Playing On The Tracks: The Origins of a Personal Escape Velocity

It has been exactly 30 years since we sold our townhouse in Skokie, IL, which we owned for less than a year, and moved to Massachusetts so that I could take a job in scientific sales & marketing. It was a significant risk for a “YUPPIE” couple that had been married for only a couple of years. mrsfromthebachrow quit her job for me to make the career leap to an area that would later become the biotech capital of the world. Did we comprehend the scale of picking up and moving in a very short period? Nope, didn’t have a clue, but the youthful exuberance and the quest to get out of a dead-end and toxic laboratory job motivated to act. After 30 years, I can now pause and reflect on parts of the experience since that risky repositioning.

Any self-doubts were certainly not registered during the transition, which occurred over three months. In hindsight, it was not that bad. If we as young adults, husbands, friends, and fathers have any self-doubts or do any second-guessing, many would not allow our vocal cords to resonate those thoughts.
Hell, most men don’t even stop and ask for directions when we’re lost, so how can we openly admit to the world or worse our partners, that yes, sometimes we are clueless about some things?
We secretly find our way, making sure that it appears that we are confident in our actions to minimize the exposure of looking foolish. We have learned how to cover our asses at work, which transpires in our home life. Except the stakes are higher at home and the rewards cannot be a measure of net worth or our investment portfolios. No, something far more valuable and irreplaceable,-our self-respect/self-worth or our time.

Time
In the age of healthy living and the pursuit of having it all, the whole nucleus of daily interaction with our family boils down or over to self-worth. People are given TPA for heart attacks, Prozac for depression, and Viagra/Cialis to correct the male hydraulic system that runs our pocket explorers. We are looking for magic pills or down the open glass of a daily cocktail to cure our ills, get that quick fix, and get the problem behind us. We are in such a hurry to get to the next level, only it’s nothing we expected. The old adage of achieving actualization rings true…. IS THAT ALL THERE IS?

We rush through activities and sterile MBOs like a computer game with multi-levels, constantly striving for the next level. After all the levels have been conquered, the game becomes boring and unchallenging, and a new game must be purchased to start the process over. Consumerism trains us to go shopping for a new solution, or purchase a new game, only to find emptiness in the achievement of levels of that game. One problem with the real-life career track version, we only have one game, one life, one shot. The cycle is repeated through most of our adult life until we are old and weak.
We may find ourselves sitting on a bench by the beach, as senior citizens, watching the young people going by full of energy.
We will shake our heads, and say to ourselves if I knew then what I know now.
Or worse, I wish I would have enjoyed and appreciated my youth. I wish I had appreciated the process of going through life’s stages.

Moonlight Graham said it best in Kevin Kostner’s Field of Dreams:
“People just don’t recognize their most significant moments in life when they are happening.”

Time is of the Essence
Unless you are watching sports, no care about the process, only the end results that can be measured. We are educated and trained not to enjoy the process, only to bask in the glow of victory or regroup after experiencing the agony of defeat.
During our thirties and forties, we were too busy to notice life escaping us during each passing day because we were dying to make a living. We give the best years of our lives to a cold-hearted and stodgy company to trade our time for money to make ends meet. If we’re lucky enough we may even be able to save a few bucks. Just when we relax a bit, the corporate figureheads make decisions to discard a few folks like yesterday’s trash. They fire, right size, and downsize us out of what was a hollow and disassociated misconstrued self-worth. It some cases, it can destroy us because we sometimes mistakenly hitch our identities to our careers. This blog, and many others, provide the reader an opportunity for entertainment or escape with a few moments of reading and reflecting to recalibrate your perspective and your time.
Time in a limited, nonrenewable resource, no matter how you slice it. The typical male can expect to live for 80 years depending on the year you were born. Broken down into how we measure time, it becomes:

960 months or
29,200 days or
700,800 hours or
42,048,000 minutes

Can you remember a project that had a definitive deadline that was fast approaching and the shortage of time versus the workload became the stress factor? Thinking seriously about the numbers above, 960 months or 29,300 days, does not seem like a lot of time to work on this lifelong project. I only have nearly 300 months remaining if I set the alarm for 80 years old. How about you? (Take your current age in years. Multiply by 12. Subtract that from 960 months/ your remaining life clock will be displayed in digital format. How do you want to spend the next 100 months?
Paradigm shift #1. It will either scare you or motivate you. The response is of your choosing.

Jumping the Tracks
Time indeed is short. It’s time to start figuring out how to jump off the fast track to nowhere and into the slow-moving waters that you once experienced when you wore a younger person’s clothes.
Allow me to paint this image in your mind’s eye. Most railroad tracks were built next to rivers and streams.
Right now we’re on the tracks, our families are having a great time floating in the rubber raft on the river next to us. You can see them floating along on certain occasions. You see, the fast track is actually a loop, and now and then you catch a glimpse of them on the slow-moving river as you whip around your track. You have experienced that river float before when you decided to stop once in a while for what is known as a vacation and play for a week or two. These vacations are temporary as the gravity of the fast track is a constant reminder of our responsibilities to climb back on.
Each time we change jobs or get more responsibility, the fast track increases in diameter. It gets harder to see the river with this increased responsibility. Sometimes the river keeps flowing away from the fast track and we lose our families for good. The fast track begins to collapse soon after that.

Paradigm shift #2: You could lose them on the river, but they won’t be lost if you are with them.
Years ago my wife and I took the then-young kids to Cape Cod for a week-long vacation on the beach. One morning the beach and water were fogged in and I took the kids for a walk in the silkiness of the fog. It was low tide and we began to walk through the fog to the water’s edge a quarter mile out. Visibility was about 100 feet. We got “lost” very quickly in the dense fog and could not tell which way was the receded shoreline or the water’s edge. It was the coolest feeling in the world. Lost in the fog with my kids and they loved it. We found horseshoe crabs buried in the sand waiting for the tide to come. I knew the tide would be coming in sometime in the next hour and we would eventually find the water’s edge. If we perpendicularly followed the sands we would be able to find either the shoreline or the water’s edge. I stayed very close to the kids as they enjoyed the process of looking for other sea life, waiting for the tide as we explored the sand in the fog. The fog began to burn off, slowly. I could barely make out the outlines of the beach houses on the hill. We get to do low tide again tomorrow. We have been gone for an hour and a half. There will be some explaining to do.

Long vacations, of two weeks or more, allow you to make the transition off the fast track to the river’s edge and into the rubber raft with your family. Though you’ve been physically off the track for a couple of days now, your mind is just beginning to come off it. You’re standing on the river’s edge ready to climb in the raft with your family. You begin to enjoy the new environment, free of cell phones, email, and frequent interruptions, busy work, and useless meetings. You begin to rediscover the freedom and get reacquainted with your family. You realize this is where you want to be, and you start talking about your next vacation. Your mind takes a few snapshots of some precious moments, some awesome sites so you can savor them later. As the vacation ends, you begin to think about that fast track with a bit of trepidation: two solid days to dig through the voicemails and the emails. I cringe at the thought.
You’re off the track temporarily, you miss it and yet at the same time, you want something to change. Many people have yet to discover what they want to change, but they do understand that something needs to change.

Staying off the Tracks
When I was a kid we lived two blocks from the commuter tracks. Adults always warned us not to play near the tracks. They used to say that they were dangerous and you could get killed by a train. Only after growing into an adult with responsibilities did I recognize the truth in that. Death by fast track is a silent killer that leaves behind circumstantial evidence in the form of a heart attack a stroke or some kind of cortisone-induced burnout. It’s funny how we recognize things that are dangerous for kids, but not ourselves. It sometimes takes years of pounding on the fast track to wear us down. We discover with a wake-up call of chest pains or an ulcer that it was the track pounding on us.

Has anyone defined the fast track? What it is, and how does one get on or get off? Think of a rollercoaster ride at the big amusement park. We go to them to get a thrill, to challenge our current threshold for fear and adventure. That’s why designers keep building faster and scarier coasters.
We climb into the cars knowing we are in for a ride to dazzle our sensations. There’s a set route with a definite start point and end point. In the middle, we pull a couple of g’s get off, and walk away with a cool endorphin buzz. The ride lasts at the most two and a half minutes.

How does one get on the fast track in the first place? You get on because someone in front of you got off. There is a line in front of you and behind you. Your queue is next and you will be taking someone else’s place when they get off. In the corporate world, this comes as corporate restructuring, layoffs, and mergers. Notice how not many people retire in the old-fashioned sense anymore. You step in and fill someone else’s shoes, only now your shoes are more expensive. Your time will come if you follow the traditional track, your ride time is limited with some control of the duration, eventually, your ride ends and you’re history.
You get in line at another company, but you know the ropes now to get onto the track quicker.

Dimensions of Responsibility
As one grows older so do responsibilities. More important the urgency that the responsibilities and deliverables are required to be met or you will be left behind. The spectrum of learning responsibility goes from how to wash your face, brush your teeth, and go to bed as a five-year-old, all the way to sending the mortgage check in at the end of the month as a homeowner. We learned to take on simple responsibility in a step-wise and controlled manner as a kid. Only as a teenager did we get the true taste of responsibility in our eagerness to take on more during our “invincible” or at times rebel period. We sometimes look back and reflect on how simple and uncomplicated our lives were.
Responsibilities seem to pile up in layers, much like the process of making of a sandwich. We decide what kind of sandwich we want and begin pulling the ingredients out of the fridge and laying them out on the counter. We decide what to put on the bottom piece of bread and begin building the layers. Holding the sandwich in your hands, you marvel at your creation admiring the construction and seeing the various layers and how they begin to become one with the pressure of both hands holding it. Like a first graders peanut butter and Nutella sandwich of two layers, the sandwich’s ingredients symbolize is level of responsibility as a seven-year-old, while our multi-ingredient sandwich represents ours. We require two hands to hold on to our sandwich of responsibility. Otherwise, the levels will slip out one side and land on the plate in multiple plops. How appetizing is this sandwich now? Jobs with increasing responsibilities will eventually reach a tipping point and you’ll begin to question whether or not these responsibilities are aligned with your sense of “Why”.

The quality of one’s life may be determined by the quality of questions that you ask yourself in your daily self-talk and the decisions that you make. Change happens in an instant… Look back at some major decisions or choices that you had made. Where were you when you first thought you had to make that initial decision to get started?
Yep, in the bathroom. What type of decision-maker are you; shower, sink or sitting down? For me, most of these answers and decisions happen during a long hot shower usually after a long workout at the gym. The key is doing something about these decisions after getting dried off.

So what’s a quality question? It’s not going to be: What should I have for breakfast? Or what’s on my calendar this afternoon? It’s a series of questions that are going to stretch and spur some growth. They should even scare you. Remember the questions you had asked yourself about which college you should attend, or what major should you put down on the form? Same quality of question from a different stage of your life.

Let’s try this: Take an honest stab at these.
#1. What would you do if you were downsized right out of your job right now?
#2. What would you do if you were downsized right out of your job right now and you had money in the bank and zero debt?  Either FU Money or FI.

You must answer each of these two questions separately and honestly.
Don’t be afraid to take a week or more to find an answer for #2.
Write down each of your answers.

I bet you had two different answers to the same question. Yes, it is the same question, only the second answer is the one that counts because it gets down to the nitty-gritty of who you are and why you do the things you do every day. Question #2 frees you of your gravity.

The first question will draw an answer out of you that feeds the Fast Track. My initial knee-jerk response used to be: Get another job that pays the same or more. The second question jumps on the fast track, except many people do not know how to react. Very few people have ever considered an answer, a goal, an action if they could walk away free and clear of the fast track trap so that you can enjoy your thirties forties, fifties, and beyond. The few that have, had one thing in common: Escape Velocity.

Escape Velocity
Isn’t that a cool term? Credit for the term goes to Thomas Bass who authored The Predictors.
The scientific definition of Escape Velocity really pertains to the speed required to escape the gravitational forces of Earth, 25,020 miles per hour. Once escape velocity is achieved it, no further energy is required to maintain it unless an outside force or friction gets involved.
I am a child of the space age during an era when the U.S. was racing the Soviet Union to get the first man on the moon. The Apollo space program always held my interest. Also, when the Space Shuttle Program started to fly in 1977 with the Enterprise (OV-101) “Glider”. When the Space Shuttle was flying, it harnessed the energy from a chemical reaction by mixing Hydrogen, Oxygen (and whatever is in the Solid Rocket Boosters or SRBs) to produce the thrust. Once they blow the bolts and release the scaffolding that holds it on the launch pad, the thrust provides the energy to create the acceleration and the velocity to escape Earth’s gravity, which is a constant 9.8 m/s. For about 2 seconds, the Shuttle is free-standing and vulnerable before its ascent begins.
Lately, I started reading about the Moon Walkers. Here was a group of highly intelligent, talented people that trained for years to have a chance to go into space, and an even smaller chance to be selected to fly to the moon let alone be one of the twelve that would walk on the moon. Did you, at the time of this writing, that only six Moon Walkers are remaining?
Sure, the astronauts were the face of the program, yet it took 400,000+ people together to work on the same goal to support the Apollo 11 Mission. This includes the NASA engineers, scientists, and all of the contractors and suppliers. An incredible feat of orchestrating millions of moving parts with incredible precision to achieve this 20th century marvel of an accomplishment. Despite some setbacks, the objectives and goals were crystal clear. It also took an entire country get to people in space before Elon Musk’s SpaceX scaled, commercialized, and modernized it for the 21st century.

This little space safari story is just a slight peek into the origins of my quest for “escape velocity and how I defined it.” I’ve defined it as:
“The purposeful act of acquiring the skills, knowledge, and resources and utilizing them to achieve more freedom, ease, opportunities, and options on your terms.”

Building enough resources to position yourself and pursue the answer to question #2. We all dream and fantasize about escaping from something to somewhere. We even have weekend escapes from the normal routine of life or the vacation escape from work on a vacation getaway, temporary mind you, nonetheless, escapes.

What’s your gravity? A dead-end job with no purpose, debt, saving for retirement or college for the kids, a quiet marriage, horrible boss, amateur supervisor? No need to go on, you can list them yourself.
All of these are part of your launch pad that you are bolted to, just like the Shuttle. These bolts must be “blown” when you start the engine and release to establish Escape Velocity. Keep in mind the countless hours of prep time to get to the point of Blowing the Bolts when the Shuttle Launches. It’s a complicated process, yet well-orchestrated on a routine basis.
There are risks. If there is no risk, there is no reward and no growth.

Managing Personal Gravity
The secret of managing personal gravity is minimizing the negative effects it has on your psyche.
It is crucial that personal focus, planning, and preparation all come together before you launch your decisions into an action plan to enable Escape Velocity to occur. As I mentioned before, it’s an easy process, but a long process. You still have to do the work.
We all eventually prep for some kind of launch. Traditionally it’s called retirement at age 59 ½ to 67 and we are too tired to launch. In most cases, we are simply not prepared for it. This blog has referenced plenty of examples, methods, and tools that are documented in the FIRE community.

Planning Action/Taking Action
Questions you ask of yourself are the foundation of issues that make you aware of a purpose. Do you recall that passion in your late teens and early twenties? It is still there, buried deep within yourself, suppressed only by accepting someone else’s agenda. Every person has tools available at their disposal. Tools can be either physical or intangible like skills. Physical tools have been used to achieve impossible goals like moving the earth to build the Panama Canal and putting men on the moon.
Intangible tools achieved smaller feats, but no less important like starting a new job or starting a family. Tools are forged from asking questions, really tough questions. It takes courage to ask tough questions of yourself because they can find the true meaning of what needs to get done. Tough questions begin the first step to developing your plan to find the solutions that you wish to incorporate into your life.

Think of a shovel, comprised of two parts, the wooden handle, and the steel blade. Making Tough Decisions is symbolized by the wooden handle; the blade is symbolized by the skill of asking questions. Like the parts of the shovel that are dependent on one another to function, questions and tough decisions go hand in hand. They both require action and effort to accomplish the task. You’re going to have to pick your tools and do the work.

It seems sometimes easier to go with the flow, sometimes realizing too late, that the flow is in a different direction than you intended. I could not possibly imagine sticking to the flow of that laboratory job for 30 years. For two years, I woke up every day and started asking quality questions. (Yes, I will leave you hanging until a future post to publish those questions.)
Asking yourself quality questions will get you on your way to making tough decisions. Begin with the end in mind. What do you want?

If you think you can get away with not incorporating tough questions and decisions into your daily life, you might find yourselves sitting on that bench by the beach, in your senior years, watching the young people going by full of energy. You may shake your heads and constantly say to yourselves if I knew then what I know now.
Or worse, I wish I would have enjoyed and appreciated my youth.

This week’s bottom line:
The business of living is the process of life itself and the process is really the best part.

Answer each of these two questions separately and honestly.
Don’t be afraid to take a week or more to find an answer for #2.
Write down each of your answers.
#1. What would you do if you were downsized right out of your job right now?
#2. What would you do if you were downsized right out of your job right now and you had money in the bank and zero debt?

Backlinks to other FIRE stories & blogs.