On the other thread, I was surprised at some of the negative/defeatist attitudes. Esp. for a FIRE forum where I expect people to be motivated and believe they can achieve success in an area many people believe is difficult/impossible.
You’ve seen the phrases like:
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
“If you believe it’s impossible, you’ll never try.”
“The only thing stopping you is you.”
“If you think you’re beaten, you are.”
“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.”
“You can’t succeed if you’ve already decided you won’t.”
“Believing you’ll fail is the first step to failing.”
“If you talk yourself out of it, you’ve already lost.”
And although some of these are corny and clichéd, I think the underlying concept is true.
When I read things like “x savings per month is not that easy to achieve” I wonder whether people are internalising negative attitudes that prevent them from achieving more?
Which education would you propose to get to (guarantee) that sort of salary straight after uni/apprenticeship?
Just look at the assumptions in the above quote:
education
guarantee
salary
after uni
Why do you need an education? Why do you need a guarantee? Why just a salary? Why after university?
Each of these has drastically narrowed down the opportunities you could follow. You’ve mentally boxed yourself in (probably without realising it) before you’ve even started!
Let me help re-program you:
Saving an additional 3’000 per month on top of what you already save is a realistically attainable goal
But let’s be careful. Don’t let the word ‘saving’ limit you into thinking of just spending less money, or getting some pay rise. The trick is to earn an extra post-tax 3’000 outside of your job and save that.
Well, that’s not my intention, in fact, quite the opposite: by having an open and positive attitude, I think you free yourself from limits to live life to the maximal extent you desire.
While people are discussing financial goals here, the same principle applies to: health/fitness goals, learning languages, eating healthily etc.
The main thing I’d say is we waste too much time on things which are detrimental to our physical and mental health e.g. sitting and doom-scrolling on our phone.
If we take some of this time and spend it on other things, we will be happier and healthier and probably financially better off too.
I know that and I applaud you for focusing on the mindset. There are too many discontent rich people to allow the assumption that financial goals are the milestones leading to happiness.
Go a step further. I suggest not focusing on finding and optimally applying the best crutches to obtain happiness. It’s the consciousness, our comparing mind that hinders much our contentment. And we can’t think or argue our way out of this. Or achieve it by chasing goals. Goals are not per se bad, just not helpful in being lastingly happier.
Here we are completely on the same plane. However, we also have to be honest: We are saying this while being online and discussing right/wrong, better or worse. We are thus again locking ourselves in a box that is very hard to see and harder still to get out of.
Yeah I mean reading those posts about saving rates on the other thread I was also thinking „straight out of uni, I don’t see why one can’t reduce their costs to almost zero“.
It’s all about tradeoffs. But fundamentally there is not really anything preventing a 90% savings rate straight out of university, if you want…
I think a balanced approach just makes more sense. But at the same time, the exceptional success of final countdown may also be to a lot of sacrifices which aren’t so clear on the forum!
True. I should spend less time on the computer. While I am on here often, it is because I’m working on something else on the computer and I take ‘breaks’ while things are working in the background.
Yes as a student you can reduce your costs a lot also afterwards due to expectations and life situation e.g. room sharing is probably a positive for social aspects rather than a negative.
During university, I bought and sold stuff online. No education. No guarantee. No salary. I was making £2,000 per month sending around 50 packages a month. So little time requirement I could continue while I worked.
I have friends who learned to paint as a hobby and put their works on Facebook. They started selling for 1’000s and it become a paying vocation.
I think there’s a big difference between being defeatist/negative and believing something to be difficult/impossible. I think just by being here and discussing what we are we’re in far better financial position than the VAST majority of the planet’s population.
Totally, but can we pick on whether people are incapable or just lazy when it comes to being consistent with…anything? Initial progress is very slow…the task feels insurmountable…”what does it matter”…and then they reach for the phone and doomscroll 30+ minutes of their life away. That’s one area that computer games did me a TON of good, getting used to the grind, it’s critical to grind in life, that silly rat you need to kill 10000 times in a row to get the next level taught me the critical lesson that “no matter how tedious it may be, you will get there if you do it”.
Yep, I personally stand by all of them yet it’s a mental shift that most never make. They hear these sort of sentences and brush them off like “Oh yeah, more American one liners”. Being born in a good country helps remove some barriers too. Greeks are scared people, people from the Balkans are, overall, scared/paranoid/superstitious. They learn that they can only trust their family and everyone else is out to get them, and they need to satisfy so many NPCs because “what will people say?”. (I know that calling other people “NPCs” is mostly done by assholes but in this case it fits, or maybe I am one too!). They don’t walk to Kita aged 4, sharpen sticks with knives in the woods aged 5, or rent boats to go sailing (with money they earned working in the summer) aged 16 - like a Danish friend of mine did in the 90s.
Don’t underestimate what deep phycological/mental/character barriers growing up in such an environment puts up, these are real invisible chains around them and while I am not using this as an excuse (would go against the one liners above, which I full align with) I am offering the other side. We have some relatives visiting us from Serbia (my wife’s country), they told us they think the simple act of walking to school and back, no matter the weather or age, is phenomenally good for the children. I fully agree.
Mate, that’s a freakload of money if were talking about late 90s. Friend of mine at uni in the UK used to make music lists and burn CDs on order, he had a good internet connection and overall good gear in our student halls, he made pretty good money on it, but 2000 quid/month is a lot. My student stipend on my PhD (2004-2009) was £6,000 and I felt rich as hell at the time (but my rent was £250)! Edit: thinking about the numbers…that’s just a £250/month allowance - rent was for university housing, student and College (Oxbridge) fees were covered by the stipend, included bills, there was no internet connection, were prices really that low just 15-20 years ago? I don’t recall feeling pressed for money at all at the time. Used to go out a lot, including for eating, had rudimentary internet on my phone. Sure, no splurges or anything and my parents chipped in a bit for airplane tickets, clothes, but now I genuinely feel puzzled about it because I didn’t feel poor, yet I was!
If you think about it, that’s true of most times of life. If you are willing to move, you can live close to your work place and have very low transportation costs. Living together with other people in an older appartment allows to reduce the rent. But for some rare cases, health costs are capped. Other costs can be reduced by the choice of activities and the time we spend on them instead of outsourcing them.
Things change when you have dependents, and you can have dependents straight out of uni. Our optimisation, then, affects other people and extreme frugality has to be balanced with its impact on other people’s life.
One risk that comes with frugality is to let the scarcity mindset set in: passing on investments because of their costs without properly taking their opportunities into account. I think one has to manage their costs but, past a certain level the gains coming out of further optimization have lesser and lesser benefits. As stated by @PhilMongoose, the income lever isn’t capped.
The cost then can become burn out, a lack of social life / time dedicated to friends and family and such. It’s a balancing act though, there again, there is a risk of overthinking.
I think there are a few areas of life that help keep us balanced, nurture a positive mindset and unlock more energy and time availability:
good sleep habits;
hygiene habits (the small things like teeth brushing, taking a shower, making the bed, washing and folding clothes, time without screens, etc.);
food habits (eating enough, not too much and diversified enough);
physical exercise (workouts, cardio, (team)sports, even a simple daily walk,…);
social contact (includes quality time with family).
I find focusing on the system and the small daily routines helps me feel like I have energy to burn and then use it to pursue projects.
One thing that usually stops me is that I tend to overthink. My go to in these cases is to remind myself that what really matters is to plan, then execute. If the time is to execute, then it is time to shut off doubt and just do actions. One after another, continually, regularly, until it works.
I feel it’s a good place to post again my favourite motivational video (more for taking action/keeping consistent): Youtube - Rise and Shine
I think the important thing is to execute. I’m a natural worrier/over-planner. But the problem is that there is a very hard limit to planning and planning beyond a certain limit gives rapidly falling marginal returns, in fact, it quickly turns negative.
Once you start executing, it reveals things which then allow you to plan more effectively. To use a game analogy, over-planning is like being frozen while the RTS map is all hidden in fog of war. Only when you execute and explore do you reveal more of them map which allows you to plan more effectively.
Yup, it was more than my starting salary, which was £20k per year. And that was back when GBP was worth something.
It comes back to executing, first I bought and sold and was maybe buying at 2 and selling for 15. Then as I learned the market more, I bought out stock to corner the market and then raised prices to 20, the 25 then 30. Then I bought accessories to expand the offering and increase basket price to 35-50.
I could have never planned or theorized that. Only by doing could I learn and develop and implement.
GSM modems. Thinking back, I have no idea how I even started that and why I thought there was a market for it, but it worked.
EDIT: I abandoned it shortly after moving to the CH, I’d asked a family member to help do the physical packing and posting of items while I handled the rest from Switzerland, but yeah, learned the lessons of having good employees and shortly closed down the operations.
There would actually have been a potential decent follow-up business. I was selling 2G modems at the time so as these were being phased out, I could have re-sold 3G modems to the existing customer base.
Although it doesn’t really come across in what I wrote, I wasn’t really that interested in the money, it was just interesting to run the business and try to grow it. It was more like a game to me and after I moved, I got bored of it and wanted to move on to other things.
What I since learned about business is that the money is made when you stick to something that is working and keep grinding and scaling it out even though it isn’t fun any more.
What you might be experiencing is exactly that. When you have wealth, at least in the constraints of the forum, the ppl for whom this makes up an important timeslice of their day, they want to accumulate status.
This wanting of status can sometimes come off as cockyness and probably it is, it might even be subconcious, the pursuit of it. So other readers react negatively.
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I think the conclusion that this thread is heading into, is that mediocrity is not good and does not lead to being content, be that financially or otherwise.
To have a good self-esteem we do need a mission, this can be kids, a product/business, god or a combination or all three.
Though what happens when you have none of them? You realize at some point that your everydays are mediocre, and you can either not think about it, hide from it, keep your self busy with meaningless stuff, or start again.
I think this starting again, be that only in mindset or generally a new profession/business is very, very hard, while your brain is shouting at you that discomfort of being a beginner again is not worth it.
There is the danger of pursuing money for its own sake. It should be a means to an end and the pursuit of money was warned even in biblical times:
“You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13).
There are enough stories about people who only on their deathbed reflect that they spent their life chasing money but neglected family, god, community or a wider purpose or leaving the world a better place before you go.
That was my point as well, having a mission or a purpose cannot conclude to only money, that itself doesnt bring shit, a business on the other hand could, kids and god as well.
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Without getting too philosophical, you could invert the problem and try to discover what happiness or being content with oneself and ones life means. Asking the question, how could I be unhappy, how could I be discontent.
Most of us are getting to these states because of desires that shadow our days.
Obviously, there is a lot of nuance to this, in my own experience, it reduces to not wanting, being very much satisfied with life. Now, this satisfaction is tighly coupled with the above abstract ideas.
Ofc, this does assume that the satisfacion is genuine, and you arent brainwashing yourself with some dogma.
“If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.”
— Lao Tzu (often cited, though variations exist)
This sentence is not helping me at all. But maybe someone else will.
edit: the second part of my sentence has actually two meanings: the grammatically correct, and what I really meant. I hope both get true
If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.
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