chapter four – my 30s
Happy Chinese New Year! Welcome to the year of the Ox! According to Wikipedia:
The Ox is the sign of prosperity through fortitude and hard work. This powerful sign is a born leader, being quite dependable and possessing an innate ability to achieve great things. As one might guess, such people are dependable, calm, [...]
I love London. I love the people. I love the energy. I love me in London. I love who I become. How I think. And the ideas I have. The idea that’s really captured my imagination right now is three word maxims, I’ve spent three days in London and [...]
2008 was a pretty intense year for us, all of us. Okay that might have been a bit of an understatement.
We – the bee and me – moved to Switzerland, the world suffered through the worst economic crisis since the depression. That’s looking like a tie right now.
We got to visit Rome, [...]
A friend of mine asked me last night what I thought of the situation in Mumbai. I answered that I find it, like all terrorist attacks, crazy. It’s a sad reaction by desperate misguided individuals who don’t value other human lives as much as they should. After that I qualified my response [...]
One of the things I’m discovering about Switzerland is that they force you to assimilate by offering you less of everything.
Examples:
95% of the gyms in Switzerland do not open before 9am. Which means working out in the AM is next to impossible
All the retail stores are closed on Sunday and most are [...]
The Bee has started a blog about our move and two posts in she’s definitely proven she’s the writer in the family – I can’t believe she’s written about how we’re using stolen cutlery! Crazy to think after a combined 14 years in London (my eight and her six) we’ll be leaving for the [...]
My mom and dad were born in Tanzania to parents who had come from India. My mom travelled to India and then to Canada, my dad ended up in the same place but instead of India did a stop off in the UK to study. It was a tough journey. But I [...]
Coming back from vacation and reading about how to taking time off from work on the Harvard’s Discussion Leaders site was a pretty interesting coincidence. I don’t take enough holidays and when I do I end up occasionally checking email and reading blogs and what not.
Working too hard can be counter productive. If [...]
I just finished reading Seth Godin’s the Dip. It was a quick, enjoyable read that’s helped me focus a bit.
The book talks about how anything worth having needs dedication and is usually pretty hard and how quitting a dead end masquerading as an opportunity (or as Seth calls them a “Cul-de-Sac”) is a [...]
I finished reading the Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt this week. A lot of it was pretty common sense and some things were surprising, like religious people being happier.
One of the things that caught me off guard was work and achievement of work as a source of happiness. In hind sight [...]