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Last week I left my job at Collins Aerospace to pursue my own interests. The KC-135 team is a phenominal group of people and extremely dedicated to what they do (keeping a plane airworthy for nearly 75 years is no small feat!).

For the next while, I will be playing with stocks to generate some cash for the climbing gym, then establish the gym and go from there. This should take a year or so to really get everything fleshed out. It's a freeing feeling having few strings to others. The house and dog and friends are what keep me tethered to the area now, but overall it's nice knowing that whatever I do directly reflects on my character. No one judges my performance except myself, and if I'm my harshest critic, then my work better be of the highest quality I can muster. If it's not, then I'm the one that has to deal with my own mediocrity. No worry about losing a job if I don't have one, which really is a relief. One of my financial goals is to be wealthy enough to not need insurance so I can go anywhere I damn well please and not worry about cost.

Remember, money doesn't buy happiness, but it does buy freedom.

Additionally, I was pondering what it means to be successful in any meaningful sense. In one of my favorite blog posts, there is a detailed breakdown of how financial and business success may be acheived, but then I got to thinking that if success is an event as in acheiving a set goal, then what happens after that is goal is met? Are you still successful even though you haven't met your next goal? Perhaps, but are you happy? Naturally, happiness has nothing to do with success unless happiness is your goal, but that may be something that as soon as it becomes a goal, it can no longer be reached because the pursuit of success is directly at odds with the attainment of happiness.

That is, in some form or fashion, being successful means moving faster in life in order to attain goals, whereas acheiving happiness means moving slower in order to absorb the surroundings clearly and appreciate the things that have been attained. This is different than pleasure which can be derived by both moving fast or slow (e.g. learning can be pleasurable (moving fast), as is writing reflective blog posts like this (moving slow)). This may be why traditionally successful people who by all rights ought to be happy generally aren't due to being so used to moving fast, and those who are traditionally unsuccessful may be happier because they move slower and appreciate what they have (dyor).

After seeing my mom go so young, it put my life into perspective to really wrangle it to achieve some baseline of success early so I can spend more time being happy and enriching the world to the best of my ability before I too am removed from here.

There is no correct way to live a life, nor is there inheritly a wrong way to live one either. The only disappointing thing to see is so many not valuing what they have.