Category: Freedom

  • What It Took to Walk Away: How I Retired Early

    What It Took to Walk Away: How I Retired Early

    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.

  • Rewired for Joy: How Interest-Driven People Can Learn to Love What is Good for Them

    Rewired for Joy: How Interest-Driven People Can Learn to Love What is Good for Them

    I’ve always been jealous of disciplined people who do hard things just because it’s time to do them.

    My sister is like that. As kids, she practiced the piano every day, exactly as our teacher assigned. I was all over the place — three hours, then nothing for days. Discipline didn’t come naturally to me. My teachers said I was smart, but I struggled to stay present with the lesson at hand. I was caught up in daydreams. On another planet. A few decades later, someone might have called it ADHD.¹

    As a kid, I thought I’d never be able to keep up—let alone thrive in the world.

    I knew I needed more than a schedule or a rule to do the hard thing. I needed a reason. Something joyful. Something interesting. And that need has shaped how I approach everything I care about.

    I started tricking myself into wanting to do the things I was supposed to do.

    I learned to cultivate motivation by highlighting the best parts of a task, noticing the pleasure in it, even exaggerating it to myself until the task became something I wanted to do.

    At school, everything changed once I figured out how to enjoy reading, writing, and learning. I went from barely surviving middle school to thriving at a top law school.

    I studied harder and worked harder because I loved the process of thinking through challenging problems. My “superpower” was that I cared more than anybody else. That engagement carried me farther than discipline alone ever could.

    Learning how to want what’s good for me didn’t just make life easier—it made my life possible. And this mindset didn’t just save me in school or work. It became the foundation for how I live—how I eat, how I move, how I build wealth, and how I stay free.

    You can use the same approach to learn to love movement, strength training, or eating well. Our bodies and minds are primed to enjoy those things. That great feeling after a few minutes on a treadmill or a walk around the block is your body rewarding you for doing what it was built to do.

    And it works just as well for money.

    This joy-first mindset helped me build a financially lean life—grounded in gratitude, rooted in sufficiency, and free from the dopamine hits of consumer culture. I learned to savor the feeling of being able to do it myself, or make it myself, and the lightness of needing less.

    A rich life isn’t built on more stuff. It’s built on things like time, freedom, self-reliance and creativity.

    Typical advice—”work out at the same time every day, track every expense, follow the plan”—just sounded so boring. For me, healthy habits, like anything else, need to be rooted in joy. In love, even.

    I used my old trick and found a way to love what I needed.

    Want to learn to love what’s good for you? Start by noticing what already feels good. The way your breath steadies. The rush of air. The brightness after a clean meal. The freedom of knowing you don’t need much.

    Catch that moment. Build on it. That’s how it begins.

    In other posts, I share tips for how busy people can learn to love moving, getting stronger, eating well — and living below their means without feeling deprived. Subscribe here to get the latest posts.

    I also run a companion blog, Not Your Fiat LIfe, which provides a space to practice appreciation. Click here to subscribe to Not Your Fiat Life.

    Footnotes

    ¹ Some “undisciplined” or “lazy” kids are just interest-driven learners — a pattern reportedly seen in ADHD, particularly in girls. Source.

    A tangent for people with ADHD-type minds — and their parents:
    Another thing made a huge difference for me. I never would have made it through law school or a legal career without it.

    I developed a strange little habit: flipping the tassel end of a bookmark over the page as I read. I still do it — much to the annoyance of anyone who’s ever officed next to me. It’s rhythmic, soothing, and essential. I do my “bookmark thing” when I’m reading on a screen, talking on the phone, writing emails — even writing this blog post.

    Without it, I cannot focus.

    Maybe it was the original fidget spinner!