Thanking my lucky stars

Before we know it, we've flipped near to the end of the calender. As the end of this year ushers in the new year, I begin to reflect on all that had happened for this year. In summary, I would say that this is a very exceptional year for me, in terms of my career, investment philosophy and my personal growth.

Here's a few things to be thankful of:

1. I've survived my 2nd year in the stock market, with a few spots of 1st degree burns and a few amputated limbs. But hey, I'm still standing!

I dare not claim that I'm a better investor, but I did finish what I had intended to start off, which is to be acquainted with investing and stop my trading. I spent a lot of my free time reading up books to immerse myself in the jargons and mentality of being an investor. I finished up the year reading more than 52 books this year - roughly 1 book per week.

I started late last year trying to find out more about investing and trying to quit trading. It's not that trading is all bad and all, but rather, I find that my time is more precious than to dedicate my hours watching the market. It's too stressful for me and it affects my mood and my job. For a normal job, I'll say it's very hard to juggle both career and trading well at the same time. The key word here is 'well'.


2. A very bountiful year in my career.

I've not worked so hard in my life before, and consequently, I've not earned so much in my life before. In my line of work, it's hard to forecast my salary because I've got to restart my salary again every year. I've always feared that my salary last year reached the peak and it will slide down from there on, but thankfully, I've broken my salary's resistance and reached new high this year. Still, it falls short of my target which I've set for myself.

More importantly, I've come to realise that I need to bring my career to the next level. I've only have 24 hours a day and no matter how long I'm willing to work and how high I'm willing to charge, I cannot afford to push it beyond a certain limit. I've come to realise that without changing the gear of my career, I'll be running on a treadmill but never really moving forward. This had got to stop.

I'm going to spent more time and effort to bring a new level to my career for next year, and lesser on equities investment activities.


3. Good health and an almost vegetarian diet.

Almost? I heard you ask. I'm on a seafood vegetarian diet (I proudly claim to be the first person to have coined this philosophy) out of a long term desire to eat less animals. I've been starting since January and have pushed to this end. To confess, I'm slacking a bit now but with the new year coming, I'll kickstart it with more vigor than before. This had got to be one of the most important decision that I've made this year - which is to switch to a mainly vegetarian diet. It made me more alert and aligned me with my philosophical viewpoint of all lifeforms.

My periodic bout of diarrhoea is gone now. I feel that I can sleep on less and still work the same intensity. I recovered any flu-like symptoms in 1 day, had no high fever, no wisdom tooth pain and absolutely no reccurence of my skin allergy this year. Sometimes I feel a little palpitation i my heart but that's about it. Life is good to me because my body is good to me. I'm thankful that I've lived this good.


4. Met plenty of new faces.

One of the smartest thing I've done to myself is to put up a blog, set up a cbox and paid for a premium edition of it. The amount of experience that I gained from such a simple act is akin to rolling a snowball down a slope - it starts small and becomes bigger exponentially. Here's a list of people whom I've met before:

Charlesming, jeng, skyalps, casanova, dream and sharon, lumiere, KK, mw, cookieguy, san, 'pepper', cheng, stupidbear, kay, createwealth8888, kurt... (if I forgot to put in your name, please remind me!)




My gf is even surprised that I managed to meet up this interesting bunch of people just from this tiny community from the cbox. Meeting this diverse bunch of people broadened my perspective tremendously, and it changed my frog-in-the-well mentality in ways unimaginable. I've lived so long, but it's only this year that I realised that my time is wasted in not meeting more people! Alas, I'll do my best to change that shy introverted nature of mine. I'll have none of this in the future!

I'll be thanking my lucky stars if life is this great every year.