Man in Santa costume
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It’s 21st December, Christmas and New Year are coming. There were good things and bad things this year, so they kinda leveled it out. The things that had the most impact on me and I’m grateful for:

  • Waking Up meditation app. The impact was substantial, I’ve been experiencing less social anxiety recently. I also had some highs from meditating.
  • 12 Week Year book. I’m grateful for its help in developing vision/goals. Whenever I connect with my goals, I feel motivated, and it helps me to execute. I’ve been constantly putting time into upskilling thanks to it, and learned Vue, Docker and AWS.
  • I’m grateful to Brave browser for fast and private browsing, with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. Also, for getting rid of ads that Chrome allows through.
  • I’m grateful to DuckDuckGo for good search results and not tracking me. I know I have Chrome history and activity turned on in my Google account, but I was flabbergasted about just how much Google knows about me.
  • Your Money or Your Life book. I’ve implemented just one of the described steps, but it has had some impact already. And, a humongous impact was achieved just by reading about separating work and paid work. I think it’s had the biggest impact on me this year!

Let me quote the book:

The real problem with work, then, is not that our expectations are too high. It’s that we have confused work with paid employment. Redefining “work” as simply any productive or purposeful activity, with paid employment being just one activity among many, frees us from the false assumption that what we do to put food on the table and a roof over our heads should also provide us with our sense of meaning, purpose and fulfillment. Breaking the link between work and money allows us to reclaim balance and sanity. Our fulfillment as human beings lies not in our jobs but in the whole picture of our lives—in our inner sense of what life is about, our connectedness with others and our yearning for meaning and purpose. By separating work and wages we bring together the different parts of ourselves and remember that our real work is just to live our values as best we know how. In fact, mistaking work for wages has meant that most of our “jobs” have gotten neither the attention nor the credit they deserve—jobs like loving our mates, being a decent neighbor or developing a sustaining philosophy of life. When we are whole, we don’t need to try to consume our way to happiness. Happiness is our birthright.

🎄 Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2020 🎄