To live life large instead of postpone it.
If you’re sick of the standard menu of options and prepared to enter a world of infinite options, this book is for you.
Millions of people have seen their savings portfolios fall 40% or more in value and are now looking for options C and D. 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? Sell their services to companies in the UK to earn in a stronger currency? The answer to all of them is, more than ever, yes. I encourage you to remember this often-neglected question as you begin to see the infinite possibilities outside of your current comfort zone.
Grads from top schools are funneled into high-income 80-hour-per-week jobs, and 15–30 years of soul crushing work has been accepted as the default path. How do I know? I’ve been there and seen the destruction. This book reverses it.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and redirect.
—MARK TWAIN
Assuming you can find me (hard to do), and depending on when you ask me (I’d prefer you didn’t), I could be racing motorcycles in Europe, scuba diving or a private island in Panama, resting under a palm tree between kickboxing sessions in Thailand, or dancing tango in Buenos Aires. The beauty is, I’m not a multimillionaire, nor do I particularly care to be. I never enjoyed answering this cocktail question because it reflects an epidemic I was long part of: job descriptions as self-descriptions.
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.
—OSCAR WILDE, Irish dramatist and novelist
How can I possibly explain that what I do with my time and what I do for money are completely different things? That I work less than four hours per week and make more per month than I used to make in a year? For the first time, I’m going to tell you the real story.
Gold is getting old. 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).
I’ve deciphered the code—simple to duplicate. There is a recipe. Life doesn’t have to be so damn hard. It really doesn’t. Most people, my past self included, have spent too much time convincing themselves that life has to be hard, a resignation to 9- to-5 drudgery in exchange for (sometimes) relaxing weekends and the occasional keep-it-short-or-get-fired vacation.
Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, real-life fantasy travel, long-term wandering, setting world records, or simply a dramatic career change, this book will give you all the tools you need to make it a reality in the here-and-now instead of in the often elusive “retirement.” There is a way to get the rewards for a life of hard work without waiting until the end.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
People don’t want to be millionaires—they want to experience what they believe only millions can buy. Ski chalets, butlers, and exotic travel often enter the picture. Perhaps rubbing cocoa butter on your belly in a hammock while you listen to waves rhythmically lapping against the deck of your thatched-roof bungalow? Sounds nice.
What is the pot of gold that justifies spending the best years of your life hoping for happiness in the last?
Is it really necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire?
This book will teach you how to see and seize the options others do not. You are suffering from time famine, creeping dread, or—worst case—a tolerable and comfortable existence doing something unfulfilling.
The goal is fun and profit.
The perfect job is the one that takes the least time. The vast majority of people will never find a job that can be an unending source of fulfillment, so that is not the goal here; to free time and automate income is.
Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn’t require being unethical.
What on earth do you do when you no longer have work as an excuse to be hyperactive and avoid the big questions?
Being financially rich and having the ability to live like a millionaire are fundamentally two very different things. Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it. I call this the “freedom multiplier.” Using this as our criterion, the 80-hour-per-week, $500,000- per-year investment banker is less “powerful” than the employed NR who works ¼ the hours for $40,000, but has complete freedom of when, where, and how to live. The former’s $500,000 may be worth less than $40,000 and the latter’s $40,000 worth more than $500,000 when we run the numbers and look at the lifestyle output of their money.
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
When I was in data storage sales, my first gig out of college, I realized that most cold calls didn’t get to the intended person for one reason: gatekeepers. If I simply made all my calls from 8:00–8:30 A.M. and 6:00–6:30 P.M., for a total of one hour, I was able to avoid secretaries and book more than twice as many meetings as the senior sales executives who called from 9–5. In other words, I got twice the results for 1/8 the time.
Everything popular is wrong.
—OSCAR WILDE, The Importance of Being Earnest
It is unsustainable, just as what most define as a career: doing the same thing for 8+ hours per day until you break down or have enough cash to permanently stop.
Less Is Not Laziness.
Doing less meaningless work, so that you can focus on things of greater personal importance, is NOT laziness. This is hard for most to accept, because our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity.
Focus on being productive instead of busy.
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 refers to harmful stimuli that make you weaker, less confident, and less able. Destructive criticism, abusive bosses, and smashing your face on a curb are examples of this. These are things we want to avoid.
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.” Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress—stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth. People who avoid all criticism fail. It’s destructive criticism we need to avoid, not criticism in all forms. Similarly, there is no progress without eustress, and the more eustress we can create or apply to our lives, the sooner we can actualize our dreams. The trick is telling the two apart.
How do I escape this self-made prison?
No more passing days as the living dead, no more dinners where his colleagues compared cars, riding on the sugar high of a new BMW purchase until someone bought a more expensive Mercedes. It was over.
It wasn’t the driver, it was the vehicle.
Conquering Fear = Defining Fear
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. Now 48, Jean-Marc lives in a nice home in Ontario, but could live without it. He has cash, but could fall into poverty tomorrow and it wouldn’t matter. Some of his fondest memories still include nothing but friends and gruel.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
—MARK TWAIN
you are nervous about making the jump or simply putting it off out of fear of the unknown, here is your antidote. 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.
God, life is a cruel, hard bitch.
“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
Doing the Unrealistic Is Easier Than Doing the Realistic
It’s lonely at the top. Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too. Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think. Unreasonable and unrealistic goals are easier to achieve for yet another reason. Having an unusually large goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides the endurance to overcome the inevitable trials and tribulations that go along with any goal. Realistic goals, goals restricted to the average ambition level, are uninspiring and will only fuel you through the first or second problem, at which point you throw in the towel. If the potential payoff is mediocre or average, so is your effort.
Happiness. I no longer believe this is a good answer. Happiness can be bought with a bottle of wine and has become ambiguous through overuse. There is a more precise alternative that reflects what I believe the actual objective is. Bear with me. What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No.
Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here’s the clincher—boredom. Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all.
Be realistic and stop pretending. Life isn’t like the movies.
Living like a millionaire requires doing interesting things and not just owning enviable things.
“Fail Better” and written by Adam Gottesfeld, explores how I teach Princeton students to connect with luminary-level business mentors and celebrities of various types. I’ve edited it for length in a few places. People are fond of using the “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense.
“It’s easy to sell yourself short, but when you see classmates getting responses from people like [former president] George Bush, the CEOs of Disney, Comcast, Google, and HP, and dozens of other impossible-to-reach people, it forces you to reconsider your self-set limitations.”
‘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.”
Life is too short to be small.
If something will improve your feeling of self-worth, put it down.
In that case, consider these questions:
a. What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?
b. What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?
If still blocked, fill in the five “doing” spots with the following:
one place to visit
one thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime)
one thing to do daily
one thing to do weekly
one thing you’ve always wanted to learn
Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!
COMFORT CHALLENGE. The most important actions are never comfortable.
Just a few words on time management: Forget all about it. 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. It took me a long time to figure this out. I used to be very fond of the results-by-volume approach. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions. The options are almost limitless for creating “busyness”:
Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.
Here are two truisms to keep in mind:
1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
Vilfredo Pareto was a wily and controversial economist-cum-sociologist who lived from 1848 to 1923. An engineer by training, he started his varied career managing coal mines and later succeeded Léon Walras as the chair of political economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. His seminal work, Cours d’economie politique, included a then little-explored “law” of income distribution that would later bear his name: “Pareto’s Law” or the “Pareto Distribution,” in the last decade also popularly called the “80/20 Principle.” The mathematical formula he used to demonstrate a grossly uneven but predictable distribution of wealth in society—80% of the wealth and income was produced and possessed by 20% of the population—also applied outside of economics.
Pareto’s Law can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs. Alternative ways to phrase this, depending on the context, include: 80% of the consequences flow from 20% of the causes. 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort and time. 80% of company profits come from 20% of the products and customers. 80% of all stock market gains are realized by 20% of the investors and 20% of an individual portfolio. The list is infinitely long and diverse, and the ratio is often skewed even more severely: 90/10, 95/5, and 99/1 are not uncommon, but the minimum ratio to seek is 80/20. When I came across Pareto’s work one late evening, I had been slaving away with 15-hour days seven days per week, feeling completely overwhelmed and generally helpless. I would wake up before dawn to make calls to the United Kingdom, handle the U.S. during the normal 9–5 day, and then work until near midnight making calls to Japan and New Zealand.
Remember, more customers is not automatically more income. More customers is not the goal and often translates into 90% more housekeeping and a paltry 1–3% increase in income. Make no mistake, maximum income from minimal necessary effort (including minimum number of customers) is the
primary goal. I duplicated my strengths, in this case my top producers, and focused on increasing the size and frequency of their orders.
Slow down and remember this: 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 food of minutiae, and the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Take time to stop and smell the roses, or—in this case— to count the pea pods.
This schedule is a collective social agreement and a dinosaur legacy of the results by- volume approach. How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9–5 is arbitrary.
Divided attention will result in more frequent interruptions, lapses in concentration, poorer net results, and less gratification. Eating while doing online research and instant messaging? Ditto.
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
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Learning to ignore things is one of the great paths to inner peace.
—ROBERT J. SAWYER, Calculating God
More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it. Develop the habit of non-finishing that which is boring or unproductive if a boss isn’t demanding it.
The cost- and time-effective solution, therefore, is to wait until you have a larger order, an approach called “batching.” Batching is also the solution to our distracting but necessary time consumers, those repetitive tasks that interrupt the most important.
Realize that bosses are supervisors, not slave masters. Establish yourself as a consistent challenger of the status quo and most people will learn to avoid challenging you, particularly if it is in the interest of higher per-hour productivity.
SET THE RULES in your favor: Limit access to your time, force people to define their requests before spending time with them, and batch routine menial tasks to prevent postponement of more important projects. Do not let people interrupt you. Find your focus and you’ll find your lifestyle.
The bottom line is that you only have the rights you fight for.
People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don’t realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world.
—CALVIN, from Calvin and Hobbes
For families, the four-hour workweek doesn’t have to mean four months on a sailboat in the Caribbean unless that’s their dream, but even the simple ideal of having time to take a walk in the park every evening or spending weekends together, makes taking actions to implement this program worthwhile.
Fun things happen when you earn dollars, live on pesos, and compensate in rupees, but that’s just the beginning.
Eliminate before you delegate. Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be automated or streamlined.
Short, sweet, and to the point. Clear writing, and therefore clear commands, come from clear thinking. Think simple.
What would you do if you didn’t have to think about money? If you follow the advice in this chapter, you will soon have to answer this question. It’s time to find your muse.
This chapter is not for people who want to run businesses but for those who want to own businesses and spend no time on them.
People can’t believe that most of the ultra successful companies in the world do not manufacture their own products, answer their own phones, ship their own products, or service their own customers. There are hundreds of companies that exist to pretend to work for someone else and handle these functions, providing rentable infrastructure to anyone who knows where to find them. Think Microsoft manufactures the Xbox 360 or that Kodak designs and distributes their digital cameras? Guess again. Flextronics, a Singapore-based engineering and manufacturing firm with locations in 30 countries and $15.3 billion in annual revenue, does both. Most popular brands of mountain bikes in the U.S. are all manufactured in the same three or four plants in China. Dozens of call centers press one button to answer calls for the JC Penneys of the world, another to answer calls for the Dell Computers of the world, and yet another to answer calls for the New Rich like me. It’s all beautifully transparent and cheap.
Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is much easier. Don’t create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market—define your customers—then find or develop a product for them.
Be a member of your target market and don’t speculate what others need or will be willing to buy. Start Small, Think Big
It is said that if everyone is your customer, then no one is your customer.
Which social, industry, and professional groups do you belong to, have you belonged to, or do you understand, whether dentists, engineers, rock climbers, recreational cyclists, car restoration aficionados, dancers, or other? Look creatively at your resume, work experience, physical habits, and hobbies and compile a list of all the groups, past and present, that you can associate yourself with. Look at products and books you own, include online and offline subscriptions, and ask yourself, “What groups of people purchase the same?” Which magazines, websites, and newsletters do you read on a regular basis?
Genius is only a superior power of seeing.
—JOHN RUSKIN, famed art and social critic
How is it different and why should I buy it? ONE sentence or phrase, folks.
The bulk of companies set prices in the midrange, and that is where the most competition is. Pricing low is shortsighted, because someone else is always willing to sacrifice more profit margin and drive you both bankrupt. Besides perceived value, there are three main benefits to creating a premium, high-end image and charging more than the competition.
1. Higher pricing means that we can sell fewer units—and thus manage fewer customers—and fulfill our dream lines. It’s faster.
2. Higher pricing attracts lower-maintenance customers (better credit, fewer complaints/questions, fewer returns, etc.). It’s less headache. This is HUGE.
3. Higher pricing also creates higher profit margins. It’s safer. I personally aim for an 8–10x markup, which means a $100 product can’t cost me more than $10–12.50.2
Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.
—VIDA D. SCUDDER, The Life of the Spirit in the Modern English Poets
This was a new product category that I created to eliminate and preempt the competition. Strive to be the largest, best, or first in a precise category. I prefer being first.
If you decide to resell someone else’s higher-end products like Doug, especially with drop-shipping, the risk is lower and smaller margins can suffice.
Don’t pretend to be strong. Make it clear you’re nervous and they’ll lower their guard. I often do this even if I’m not nervous.
COMFORT CHALLENGE
So, relaxing in public. Sounds easy, right? I’m somewhat famous for relaxing in style to get a laugh out of friends. Here is the deal, and I don’t care if you’re male or female, 20 or 60, Mongolian or Martian. I call the following a “time-out.” Once per day for two days, simply lie down in the middle of a crowded public place at some point. Lunchtime is ideal. It can be a well-trafficked sidewalk, the middle of a popular Starbucks, or a popular bar. There is no real technique involved. Just lie down
and remain silent on the ground for about ten seconds, and then get up and continue on with whatever you were doing before. I used to do this at nightclubs to clear space for break-dancing circles. No one responded to pleading, but going catatonic on the ground did the trick. Don’t explain it at all. If someone asks about it after the fact (he or she will be too confused to ask you while you’re doing it for 10 seconds), just respond, “I just felt like lying down for a second.” The less you say, the funnier and more gratifying this will be. Do it on solo missions for the first two days, and then feel free to do it when with a group of friends. It’s a riot.
It isn’t enough to think outside the box. Thinking is passive. Get used to acting outside the box.
It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
—THOMAS H. HUXLEY,
English biologist; known as “Darwin ’s Bulldog”
While entrepreneurs have the most trouble with Automation, since they fear giving up control, employees get stuck on Liberation because they fear taking control. Resolve to grab the reins—the rest of your life depends on it.
Just because something has been a lot of work or consumed a lot of time doesn’t make it productive or worthwhile. Just because you are embarrassed to admit that you’re still living the consequences of bad decisions made 5, 10, or 20 years ago shouldn’t stop you from making good decisions now. If you let pride stop you, you will hate life 5, 10, and 20 years from now for the same reasons. I hate to be wrong and sat in a dead-end trajectory with my own company until I was forced to change
directions or face total breakdown—I know how hard it is. Now that we’re all on a level playing field: Pride is stupid. Being able to quit things that don’t work is integral to being a winner.
There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth. The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.
Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.
—INGVAR KAMPRAD, founder of IKEA, world’s largest furniture brand
True freedom is much more than having enough income and time to do what you want.
One cannot be free from the stresses of a speed- and size-obsessed culture until you are free from the materialistic addictions, time famine mind-set, and comparative impulses that created it in the
first place.
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
—ANATOLE FRANCE, author of The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard
Isn’t more time what we’re after? Isn’t that what this book is all about? No, not at all. Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal. Living more—and becoming more—is.
People say that what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL, The Power of Myth
Think of a time when you felt 100% alive and undistracted—in the zone. Chances are that it was when you were completely focused in the moment on something external: someone or something else.
Sports and sex are two great examples. Lacking an external focus, the mind turns inward on itself and creates problems to solve, even if the problems are undefined or unimportant. If you find a focus, an ambitious goal that seems impossible and forces you to grow,81 these doubts disappear. In the process of searching for a new focus, it is almost inevitable that the “big” questions will creep in. There is pressure from pseudo-philosophers everywhere to cast aside the impertinent and answer the eternal. Two popular examples are “What is the meaning of life?” and “What is the point of it all?”
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
I believe that life exists to be enjoyed and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.
Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas.
—PAULA POUNDSTONE
What makes you most angry about the state of the world?
What are you most afraid of for the next generation,
whether you have children or not?
What makes you happiest in your life? How can you help others have the same?
What are you good at?
What could you be the best at?
What makes you happy?
What excites you?
What makes you feel accomplished and good about yourself?
What are you most proud of having accomplished in your life? Can you repeat this or further develop it?
What do you enjoy sharing or experiencing with other people?
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.
—FRANK WILCZEK, 2004 Nobel Prize winner in physics
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something … almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
—STEVE JOBS, college dropout and CEO of Apple Computer, Stanford University Commencement, 2005
The heaviness of success-chasing can be replaced with a serendipitous lightness when you recognize that the only rules and limits are those we set for ourselves. So be bold and don’t worry about what people think. They don’t do it that often anyway.