For this post to make sense, the reader should note that I like to think about my life using 5 subdivisions: health 🍎, money 💰, family 🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒, love ❤️, and fun 🥳.

Money is not about money itself, but about work or creating a company, but I decided to keep it like this to make things simple.

My main life goal is to maximize each of them as much as I can. That means I will try to be the best and pursue constant progress in all of them (whatever that means for each category). Sometimes, one of them is put to the side so that I can focus on another, which is fine, but I try to balance them all in the majority of the time.

Here’s a quick explanation of what they mean for me:

• Health
  • a great and healthy body
  • achieve above-average performance in sports I like (surf, BJJ, and weights)
• Money
  • amazing job
  • create a profitable startup (my end goal is to build a company that helps lots of people)
  • the only purpose of the job is to provide stability while I don’t run a company
• Family
  • a great connection with my family
  • nice moments to remember
• Love
  • self-explanatory, find the love of my life…
• Fun
  • do great things
  • have great experiences with people I love

Now that you know how I think, here’s where I’m at today.

Present

I feel like I’m in the middle of a hiatus in my life right now. Some areas are absolutely amazing and I’m extremely grateful for how they are turning out, but some of them (money 💰, to be precise) are just in some kind of vacuum. I haven’t been seeing much progress in some of them recently, which makes me anxious and think that something’s wrong. Right now, I’m trying to seek answers about the ones that are in this vacuum state. So, the first idea that popped into my head was to write about it to make my thoughts clearer and try to find a “solution” or, at least, to finish this with a plan for the next months.

Here's how I see my current positions:

• Health - (8/10)
  • my body is in good shape (7% BF in my last test ~2 months ago)
  • surfing better than ever (but far away from where I want to be), improving in BJJ, and stable (in a good way) in the gym
  • need to eat healthier though
• Money - (5/10)
  • working in the same startup for the last 2 years
  • everything is fine, but I’m starting to get comfortable
  • feeling a little stuck and in need of a bigger challenge
  • no current side-project going on
• Family - (10/10)
  • everything is great and balanced
• Love - (11/10)
  • last year, I found the love of my life :)
• Fun - (9/10)
  • will make a ski trip in Q3 and surfed a lot of times this year
  • this is the category I usually put aside to focus on others

As you can see, the main area that’s sort of stagnated is the money 💰 one. I’ve been working in a fintech for the past 2 years and it has been an amazing time. The problem is that I want more than that. In terms of the actual work, there are almost no challenges remaining. As I wrote in Glasses, now may be a good time for another big change.

This situation is starting to bother me now, so I will try to find a way to improve it.

Future

As you can see, I’m a very future-oriented person. This makes me wonder about the future a lot more than I should and sometimes that’s not good for me. Some stoic books I’ve read say that you shouldn’t live anywhere but in the present. You feel sad when you’re in the past and anxious when you are in the future. Even though I have been constantly trying to embrace the wisdom of stoicism to prevent me from falling into future-planning rabbit holes, I often find myself doing so.

This time it’s not different. I will try to create scenarios for what might happen in the money 💰 subdivision and what I should do to bring them to reality.

I see majorly 2 options in front of me:

• become the best software engineer I can
• create a startup

Let's start with the latter.

Last year, my friend Abdul and I started a company called Mind, which failed mainly because we didn’t follow Paul Graham's first advice: make something people want. Another reason for our failure is that we were both only part-time dedicated to the company as we both worked as software engineers and didn't have enough money to quit our jobs and work on our idea. Now, I will only start a company if 1) an amazing idea appears, 2) I can work in it full-time or 3) a side project becomes huge. Since none of these is currently going on, let’s think about the first one.

This is the path I’m more inclined to pursue right now. Basically, study CS Ad Aeternum and improve my coding skills to find better jobs, while also doing side projects. A great company might emerge from these side projects, but that's not going to be the main focus (unless it becomes huge). I believe that by becoming a better engineer, I will have access to stuff that might help me with my startup goal. For example, if I become a better engineer, I will be able to get a better job, in this job, I might connect with people who have amazing ideas or influence me to have better ideas.

These are the steps I'm taking to fulfill this path:

• study new programming languages (Swift, Elixir, Go, Rust)
• create side projects with them (like 5Devs or VAYØ)
• get better at LeetCode
• study CS fundamentals