This is my first blog entry ever and I plan to make this an annual practice. I’m going to talk about some of the experiences, learnings, and thoughts I had this year.

Let’s see…

2021 was everything but boring. Won some friends, lost some others, progress somewhere, mistakes elsewhere, destruction and reconstruction, and most importantly, a year full of lessons.

I discovered many ways I want my life to unfold, but even better, tons of ways I don’t.

I’m becoming more aware of how early I’m in the process of mastery. How important it is to enjoy this journey, and how accepting our vulnerability could become a big strength.

I will also cover some interesting topics that marked my 2021 and made it stand out from every other year, like my immersion into technology, web development, mathematics, economics, philosophy, and, crypto and web 3.

So…Let’s dig in!

We’ve all heard this phrase before, but not many people out there know its real implications. We are what we eat, in a literal and metaphorical sense, this includes every thought that crosses our minds and every little interaction we have on our day by day. Everything affects everything, and whatever we choose to do today is the person we will become tomorrow. It’s important that we choose how we spend every moment of our limited lives, of course, there’s room for indulgence, but, remember, just by saying yes to something you’re already saying no to something else: Opportunity Cost, have you ever heard of this concept before?

What do you prefer $500 today or $600 in one year? Well, it depends, it depends on what you can do with those $500 today, and whether you can transform them into more than $600 in less than one year. Both options have an inherent risk, the risk of “what if instead”. There’s an infinity of things that you can do with that money, and by choosing an action we automatically eliminate all the other possibilities.

But what if we apply this same rule to an asset more valuable than money: Your time! There’s a quote that I like:

“Live every day as though it’s your last cause one day you’ll be right.”

-Benny Hill

I have this thought that death is what gives value to time, just like a discount rate assigns value to money. The cost of opportunity is related to the amount of time you have at hand, the less time you have left, the less you can afford to spend time not doing what makes you happy, and when you constantly remind yourself of your mortality suddenly you start to feel a sense of urgency, an urgency to create something that outlives you, this is by no means easy, once past this point, you’ll never be able to lay in your couch watching sitcoms the whole weekend through, you’ll be perpetually uncomfortable not doing something to achieve something great, embrace that displeasure for we find greatness in struggle, and deep inside we want to live a great life, not a comfortable one. Keep yourself in a constant state of restlessness.

“Sometimes it takes great suffering to pierce the soul and open it up to greatness.”

-Jocelyn Murray

Once we become aware of the impermanence of everything, life becomes more beautiful. Our senses come back to life. And if we find ourselves doing nothing, it’s fine, lets just do it understanding the implications of it, and that nothingness will have a purpose in our life, sometimes doing nothing achieves more than doing anything.

When was the last time you lost control of your life for a moment, not attempting to achieve anything at all?

A couple of months ago I watched a very interesting video, on how our attention works on peak intervals, meaning that we can efficiently dedicate our focus to something for short intervals of time, passing that interval we retain less of what we’re trying to learn, and the way to restore our levels of performance is…taking a break, doing nothing. You must implement this in your day if you want to become more productive. For every 30 minutes of continued attention give yourself 5-minute breaks, and after many cycles reward yourself with a long break; Go for a walk, listen to music, take a siesta, call your friends, watch memes, you name it. The best ideas come out of boredom when you give time to your unconscious mind to process everything.

Inverse-thinking is the art of visualizing a non-positive outcome instead of a successful one. Here’s an example, now that the end of the year is around the corner, most probably you’ve curated your list of resolutions, or what I call “Casual promises to myself that I am under no obligation to fulfill”. Well, most probably you started by asking yourself: “What do I want to achieve this year?” Or, “What goals do I need to accomplish this year to be successful?” or just things that you want to manifest into life. That’s all great and beautiful, but what inverse thinking tells us is that instead of concentrating our attention on goals, we should instead focus our energy on steering clear of the pitfalls that have the potential to jeopardize our vision of success. The logic is simple, we tend to concentrate and cling to a fixed set of goals that can change over time while completely disregarding the risk factors that could lead us to mediocrity.

So instead of asking “What do I want to achieve this year?”, you inverse the question to a: “What are some things that I want to stop doing this year”. Ok, so let’s say something you want to achieve is reading 12 books, losing 50lbs, and strengthening your relationships, great! Now, what’s the plan to achieve this? you would normally say: “I will dedicate 30 minutes a day to read my book”, “I will exercise at least 3 times a week”, and “I will try to call my best friend every Saturday”.

With inverse thinking in mind, instead of blindly focusing our energy on doing these tasks, we focus it on things that could impair our ability to do these actions in the first place, most of the time these are not obvious and would even seem like unrelated events, that’s why it’s very easy to disregard them. Look for behaviors that you are currently doing that have a negative relation with what you want to achieve, for instance, you check social media all of the time and that impairs your ability to read with optimal concentration. Well, an easier new year resolution could be something as simple as “turning off all the notifications from social media”, or “watching Netflix only on the weekends”. It’s easier to replace a behavior for another than it is to implement a new habit all at once.

You could do the same with the second goal, instead of trying to enforce a new habit that you’re not used to doing, ask yourself what are some behaviors that you could replace, maybe stop using the car to travel a short distance and replace it for walking, maybe stop eating chocolate cookies and replace them for fruit which is also sweat, or oatmeal cookies that are even more similar.

More examples of Inverse-Thinking:

What goals do I need to accomplish this year to be successful?

What mistakes do I have to commit to being unsuccessful?

What are the values that I look for in a partner?

What are the values that I don’t want in a partner?

Where do I want to be in 10 years?

What’s the worst place I could be in 10 years?

This is a powerful mental model that I inherited from wise men, namely Warren Buffett and Charles Munger, that created an empire by avoiding mistakes.

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

-Charles Munger

Check this article for further reading.

“Small daily improvements over time create staggering results”

-Robin Sharma

Incremental marginal gains lead to exponential improvements.

Let me show you a simple image that quickly summarizes what I’m trying to say:

But how can we apply this to our life?

Remember that success is in the small actions that if done right and repeated every day will have a cascading effect in every aspect of your life even if not discernable at first. Likewise, failure is the result of small mistakes that compounded upon each other.

Don’t underestimate the tiniest of events that take place in your everyday life, your life is the sum of these tiny events, and I promise you, there are hundreds of events that we deem as insignificant in our life.

Every single thing that we do in body and mind affects our destiny; The way that you dress communicates something to yourself every time you look at the mirror, so dress for success. If you’re working from home and you feel unproductive try taking a shower and dress properly, even if nobody is watching you, you’re watching.

Another example is the time at which you wake up (this is something I still struggle with a lot, especially during the winter). Winning the morning is key to winning the day and some of the most successful people I can think of know this little secret quite well. Wake up early even if you don’t have to, remember you’re doing this for yourself, not for your boss.

Take your diet dead serious, fuel your temple with the best quality of energy, if you could only improve this aspect of your life, I promise you, your life would improve by a factor of 10. This is the main reason that I decided to go vegan this year, it hasn’t been the smoothest of transitions but here I am now, eating 100% plant-based, well, more like 95%, I have to admit. Now I am reconsidering this decision since I have been doing some research and I found that the Mediterranean diet might just be the best diet for humankind that exists, and best of all, is environmentally friendly.

So let’s apply the 1% rule (see the picture above) in our diet. If you’re having a horrible time adjusting yourself to a new diet, don’t do it all at once, do it one tiny step at a time, if you eat meat every day, try reducing it to 6 times a week for the first month. If you want to start meditating but can’t seem to focus for more than 3 minutes start meditating just for 3 minutes a day for the first week.

Tiny improvements can be found in every aspect of our life, and they have the power to transform your life from good to great.

I am “studying” accounting right now, I put this in apostrophe because it’s not even what I dedicate most of my time studying anymore, the world out there is so damn fascinating to commit to a single field of study.

At first, I was afraid of exploring other interesting fields because maybe I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my school programs. Then I realized that if I want to achieve great things in life a diploma wouldn’t stop me. When I lost the fear to fulfill my teacher’s expectations I was free to fulfill my curiosity.

I began rethinking the whole thing through and approaching the decisions I’ve made with skepticism. I discovered that the reason I have decided to study accounting in the first place was not to become an accountant, but the underlying motivation was that I wanted to understand how the world works better, and just like learning a new language opens your mind to new perspectives, so does learning to speak the language of business. As business is one of the main pillars of society, I wanted to understand how business work at its core, a story only numbers can tell.

Once I got a clear sense of what lies underneath the hood, I became increasingly more motivated to understand other fundamental aspects of the world. “What’s drives business at its core?” No, it’s not interest rates or ROIC, it’s humans (duh), if you want to understand business at its deepest level you must understand people! And so I became interested in other seemingly unrelated subjects such as body language, philosophy, and human sciences, and as I got deeper and deeper in these topics I became fascinated with other even more fundamental aspects of reality like mathematics, and science. And this led me to discover a new passion, a passion I want to dedicate my life to: Web 3.0, where technology and humanities intersect.

It all started at the beginning of this year, when I casually stumbled across an app that promised to teach you Java Script very simply, I knew that learning how to code will open a whole new door to understanding the world better. I immediately became immersed. I then discovered a course about computer science imparted by Harvard for free, too good to be true! But fortunately, it was true and I learned so so much, I knew I wanted to explore the space deeper, I did a couple of projects, building websites, but that wasn’t enough to leave me satisfied, something was missing, I didn’t just want to build websites for the rest of my life, that was around the time my trip to Europe begun, so I decided to take a break from coding, and during August walking through the beaches of Barcelona I rethought my life once again, I made the decision not to be attached to something in specific, instead, use my time in Europe to discover myself, without expectations, leaving my mind open to any possibility.

I used to listen to “The Tim Ferris Show” podcast a lot, and there was a topic that kept coming up consistently: “Blockchain”, I had heard about bitcoin and even owned some ETH, but I realized that I didn’t understand the technology since most of what these experts were talking about sounded like mandarin to me, so I decided that I wanted to figure what was all the hype for, and as soon as I started learning about it I saw the potential in it, and here I am now, reading everything I can get my hands on related to the topic, it has become a bit of an obsession, I have to admit. But I know now that I want to dedicate my life to put my grain of sand to the development of this vision, of web 3.

fun fact: you’re reading this article on an platform running on the Ethereum Blockchain.

Imagine a world where you’re free to choose your identity, a world truly connected without any kind of barriers, where you can interact and exchange value with every other person in the world in a permissionless way, a world where you can finance a new house without needing a bank, a world where you can sell anything to anyone without a third party in the middle, a world where you can own digital assets and move them across the internet, a world where your voice cannot be censored. Web 3 makes this and more possible. I plan to start writing articles as I learn, so if you want to join me in this voyage, stay tuned!

A major highlight of my year that deserves its own chapter for the big impact it has had on my life.

It’s funny to think that I discovered it almost by accident. I’ve always been a fitness type of person, and I’ve tried almost every discipline at least once, I just love to feel the motion through my body, and moving to Belgium was not going to change that, but it did make it a bit more complicated.

First of all, Belgium is located in the north end of western Europe, a zone prone to cold temperatures and lots of rain, so it’s not the ideal place to practice outdoor activities. Second of all, the gym and other activities subscriptions are expensive. So I decided that maybe the best way to keep in shape was to train from home. I bought a mat and a skipping rope and I turned to YouTube to become my personal trainer.

Alles gut, but now there was a little drawback. I lived on the third floor of a condo, and my lovely neighbors were complaining about the noises that I was generating with my routines, so I knew I needed to find a way to work out that didn’t require me to move aggressively, that’s when I considered yoga as an option.

Up until that point I have never considered Yoga as a real workout, boy I was proven painfully wrong. If you’ve ever done a vinyasa flow for 1 hour, you know what I am talking about, it is not as easy as they make it look. And so I was there, trying my best not to lose my breath while trying to touch my knees with my head, what a sight.

I immediately started to see positive changes in my life; I had hurt my left knee at the beginnings of the year while running, and that left me incapable of running long distances, and after just a couple of weeks into yoga I was able to run as if nothing again. I also experienced a tremendous increase in my endurance, I was never able to maintain a rhythm of fewer than 5 minutes per kilometer for very long, and now I can. The amount of flexibility that I’ve won in just two months is remarkable, I am almost able to do a split now. And for someone that has always suffered from back pain, going through my day without noticing my back is a blessing. These among other benefits like a better mood, better focus, and more strength.

If you are serious about improving your life, try doing yoga and thank me later.

I think the notion behind what an echo is, is very interesting if you think about it very deeply: The repetition of a sound that stays lingering even after the source is not broadcasting it anymore. This is a very beautiful abstraction of what I think means to live a good life, its impact is forever.

Our actions resonate for the eternity. Our journey in this world is ephemeral, but our essence remains, and that’s what we are. We are the butterfly effect of our actions. We ultimately become an echo of our life.

We are not meant to find the meaning of life, there’s none, which makes us free to give it the meaning that we want. Life is a white canvas ready to be transformed in art, paint something beautiful on it, and remember, enjoy the process, artist.

I can’t believe my life right now. Looking back, and thinking about the person I’ve become today, all I can say is “wow”. I’m incredibly grateful for my friends and family, and some of the most amazing people that just entered my life this year, and I am speechless for how incredibly lucky I am for just being, being right here, right now, and to be able to witness the greatest era in human history. I have no idea what my future looks like but I welcome it with arms wide open.

Thanks for taking the time to explore a piece of me, you’ve gotten the best one as I poured my heart into writing this.

For a 2022 full of lessons and great things manifesting into your life, and of course, full of love.

Marty Lobdell - Study Less Study Smart. (2011, 22 juli). YouTube. Geraadpleegd op 23 december 2021, van https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlU-zDU6aQ0

Street, F. (2021, 12 November). Avoiding Stupidity is Easier than Seeking Brilliance. Farnam Street. Geraadpleegd op 23 december 2021, van https://fs.blog/avoiding-stupidity/

Mediterranean Diet. (z.d.). usnews. Geraadpleegd op 23 december 2021, van https://health.usnews.com/best-diet/mediterranean-diet