I wish, when I was starting my financial life, that I’d paired finding a profession with the pursuit of financial independence, FI. Someone who is good at living on a budget, saving, and spending 10 minutes a day learning about money, is able to live a good quality life while progressively reducing the need for a profession to pay for it. 

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The least helpful advice I received from adults was to ‘do what I love’. The advice isn’t necessarily bad for everyone, but it didn’t work in my case. I really started to make progress when I treated doing what I love and how I support myself as two separate questions. The professions I gravitated toward tended not to pay well. I think the most extreme was when I tried to write poetry for a living. I started to put more time into making poetry pay than actually writing poetry. What worked better was to find a profession I didn’t hate that gave me plenty of autonomy and free time. That seemed to be the best deal I could cut. Moreover, I enjoyed what I loved more without the pressure of having it support me.

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I initially worried that I wouldn’t accomplish as much using experiences, but paradoxically, I’ve accomplished more. Here are my guesses as to why.

1. The desire to keep working: I don’t experience burn out or discouragement like I did under my goal paradigm. With larger goals, I was keenly aware of how far I was from accomplishing them. That can be discouraging. After I switched, I still have goals but more as an excuse to have a certain kind of experience.
2. The goal posts don’t move: Another problem with goals is that after the immediate high of accomplishment, you don’t really feel that different. Goals have this illusion of completion that they never come through on. All there is after any goal is another goal. Now that I focus on experiences, each day is about renewing the things that make me feel like me. There is no illusion that what I have done is finished. The work is the reward, the renewal. 
3. Losing that deep concentration of focusing on one or two goals at a time worried me the most. So much progress is made with that focus, especially the initial burst. What I didn’t realize before was the trade off for that progress was losing sight of my other goals. For example, if I spent three months drafting a collection of poems, I did almost nothing else. Once I had time to return to my other goals, I had forgotten the reasoning behind some decision, forgot something I’d already learned, or lost contact with someone who was helping me. Switching from one goal to the other, I would lose a lot of momentum. Now all my efforts have more continuity. This might not work for everyone. You have to be able to compartmentalize. It is also hard not to throw everything else to the side when a bout of inspiration comes. I’m still working on that one. 

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I used to structure my to-do list around goals. One problem of making a list of goals was the narrowness of focus. I’d end up spending most of the day on one or two big ones. Say I was focusing intensely on writing a collection of poems, that goal would take up the major part of the day’s actions. I would get deep into the mindset of a writer, which was initially thrilling. It motivated me for two or three days, but after that I had to suppress parts of myself to enable that deep concentration. I would begin to crave learning something new or miss spending time with my family. In my forties, I started to orient my day around experiences. It took some experimentation but I’ve settled on this list: creating something, learning something, working on my relationship with my wife, fostering relationships with my family and friends, engaging with my physical body, working on my financial health, contributing to the benefit of the wider world, and accomplishing something at work. If my day touches on each of these experiences, I end it feeling complete. 

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Serbia has an interesting Christmas tradition. It is said that what you do on Christmas determines how you’ll spend your year. So on that day, you do many different things for a short period of time and you are intentional about which things. My wife is Serbian so this tradition is part of our family’s celebration. And note, that because Serbia is on the Orthodox calendar, this is a separate day from 12/25, the Protestant and Cathothlic Christmas. Strangely, I now look forward to Orthodox Christmas more than the Christmas of my youth. It has even changed the way I think about my non-Christmas days. What makes it so wonderful is the focus on experiences, not outcomes. The other is that I do a little of everything. It connects me, in a single day, to the variety of experiences that make me feel whole. 

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Living with a daily to-do list can be great or terrible. I have noticed the difference between feeling motivated by my list versus grinding under its tyranny isn’t how many things I actually do. It’s only how much I do relative to the length of the list. Said differently, what matters is expectation. Therefore, the number of things I put on my list is important. I don’t write down everything I want to do. That list is endless and saps my will to work. On the other hand, I try to write down enough to push myself to be productive each day. Judging what my productivity sweet spot is can be difficult. It is much better to err on the low side though. When I finish my to-do list early, I usually have the motivation to continue working.

Check out other work in the Personal Ethic series here.

I mean “ethic” more as how shall I live rather than as what is right and wrong. It is roughly how I organize myself daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. A lot of these observations overlap with personal productivity literature. However, the telos isn’t productivity, it is living a better life. The scope is bigger than simply moral improvement. Living a good life must also address questions of meaning, satisfaction, engagement, and fulfillment.