There's an old Japanese proverb about sitting on a stone for 3 years, it will become warm. A different version of the American phrase: "good things come to those who wait" but hard work and perseverance is added to the formula to adjust the phrase to "good things come to those who work hard and persevere." I often view my life in different chunks of time, like what I was doing last year at the same time (recovering from a trip to Italy) or 2 years ago (buying a new home) and 3 years ago (right smack dab in the summer of quarantine, stuck inside during a pandemic). It's crazy how the news shapes our daily lives in dramatic ways, where 3 years ago every top headline in the news would be about Covid and number of deaths, number of cases (interspersed with the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd) to the point where you think this will be the only thing in the world that happens, until it doesn't.... and 3 years later, Covid is literally yesterday's news, with news agencies figuring out people don't care as much anymore and moving on to other stuff. It kind of validates my theory (pretty generally accepted) that the news is just another business entity trying to get our attention, which nowadays is more valuable than getting our money because you can monetize the attention into money, and better than an instant hit of money it's a steady stream of money and income. Which makes it all that more important to have perspective during a certain time in one's life, realize in a few months or a few years everything might change, it won't always be like that (especially stock market stuff! All the fearmongering about stocks going down last year have been replaced with headlines of Nividia and other stocks surging up in 2023!)
The "3 years" in the Japanese proverb is important too to emphasize that hard work takes a long time to reap benefits from, it's not like you can just sit on a rock for 3 minutes, 3 hours, or 3 days even, it takes a while for good things to happen, good habits to develop, good projects to materialize. More and more in our society (me included) we're looking for a shortcut to our goals, whether it's fame, wealth, or status. If someone gave me enough money so I could retire and not work for the rest of my life, I'm sure I would take it. But is that likely to happen? Not at all. And would I even be satisfied for that to happen? The financial stress would be gone, but the feeling of accomplishment and having earned the money would not exist. The "Moonwalking with Einstein" book taught me that no one necessarily has a "bad memory," it's just up to you to train your own memory to be a good memory. Too many things are blamed on naturally being bad at something, which in some cases is true: some people have bad health, are shorter, have brown hair, etc., but memory is something you can control and train to get better, that anybody could do.
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