I just finished reading the book called ‘Living With The Monks’ by Jesse Itzler. It’s about him going to a monastery to live with the monks for 2 weeks.

One of the lessons Jesse learned from the monks is that the monks are in love with their life. They have a ‘love affair with life’. When I read those words, it hit me hard but in a subtle way. I recognized that I do have a love affair with my life. I love my life. Not in the cliche way but in the truest sense. 

I love to see my life unfold. Leading a rather unconventional life, I get to constantly let life surprise me. For example, last night on New Year’s Eve, I spent time with Vera’s family, Jewish immigrants in Germany. I got to immerse myself in their family love, experience their family culture, listen to their stories. They accepted me and loved me as their guest and a temporary member of their family. I had the kind of experience I probably wouldn’t have had if I had a conventional life where things are pretty much predictable and planned. Having this kind of lifestyle really opens me up to experiences that I would never think of or plan for myself. 

The last two months traveling with Avner around Portugal and Spain is a similar affair. We didn’t really have a concrete plan. Some days we didn’t even know where we would sleep that night. Being totally open to what to come and staying curious along the way is a love affair itself. The mystery, the anticipation, the curiosity are the key ingredients to living a life that never gets boring. 

I am a sucker for new experiences. I absolutely love meeting new people, especially those that I meet randomly. Like an old Portuguese man who doesn’t speak English and requires me to use sign language, translation app, and a lot of laughter to communicate. Meeting my friend’s family who takes me in as part of their family. Being in a foreign land for the first time and getting my way around not understanding their language or ways of operating. 

I love the constant learning about my environment, new culture, and new people. I integrate all the new information into my being. As the more I experience, the more I expand. And that drives me, fulfills me, and makes me feel alive. 

I feel blessed to lead the life I have. I appreciate even more my courage to play with the unknown, to sometimes sit with discomfort but to ultimately taste all the juice life has to offer. 

‘Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.’

What’s your relationship with life? A love affair or a dead marriage? How do you spice things up so your love for life gets tastier and juicier?

Cheers to a great year ahead!

Two days ago I did a training with a group of 60 Filipino Virtual Assistants on the topic of goal setting. Other than going over the basic goal setting structure, we also talked about the Be-Do-Have concept, creating habits, and being our own cheerleader.

Before I was queued to go on the ‘zoom stage’, I was listening to the group reflecting on their year, sharing stories and celebrating their wins. It inspired me to also write down my wins from this year. As I started to write, it didn’t take me more than 10 seconds to finish the list. Immediately I thought, wow, I can’t believe I didn’t accomplish much this year. What the heck did I do? Then I thought surely there’s more than this. Then I started to write down all the little wins that I had. Nothing is too insignificant. It immediately lifted up my spirit again and I was reminded, regardless of how big or small, we get to celebrate all of our wins. Instead of thinking I didn’t do or accomplish enough, I looked at my list and decided to be grateful for all that I did do. 

The biggest one to me is the blog that I am writing now (this one that you are reading). This blog had been something I wanted to do since I started traveling 5 years ago. This year, I finally got it up and wrote quite a number of posts. Not bad for the first year. Even when the whole site disappeared, I still managed to build it back again. That itself is definitely something worth celebrating. I am patting myself on the back.

Staying with Vera at the moment in the rather quiet Munich, Germany, I got to take the time to go inwards, to reflect, and to set up my vision, goals, and plans for the next year. I’ve been feeling more centered and happy to work on the projects that I love. I am ending the year with so much gratitude for all that happened this year and all that is happening now at this moment. I want to take this moment to thank Vera for sharing her house with me, giving me the space to do whatever I want to do, and showering me with love and attention every day. 

The sun is setting. For New Year’s eve, Vera and I are headed to her sister’s house and spending the night celebrating with her family. I can’t wait to finally hang out with her family and welcome the new year with much joy, love, and laughter. Happy New Year everyone! 🥳

I haven’t been writing for a long time. My latest entry was six months ago in June! That’s how crazy things can go when we get side-tracked by life. 

Another reason I stopped was also because the blog that I was building got wiped out. My hosting expired. I didn’t renew it and I forgot to back up the site. So the whole site was gone. In a way, I know to start things over is not necessarily a bad thing and I’m glad that I type all my entries on Google Doc. So not all was lost. But it definitely broke my writing flow.

At the same time, my head just wasn’t at the right place to write. I was back on Koh Phangan and felt like the island overtook me. 

Anyhow, I am feeling so amazing at the moment typing away on my computer, sitting in my friend Vera’s living room in Munich, Germany. I flew here a few days ago from Spain to spend the winter with her. It’s also my first time in Germany! I haven’t gone out much other than doing groceries. After spending almost two months on the road in Spain and Portugal with Avner, I feel like some self-quarantine time is necessary. I’ve got my workspace set up at Vera’s. I have been cooking every day and cleaning her house like an Asian maid.

There’s a sense of contentment and ease I am feeling. Not needing much stimulation but being happy with the simplest things. When external stimulation is at the minimum, I finally get to be in touch with my inner self more. Hence, it got me on my Google Doc again typing and journaling.

“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers” – Pierre-Marc-Gaston

This is the question that Tim Ferris brings up in his book ‘Tools of the Titans’. It goes “What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months if you had a gun against your head?”

So often we settle for the norm. People normally work 8 hours a day and take 2 days off on the weekend. That’s the norm, the mediocre. But I know I don’t want to settle for a mediocre life. I want to create a life out of the norm. Whatever it looks like. That’s why I have been leading the life I have. 

I moved to the states from Malaysia when I was 20. I started my first company when I was 26. At age 31, I downsized my belongings to a 40L backpack and traveled the world with no return ticket. 

All of these moves are out of the norm. Throughout my life, I just happened to always live differently than my peers. I am seen as an outcast in my family. They can define me as being different but I know they are also proud that I live a different life.

So goes back to the question, what if I have to accomplish what I think I can do in 10 years in 6 months. That opens my brain immediately. I still a lot of times settle into what’s comfortable, what’s easy. I have a blueprint to expand my business. Though I understand most things take time, Rome wasn’t built in one day, I also understand there’s a lot more that I can do. 

Not in the sense that I am forcefully forcing myself, but instead, creating a momentum I can ride in. Recently, I started building myself a more concrete routine. This jumpstarts my momentum and makes it easier for me to tackle work that requires more energy. 

If I were to plan what I do in the next 6 months as something I could have achieved in 10 years, I would design my life differently. I’d set my daily goals differently. I’d bring a different focus into my work. 

Keeping up with my routine has been wonderful. As I mentioned in my previous post, I plan my routine for my worst days and during the normal days, it just creates a nice flow to my day, my life. 

If I design my routine a.k.a. my system to produce certain results I want, then I can shift my focus from attaining the results to simply following and improving my system. I let my system run me. 

Discipline equals freedom. When I don’t have to think about what to do, instead, following the system I have designed for myself, my mental capacity is freed up to actually doing the work. 

I didn’t grow up as a disciplined person. I was quite the opposite. But as I grew older, discipline and routine became the guiding force in my life. Dare I say it even contributes to my happiness and fulfillment. I am sure if I told this to my 20-year-old self, I would think I was crazy. 

So here, I’ll close up this post to contemplate what I plan to achieve and what level of focus I want to bring into the next 6 months. 

I just finished reading the book Atomic Habits. It’s a great book, very easy to read and very practical. 

It helps me reframe the way I see myself building habits, cultivating self-discipline and creating my own environment for success.

Years ago when I started learning about meditation, I went through what probably many people go through. I couldn’t sit still for more than 5 minutes. I couldn’t hold a consistent practice. I’d meditate for one day and stop for 2 months. You know how it goes. 

But then I heard the best advice I got for meditation and for building any habits – Start with 1-minute meditation. 

Chiameng-de, an early pioneer at Google, now teaching meditation and mindfulness introduces this 1-minute meditation method. The idea is to make it so easy that you can’t say no. The key to building any habit is consistency. We can’t expect to have a fit body only going to the gym once in a while or whenever we feel like it. We see the results by consistently putting in the effort and time. 10 pushups a day is better than 100 pushups a month. 

In Atomic Habits, James Clear also makes that very clear. One of the principles is to make a habit so easy that you can’t miss it. For example, meditating for one minute. So often when we try to start a new habit, we want to build a perfect habit from the get-go. We want to go from never working out, to going to the gym every day for an hour. Or having never meditated to meditating for 30 minutes every day. We might be able to gather some will and determination to kickstart the habit this way for a day, a week or even a month. But most of the time, this method is not sustainable and we fall back to our old ways in no time. 

James Clear says, standardize to optimize. When we want to start a new habit, try to make it as simple as possible at the beginning and then optimize from there. 

The one-minute meditation helped me build a meditation practice. That was when I was able to keep this practice consistently and ultimately enjoy the benefits that it has to bring. 

Last night, I went through my phone and rearranged my apps to create an environment on my phone that supports my lifestyle. 

I also downloaded a habit tracker to track a few habits that I want to build and I fool-proved them to help myself stay consistent with them and make them enjoyable to do. I wrote down 5 habits to start keeping track: Yoga, Meditation, Writing, Guitar and French. 

All of these habits were scheduled into my days in bite-sized chunks. Yoga – 3 times a week, 5 minutes. Meditating – every day, 5 minutes. Writing – every day, 100 words. French – twice a day, 5 minutes each time. Guitar – every day, 5 minutes. 

I want to make my habits so easy that I can’t say no to them and don’t weigh me down when I think about them. 

Most of us know many obstacles or hardships that we perceive we have are mostly in our head. When I think about writing 5 pages every day, it seems ‘big’ in my head. Hence, I feel stressed just thinking about it and it stops me from actually doing it. So I set the goal to write 100 words. Now I am at 553 words. 

This idea of ‘making it easy for myself’ is counterintuitive. Many times we think we need to hold ourselves to a high standard so we set the bar very high for ourselves to reach. But what I’ve found is that when I make a goal, a habit, a task easy for myself, I tend to excel in them more. 

‘Design the system for my worst days. Not my best days.’

I feel like nowadays we have a habit of making things hard for ourselves. It’s almost like making something easy for ourselves will be seen as a crime. It seems like what a failure does. But in reality, it’s the opposite. 

Do you have any habits or things that you’ve been wanting to do but just can’t get around to it?

How do you simplify, fool-proof it and make it easy for yourself to achieve? You got this!