Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life. Yeah, it’s cheesy but deal with it. This is my diary and you can get lost if you don’t like it 🙂
The reason this is the first day of the rest of my life is because today I made a decision. I was standing at the funeral of one of my good mates from high school, commiserating his passing with 20 people I hadn’t seen in 15 years.
You know how you think that once people get out of high school and see the real world, they’re going to change? Yeah, it doesn’t happen like that. Some people don’t change.
The funny thing is that I was one of them.
Yeah, I’ve got a wife and kids and a degree and a mortgage, but talking to these people and seeing their response to me, I realised I was just the same dropkick that I was when we were still in school.
I was talking with one guy, Jerry, who was always a bit of a debbie downer, and he said something that really shook my world up: “John, yeah, he’s a lucky stiff…”
I didn’t understand what he meant until he saw the dumbfounded look on my face and kept talking: “His life was pretty shit. He was up to his eye balls in debt, he was divorced and his misses wouldn’t let him see the kids, he was still stuck doing the same shitty factory he’d been in since he got out of high school, and his life wasn’t going anywhere. If you ask me, he’s better off in the ground. It’s easier down there.”
He was right. It was easier down there. He was a lucky stiff.
I thought about what he said for a while and decided that that wasn’t going to be me. I didn’t want to be the lucky stiff who got to leave behind a shitty life for the quiet of the grave.
I wasn’t going to let my marriage fall apart from neglect, I wasn’t going to waste my afternoons looking for the excitement and promise that my life once had in the bottom of a schooner glass, and I wasn’t going to spend the next 10 years working in the same shitty job that I’d been doing since I got out of college.
So this is why this is ground zero. It’s time to take control.
I’m going to make my marriage and my relationship with my kids the best I possibly can be, I’m going to get out and start crossing all those things off my bucket list that I’ve been telling everyone I was just about to do, and I’m going to start my own programming company, right from the spare room in my house.
And just to keep myself accountable, I’m going to record everything I do here so all the world can see my wins, my losses, and my lessons.
Welcome to my life.