Collect Only As Much Wealth As You Need To Live Your Optimum Lifestyle
“When you’re finally wealthy, you’ll realize it wasn’t what you were seeking in the first place.”
Wealth is not an end in itself. What money buys is the freedom of your time to design a lifestyle you love. We are all here for such a short time - years pass in the blink of an eye. Don’t spend your life chasing more wealth than you need for the sake of making money.
Get paid, then cash out.
Judge Your Wealth By Lifestyle, Not money.
Most people get a job to make money, and then design their lifestyle around their job. And many are miserable because of it.
The forty-hour work-week is a big part of that. Humans aren’t meant to work forty hours and then “live for the weekend.” That was only necessary when the number of hours you put in determined the number of widgets you would get out of the factory.
Leverage has changed the game. You can now design your lifestyle first, and then find the right leveraged career that suits you.
Here’s entrepreneur Daniel Vassallo advocating for this on Twitter:
“I want my work to help me design my preferred lifestyle, not my work to dictate what my lifestyle can be… The biggest opportunity cost is enduring a lifestyle you dislike…Thinking about opportunity cost in terms of earning potential is missing the point. If you're enduring an existence you dislike, you're missing out on a lifestyle that matches your true preferences. That's the real opportunity cost.”
My preferred lifestyle has a lot of free time - for thinking, for walking, for exercise, etc. So, that’s one big reason why I chose developing and selling film and TV as a career.
First, it’s project-based, which means I’m judged on my output, not hours worked. And it’s the free market that judges my output, not any one person.
Plus, writing has loads of free time built in. You only have 3-4 hours of solid creativity available per day, so once that’s burned, you’re freed up. That’s ideal.
The Less You Own, The Freer You Are.
One trap a lot of people get into once they start making money is they surround themselves with more “stuff.” They keep upgrading their lifestyle as the money comes in. But the more stuff you buy, the more trapped you become.
Here’s Derek Sivers talking about this in his book, How To Live:
“Money is your servant, not your master. Don’t act rich… Don’t buy too many things, too big of a house, or hire too many people. Rich people who do this feel trapped and miserable. The less you buy, the more you’re in control… Say no to more stuff. Say yes to more choices.
More stuff does not correlate with more happiness. Meaningful creativity and the freedom to pursue your innate curiosity do.
When You’re Wealthy, You’ll Live With The Fear Of Losing it All.
The more you have, the more you have to lose. That’s the downside of building a fortune and the reason you should stop going after wealth as soon as you’ve found your ideal lifestyle.
There’s an asymmetry to getting rich - it’s called loss aversion. The joy you feel when you make additional money is much smaller than the fear and pain you experience when you lose some.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his book, AntiFragile: Things That Gain From Disorder:
“When you become rich, the pain of losing your fortune exceeds the emotional gain of getting additional wealth, so you start living under continuous emotional threat. A rich person becomes trapped by belongings that take control of him, degrading his sleep at night, raising the serum concentration of his stress hormones, diminishing his sense of humor, perhaps even causing hair to grow on the tip of his nose and similar ailments. Seneca fathomed that possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend on them.”
Don’t make more money than you need. The emotional distress at the possibility of losing it isn’t worth it.
Money Magnifies Who You Already Are.
Money will not change you - it will simply magnify what you already are. Pursuing wealth thinking that it will make you happy is a fool’s errand. It won’t.
Wealth just frees up your time. You must decide what to do with that time. You have to create meaning for yourself.
Naval talks about this in his How To Get Rich podcast:
“Yes, money will solve all your money problems. But it doesn’t get you everywhere. The first thing you realize when you’ve made a bunch of money is that you’re still the same person. If you’re happy, you’re happy. If you’re unhappy, you’re unhappy. If you’re calm and fulfilled and peaceful, you’re still that same person. I know lots of very rich people who are extremely out of shape. I know lots of rich people who have really bad family lives. I know lots of rich people who are internally a mess.”
I found this out when I quit my job to work for myself. I thought that having a little bit of wealth to buy time would make me happy. It didn’t.
Instead, it was using that free time to find meaningful, creative work with long-term partners. It’s using that free time to exercise and take care of my body. It was spending that free time with people I love.
Wealth buys freedom, but you must use that freedom to find happiness.
Thanks for reading.
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ARTICLE SOURCES
Derek Sivers. How to Live. Hit Media. Kindle Edition.
Naval Ravikant’s site: https://nav.al/rich
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Incerto 4-Book Bundle. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.