Newsletter › #23
Life Is a Long, Continuous Accumulation
【What I've been up to】
Hi, Reader,
annyeong! How was your week?
Last weekend I went on a camping trip
and made lots of new friends.
It felt like being back in school —
a really special experience 😁
After camping I headed straight north to Taipei
for a packed schedule: classes, creator meetups, interviews and recording.
I'll be there until Saturday, and fly abroad on Sunday.
It's busy, but I'm happy,
because it's a schedule I chose.
Having choices brings a kind of happiness:
a sense of control over your life and ownership of your time.
I think that's the greatest benefit wealth brings.
Even staying in a backpacker hostel and eating Chishang boxed lunches,
I still feel very happy — that's the calm minimalism brings.
I hope you find your own happiness and calm too.
Finally, I want to share that
I joined a singing class with teacher Chen Wei-Yu of Mr. Voice.
It's excellent — if you want to improve your voice,
check out his course. I wrote about it on Instagram.
Now, on to the topic.
【Life is a long, continuous accumulation】
Today I want to share Professor Peng Ming-Hui's book on life as a long, continuous accumulation.
Here's a short passage:
“Life is a long, continuous process of accumulation.
No single event will ever ruin a person's whole life,
and no single event will ever save it.
What we deserve, we'll get sooner or later; what we don't deserve,
even if we grab it by luck, we can't keep for long.
If we see this clearly,
many so-called ‘major life decisions’ can be met calmly,
with no need for anxiety.
And so-called ‘life's predicaments’
often become trivial in the moment.”
This isn't the first time I've read this passage —
I remember reading it long ago —
but reading it at different stages of life,
and comparing it with my own experience,
it feels different every time.
I remember I never liked studying and my grades were poor.
I took the university entrance exam twice,
and in English I scored just 19 out of 100.
Almost no school would take me.
But none of that stopped me teaching myself English later,
scoring 815 on the TOEIC in 2016,
and now even being able to run a book club entirely in English.
Life really is a long, continuous accumulation.
A poor entrance-exam score
didn't decide the rest of my life.
In a radio interview, Professor Peng
was asked: “How do you deal with the predicaments in your life?”
He froze — for a moment he couldn't think of any.
Thinking it over later, he realized it wasn't that he'd never faced difficulties;
it was that what others saw as predicaments,
he simply treated as passing circumstances.
In a single thought, a predicament becomes just a circumstance — it all depends on how you see it.
I once took a Satir workshop with teacher Lee Chung-Yi,
and one thing he said stayed with me.
Every negative event contains positive resources;
we just don't notice them.
For example, my parents divorced when I was young, and from age ten I had to look after myself.
People who heard this felt sorry for me — even I did at the time.
Why did everyone else have parents looking after them,
while I had to get myself to school and learn to run my own life?
But when I went to college and lived in the dorms, I found I adapted quickly.
Not only could I take good care of myself,
I had room to look after others too.
Looking back, I realized this was an ability I'd built in childhood,
which is why I matured earlier than my peers.
That experience also showed me
that every negative event contains positive resources.
Life is a long, continuous process of accumulation.
No single event will ruin your life,
and no single event will save it.
What really shapes your life is how you see it.
What's meant for me will come in the end;
what isn't, I can't hold on to however hard I try.
There are no real predicaments in life. Seen over a long enough time,
they're all just passing circumstances.
That's what I wanted to share.
This week's episode
#68 | From debt to recovery: getting out of life's low point (guest on Infinite Possibilities Sofa #1)
Why I went into insurance sales, the hard early years, how I changed my mindset when I was stuck, and the turning point of the Dale Carnegie course.
Read the full show notes in English › (the episode is in Mandarin Chinese)
🍎Apple Podcasts
🎧Spotify
🎦YouTube
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——
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That's it for this issue of the FIRE Life Weekly.
If you have any questions about the show or the newsletter,
just write to me at doug@firetw.com.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Have a lovely day,
and see you next time.
Doug