Biggest Learnings 2018

~ 4 minute read.

Since the year has come to an end and I did a re­view of it for my self, I want­ed to write about my con­clu­sions.

When I start­ed the re­view ses­sion, I thought about writ­ing down my big­gest mis­takes. But that sound­ed so neg­a­tive! “Learn­ings” or “lessons” sound­ed more like it, since it’s not the mis­takes that are im­por­tant, but what I learned from them.

So, here we go:

1. When health is at an Op­ti­mum, Ev­ery­thing is Fun

I start­ed the year bat­tling Repet­i­tive strain in­ju­ry (RSI), a com­mon prob­lem with­in jobs that re­quire a lot of typ­ing. And since I start­ed the year with a marathon for my bach­e­lor’s the­sis, 15 hours a day of typ­ing, 15 days in a row (read more about it in this blog post), my right in­dex fin­ger had swollen twice its size.

I had to deal with this through­out the en­tire 2017 al­ready, but it had reached a new lev­el of sever­i­ty. Such a po­ten­tial­ly job-threat­en­ing health is­sue is a heavy load on the mind, es­pe­cial­ly if you love work over ev­ery­thing. Thanks to es­pe­cial­ly Karo­line Ren­ner, who treats this kind of prob­lems for mu­si­cians, I got through all of this and ac­tu­al­ly got rid of it this year. 1

Out of all of this arose my prin­ci­ple “Health first”. Even first be­fore work. And even if it means “sac­ri­fic­ing” ap­par­ent short-term fun like al­co­hol or sug­ar. In the long term, it pays off. Noth­ing is worth risk­ing your health, be­cause los­ing that will make ev­ery­thing very un­fun.

2. Prime Your Year

Fire­works are amaz­ing, the air crack­les with en­er­gy and if you love fire­works, too, the en­er­gy will sap in­to your chest. Which can be an amaz­ing­ly eu­phoric mo­ment that you can use to af­firm/emo­tion­al­ly an­chor your de­ci­sion to make the com­ing year the best of your life up to date.

I lit­ter­al­ly did this for 2018 and boy did I make it true! You are in con­trol, law of at­trac­tion-wise, you can make this hap­pen, too, with or with­out fire­works.

3. Ex­po­sure to Dis­com­fort rais­es Com­fort

Tak­ing cold show­ers helped me freeze less. Ap­proach­ing and talk­ing to girls at Sal­sa danc­ing par­ties and danc­ing in gen­er­al helped me be more re­laxed around the oth­er sex. Do­ing 50 pull ups one day helped me feel com­fort­able do­ing ten an­oth­er day… and do­ing oth­er ex­cer­sise helped me sit up straight. Yes you read that cor­rect­ly. Which in turn re­moved my neck ten­sions, which were al­so one of the caus­es of my RSI.

And so on.

The body and mind adapt. Es­pe­cial­ly—if not on­ly—in un­com­fort­able sit­u­a­tions.

Mis­cel­la­neous

Here are some small­er learn­ings, I found to be true. Don’t take them as ad­vice, I don’t know any­thing and I will not take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for your ac­tions. In­stead take them as hints where to dig deep­er, if you like.

  • Don’t in­vest in sin­gle stocks, prop­er­ly di­ver­si­fy, e.g. in in­dex funds. I sug­gest you read or lis­ten to Tony Robins book “MON­EY - mas­ter the game” 2
  • Ev­ery­one ap­pears to ev­ery­one as if they’ve made it.
  • Trav­el­ling is not ac­tu­al­ly hard.
  • Be­lief dic­tates your abil­i­ties (I de­cid­ed to have a good mem­o­ry for names, so I did.)
1
I will write a blog post about the de­tails to po­ten­tial­ly help oth­ers who are strug­gling with this.
2
Here’s an ama­zon af­fil­i­ate link to the au­dio­book: MON­EY Mas­ter the Game: 7 Sim­ple Steps to Fi­nan­cial Free­dom