Erick's Thoughts | Blog

In attempting to achieve things, a tricky situation pops up where it’s easier to not care so much about the outcome when you already have what you want, yet very hard to not care while you lack what you want. For example, consider a financially free person that does not have to worry about work anymore – I imagine they would have a more relaxed holistic outlook on day to day living than a person that is not financially free. They may choose to not work at all anymore. If they keep working, as long as they are sufficiently prudent, they can aim for more gains without risking their main capital base. Even while they aim for more gains, if they are fully content with the current lifestyle they live, then they won’t really ‘care’ if more gains come or not because they are already free and don’t need additional money. So it becomes a bit more fun I think. There’s a bit more room to be creative and selective in how to spend one’s time, whether that’s for business, leisure, research, or some combination. Also more room to help people in general.

I chose this example because honestly it’s one of the biggest things on my mind. I don’t want to work forever – or even remotely close to most of my life. I would like to read and write a lot more than I currently do. Why? I don’t know. Just because I love it. It may have no ultimate purpose in the world, but I still feel like it would fulfill me. Of course, I could already do research / writing full time if I really wanted to. I have enough free will to just start doing it. The practical question in the background is how well do I want to live and how big of a help to others do I want to be? I think in this world, both of those background points require money. So it’s not so much that I really want to achieve things as much as I feel like I need to achieve things to live my ideal life. It’s a subtle need though because of course I could decide to live a different, more ‘me’ life.

Now, let’s consider the actual achievement of things. There are infinite ways to get from point A to point B, even in just my own life as an example. I could do X and that would take Y years while I live in such and such place and mingle with such and such people. Alternatively, I could do Z and that would take a different amount of time, doing different things, with different people. I’ve always been a bit agnostic on the means, I care more about the outcome, and most about time. Time is our scarcest resource. Whatever gets me somewhere fastest is usually my default calculation and preferred action. I’m learning to be more patient, slowly. So, on the road to achieving things, I do worry sometimes if I am actually doing the right thing, the best thing, the most efficient thing.

Conventional advice (and what I often hear from mentors) is to not focus so much on the end goal, focus on the process. “Don’t be in such a rush, the results will come,” but this is usually coming from people who have achieved something. Achievement gives you the ability to be patient because even if you achieve nothing new, you will still end up with something – an extremely valuable asset. Patience is like insurance, providing calm of mind to be a little more rational and less biased in decision making. The opposite of patience is impatience. I can be impatient sometimes. I must do things now until I have something. Of course, if I never achieve anything, there will be an indefinite amount of stress and letdown. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. If only I could achieve a little then I could be more patient. Yet, perhaps if I actually were more patient I would achieve things in a better way.

I think that’s the real test. Can I be actually patient, as if I had achieved something, without having achieved something, such that it will be easier for me to achieve ‘something’? It’s hard, but I think it’s the best path forward optimizing for accessibility and efficacy. This is where the concept of confidence / self-belief etc. will really kick in, yet there is a delicate balance that needs to be found so that you don’t believe in yourself too much ahead of time and still keep yourself accountable to actually achieve things. It can be seductive to imagine an achievement and let that feeling substitute for the real thing. In that case, nothing ever really happened in the real world, and not only did you create nothing, you effectively wasted the time in between – to put it in the harshest light possible.

Alternatively, instead of blindly fumbling for some, let’s say artificial, patience, I could reframe my goals to abandon the thing I don’t want to have patience for or reduce my expectations, but personally I find that hard to do. I would be disappointed and critical of myself because I would have taken the loser’s way out. Not to say I think that once you set on a plan you should follow it through no matter what – I believe in adjusting as necessary (even adjustments that abandon current goals). I believe a goal should be abandoned when it no longer aligns with your conception of who you are, you have come up with a different better goal (ideally leveraging some of the legwork you already put in to the stale goal), or upon reassessment of the pros / cons you decide that a goal is not worth the time and energy (letting go of sunk costs / not crying over spilt milk). The last type of reason while totally valid is a bit tricky because it could look like giving up – but with enough sound thought behind the decision it’s okay. Just don’t stop doing things because it doesn’t feel good I suppose. I could also take a leap of faith and just change my goal / life pattern without knowing that’s what I want, but I think today I am not gambler enough to take that bet (maybe one day who knows).

Another approach (maybe most practical) is to pick a goal and do all the work and not care about there being results there today, tomorrow, or any particular day with an implicit understanding that at some point the results will be there. And if the results never appear, you have to be prepared upfront for that ‘failure’. Really, in most interpretations, that could only be deemed a failure. You set out to do something, and you were not able to do it. It doesn’t matter whether that was the right or wrong thing to pursue, you failed in your pursuit all the same. It’s okay, we need to be able to accept failure if we are to embark on such a journey, I think. It’s important to note that in this heads down approach, one should ideally like / love what they are doing along the way because it’s one of the least real-time flexible, most reliant on end state ways of living. I would not want to be the person living like this and failing in the end, especially if I still worked in finance the whole time. I was trying to think of a positive spin, but honestly I think it would suck. None of this is black and white of course, we can sprinkle in fulfilling personal relationships, hobbies, etc. The sucky part is that we probably should have just done more of those fulfilling things to begin with.

In reflection, what does my journey look like? It’s in process so I’m not totally sure. It’s hard for me to ‘pick’ a goal and then just press play and live because it’s not how I think. I’m always me, but I’m also always progressively changing. I think that my true life goal is to make the most of my limited time here, across domains such as personal, family, romantic, communal, etc. They don’t all have the same weights, but they’re all important to an extent. Hindsight will be 20/20 but right now my vision is reasonably impaired so the best I can do is sort of sense that I am on a path and not stray too far from it and retain flexibility. That way, when I feel I am going too far off base I can adjust. I’m not a perfect straight line, but when I zoom out far enough I hope that my life does have some sort of structure that shows I was intentional and not just a jumbled mess of zig zags. Also, I think it will be wise to continue to weight my life time towards things I know are fulfilling to me today. I’ve been doing that for the past couple of years, and so far feel no real regrets.