I am a to-do list kind of person. My upbringing and reality have molded me to make every minute of my life count. This does not mean I want every minute of my waking hours to be productive. Trust me, I do a lot of stuff in a day that you would not necessarily label as “productive.” Playing the ukulele while my roommate sings deserves to be in my schedule, for example, as long as it brings me inner peace.
But I want my life, and every day of it, to not be filled with regrets. Nothing is as heavy as a heart full of regrets.
Enough ranting about why I am a to-do list kind of person.
Anyways, I like to have a list of short-term goals and a list of long-term goals. The leaves of a branch and its neighboring branches make up a tree. In a way, the leaves themselves are the tree. In the same notion, the collection of days make up our life. In a way, each day is a miniature version of your life, except that you do not die but get another life the next morning.
How we plan our days tells a lot about how we are planning our life. This is why your short-term goals are a reflection of where you are headed for the long-term.
These are my beliefs. You can agree to say otherwise. Regardless, these are my short-term goals for the time being:
Goal 1: To take care of my finances
Life is a lot better with money.
Just yesterday, I went on a hike funded by my office. It was a hike with the theme “Hike for Water,” organized by Wine to Water Nepal on behalf of World Water Day.
This was when I got the opportunity to listen to the story of Wine to Water, the organization. Here’s the short story:
Founder Doc Hendley dreamed up the concept of Wine To Water while bartending and playing music in nightclubs around North Carolina, USA. He was startled to learn that some parts of the world still have water scarcity, a problem he thought did not exist, given that he was raised in one of the most developed cities of the world.
In February 2004, Doc held his first fundraiser. And by August, he was living halfway around the globe in Sudan, Africa installing water systems for victims of the government-supported genocide.
His life would never be the same.
After spending one year in Darfur, Doc returned home. The haunting memories of what he had witnessed drove him to continue building the organization he started with that first fundraiser in a bar. Doc was determined to provide clean water for the world.
This is how he started, from saving up money from his job “selling wine,” to working to solve the world’s water problem. If I was him, I would give the organization the same name – Wine to Water. Damn. This story gives me goosebumps every time I narrate it.
In 2009, Doc was named as a top ten CNN Hero for that year.
Money matters, guys. It does. A lot. All the good deeds in the world are impossible without money. Hope you learn to master it too. I’m trying. Immediately after I finished high school, I dived headfirst into learning the basics of investing in the stock market. Thanks to Law of Attraction, I now work at Sharesansar, Nepal’s most reputed company when it comes to the capital market. I also started this website you’re reading right now to document my entire journey in the Nepal Stock Exchange (NEPSE). Furthermore, I have an Instagram page @nepsetrader to connect with people who have the same passion that I do.
All this for what? For the money, dammit. I say this without shame. For the money. The miracles that are possible with money. In your personal life and for humanity.
Goal 2: To have a hard skill
Writing, communication, networking, debating: these are just soft skills. Authors have created a fortune by writing bestsellers, and speakers have created millions hosting conferences (which my mentor Dan Pena says “filling asses on seminar seats”), but you get my point.
You NEED to have a hard skill to serve the people of the world. A smart-mouthed salesman can’t sell if he does not have a product. A writer can’t finish a book if he has not lived a life with a story worth listening to.
Combine this with the fact that I have always considered that people in tech are from an entirely different world altogether. Students in IT speak in terminologies that a layman doesn’t understand. I need to change that if I want to have a meaningful conversation with the tech guys and collaborate with them in a corporate setting. This is why I chose programming as a good hard skill to have.
I first started with Python, given its capabilities to work with a massive amount of data. I figured this would be helpful to me since I am also considering algorithmic stock trading as my career plan. However, after learning data scraping, I figured I would be better off learning in the niche that would show results quickly, not when I own a hedge fund 10 years into the future.
Right now, I am learning Flutter along with Dart, a combination of which will allow building cross-platform applications. Combined with my data scraping capabilities, you might see me unveiling cool apps sometime in the near future. Stick around for that.
As a side note, if you are actually reading this article till this point, please do not come to me and say that you read it. Otherwise, I will get a false sense of accomplishment (now that people have already read about my “cool” plan) and I might never finish my projects.
Goal 3: To be a better human being
Physically. Socially. Mentally. Spiritually.
I am working out regularly, and I mean every single day, thanks to the 60-days working out streak I am trying to complete on my personal Instagram. I am learning Mandarin Chinese since China is an emerging world force and we are their neighbors. I hike regularly to wander and meet new people.
I would love to experiment with Yoga now, but I just can’t sit still. If you’re reading this and you do yoga, please come teach me without ever telling me you read this article.
We get one life, and I mean one. Literally. Let’s be the best. At everything. Let’s try, at least.
