#29 | Why 3 Life Focuses?

I wanted to talk today about why I pick three life focuses. I feel this is especially important because when I started this journey, one of my original inspirations had seven focuses.

That inspiration was a Merril Lynch life planner. My wife and I went through this life planner, and although it tries to be great, it's a bit overwhelming. It took us forever to go through all seven categories. Especially because each of the seven categories then wants you to have two goals. That means you end up with 14 life goals. To me, that's just insane. How can you apply focus when there are 14 things on your plate?

My wife and I pushed through the process and started prioritizing these 14 goals. We could only prioritize five goals before we started having arguments between what the next priorities would be. It was ridiculous. From my years of dealing with product managers trying to prioritize feature development, it's obvious anything above a certain threshold is pointless. If it's not something you can start working on immediately, it's priority will change by the time you get to it.

As a couple, if we can only work on a few priorities at once and trying to prioritize everything beyond that top group becomes pointless, why even try to prioritize everything? So the first thing I wanted to do when I was developing my Personal Control Book was to define better these life goals (called Life Focuses within the PCB) and goals (called Beacons within the PCB). During this redefining is when I determined three was the ideal number.

One might ask, why not just have one? Then you could focus entirely on something. This concentrated focus is what I feel a lot of the FIRE community does. The subreddit is bursting with people who put FI as their top and only priority and end up negatively impacting other parts of their lives. There is no life balance.

It makes sense if you think about it. If you become a workaholic, you will never see your family. You will eat unhealthy because it's convenient, and you will never make time for exercise. Eventually, your family life will fall apart, and your health will diminish. If you become an obsessed gym rat, you won't give your career the energy it needs to flourish, and again your home life will become heavily neglected. And if you spend all of your energy building relationships with your family, then unless they are part of your fitness and career, your performance at work will suffer, and you'll never take time to take care of yourself.

Three Life Focuses don't have the downside of either having a single Life Focus or seven Life Focuses. It keeps you well rounded, yet not so well rounded that you can't make progress on anything. It's in the Goldie Locks zone.

And just because some things are not part of my three Life Focuses doesn't mean I neglect them entirely. For example, if my three Life Focuses are family, career, and health. Friendships are not directly part of that trio, but healthy friendships might be necessary to health and so are indirectly included. That's why I don't have the family as part of my Life Focuses within my PCB, because to me, having a strong relationship with everyone in my family is a critical part of health. When I focus on health, typically, things related to building stronger familial relationships is top and center.

By having three Life Focuses leading to three On-The-Horizon Beacons, it lets you focus on what you feel is most critical while ensuring you still become a well-rounded individual.

(Written 2019.06.27)

#28 | Career vs Job

I frequently tell my colleagues that their career is not their job. My intended purpose of voicing this opinion is to bring focus on the bigger picture of their career instead of the smaller front-and-center "distraction" that is their job. Recently I repeated this to someone but with a tweak.

I realized the concept was more profound and pointed out how some people risk their careers for the sake of their job, while others risk their job for the sake of their careers. As soon as I said that phrase, I wanted to delve deeper into that meaning. It felt like a light went off. So here we are.

This talking point stemmed from discussing how drawn out it was to get anything done in our environment. The politics, bureaucracy, stay-in-your-lane mentality, and non-productive anti-pattern roadblocks cause every task to take substantially longer than it should. Minute-long tasks could take days. Day-long tasks could take a month. Every step required making requests from other people, then you wait. You finally really receive a response, but find out your request was wrong. So you must make a new one, and then you wait. You finally receive approval to proceed, but you are required to talk to someone else to execute the task. So you create a new request, but that request is low on their priority list, and then you wait.

This cycle goes on, and then suddenly, you're 20 years into your career but feel like you only have a few years of experience. No matter how much you try to make that wait time more productive, you really can't. If you follow the rules, you're gated waiting. The sad part is, you might not even realize that two decades into your career has only produced two years of real experience because all of your peers have done the same thing. It feels normal. The reality is that everyone's years of experience has been watered down to be almost meaningless.

This situation is where I feel people risk their careers for the sake of their job. They played it safe. They followed the rules. They didn't step on any toes, crossed all their "t"s, and dotted all of their "i"s. They asked before acting and never did anything which would get them, their team, or their project in trouble. They never failed, but they also never really succeeded. Their job stayed happy, but their career stalled.

And then one day their company gets tired of them. That's a given in today's corporate landscape. What happens then? Panic is what happens. Because even though they might have two decades of being a warm body in a field, when they interview at another job, their experience level seems junior in comparison to what it should be. It's hard to find another job who will see value in them at the same level as their old job.

I saw this frequently happen at my first job out of college. It terrified me and even depressed me watching that happen to some of my more "experienced" peers. I see it happening to some of my coworkers now, and I fear for them. Their careers are at risk because they put their job first.

I try to do the opposite and put my career first. Straight out of college, I would freelance and do side projects even though most day jobs discourage extracurricular activities. Even within my day job, I'm respectful of job roles and responsibilities, but I center my focus around getting the project done regardless of whose lane I have to enter. One of my mottos is to let someone do their job first, but if they don't do it, then don't be afraid to step on their toes and get it done.

I've spent a lot of time risking my job to make sure my career was good. And that has given me confidence.

If I ever push boundaries too far, what's the worst that would happen? I would get fired. I've been in the field for a decade and a half, but between my mentality, my constant pushing, and my side projects, I have the equivalent of several decades worth of experience. I'm not worried about finding a replacement job.

But would my job fire me? It's possible; I might eventually cross a line. Sometimes I push too hard, and the anxiety hits me. But I have confidence that line is farther away than I'm willing to go. Plus, I provide value to my company. If I can get a "30-day" task done in a few days, that's invaluable. And Because I promote an influential positive culture among my peers and employees, and because I'm very respectful and compliment those around me that are skilled, I've built a social buffer. My teammates speak well of me. My managers praise me. And my (competent) colleagues support me. There is always a line, and there is still an ending, but I've built the proper offenses and defenses to help ensure that I'm secure.

By putting my career first at the risk of jeopardizing my job, I've created a win/win/win/win situation. My company wins by receiving more value; My coworkers win by having a champion to promote a competitive but collaborative culture. My job wins by creating a list of accomplishments and building a social buffer; My career wins in case my job ever gets tired of me, and I need to scramble to replace it.

It's not enough to say that your career is not your job. It is also essential to understand that those individuals who risk their careers to secure their jobs end up at a disadvantage in the long run, while those who risk their jobs to secure their careers tend to benefit all parties involved in the long term.

(Written 2019.10.05)

#27 | The Perks Of Having Kids

I hit my blog's half-birthday and lost steam. A lot of opportunities popped into my life, taking all of my time. Mix that with being dominated by writer's block. I haven't posted in three months, and I've been debating the future of the site.

Then my wife and I went to a Financial Independence (FI) Meetup, and the other attendees inspired me to continue. As they put it, I had already put six months into exploring this concept, creating content, and developing the site. But what sparked me was a question that someone asked me.

In this particular FI group, having kids is rare. So someone asked my wife and me: "What are the perks of having three kids?"

It's a great question, and my wife answered it well. However, we discussed it more on the way home and realized there were so many more layers to explore. So I decided to revive the blog and address this question.

The answer is multi-faceted, but I can summarize it with one word: mindfulness.

To begin explaining, we will address the aspect of time. When you have kids, especially three kids, every free minute of your life will be sucked up. To be able to get anything done, you have to learn to be very efficient and effective with your time. My wife and I are both ambitious, so we have become calculating where our time goes. When the kids are off at school, we have to maximize our time to work on our day jobs. We're human and still have idle times, but we don't have the freedom to dawdle around frequently.

This time is bookended by dropping the kids off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon. There are exactly 8 hours between those two bookends. That means we need to pack a full 8 hours of work, including lunch, errands, or other distractions, into precisely 8 hours. This statement might sound obvious, but you would be surprised how many of your peers do 8 hours of work during their 8-hour workday. Although our day jobs frequently bleed into our evenings, we strive to keep it contained within those two bookends.

Then the evenings come. We have about three to four hours of family time. We feel family dinner is important, so most nights, we put a focus on a home-cooked meal and eating together as a family. We tag-team to get this done, but also get all dishes and household cleanup done. Let's not forget about the kids' homework. And then the real joys of just spending some quality relax time with the kids. Almost every night, there is a struggle to push past fatigue from a long day. But because we feel it's essential to have healthy meals and spend time together as a family, we make it happen.

And finally, the kids go to bed, and we get our final chunk of time. We have about two hours before we go to bed. Some nights we put our feet up and watch a show. Most nights, we look at our side projects, investments, or interests and push on those. These two hours are our only "us" time, so we have no choice to use this time as effectively as possible, even if that activity is to cuddle up and watch something together.

Our weekends are only a slight variation of our weekdays. Some weekends we relax and are idle all weekend. But those are very rare. We have to go to the grocery store to feed five, along with doing laundry for five. We want to do activities so that the kids can have an eventful weekend. But we also have things like Meetups, date nights, and other social events. And don't forget about the side projects. The weekend is the perfect time to knock out a chunk of tasks for those.

Especially with the theme of this blog, we want to maximize our time by minimizing our wasteful activities. Looking over our days, pretty much 24/7/365, we are mindful of our time and how we use it.

We can now get to the second layer of the answer. Having kids forces us to live in the NOW. Several of the leading FI voices who have reached early retirement have talked about the downside of obsessing over their FI number. They say they wished they enjoyed life more during the wealth-building years. Hoped that they had taken better of their health or cared a little less about every single dollar saved. But with kids, we don't feel we have that option.

As hypothetical kid-free adults, maybe we would be comfortable with making a decision where we give up five or ten years of life experiences so that we could retire early and have 50+ years of early retirement. But that's not fair to our kids. Those five to ten years might be an instrumental part of their childhoods. When each kid is only at home for approximately 20 years, even though that feels like an incredibly long time, it passes in a heartbeat. What's 50+ years of retirement worth if you lose half of your kids' childhood to FI obsession.

Although we have an FI-mindset combined with our ambitious personalities, we won't sacrifice our kids' childhood or their early life experiences. It can be exhausting, but our kids give us the energy and motivation to do exactly that.

And finally, the last layer. Motivation. After the birth of every kid, my productivity and drive in my career shot up. Once the chaos of having a newborn dies down, the thoughts of providing for the kids and ensuring they have excellent future opportunities shoots up. Not only do I want to be able to provide for them, but I also want to be a good role model for them. So I strive to achieve a career they could be proud of and possibly be influenced into also working hard and reaching their dreams when they get older. But life is much more about career. So we push hard towards living a healthy lifestyle for them to mirror. We push harder in experiencing life so that they can see what's possible. It's hard to be complacent in life when you want to provide the best life for your kids.

In the end, having kids increases the stress, chaos, and sheer amount of overhead in your life. But, besides the obvious of being a bundle of joy and happiness, the mindfulness they give you in just about everything in life is a fantastic perk to having any amount of kids, especially three. You don't have the luxury of letting life pass you by.

(Written 2019.10.05)