Reading 2022-01-26

Metadata

• Ref:: Of Dollars and Data
• Title:: Just 5 Years Can Change Your Life
• Author:: Nick Maggiulli
• Year of publication:: 2021
• Category:: Blog
• Topic::

Notes from reading

I found myself asking, "What am I going to do with my life?"

The question seems simple enough, but it’s one that most people throughout history never had to ask themselves. Until the last few centuries, society had already determined most peoples’ lives for them. If you were a woman you took care of the home/children and if you were a man you worked or farmed. But that’s not true today. Today we have the freedom to be whatever we want. But that same freedom also comes with a side of existential dread. After all it’s on you to figure out what you want out of life. And if you don’t figure it out, it’s nobody’s fault but your own.

if you want to change your life, it’s going to take time and it’s going to take discipline. This explains why the typical self-made millionaire takes over 30 years to build their wealth. They had to work, save, and invest for decades to see results. They did it through bull markets and bear markets, through windfalls and tragedies.

You will have to do the same thing too. You will have to keep going even when you don’t want to, even when things seem hopeless. Why? Because even in those dark moments, you are still making progress.

It reminds me of the Stonecutter’s Credo by Jacob Riis:

When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.