Summary: Exact revenge. Take action. There is no time like the present to quit. Every yes is a no to everything else, and every no or U-turn is a door to a world of opportunities. Don’t kill your aspirations with misguided loyalty, least of all to yourself. You don’t have that many books left to read or quality weeks with your friends. Waiting for your turn is tantamount to killing your dreams.
Life is not a dress rehearsal
TEXT FROM MY SUBSTACK
You are not getting a do-over. You’re not going to heaven. You’re not going to live a second life. How many minutes or hours do you think you can expect to be with your best friend, your family, your parents before you or they pass away? How many books will get to you read? Which ones do you choose? Think about it.
How many days of quality time do you have left to spend with your loved ones?
Let’s say you have 80 more years to live and read. That’s approximately 1 000 months or 4 000 weeks. If you read a book a month, you’ve got to choose which one thousand books to read. That’s not even a very big book shelf to have around the house. One thousand inches is about 80 feet or 25 meters. Standing six levels high, that’s just two ordinary 2-meter wide book shelves worth of books. If you manage to get through one book a week for the coming eighty years, you’ll still just collect eight such book shelves.
What about travels? How often do you go away on vacation? Once a year? Twice? How many new places do you expect to visit? Or old favorites?
How often do you spend quality time with your friends, siblings or parents – not least if you live in different cities? Do they even get a week a year? You might actually have less than 100 weeks of quality time with your loved ones left. Using millimeter paper, 100 squares amount to a piece of paper about the same size as your thumb nail. Those hundred small squares could represent all the weeks you have left to hang with friends and family. If you think a little about it, maybe you can double the time, or the quality, but you still should choose wisely how you spend your time.
Harvard research shows the worst thing you can do for your happiness, is spend your time on micro interactions on social media, while being with your actual IRL friends.
Loyal to Godot
When I was a bullied kid in third grade, I couldn’t wait to get to sixth to get my revenge. By then, however, I wanted to protect the bullied ones — and when the little bullies, who bullied even younger kids, dismissed my interventions there wasn’t anything I could do, since using force against little kids would be wrong.
Throughout primary and secondary school, as well as college, I couldn’t wait to finish my studies and start working, only to realize working in finance meant even longer hours and more tedious assignments.
I stayed in school, and later on in finance, because I thought you were supposed to. Supposed to finish school, supposed to have a “good” job, supposed to “work hard, play hard”.
When I’d made some money, I predictably spent it on partying, expensive vacations, an apartment, on watches and sports cars. That’s what society teaches us; that’s what your friends and colleagues do, and expect you to do. It’s the “only” way I knew.
Don’t put off living
But, you don’t have to do as everybody else. You don’t have to go to college, work long hours at an office, take 2-week vacations to the sun every year, ruin Christmas by stress and visits no one appreciates. All you have to do is provide for food and shelter to survive and then you can choose to do whatever resonates with you.
There is no use at all in waiting for life to begin, waiting for the weekend, waiting for summer, for vacation, for retirement. You’re always changing anyway and risk not being able to or want to fulfill your plans once you get “there”.
The silent assassin of dreams
I used to dream of becoming a ski bum, but when I was 33 and started planning for an imminent retirement, I had to operate my right knee (the ACL I had torn 13 years earlier) and decided to wait until it had healed. After that I got sucked in at work, was appointed managing director (actually while being sedated for the surgery), and stayed put for loyalty reasons. In addition I realized I was probably too old and too poor a skiier to be skiing full time. Slowly, I also became more and more greedy and wanted “just one more year of dividends”.
I had learned this lesson before but forgot about it. When I was 22, I hurt my ankle badly and more or less gave up my Taekwondo career without even realizing it. I thought I’d just do weight lifting until I had healed properly and didn’t need to put in 70-100h weeks anymore. Well, here I am 30 years later and I’m still hanging around the gym and can’t decide whether it’s time to go back to martial arts yet or not, if my body can’t take it or not, if I’m too old or not. Still waiting, still haven’t learned the lesson properly.
The problem is that I’m not taking action, I’m just lingering in my homeostasis, because that’s the easy thing to do, because I’ve become “the guy who lifts” – and I’m not even any good at it.
I’ve let my lack of wants make excuses for my inaction, which over the years have slowly killed off what little wants and dreams I had to begin with, cementing a lifestyle of inaction and a mindset of wrapping it up, just coasting to the finish line. The good thing is you can always change, can always take action, can always make it your turn to be free to live.
It’s never your turn
and
it’s always your turn.
Take it, it’s yours for the taking
— Kool and the gang?
If not in sports, at least in matters of career and life, I eventually saw the light, quit my job and woke up to some important truths about living. So, fuck ‘wrap it up[ http://mikaelsyding.com/purpose/]’. Go for it! There is no time like now to start a project, or better yet to quit a project, to truly live and be happy.
You can’t wait it out, but have to act it out. Good things don’t come to those who wait. Nobody is just going to hand it to you. There is no waiting line to stand in to get your turn. It’s never your turn, and it’s always your turn. You just have to take it. I finally did, and it turned out to be early, emphatically not too late.
Investing requires patience,
but living should be done impatiently
Start a business, take up a sport, quit your job or marriage
If you had any doubts, age 50 is an excellent time to start a business, initiate a venture to help people, take up a new hobby, learn something new. Sixty too. Not to mention Seventy… The later you start, the better a time it is to make a change. Investing requires patience, but living should be done impatiently.
Do you want to be happy? Then take action: Move. Change. Accept the ephemeral nature of both the self (you’ll die) and context (it will change no matter what you do), instead of clinging to a fake consistency and misguided sense of loyalty.
Fuck ‘wrap it up’ at any age
— Just say no!
