Ask HN: What is the single most important decision you took in your life
The best decision in your life that changed your life's trajectory, i.e that made your life more secure or financially independent or brought lots of happiness etc etc. I hit my singularity when I realized that you can take as much time off as you want if you are prepared to take it unpaid. I recently went heads down for a few years, when kid #1 was born, working as close to a full-time gig as I can bear to sock away college savings, pay off houses, and get my product businesses to the point where they support the family full time. But now you can stick a little Infinity symbol at the end of that chart. Software is one of the few professions where you can effortlessly switch back and forth between High Paid Professional and Dirtbag On The Beach. For months at a time, for years on end, without harming your career or affecting your retirement savings. How do you get to the point where you can easily switch between "High Paid Professional and Dirtbag On The Beach"? As someone just starting his career this concept is slightly foreign to me. Any general tips? Contracting was how I did it initially. That's just about getting provably good at something so that you know you can always pick up an onsite gig with an email or two before flying back to the 'states. Recently, a lot more shops have opened up to remote work, so it's much easier. You can plant yourself on that beach while still working mostly full time. And you don't need to have built up the leverage and reputation to quickly find work when you need it. All you need do is impress the folks you're working for enough for them to put up with your occasional timezone switches. I've worked with guys doing that as part of their first job out of school. Building up the energy to go to a party when I had one of the worst hangovers I've ever had in my life. Met a girl at the party and 4 months later, decided to leave my life in England to travel for 10 months, and then moved to Australia to be with her. Nearly 6 years later, and I am 2 months away from having an Australia passport and pretty much every facet of my life is better. Volunteering to be the VP of the computer society. Met an awesome guy called Christian Kent who I build a Tsunami warning widget with. This widget got picked up by the media which enabled me to get a Masters of Design Science degree (a degree for which I didn't have the marks to get into the undergrad version). In that degree, I had excellent lecturers and we did things like strapping accelerometers (a big box at he time, think 4 iPhone 7+ stacked on top of each other) to mobile phones (this was all pre-iPhone). I thought my lecturers were nuts when they said that soon this big box strapped to this chunky cell phone would be built into the phone. This was also where I first met the Arduino. At the time Arduino didn't have any international distributors and it was really hard for my lecturers to buy them. As I always worked during university, mine of my lecturers said: "Marcus, you're entrepreneurial, you should sell them in Australia." So to keep him happy I did. We were Arduino's first reseller and this one product, snowballed into nearly 18,000+ products and a multimillion dollar ecommerce company (http://littlebirdelectronics.com) College -- I recently did the math and figured the tuition alone for my in-state education in Ohio was something like $22k. Doing software engineering consulting in the valley, it's not hard to bill that in a _month_ -- granted I've been out of college for 15 years and I have a ton of relevant experience, but overall, for me, an education has had huge financial upside that continues to pay off. 22k month. Considering my tuition fees were less than $2k (that was before te Euro) in comparison my Roi would skyrocket. Leaving college and joining the US. Navy. I was able to travel the world,get paid,& learned how to be a functioning adult. Im now a lead for a Alphabet X project with decent pay. 'decent pay' Not going to grad school. I've always wanted to teach, so thought I should go to grad school to be a professor. I applied, didn't get in, decided to join the working world but teach on my newly formed blog (betterexplained.com). It's been one of the most satisfying and enriching parts of my life, with complete freedom about how I want to present things, along with some measure of financial independence (another life goal). You never know if an event (not getting into a school) was "good" or "bad" until years later (http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/zen.html). It helped give me a sense of equanimity about events. Quitting my high paying consulting job and starting my own business. Income is still not quite the same as I used to have but happiness level has skyrocketed. I started meditating daily. I do it for twenty minutes every morning. It seems small because it is, but the impact has been huge. I genuinely feel that it's recalibrated my mind, which has resulted in me becoming more and more focused on my health overall. I've started intermittent fasting, keto, and I'm about to start lifting. I was never a "gym-type" so this is quite a transition for me, but I literally imagine my body as a temple now and I can't bear the thought of polluting it. I attribute it all to meditation as being the catalyst. Something just clicked and everything fell in to place. I'm more aware of my communication with others, which has already proven very helpful at work, and I find that I can now look at emotions as something that are just passing through me at any given time - financially, this is helpful because I can be a bit of an impulse spender, particularly when bored/sad/whatever. How do you meditate? I took a stab at it when I was 18 (24 now) and I'd do it by essentially trying to make myself feel pleasure. You're working out now, so a workout high is an easy start point. Try to expand the feeling and you'll notice it in your gut (un-incidentally, this is where your adrenals, a majority of your serotonin and a good percentage of your dopamine is located). If you're interested, injecting that into your routine can be a fun experience. Getting away from everything that I know. I was born and raised in the States so it was all I knew about the world. Now that I've lived abroad for several years, in different countries, I don't know when or if I'll ever return. It's too interesting to be confronted with new/different experiences, on a regular basis, to want to go back to something I know so well. There's a world map on my wall currently, with all the flags and countries listed underneath it. The other day I counted how many of those countries I know now (13) vs how many more there are to get to know (183), I feel like I've barely seen anything. Now if I could only earn more, that world map would look a lot smaller. To stop believing the thoughts that go through my mind and to stop calling them "mine." Which is correlated with the choice to spend time focusing on non-thinking activities. tell me more Reading Psycho-cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. Moving country. Stop trying to please everyone
The work equation changed to: (how much do I need to travel for another 9 months) / (hourly rate) = (hours I need to work on this next contract). 1996: 3 weeks
1998: 10 weeks
1999: 4 weeks
2000/1: 20 weeks
2002: 6 weeks
2003: 36 weeks
2004: 32 weeks
2005-2010: ~36 weeks (9 months)/year
2011-2015: 12 weeks