How To Train The Muscle of Resilience
Feel the pinch or be pinched.
Each month, you can either:
Spend too frivolously & you’ll feel your income isn’t covering your credit card bill.
Or:
Save generously & you’ll feel you have little discretionary income left over.
How you allocate your cash flow surplus is the difference between achieving financial freedom or financial ruin.
Let’s be honest, if you’re not saving your additional cash flow where is it going each month?
It’s being spent.
Allocating money is simple.
There’s three things you can do with money:
Save it
Spend it
Pay off debt
That’s it.
Setting the record straight - you should feel pinched.
If you’re not feeling pinched now, you’ll feel it later.
Retirement made simple is boiled down to saving enough money so that you can spend a portion of your nest egg to last you until you are no longer here.
From the hundreds of conversations I’ve had with families looking to retire, this pivotal inflection point brings upon a raw realization:
“I can’t spend what I’ve been spending”
“I’ll have to work 5 more years”
“I didn’t save enough”
& guess what?
That sucks.
The harsh truth is that when you’re 65+ and you’ve exhausted much of your youthful energy looking to cash in your chips, this realization can be devastating.
You’re tired and looking for a change.
But you’re trapped.
& the worst part is?
It’s your fault.
Without unrelaxing vigilance to the supervision of your own thoughts and actions you pay the price of living an unexamined life.
You respond to your impulses, answer your cravings, and bow to your desires.
“The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think and what you do is who you become.”
You cannot control how the market performs but:
You can control how much you save.
You can control your impulse to buy fancy clothes.
You can control your aversion to not buy the new car or the bigger house.
Wealth exists not to those who have more but to those who desire less.
Much of life's luxuries distract us from the meaning we seek.
Any item that costs more than the utility it satisfies is energy wasted.
That energy is better suited to be directed into something that feeds the soul, not drains it.
Much of human behavior rests on satisfying what’s immediate.
Just when we find a little fluff in our budget we begin to fantasize about what we don’t have.
Magically, we find ourselves back feeling pinched.
Then we’re working harder to compensate for the lifestyle upgrades we keep granting ourselves.
This is the hedonic treadmill of adaptation.
We derive more pleasure from the idea of acquiring something than we derive from the actual acquisition of that thing itself.
It’s not the thing that we want – we want the feeling it brings.
Many don’t do what they know they should, not because they don’t want to, rather, the temptation of succumbing to impulses is greater than the perceived benefits from disciplining desire.
Western culture is designed this way.
Here’s the dirty secret:
Institutions don’t want you to be virtuous because the pursuit of your virtue comes at the expense of their profits.
“The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have.”
Striving for the good life of an excellent moral character is the most irresistibly intoxicating drug.
The pursuit of greatness is the drug we all want and know we need.
Not for what external validation it provides but for the internal illumination of fulfillment.
It’s what keeps us coming back for more - it’s why you bear the grunt work for the fruits of your labor.
Imagine a time when you felt most alive.
Maybe it’s a sports game, obstacle conquered, problem solved, or a completed project.
It’s not the result itself that made you feel alive but the value you placed on the outcome that you exchanged time, energy, and effort to acquire.
You don’t get to harvest your crops after you plant the seed.
You must tend to the field daily.
When it's hot or cold, raining or sunny, whether you want to or not, you go outside and do your job.
Not because you want to, but because you must.
The harvest won’t be worth much if you don’t tend to the field.
What’s worth it isn’t easy and what’s easy isn’t worth it.
Tending to the field is necessary.
It’s not tending to the field that upsets us - it’s the fact we’re growing impatient as our expectation of growth and reality of growth are severed.
We want to feel compensated now.
But that’s not how fulfillment works.
If your crops grew overnight, how proud would you feel about your work?
The less grunt work you do, the less satisfying the harvest of your crops becomes.
It’s only through the test of poor weather conditions, machinery failures, and your tedious labor amidst your wavering desire that you feel proud of your crops.
The work is the key to fulfillment.
If you’re under the impression you get more yield with less work - your reality is illusory.
Even if you’re someone who can leverage others to do the grunt work for you, the grunt work doesn’t go away - the only thing that changes is the size of the levers you play with.
This isn’t to say you should work your bones off and you need to suffer to feel fulfilled.
Rather:
It’s to recognize that you’re training the muscles required for the resistance of adversity.
The challenge of living within your means and creating that pinch to prepare for the future is hard.
But that’s why its yield is so high.
Feeling pinched isn’t bad.
Only you have the power to choose how to respond to adversity.
Struggle or opportunity?
The choice is yours.