Meditation by Lake Geneva

Not having time to do the things we love is merely an excuse we tell ourselves. 

It’s not uncommon for people to live deferred lives. You might tell yourself:

I wish I could learn Italian. I wish I could travel the world. I wish I could raise goats. I wish I could live off my own Youtube channel. I wish, I wish … 

But which steps are you taking on a day-to-day basis? What goals, objectives, and habits have you gotten yourself into? If you’re waiting for tomorrow to start, remember there is no guarantee you’ll see the end of the day.

The dreams that matter happen in the here and now, when we’re awake. The rest is wishful thinking.

When I started working on my first startup, I had just joined a Swiss company based in Geneva as a tech product developer. I was living in Annemasse, on the French border, so I had to bike every day to work.

I biked 20 km every day for four months, back and forth. Under the rain, in the dark, in snowstorms, in steep slopes, in traffic jams… it didn’t matter. Add in 8 hours a day at work, and you can guess I was pretty exhausted by 6 PM. I would try to push through the fatigue and work an hour or two in the evening, but it almost never worked. 

Instead, I shifted my priorities. I would begin my day with my most important goal—grow my own business—and go from there.

That meant waking up earlier, between 4 and 6 AM, commute thirty minutes to work, and use the two hours before the start of my shift.

Every day at the crack of dawn, sometimes during weekends as well, I would pass by Lac Léman going through the Jardin Anglais, stare a few minutes at the lake while listening to an audiobook of Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, and be on my own way to the office. This is how this picture came to be.

Fast forward 3 years, I’m close to living the dream: working on my own projects, having my own schedule, and being able to balance my work and my personal life while having the opportunity to relocate anywhere I want. There is still a long way to go, but it still starts today.