Another one bites the dust. I'm over a quarter century old now and it was fun so far. First of all I want to thank all my friends and family who sent me birthday wishes, I'm truly grateful to have you.
In this great day, I would like to list 15 things i've learned so far in life:
Friends are the best
Friends are one of the best things to have in life. People you trust with who you can discuss anything and share experiences. Every person you encounter lives his own life and has his own experiences; how amazing it is that we can just sit and talk about our experiences and enrich each others' lives?
Also the best friends you have are your childhood friends because you have shared time with them in a time when you were growing up and forming your identity. I am grateful to all my friends and can't wait to meet new friends in the next quarter century.
Family is king
Your close family members care the most about you. They are the closest people to you and share your biology. Treat them with respect and open up to them the most. They are the people that matter most to you.
Invest in yourself
Instead of spending your life trying to gather external things and posessions, invest in yourself: learn new things, educate yourself about anything and everything in life, and most importantly learn how to become successful in what you want to accomplish. This way you will grow your self confidence, throw away worry, and learn to appreciate yourself.
You could strip me down of everything I posess right now and throw me on a deserted beach in a random country and I know i'll just start over and make it again. Because my value and what I need to know to get to my goals are inside me, and not dependant upon the external things I own.
You write your own story
You are the one in control of your life. Your every decision impacts your story and you have free will to choose the next statement in your story.
Do not just go through life and always make on-the-spot decisions. You can envision your future, put an action plan on how to get there, and carry it out step by step. You can plan your future; and they say that the best way to predict the future is to create it.
Aim to become anti-fragile
When something is fragile, it gets harmed by chaos and disruption, like a glass of water that is harmed by an earthquake. When something is robust and solid it is not harmed by chaos and disruption, but also does not improve by it, like a solid rock that is unchanged by an earthquake. On the other hand, when something is anti-fragile, it is improved by chaos and disruption.
For example, if you taught yourself to adapt quickly to change in your field of work, quicker even than your competitors, then everytime there is change in your environment, you quickly adapt and become better than your competitors. The fact that you are improved by change, chaos and turmoil makes you anti-fragile, and makes you not fear change.
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.
Nassim Taleb
Incentives are what drive people's behaviour
People are driven primarily by incentives. An incentive is a thing that motivates or encourages someone to do something. The most common incentive used in today's world is money. Recognize this and know that people will most of the time prefer to make a choice that gets them something in return rather than to do something that does not.
Do not be surprised when you see this behaviour in people as this is how life goes. Always take this in consideration when predicting someone's behaviour.
Decide and focus: live a fair life
Do not confuse being busy with being productive or efficient. Most people throw their energy and efforts in many directions without a plan and without focus. They do not know how much they lose by doing that. I was one of them, and I described why that was a bad thing to do in my article "Time is limited: 'Focus' is your most important strategy".
Put your energy in a clear plan and give fair time for all important things. Sleep well, eat well, live well, see your friends and family and focus on your main goal. Do not disperse your efforts onto many things, and do not sacrifice the main things in life as a consequence.
If you wish to win at the Olympic Games, to prepare yourself properly you would have to follow a strict regimen that stretches you to the limits of your endurance. You would have to submit to demanding rules, follow a suitable diet, vigorously exercise at a regular time in both heat and cold, and give up drinking. You would have to follow the directions of your trainer as if he or she were your doctor. Then, once you are actually in competition, there's a good chance you'd be hurled into a ditch. You might injure your arm, sprain your ankle, get your face slammed in the mud; and after going through all this, you might still be defeated.
After you have contemplated all these possibilities—mindful of all the things that might happen and their consequences— and if your resolve is still strong, then exercise your judgement. If the overall picture still seems beneficial, then do enter the Games—wholeheartedly.
By considering the big picture, you distinguish yourself from the mere dabbler, the person who plays at things as long as they feel comfortable or interesting. This is not noble. Think things through and fully commit! Otherwise, you will be like a child who sometimes pretends he or she is a wrestler, sometimes a solider, sometimes a musician, sometimes an actor in a tragedy.
Epictetus
You can learn anything you want to
No one is born better than you were. Everything is learned. There is no shame in being ignorant in a specific subject, but there is shame in not learning what we want to learn. You can learn whatever you want to. If it's a subject you need knowledge about, there are plenty of books and audiobooks written by experts who can take you from being an ignorant to being knowledgeable about any subject. It is one of my great strategies to gain knowledge, and that's why I love books.
If it's something that requires practice then just plan the time you will practice in and practice it. The fact that we can learn anything we put our mind to is a great thing, it means that the possibilities are endless.
Our time is very short
Time passes very; very very fast. Our lives are short and we should take the time to appreciate each phase of life. The present is the only real thing we posess at any moment, which is why we should learn to appreciate it and not be bothered with the past or live in a future dream.
We individuals are hugely blessed; and not just blessed to enjoy our planet, but more, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.
Richard Dawkins
Money should never be your primary goal
Money is our own creation. We humans made it up. It does not hold value in itself, but hold the value that we give it by believing in it's value. The real value is in things that money can buy, and these are what's important. In any undertaking you do, your goal should not be pure money as money is just represented in numbers. You should focus on the great things in life, and then just make your way to get the money you need to get it. But in no way can money be your end goal.
Experience is more important than Education
What you have done is much more important than what someone has taught you. Obviously, education is important because then you can learn about the possibilities and know what is possible for you to get into; but once you know about them, it is much more valuable to do them rather than just remain knowledgeable. So try to do many things, and even if you fail:
He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors—though never the same error more than once—is more reliable than someone who has never made any.
Nassim Taleb
Problems do not exist, we make them up
As long as you are alive, the game is not over. Any problem that comes up exists just in your head. We make up the problems, they are subjective. I suggest you read my piece "Overcoming your obstacles with your mind using the Stoic philosophy". If you follow that piece of advice, you would find yourself in a very confident attitude and await whatever is next in life with gratitude and excitement.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Put from you the belief that "I have been wronged", and with it will go the feeling. Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
Marcus Aurelius
Do not fall for the endowment effect when faced with an opportunity
In life, we sometimes have to choose between two things; whether it be a job opportunity, a lover, where to live. When we choose one of them, we lose the other. It is sometimes difficult to choose between both options.
We should not fall into the endowment effect which is when we value something we own more than something else merely because we own it. We should also avoid falling into loss aversion, which is the fact that people prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains, because losses are twice as powerful emotionally as gain. As long as we can factor out those two effects from our decision when we're choosing between two mutually exclusive things, we will be fine.
The Internet is broken
There are a lot of things that are very bad about the Internet. Throughout my twenty years using the Internet I learned a lot about them. I am even writing a book that reveals them. You can check about it here in my post "The Internet Is Broken - My Upcoming Book".
Cashflows and passive incomes are more important than capital
Finding a way to build passive income, meaning creating something that generates money for you on its own, without you needing to invest any time in it is the best investment you can make because it keeps your time free, and makes you a bit richer than if you didn't do it. Also note that you can convert cashflow to capital using secured loans or convert capital to cashflows using annuities; but cashflows are more important than capitals because not only can you convert it to capital but also you can leverage someone else's money (the bank's) to multiply the power your money has.
What's next?
My upcoming goal and focus now is the company I Co-Founded, Coddict.
My goal is to take my company to the next level and achieve Market Domination in the Middle East in the Digital Marketing field.
Can't wait for the wonderful future that lies ahead.
Freddy
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