From The Bach Row

Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad Poor Dad book series wrote: “For many, the power of their excuse is more powerful than the power of their dreams.”
Excuses might be one’s defense mechanism for avoiding the discomfort of moving into unfamiliar territory.
Up until the age of when we were selecting what college we were planning on attending, someone else was making our choices for us. There are of course a few exceptions. Take for example when I was a kid with a dime in my pocket. I had some pretty exciting choices to make when I was selecting some candy to blow my dime on at Zarchies’ corner store. Back then, ten cents could buy ten pieces of candy. Zotz, Bazooka, Hot Tamales, Bullseyes, Pop Rocks, and Bit O’ Honey were some of my favorites.  I vividly remember walking home and eating those sugary delights. I had to make sure I ate all that candy before I got home. Hint, don’t get the Bit O’ Honey. Remember the slogan?  If you’re in a hurry, forget it.

Bottom Line #1. The best position is to be in is to make a decision for yourself.  In some cases, if you don’t, someone else will make the decision for you, and you may not like the direction or result.  Either way, a decision is going to be made with or without you.

OK, back to the topic on excuses. Making excuses limits your behavior to get what you really want. One has to learn to identify what one wants once they filter out the noise of professional objectives.

For the past three weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of filtering out, actually eliminating, every one of my professional objectives that came into me through a corporate Outlook email box. Yep, I’m no longer at my place of employment.
More on that story after I finished digesting the seven years that I was there and after I finish organizing a bunch of moving parts to complete the exit. Of course, there is a happy ending to the story. Not as good as Edith’s story, but along a similar thread.

Since the previous package, I’ve prepared for these reorgs and times between gigs by getting my financial house in order. If you recall from previous posts, I discovered the term escape velocity.   The FIRE Community refers to it differently, but the same concept.  Since I have a science background and was a child of the NASA era in its heyday, escape velocity provides much more meaning to me as I was not able to achieve this with a lot of help and guidance.

The one thing that I struggled with and made plenty of excuses to avoid working out in detail was deciding what I would do with my time without the structure of corporate goals and objectives.
When I finally receive my very last W-2 statement, how will I spend the 168 hours each week?  For 33 W-2 years, 40-50 hours each week was structured by an employer, customer or a service to a series of fantastic direct reports.

I had designed a robust cash flow model that extends out to 2027.  I really struggled to design a schedule to account for the actual 168 hours that are available each week while unemployed for, say, the next 33 years. I made the excuse that I had the plan rattling around in my head and I will eventually write it down when the time comes. It was made tougher because of inexperience, procrastination. Of course, reasons and excuses fueled by perhaps some complacency and lack of a sense of urgency without a deadline also didn’t help matters.

Bottom Line #2:“While we are postponing, life speeds by.” -Seneca

Again, Mrsfromthebachrow nudges me lovingly into a different thought pattern to shift my behavior away from a financial analysis planning excel sheet into daily practical living and planning.
Over the course of the past three months, I’ve come up with the following response to the question that I repeatedly asked myself. “How will I spend my 168 hours each week when not in vacation mode?”  I started with the easy stuff and worked my up until the struggle became unproductive.  This is what I came up with, and just recently started to add time values to them.

1. Sleeping: 58 hours
2. Gym time & Yoga: 14 hours
3. Fun, leisure, friends, family spontaneity: 12 hours
4. Blog research & writing: 12 hours
5. Meals, Prep & clean up: 10 hours
6. Reading: 10 hours
7. Improving Website design skills & website security: 2 hours
8. Managing cash flow, expenses, investment allocations etc.: 2 hours
9. Grocery shopping: 2 hours
10. Keeping up with professional skills: 2 hours
11.  Club activities: 2 hours
12. Linkedin research: 2 hours (you, know, networking and job hunting)
13. House Cleaning: 1 hours
14. Inside house maintenance/projects: 1 hours
15. Outside house maintenance/projects: 1 hours
16. Library time:  1 hours
17. Procuring supplies: 1 hours
18. Wasting time online: 2 hours?
    Crap, how many hours is that, only 135 hours?  What the hell am I missing? Oh, that’s right, a job and travel.  I don’t have one of those right now, so there’s some of those missing 33 hours.

Bottom Line #3. “Humans don’t prosper without a positive way to spend their waking hours. Children, family, exercise, and chores can take up a few hours, but without something else, it can be brutal.”

Bottom Line #4. “To get different results, you’re going to have to do things differently.” -Darren Hardy

What else do I want to accomplish?  (I have a separate running list of places that we would like to do some slow travel and is this outside the scope of this piece.)
Now that I’m between jobs, so to say, and in decompression mode, it might be time to make a shift away from accomplishments and ask a different question.  What do I want to learn?  What new hobbies or experiences do I want to get involved in?
Those are better questions, don’t you think?

Again for the past three months, I started jotting down things that could fill in the 33 hours that I have available.  This was a brain dump and the items are not ranked. So here goes.

1. Get better at fly fishing and fish locally
2. Try learning Spanish with podcasts
3. Explore Paintless Dent Removal training (PDR)
4. Factory Five 3 day build school in Michigan
5. Build a Factory Five Roadster
6. Take a WordPress Coding Course at the local Community College
7. Rebuild the lawn mower engine that has been giving me problems
8. Restore the 1999 Trek Mountain Bike that my team gifted me.
9. Lakefront time: biking & paddle boarding
10. Part-time work at a marina, fitness center, winery, Trader Joe’s, Costco,
    a. usher at concert venues, college sports arena or Wrigley Field
11. Write the personal finance course for College Seniors
12. Write a sales training course for the service industry
13. Temporary Contract Sales Manager
14. Cloud-based project marketing consulting. (yes, Julian, I’ve been following)

It’s an interesting list that is broad, yet not too deep. I plan on revisiting my childhood and adolescent memories to see what I neglected all these years.

Perhaps it’s time for all those silent readers to take a few moments to jot some other ideas in the comments section and share them for consideration. It’s brainstorming, so no idea will be rejected.
While you are preparing your thoughts, I’ll leave with this last point that puts this whole FIRE concept in the proper context for me.

Bottom Line #5. “The goal of life is not to relax on the beach, sipping mojitos all day. The purpose is to find something you love that also adds value to the world.” -Benjamin Foley