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On to A New Year

First full week of the new year, and it is off to a pretty good start. This is the first year that I have no football obligations nor any finals to worry about over break.

Personal Updates

The biggest focus that I have had while at home has been on losing weight. Now that I am officially done with football, I saw no reason to be 300 lbs, and have continued to lose weight. The day of this post, Sunday, January 9th is actually the first day that my morning weigh-in read below 260 since I started this weight loss journey. I have about another week or so at home before I return to school, and I am right on track with my goals. My goal in coming home was to get down below 260 before coming back since I thought the 250-260 range would be where I ended up settling down. Now that I am actually here, I still feel that I still have a ways to go as far as body recomposition even though I am down over 50 lbs from where I started the season at. I definitely have more of a runway than I thought, but we will see how the next few weeks go and where I actually feel comfortable settling down. 

My life while at home has pretty much solely consisted of going to the gym, reading some books, doing minimal thesis work, and various other tasks along the way. I am just starting to apply for jobs and connect with different alumni to try and figure out what I will be doing post-graduation. I had a call with someone from the entrepreneurship office at Princeton to discuss a product idea that I may end up working on this spring as a side project which went surprisingly well. At this point, I am really not sure what industry I will end up in nor what part of the country I will be living in. I can pretty confidently say that I will likely be working in the U.S., but given that I just got my passport renewed, I could see myself traveling abroad if the opportunity presented itself. 

Books/Other

This week I managed to get through both Hedge Fund Market Wizards and The Power of Broke which were both interesting reads stemming from the WSB (We Study Billionaires) podcast. This was the first of the market wizards series that I read, and at first, I almost decided to put it down, but I am glad that I persisted. It was a pretty long book, but it was really just a series of interviews with a number of successful hedge fund managers with different strategies in different time periods. I figured that a lot of the podcast episodes that I listened to or found interesting were basically this same format, so I ended up getting through the whole thing. The Power of Broke was pretty good as well. It echoed some of the lessons that I have heard in other contexts, specifically similar to the lean startup methodology, but provided stories of various companies that I had not heard before which were interesting.

Regarding podcasts, I have continued to listen to The Daily Stoic, as well as the WSB and Bitcoin Fundamentals podcasts. I have been able to add in some more Huberman Labs episodes which have been helpful in my training and attempts at body recomposition. I also received the Daily Stoic physical book as a Christmas gift and have been reading those passages daily thus far. My plan right now is to continue to read those passages each day for this full year. I initially had thought that it would be redundant to listen to the shorter podcast episodes and also read the book, but I was surprised to find that the content varies from day to day, and the podcast episodes are rarely the same as what is in the book. Even still, I feel like the lessons are valuable so if I hear the same message twice then it will probably stick better. My plan now, for at least until I move into my own place, is to continue to expose myself to a lot of different books and see what authors or genres I gravitate most to, and then eventually buy the physical copies of the books to engage more deeply with them and take notes, etc.

Gratitude

For this week's gratitude post I am thankful for the ability to relax. I am pretty privileged in that I do not need to be working a job during this break if I do not want to. I obviously still have some opportunities available to me if I chose to do some work, but this is really the first time in a while that I can actually relax as I have no pressing obligations. I am aware that I still have to do my thesis and find a job, but given the amount of free time that I will likely have this next semester, I am not too worried about getting a lot of work done while home, especially since I think that I will be more productive at school with my meals taken care of and the lack of other responsibilities. This is definitely a rare segment of time as I do not think I will have another similar portion of time likely until I retire. I realize that not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to actually fully relax and take a step back from their lives, so I wanted to do just that, even if it is just for a couple of weeks. 
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