Ask HN: What is the single most important decision you took in your life

I've always wanted to teach, so thought I should go to grad school to be a professor. I applied, didn't get in, decided to join the working world but teach on my newly formed blog (betterexplained.com). It's been one of the most satisfying and enriching parts of my life, with complete freedom about how I want to present things, along with some measure of financial independence (another life goal).

You never know if an event (not getting into a school) was "good" or "bad" until years later (http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/zen.html). It helped give me a sense of equanimity about events.

I do it for twenty minutes every morning. It seems small because it is, but the impact has been huge.

I genuinely feel that it's recalibrated my mind, which has resulted in me becoming more and more focused on my health overall. I've started intermittent fasting, keto, and I'm about to start lifting. I was never a "gym-type" so this is quite a transition for me, but I literally imagine my body as a temple now and I can't bear the thought of polluting it.

I attribute it all to meditation as being the catalyst. Something just clicked and everything fell in to place. I'm more aware of my communication with others, which has already proven very helpful at work, and I find that I can now look at emotions as something that are just passing through me at any given time - financially, this is helpful because I can be a bit of an impulse spender, particularly when bored/sad/whatever.

Met an awesome guy called Christian Kent who I build a Tsunami warning widget with.

This widget got picked up by the media which enabled me to get a Masters of Design Science degree (a degree for which I didn't have the marks to get into the undergrad version).

In that degree, I had excellent lecturers and we did things like strapping accelerometers (a big box at he time, think 4 iPhone 7+ stacked on top of each other) to mobile phones (this was all pre-iPhone). I thought my lecturers were nuts when they said that soon this big box strapped to this chunky cell phone would be built into the phone.

This was also where I first met the Arduino. At the time Arduino didn't have any international distributors and it was really hard for my lecturers to buy them.

As I always worked during university, mine of my lecturers said: "Marcus, you're entrepreneurial, you should sell them in Australia." So to keep him happy I did. We were Arduino's first reseller and this one product, snowballed into nearly 18,000+ products and a multimillion dollar ecommerce company (http://littlebirdelectronics.com)