++ than Emacs. In our team there is one person who refused to use Emacs, instead he was using vi (without the m!). To be honest, it looked painful watching him edit code with no syntax highlighting, no line numbers, and no plugins whatsoever. We tried constantly to convince him to use Emacs but he always refused and stuck to using vi. I thought the guy was crazy.
Fast forward 12 years in my career. I was attending a Ruby conference with my peers and one of the speakers (Brad Urani) demonstrated zshell, vim, and tmux and how he does development in his machine. It looked cool! Some of my peers also uses vim and tmux so its not a new concept to me, however I always decided to use gedit all these years. This time, they probably thought I was crazy.
Investing can be daunting especially for people beginning to learn how to manage their money. One way to make it easier to understand the concepts and avoid doing things that can hurt financially is to think that investing is like planting a tree.
All plants and trees start out as a seed and then a sapling. Even the largest trees in existence today started out as small saplings many years ago. This is also true with wealth: all of the wealth today started out as a small investment decades or centuries ago.
I pride myself on being conscious about my time (or at least I like to think I am). I set up a daily routine in the morning when I read my devotionals, do my personal projects, and write something in this blog. I have written posts about time management like “Consistency Beats Intensity” and “How to gain extra time“. I listen to podcasts and audiobooks daily, and give my best to my work every day. I might even like to call myself Mr. Productivity.
I don’t like it when something happens in the day that ruins my routine. Some days there is something that needs to be done, or something unexpected that needs to be fixed and cleaned and it disrupts my schedule. I am also uncomfortable when I feel like I am not doing anything useful, like just lying down to rest or sitting somewhere to talk.
After reading Dale Carnegie’s book How to stop worrying and start living, one concept stuck with me in the end: learning how to live in day-tight compartments. This is one of the main concepts discussed in the book that enables us to reduce worrying. However I think this can be used in a wider scope than just a remedy to worry.
Dale Carnegie is also the author of one of my most recommended books, How to win friends and influence people. So when I found out that he also wrote a book about worrying and anxiety, I knew that I am going to learn a lot. The concept of living in day-tight compartments was actually discussed in the very first chapter, but this idea was the most influential for me. If you feel like you do not have the time to read the whole book (which is just an excuse), give the first chapter a chance and you will not be disappointed.