11–20 of 138 posts
Spending less and saving more.
To explain: savings is great and smart. But I never evolved past university frugal living. I recently realised that I was living like a student despite a good salary. So I bought some nice furniture and other things. I didn't realise I was missing out on reduced life friction.
Blogging. EDIT: It would be nice to look back at a decade of blogging, but I only started like ~3 years ago. It has many, many benefits: Practicing written communication, organizing one's thoughts, build up credibility, learn things in-depth by teaching etc. Now that I think about it, actually, publishing anything in general. Working out in the open. I often kept side project to myself. I should have just open source…
Accepting that I was an introvert. I remember the exact moment: I was traveling, had just settled down with a good book at a hostel, and then heard some folks heading to the bar. I remember thinking "gosh, I should be social," and then "nah, I'd rather be here." Self acceptance of that was a big change for me.
I organise an event for people who run agencies in London (www.agencysummit.co.uk). I use bots to find relevant people on LinkedIn, and then pay somebody on Fiverr to find their email addresses. Then, I put them into Reply.io and send short two sentence emails asking people if they'd like to check out the event.
It works. Two or three times a day, I get push notifications telling me somebody I've never met has bought a ticket.
Without a cold outreach system like this, there's no way I'd be able to run this business.
I believe that my quality of life would have been significantly better if I had started those habits earlier in my money-earning years.
Stopped eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates.
For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though.
Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.
Turning off email notifications on my phone. Finally pulled the trigger when I was relaxing on a Friday night and getting work emails. It’s usually more efficient to deal with email only once per day anyways.