Dear future Sacha,

Posted on May 12th, 2010 by Sacha Chua

Remember these things as you go through life:

Happiness is a state of mind. It can’t be bought, given, or taken away, but it can be chosen.

Simple things can make it easier to be happy. Experiment.

Don’t forget that the reason you make a safety net is so that you can fly.

Tough experiences make good stories. Everything will work out.

It’s possible to have laugh lines, great stories, and lots of energy well into what most people would consider old age. Go for it.

On the different components of happiness: You can manage yourself. You can create opportunities for work. Relationships are different. You can’t control them, but you can invest in them.

Good parenting comes from a strong partnership. Don’t let kids or work distract you.

People will flow into and out of your life. Grief is the other face of love. It’s worth it. The holes in your life show you what people added and force you to grow.

The world is full of good people.

It’s never too late to learn something.

Always give yourself room to write, reflect, draw, and know yourself.

Other people can learn from you, even while you’re learning.

As you grow older, people will focus less on your “potential”. You won’t get as many lucky breaks practically handed to you, but you can keep creating opportunitites. This is good. It gives you the freedom to explore.

You don’t have to do everything. Eliminate, negotiate, and delegate.

You are not responsible for everything. Give people room to learn from their own experiments.

Don’t let nostalgia for the good old days blind you to the good new days.

Whether or not the world falls apart, life is what you make of it. Worry only so much as that helps you plan. Skip blame entirely. Look for the bright side, and share it with others. Life will be awesome.

Love,
26-year-old Sacha

More posts about: life, reflection // 5 Comments »

Short URL: http://sachachua.com/blog/p/7184

http://paul-drummond.tumblr.com/ Paul drummond

Great post! Very inspiring Sacha.
http://mylenesereno.wordpress.com/ Mylene Sereno

I love this post!
“Relationships are different. You can’t control them, but you can invest in them.” – Certainly, one of the things in this life that is most important to a person is relationships.

In some other areas of life, once you give your all, your best, you can almost always guarantee positive results… But in relationships, even if you work hard to make them work, you can never control their outcome.

Life is all about choices. And happiness is always a choice. So it’s great that we can always choose to have a happy life. :)

Thanks future Sacha! :)
http://punchagan.muse-amuse.in punchagan

Wonderful post. Thank you!
I came back to it today, thanks to a friend!
http://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondzeitler Raymond Zeitler

Oh wow! You took me up on my suggestion! Thanks so much. It’s really good.

I especially like this: “Don’t let nostalgia for the good old days blind you to the good new days.” I was always forward-thinking, like you. But yesterday I fired up my daughter’s new Kindle, and I was thinking, “Oh no, not another thing to set up.” So I might be turning blind to good new days.
http://sachachua.com Sacha Chua

Yes, from your suggestion on my letter to my 8-year-old self! 26-year-old Sacha put together a wonderful safety net of family, friends, finances, and skills. At 29, I continue to make this net stronger – and to use it to take braver and braver leaps. We’re hoping that it will help 48-year-old Sacha totally rock. Thanks for being part of the journey. =)

You know, it’s kinda awesome to be able to run into these older versions of myself in this blog. People get something of a similar experience flipping through photo albums, I think, but journals and blogs – written records of how you thought and who you were – are something different. I think it’ll be fascinating to be able to look back thirty years.

On This Day...

2013: Cherry blossoms in High Park, and playing with digital watercolour in Artrage 4 — High Park has a lot of cherry trees. They bloom for such a short time and it’s hard to predict [...]
2012: Weekly review: Week ending May 11, 2012 — From last week’s plans Business [X] Earn: E1: Mon-Thu (training, prototyping) [X] Connect: Go to Toronto Reference Library small business meetup and post [...]
2011: Weekly review: Week ending May 6, 2011 — From last week’s plans Work [X] Tidy up project C Relationships [X] Hang out with my family! Yay! [...]
2009: Smiling over a distance — I spent another hour this morning coaching Milind, a developer in India who’s starting on the Drupal project I worked [...]
2009: A love affair with books — (2008) W- and I got to know each other over lots of carpool conversations. One time, he gave me a lift [...]
2008: Sketchcat — Hey, that worked. Good thing I still have some of my favorite sketches on my DS. Here’s the sketch I [...]
2008: Sketchcast: Week ending May 11 — Andy Piper linked to my Nintendo DS sketches and to something interesting called sketchcasting, so I wanted to figure out [...]
2005: Hipster PDA: GTD Tiddly Wiki — Miguel Javier said: GTD Tiddly Wiki is a GettingThingsDone adaptation of JeremyRuston’s Open Source TiddlyWiki. The purpose of GTD Tiddly Wiki is [...]
2005: New productivity blog: To-Done — I stumbled upon a cool new productivity blog: http://www.to-done.com. Keith started on May 4. Based on the articles that are already up, [...]
2004: emacs-wiki oops — As a side-effect of handling tags first in order to deal with nasty things like <example>, <contents> no longer lists notes. We [...]
2004: 55er: “We’re Pregnant” — “Easy does it. Remember that Lamaze class we took? Breathe in, breathe out. Don’t think of it as a big deal.” “I’m [...]
2004: “Fast Food Fiction: Short Stories to Go” — 179 pp., Anvil Publishing edited by Noelle Q. de Jesus A local anthology of flash fiction. I want. Sixty stories of 500-900 words? [...]
2004: “Adopted” — “Mother? Am I adopted?” A tiny hand slipped into mine. The moment of truth? Raised her as our own flesh and blood, [...]
2004: Cybercode — http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=354667&dl=ACM&coll=GUIDE
2004: Semacode – Hyperlinks For The Real World — http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/08/1913229&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=137&tid=193&tid=95
2004: Getting Things Done, by David Allen — http://www.davidco.com/ Niklas Morberg sent me an e-mail about planner.el support for Dave Allen’s “Getting Things Done” method. This is the first time [...]

sacha chua living an awesome life