I’ve finished reading “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albiom on my iPad kindle app bought from Amazon for USD 12 or so and thought that it has some simple lessons to teach me in my journey towards financial freedom. The book’s story is simple, about how Mitch who is a sports journalist reconnects with his old teacher, or “coach” Morrie Schwartz and learns or relearns some of life’s lessons as seen from Morrie’s eyes.
One of the critical things that I’ve learnt during my journey toward financial freedom is to be open to new realities and possibilities towards financial freedom.
When I first started out this journey, I was overly focussed on savings and investment and trying to grow my investment nest egg to a large enough size to live off the passive income. A lot of this was influenced by Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” It is not a bad objective, but the uncertainties come with the investment returns that one can obtain from investments and also the risk of losing all your capital if you bet on the wrong instruments. Continue reading
I am reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success” and am finally able to make the connection to the reference of “10,000 hours”.
Basically what this means is that from research, the differentiating factor between people who are very successful in their chosen fields i.e. competitive sports, musical performance artistes, professionals is that they put in the magical 10,000 hours or so to be good in their field.
What does that mean for us?
Besides my love for learning and travelling on this journey towards financial freedom, I also pursue other interests such as public speaking. I’ve been in a toastmasters club for close to 8 years and after a break in the last 2 years when my daughter was born (she’s coming to three years in March 2011), I again participated in my club’s International Speech and Table-Topics contests.
So how did I fare in this contest?
I’ve been writing fewer and fewer posts over time as I approach 40 this year. Part of the reason (or excuse) is pure laziness. There are many areas in personal finance that I’ve shared and increasingly there’s fewer new areas for me to explore. I’m currently reading the book, “The War of Art” and realise I’m facing what the author Steven Pressfield describes as the “Resistance”.
One of the things that I find satisfying is reading. Reading non-fiction teaches us some hacks to make our lives easier and more efficient. Reading fiction allows one to engage more in the senses and emotions. I finished reading “Norwegian Wood” by Haruki Murakami and it was a moving though sad novel. “The War of Art” reminds me that to achieve anything worthy, one needs to work at it. And so it is for fivecentstencents blog as well. If I want it to continue to have readers and to engage with people interesting in personal finance in Singapore, I need to continue sustaining it with bits and pieces of my thoughts written down in this blog. Continue reading