Learn, Earn & Return

My 2018 New Year’s Resolution via @dudonwai

Posted on Jan 7, 2018 at 4:09 PM

Learn Earn Return

Looking Ahead — Banff, Alberta (April 2017)


Happy new year, everyone!

The period between Christmas and New Year’s is one of my favourites. Every year, that’s when I catch up on self-care and the neglected parts of my life: myself, my friends, and my family.

Whether officially or unofficially, it’s also the time I’m furthest from work and the Internet, and I’m able to reflect on the past year, and look forward to the year ahead: what I’m excited about, what I’m fearful of, what I need to do to evolve, which of my core beliefs have changed, and which high-conviction beliefs I still hold.

The process helps me de-clutter my mind, refine my plans for the future, and look forward to how amazing and happy the future will be.

In my first post of the year, rather than share my goals of 2018, I wanted to share 2 of my life goals with you, that will shape my goals for 2018, but for 2019, 2020 and so on, too. Hopefully this will be helpful for you, but it’s certainly helpful for me to to sharpen my mind and refine my thoughts. Enjoy!

Life Goal #1: Learn, Earn & Return

The concept of Learn, Earn and Return is an approach to structuring your life into 3 stages. You spend the first third of your life focused on learning — learning in school, from friends, from mentors, about yourself and about the world. You spend the second third focused on earning — earning a living (and wealth if you can) and earning respect by nurturing rewarding relationships. You spend your last third focused on returning — giving back to the world through mentorship, quality time and philanthropy.

Now, I’m not saying I intend to only learn in the first third of my life. I just mean that my focus will be to learn. As with any investment (like financial or relational) you need to have a strong base before you get any value out of it. For financial investments, I view learning like building your principal and improving your interest rate all at the same time. For relational investments, you need to learn deeply about yourself before you can understand others and be a strong support for others (or healthily seek support from others).

My first life goal is to follow the 3 stages, which means to still stay focused on learning (until I’m 30 or so). I spent my early-20s learning in university and engineering jobs, and now I’m spending my mid-20s to learn about passion and building something from scratch. There are several ways the rest of my 20s can pan out, but through all of it, my goal is to keep learning in everything I do — my relationships, my work, and myself.

Life Goal #2: Be a Journalist with a Day Job

As part of Life Goal #1, I want to continually learn through reading and return through writing. I’ve had trouble writing last year when I feel my idea isn’t good enough, or I’ve taken too long to write it and I’ve lost interest. A lesson I learned from Andrew Chen was to forget obsessing over needing to write original ideas, and be a journalist with a day job. That means you always have unique perspectives to contribute, and you don’t need to share it during your 9–5. You can share it in the evening, or on the weekend, or during the winter break. Any time, and for the rest of your life.

And I honestly do believe that everyone has unique ideas to contribute. In a world of increasingly more information on the Internet, that just means more noise that we each need to filter through. Everyone’s opportunity to be a journalist is to skip the noise, and share relevant, high-quality perspectives that others can learn from.

With that said, my second life goal is to write more than I did than the year before, which for 2018, means to write more than 4 posts (1 down, 3 to go!).

Your Life Goals

So those are my 2 guiding life goals. If New Year’s resolutions are too mainstream for you, think about your life goals keep yourself accountable!

Happy New Year everyone!

— Dudon