Having fewer, better things will likely make you happier. “The things you own, end up owning you.”. Only invest in things you spend a lot of time with and where money invested will make a quality of life difference.
This is my “would buy again” list of items I’d immediately replace if needed.
(nb: I’m not receiving sponsorship or affiliate revenue for any of these things, just genuinely wanted to recommend them to people who might need them.)
I’ve had a theory of happiness since my twenties.
I’ve often wished I’d listen to it more since it’s powered the really good parts and decisions in my life. And strangely, I’ve found it holds for most people, in most places, I’ve been. And I’ve been around.
I don’t talk about it much, because I’ve often thought it’s obvious, even silly. But it’s been surprisingly transformative for people I’ve told about it who nudged their lives in its direction.
I’m convinced now that the underlying database for my life needs to move longer-term to human-readable, plain-text formats. As much as practical. And files under my control. But, it’s hard being an OG when everyone is shouting cloud. How do you do it? Why would you do it?
Sounds old school, I know… but, more than a decade of hard knock lessons about applications, apps, and companies have taught me that the only thing you can rely on is plain text representations. If you want any semblance of continuity and history in your data. Doubly-so for the metadata around your data.
Going totally remote WFH over 2021 tweaked choices. I really tried to simplify tooling and focus on process though experimented (particularly between org-mode, notion, and logseq for GTD.).
Flirting with Zettelkasten did not work for me. Spent more time curating notes then action, and wanted a system which defaulted to doing (though some ZK practices made me better at absorbing material and acting on it).
For the interested, you can see the toolchain evolution through 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , and 2017 editions of these posts as well if you’re digging for some possibly better ways to do things, especially as we’re in the new year and year two of the pandemic.
Succinctly:
Luck is an attitude, not a thing. Be open to experiences and opportunities.
We don’t pay truck to the role of luck in successful people’s lives. I get irked with business biographies as unbalanced personality cults where luck or psychopathology noticeably outruns talent.
Smart, productive, and ambitious are table stakes these days. Luck, and having help (and being raised white, male, and in the West to be clear about entitlement), often play an outsized role in many success stories we lionize as self-made.
Part III in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .
Part II focused on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out.
This post focuses on moving into slightly more advanced investment topics and strategy around building your portfolio.
The individual point of action of the Great Resignation is quitting.
But how do you know when it’s time to go? If your place isn’t completely toxic or you’re not deeply unhappy, it can be hard to tell when giving up an “alright” thing should yield to a better opportunity, and the effort and risk of moving.
For any job you have, even a great one, you should have a proactive system for evaluating at regular intervals whether consider a change every quarter. There’s also a more reactive “gotta go now” checklist where hygiene issues or changed conditions are a consideration to pull the ripcord.
Productivity in about working a limited number of the right things with sustained focus.
This is what actually worked over years of a lot of personal productivity hacking experiments (and avoiding general hustle culture and cult of busyness garbage.).
If you haven’t read it, go read Atomic Habits by James Clear (or where I first encountered the idea, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adam’s How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big .).
I’m always trying to do too much. You probably are too.
Whether through insecurity, lack of assurance about my choices, or just wanting more, until recently, I spent way too much time trying to do it all. And failing. Todos would get ticked done but big rocks didn’t move.
During covid and lockdowns, forced to do less, it actually got better. Sure, a lot of productivity books say to do less, but there is a difference between reading it and living it.
I don’t want to go back to how things were before the pandemic. I want better. You should too. Don’t accept a return to what was normal as sufficient anymore. We can have more.
Alongside the illness, death, inoculation, and dread the virus caused, the virus may actually have made us better in one way.
It has reset both our expectations about the lives we can lead and about the world we can live in. Especially where we saw what choices the world and policy makers made to keep the world spinning. The pause it forced on everyone allowed us to see more clearly what our pre-lockdown days lacked and trade-offs we had made, often unwittingly, in our lives and by our policymakers and employers.