what we’ve been taught about wealth is wrong
When I was a kid, I always thought that you needed to be rich in order to do whatever you want. I internalized the thoughts and logic of people who were just living from paycheck to paycheck.
Over the past ten years of working, making, and spending my own money, I’ve come to realize that it’s not about how much you can make, but how long your financial runway is.
What is a financial runway?
A financial runway is how long you can go without having an income. …
Start with a simple question
I’m not a relationship expert but I’ve had my fair share of misunderstandings and arguments. I’m not a perfect human either. I can be hot-tempered, easily annoyed, and completely miss the plot when it comes to understanding what the other person is saying.
This applies to all my relationships — with my partner, my toddler, parents, friends, and various family members. While I have good intentions, sometimes I misread the situation, and it gets blown out of proportion.
I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Over the past years, I’ve discovered something about why we argue with the people we…
it’s one part a habit of repetition
We are blind to progress until we look back on our old work. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been digging through my old archives of old and forgotten pieces, some dating back to my high school days.
The treasure trove of words, immortalized in digital ink, was like a walk back down memory lane. As sights, sounds, and emotions returned through the letters of the digitally etched pieces, I could not help but reflect on how far I’ve traveled as a writer.
But I didn’t stop at the printed words. After digging through my forgotten bits and bytes, saved…
A theory on how to move up the lobster hierarchy
No one really paid attention to lobsters, unless you were eating them. Then along came a clinical psychologist and the next you know, how we socialize and respond to our environment becomes compared to the crustacean.
Here’s a short summary of the neurochemistry of defeat and victory in lobsters, as told by Jordan B. Peterson.
- Lobster hierarchy is based on posture. A lobster with higher serotonin and low levels of octopamine walks ‘taller’, acts more confident, and less likely to back down when challenged.
- If a lobster loses a battle, it gets beaten down, loses its serotonin dose, turns timid…
how to wake up without one
We, as humans, are creatures of habit. Over the years, I’ve jumped in and out of using an alarm clock — each with its own successes and failures.
In these past few months, I’ve stopped using an alarm clock and naturally wake up around 6:30 am without any prompting. It’s not bad, considering that I go to bed around 11–11:30 pm.
Arianna Huffington wakes up without an alarm clock. The same goes for Oprah Winfrey.
The case against alarm clocks
For some people, alarm clocks work.
For a majority of us, it’s got a negative association.
It’s as bad as waking up on a Monday…
How to crunch numbers that can actually happen
I’m not a financial advisor, but I used to work with a guy that really wanted to have $10,000 in his bank account by the end of the year. He showed me his game plan and it looked something like this:
Week 1: $10
Week 2: $20
Week 3: $30
Week 4: $40
Week 5: $50
....Eventually, he’d work his way up to $520 on his final week. While the game plan looked solid to him, I had a few questions:
- how much does he actually have leftover by the end of the week?
- how is he planning to…
Looking at my financial story in hindsight
If you’ve ever been in debt and looking to get out, you would have encountered a guy called Dave Ramsey at some point. Personally, I encountered him by accident via YouTube. Google probably figured out I was after some financial advice after aggressively searching for ways to get rid of my student loan without resorting to selling one of my kidneys.
One thing led to the next and I found myself reading his book, listening to his podcasts, and followed people that were also going through the debt-free journey by mid to late 2019.
Then the pandemic hit and I…
among many other things
“Follow your passion” is terrible advice — especially if you haven’t figured out what your passion is.
Not everyone knows exactly what they want in life until they’ve lived a little bit of it. It’s like expecting to know if you like caviar without ever eating it. What if you hate it? what if you love it? What if it just induces a ‘meh’ kind of reaction?
It’s just one of those things until you try it.
Sometimes we confuse our ‘passions’ with daydreams of what we want to be. To make your passion a reality, you need to enjoy…
basically, everything no one really tells you about
Over the years of adulting, I’ve fluctuated between having a solid $35k in the bank account to $5 after rent is due. Personally, my financial journey has been one filled with ups and downs. From being in student loan debts to finally hitting positive net worth territory.
A lot of things have happened in the past decade and here are the top 21 things, in no particular order, I eventually learned in life about money.
- If you’re not a fan of insurance for whatever reason, get at least income protection — especially if you only have a day job and…
It’s also one way to achieve eventual quality
In Japan, they have a saying — 酔生夢死 (suiseimushi) — which translates to ‘drunken life, dreamy death’. In short, it means that you can have dreams, but if you do nothing about it, you’ll just dream your life away.
And that’s what many of us do to ourselves. Sometimes not by choice, but because we’ve been taught that we can’t.
We can’t make a YouTube channel because we’re not pretty enough.
We can’t run a marathon because we’re not fit enough.
We can’t write because we’re not skilled enough.
We can’t make time to do the things we want because…
