Who Taught You That?
Day 76 - 82 / 1000
The way you handle money, your friendships, and even a hard day, you picked most of it up long before you ever noticed.
Some of it still serves you. A lot of it doesn’t.
This week is about where those patterns come from and how you start choosing your own from here.
Here is what has been on my mind this week:
Woman in our life
Intertwined
Money affection
Job applications
Real friends
Clarity comes from a place
Making peace
1. Woman in our Life
What role do women play in your life?
Without a woman, none of us would exist.
So we go all the way back to the beginning. To our moms.
I would say she is one of the most important people you will ever know.
I know some of you might have mixed feelings about your mom, or a difficult relationship, or some of you might not even know her.
Despite all of this, she is still someone who influenced your life for a very long time, and probably still does today.
Directly or not.
This kind of connection never goes away.
There is something deep about birth, about the fact that you came into this world.
Because nothing in life is a coincidence.
How is your connection with your mom?
2. Intertwined
What do these three things have in common: money, concerns about the future, and distraction as escape?
One of the biggest challenges young people face is the constant concern about the future.
A lot of questions pop out of these concerns.
How am I going to afford to buy a house?
What career should I pursue?
Where do I meet my potential partner?
When do I start a family?
And much more, passing through our thoughts constantly, every day.
So I’m asking: what is the solution to this?
And can we even solve something like people’s concerns?
I think concerns are a natural by-product of our thinking.
We want to know what the future will look like, because humans don’t like the unknown.
The difference lies in what you are concerned about, and whether there is any real reason for it.
So what do those three things have in common?
They are intertwined.
Money causes concerns about the future, so we look for distractions to escape the reality we live in and forget about everything for a moment.
Do you often feel occupied by concerns about the future?
3. Money Affection
How does money affect us?
Here we are, talking about it.
It’s one of the greatest powers in the world, touching almost everyone on this planet.
Yet most people have very low financial literacy and little understanding of how to manage their money.
It comes back, once again, to our childhood.
To how our parents managed money, and how they taught us to do the same.
We all have different relationships with money because we come from different backgrounds.
Which of these descriptions fits you?
You just received your salary.
Filled with excitement, you treat yourself to a nice dinner at the restaurant you’d been eyeing all month.
Tomorrow you order the sneakers and the jacket you saw your colleague wearing and liked a lot too.
In the evening, you go out to try the new pizza place on the corner because it looks really cool.
On the due date for your bill, you find yourself quickly transferring the money, hoping not to be late, again.
And just like that it goes on all month, until you hit the bottom one week before your next salary.You just received your salary.
Filled with excitement, you put a huge chunk of it straight into your savings account and pay your bills right away.
For the rest of the month, you live low-key on a budget, shopping mostly for discounted items and skipping eating out to make sure nothing disrupts your plan.You just received your salary.
Filled with excitement, the first thing you do is move money into your savings and investments.
After that, you pay the monthly bills.
The rest, you split into a budget for your needs and wants, making sure you give yourself the little treat the budget allows while still living the month with enough ease.You just received your salary.
Filled with excitement, you just go with the flow.
You might save something at the end of the month, if there’s anything left.
But you might also end up in the red.
You don’t stress about the future because you feel too young to care about such things.
Worst case, you borrow money from friends or the bank to get through the period.
I believe there are many more models of how people behave and what they do with money on a regular basis.
I treat money very differently now than I did 10 years ago.
I come from a regular middle-class family that never had much money, but I never missed anything as a kid either.
There were small trips within my country, but nothing crazy.
Looking back now, the way I was taught to treat money wasn’t really the smartest.
Maybe they weren’t directly taught lessons, but as a kid or a teenager you copy the patterns and behaviour you see your loved ones live out.
I started working from a very young age.
I was 16 when I got my first job, and I’ve been working ever since.
Back then I spent money without much thinking.
I expected money would always come, somehow.
I was lucky enough to go through very different experiences with money during this period, and they taught me a lot.
I went through periods where I had more money than I should have, and I spent it mindlessly on expensive shit.
Designer clothes, fancy restaurants with big tips, things I genuinely didn’t need.
I thought spending money on these shiny things that make you feel seen would make me happy.
That it would make me feel special. And it did, for a short while.
Then I realised that even if I kept earning that kind of money but kept behaving the same way, I wouldn’t get far in life.
It took some time to change my mindset about money and spending.
I read some books, but what taught me even more was the opposite side of the spectrum.
On that side I went through periods where my weekly budget was 20€, and I had to cook meals big enough to feed me for the entire week.
Let me tell you, when you eat the same thing for the fifth day in a row, it’s not that enjoyable.
The biggest lessons came in between these periods, because they kept switching back and forth.
I went from not having enough money to pay one month’s rent and food, to buying designer clothes and eating in high-end restaurants, and back to cooking on 20€ for the entire week.
Thanks to these lessons I learned a lot and made better decisions later in life.
I’ve more or less stabilised my finances by now.
It’s definitely not perfect, but now I at least know where to add and where to take from, to keep moving steadily forward.
If I had to choose from the options above, the closest would be option c.
It makes the most sense to me right now, and I believe it’s the right way to manage money.
Life happens, and from time to time you’ll be forced to take money from your savings because of some unexpected situation.
That’s okay, as long as you get back on your feet.
Don’t stay down and pity yourself.
Some people end up living on the streets, so be thankful if you have anything more than that.
We all have different financial goals.
And yes, money does make you happier in some way, because it gives you options and freedom of choice.
But it’s far from being THE THING that’s going to change your life and make you the happiest person in the world.
I once spent over a month traveling solo in India.
One of the things I noticed there was that people with very little money and few resources were genuinely happier than many high-income people in the Western world.
I would love to know about your relationship with money and what your monthly routine looks like.
4. Job Applications
What about applying for a job?
I don’t know about you, but the job application process was always a pain in the ass for me.
I don’t know why, but it just feels overcomplicated and drawn out for almost no real reason.
I would always prefer to get a straight answer as fast as possible.
If it’s no, fine, just tell me why and I’m happy to move on.
If it’s yes, cool, let’s discuss the contract details.
All that fluff. Using the right words, writing essay-long cover letters, pouring my heart out about why I want to work for someone.
It just feels useless to me.
The same goes for all those descriptions of past experience in your CV, where you are supposed to include the percentages, the data, and other things no one really reads.
Let’s be honest.
What does a company usually want from its employees?
They want you to be useful, hard-working, and to not be a dick to your colleagues.
That’s what you do on a daily basis anyway.
Obviously, you’d want the skills the position needs.
If you’re an IT person applying for a job as a nurse, it might not be in your skillset.
Is it complicated for a reason?
What do you think?
5. Real Friends
How important is friendships in life.
It’s nothing new to say that having real friends is one of the most valuable things a person can have.
Friends surround us from childhood and play an important role in our lives from then on.
As we hit high school and adolescence, the feeling of being surrounded by friends usually peaks.
We’re in daily contact with our peers and basically hanging out all the time.
Once we hit adult life and start working, our time with friends begins to shrink.
Something I heard recently in a podcast was that no one really teaches us how to build and nurture our friendships.
It struck me, because it’s so true.
We go through life meeting people, making friends, but sooner or later we hit a turning point where we start to realise that something has changed.
Year after year, we notice fewer people writing to us on our birthdays, fewer people we still have things in common with, and fewer people we keep in touch with regularly.
Our friend group naturally shrinks, and that’s the point where this whole thing comes into play.
If we don’t know how to properly take care of our friendships, we’ll lose them.
And I once read that loneliness is one of the strongest predictors of an early death.
Yet we still hesitate to tell our friends how much we love them.
We still put work first and keep postponing that coffee with a friend.
We’re way too busy to find the time to answer their texts.
Don’t let life occupy you so much that you forget about your friends.
Your friends will be there for you when you’re going through a tough time. Your work won’t.
Tell your friends how much you love them and how happy you are to have them in your life.
There is nothing more beautiful in this world than having real friends to share your life with.
Be the kind of friend to others that you’d want to have yourself.
Have you told your friend you love them?
6. Clarity Comes From a Place
What do you do on days when you basically don’t know what to do?
If you’re asking yourself, “wtf is he talking about?”, that’s alright. It’ll become clear soon.
You know those days when everything falls on your shoulders at once?
You feel like nothing is working in your favour. You feel behind in life, and on top of that, constantly tired.
You just don’t know what to do to change it.
Days like these suck, right?
What I’ve found helpful is to do the opposite of what many would expect.
Instead of pushing even harder and over-revving the engine, take a step back.
Preferably, get some rest.
Clarity comes from a place where you allow your mind to think.
It’s a place of calm, with no distractions.
It’s like the feeling you get from shower thoughts.
They feel different from the rest of your day.
This is the state you want to be in. Not for 5 minutes, but for 5 hours, or even 5 days.
Your mind, body, and soul are asking for that “me time”.
So, what do you do on days when you basically don’t know what to do?
You take a step back, so you can come back stronger and with clearer thoughts.
What’s your recipe for days like that?
7. Making Peace
How do you make peace with your childhood?
For a start, I just want to say that not everyone needs to have childhood trauma.
It’s not a trend, so don’t be disappointed if you didn’t get one.
By now you probably already know that your childhood shaped you, in many ways, into who you are as an adult.
When you look back, you can see how certain moments shaped you.
As you go through adult life, you run into situations where it’s crystal clear why you react a certain way.
From stressful ones to joyous ones.
You learned how to react from your parents.
In romantic relationships, you discover patterns that might feel odd.
It’s like they aren’t even yours, but you do it anyway.
How come?
You learned that from your parents too.
Childhood is a beautiful time, full of lessons about how the world around us works.
At the same time, it’s the period when the outside world has the deepest, most unfiltered influence on our future.
As an adult, you choose what to believe in, and which habits and patterns of behaviour to adopt.
You make conscious decisions, because you have some outcome in mind you want to reach.
As a kid, you don’t choose any of this.
Because of this, we’re left with whatever our parents and our surroundings believe in.
At certain points in life, we come to understand what baggage we carry, and how deeply it’s rooted in us.
I think it’s a powerful moment when things click and the realisation lands.
It’s like you were living blind, and now you can see.
You can see all those moments that didn’t make sense before, and now you know why you behaved one way or reacted another.
It’s not about using your childhood to blame everything on it.
And it’s not about using it as an excuse.
Now you know the cause, so you can consciously decide, like the intelligent person you are, how you’re going to live your life from here.
Are you going to do the work to become a better version of yourself?
Or are you going to keep using excuses for being a dick to others?
I aim to deliver the most personal stories, insights, and lessons from real-world experiences I have lived through over the past decade.
As I continue building my life and trying to be a better version of myself, I am documenting this journey and the lessons from my life for people who might need to hear them.
- Lukáš