#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)

#26 | Half Birthday

Post 26. Wow.

With a new post every week, that means I've been working on this blog for half a year. Six months. I wanted to take the chance to make evaluate where things started and where we've ended up.

A year ago, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. Although I've always had a focus on NOT being in the rat race of life, I was feeling the wheel pulling me in and locking me down. Life was progressing, but was it progressing how I wanted? I couldn't tell you, all I knew is that I was busy getting things done. I can also tell you that my stress levels were high while my energy levels were low.

That's when the philosophy of Boredom started to form. Initially, it was a struggle. Cutting activities and distractions out of your life is a hard task. Do the same thing for a blended family of 5 is near impossible. But we slowly persevered.

Six months in and I was starting to see dividends from our efforts. I decided to share my knowledge with a broader audience. The blog was born. I had no clue what I wanted to do with it. I still don't know, but I do know I should continue writing and see where it lead.

Creating the blog led to becoming semi-active in Reddit as both a topic contributor and comment contributor. I was a long time lurker but had never had a desire to post. It led to reaching out to a few of my favorite content creators, asking for feedback, and receiving some interesting and useful advice. It led to reaching out to some newly discovered content creators who were writing about the same subject matter, and starting some exciting dialogues while gaining some recommendations on some interesting books and articles to read.

As time passed on, I realized writing posts for the blog wasn't enough. It was an outlet for my voice, allowing me to tell my story, but it felt like the site needed to be more. The blog broke into three sections. In addition to telling my story, it became the home of my permanent Personal Control Book along with the transient accountability Weekly Update.

The Personal Control Book has become the containing force, ensuring I maximize my time and energy to it's fullest. The Weekly Update has become the driving force to make sure a week doesn't go by where I'm not in some form advancing one of my goals.

After executing against the PCB for a few months, my train of life was chugging along at full steam ahead. From a random conversation with a business associate, I found my first guinea pig to try out the PCB for herself. It was a success, so I reached out to strangers. That's currently a work in progress, but I'm determined to make it a success regardless if it takes one, two, or ten groups. I've even built a Business Control Book for a different business associate and started helping them progress through that.

As of this writing, I've created or helped create 26 posts, 5 PCBs, 1 BCB, 3 permanent pages describing my PCB, and 15 transient Weekly Updates. I feel blessed to be able to create this content and have the opportunity to continue writing. I can't wait for what the next six months will hold.

(Written 2019.05.28)

#25 | PCBs and Boredom

I wanted to write today about the Personal Control Book and how it relates to my philosophy of Boredom is my Goal.

I’ve recently put a more substantial focus on running my PCB and have been exploring the idea of coaching other people on how to run their own. While doing this, the nagging voice in my head has been telling me this doesn’t make sense. The PCB is a productivity tool that on its surface is made to help you accomplish more. The philosophy of Boredom is my Goal is to minimize what you’re doing in life so that you can have more moments of Boredom. They seem like they are in direct conflict with each other.

This apparent conflict is what I would like to clear up.

To recap what the philosophy of Boredom is my Goal tries to promote, it’s not actually about sitting around and doing nothing ALL day long. It’s about trying to make pockets of time to do nothing by decluttering your life of all of the pointless tasks and distracts that we have every day. It’s about being mindful regarding where we put our time. It’s about minimizing the activities we have in our lives.

During this cleansing process, we get to do nothing and achieve Boredom. Once we have removed all of the unnecessary, that’s where the real benefits come in. We have a clear mind and spirit. With rested bodies and minds, we become more capable. When we add new projects to our lives, they can be projects which are most critical to us.

The question then turns towards what projects to add. And this is where the PCB shines. The reason why I developed my PCB was that I had gone through all of my long-running random projects. The sense of accomplishment of tackling another nice-to-have project was wearing thin. There was no ultimate goal. There was just busy-ness.

Being mindful about the random projects you pick up is just slightly more advantageous to flittering your life away with distractions. If I spend my days browsing the latest Game of the Day app, or if I spend my days conquering a specific game, the result is the same. Mindless entertainment. There is little difference between YouTube surfing for an entire week watching YouTube’s recommendation list versus binge-watching the latest Netflix intriguing series. Even if I was productive with my random projects, like doing odd-job projects around the house, it’s still just tinkering. There is no value added to my life, besides just causal distractions.

The PCB became a tool to focus these random projects. It helped paint a picture of where I wanted to head in my life. I already had a vision, but the PCB helped make that vision concrete. It also helped with motivation. Even today, when I start to get distracted by the latest fad activity, I remind myself how it helps me to reach one of my three Beacons. If it can’t, I question if I should start it.

Boredom is my Goal is a philosophy of life to live by, while a Personal Control Book ensures you spend your time and energy to maximum benefit.

(Written 2019.05.28)

#24 | Personal Productivity Mastermind

The evolution of the Boredom continues. At this point, I feel like this adventure barely resembles its original form.

As I mentioned in my last post, I was exploring ways of exposing the Personal Control Book concept to others. This past weekend, I posted an offering on Reddit. The post explains it all. The PCB has been very beneficial to me. That doesn't surprise me, since it was built for me, by me. When I had my business contact go through the first steps of the PCB, the reflective characteristics of the first few steps blew her mind. It gave her renewed focus and energy.

Now we'll see if I can get strangers to benefit from it. It's pretty exciting for me to try and grow this concept. But it's even more exciting to see if I can help others achieve their life goals. Considering I posted in the Productivity subreddit, I'm assuming everyone that has contacted me will already be productivity-minded. I'm hoping this sample run will be a chance for me to test my ideas against a set of individuals eager to learn.

It's only been a few days, but it's already been quite a journey.

As of this writing (which will be almost a month after it posts), I've had 11 people show interest. All 11 have been contacted, with a Slack invite link sent to five of them tonight. My ideal size would be 2-3 people. Probably five would be the maximum size I would want to do. Any more and it might be too overwhelming. I'm hoping with the level of interest I've received that I'll be able to get at least those numbers.

We'll see if it's even a mastermind. I proposed to the first half dozen of people doing either a Slack workgroup or individual 1:1 discussion. Today someone said they liked Slack, so tonight I created a new Slack workspace. Created, customized, and locked down to create a safe walled garden. I did put together a post for the five steps required to set up a PCB. So I have an idea of how to progress things. I've already gone through it a few times. In theory, it works. I'll have to work with strangers to help them feel confident it'll work.

My mind is racing of what I can do with this group. But it's also a bit intimidating not in what I need to do but in the possible amount of work. If it's my projects, I can work on those on my own time. If I'm trying to engage in individuals, I'll want to make sure things are moving at a pace that keeps people involved. I'll have to do tasks like creating a new Slack workspace quickly and efficiently. I'm going to have to figure out Trello Teams rapidly. I've used Trello Teams before, but there are some unknowns. There is so much I'll have to figure that out just-in-time.

And to think, this is where the Blog adventure has morphed after only six months. Whether this mastermind is successful or not, I'm excited to see where the winds will blow us next.

(Written 2019.05.20)

#23 | Changing the World

This morning I was thinking about my efforts to expose more people to my PCB. I was thinking through ways to reach out to people, what I would say, how I would respond and organize them. Then my mind started going towards that thing so many people dream about: changing the world.

I remember early in my career, that was the response everyone, including myself, gave for their ambitions. What do you want to do? Change the world. Why do you want to go down this career path? To make an impact and change the world. What's the end goal you see for this project? To see the world changed.

I realized that's all bullshit. We have a lot of true global visionaries: the Gates and the Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Branson. The list goes on. But the list is incredibly exclusive. Although they have the personality type, intelligence, and correct connections to achieve that level of success, I'm betting that luck was the most prominent attribute they had.

There are seven and a half billion people on the planet. Most likely, there are thousands if not millions of people that have the same combination of personality type, intelligence, and connections as these visionaries. Not everyone can execute the same steps to achieve the same level of success. Otherwise, everyone would be that successful. If it was that certain, I could read a biography of someone I wanted to emulate who has my background and personality type, take the same steps they did, and end up in the same spot they are. Sounds great, let me do what Bezos does and become the wealthiest person alive. It doesn't work like that. These are very talented people, but luck has a lot to do with it too.

So then why would I place my happiness and image of success on luck? If my goal in any endeavor I do is to change the world, what happens when luck doesn't favor me, and I don't change the world? Do I go back and blame myself for not being lucky? Maybe it's my parent's fault for not tapping me with a lucky stick when I was a baby. It's silly. And I realize it's a vision that's outright poisonous.

I look back at some of my side projects. Right out of college, I launched multiple hobby projects that ended up with a small handful of users. Instead of embracing that audience, my co-founders and I focused on how to go global. We ultimately failed due to visions of grandeur. When I first moved to Los Angeles, I built another hobby project which became an internet darling and made it into the 5-digit Alexa global rankings. We had partners who wanted to integrate with us, buyers who wanted to acquire us. Again, my co-founders and I focused on changing the world though instead of realizing our reality. That project is now in massive decline, and it's been years since I've even looked at it because, in my opinion, we focused more on the future than the present.

You might be asking, but aren't your Beacons looking at the distant future? That may be true, but the Beacons I've established for myself are something that I can obtain 100% if I apply myself. There is no luck involved. If I execute step by step, I can get there. One of my Beacons isn't to become a billionaire. It's to be able to work remote for 1-3 months a year during summer. One of my Beacons is even to live a healthy life until my mid-60s. These are very attainable long term visions. Only my philanthropy goal is more of a stretch goal, but that's also attainable with a long term plan.

When you include luck in your calculations for your future success, you might as well go to a casino and try to find success there.

(Written 2019.05.11)