For a long time, I had been wanting to live and work at a farm. As an engineer, working at an office, the simple life of the outdoors and manual labor seemed appealing. And in 2016 it finally happened. I went to New Zealand and became a cow farmer for 3 weeks. It was an amazing experience where I got to live with a kiwi family. My first few days at the farm had passed when I noticed something: I have so much free time! Cows only required around 6 hours of work a day, and after that, I was free. At first, I would take naps, walk around, watch a lot of TV, sometimes talk to the family (they were busy people so most times I was alone at the farm) and play games on my phone. But all of this became boring very fast, so I need a new hobby.
One day, while sitting at the patio, watching the clouds move (I told you I had a lot of free time), I got an idea! I remembered that when I was a kid, I used to enjoy reading, but I had lost that years ago. It had been over a decade since the last time I had read a book. I thought to myself: maybe I should try reading again, so I went on Amazon, and bought a Kindle book. I started with something easy, a book about cars, (I love cars) written by a blogger I liked. I ended up reading the book in a couple of days and I was hooked! While at the farm I finished 3 easy-to-read books (I know it’s not much, but for me it was amazing). After leaving the farm I kept reading and reading, moving to more helpful books, leading to today, where I read every day, mostly self-help books. A year has passed since I really took reading seriously, and I already finished over 10 books, reading many of them more than once. Now I have this wonderful lifelong passion for reading and learning, and everything because one day I was bored at a farm.
Lesson: Sometimes it’s good to be bored since ideas can come to us when our mind is relaxed and at ease. Take advantage of those times and have productive thoughts.
