About

As a teenager, I used to wake up around 10-11am on weekends and holidays. I was lazy, I will admit (I still am), and I like to stay in bed dreaming and thinking. My bed is comfortable, what can I say!

But, imagine this: if instead of waking up at 10am I had woken up at 9am every day, and spent that extra hour of the day, say, studying French, I would have dedicated 365 hours to studying French by the end of the year. It takes a monolingual native English speaker around 600 hours to learn to speak French fluently (according to the FSI), but since I already speak Spanish and Catalan, I would have been able speak French by the end of one year. If, instead of French, I wanted to learn programming, I would know HTML, CSS and Javascript by the end of the year and would be able to look for a job as a front-end software developer. Or maybe I wanted to learn to play the piano, or train to run a marathon, or become a youtuber.

And imagine, if I had started doing that a year earlier, I would both speak French and play the piano. If I had been doing this for the past five years, I would be able to do all five things.

And now imagine if instead of waking up at 9am for 5 years, I had instead been waking up at 8am, or at 7am, or at 6am— You see where I’m going with this. That’s four extra hours every day. 1460 hours by the end of the year. 7300 hours after 5 years.

One day, I became aware of how much time I was wasting in bed and I decided to put a stop to it. Since then, my life has turned upside down and I have achieved things I never knew possible.

The 10 Year Plan

I have a 10 year plan with the things I want to do and accomplish during this chapter of my life.

To sum it up, right now I should keep doing what I’m doing: working on small or mid-size projects, take care of some standalone bucket list items and save lots of money. In 2-3 years time I will take my first mini-retirement, after which I will move to New Zealand. Once there, the general idea is to get to know my grandparents, buy a house, build more work experience, learn Maori and, maybe, get a degree in Maori and/or Asian studies. Also, see lots of seals. I don’t know how long I will want to stay there, probably anywhere from three to seven years. After that I might move to Switzerland and properly improve my French (and skiing, lots of skiing) or live a simple life back at home in Spain for a few years. Ten years from now, I expect to be moving to Japan long-term.

I set my goals on my birthday, in February, rather than for New Years. This makes them more personal and motivating for me and the year-end gives me a push for the last sprint.