Mark and I didn’t achieve early retirement because we’re better than other people at money. We did it by accepting our natural tendencies and shortcomings, and by creating systems that set us up to succeed in spite of our worst habits. We had some big advantages that made our journey shorter than some people’s will be, like having gone to college, having graduated without a soul-crushing level of debt, and earning six-figure salaries in our last several working years. That last one especially accelerated our pace, but it would have been just as possible to retire early if we’d earned
