My mom’s older brother passed away a few years ago. He was the quiet type. Lived in the same modest house for decades. Wore old flannels. Fixed his own car. No one ever thought of him as “well off.”
After he died, we learned he had been buying small life insurance policies over the years. Not for himself. For his nieces and nephews.
In his will, he left each of us a payout that would only be released for one thing: education, starting a business, or a down payment on a first home.
No speeches. No “remember me” letter. Just paperwork and signatures.
Turns out he had also been anonymously paying for one cousin’s trade school tuition when their parents couldn’t afford it. None of us knew.
He never posted about helping anyone. Never brought it up at dinner.
He just quietly positioned the next generation a few steps ahead.
Sometimes love looks like preparation no one sees coming.
My time at @afcbournemouth. Where do I even begin? Family. Growth. Memories i'll cherish forever. Thank you to everyone who made this journey so special. ❤️🖤
I used to work 6am - 6pm, 6 days a week, on a construction site in my early 20s.
Honestly? It fucking sucked, dude. I would sit in my car outside the site at 530am, desperately drinking a coffee, telling myself over and over again, "god I wish I was in sciences"
Because every night when I got home what did I do? Watch Walter Levin MIT Open Courseware physics lectures. I had already exhausted all the popular science books long before so just started on undergrad level physics. The alternative was drinking a six pack of beer like everyone else and watching bullshit TV.
The construction site job was actually better than what I was doing before. Landscaping, stone masonry shit. Backbreaking labor, truly. Breaking concrete slabs up with a sledgehammer and carrying bricks all day. That's literally a punishment in prison.
There was a company event for the property development Corp doing the construction I was working for where everyone talked about their degrees. Most people had been at the company for almost a decade, did random unrelated degrees.
I realized. If I didn't take control of my life the years would tick by. So I went back to school for engineering physics at age, like, 25. I probably wouldn't graduate until I was 30, but shit.
You're going to turn 30 one day anyway. Might as well be doing something you chose.
A year into schooling I had my first paying job in a physics lab, basically minimum wage, but my god. I was getting paid to work in a physics lab. I could drink coffee and read papers, build cool stuff. It was insane.
The kids around me had no idea how lucky we were to be there. They hadn't suffered being trapped in dead end jobs that leave you too exhausted to really think, plan, get ahead. So I viciously worked my ass off through out engineering physics to play the game as best I could. Get the best internships, connections, etc. By the end of undergrad I was taking graduate level classes and outperforming the PhD students at them.
Everything since then had gone better than I could've imagined. I used to think - wow, the dream would be designing fusion reactors, if only. Now I have patents in fusion reactor design. I've worked on particle accelerators, LEO satellite communications, beam driven fusion devices, finite element analysis for RF source design at SLAC.
So no. Fuck mind breaking manual labor. Leave it for the robots. Choose your own path.
I will say though. There are few things as therapeutic and full body workout as shoveling sand. I can show you at least a dozen different sand shoveling techniques to work every muscle in your upper body. Also wheelbarrow technique.
I've been married 30 years. When we got married, we agreed that as the husband, I would make all the big decisions and my wife would make all the small decisions.
It's worked out great! I'm just surprised there have never been any big decisions.
I'm so old I wrote that!
That's assuming it's the Windows version, which is the one I worked on. The Win9x game, art, and original code, were done by Maxis/Cinematronics. I ported it to Windows NT, converted the x86 asm to C, made it work on RISC, and so on.
Success has many fathers, and all credit should really go to the original designers... I'm just the fun uncle that brought it to the masses.
It was back in 2008. I had this friend we all called him Sunday.
He used to climb palm trees and cut down palm fruits. That day, he came around like usual, ready to climb.
I told him, “Guy, clear the base well before you climb oh.”
He just laughed and said, “No .....