Wow, so we’ve come to is the end of the first week of Minimal Student’s Christmas Challenge. I chose money as the theme of this week, because I thought it would be appropriate considering it’s something a lot of people are thinking about during this time of year.

I’ve received a lot of emails and comments on people’s thoughts on each prompt, thank you! 140 characters is so little, if there’s one skill I’ve honed this week it’s the ability to cut down what I want to say to an absolute minimum. So, for today’s review post, I’ll do the same and stick to brief notes on each.

Dec 1 : Does your wallet contain more than just money? Empty out old receipts and cards you don’t use at least 2x a month and feel the difference.

I see so many people lug impressively huge wallets and purses around with them. They carry stuff with them everyday that they only use once or twice a month, or maybe even never! This not only includes old receipts and way too much change, but tons of membership cards, bits of paper, gum and so on. I used to be a ‘just in case I need it’ person too, but since I’ve given my purse (and the rest of my bag) the minimalist treatment, I literally only carry a bit of cash and my ID, and I can’t think of a time one of those ‘just in case’ moments actually happened.

Dec 2 : Make your lunch today, or bring your own water/tea instead of buying a coffee… then drop the money into a charity box, how do you feel?

If you spend about $5 everyday on your lunch, imagine how much you would save if you made your own. Normally, I could buy ingredients such as pasta, salads, bread and fillings that would last me a week for about $15. Not to mention how much money I’d save just by cutting out buying coffee at school/work and just bringing my own. There are charity boxes at almost any till in Japan, and it always makes me feel  a little better to drop a few coins into them every now and again. It may not be much, but it’s the least I could do.

Dec 3 : Leave your cards at home and pay for everything with cash today. Do you feel different when you actually touch the money?

One of the many culture shocks that I experienced when I moved from England to Japan was the Japanese’s tendency to pay for everything in cash. In England, people would use cards to pay for even the smallest things. In Japan, the most common method of payment by far is cash, even for things that cost over hundreds of dollars. Because of the (amazingly) low crime rate,  it’s not uncommon for people to carry upwards of $300 in cash with them all the time. For me, it was interesting to see how I felt a bit more resistance parting with cash that I physically touched because I could see it disappear from my purse.

Dec 4 : Today is the weekend. Can you still have fun and not spend a penny?

This weekend, I spent some much needed time with my host family. We talked about our different cultures and I learned a lot of things about Japanese language and life. I played with the kids, taught some English and learned how to make some more delicious Japanese dishes. I exercised, I read, I studied. I had the best time, and I didn’t spend a penny.

Dec 5 : Look around you. What kind of things can’t you buy with money? How much do they mean to you?

Generally, I can replace any of the material stuff I own. But, there are only one of the each of the people I care about. I made this prompt because I was thinking how much better Christmas is when I’m surrounded by the things that are most valuable to me – I don’t mean toys, food, or any kind of shopping mall gift – but the things money can’t buy.

Thank you to everyone who have participated so far. Feel free to leave your comments below, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the challenge!

In our everyday lives, we tend to notice when something is off. Like when we’re feeling stressed because of work, or tired because there aren’t enough hours in the day, or that we don’t have enough money in our bank accounts to do all the things we want to do.

It’s easy to spot when we’re lacking something. When things aren’t going well, we tend to zoom in on all the good things that we want and don’t have, like fortune or fame, rather than all the things we don’t want, and don’t have.

When was the last time you stopped to appreciate that you’re not in pain? Or that you’re not terminally ill? Or that you don’t live in a war-torn country? Or that you’re not living on the streets? Or starving to death? Or any one of the million types of suffering that life can throw at us.

How often do we take time to notice when we’re not lacking something?

We crave for good things to happen to us, that’s natural. But much of the time, no news is actually good news. A life without much drama is actually a pretty good life.

taking the time to be grateful – for the bad and the good

It’s one of the secrets to happiness – to appreciate the absence of bad things as much as the presence of good things.

We can’t always get what we want, and many of us never will. But instead of concentrating on those few things, why not feel grateful for the almost infinite amount of things we don’t want in our lives, and are still lucky enough not to have, at least for now.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re living in a country with access to a computer, and the internet, which means that you are lucky enough to be living with a roof over your head, enough food to eat, and access to medical care, hopefully. If not, even without looking too hard, I’m sure there are still many things to be grateful for.

Things could change in the future. Who knows what will happen. But for now, let’s enjoy the present moment, when we’re lucky enough to have our health, or youth, or people who love us, or all three and more.

The ability to see, and appreciate, even just a few of the good things we have in life is key to being happy. The ability to still do that when life has dealt a mediocre hand, that’s a testament to our character.

Related Posts

• Positive mindfulness – how to be grateful for the good things in life
• The biggest mistake people make when making their life goals, and how to fix it
• Digital House Burning – A Lesson in Letting Go

P.S. On the Shortness of Life series to continue soon!

This is the third part in my Minimalist Guide to Money and Investing. Here is Part I and Part II. You can also read about my Minimalist Meditations on Wealth and Money. It takes me a long time to write these posts, if you find them helpful, let me know in the comments below.

Reminder: I am not a financial adviser. What I talk about below may not be best for you or your situation, please seek professional advice or do your own research before you put real money on the line. Short of writing an entire book,I can only give you the basics and tell you what I’ve done and what has worked for me.

4—Investing and Income

So you’ve paid off your expensive debt, and have a small nest egg saved for emergencies, what do you do next?

You put your money to work. Think of each dollar or pound as a little worker bee—you can let it stay in the bank and do nothing, or you can send it off to go recruiting for more dollars.

The best thing about making your money work for you, is that you don’t have to do it yourself. The more you make your money work, the more passive income you have, which means the more time and freedom you have for important things.

The aim is to achieve financial independence—this means earning enough money passively to cover your essential living expenses. Once you do that, you no longer have to work if you don’t want to. What your income has bought you is the freedom to choose. You can simply retire, or do whatever you want (painter? teacher? glassblower?). You can choose to work freelance, or part time, or even volunteer to do it for free because you no longer need the money.

When it comes to investing, the two most important things to know are:

• how to compare yields across different types of investments 
• how to calculate risk and reward

It is quite difficult to get precise figures, because you can’t always have perfect information and you can’t predict the future, but you can make very educated guesses which will inform you on which investments to choose.

Yield means how much money you can get back for the amount of money you put in. If you can work out the yield for any investment, firstly you can see if it’s above inflation (which is 2-5% in most countries) so that you know that you would be at least making the amount of value your money is losing just sitting in the bank (I highly recommend reading up about how inflation works against you and your savings) and secondly you can compare it to other types of investments to see if it’s worth the risk…

Risk is the chance that you will lose or make money. Risk and reward tend to be inverse, in other words, if something is easy and safe to do, you’ll get a small (but safe) amount of return, but if something is riskier or requires more research and knowledge, you’ll be rewarded with higher returns if it turns out that you were correct.

A few important points:

• Investing is not gambling—even though risk is involved, if you choose your investments wisely, the risks should still be very low. The riskiest investments you should be willing to consider are ones that you can either make nothing or at most only lose a small part of your capital. You should not consider investments that are not backed up by anything of value, or where you can lose everything—that is gambling.
• Diversifying—having many different types of investments is how you can balance risk and reward. The bulk of your investments should be safe, even if they give low returns, with a few medium and higher risk investments in the mix to add to the returns. How you balance the ratio of low/medium/high risks depends on your own risk appetite, how much money you have, what your financial goals are, and how close you are to retirement age (when you can no longer work even if you wanted to).
• Getting yields of 5-10% is very respectable. A lot of people might think that getting £10 for every £100 invested is a very small amount (“But it’ll take 10 years to make back my money!”) but the point of investing isn’t to make back all of your money as soon as possible, that’s what owning a business is for (breaking even on what you’ve spent and then making a profit for all the time and effort you are putting into it). Investing for a passive income, on the other hand, is about getting the money that would have otherwise earned nothing as savings working for you. £10 might not seem a lot, but if you invested £10,000 with a 10% return per year, you would be earning £1,000 basically for free without doing any work.
• Compounding is the 8th wonder of the world. Furthermore, if you reinvest what you earn, you can earn interest on your interest and it wouldn’t take you 10 years to get your money back. In the example above, you may earn £1,000 in the first year, but if you add it to your initial investment of £10,000, making £11,000, 10% of that is £1,100, and if you add that on you’ll have £12,100 invested which will yield £1,210 etc. So you’ll be making money on your money that made money. Compounding is such a powerful force that if you achieve 10% returns per year, it would only take you 7 years to double your initial investment (£10,000 becomes £20,000).

So you can see that the more and the earlier you can invest, the more quickly you’ll achieve financial independence. The step after that is financial freedom—when you earn enough to cover both your essential and non-essential (i.e. ‘luxury’) living costs.

One of the easiest and safest ways to start to put your money in a low risk, low cost fund, such as an Exchange Traded Fund which now, thanks to the internet, you can find an abundance of low-cost platforms for online (Google ‘ETF’ to find out more about what they are). You can start with just a few dollars and earn anything form 3-5% return on your money. Considering inflation is about 2-3%, you’ll not only be preserving the value of your savings, which would otherwise be worth less and less over time, but you’ll also earn a tidy amount of profit on top.

There are hundreds of different ways to invest your money, and I won’t be able to go over all of them, but I can tell you what I do. Through all of my research, I have found that for me and my situation, property is the best investment for several reasons:

• Location—I live in an area where rental demand is high, but supply of housing is relatively low (this means with the rental income I can achieve yields of of 7-10%).
• Economics—there is a very healthy employment level and growth prospects for this area, and the other areas that I am investing in.
• Leverage—I can leverage my investment by applying for a mortgage (ie. instead of having to save up £100,000 which would take a long time, I only have to save £25,000 which is much less, and borrow the rest, yet still receive 100% of the rental income). Property is one of the only investments that banks will lend you money for.

To give you a concrete example and show you it can really be done, I own a two bedroom apartment that costed £125,000. I supplied the 25% deposit of £31,250, and got a mortgage for the other 75% of the value at £93,750. The market rent is £850 per month/£10,200 per year (£10,200/£125,000 = an 8% yield). Maintenance and other expenses amount to about £120 per month, and the mortgage costs £310 per month. This leaves a profit of £420 per month, which is £5,040 per year—a 16% return on investment of £31,250. Best of all, after doing the initial paperwork, it’s all passive income.

On top of that, at the time of writing, the value of the property has gone up to about £160,000 so I have also gained £35,000 in value in just two years, and in the future I can refinance it to get these funds out to reinvest. And this is only one of the properties in my portfolio. At the moment, I have achieve financial independence, which is why I was able to quit my job, but I intend to reinvest 80%+ of all my passive income over the next 5-10 years to increase my passive income until I’m able to achieve financial freedom.

I’m not telling you all this to show off, and I’m not necessarily advocating property as an investment for everyone. It’s just an example to show that with a minimalist lifestyle and a bit of hustle, I was able to go from nothing to something like this. If you set yourself an income goal that depends on how much you can live on a year, even if you were to have more than a few luxuries, say £30,000 per year, you can see how just by owning a couple of investments like the one earning £5,000 per year can realistically get you there.

Don’t wait to win the lottery. There are opportunities to make passive income everywhere. You’ll never be free if you slave away at a job you hate, trading hours of your life for cash, and you’ll never make it just by wishing for good luck. You have to take control of your finances, because it’s not about the money, it’s about freedom.

The magic formula for success is: Education + Action. This post only briefly covers things that took me months to learn, and then more months to implement. If there’s anything you didn’t know about or didn’t understand—feel free to ask me in the comments, but most importantly, do your own research. Here are some resources that I’ve found extremely helpful:

The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape the 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich

This book was life-changing for me when I discovered it when I was twenty years old. It introduced to me to the art of setting up a passive income business so that I wouldn’t have to work for money. Not only is it possible to earn money while you sleep, but it is perfectly achievable if you want to and believe you can do it. It also introduced to me the concept of taking retirement breaks now (doing things like travelling, volunteering, spending time with family etc.) without having to wait until I’m 65. I also reread this book every year to remind me not to let my business become another job.

How to Own the World: A Plain English Guide to Thinking Globally and Investing Wisely

A lot of investing books contain too much jargon and formulae that I don’t want to get into as someone who doesn’t want to be investing full time. This book is the most approachable one I’ve found for beginners, and I recommend it to people who are getting started. It explains in more detail the things I’ve mentioned in these posts about the basics of investing—why you should do it and how best to choose your investments wisely. It teaches you how you can compare different types of investment and how you can decrease risk by basically buying a bit of everything (i.e. ‘owning the world’).

The Little Book That Still Beats the Market

This book is a great introduction on how to assess businesses to see if they’re worth investing in. Before this book, I stuck to ETFs because I didn’t think I would be capable of analysing company’s accounts and putting it all into complicated ratios and so on, but after reading this I realised that I can rule out a lot of the work by comparing some fundamentals to narrow down the number of companies I’m looking at. I genuinely believe the advice I got from this book will make me a lot of money in the future.

Blogs: Rockstar Finance links to all blogs worth reading in personal finance. I recommend signing up to their newsletter which I receive and read every day. In fact, if you liked this article, please submit it to share with others!

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Related Posts

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On October 2nd 2013, I downloaded an app on my iPhone called ‘Seven‘. It was a free app that guides you to doing a workout that lasts approximately seven minutes, which includes exercises such as push-ups, sit-ups, squats, and lunges, amongst others, without the use of any equipment, except a wall and a chair.

The exercises make you use most of your core muscles of your entire body within just a few minutes. The aim is to do the workout at least once per day, every day.

If you miss a day, you lose a ‘life’ (represented by a heart in this app) and you only get three of them per calendar month. The point in this is to keep a high level consistency by doing it almost every day throughout the month.

Apps like these were featured in The New York Times and have since become a dime a dozen from their popularity. It started out as a fad, but it became something I took quite seriously after a few weeks.

If you ask me why I started doing this, I wouldn’t really be able to go give you a good answer. I suppose it was because, like most apps, I just wanted to give it a go. But, if you asked me why I kept it up for 365 days, I can give you a much better answer.

It’s only seven minutes a day. Seven minutes. It’s not much if you really think about it. It’s probably the amount of time you take to scroll through Facebook, wait in line at the supermarket, or make a cup of tea.

There are 1,440 minutes in a day. Seven of those make up less than half of one per cent of it.

The argument is that if you can’t even find that much time to do a short workout, and keep your body in shape, then you’ve got your priorities mixed up.

When I first started, I didn’t think I could keep it up for a month, let alone for a year. However, I’ve always believed that my body and health is one of the most important things to me because without it I wouldn’t be able to do anything else.

So, it was that thought that kept me going. What else could be so important that I couldn’t give <0.5% of my day to keeping fit?

I had no excuses.

In the year that I’ve started this workout, I’ve moved several times across the world. I started it in Kochi, Japan, where I lived at my other half’s house, then moved to my own apartment in Tokyo for a few months, then back to Kochi, then back to my parent’s house in Kent in England, then I stayed in my brother’s dorm in Leeds, then moved to my own place in Manchester. In between, I’ve stayed in quite a few different hotels and hostels as well.

I can proudly say, even after all of this moving around, I never missed a single workout.

After about a month, it became a staple part of my day. I simply couldn’t not do it. It was the only part of my day that was consistent during this tumultuous year with all of the moving around I did.

I usually did it in the morning, straight after waking up and splashing my face with water. It woke my body up and prepared me mentally for the day. I would either do it mindfully in silence, or play loud music and get myself pumped up for whatever I had to get done that day.

On the days I didn’t have time to do it in the morning, or when I had flights etc. that messed up my schedule, I would find another time to do it during the day, but I could feel the difference having missed it in the morning. I would be much more sluggish, and achy in some places.

I wish I could include some sort of dramatic ‘before and after’ photos of myself a year ago compared to now, but I don’t have any. I’ve never really had a problem with my weight, and the truth is, I’m sorry to say, this is not a weight loss app. Seven minutes is still only seven minutes, not a magic formula to lose weight. It has never advertised itself as such, so don’t be disappointed if you try it out for that reason.

What it is for is to ensure that for most days, you’ve done at least one thing good for your health. Even if you didn’t find time to go to the gym that day, or you ate an extra piece of chocolate, at least you can go to bed that day knowing that you did one thing good for you.

It’s been a long journey. There were days when I could barely pull myself together to do it, and there were days when I was ready to go by 6am. It hasn’t been easy, but I don’t plan to stop anytime soon.

Related Posts

Check out How to Lose Weight Fast Without Exercise : 8 Sure-Fire Ways by Fitness Jockey.

• 5 quick tips to get healthy the minimalist’s way
• 5 lessons learned from a year of vegetarianism
• 10 minimalist reasons to start cycling today

Right now, I’m in the midst of exams, so you could say they’re on my mind. I thought I’d share some ways minimalism helps me make studying easier.

1. Get rid of the unnecessary. Use the 80/20 rule as a guideline: probably only about 80% in the syllabus will actually come up in the exam. That means that if you study everything, roughly a fifth of it would be a waste (if your goal is purely to pass the exam). Because of this, try to identify which areas are the most important, using tips and clues given by the lecturer and look back at things you have covered extensively in class. Don’t just work blindly memorising from the textbook, be savvy and try to get your hands on past papers and become familiar with exactly what they’re looking for.
2. Simplify. Make life easier by breaking things down into small manageable steps. Draw mind mapsusing different colours to lay everything out. Mind maps are great because the general rule is that you can only use one or two words per branch. Spread out, try not to cram too much on one page and embrace the white space. Giving yourself room calms your mind and allows it to think with more clarity. You might even find recalling things easier if you can remember the layout of your notes.

Download mind mapping freeware here.

3. Know the fundamentals. Even if you don’t think you know everything in terms of scope, taking care of the essentials is just as important. Lecturers tend to set questions that seem complicated, but they are really just testing if you know the basics. Make sure you know them like the back of your hand. You can even make an activity out of it by making a poster summarising the formulae, key points and basic steps and putting it up by your mirror.
4. Focus. Decluttering your desk can make all the difference in your concentration levels. Clear everything off and only put on what you need for the next hour. Chances are you’ll only need a book or two, a pen and paper. If you’re not using your laptop, it might be best to hide it that as well so you’re not tempted to get distracted.
5. Disconnect. Now that I’ve switched to Chrome, I use the StayFocused extension to cut down on the time I spend on facebook and twitter. I finally found an extension that actually works and does a pretty good job at keeping me on track. It even has a ‘nuclear mode’ which blocks all websites for as long as I want. I also turn off my iPhone or at least put it on silent. I have never encountered a situation when I got a call or text that had to be answered immediately anyway.

I hope these tips helped! If you’re in the middle of exams too, I wish you the best of luck. If you have any more suggestions, please share them with everyone in the comments!

Related Posts

• 5 Ways to Cut Down on Social Networking
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In Emptiness, there are no complications, just simplicity.

In Emptiness, there is no confusion, just clarity.

In Emptiness, there are no costs, just freedom.

In Emptiness, there is no selfishness, just selflessness.

In Emptiness, there is no waste, just efficiency.

In Emptiness, there is no pollution, just purity.

In Emptiness, there are no distractions, just mindfulness.

In Emptiness, there is beauty.

…Empty a space, and make it beautiful today.

Related Posts

• Zen and the Art of Minimalism – Part 1 : Zen Philosophy
• Zen and the Art of Minimalism – Part 2 : Mastering the Art

“The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.” – Douglas Horton

You would think that there would be little to say on the subject of minimalism, but ironically this isn’t the case.

Minimalism isn’t simply about throwing out everything you own, or about boycotting purchasing new things altogether. Getting to the stage where you only have what you need is a difficult battle, but it doesn’t end there. You have to be constantly aware of accumulating more stuff and the consequences and futility of perpetually pursuing material posessions.

On top of that, depending on people’s preferences and situations, there isn’t a cookie cutter criteria for a minimalist. I’ve always believed that minimalism can’t be measured, you can’t take a number like ‘100 things’ and apply it to everybody. Compromises have to be made for preferences, jobs, children and other lifestyles.

So, minimalism isn’t simple, but who cares? Arduous journeys lead to great goals, that’s what makes them so great. I don’t want to put anyone off, but I know it takes a certain level of commitment to begin and maintain a minimalist lifestyle. The secret is to make baby steps, and work out what works for you.

It’s gets easier when the complexity of minimalism is broken down into smaller steps. A minimalist should consider weighing the pros and cons of each item’s:

1. Versatility. If something can be used for two functions instead of one, you have automatically halved the number of things you would have needed and perhaps saved some money in the process. Versatile clothing is the key to a minimalist wardrobe.

2. Durability. The longer it lasts, the less you spend fixing it or replacing it. Durability is what dispels the myth that all minimalists are frugalists. Sometimes, it’s worth paying that extra amount for better quality so that you don’t have to constantly replace it. But be careful, durability should not be mixed up with perceived quality achieved through marketing and brand names.

3. Availability. It’s better to avoid relying on things that are too rare or extravagant that would be expensive and/or difficult to replace, since you could become stuck if it gets lost, broken or stolen. The point of minimalism is that you don’t have to constantly worry about your material things.

4. Portability. For people that travel a lot, the portability of an item is extremely valuable. Ideally, most items should be easy to pack, light and have multiple functions so that you can take a smaller and more manageable suitcase.

Walking the life of minimalism isn’t done without making sacrifices and difficult choices but every right decision, no matter how small, contributes somehow as one small step forwards, instead of backwards, towards happiness. And you never know, the impact you make may inspire others and can create a revolution.

So it’s that time of year again when we make the obligatory promises to ourselves and if we’re lucky, they’ll see the other side of February. I was wondering how I could solve this problem, and I think I came up with a solution.

a new way of making resolutions

Most people would tell you that the best way to make New Year’s resolutions is to set goals like losing a certain amount of weight or getting a certain level of grades etc. There’s nothing wrong with setting goals to achieve, in fact, I think it’s one of the best ways to approach it.

However, setting specific goals and achieving those goals are separate things. Using the old method, you have to be responsible for setting the goal, then deciding how you are going to achieve it. A lot of people get to this stage, they buy planners, equipment and gym memberships but when it comes to actually doing it, their motivation runs out after a little while and soon they give up.

So instead, I’ve decided to do things a little differently. I will pick five things to focus on in 2011. And I mean really focus. Apart from basic living – eating, sleeping etc. I will dedicate as much of my time, effort, money and energy into five areas of my life. My motivation is less likely to run out this way if I make my life revolve around doing things in these areas.

why five?

The conventional wisdom is that you are much more likely to accomplish something if you focus only one thing. This is great, because it really means you’ll get it done, but it’ll only work for something like a particular project or measurable goal (“I will lose __ pounds this year” etc).

But if I want to be able to live out an entire year, it would be better to not be too narrow. And, it would also be better to not be so wide ranging that you end up doing a little bit of everything and not really achieving anything. Five is a great number, but if you would like I think three would work great too.

my five focus

1. Write. Back in October, I started 750words and now almost every day I log onto that site and tell it everything, from my daily life to my most intimate secrets. I use it to draft stories, blog posts and to answer Reverb10, MMT and the mindfulist. I’m not worried about putting my thoughts out there, (I haven’t done anything illegal, don’t worry!) it feels good to get it out of my system, and speaking of focus, it helps me concentrate on my work and arrange my ideas into something tangible.

2. Learn. As a book-lover, there are some books that I feel guilty about having never read in high school. Of course I’ve read some classics, but not all the ones I always see on ‘books to read before you die’ lists. I got a brand new Kindle now, so in 2011 I will definitely concentrate on ticking them off. Also, this year I will really focus on learning Japanese and getting to the level of fluency that I really want to reach. I have my own measurements for this, but for my resolution, I would just like to say that I want to dedicate much more time and effort into it.

3. Travel. I still have the bulk of my year abroad to come in 2011, not to mention a very long summer break. During the last couple of days, I spent it touring Tokyo in all it’s early morning to nightlife glory. It’s been one of the best trips I’ve made in my life, let alone 2010, but I don’t want to leave it there so in 2011, I plan to do much more travelling all over Japan and Asia.

4. Health. I’ve made a lot of improvements this year, but I am still not at the level of fitness I would like. I run over 5km quite often now, but I hope to be able to double this in 2011. Also, after my year abroad, I hope that I would be able to go back to being vegetarian.

5. Minimalism. Finally, there’s being ‘more’ minimalist – which covers all of the previous four focuses. For ‘writing’, I will concentrate on growing Minimalist Student blog. In the past few weeks I’ve been a little busy with studying and travelling, but after the new year, I will go back to writing about minimalism in general, tips and so on. I’m always learning about minimalism all the time, and because of minimalism I’m able to travel as much as I do. Finally, it is no exaggeration that because of minimalism, I’ve managed to improve my health to the point it is at today, but in 2011 I am going to redouble my efforts.

So these are my Five Focus. With these, my daily life may include a run in the morning, studying and reading during the day and travelling on weekends and holidays.

how to create your own five focus

Ask yourself:

• What is important to you?
• What do you want to achieve?
• What skills would you like to develop?
• What kind of person do you want to become this year?

I would love you know what your five focus would be! Please leave a comment.