Successful Summer

How do you define success?

For me, success is growth in the direction of my goals. This summer has been a very successful summer because I have grown so much from the start of the summer to now and my growth has been focused on my goals of improving my skillset and building wealth.

Some of the highlights from my summer have been:

• Establishing a morning routine – I wake up earlier during the week, walk my dog, write my morning journal, and practice Spanish and Japanese in Duolingo
• Having my family visit me – we ate so much food, it was amazing
• Finishing reading The Life Brief by Bonnie Wan
  • An amazing book that challenges you to get to the root of what you want, what you believe, and why as well as helping you establish a plan to keep moving towards your goals
• Making the decision to focus on building wealth with the goal of true financial freedom

Establishing a morning routine has been incredibly helpful in ensuring I start my day with purpose and clarity. It has also contributed to my decision to begin my journey towards financial freedom.

I am incredibly blessed in that I am already financially stable, but I am ready to pursue more. I want the freedom to never have to worry about money or need to include it as a factor in my decisions. I want to retire young and have the time and energy to devote to pursuing my passions and helping others do the same. My decision to begin steadily moving towards this goal has already been incredibly impactful on my life.

Keeping my goal as the driving force behind my decisions and actions has led me read and write more consistently, leave my position at Full Sail so I have more time and energy to put towards my goal (although I will always be immensely thankful for the time I’ve spent and the people I was able to work with while I was there), reach out to business owners for advice, join a business program to learn how to create my own membership based business, and start working on that membership. I am currently preparing to do a seed launch of my membership which helps programmers struggling to accelerate their careers. I’m basing the curriculum around the process I used to get my jobs at Interapt (with no prior industry experience) and then at LinkedIn (with only Interapt as prior industry experience) as well as offers from multiple other companies. While the course has not been created yet, I will be working on it alongside my founding members and with their feedback to help guide me, I am super excited to have come this far.

On a slightly different note, I have also learned so so much this summer. I have been blessed with an amazing manager at LinkedIn who has encouraged me to push myself to learn and work on different projects and tech stacks and I’ve been learning a ton about AI, the full stack workflow, and data and database patterns and handling. My coworkers have also been really amazing and patient when I bombard them with questions about everything I’m learning. I’m also learning a bunch from reading Greg McKeown’s book Effortless. Including the importance of setting an upper limit for work to get done in a day to prevent burnout. I’m using this learning to only write 1 chapter a day to ensure I continue working on my book instead of getting burnt out from trying to write 2-4 chapters in 1 day and then getting nothing done for the next 3 days. He also emphasizes the importance of only getting done in a day what you can fully recover from by the next. It’s fascinating to learn more about practical examples of why work life balance is so important. I highly recommend giving his book, Effortless, and Bonnie Wan’s book, The Life Brief, a read.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this fairly long spiel. I will be writing more often so they should be shorter going forward. I’d love to hear how your summer has been going!