Introduction
I am sure that many of you have read the following phrase so many times on Instagram you are starting to get nauseous, but yeah, 2020 has been rough. Every sector took a dent — family, romance, work, finance, friendship, self-worth… the list goes on. If you are well acquainted with me, you know for a fact that I am not one to take things “too seriously” and quite chill in general. If I say that things are going rough for me, most likely I am not making things up or exaggerating. In other words, 2020 sucked, at least initially.
Initially, yes. Despite getting rawdogged with no vaseline by a lot of things, my results don’t lie. None of my obligatory work was postponed and I was able to fulfill my academics shenanigans. Not only that, but I also have discovered new hobbies and nurtured old ones to the next level. Lastly, the most important one, that is fulfilling my own expectation and personal goals. Surely there was some hiccups here and there, but to me last year was almost as miraculous as an underdog team winning a prestigious tournament. If it were for anybody else that was in my shoes, I am not sure that that person would be able to achieve what I achieved. Funniest thing is that I neither am a capable person nor did I construct a God-tier plan every other month. In fact, most of the time last year I was running on autopilot because I was sorrowful and emotionally bruised all the time. What gives?
The Trinity
Upon reflecting on my life at the end of the year like every normies do, there are three things that brought me to where I am today. Let’s get into it.
1. Friends
This is as cliché as it gets, but having the right friends is just living life in easy mode. Specific to last year when I was in tough times, a lot of my friends were helping me out in many different areas. Helping me cope with the actual grieve, hanging out and uplift my mood, assisting me in college be it administrative stuff (I seriously couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to this lol) and academic stuff, discovering new hobbies/philosophy/work related insights, exchanging self-help techniques, playing video games together, talking about hoes, I seriously can’t name each one of them. So many things that just made my life better. Now you might ask, well, doesn’t everybody has a circle of friends?
Of course they do. The question is, do they actually make you happy? Are they able to provide you the support you need when you’re in tough times? Are they able to make you a better human being by exchanging life philosophies and “information” that is useful for your own journey? I bet no one will have the audacity to answer yes without taking their time to think, and that’s alright. I am pretty sure I don’t have it all either, but the point is: are you trying to achieve that?
Now, this is where my point of view comes in. It sounds insincere, but it is undeniable that human relationship is a give-and-take. It doesn’t have to be something as big as social status, positional power or materialistic tendencies, but at the very least, are you interesting enough to be befriended? Do you have unique views on life that can bring new perspective to other human being? Qualities like these are what separates low quality friend from a premium one. So, am I telling you to choose your friends right off the bat and gauge their value from what they provide? Absolutely not. In fact, quite the opposite. Look in the mirror and think, what can YOU provide to your friends? Rest assured that if you are able to support your friends through various means, people will flock onto you then you can use your common sense and judge whether someone is worth befriending. Spend time with your friends and cut cancers from your life.
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” Jim Rohn
2. Habits
Remember what I said about me running on autopilot? Well, if autopilot is the execution, habit is the program. There are so many things I want to write about this keystone, but I’ll try to elaborate on things that I find the most important.
First and foremost, why do I think that habit is crucial? There are two main reasons. One is that human is composed of 70% habits and 30% conscious decision making. Imagine in a day, there are 100 tasks to be done, and you are able to get 60% right from habits alone and another 15% from your conscious decision making. You’d get 75% out of 100%, which is not bad in a normal day. If you are able to consistently get that 75% over a long time, you will be a significantly better person in the long run. Second reason is that in life, I believe there is an order and chaos to everyone’s life. With a bunch of good habits that you have nurtured, you create an order in your life — a framework to grasp on, a comfortable ground, a sanctuary to stand firmly to tackle whatever chaos (unpredictable misfortunes) lies ahead in your life. If you can’t clean your room, have trash diet, doesn’t sleep >7 hours a day, I guarantee that those habits will cripple you even further when you’re solving the uncertainties.
Having said that, what is habit anyway? From what I understand, habit consists of three fundamental things: cue, execution, and reward. Say, you’re a smoker that has just finished a meal. Over a few minutes you’ll feel that “sour” taste in your mouth. That’s your cue. Normally, your execution is to obviously smoke (execution) and you’d feel relieved from the “sour” taste (reward). The only thing that is directly actionable is the execution part. Now I’m not trying to downplay nicotine addiction, but obviously the smoker needs to exchange the execution part with something else that’s better. I know it’s not as easy as “just don’t smoke bro lol”, but this is pretty much the basic understanding of habit. If you want to change an execution and you can identify the cue OR the reward, you will have an easier time to restructure your habit. Of course this applies to creating new habit as well. If you are interested in habits in general, I highly suggest you to take a look at The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. All these things I wrote in here is based on that book so rest assured, I am not talking out of my ass.
Now that we have gotten a better understanding of habits, I want to discuss several specific habits that I believe are fundamental in anyone’s life. Without further ado, let’s get into the shilling:
- Reading: This is my newest addition to my arsenal, yet I dare say that this is the most influential habit that anyone can pick up in their life. I have only finished 2 books, and two of them have improved my life tremendously. The most surprising thing is that I didn’t even expect this habit to have this much impact. In fact, I picked up this habit not because I want to be Gandalf the Wise, but simply because I want to have a better sleep. So I decided that every night, I’d spend at least FIVE MINUTES to read a book so I can be sleepy. In the past I have tried this habit several times, but it never sticked. For me, the trick was to actually grasp a real book, not ebook, and have a realistic expectation. It took me 3–4 weeks to finish a 300-page book, but nevertheless I finished it.
- Sleep: Sleeping and waking up at the same time is underrated. The research about this is everywhere, and none of them disagrees that 8 hours sleep is crucial if you want to have a good day and be free from disease.
- Nutrition: Same as sleeping. Tons of evidence of undeniable benefit to your health, yet almost no one practices it. Get enough macro and micro, it’s not that hard once you develop a “lens” to filter which food is trash and which one is good, and develop the discipline to actually act into it.
- Lifting: Self explanatory. Better physique means more self confidence, better health, etc. Remember, you are no longer an adolescent. Your body is now aging against you and if you don’t take care of it as soon as possible, you will pay dearly in the future.
- Meditation: another staple aside from reading. If you go to any self-help writings, meditation and reading is almost always mentioned. Says it helps you from thinking unnecessary things. I personally haven’t practiced this yet, but will definitely try this one after reading habit is cemented onto me.
- Saving money: Self explanatory. Compound investing etc. You don’t want to be poor, do you?
One last tips from me is that it’s always better to start slow and steady rather than press the gas pedal and crash several blocks later. When I give lifting advice to my friends, I try not to overwhelm them with “you do x y z”, but I prefer to stress the most important point, which is progressive overload. I always say that it’s fine to eat dogshit when you’re starting out. However when your progress stalls, it’s time to take a look at nutrition. You get the idea. A mediocre progress over a lifetime is better than a godly progress for just one or two years. This also applies to every other habit.
3. Hobby
If habits are the framework of your life and friends are the WD-40 to make everything runs smoothly, then hobby is the substance that curates life into you — things that make you unique and humane. Maybe I’m too invested in my hobbies, but it is not an understatement when I say that they saved me in a way. After all, they were the only motivation left in me after everything went south. I remember at one point there were only 2 goals in my life. Short term is to be “ripped as ****” and the long term is to have a huge, fancy aquarium that will stun everyone when they see it. I was willing to do whatever it takes to achieve them.
Regarding hobby, I like to classify them as three archetypes: consume, produce, and work.
- Consume: basically “using” things, such as watching movies, reading comics, playing video games, etc. In short, consuming media. The only function of this hobby is to not look like a robot who only does work and to entertain you.
- Produce: producing things, either arbitrary or physical. Usually things that might be boring at first, but gets better when you put more time into it. Cooking, making music, keeping living things, painting, writing, etc. These activities might not make you rich, but it’s the hobby that brings the most color to your personality.
- Work: things that make you more “valuable” but is usually always boring or tedious. Studying, investing, working out, etc. Increases your raw stats directly.
So, why is it important to know the classification of hobbies, you ask. Well, if all you do is watch movies, play video games and browse social media, then all you do is consume, consume and consume which is obviously imbalanced. You have to balance it out with other hobbies to make yourself a well-rounded individual. It doesn’t even have to be equally spread. For example, spending 15–60 minutes on your “producing” habit, accumulated enough over several years, is enough to make you adept at that craft. Being interesting and having value on yourself is great because you always have some stories to tell to your friends. You might exchange your knowledge with your friends about crafts that you are both adept at. You might even discover an untapped business potential. These things correlate directly to the first point where you need to be valuable to your friend. When you have balanced hobbies, the possibilities are endless.
Closing Thoughts
All three points here are pretty much intertwined with each other. If you practice all these three, you WILL see results. You just need to be patient because Trinity Force is not a band-aid fix. It takes months to manifest and years to show its result. In a world where “instant” is reinforced, don’t be discouraged when you don’t instantly succeed. Don’t tap out too early. Play the long game. Trust the process.
