I ran across this great quote:

To laugh often and love much;

to win the respect of intelligent persons

and the affection of children;

to earn the approbation of honest critics

and to endure the betrayal of false friends;

to appreciate beauty;

to find the best in others;

to give of oneself;

to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child,

a garden patch or redeemed social condition;

to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation;

to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived–

this is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I like it a lot. Makes me want to be successful in life.

Today I watched this documentary, and it deeply moved me. It is about an old teacher, who teaches his students something relevant. Compassion, friendship, and happiness.

His work touches me on a deep level. I cried quite a lot. I hope you like the documentary as much as I do!

Here is a skill that helps you to become financial independent, healthier, happier and helps you to grow as a person.

It is not very popular these days. But hey —  Common Sense these days makes no sense at all.

I am talking about insourcing.

Insourcing means taking your matters into your hand.

It means going for a daily walk, instead of taking those pills against high blood pressure.

It means cooking your own food, instead of running to the next restaurant.

It means to change a bad situation instead of complaining.

It means you stay at home with your children when they are small.

It means you clean your flat.

It means growing your own food. Organic, local, seasonal and fresh. You name it.

It means building your own items. Maybe even your own house.

It means when something breaks, you try to repair it.

It means before buying something new — you think about what item does nearly the same and use it.

It means you build the toys for your children — toys they will probably never forget.

You get the rough idea. Insourcing is simple.

Where do you insource already?

We can remember between 5 and 9 digits.

So, why do we value our thoughts so much?

Gaze at a flower and it is marvelous. — Look with a mental projection in your head, and you only see a representation. You look at the thought of a flower.

You could not accurately describe how a flower looks. How it smells with words. You have to go beyond thought. Beyond words.

So let’s try to be like a child. Let’s try to open our eyes and just see.

Let’s marvel at the flowers.

I discovered the secret how you can achieve your goals.

A secret that can change your life. Forever.

When we look at people who lost weight, at people who got rich, at happy people, at people who mastered a craft, we only see the results.

We see what they are now. And not the path that let them there.

We do not see the hours of hard work they put into it. The errors they made. The times they wanted to give up.

One reaction to this is to be overwhelmed. What they did, we cannot do…

The other reaction is to imitate them. But one has to fail it that if one only looks at the results.

So, now let me propose something different.

Focus on the small everyday steps.  Stick to them.

Read the secret again. It’s too easy to forget. It’s not popular these days. It never was.

The reason is that going from A to B, one step at a time, does not look or feel glorious.

Energy and persistence conquer all things.

Benjamin Franklin

Why small steps are so magical

Small everyday decisions compound over time.

Example 1: Money

You invest $200 a month. It’s easy to do for most persons. Also, easy not to do.

It will not make a big difference at first. You will hardly notice how your savings increase. You’d rather keep the money.

But after 20 years, you will have saved $232.777,50. Here comes the fascinating part: Your investment will return $1370 per month. Not bad at all.

Here comes the fascinating part: Your investment will return $1370 per month. More than you ever saved.

You could even stop saving at this point and have a fantastic retirement nest-egg.

Example 2: Health**  You go for a walk every day.

In your youth, you don’t notice much. Just having some fun.  Enjoying the sun.

Down the road, walking has massive health benefits. Less risk for diabetes, lower weight, better mood and many, many more. It also saves a lot of money.

Example 3: Happiness**  Boy Scouts do a good deed every day. Try it — not only will you make the world a better place to live, but you also will be happy.

Or say thank you to a colleague every day. This changes everything if you stick to it.

The sky is not the limit:

That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind

Neil Armstrong

The one step. For the one man.

It was billions of steps. Years of hard labor of thousands of men. Many mundane, seemingly insignificant things.

Culminating in the one step everyone sees.

Go.

I realize that all of this sounds unimpressive. After all, we all do small steps — right?

The problem is: there are 1000 good excuses for quitting. I don’t see results. I don’t feel well today. The weather is fantastic outside.

So one walks into different directions. No wonder it is overwhelming to come from A to B.

So stick to one direction and go. One small step. 5 minutes - it does not matter. Do not quit. No day off. No matter what. You will be surprised where it takes you.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

Franz Kafka

Often I feel bad after watching an ad, reading an article about the next health gadget, after watching Apple keynotes or browsing on Amazon.

I feel like I have a hole in the stomach. I have to fight internal fights. Shall I buy the thing I didn’t even know about a few minutes ago?

Often I loose and buy. Despite knowing better.

Worst of all — it became apparent to me that these holes in my stomach cannot be filled by stuff. They appear again and again and again.

Getting rid of ads

Here is what I do since about a year - and it works quite well. I got rid of many ads:

• Install an AdBlocker plugin for your browser
• Block Amazon and other shopping sites that you tend to browse
• Prevent watching TV ads
• Unsubscribe from all email-newsletters at once

For all other ads: Try to catch yourself watching as them. When you catch yourself, go on with your life.

For example, I look at tobacco ads quite frequently. I have no idea why — I don’t even smoke.

Ads work

They work against your financial freedom. They work against your happiness.

Do not let them punch holes into your stomach and your purse.

Photo by Nico Smit on Unsplash

Today, our society tends to move more and more towards specialization. You can buy everything prefabricated, and you are supposed to hyper-specialize in your job.

When it comes to your life, you should really consider if this makes sense for you.

Here are some examples, what we do on our own. Many examples are mundane — but that is just fine, considering that many people cannot boil an egg, without a special appliance.

We are chefs

Every morning, we stand in our kitchen and prepare a meal tailored exactly to our taste. Additionally, we have complete control over all the ingredients - which is great since we both are on a special diet.

It’s cheaper and healthier than to buy a meal every day — and best of all, cooking is a skill, and we are getting better and better.

We are barbers

Jupp. It probably doesn’t look great, but this saves money and is relatively simple to learn.

For the ladies, this is probably a bigger challenge — but it should save you gals even more money.

We are farmers

We have a little garden and are starting to grow our food. I won’t argue that this is cheaper in every case — it isn’t — but It’s great to do it.

We build furniture

Some of our furniture is hand-made by us. You really don’t have to buy every piece of furniture. It’s wonderful to have some pieces custom-made by you.

We repair our devices

If a device is broken, we try to fix it. Occasionally this is beyond us — but often it works.

What has this to do with early retirement?

My point is — you don’t have to buy everything. Use your money and save money to build the skills you want. You don’t have to be perfect.

This is very rewarding.

As a retiree you will probably be very happy to be into knitting and soldering or to have acquired other new skills.

Photo by Shir omani Kant on Unsplash

I love reading. When I was young, my parents heavily subsidized my book purchases. So, I formed a habit of buying a ton of books.

When I became a programmer, this started to become more and more costly. Every few days, the postman delivered my books.

When I started to budget and tried to invest money, I noticed that I spent between 100-200 Euros on books every month.

This means 18,000 Euros over ten years. Quite a big sum.

I managed to get my book related expenses down to 20 Euros per month with these tricks. Spoiler: They are obvious — but only in hindsight.

The library

Most of my non-technical books I get from our local library now. It has quite a wonderful assortment of great books. And: Every time I ask for them to buy a new one, they buy it for me.

I enjoy being there. It gives me a sense of community to share all these books with many people.

Used books and selling books

For books that the library doesn’t have, I buy used book over Amazon Marketplace. And after I read them, I sell them.

This makes even expensive books very affordable.

My employer

For work related books, my employer is happy to order them for me. And I can give these books to my colleagues and have them at hand in our company’s library.

Saving is not about sacrifice

So, you see: I still love books. I read as many as before. I enjoy walks to the library — and all the book-loving people there.

I do not have shelf after shelf full of books at home — but that’s fine with me.

I save a ton of money — and still enjoy reading.

These are the kinds of things, you have to watch out for — where you waste money, without improving your life.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 – 1971)

Life is full of problems. Haven’t you noticed? You can spend your whole energy and creativity on fixing them.

Here are a few examples that you might encounter as a programmer:

• Your team does not test code
• You want to use Git, but everyone else just feels fine with SVN
• No department speaks to another one
• Scrum sucks

I had quite a hard time trying to fix all these things only a few years ago. It was quite impossible for me to “fix” these things in my team.

Do not try to change people

This is my advice: Do not try to change people.

It sounds simple. But it isn’t easy to do it.

Start with yourself

Here are a few examples:

Example 1: Everyone else uses SVN and you want to use GIT

What you can change today is use git-svn. It is not perfect, but you can commit as often as you like, squash commits and only push quality code into SVN.

You don’t have to ask anyone. Just do it. Be patient and wait. Someday, some other colleagues might use GIT. Tell them about git-svn. Before long, you all might use GIT.

Example 2: Your team does not test code

And what about you? Do you really test-drive or test code? No? Then why not start now. You don’t have to ask for permission. If you believe it’s what professionals do, then do it. Today.

If there is a point to testing, then someone might notice. If there is no point to testing, you might notice.

Example 3: The debarments do not speak to each other

Speak to another department. Invite a colleague that you don’t know to lunch. Are you willing to do this? Are you willing to do this weekly?

Are there any colleagues that might be willing to do it? Can they join you? Ask them :)

Is there a question in your daily work, that only another department can answer? So, why don’t you ask them?

This is something that you can do. Today.

Why is this more effective?

You can act immediately on these problems. You do not have to ask for permission to change yourself.

Why waste any energy on stuff that you cannot do? It is absurd to change, if you think about it. It shows a lack of trust into your fellow programmers. Without trust, why should they follow you? You are not testing your code as well. You are not talking to other departments — why should they?

Change yourself

The things that you cannot accept in others, are a mere reflection of you. You cannot accept them because you haven’t come to terms with yourself.

Try to change yourself.

You might not change the “situation” at all — but you will stop to be its victim. You will feel much better and, in the end you might be surprised, that the problem just dissolves over time.

After a few of these experiences, you might even notice, that the biggest problem might have been your perception of the “situation”.

This is for the brave

Do not forget that changing oneself is only for the brave. It hurts to see that all the bad things that we think “others” do, we might actually do ourselves.

So be gentle to yourself :)

From time to time, I really want to make it hard for me to seek for distractions.

I found myself using the nice Mac OS X tool Freedom all the time. Freedom disables the network connectivity, which means no Twitter, Facebook etc.

But when I revisited the site, I found that the author now charges $10 for it - That’s just a little too expensive in my opinion.

So, I went out, and it took me 5 minutes to come up with freedom.sh.

# !/bin/bash
echo "Enough of this filthy internet" | cowsay -s
sudo route -n delete default &> /dev/null

Cowsay required. (If you prefer not to install cowsay just remove the line!)

________________________________
< Enough of this filthy internet >
--------------------------------
            ^__^
            (**)_______
            (__)       )/
             U  ||----w |
                ||     ||

To reenable your internet, you have to add back the default route or restart your computer.

Little update (18.09.21): I do use Freedom now. It got even more expensive - but it syncs between all my devices and changed from a internet kill-switch to something even more useful. I found it great to disable news sites and other addictive sites during corona.