Stripping Down To The Core: Why Zeroscaping Is The Next Step
Alright, so now you have the 7 FIRE Metrics That Matter.
Get your head around those for your own life situation.
And while you do that, figure out your path to wealth.
How will you get to the various cross-over points that you can reach?
I did it by increasing my value at work.
Basically, I tried to bring my best self to the work I was doing.
There were times I failed, but over time, I did.
This led to increasing my pay and increasing my savings.
I also learned how to invest it and continued to learn how to control my spending.
It was pretty straightforward.
And, as I have said, I basically leveraged four sources:
9 Steps of Your Money or Your Life (modified to my needs)
The prerequisites and 7 Baby Steps of Total Money Makeover (modified for my needs)
Early Retirement Extreme Blog, for motivation and ideas
Financial Mentor’s Wealth Building Plan course
Plus, I read and reviewed a lot of other personal finance stuff. Books, blogs, magazine articles, YouTube shows.
A lot of this stuff was crap. A lot of it was a repeat.
But it’s fine to read the crap. It helps you develop a good BS detector.
It’s good to repeat and review what you have already covered, too.
It’s been said we sometimes need to hear something seven times before it finally sinks in.
Personally, I recommend repeated readings of things that move you. You miss a lot the first time through.
For example, Your Money or Your Life is really about living with the highest amount of integrity you can muster.
It took me probably three repeat readings before that finally clicked.
It’s really a book about living authentically.
The money is important, too, but that’s not the core practice.
As for this Highway To Yeah blog and the articles being posted, I suppose it could turn into another book about achieving financial freedom.
But I think it might end up being more about trying to answer what to do once you get there.
That said, I could definitely coach someone to get on the path to wealth.
Maybe I will do that someday beyond what I have done for friends and family.
However, I do not plan to be One of the next personal finance gurus or such.
I am just sharing what worked for me and what I am still struggling with as I go down this Highway to Yeah.
Thus, let’s assume your financial plan is in place.
What do you do next?
Zeroscape your life is my advice.
Actually, I started this whole thing with a form of Zeroscaping a few years before I stumbled across the Transforming Your Relationship With Money seminar tapes at the library.*
I had been inspired by an article I read in 1999 or so.
What was I reading?
I think it was an article about living your best life by author Richard Leider.
There was a formula he had describing how to live something like a fulfilling life.
I played around with the formula a bit and came up with my own:
Vision x (Passions + Talents + Environment) = A Life You Love
This was drafted in the year 2000.
(It was a lot of hooey, now that I re-read it, but it got me started. It was the first time I developed a “score” for how to measure this.)
In the formula, you would assign up to 10 points for each thing that was working in the equation.
(10 + 10 + 10) x 10 = 300
Later, I simplified this into a mock “bowling game” where I measured 12 items each quarter.
Each item could be a 0 (gutter ball), or 1 to 10 pins knocked down.
If you “roll” all strikes (10 points per item), you get a perfect game score of 300.
Within a few years, I decided to change it to a monthly review.
This was probably because of the monthly review step in Your Money or Your Life.
Much later, it became a daily review.
And I still do the daily review. It’s my form of journaling.
Scoring has only helped a bit. So be careful about gamifying your life.
It can become the tail wagging the dog.
I still do it out of habit, but I am not recommending it.
What it helps with is giving me a “reality test.”
How did I do this last week and month at accomplishing the things I intended to do?
If it’s a very low score, why? Are the goals too ambitious?
Typically, this is the case,
but I have also set the bar so low it becomes too easy to get a perfect score.
That said, the Vision part of all this stuff I was writing back in 2000 is still mostly relevant.
The “top 10 things I want to do before I reach 95 years old” list is all still relevant.
Some of them I have already accomplished.
What I called “Passions” were really a reflection of my core values.
Talents were essentially my strengths, things I do well and naturally love to do.
Environment became really important to me that year because I lived in a place that was not a good fit for who I was and wanted to be.
It was that focus that really got me back to the PNW again.
Thus, it was helpful as a start to answering the question “Who am I and what do I truly want” out of life.
It also gave me some direction for how to start living that way.
However, it probably wasn’t until 2010 or 2011 when I finally got a grasp on what this Zeroscaping thing was about.
The whole thing rests on getting rid of unnecessary friction.
Some friction is good.
However, if you are like me, you probably could eliminate (or replace) 80% of what you own, do, say, or think.
And then start over.
in 2010 I began to see that eliminating unnecessary Physical Stuff Is one of the best ways to remove friction.
Since then, Digital distractions have become a huge culprit in creating Unnecessary friction.
that didn’t exist to the same extent then as they do now.
Sure, there was email, TV, perhaps too much internet scrolling.
I recall MySpace and FaceBook starting to be all the rage. Luckily I resisted this.
but jeez, now digital distractions are everywhere and have grown exponentially.
Back then, the joke was you go into the office for 8–10 hours and spend half of that time answering and writing emails.
Yep, that was about the way it went back then.
Now it’s also Slack or such.
you may also be expected to keep up on other apps or social media at work.
Ugh.
I mean, I love the internet, and I even like the new Google Gemini search result summaries.
It makes finding out something way more efficient than even two years ago.
But whoa, the digital world can drain massive amounts of your time and energy.
For example…
Just a couple of days ago, I reviewed 220 open tabs on my phone.
I got rid of 160 of them.
That took me about two hours.
And how many minutes did I spend reviewing those tabs the first time?
Probably up to five minutes per webpage?
What a waste.
I was leaving these tabs open, holding onto them as “someday I might” want to buy, do, or experience items.
That behavior increases unnecessary friction.
These are open loops that quietly drain your energy in the background.
What I am learning is that post-FIRE, It’s all about time and how you use it.
Money is still important, but that fades to the background comparatively.
*P.S.
Here are a couple of YouTube links to the Transforming Your Relationship With Money seminars by Joe Dominguez.
Yes, they are dated, but I think they are great and the topics are evergreen.
He was a funny guy in how he delivered the material.
Personally, I prefer them to the book, Your Money or Your Life, but it’s a very handy reference tool, so I highly recommend both.
Disc One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYn-JaChPC8
Disc Two