We have three main guiding principles in life and in writing this blog. The following phrases from our favorite authors have expressed our guiding principles in the best way they could be.
On this blog
We want to share our experiences and habits that enhance our well-being through a healthy relationship with money. Hopefully, you can have something to take-away and improve your relationship with money.
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well.
Stephen King
On the process of learning and developing new habits
We wish there is an easy way to master new skills and knowledge. For a program, the programmer can write new codes for it to perform a new task. Even this process takes time on feedback and iteration to see if the code works as expected. We believe how we learn and what we learn is based on who we are and what we value. In the book Peace in every step, Thich Nhat Hanh discusses the process of psychotherapy, which we think is relevant to any learning processes and developing new habits.
Together with the patient, a therapist looks at the nature of the pain. Often, the therapist can uncover causes of suffering that stem from the way the patient looks at things, the beliefs he holds about himself, his culture, and the world. The therapist examines these viewpoints and beliefs with the patient, and together they help free him from the kind of prison he has been in.
But the patient’s efforts are crucial. A teacher has to give birth to the teacher within his student, and a psychotherapist has to give birth to the psychotherapist within his patient. The patient’s “internal psychotherapist” can then work full-time in a very effective way.
The therapist does not treat the patient by simply giving him another set of beliefs. She tries to help him see which kinds of ideas and beliefs have led to his sufferings. Many patients want to get rid of their painful feelings, but they do not want to get rid of their beliefs, the viewpoints that are the very roots of their feelings. So therapist and patient have to work together to see the patient see things as they are.
Our beliefs and personalities influence how we think and make decisions. We write what works for us because of our set of values and beliefs. We can’t fix you or your life situations. Your efforts are crucial to the process. Only through the process of understanding who you are and figuring out what works for you can get you to your destination.
On how to read this blog
While any blogger would wish readers to read everything, we think Tim Ferris captures the core of our hopes in rule #2 in using his book named “Tools of Titans”:
Skip, but do so intelligently. Take a brief mental note of anything you skip. Perhaps put a little dot in the corner of the page or highlight the headline.
Perhaps it’s skipping and glossing over precisely these topics or questions that has created blind spots, bottlenecks, and unresolved issues in your life? That was certainly true for me.
If you decide to flip pass something, note it, return to it later at some point, and ask yourself, “Why did I skip this?” Did it offend you? Seem beneath you? Seem too difficult? And did you arrive at that by thinking it through, or is it a reflection of biases inherited from your parents and others? Very often, “our” beliefs are not our own.
This type of practice is how you create yourself, instead of seeking to discover yourself. There is value in the later, but it’s mostly past-tense: It’s a rearview mirror. Looking out the windshield is how you get where you want to go”.
We are all in for “Choose your journey.” While doing so, we hope you will be mindful of your emotions and biases to certain ideas and notice what triggers you. For example, with my Finance and Investments background, I usually skip through when someone talks about the power of compounding (i.e. the interest on your savings will earn interest, and it will grow with time). I know everything I need to know about this concept because I work in finance (i.e. overconfidence bias). It was not until recently, when I sat down with my excel spreadsheet and crunched the number, that I could see the cost of my overconfidence bias. So what are your biases?
Sophie & Hai - Notes on building a healthy relationship with money 