Personal Milestones

Do you have personal milestones? I do. By personal milestones I understand those times when you sit down and replace the “doing” in your life with the “seeing”. You stop doing whatever you planned to do and start to stare at your life. Right, just stare at whatever it comes to your focus and try to understand why and how you’ve accomplished that.

Today is one of those milestones for me. It turns out that today is my birthday. I’m a Scorpio, yes, and my rising sign is Capricorn. Oh, and my Moon is in Aries, in the 3rd house, if you’re interested. Unless you know my date of birth, the time and exact place, you wouldn’t know that. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to share with you some of the things I see right now when I’m staring at my life.

First of all, my career has dramatically changed from my last birthday. At that time I was still an online entrepreneur, with a moderate success in his field, struggling to find resources to keep the things running. That was one of the activities I thought I enjoyed the most, but time said otherwise. I don’t miss at all being a regular business man. To be honest, I don’t think I ever liked to be perceived like this. I always thought that the label of “entrepreneur”, or “successful businessman” is a shallow and empty form. I accepted it and carried around with me only to be accepted in turn by society. It’s still pretty difficult to walk into a potential client office and say: “Hi, I’m a citizen of the world, and I think I might have something that could interest you. Let’s do business together!”. I guess will have to wait a little bit for that one to manifest…

If you look from outside it might seem I don’t have a career at all. I don’t have a regular job. All I do is experience life as it is, blog about it and follow some simple principles for living. That would be my “mission statement”, by the way, and if you don’t have one yet, I highly encourage you to make one for you. It’s so much simpler when you have a personal mission statement, than when you don’t. The moment you start to sketch a personal mission, you may find some very interesting patterns in your life, not always under your control. You may found that what you do on a daily basis has nothing to do with your core principles, or, to lighten up the things a little, with what you simply enjoy to do in your life. But, as I plan to write a full post about finding your personal mission, I’ll stop my ramblings about it.

My health is another thing that really skyrocketed during the last year. After I sold my business, I started to really take care of myself. I become an early riser and embraced a full raw food diet. I can proudly say that for the last quarter of the year I’ve been in my best shape in the last 10-15 years. Especially the raw food diet has been a tremendous step ahead. Another very interesting thing that I see – now that I started to really stare at my life – is the fact that I’ve been doing all of this progress with so much little effort. Becoming an early riser especially would have been a major burden for me in other circumstances. But I somehow managed to get over with it and enjoy it. I’m planning to write how to become an early riser later on, so enough for today.

Financially speaking, my current status is a complete rewrite of my last birthday financial status. I turned more than 100.000 EUR debt (that would be a consolidated debt for both personal and business debt) into zero, and my finances are having now a consistent growing path. There’s no explosion coming in and I don’t really think my finances will jump to the sky like tomorrow, but I’m out of debt and I’m making as much money as I need. Of course, this was possible because I sold the business. And now it’s the moment to say that I never felt like I’ve sold anything. I always felt like I was buying my liberty in exchange for my business. That was quite a deal, my friend, believe me .

Personal relationships are much more fulfilling than on my last birthday. I don’t have as many “friends” as I used to, and I find this a relief. I can hardly count my friends on one hand fingers, and I find this extremely fulfilling. Never was I the going out guy type and I prefer much simpler friendships. And my family is just starting to function. I can’t say I had a family while I was focusing on the business, although I did most of the things you are supposed to do when you have a family: like social entertainment and so on. It’s only in the last few months that my family relationships are starting to unfreeze and rearrange. It does come with some floods if you are curious and the unfreezing process is not always pleasant. There are ups and downs but I am so thankful for the fact that I do have a family relationship that I can control and take responsibility for, even if we’re fighting at times. But fighting is healthy. If you keep it inside it will start to rotten.

Another fantastic thing that happened this year was my trip to New Zealand. I would hardly have understood what you were saying if you had come to me one year ago and tell me that I will travel to the other end of the Earth and back. I’m pretty sure that I would seriously consider your mental health if we had had that type of conversation one year ago. Oh, and the fact that I decided to move with my entire family there, that would have been unconceivable. But it happened. It really happened. The trip was fantastic, and the move to New Zealand is started. It might happen at a different speed than I thought, but it’s happening, it started to unfold and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

Overall, this personal milestone is much nicer to have and describe than my last 10-12 personal milestones. And all of this happened because I wanted to. In fact, everything in our lives happens because we wanted it to happen. There are no excuses, no coincidences, no other persons to be blamed for your life. You are what you want to be, every second of your life. And if you don’t like who you are right now, if you hate your life as it is in this second, if you feel you live under your real potential, remember it takes only a shift in what you want to change your life for good. That’s all you have to do. Is that simple, you only have to want the change. The changing process can be painful and you might overcome a lot of resistance, but eventually you will change your life. And it really starts with wanting something better for yourself.

Happy birthday, Diana!

Today is my wife’s birthday. We’re both Scorpio so our birthdays are really close. I write this without really planning – one of the things Diana taught me being to enjoy life without too much planning. But that’s not the only thing that she taught me. There are plenty of other things she taught me and for which I am grateful. I am grateful to Diana because

• she takes me for who I am
• she gave me the beautiful gift in the world: our daughter
• she is beautiful
• she is sometimes moody
• she understands when I’m sometimes moody
• she has green eyes
• she is the most playful person I ever met
• she thinks in unusual ways, although so similar to my ways
• she is somebody I can trust
• she is telling the truth
• she makes me telling the truth
• she smiles more than any other person I know
• she knows how to make – and keep – new friends
• she know how to accept my failures and acknowledge my successes
• she taught me traveling is the most interesting way to enjoy life
• she never worries, except when she does
• she is a free person
• she made me a free person
• she have unusual subtle intuitions
• she made me trust my intuition
• she made thousands of little beautiful things that I don’t remember now – the same way you don’t really remember putting together every brick of your new home, but you’re always surrounded by those bricks, which of course, are your new home now

For all those little beautiful things I am grateful to Diana. But I don’t love her because of that. I just love her.