I decided to write this blog post because as we progress through our own challenges, we all have good days where everything seems to be flowing and bad days where we just feel like giving up and moving on.

It’s hard… we don’t see the end of the tunnel, we doubt, we don’t know if we will ever reach the goal we have set ourselves to achieve.

People have different ways to cope with this feeling. Some simply give up. Afterall, stopping to try to achieve something hard makes your life much easier… Well, at first… then frustration and guilt come in to play that can make your life miserable too, but let’s not go into that… that’s a topic for another day. Just … yeah … don’t be that guy.

The best way to remedy a bad day

Today I just wanted to share two podcast episodes that you should absolutely listen to if you’re having a bad day or if you are thinking about giving up whatever you are currently undertaking.

These two podcasts relate the story of two incredible people who have been through their own version of hell and that came out of it alive and striving. Listen to this on a bad day, and suddenly your day won’t sound that bad afterall and it will really make you think about your current situation and how it’s quite ok afterall.

I listened to this on a Sunday, I was travelling from France to Spain after a full morning of debugging hell that really drained my energy and motivation. I remember myself thinking:

Damn, all these hours wasted and no progress, and now I won’t be able to work on my apps because I’m stuck in a car for 5 hours. I don’t have a job and really need to make this work so I don’t burn my savings for too long before I reach the strategic break even point where I can survive with my passive income …

I’ll stop it there but you get the full picture. I was basically bouncing from one negative thought to the next, trapped inside a vicious circle. All of that for no apparent reason beside a slight frustration triggered by bugs in my code. Wrong.

Many things were wrong in my way of analysing my current situation.

I have savings on the side. I could easily go by for a few months if not a year without needing to worry about finding a job. I am worried about not having enough passive income when I could actually very easily generate non-passive income by just taking a job and as an iOS developer it wouldn’t even be that hard to get one.

It’s just an additional constraint I’m forcing myself to work with simply become I want to achieve financial freedom.

These two interviews discuss another kind of freedom and if you listen to them, I’m sure you too will find that the way we perceive our lifes really depends on how we define them and where we set the bar.

Podcast 1: Joe Rogan Experience #1149 - Michael Scott Moore

Michael Scott Moore is a novelist and journalist, who was kidnapped by Somali pirates and spent two and half years in captivity.

If you’d rather get this as a podcast on your phone, check this link.

Podcast version: Joe Rogan Experience #1149

Michael’s book on this amazing and terrifying experience came out a few weeks ago if you want to check it out.

Book: “The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirates Coast”

This episode really made me rethink about the situation I currently live in. Michael tells this extraordinary story in great details, as a writer would, and Joe always have the right question to take a conversation to the next level.

By the end of it, I was already feeling much better about my day. Putting things into perspective always helps but we tend to not do that enough and stay stuck with our own lot of bad thoughts.

Podcast 2: The Jordan Harbinger Show - #84-88 Charles Ryu | Confessions of a North Korean Escape Artist (Part 1 & 2)

This one actually came into two separate episodes. Lucky for us we get even more details for this amazingly inspiring story.

Charles Ryu @freshprinceofpyongyang escaped from North Korea — twice — and now works with Liberty in North Korea to fight for the rights and freedom of those who have been left behind.

In these two episodes of the Jordan Harbinger Show, he tells his story from being born North Korean back in 1995 to becoming American in 2018. In between these years, I lived under the thoughest conditions, lost his mother, lived homeless several times, almost starved to death, was detained and interrogated by the North Korean police and worked in a coal mine where he was paid 30kg of rice per month. That didn’t stop him from escaping from this jail-country… twice.

You can’t really do more inspiring than that.

Charles Ryu | Confessions of a North Korean Escape Artist

Episodes:

Part 1: 84: Charles Ryu | Confessions of a North Korean Escape Artist Part One

Part 2: 88: Charles Ryu | Confessions of a North Korean Escape Artist Part Two

Wrapping up

I personally bookmarked both these episodes and will make sure to go back to them whenever I feel down or demotivated. That will for sure help me stay on course, not give up and also enjoy the present and feel good about the life I have today, no matter how far I still am from my objectives.

Now let’s get back to work!

I hope you found this post helpful. If you did, it would mean the world if you shared it with your network. Feel free to reach out if you have any question or feedback on this post, you can find me on Instagram or on Twitter.

If you want to find out about the apps I built, feel free to check my portfolio which can be viewed here.

Til next time, happy learning.

Cheers, Ed