November 2018 Monthly Letter
Another month done and dusted — a quick trip to New Zealand and a week down with a cold. I’m gearing up now in the lead up to Christmas, and looking forward to catching up with my friends and family. I recently updated My Impossible List and added a few new goals that I want to achieve to it.
I put together some of my favourite FIRE resources from around the web (which I will add to regularly) in this article. Although a huge amount of these resources are coming out of America (where the FIRE movement is much bigger), there are some fantastic resources starting to appear in Australia which is amazing to see!
Interesting Reads from Around the Web
In Praise of Mediocrity — The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure.
“I’m a little surprised by how many people tell me they have no hobbies. It may seem a small thing, but — at the risk of sounding grandiose — I see it as a sign of a civilization in decline. The idea of leisure, after all, is a hard-won achievement; it presupposes that we have overcome the exigencies of brute survival. Yet here in the United States, the wealthiest country in history, we seem to have forgotten the importance of doing things solely because we enjoy them.
Yes, I know: We are all so very busy. Between work and family and social obligations, where are we supposed to find the time?
But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our ‘hobbies’, if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.’
This month I started to dive into stoicism after a friend mentioned reading a book about it, and this is the first piece I read on it. The Daily Stoic is a great resource when getting started, and has given me a lot of concepts and ideas to think about.
A Stoic turns every obstacle into an opportunity, and that is a thought process that I aspire to reflect in my own life. The modern day philosopher and writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a Stoic as someone who “transforms fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation and desire into undertaking”.
‘Comfort is the worst kind of slavery because you’re always afraid that something or someone will take it away. But if you cannot just anticipate but practice misfortune, then chance loses its ability to disrupt your life.’
Enjoy a festive and fun filled December,
Kate