Managing life is way harder that you would
normally think. Nevertheless we all do
it everyday and most of the time
we end up pretty okay

Continued from 'My vacation is over'.

Having a week where I was supposed to do nothing, was not something I was looking forward to. In fact it turned out to be exactly what I needed. In my everyday life I have a lot to do. So much that I never stop up and give myself the time, to take a step back and look at the big picture. Of course I tried, but the nagging urge to get back to work, was enough to make me lose track of my major goals. Still I'm doing pretty okay but that is not good enough if I could do much better.

On the most general level I want to be happy and live a life with no worries and be able to do the things I want to. Great, who doesn't? Even though this seems like saying absolutely nothing there's a lot of concrete ideas and goals hidden underneath.

A closer look
Let's take a closer look at some of the keywords/phrases from my 'life mantra': 'happy', 'no worries' and 'things I want'.

What would make me happy in the most general sense of the word? I believe it would have to be to have no worries and be able to do the things I want!

Now, 'no worries' is a little bit harder. I don't mind being committed to different projects that would involve some kind of worrying, but that falls into a category of self imposed worries, which is alright. I don't want to worry about my health, economy, bad relationships of any kind, but those are really hard things to remove from your life.

What things do I want? By things I don't mean material stuff. Of course a nice house, a nice car, maybe a little boat wouldn't hurt, but that is beside the point here. I want freedom, to be successful, make achievements and have the possibility to be able to enjoy it.

Connection to everyday life
Still my goals are a little bit vague but let's try to make a connection to my everyday life.

Work! At this very moment you are reading something I created as a part of my work. I spend a week a month writing blogs and creating and running projects with Coinflip and Bet24. The rest of the time is devoted to poker activities. I feel my current situation is as close to ideal, as I realistically can hope to achieve. I have very flexible hours and I really enjoy to be creative and plan things. This certainly satisfy the freedom aspect and some of the achievement aspect too. Playing poker is a way to try to become economical independent and still have the freedom to spend my time as I see fit (more on that later). As long as I can remember I got quite a lot of my drive from the urge to compete. No matter whether I fail or triumph I want to do better next time. To me, to be able to compete is a very big part of being happy.

Relationships! The most important relationship I have is to my wife. We have been together for more than 11 years now and she is a part of me that I never want to be without. She gives me comfort, care, support and much more, but most importantly she understands me and knows me better than anybody else and she loves me for who I am. I think it is very important to have someone or somebody to share your happiness with, to make it perfect. She stands for most of the 'be happy' part.

Life is to short to have bad relationships and I mean that in the most general sense. Why spend time on people that annoys the shit out of you? Why not just pass the time with people you really like and care for. I'm sure everybody (including myself) at some point have been in a position where they knew that the people they were involved with weren't worth the effort. I try my best to only have people in my life that really matters to me. There are many great people I've met through my life I wish I had more time to still be in contact with, but as the years pass by it's getting harder and harder to keep the relations going.

Health! Well, this is a tricky one. I have to admit that at the age of 37 I've been experiencing that my body is getting older for some years now. Let's be honest and say that I've been pretty stupid and kept ignoring that fact as if I could do nothing about it. On a normal day I sit in a chair most of the time. When I get home I don't have the energy to work out or do something like running or even taking a walk in the park. Intellectually I understand that if I started working out I would have even more energy to be physically active. Just recently I managed to get out of the hole and start running. Really fast it became a lot easier to do everything. Even play poker! I have more energy. I'm more happy. I feel motivated to go out and try to achieve something. See, that's positive reinforcement!

Looking ahead
To fit it all into the master plan I just need to become economical independent. It all seems to come down to performing as good as possible playing poker. Sounds trivial but it's not. If it was we would have a ton of people playing poker at a very high level, which is not the case today. It's not that I haven't tried to become as good as possible up until now, but I recently realized that I have been working on my game the wrong way.

In my next blog I'll go into the specifics of what to do and why I believe it's going to work.