There are good days and there are bad days. A bad day might be your own fault or it might not but either way there is no shame in having a bad day. If you have a positive outlook on life the ratio of what you consider bad days versus your good days will be better than if you feel depressed; so your own judgement can transform a bad day into a good day and vice versa but even if you have a habit of transforming what could objectively be called a good day into what you subjectively think is a bad day, there is still no shame in having a bad day.

I often wonder about the different ways people live their life and how it affects their life story. What kind of story would be written about your life when you are gone? I know you have many years still ahead of you but given the life path you are currently on, what would be the story written about you by your spouse? by your children? by your friends? By choosing your path today you are choosing the content of your life story. You may want your story to be written like a James Bond novel, like the biography of a great statesman, or perhaps you would rather be known for your loyal and loving role as a father/mother. In any case your ability to leave a legacy will be determined by the actions you take today.

There are many different points of view of the stock market. Having lost quite a bit of money in stocks my father says “stocks are just too risky”, others will quote statistics like “historically stocks have yielded a better average return than other traditional forms of investing”, some advocate daytrading (only keeping each stock for a short period of time like hours or days) as a way to financial affluence.

Yesterday I fell in love. If you are not a car nut like me this will probably sound a bit silly but I fell in love with a car. I was out at a dealership and had 4 different cars that I wanted to look at, two of them were in my price range and the other two were on the upper limit of my price range. But the first car that caught my eye when I entered the dealership was a charcoal grey 500 series BMW just outside of my price range. Even though the car was a used one, it looked just like new and was obviously very well taken care of. The best thing about it though was the interior, it was fantastic, it was so good in fact that it redefined for me how good a car interior can be. Inside that car I felt right at home, there was nowhere I could look that was not made of a quality material and seemed like a natural part of the design. Before getting too caught up in a car outside my price range I decided to look at the cars I originally wanted to look at but after having had such an experience with the charcoal one none of the other cars seemed like proper cars but rather like cheap imitations of the real thing. I found myself back by the charcoal BMW for some more drooling but to my luck the dealership was closing and I left without trading in my left arm for the car.

When I was 22 I worked as a telemarketer for a while. I was selling book subscriptions over the phone. I know you are now grinning a bit and thinking “what a lousy and despicable job” and it is probably not entirely without reason that telemarketers have a bad reputation. For me though, it was a chance to learn a bit about selling and at the same time earn some money to finance my studies (and parties :)). Also, at first I actually liked the job: I could offer people a good deal; the books were cheap and mostly pretty popular. Of course the reason why it was a good offer was because people would be signed up for a subscription in the hope they would later buy other books at full price but the good thing was that nobody was bound to this subscription and you could cancel it any time. Later though, the company changed its policies, not only was the price of the introductory offer increased, there was also introduced a minimum amount of books you had to buy at full price. Suddenly I did not like the deal I could offer people and I started to feel bad about selling the books. Of course my job satisfaction as well as my sales plummeted and I soon quit the job.

I think most people live in a world of shoulds : You should eat healthy food, you should not smoke, you should go to work every day, you should not hurt peoples feelings, you should love thy neighbour, etc. It all reminds me of the Henry Thoreau quote “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” as all these shoulds are present exactly because the actions are not something that comes naturally to most people and probably conflicts with their desires and passion.