A Christmas message

This is written by the 19 year old son of friends of ours. It was sent to family as a Christmas present.
I think it is GOLD and is well worth sharing, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.    Sorry it is so long, but I had to.

To me, I think this guy has just figured out what, snowboarders, skaters & surfers already knew…........... wonder when he will discover his board of choice?

As most of you know, I don’t have much in the way of money at the moment, so I thought I’d write this post as a way to teach my family and friends the myriad things I’ve learnt in the last year.

To begin, I’ll provide a bit of a timeline so that you can see the last year from my perspective. I’m covering mainly business topics (funnily enough).

Started ************ in December and worked for a Mining Engineering company (which bored the shit out of me)
In early January, having juggled the engineering job and **************** for a while, I came to the realisation that I didn’t want to work for anyone else… and really started getting excited about becoming an ‘entrepreneur’
Moved out of home for a while in January which was great apart from the absence of aircon and the crappy shared facilities.
January-May — ****************** had its ups and downs, the downs mostly being attributed to laziness/bad judgement – but it became obvious how bad so many businesses and business people are, which really makes it easy for people with a few brains and command of technology.
Late May (I think) – started planning to go national.
June – formed *****************
July – hired interviewers in Sydney and Melbourne and started managing people many years older than me
August – September – off to Latvia, not much work was done in this time but I had a lot of fun and learnt a lot about how little most of my material possessions mattered.
October-Now – Working almost non-stop on making **************** something good and something that earns good mone.
A lot of time was wasted throughout the year, yet even so, I have learnt more in this last year than in my whole 12 years of school (funny that). The skills I’ve developed have really created a learning snowball effect for me, in that I am learning more and more each week, and learning more useful and enjoyable things as well.

In this post, I am going to try and document many of these skills I’ve learnt, as well as many of the cool and useful resources I’ve come across since last year.

Many of the resources will be tech-related, though I will dabble into a little bit of life philosophy too. I will try to make this post cohesive so that everything flows nicely, but note that I am bound to go off on tangents at times.

To begin, I will introduce some of the ideas of my favourite lifestyle author, Tim Ferriss (read his book!!!!). Tim basically purports that there is far too much of a focus on making money to buy bullshit material possessions like nice cars, furniture, big tv’s, expensive clothes…. the list goes on. Almost everybody wants more money than they have, and these bullshit possessions are the first thing they think of buying were they to come across more money.

The New Rich aren’t necessarily super-wealthy in traditional terms. Instead, they are rich in terms of their lifestyle, and place enormous value on time. For example, a 50 hour a week $60000 a year person who is a slave to their job would be considered far less wealthy than a 20 hour a week $35000 per year person who has time to spend with their family and do the things they really enjoy.

The ideas in Tim Ferriss’ book are all very eye-opening and I’ve only really touched the tip of the ice-berg, so I hope that you will read his book, as it is quite seriously life changing.

My personal life philosophy that I am becoming more and more passionate about with time, is that we live in a fucked up society where everybody is conditioned to follow one of a small number of very linear paths – most of these paths involve something along the following lines:

You are born!
As a toddler life is all about having fun and learning
You go to school and start learning formally – and receiving nothing challenging for the first 7 years of education.
You start high-school, and things become slightly more difficult, however, you still have very little choice in what you learn and you have to behave like a good little boy/girl or your parents will be very angry that you aren’t learning what you are told to learn (its not the parents fault, they are conditioned to think that school is the be all- end all of life)
Year 11-12 – you have a little more say in what you learn and your parents trust you enough to start partying like crazy.
Start uni/apprenticeship and start hitting the clubs and pubs in your spare time. You have much more freedom and you can party and socialise much more.
Get your degree/Finish your apprenticeship — the next step is where the big problem lies
Start looking for a job – decide that you are at the point in your life where you need to start taking everything more seriously, become more ‘responsible’, and more ‘mature’. You subsequently get your first ‘real job’, stop partying, try and find someone ’sensible’ to settle down with, and watch the news every night.
You spend 20 years climbing the corporate ladder, maybe increasing your salary 60% if you are lucky. You take a holiday once every two years – how fun!
You hit 45-50 and realise that you have wasted your younger years working your arse off, being predominantly a boring, miserable fuck, and become even more miserable because of this realisation.
You retire at around 60 and start doing some of the things you always wanted to do – although in a much more reserved and sensible fashion than you would have 30 years prior.
You die 20-40 years later, after having spent most of your retirement complaining about young people and how they are hooligans – hahaahah
I know this is super-generalised, however, I feel that it is a reality for at least 60% of people out there – and I’m not sorry if you find my phrasing of the matter offensive, as I am really expressing my true feelings, not those feelings that I’ve formulated to please all the nice people out there.

The example above is what I see as a shit lifestyle, and one of my biggest goals in life is to help people live better, through having more fun, being less mature, having less stress, and fulfilling passions.

This post is proving much more difficult for me to structure than I anticipated…. so bare with me.

In my opinion, the best way to effectively extricate yourself from the life path I provided above (and it doesn’t matter how old you are) – is to start working for yourself, be this starting a business, or contracting your services to others.

Contracting your services is much easier these days with the Web – have a look at Elance.com and Odesk.com, where you can freely advertise yourself to do any sort of task, be it creating music, writing articles, writing ebooks, editing, creating web sites, being a personal assistant, there is a niche for everything.

Starting a business is much easier (and less risky) than many people believe. I’m 19 and I’ve done it. My sister has started a business inspired by the shitness of somebody she worked for (this is a great way to get started). The two biggest keys to starting a business are:

Having the fucking balls to go ahead and do it (you don’t have to quit your job, you can spend 1 hour a night working on it instead of watching TV).
Keeping up with technology and staying in touch with the web – the internet has made businesses so much easier to start, in that you can now start a business with almost zero capital, and effective advertising is much more affordable (again, read Tim Ferriss’ book as it talks about a lot of this in more detail)
Big piece of advice – limit your information intake to that information that you are really interested in. Stop watching TV, and use the internet to find articles, books, videos, movies, etc that you are actually interested in.

Humans love information, especially when its easy to digest. Thats why so many people are addicted to TV – they watch it for 2-3 hours a night, watching it even if they aren’t particularly interested in the programs. This is stupid – you are wasting your life.

If you want to know what the latest headlines are – go to google news, or channel 7 news online (any online news site) and do a quick read of whats been happening – you can then read or watch the articles that interest/effect you, and fuck off all of the stuff that you don’t care about but would otherwise watch just because it is ‘on’.

With websites like Google Reader and Feedly, you can freely subscribe to information that you care about – you can subscribe to the latest soccer news (and piss off all that sports news that you don’t care about), you can subscribe to the latest interior design news, you can subscribe to whatever you want! There are so many resources out there – the trick is finding the good quality stuff.

Below is a list of the information I follow and really care about:

Tim Ferriss’ blog – http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog    –    it covers all sorts of fun stuff about lifestyle design, travelling, health, learning, and much more – he researches everything properly and I enjoy and am interested in almost all of the information.

Scott Young’s blog – http://www.scotthyoung.com  -  great young guy who focuses predominantly on learning better, living better, and questioning common assumptions that people in society hold – highly recommended.

Anthony Johnson’s blog – http://www.thedreamlounge.net    –  has heaps of excellent information on health, nutrition, and fitness – discovered this blog today and he really seems to know what hes talking about (and I’ve discovered that much of the stuff I had heard previously about health and fitness is questionable)

Those are my three favourites and I highly recommend them – I think that applying the techniques suggested in all three would culminate in one very enjoyable and fulfilling life.

I’ve rambled on a fair bit, so I will try and cut to the chase with what I have learnt in terms of technology and the internet.

You should note that in this day and age, open source software is available for almost all of your technology needs. Open Source basically means that it is free, and is developed by the community.

For example, an alternative to using Microsoft Word and Excel would be to use OpenOffice (completely free!), or Google Docs

I highly recommend Google Docs (docs.google.com) as it allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online in an account, meaning that you can access these documents on any computer you want to, and you can also share the documents with whoever you want to withouth having to email them as an attachment. You will never get somewhere and go, shit I forgot my USB, or fuck i forgot to email that speech to myself – it will always be there.

Instead of doing a project and have 10 versions of a document between 10 team members, you can (using Google Docs) have the 1 version of the document that every team member can edit at the same time.

Another highly useful (free) tool is Dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com). Dropbox allows you to have a folder on your computer that is synchronised to the internet. If you put all of your important files in your ‘Dropbox’, you could blow up your computer and still have all those files nice and safe online, meaning you could open up a new computer and access your Dropbox and important files again.

A biggggg suggestion now – start using Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Exporer. Google Chrome especially is pioneering the web browser industry and making everything easier, faster, safer, and more customisable to your own wants/needs.

Google is one of the best companies in the world, and is constantly coming out with quality web applications that make your life easier.

I suggest having a look at Google Sites, Picasa, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Wave, and look out for Google Voice which will be coming out in Australia sometime soon hopefully.

Skype is another great tool that many people have started using, but aren’t using to its full potential – you can pay a small amount on Skype to make free landline calls anywhere in the world (9 euro a month) and you can make mobile calls for around 18 cents per minute. Moreover, you can have a home phone number that you buy from Skype for wherever you want. You can buy a Brisbane number, a Sydney number, or a fucking New York number. Skype can save you hundreds a year on line rental and Telstra bills.

I think I am going to have to wrap it up with some financial applications.

Ubank (http://www.ubank.com.au) – is a new bank in Australia back by NAB, You can sign up for an account in 5 minutes using your driver licence and passport numbers and a text message verification. It provides the best interest rate in Australia (currently close to 6% or something), allows you to create as many accounts as you want for free (1 for bills, 1 for travelling, 1 for beer, whatever you want to do really!!!!) Gives you graphical representations of all of your account balances over time so you can see how much money you are hoarding in each account.

Pocketsmith (http://www.pocketsmith.com)  –  allows you to upload all of your transactions so that you can see how much you are spending – you have a simple calendar that lets you plan when you need to bay bills and all that sort of fun stuff.

2 other services i recommend, are xero.com and outright.com - they are both bookkeeping/accounting sites that are very cool and constantly being updated.

Anyway, I have pissed on for long enough for now, and I hope that you take a lot from this article. Ask me questions if you need clarification on any points and make sure you read Tim Ferriss’ four-hour work week book, it is life changing.

Sorry that I had to give you this as a Christmas present this year and not a fancy gift of some sort – Next year should be very different, though I think I will provide something like this on top of some fancy fun gifts.

Merry Christmas and start changing your life and living it to the full.

That was a good read. He has some valid points. I like the way he thinks and I’m guessing he has a very bright future ahead of him.
I would like to read his Christmas letter next year to see where he’s at.

The New Rich aren’t necessarily super-wealthy in traditional terms. Instead, they are rich in terms of their lifestyle, and place enormous value on time. For example, a 50 hour a week $60000 a year person who is a slave to their job would be considered far less wealthy than a 20 hour a week $35000 per year person who has time to spend with their family and do the things they really enjoy.

I like that. It’s important.

Having the **** balls to go ahead and do it (you don’t have to quit your job, you can spend 1 hour a night working on it instead of watching TV).

Agreed. No point in saying “what if?” later down the track.

live better, through having more fun, being less mature, having less stress, and fulfilling passions.

I’m looking forward to doing his suggested reading and exploring the web site links.

Good info, thanks Azz.

I am looking forward to seeing what the following year brings.

Having the insight into his business venture, I can see him doing very well. Mostly from selling the idea of how his business runs rather than the core of the business.
It can be applied to many different applications. Clever young man, not sure if he has figured that out yet.