With lots of cash but no sense of purpose, he went hiking, broke up with his girlfriend, went to the Himalayas, tried getting to Washington, and on and on. All in an effort to find a sense of meaning.
While I haven’t had an exit yet, I found myself going through something a similar situation.
I had my sense of value attached to my job. “Software Engineer.” For some time, that was everything I was and did… until I lost my job after a layoff.
All of a sudden I didn’t have the title. I wasn’t doing any coding. And I didn’t want to do any more of it. I felt trapped in a label I decided to accept on my own. “Coder” and “Software Engineer.”
I realized that, above all job titles, I’m a learner. Software engineering? It was just a stint of that.
If you’re in a similar situation,
Understand you’re not your job. You’re not a title. You are way more than that.
Find new hobbies outside work. Learn new skills just for fun. Read books from different fields. Practice a physical activity. Do something with your hands, away from screens.
Remember, your purpose and joy shouldn’t come from just one place. Don’t wait until you feel lost. Start today. Diversify your sources of purpose and joy.
I’m not a quote addict. And I don’t collect quotes for a living either.
These weren’t intended to be quotes. But they’re pieces of wisdom I noticed and wrote down when consuming content as part of my daily procrastination. Sorry, I meant catching up.
From James Altucher—Writer, entrepreneur, and investor
Last year, I stalked James Altucher. I read his books and watched his interviews. I found his story and writings raw and inspiring.
Money is a by-product of personal development
Money is only one part of an abundant life.
And your life is abundant when your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional bodies are healthy. You’re abundant when you move your body, do something creative, share ideas, and live free of negativity every single day.
Little things show how people really are
It’s not the speeches, interviews, and business presentations. It’s how you treat a waitress, your coworkers, or the janitor.
Don’t do things you hate at the expense of things you love
It was when I tried to convince myself of showing up to work just for money that I got burned out. I tried to convince myself to take that money to build a runway for my side hustle. I was so wrong!
Have multiple sources of joy
When things go sideways in one area, you can jump to another and still find joy and meaning. Diversify your joy the same way you should diversify your income sources.
Taylor Cavanaugh—ex-SEAL and life coach
Anything you do starts with self-development
This one comes from a Navy SEAL turned into a French Legionnaire. The media has created this glorified image of SEALs like indestructible and focused men.
But this isn’t the case. Taylor’s life was a disaster. All his bad decisions led him to escape to another country.
After overcoming his messy life, now he’s a life coach. And that quote summarizes his journey through recovery. It all starts in your mind with your beliefs.
Seth Godin—Entrepreneur and writer
Big problems demand small solutions
You don’t go to bed and wake up with a dream life. It requires effort and consistency. And it starts with the desire to change and small simple steps in the long run.
Dan Koe—Writer
The goal is getting paid by being you
You don’t need to close your eyes and try hard to come up with a niche. You’re the niche. Your interests, vision, and goals make you the niche.
Make the content you want to see in the world
The internet isn’t saturated. Sure, it’s getting flooded with more AI-generated content every day. But we’re craving more genuine and human content. Create that.
Jim Kwik—Brain coach
A confused mind accomplishes nothing
In 2023, I burned out. It took me months to get back on track. I was so deeply rooted in my frustration and resentment that I couldn’t see a way out. It was only when I started to work on my health and change my internal voice that I found a way out.
Reading is the best exercise for your brain
Reading is the closest we are to plugging ourselves into a computer and downloading decades of information to our brains in seconds. Reading is the Neo’s “I know Kung fu” from The Matrix.
Ok, I said I’m not a quote collector. But I have to confess I have one or two quotes beautifully framed around my desk. Whether you hang quotes on your wall or not, what truly matters is turning that inspiration into beliefs, actions, and habits.
Money is one of the skills we have to learn by ourselves.
I didn’t have a class called “Money” in high school. And if you went to a regular high school like me, you didn’t either.
Like it or not, we live in a world run by money. And still, we don’t learn a thing about money.
What we know about money is what we absorb while watching our parents sitting at the dinner table discussing or arguing about money. And they learned about money by watching their parents too.
I felt the urgency to learn about money when I started to earn a high salary as a software engineer, higher than all my previous salaries.
The fear of letting money slip out of my hands led me to watch finance videos on YouTube. One video led to another one, and videos led to books.
If you want to start your money journey, start with these four books:
1. The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason
If you want to only read one book from this list, read this one.
This book takes you to ancient Babylon and uses fables to teach you money lessons. It shows the power of stories. You will picture yourself in the middle of the desert, sitting in a caravan, listening to money lessons.
We don’t trade gold coins for food and live in cities enclosed by walls anymore. But you can easily translate the lessons in this book to our day and age.
If I could summarize this book in one sentence, it would be:
“Ask the jeweler for jewelry advice.”
Often we go to our friends and relatives with poor financial education to ask about money. That’s an expensive mistake!
Key Lesson: Pay yourself first and save 10% of your income.
2. Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
This won’t be a complete list of money books if I don’t include this one.
It doesn’t matter if Robert Kiyosaki’s rich dad is real or not.
Again, the power of stories to share lessons. It tells what his best friend’s dad, the rich dad, taught the author and his best friend about money.
The rich dad taught them not to work for money but for experience and lessons. And the poor dad taught them to go to school, get good grades, and get a job.
“JOB is an acronym for ‘Just Over Broke’”
The lesson I remember the most from this book is the employee/employer dilemma. Employees do the minimum not to get fired and employers pay their employees the minimum so they don’t leave. They’re always in a conflict of interest.
Key Lesson: An asset puts money into your pockets and a liability takes money out of your pockets. To be truly rich, buy assets, not liabilities that look like assets.
Repeat out loud: if it doesn’t put money into my pockets, my car is not an asset.
3. Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins
This book is a collection of letters and posts the author wrote to his daughter to teach her about money and the Stock Market.
The premise of this book is that some young people don’t care much about money, so they need a simple plan to build and preserve wealth.
This is the book that taught me about emergency funds. Well, the book called it “F*ck-you money.” Some savings to keep the boat floating when you don’t tolerate your job anymore and just want to tell your boss the big F-word or when the decision to leave is not yours.
Thanks to an emergency fund, I kept my family’s boat floating for months after an unexpected layoff until I found something else.
“[Before picking stocks], ask yourself this simple question: ‘Am I Warren Buffet?’ If the answer is ‘no,’ keep your feet firmly on the ground with indexing.”
The author is a fan of low-cost index funds and that’s the approach he teaches in the book. Stick with a total market index fund and invest regularly the same amount no matter what disaster or recession “experts” are forecasting.
Key Lesson: Stay away from debt, keep your expenses in check, and invest in broad index funds like the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF (VTI) and
Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO).
Against the author’s teachings, I have to confess I added a second fund on dividends to my portfolio. Sorry!
4. Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
This one is less about the mechanics of saving and investing. It covers 20 lessons about money, all of them around the premise that money is a soft skill.
Money isn’t about rational decisions we make in front of an Excel file. It’s more about the emotional decisions we make at the dinner table.
The story I remember the most from this book is the one about the janitor who went unnoticed until he died, and his net worth was revealed. He was a multi-millionaire who donated part of his fortune to the local school and library. In his lifetime, he kept saving and investing his modest salary.
Key Lesson: Money is not what you can see: fancy watches and expensive cars. Money is the assets that haven’t been made into fancy watches and expensive cars yet.
Parting Thought
You could read more books and watch more YouTube videos. Some are more practical, others more philosophical.
But all of them have in common that money is a mindset and a skill we can master like any other skill.
Money isn’t evil. Money is what we decide to be. It’s a multiplier of our values. Remember: “If it’s in our heads first, it won’t be in our hands.”
It’s discouraging when a teacher corrects your mistakes in every phrase. It makes you want to stop speaking.
I’ve had all types of teachers:
The ones who cut you off in the middle of every sentence to correct you
The ones who write corrections on a whiteboard
The ones who don’t correct at all
We need the right balance when learning a new language.
If we’re not corrected, we keep making the same mistakes. But if we get corrected all the time, we lose confidence.
After taking many language courses and doing plenty of language exchanges, here’s my strategy for correcting mistakes:
Instead of cutting off your language partner (or student) in the middle of a sentence to point out a mistake, restate the sentence or ask a follow-up question without the mistake.
For example, if someone says “my brother don’t like apples,” you could say:
You mean your brother doesn’t like apples?
Why is that? Why doesn’t your brother like apples?
You’re correcting the mistake while keeping the conversation going and without discouraging the other person with too many corrections.
