What did you do that has changed your life the most?
What did you do that has changed your life the most?
When I was 20 years old I gave up adding sugar and salt to food and drink. This was due to current news advising the overuse of these ingredients in commercial products.
That was more than 50 years ago and I consider my giving up sugar to be the best decision of my life!
That's a hard one. It could be the kid I had at 15 (still with the same woman, now married, and a couple more kiddos). But maybe bigger than that was finally getting a job that allowed for disposable income at age 27, or that that same company went public years later and I got a windfall removing all debt. But other keystone moments include the following. As a teenager, internalizing a proverb I read: if you can't do something about a situation, don't worry; if you can, then do so and don't worry. Earning a full academic scholarship to university where I took my first programming course. Taking a sales type job that requires talking to strangers (which I also failed at, but the people skills have been a great reward). Starting CrossFit with a very knowledgeable coach which led me to being stronger and eating healthy (mostly the removal of sugar). I could go on.
Meditation as regularly as possible, whether it’s 3 minutes or 30 minutes.
Has helped digest conscious and subconscious thoughts, occurrences throughout my day, and emotions. My family and friends have mentioned a noticeable change in my personality as being much more relaxed and insightful no matter the circumstance. That’s without them knowing I’ve been meditating consistently for the past year.
Applied for jobs I felt entirely unqualified for.
I gave up my more or less very highly paid software development career and moved to Utah to eat ramen noodles every day and ski 120 days a year.
All things considered I now wish I'd done that immediately as soon as I was old enough, and never got into programming as a career. I'd almost say I wish I'd never learned to program, except being able to write your own programs for your own use (or fix/improve existing free software that you use heavily) is pretty nice.
The money I've made in those ~15 years sure is nice, but it doesn't really come close to making up for wasting the best years of my life.
Made a habit of writing regularly. This was something I wanted to do for a while but I had only sporadic output until I gave a group of readers (almost none I personally knew) the expectation that I would email them weekly original posts related to understanding systems. I've been doing this for over a year now here: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/blog/
Intermittent fasting. Vegan diet. Cycling 100 miles/week.
And yes, meditation. Meditation is key. You've got to take hold of yourself (your mind).
Having a bedtime routine that I stick to. At 9:00 I will drink my chamomile tea and at 9:30 I will put away my electronics and read until I fall asleep. I have found using a red headlamp to read also helps me relax as opposed to having a lamp illuminate my room. Blackout curtains also do wonders.
Continuous learning and studying outside of work. I know being a workaholic is not good but if you really enjoy what you do and you have big goals, getting the discipline to learn something new every day, pays huge dividends short and long term.
Assuming you mean for the better, got a good quality mattress, a house, and a coffee pot I can schedule. Maybe reading/writing every day, but i don't think that's really changed much.
I got a kid, which pretty much changes everything.
It sounds trivial but exercise and a moderate diet affects my well being more than anything else.