Agatha Christie’s antiheroes kill off their rich uncles to inherit enough money to stop working and live quietly in the English countryside. In real life, you don’t need to kill anyone; you just need to save enough money over a sufficient period of time.
That isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The “standard path” is to work until age 65, 70 or beyond, then retire just before you lose your taste for even mild adventure.
To do something different you need to be:
1) Free-minded. That starts by envisioning a life without the external impetus of a job. Making your own meaning can feel disorienting, particularly if you’ve put your heart into your work. Most people stop right there.
But once you’ve got the vision, executing it means being free-minded enough to make your own consumer choices. I drove the kind of cars my partners were buying for their teenagers, and tended my own garden while my neighbors hired a landscaping crew. I’d argue the alternate path is richer, in every sense.
2) Patient. No investment strategy works without time for assets to grow. Most of this blog is about how to develop patience by loving what you do for a living. In finance circles, that is called lowering your time preference. Finding a way to lower my time preference without giving up on joy changed not just my finances, but my health, my mindset – and even what I eat.
3) Brave. Just preserving money—much less growing it—requires investment risk, and the fortitude to hold on through the ups and downs. Simply putting money in a bank account, or even buying government Treasury bonds, will not keep up with the real impact of monetary inflation. And once you find a way to effectively store and grow the money you’ve made, retiring early is itself a risk: a bet that you’ll figure it out—even if things don’t go exactly to plan.
The good news is that bravery is a skill, not an inherent personality trait. How do I know? At 17 I was so painfully shy I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. Basic tasks, like going to the grocery store, took a major effort of self-overcoming. It wasn’t clear to anyone—least of all me—that I’d be able to live as an ordinary person in the world. But I found a way to get brave enough to operate at the highest levels in a field where assertiveness is the critical feature, and then to step out into the next chapter of my life with confidence. And I’d argue that a little bit of bravery is the difference between a good life and a great one—it certainly has been for me!
The Freedom section of this blog will detail how anyone can cultivate free-mindedness, patience and bravery. It will also describe the specific strategies I used to amass enough wealth to stop working at an early age, and how I found the strength to “pull the trigger” on early retirement when everything at work was going my way.
You don’t need to want my exact life, and chances are you won’t! But if some part of you suspects there’s more freedom available than what you’ve been sold—the Freedom section of the blog is for you.
Start here. Subscribe for more to come.
The Fully Invested Lawyer 
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