Exit the Conveyor Belt of Life
These thoughts come after reading a friend’s book.
Something my friend touches on in his Author’s Note is the conveyor belt of life. I’ve always been against riding such a thing because I want to maximize my time here on Earth and not just glide through aimlessly.
Coincidentally, planning, within the realm of goal setting, is a new thing to me; I’ve only recently started planning a few steps, a few months, in front of me. I now realize that before I started planning/goal setting, I was riding the conveyor belt of life because my desire-driven decisions ever-lead back to the conveyor belt ride.
This article is about how planning is the way to exit the conveyor belt of life and how the correct decision making mindset keeps you off the belt.
Goal Setting & Planning
Planning to acheive a goal requires having a goal. Make goal setting easy for yourself by keeping it simple (a common theme in this article). There is probably a goal floating around in your head right now. It is something you know will be good for you in the long term even though it isn’t necessarily fun in the short term. Pick that as your goal.
My goal is financial freedom; adopted from my wonderful girlfriend. This goal will serve as the running example for this thread.
(The principles in this text are transferable to other goals.)
Planning for financial independence is fairly simple. Financial freedom is just having enough money to pay for living expenses without working.
My offensive strategy to reach my goal focuses on investing, increasing my salary, earning residual income, etc. This is the sexy part of the strategy that requires spending resources (time, money, energy); but the defensive strategy is simpler and more important.
The defensive plan is to protect resources from being spent on things other than my goal – aka, the things I want but don’t need (cars, clothes, consumerisms). It’s a basic strategy, simple in theory but certainly not simple in practice. In practice, this is the part of the plan that is most difficult to follow; especially in the beginning when there’s enough saved money to go buy that used 2005 Porsche Boxster S.
Defense to Keep Off the Conveyor Belt of Life
This is where the defensive decision making mindset keeps you off the conveyor belt of life and keeps you heading in your own direction.
Take that Boxster for instance. I’m not buying that car because I get a higher financial return with my money in the stock market or paying for educational resources that ultimatley increase my earning potential. Regardless of the car being used or new (lol i’m broke), it will need service; either maintenance or repair. Not only was money spent to purchase the car, but now more money is spent for upkeep. Since I don’t have the money to support repairs I’ll have to spend another form of finite resource – time.
So now I’m signing up to spend future free time to keep this Boxster. Time that could be spent reading, writing, programming, or creating which, according to my unique abilities and personal offensive plan, have a higher financial return and will get me closer to my goal of financial freedom. (Of course, this doesn’t apply to Magnus Walker). To make things worse, I wouldn’t just be fixing the car – I’d be playing with it.
Obviously fixing and playing with a Porsche sounds fun but it doesn’t get me closer to my goal. It gets me further from my goal because, on top of spending money and time, it’ll spend a third finite resource – mental energy and concentration. I can only concentrate on a single thing at once and I only have a finite amount of energy to concentrate with. If I’m working on this Boxster (fixing or playing) I can only concentrate on that. I can’t work on a car and read a book, or write, or program at the same time. When I’m done with the car, I have less mental energy to devote to my goal.
Considering what buying a Boxster would do to the finite resources (time, money, energy) I need to achieve my goal, I’m deciding to not buy the car :frown: It is a tough decision. It goes against what I want…right now. It goes towards what I want in the future. Buying the car would be me trading the next 6 years for the next 6 weeks (after 6 weeks, the car isn’t novel anymore but I’ll still be spending time, money, and energy on it). The decisions I make for these next 6 weeks can either get me to where I want to be in 6 years or land me in the exact same spot I’m in right now with a lot of wasted time.
Making this defensive play by blocking, not just the car, but all things that suck up my time, leaves me with “nothing to do” and “nothing to spend money on” and “nothing to think about”. Having “nothing” to spend my resources on tees up an offensive opportunity to use those resources to pursue things that will be financially beneficial for me in the future; thus acheiving my goal. Blocking distractions greatly simplifies my life. Simplicity is the key to achieving goals; defense is the key to simplicity.
Mindset to Acheive Goals
Step 1: Make your goal your top priority – nothing comes before achieving that goal.
Step 2: Have the correct mindset. A goal isn’t going to achieve itself and no one is going to achieve it for you. You are the only person who can get that goal for you and you’ll never achieve those goals if you go after them with only a portion of yourself. You need to be fully invested. Fully invested like my kitten and her first piece of chicken.
One time, very early on when I first met my kitten, I had a piece of chicken and the kitten wanted the chicken.
Some backstory, my kitten was found in a bush. Particularly, my friend’s bush outside of my friend’s house…where he keeps his bush. My kitten lived in the bush. I would go over to my friends house and hang out with my soon-to-be kitten. But she was still a bush kitten at that time. We would give her cat food but we didn’t realize that she had parasites; she was always hungry.
Back to the chicken. I once had a chicken drum stick. She was hanging with me up on the deck and I offered her to sniff the chicken. She had other plans. She went for the drum stick and managed to bite hard and dig into the bone. I was like “um, kitten, that’s my chicken. let me have it” and gave it a little tug. She didn’t let go. Mind you, she is maybe 2-3 pounds at this time. TINY. She wouldn’t let go. I gave it a harder tug. She wouldn’t let go. She was staring at me. Her eyes told me she was prepared to die before she let go of that chicken.
Guess who ate that chicken?
That is the kind of determination, focus, concentration, commitment, and investment that is needed in order to achieve goals. There must be nothing that is more important or more valuable to you. That is the mindset that acheives goals.
Concentrate every minute like a Roman on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness…and on freeing yourself from all other distractions… do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you.
Marcus Aurelius
Don’t Ride the Conveyor Belt of Life
All in all, don’t ride the conveyor belt of life; that’s how you end up not living the life you want to live. You trade the life you want to live for the thing you want/want to do right now. You trade the next 6 months for the next 6 hours. Aim for long term satisfaction. You owe it to yourself.
