Hello everyone, I'm Daniel from Germany. Turned 27 this year. Currently working as a librarian.
About
I don't remember too much of when I was really young. My dad worked very hard as truck driver and let out the stress his massive a$$ of a boss caused him on me and my mother. But every Sunday we would make sure to go to church and put on a happy facade. Life felt hollow and meaningless to me and around the time and I could not find faith in god, the nation, history, my family, myself or hard work. It was all pointless. Nothing I did changed my life or my outlook so eventually
at around 14-15 years old I tried killing myself and luckily failed without any long term issues. That experience made it clear to me that I DID want to live. My outlook was like this: I wanted to be alive but I was still depressed and miserable. I began looking for an escape from the daily misery in anime, internet porn and video games.
I finished high school slowly becoming more upbeat and positive about life, but unclear where I wanted to go. After a year of fumbling around, I ended up studying to become a librarian - an extremely safe and cushy job. I made no lasting friendships over my studies, but during the year of searching for what to do in life, I started many good habits that I've somewhat kept up with until today - meditation, journaling, studying vocabulary and waking up early.
They didn't teach me discipline, but they did teach me that hard work eventually will result in something resembling what I wanted.
Now I've been working in the sort of "dream" job I envisioned, extremely well treated and cushy. But - the money is bad, there is no growth potential and there is no reward for trying to improve anything. It's essentially meaningless work. I noticed this quite quickly and began looking into ways to improve income and went full Slowlane with my lifestyle.
What inspired me to change? Two weeks ago I watched a podcast or clip of Andrew Huberman, talking about while positive goal-setting is great at the start to get started on change in your life - anticipating failure and imagining what would happen if you didn't work on your goals and never aimed for your dreams can be a much more effective way to keep yourself going in the long term. That clip led to a momentary shift in perspective. I never considered it before, but it made me take up reading non-fiction books again.
How did I find the Fastlane? With my drive for reading materials renewed, I stumbled on another "great books" video on Youtube by a self-improvement Youtuber. The Fastlane was his #1. That was last week, I finished it yesterday.
The simple calculation in the book, of the Slowlane never being enough to reach the money it seemed to be promising, completely shattered the comfort and lack of worry I had.
Now, what do I want?
I want a beautiful and strong family and to expand my very small circle of friends.
I want my children to have a better life than me.
I want my parents to have a better life and death in old age than theirs had, because it was miserable for my grandparents.
What do I want to avoid?
I want to avoid being as lonely as I've been for most of my life, for the rest of it.
I want to avoid having to wipe my parents a$$ when they become older and infirm, because they failed with their savings and investments and I did as well.
To do just all that, I'm going to need far more than I make now per month or that's certainly going to be impossible.
So here I am - another beautiful day started at 5 am. Nice to meet you all.
Hope I can tell you about my first successes soon, but that might still take a while. I'm struggling to translate a decent ability to service (but not sell to!) people to a Fastlane type business idea, but I might start off with something more basic and smaller. We'll see!
I probably wouldn't have posted this, if it wasn't for Andy Black's post here.
Thank you for posting it and thank you for reading this!
About
I don't remember too much of when I was really young. My dad worked very hard as truck driver and let out the stress his massive a$$ of a boss caused him on me and my mother. But every Sunday we would make sure to go to church and put on a happy facade. Life felt hollow and meaningless to me and around the time and I could not find faith in god, the nation, history, my family, myself or hard work. It was all pointless. Nothing I did changed my life or my outlook so eventually
at around 14-15 years old I tried killing myself and luckily failed without any long term issues. That experience made it clear to me that I DID want to live. My outlook was like this: I wanted to be alive but I was still depressed and miserable. I began looking for an escape from the daily misery in anime, internet porn and video games.
I finished high school slowly becoming more upbeat and positive about life, but unclear where I wanted to go. After a year of fumbling around, I ended up studying to become a librarian - an extremely safe and cushy job. I made no lasting friendships over my studies, but during the year of searching for what to do in life, I started many good habits that I've somewhat kept up with until today - meditation, journaling, studying vocabulary and waking up early.
They didn't teach me discipline, but they did teach me that hard work eventually will result in something resembling what I wanted.
Now I've been working in the sort of "dream" job I envisioned, extremely well treated and cushy. But - the money is bad, there is no growth potential and there is no reward for trying to improve anything. It's essentially meaningless work. I noticed this quite quickly and began looking into ways to improve income and went full Slowlane with my lifestyle.
What inspired me to change? Two weeks ago I watched a podcast or clip of Andrew Huberman, talking about while positive goal-setting is great at the start to get started on change in your life - anticipating failure and imagining what would happen if you didn't work on your goals and never aimed for your dreams can be a much more effective way to keep yourself going in the long term. That clip led to a momentary shift in perspective. I never considered it before, but it made me take up reading non-fiction books again.
How did I find the Fastlane? With my drive for reading materials renewed, I stumbled on another "great books" video on Youtube by a self-improvement Youtuber. The Fastlane was his #1. That was last week, I finished it yesterday.
The simple calculation in the book, of the Slowlane never being enough to reach the money it seemed to be promising, completely shattered the comfort and lack of worry I had.
Now, what do I want?
I want a beautiful and strong family and to expand my very small circle of friends.
I want my children to have a better life than me.
I want my parents to have a better life and death in old age than theirs had, because it was miserable for my grandparents.
What do I want to avoid?
I want to avoid being as lonely as I've been for most of my life, for the rest of it.
I want to avoid having to wipe my parents a$$ when they become older and infirm, because they failed with their savings and investments and I did as well.
To do just all that, I'm going to need far more than I make now per month or that's certainly going to be impossible.
So here I am - another beautiful day started at 5 am. Nice to meet you all.
Hope I can tell you about my first successes soon, but that might still take a while. I'm struggling to translate a decent ability to service (but not sell to!) people to a Fastlane type business idea, but I might start off with something more basic and smaller. We'll see!
I probably wouldn't have posted this, if it wasn't for Andy Black's post here.
Thank you for posting it and thank you for reading this!
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