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Can they redistribute retirement throughout life to make it more affordable? Can they relocate a few months per year to a place like Costa Rica or Thailand to multiply the lifestyle output of their decreased savings?
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. —MARK TWAIN
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. —OSCAR WILDE, Irish dramatist and novelist
an epidemic I was long part of: job descriptions as self-descriptions.
The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).
What separates the New Rich, characterized by options, from the Deferrers (D), those who save it all for the end only to find that life has passed them by?
To prevent work for work’s sake, and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect (“minimum effective load”).
To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. —PABLO PICASSO
I can’t give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. —HERBERT BAYARD SWOPE, American editor and journalist; first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize Everything popular is wrong. —OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest
By 1980, 13 of the 16 Olympic finalists were using the Fosbury flop.
Don’t follow a model that doesn’t work. If the recipe sucks, it doesn’t matter how good a cook you are.
Less Is Not Laziness. Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness.
we decided there was no point in putting it off. The timing is never right to have a baby.” And so it is. For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time.
“Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
Most people are fast to stop you before you get started but hesitant to get in the way if you’re moving.
It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor. The choice is between multiplication of results using strengths or incremental improvement fixing weaknesses that will, at best, become mediocre. Focus on better use of your best weapons instead of constant repair.
By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves the time to do otherwise:
Busy yourself with the routine of the money wheel, pretend it’s the fix-all, and you artfully create a constant distraction that prevents you from seeing just how pointless it is. Deep down, you know it’s all an illusion, but with everyone participating in the same game of make-believe, it’s easy to forget. The problem is more than money.
Distress Is Bad, Eustress Is Good.
Eustress, on the other hand, is a word most of you have probably never heard. Eu-, a Greek prefix for “healthy,” is used in the same sense in the word “euphoria.”
It’s not giving up to put your current path on indefinite pause.
Most who avoid quitting their jobs entertain the thought that their course will improve with time or increases in income. This seems valid and is a tempting hallucination when a job is boring or uninspiring instead of pure hell. Pure hell forces action, but anything less can be endured with enough clever rationalization.
working lifetime of 40–50 years is a long-ass time if the rescue doesn’t come. About 500 months of solid work. How many do you have to go? It’s probably time to cut your losses.
The most basic of foods and good friends proved to be the only real necessities, and what would seem like a disaster from the outside was the most life-affirming epiphany he’d ever experienced: The worst really wasn’t that bad. To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. —MARK TWAIN
Write down your answers, and keep in mind that thinking a lot will not prove as fruitful or as prolific as simply brain vomiting on the page. Write and do not edit—aim for volume. Spend a few minutes on each answer.
What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do. As I have heard said, a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have. Resolve to do one thing every day that you fear.
Don’t only evaluate the potential downside of action. It is equally important to measure the atrocious cost of inaction.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where …” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. —LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists
The fishing is best where the fewest go, and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone else is aiming for base hits. There is just less competition for bigger goals. Doing big things begins with asking for them properly.
Samuel Beckett, a personal hero of mine: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better.”
In the strictest sense, you shouldn’t be trying to do more in each day, trying to fill every second with a work fidget of some type.
I didn’t realize that working every hour from 9–5 isn’t the goal; it’s simply the structure most people use, whether it’s necessary or not. I had a severe case of work-for-work (W4W), the most-hated acronym in the NR vocabulary.
Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing, and is far more unpleasant. Being selective—doing less—is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.
It’s easy to get caught in a flood of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities.
Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will swell in (perceived) importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion.
There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other: 1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20). 2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson’s Law).
Fat-free performance and time freedom begins with limiting intake overload. In the next chapter, we’ll put you on the real breakfast of champions: the Low-Information Diet.
Love of bustle is not industry. —SENECA
Am I being productive or just active?
Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?
If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask. It is a symptom of “task creep”—doing more to feel productive while actually accomplishing less.
If doing work online or near an online computer, http://e.ggtimer.com/ is a convenient countdown timer.
“Can I make a suggestion?” “I propose …” “I’d like to propose …” “I suggest that … What do you think?” “Let’s try … and then try something else if that doesn’t work.”
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. —HERBERT SIMON, recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics8 and the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science”
Cultivating Selective Ignorance There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)
Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also practical. It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three.
The first step is to develop and maintain a low-information diet. Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace. —ROBERT J. SAWYER, Calculating God
