Keeping Your Happiness FIRE Lit
Okay, let’s suppose you’ve built your wealth, and now you’re FIRE.
You’ve Zeroscaped your life and eliminated a lot of stuff that no longer serves you.
Habits. Physical items. Digital clutter. Digital distractions. Work distractions.
Things like this have been taken care of for the most part (although you will likely always have more work to do in decluttering).
What do you do now to ensure your happiness and fulfillment increases?
Yesterday, I walked you through a core values assessment approach. It can help you identify where you are out of alignment.
The idea of Return on Living assessment we covered from The New Retirementality could help you too, like it did me.
Craig Ballantyne, an online influencer who I think has some good ideas, puts it this way.
When you are 25 years old, your life is focused on accumulation.
When you reach 50 years old, you want to shift to elimination, he says.
We could consider his advice here as a kind of Part 2 to Zeroscaping.
His point is about Focusing on some bigger questions you want to answer for how you will live your life going forward.
He assumes you have built your wealth, too.
But have you audited your current lifestyle situation, he wonders?
Do you continue living in the same place because of old work obligations and habit?
Do you have new rules for how you will use your new level of freedom?
Are you telling yourself the same old stories and excusing yourself because of your previous circumstances?
Have you put enough focus on ensuring you stay healthy, strong, and resilient?
These are exactly the types of questions to address to increase happiness and fulfillment in a post-FIRE lifestyle.
Unfortunately, I spent at least 2-3 years of early FIRE avoiding answering the first three questions.
I’m addressing them now, but I wish I had tackled them sooner.
Future articles will address them, too.
But before we leave the discussion of increasing your happiness and fulfillment, let’s discuss a way that may help you keep on track and keep your FIRE lifestyle lit and burning.
We need a simple way to track our ongoing mood and level of satisfaction.
For a couple of years, I used Jim Collins’ Simplex Method.
He keeps a spreadsheet and captures three pieces of information:
What he did that day: highlights, key tasks, important conversations
How many “creative” hours did he get in? (As part of his overall day)
A rating of -2, -1, 0, 1, or +2
The negative -2 days are the bad days. They are the sort where you say to yourself, “Please let me forget this day ever happened.”
If it was a -1, then it had an overall negative tone.
A zero day was neutral.
What I discovered is that most days were 1’s for me.
A good, positive day, but nothing too exciting.
An exceptional day was when I was having an adventurous experience. This was typically with someone I really enjoy spending time with.
I also had +2 days when I was very focused, like the last batch of songs I wrote.
It was that simple.
For some reason, I quit this process, except for capturing my daily highlights on my tracking spreadsheet.
I guess I thought I had identified the patterns, so why bother?
because it helps you understand the type of life you are living and whether it is in alignment with your intentions. Duh.
So, I’ve decided it’s time to bring back this rating system.
I also plan to add a little section to capture the following:
What is one positive thing that happened today?
What is one thing I am grateful for today?
Who did I connect with today?
Alright, that’s it for this step.
The goal is to have Fun in the Sun.
You get to figure out how you want to do that, and I’ll continue providing ideas.
Tomorrow I will start covering the next two phases of this process of getting on a Highway To Yeah.