What to Do With Your Life Besides Make Money and Outperform Your Peers

Since I graduated from college and began my “corporate life” I have never taken a step back to determine what my personal goals and aspirations are.  From a professional perspective it was easy to fall into the trap of comparing myself to my peers in terms of performance and pay.  Thus, the goal became to outperform my peers both operationally and in terms of the amount of money I could make.  I never gave a thought as to why I was making money – to what end?  Nor did I really think about what exactly is it that I would enjoy to do!

 

Two years ago as I was leaving my job at Merrill I began to feel that I needed to find a better “purpose” in my life, not to find the “answer” but to figure out what I wanted vs. what society told me I wanted.   Being aware of these thoughts is tough because finding an answer is REALLY tough.  I ultimately fell back into the trap of working for money and prestige precisely because the answers are tough to find; it is easier to ignore the answers then to confront them head-on.  Tim Ferriss’s book the Four Hour Work Week really helped me open my eyes and think about the “why” and “what” by giving a structured method to think about my life goals.  At the beginning of the book he asked direct questions that helped tackle my fears and define worst-case scenarios.  This exercise ultimately freed me to think about all of the positive possibilities / outcomes as well. 

 

After defining my biggest fear – to lose my entire net-worth and the respect of my friends and family (realizing of course that losing the net-worth is much easier then losing the respect of my friends and family) – I proceeded with Tim Ferriss’s dreamscape exercise.  Basically I had to think about what my ultimate life-goals would be in the next 6 months in an ideal world (where I would not have to worry about money).  Very simple for me -

1. Spend a month in Buenos Aires
2. Learn how to cook
3. Learn Hindi properly
4. Learn Bridge
5. Get my own fully furnished apartment on rent (I'm talking a really NICE place!) in Mumbai

 

Based on this initial list I had to figure potential costing and a definite way to prove that I have achieved the goal -

1. spend a month in Buenos Aires (USD 1,500 round trip –> ~USD 6,000 total spend including rent)
2. Prepare an Indian meal for my family alone (lessons free from my cook!)
3. Speak to my cook for five minutes without stuttering or pausing to translate in my head (~INR 5,000)
4. Play bridge for an hour with my dad and his friends (~INR 5,000 for a teacher)
5. Apartment on rent (~INR 50,000 per month)

 

Now with realistic actionable goals and an understanding of the end-product (for skills learned especially) it makes it easy to break down these tasks into smaller and more actionable items.  I can also see from the above list what goals are realistic and what goals I will need more money for.  More importantly, though, I realized that I can achieve my dreams for less then I thought (if I were to spread the costs over 6 months it would be INR 100,000 per month [including a 30% buffer for extra expenses]).  Going back to my obsession with GTD, this type of thinking is helpful because now I can define specific steps to achieve my goals vs. being paralyzed by larger less general objectives. 

 

Now the key is, how do I make enough money to afford an apartment and go to Buenos Aires.  I am going to start learning my new skills next week!