Colleges and universities are full of examples of people wanting to make it. They want their names to be written down in history. They want to be remembered for the great things they wrote, the great things they discovered or the great things they built.

Just take a look around you at the names of the buildings and libraries. They were paid for by people who wanted their names to be remembered long after they are gone.

But, as great as they were, did they realise that nothing can ever be remembered forever? That everything in life is impermanent and constantly changing?

Nothing really belongs to us. Our favourite pair of shoes are only in our possessions, until they become worn or lost. Our bikes and cars are only ours until they are stolen, sold or passed on. Even our names are not really ours because they are just labels attached to our physical bodies – which will eventually be gone too.

And yet, some people dedicate their whole lives to financial or intellectual greatness, at what cost? So that a few generations of people will remember them. But what will happen when those people forget? Was your life wasted?

There isn’t an answer or solution to impermanence. After all, everything is impermanent except for impermanence itself. So, what can you do?

You can be the best that you can be, now. Live life to your full potential, discover and write great things, cultivate amazing relationships, help people, be inspired, inspire others and don’t worry about after. Just think about what you can do to make life better for people today, and do it.

If you live a good life, other people will know it, and maybe they’ll write it down, but the most important thing is that you did your best, and that is something nobody can take away from you.

If you look at the kind of people who have achieved ‘success’ in their lives, presidents, Olympians, millionaires, great artists, world leaders, you will find that there are a few things they all have in common.

Now, there probably isn’t a secret ingredient to success (if you find one, let me know) but rather ‘success’ as most people see it, is a result of combining great habits that incrementally lead to a successful and fulfilling life.

I’m no expert, nor am I ‘great’, ‘successful’ or ‘perfect’, far from it. These are simply the habits that I have incorporated, or at least planning/trying to in my life because I know that I can become a better person by doing so.

1. Wake up early. There’s a feeling you get about the peaceful silence of the early morning that you can’t feel at any other time of day. It’s the feeling that you are the only person in the world, solitary and ready to take on the world, whilst everyone else is sound asleep. When nobody else is awake, there can be no distractions, which makes it ideal for focussing. Combined with the fact that (hopefully) you had a good night’s sleep, your mind should be feeling calm and clear. Early morning is also a great time to practice some meditation.

This is a habit that requires discipline and dedication. It can be hard to wake up early after a late night out, but you don’t have to do it everyday if you don’t have to. Waking early is supposed to clear your mind, not make you feel grungy of uncomfortable. Sleeping a little earlier the night before can help too, if you really want to start waking up early, just try 20 minutes earlier, and build up from there. You won’t regret it.

2. Stay healthy. For some reason, it’s easy to forget to stay healthy, especially as a student. You have a deadline, so you stay up late, your bank balance is flashing red so you buy something ready-made and cheap, and social law dictates that drinking is a minimum requirement to be cool.

Most of these can’t be helped, and because they are pressing and urgent, they get bumped up to the top of the priority list. Your body, on the other hand, is stays almost silent. It can’t shout or persuade or threaten, so it slowly suffers whilst you put other things first. The only way it can tell you it’s suffering is by that tiredness you feel during the day, or that headache you feel the ‘morning after’.

Your body is your tool to life. Imagine if you didn’t have one, you wouldn’t be able to speak, hear, see…you wouldn’t be able to experience the great things in life, so why not take care of it? Eat well and exercise.

3. Learn new things. Life is what you make of it, and if you just stick with the things you know, it isn’t going to be much fun. The fact that you are at university is a good step towards the right direction, but there are so many opportunities that universities offer, don’t let them pass you by. Read books, join societies and try out new things. Step out of your comfort zone. Be careful not to overwhelm your timetable, but for certain things try to think of them as part of your timetable. Expand your horizons, you get out of life what you put in.

4. Be proactive. Great people seek their own opportunities. They don’t wait for them to fall on their laps. If you want something, go and get it, it probably won’t come to you. The great presidents didn’t get their seats because they sat around at home, the great Olympians didn’t get their amazing bodies from watching it on TV and the great writers and musicians didn’t create their art from just daydreaming about it. Go out and do it, even if it is just a tiny step towards the right direction. Do something today that will move you towards your goals.

5. Be compassionate. Often we forget about the people that surround us everyday and how much they shape who we are. Even perfect strangers on the street have an impact on your life, whether you realise it or not. When people hurt you, you want to push them away, but it will only hurt you more in the long run, being alone is one of the most terrible feelings in the world. Real, true and genuine relationships are the stuff of life.
Be kind. Forgive. Smile. As Mother Teresa said, “Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier”. That is what success really is.

Further Reading
I found a fantastic post about how to cultivate greatness via the Daily Mind. Many of the ideas I have are shared here.

Do you have any other ideas about what it takes to be a successful student? Share your ideas below.

If someone said to you that they would give you $1000 to spend in any way you like, but with only one rule, would you listen to what they had to say?

The rule is: you must spend the money on making your dreams come true.

Want to play?

The trick is, all of us are already playing this game. We might not be getting free money from a stranger off the street, but if we’re managing to earn money, then the same rules apply, don’t they? Except this time, you have a time limit too.

We can spend a portion of our money on unavoidable or necessary costs such as the cost of living, but the rest? We’re free to do whatever we want with it, and unfortunately too much of it gets wasted on things that have nothing to do with our dreams.

Is buying a fancy car your dream? Then buy it. But most people need something more than just stuff, to do something worthwhile.

The next time you’re about to spend a respectable sum of money, or hours/days of your life, ask yourself: is it going to get you closer to your amazing ambition you want to achieve before you die? Or make you a better person or the world a better place?

If it doesn’t then stop.

It’s absolutely vital to pause every now and again to give some thought into what time and money mean to you. Money itself isn’t evil, only greed for it is. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you have a lot of it, it all depends on how you earned it and how you will spend it.

And realizing that you only have a limited amount of time isn’t being melancholic, it’s being mindful of the truth.

Your resources and time are too valuable. Life is too precious. You are too special.

Investing in your dreams is the best money you’ll ever spend.

Have you ever lost a hard drive?

It’s the digital equivalent of your house burning down. Suddenly, you lose your past work, files, documents, and most painfully, your photos. Gone. Forever.

This happened to me one year ago today. Granted, I still had some of the most important things saved elsewhere, but for the most part, I lost the better part of six years or so of documents.

At the time, losing so much data felt like losing a part of my life. Things that I created during that time, the hours that I put in to writing, editing, saving everything so that I could look back on it again one day, gone.

A year later, how do I feel?

In a word, content.

That’s right. I feel fine. The minimalist part of me should have known I would be. I don’t miss anything and my life hasn’t collapsed because of it.

The things that I thought were so important a year ago don’t matter to me as much now. And I imagine a year from now, they’ll matter to me even less.

I’m a strong believer that things happen for a reason (or at least, one should try to find lessons in the things that happen to them) and losing my stuff was no different.

To me, this was a lesson in letting go.

We live in an age now where we can save everything in our lives. We can snap moments that were supposed to last a second, and keep them forever. Although this is good in some ways, it can also be negative in others. We can recall feeling angry, irritated, or sad at someone or something, and this time actually remember why.

My digital house burning was a cleansing, of sorts. It allowed me to start afresh. Knowing that the things we capture are only a snapshot of each moment, I was able to enjoy each moment better.

Instead of worrying about taking photos wherever I travelled, I stopped to talk to people, and appreciate the sights, sounds, and smells of the places I went.

Cleansed from the baggage of my past, I was able to  focus better on creating new work. I had grown and improved in so many ways in the last six years, and holding onto old things wasn’t going to help me progress forward.

Yes, it’s difficult to go through a digital house burning. I’m not saying that people should start setting their hard drives on fire (I now keep a second hard drive and also back up into in the cloud) or stop taking photographs. In fact, I am a big advocate of keeping diaries for reflection. But what I am saying is this. Even if certain stuff feels important to us now, ultimately it’s just a thing. If we lose it, we all have the strength inside us to get over it.

One day, the things that feel so precious to us now will be gone. Until then, let us cultivate a mindset that focusses more on things that we do have, rather than on the things that we’ve lost.

Learn to let go, and in the end, you’ll be okay.

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Related Posts

• When you let go of words
• Letting go of sentimentality
• Minimalize, Focus, Do

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

• 5 Ways to Get Rich for Free
• How I’m living a millionaire’s lifestyle and how you can too
• Why Minimalists Live Happy Lives

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.

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