30. USE YOUR BRAIN TO LEARN, DISCOVER AND EXPLORE
“Brain power improves by brain use, just as your bodily strength grows with exercise.” -- Anonymous
“Creativity is experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.” -- Mary Lou Cook
The most wonderful thing about achieving financial independence and retiring early is the time freedom. You can arrange how you want to spend your time daily. Your time is no longer controlled by the company, bosses or clients. Your time is yours now.
Personally, my top priorities in life now are no longer about climbing corporate ladder, nor about making even more money. My life now focuses on health and happiness.
I don't decide on doing something based on the outcome perspective. I don't ask myself the question, "If I do this, can I monetise?"; or "This is wasting my time as it doesn't generate income."
Instead, I ask myself another set of questions, "By doing this, will it make me happy?" or "Does this fulfil my unfulfilled dreams, my life list, and make me happy?" If the answer is a big yes, then I will go ahead and do it.
I will enjoy the journey without worrying much about the outcome. I flow with what life leads me. I let life, let God.
A few months later, if I decide to change my course to try something else, I won't be too uptight with myself. I will drop the initial project and move on to the next. It's all about finding happiness though learning and exploration.
Importance of mental health
When you retire early, it doesn't mean you stop learning, discovering or exploring. There are so many illness that are related to brain and mental health.
Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, Parkinson's disease, mental depression and anxiety are some of the mental-related illnesses that are closely associated with aged group.
To prevent any mental-related illnesses when you get older, it's crucial to ensure you keep your brain active and healthy. Besides, your brain is the organ of your personality, character, and intelligence, and is heavily involved in making you who you are. It shows how important mental health is.
Ways to stimulate your brain
Just like how exercise improves physical health, brain workouts make your brain stronger, boosting your memory and thinking skills.
There are many ways to stimulate your brain.
Don’t underestimate the power of physical exercise. Since mind and body are interconnected, regular exercise can boost blood flow to your brain, improve your memory and cognitive skills.
When you eat healthy, you also give your brain a strong boost.
As you age, your memory power also reduces. But according to a study, reading can help to reduce the rate of memory decline by 32%. Hence, you can read more often to stimulate your mind and slow down the memory decline process.
Besides reading, you can write stories, song lyrics, letter, emails, blog posts and books to further reduce the rate of memory decline. Writing not only boost up your working memory, it also improves your communication abilities.
Even painting, colouring and drawing, whether it’s a mere doodle, or a creative masterpiece, these are all intellectual activities for the brain.
For those who love to play games like Sudoku and chess, these fun games help to sharpen their mind. No wonder many Asian people in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia love to play mah-jong. It’s healthy for the brain.
This world will be dead silence without the presence of music. To most people, listening to music is enjoyable. Playing a musical instrument, be it guitar, piano, violin, or clarinet, can be very therapeutic. However, it goes beyond that. Listening to and playing music can also help to improve brain functions, especially for older adults.
Undoubtedly, learning new things can stimulate your mind and relieve boredom. Learning a new language or finding a new hobby like fishing, photography, sewing, swimming not only makes your life exciting, it can also improve your brain.
Let the creative soul, the inner child in you out to play, learn, and explore
This world is filled with more logical minds than creative minds. If you can tap on the creative part of your brain (writing, painting, drawing, hand crafting, photography, design, playing musical instrument, etc) during your retirement years, I believe you will do a great service to your brain health.
Why? It’s because I believe we are all born to be creative. But somehow, our education, work pressure, society expectation, and systematic structured ways of doing things and living our lives have somehow suppressed our creativity.
After you retire, it’s time to let your creative soul, the inner child in your to come out to play, to learn, to explore and to experience life freely. By doing so, you do not only improve your brain, you let yourself be a more complete person.
Letting my inner child out to play again
I have always been a creative soul, for as long as I can remember.
Growing up into my young adult years, I loved to play music, draw, and write. I knew how to play electronic organ, harmonica, trumpet, and Chinese musical instruments. I used to be an assistant conductor in a Chinese Orchestra during my high school years at Keat Hwa Secondary School in Alor Setar, Kedah. I was marching along brass band during school sports days playing trumpet. I stood on stage playing harmonica along with harmonica team members. My drawing was always one of the top three in my class. I won a consolation prize at one of the national level high school short-essay writing competitions.
During my university years in America, I had to supress my creative urges and focus on demanding studies. My field of study was statistics, nothing creative as well.
Over the span of 27 years in corporate world, my career was occupied with business issues which required logical and data-driven approach to solve. I didn't have much opportunity to fully explore the creative part of me. But I am grateful that I managed to find time to learn basic guitar strumming. Strumming along with my broken-record singing voice, that was my only creative outlet.
When I found a new passion in running back in 2010, I started to reconnect with the creative side of me through blog writing. I would write down my personal race experiences in running and triathlon that I participated. When I grow to 80s one day, I can then sit at my rocking chair reading my personal achievements in sports.
I’m truly grateful for being able to retire early. With time freedom, I can be in touch with my creative soul even more. I can now freely and fully let my inner child come out to play, learn and explore.
Otherwise, I would not have found the time to spend months to write this book and fulfil one of my long overdue unfulfilled dreams. Otherwise, I would not have found the time to learn about book publication, from editing, proofreading, typesetting, illustration, cover design, ISBN application, book offset printing, Malaysia bookstores distribution to e-book formatting, e-book publishing and online bookstore. This entire book writing journey has been arduous and laborious but full of excitement, joy and learning. I believe my brain has been given a triple shot of strong boost during these few months.
With time freedom, I also manage to spend more time in travel photography. I learn about how to take better photos from others. I learn about photo composition. I also learn about post-editing process through photo editing applications like Snapseed, VSCO, Lightroom, etc. It's such a wonderful learning discovery to see the earth and destinations through the lens. Learning the art of seeing through photography has become another outlet for me to release my creativity. It definitely helps to sharpen my mind too.
As my inner child and creative soul become more and more accustomed to come out to play, I will continue to learn new things, especially creative things, to boost my mental health.
Next, I plan to spend 3 to 6 months in a foreign country to soak myself in campus life and learning new things. This is also to make up my regret of not being able to get my MBA in Japan under full scholarship back in 1994. But this round, I won't study MBA. I have retired and MBA is no longer required. Instead, I will want to study creative courses. For example, I might want to study a foreign language, psychology, or counselling. I may even want to enrol myself in fine arts, photography, video production, drawing or painting. I look forward to improving my brain use through different experiences.
Keep your mind active
No matter what you do, do not let your mind stay idle after retirement. Keep your mind active the best you can. You will find life will reward you with many new adventures.
SECTION 5
Life after Retirement:
Health, Happiness, Gratitude, Being Significant
“If you have health, you probably will be happy. And if you have health and happiness, you have all the wealth you need, even if it’s not all you want." -- Elbert Hubbard
F I L L
Financial Independence, Live Life
achieving financial independence from 9-to-5 job before 50
Book manuscript written in 2020 & blog articles published in 2021 by Vincent Khor
Photo by Jesse Martini on Unsplash
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