Category Archives: Life

Life is a business; life is a game; life is art

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: _Essay 📝, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Favorite, Life

Here are three ways to view your life:

Life as a business

Life is a business, and you are the Founder & CEO.

You have goals, resources, and agency. The idea is to build the strongest business and life for yourself. You do this by making good decisions and generating profit.

The most savvy founders look for holes in the fabric of society, the market, their industry — and exploit them. They seek trends that allow them to be ahead of the curve.

Life as a game

Life is a game, and you are a player.

You are initialized with random parameters that inform your strengths, weaknesses, and initial environment. There’s an endless world in front of you to explore and play in.

The idea is to do well at the game — build points, power, connections. You encounter other players, transact with them, exchange moves, determine if they are trustworthy or hostile.

You learn the rules over time and understand what game you are even playing. You discover that within the greater context of “the game”, there are many sub-games you can play.

Randomness and luck are all built into the game.

Life as an art piece

Life is an art project, and you are the artist.

You have a blank canvas in front of you and an infinite number of creative decisions to make. The idea is to find a beautiful & satisfying creative endpoint for your piece.

There are many creative paths to take, leading to different ends. There is no best end, but some ends are better than others.

Like any other artist, you must apply techniques to manage the decision space. You apply constraints — sometimes artificially, sometimes destructively — to move forward.

Dimensions of life happiness

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: _Micropost 🍪, Life

On average, what are the primary, minimal set of life dimensions that collectively contribute towards net happiness?

Or put another way, what are the common causes of dissatisfaction with one’s life, due to lack of something?

Here’s what I could come up with:

  • Monetary Wealth
  • Physical Space
  • Fame
  • Power / Leverage
  • Health / Fitness / Beauty
  • Romantic Relationships
  • Family Relationships
  • Friend Relationships
  • Adventure
  • Freedom
  • Personal Fulfillment
  • Skill

Not everyone is expected to want all of these. But, the list should generally represent the primary desires, on average, of people.

For each dimension, there is no fixed amount that qualifies as “enough to happy” — rather, each goes from zero to “however much you desire in your ideal life”. If you have zero dire for fame, and don’t have any fame, then you have fulfilled this dimension. Note that it is possible also to have too much of a dimension (i.e. too much fame).

WIP: I considered “career success” as something, but I left it out. I think it can be covered by others here.

How to be happy

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: _Essay 📝, _Micropost 🍪, Favorite, Life

Note to self:

  1. Remember: You are already enough just as you are, right here, right now. You don’t need to achieve or do anything. 1
  2. Remember: The only competition in life — if you must think of it that way — is to know yourself as fully as possible, and act with maximum authenticity towards that truth.
  3. Remember: All things considered, you have it good — so many around the world would kill to switch places and inherit every single one of your problems.

Why we get busier as we get older

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: _Essay 📝, Life

There are a few main reasons why we get busier as we get older:

Adulting

As you age, you increasingly lose free time towards dealing with “adulting” type of tasks: taxes, paying bills, taking your car to the shop, researching insurance alternatives.

Relationships

We as age, we accumulate relationships. And while they have numerous benefits and make life worth living, they don’t come for free. They require time and energy to maintain — and at the end of the day, can become tasks on our todo lists. Even something as innocuous as an old friend reaching to send a text or schedule a call can, at times, feel like burdensome tasks to accomplish.

When you’re a child or teenager, the only people you know are your family and your friends (your first generation of friends). Since you barely know anyone, you don’t really have to keep in touch with anyone. Thus, more free time.

Hobbies

We as age, we accumulate interests, hobbies, and pursuits. These also don’t come for free.

As an adult, you begin to explore the world — reading books, picking up rock climbing, learning to paint, planning & taking trips one or twice a year. Your old interests don’t exactly go away, and there are always worlds of new interests to discover. Part of you feels like you should maintain or get back to some of those old interests you cherished so much. Another part is excited to get into scuba diving.

When you’re a child or teenager, you might have just one or two pursuits that occupy your time outside school. That lack of all the historical hobbies from your past = more free time.

Aging

Aging implies that your body will start to perform worse and more slowly, likely even breaking in ways. You’ll spend more and more time going to doctor’s appointments, surgeries, tending to medical conditions. It will take more effort to maintain your body through fitness. This all takes time.

Like many problems in life, the frustration at your seemingly decreasing time as one ages can be helped by setting expectations properly. Instead of feeling cheated as you feel your allowance of time seems to shrink year by year, expect it. Expect that by all logic, given the adulting to do, relationships to maintain, pursuits to keep up with, and the natural course of aging, you should have no free time at all — which gives you more reason to celebrate and appreciate the rare free moment when it comes along.

What you should know before taking your gap year (and lessons from mine)

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: _Essay 📝, Life

or alternatively:

I took a year off from my tech career and now I won’t shut up about copywriting.

It was probably going to hurt my career. I was fine with that.

The plan was cliché: quit my job, sell my stuff, spend nine months in Southeast Asia. Produce electronic music, read, and maybe code a little. Then find another tech job and pick up where I left off.

Fast forward twelve months. I haven’t set foot on a plane, I created a software product for DJs, and I’ve developed an obsession with copywriting and digital marketing. What happened?

In this post, I’ll share how, despite all expectations, my gap year catapulted my career into a far more exciting trajectory. I’ll debunk two myths society tells us about gap years and share a framework you can use to generate your own life-changing insights, whether you can take a year or a week off. Lastly, I’ll share advice for taking a gap year of your own.

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Taking a gap year and working at a fast food restaurant

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: _Essay 📝, Life

Most people thought I was crazy for doing this, but I spent the last few months of my gap year working as a short order cook at a family-owned fast-food restaurant. Here’s a short reflection on 2 things I learned from the experience as it pertains to my gap year. If you’re a programmer you’d probably be more interested in this post instead. Of course, I learned much more than this, but the rest is basic food service industry lessons that would be cringy to write about, so I’ll keep it to myself.

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