Above all else

Happy Chinese New Year!  It's great to meet up with family, wish each other well for the coming year, and have an excuse to eat some of our favourite things :D  In anticipation of that, I went to exercise almost every day of this week, before the feasting begins! I like listening to music when I'm exercising on my own in the morning, and Spotify is a great way to find new songs!  Just this week, I heard some lyrics over my earphones that were so oddly jarring that they compelled me to stop, rewind and play them again to check that I'd heard them right. We are constantly bombarded by parents, teachers, bosses, self-help gurus and the media - dream big!  The world's heroes are the people like Elon Musk, who plans to fly ships to Mars; or the titans who build billion-dollar unicorns out of bits of code; or stars accumulating billions of views on Youtube.  The whole thing is reinforced by the social media phenomenon.  Probably 90% of the stuff people po...

I'm one of those people who actually makes New Year's resolutions.  I even supplement the short term annual resolutions with multi-year resolutions, not just for me but for my family too.  Like, in 2012, I wrote down stuff that my family and I would do by the end of 2021 - a ten year period!  It's cool to read what we thought in 2012, and see which parts endured and we actually managed to do, which parts evolved and we did in a different form, and which parts we realised were dumb and we dropped! I kind of think that resolutions need to have at least two dimensions in order to be effective.  First, they need to focus on who we want to be.  Like, to be financially independent.  To be fit and healthy.  To be a generous friend.  That's important because it focuses on the core "why" of the resolution.  If a resolution is only to do something - let's say, to earn 10% more this year, but there's no underlying "why" of being financially indepe...