The Simple Dollar (15 page)

A final ingredient for professional success both personally and within a peer community is mentorship. A
mentor
is simply any person with significant experience within that field who is willing to provide advice and basic assistance to individuals who lack that experience.

Early on, finding a mentor can be an invaluable step toward getting a foothold within a particular area of interest. A mentor often knows the hurdles that a beginner will face along the way and can help a new person overcome these hurdles before they turn into genuine obstacles.

Finding a mentor isn’t that difficult. Simply seek out an experienced person in your field who you respect and with whom you won’t be in direct competition in the reasonable future. Instead of asking that person to be a mentor, keep in mind the giving nature of a successful community and also keep in mind the fact that a good mentor is likely already loaded with demands. Instead, offer whatever you can to your potential mentor, in the form of special connections to others you may have, information you may have, or perhaps even as simple as a helping hand in a tight position.

Later on, you may have the opportunity to mentor new members of your professional community. As a mentor, it’s important to recognize that, for the moment, you have substantially more value to offer them than they have to offer you. Keep the long view in mind—if you provide valuable mentorship to someone who blossoms into a success in your field, then your value to the community (and to that person) will be substantially increased.

This chapter outlines a path to career success that’s quite different than you’ll find in many career books. Rather than focusing on how to get a job and how to get ahead in a specific company, the new career rules point to a different community-based path, where passionate peers help each other find the opportunities that best fit them and support each other throughout their career growth. Here are five key steps in this journey:

1. Discover what you’re passionate about.
   Ideally, you’re already involved in a career that you’re passionate about. If you’re not, all hope is not lost. Spend some time engaging in a diversity of activities and learning experiences until you begin to find the things that awaken your senses and interests and make you want to stay up all night learning more and trying new things.
   
2. Get involved in communities that facilitate your passion in a positive way.
   When you’ve found a passion, get involved in a community of like-minded people, particularly those who have followed that passion to professional success. If you have difficulty finding such a community, seek out individuals who have already found success in your area, find a way to help them, and ask them to be your mentor.
   
3. Find ways to join your passion with the transferable skills you already have
   . People who combine their passion with a skill set that makes it easy to share that passion and work well with others often find many routes to success. Perhaps you have a strong set of communication skills, making it easy for you to evangelize for what you’re passionate about. It may be that you’re good at organizing projects, in which case you might be a perfect person to corral a project revolving around your area of passion.
   
4. Dig deep into your passion through learning, synthesis, and deliberate practice
   . If you’re engaged in a particular area, you’ll naturally want to learn more about it through experience and other modes of learning. Excellence, however, often comes from incorporating deliberate practice into your area of expertise. Use passion as your fuel to drive you through the challenge of deliberate practice.
   
5. Find ways to translate your passion and developed skills into your current career—or find a new one.
   As your new passion develops into a surprising new set of skills, seek ways to incorporate these skills into your current career. You may send your current career trajectory into overdrive—or you may find yourself relaunching in a new area. In either case, you’re on board with a skill set that differentiates you from the rest, and you have a strong community supporting and backing you. That is the ticket to career success in the twenty-first century.
   

Why would I jump off such a big financial cliff right after spending two years getting us completely out of credit card debt, paying off student loans and car loans, and finally building up a good emergency fund? At first glance, one would think that this is a position to accumulate wealth and secure a strong financial future—after
all, that’s the perspective constantly preached by other personal finance gurus.

My reason for turning my financial life around, though, was to live the life I wanted to live, free from the shackles of debt. I wanted a writing career that I could control. I wanted the flexibility to be able to spend many days with my children while they were young. I wanted a job that didn’t have to follow me with a load of stress everywhere I went. I wanted a job that would allow me to just get up and walk away from it for a while and follow whatever windmill I saw in the horizon.

In short, I wanted a very different life than the one I was leading.

In the film
American Beauty
, the central character, Lester Burnham, tells his wife something that has stuck in my mind for years: “This isn’t life, it’s just stuff. And it’s become more important to you than living.” The typical American lifestyle—buying an expensive home that pushes what you can afford, constantly striving to keep up with the affluence of others, working a job that you can’t even consider leaving because the pay is just too good—adds up to a broken American dream, one in which the joys of life are often pushed aside in a never-ending chase for something we cannot quite attain. Once we get the thing we want, we always find that there is something else to want.

I realized that the thing that was missing in my life wasn’t a material thing—it was a way of life. It was spending time with my family without the pressure of work hanging over my head. It was writing—perhaps
creating that elusive Great American Novel, perhaps not, but always enjoying the chase of the written word. It was the ability to wake up in the morning and realize that I
wanted
to do all of the things on my checklist for the day.

My family’s financial efforts in the two years between hitting financial bottom and walking away from my job were intense and, at times, extreme. We lived very cheaply, learning new skills and new interests along the way. I launched a side business—TheSimpleDollar.com—that earned a small measure of income and also allowed me to dig into my passion for writing as well as my passion for self-improvement. We threw every extra penny into eliminating debt, which meant that we went without many material things that might have provided us with a burst of short-term enjoyment.

My reward for that effort was an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and create the kind of life I’d always dreamed of. You can do it, too.

Consider the human hierarchy of needs as described by Abraham Maslow. To put it simply, once one’s basic needs are met—clothing, food, shelter, companionship—humans then tend to have higher aspirations, such as self-actualization and professional fulfillment.

This hierarchy is subverted in many ways—advertising, peer pressure, our own psychology—and it leaves us taking actions that undermine our basic needs while
making futile attempts at grabbing at our higher needs.

Add into this mix the increasing unpredictability of modern life, and you’ve got a painful situation. It’s no wonder that many people see such radical life choices as effectively being “impossible.”

They’re not.

The first step to achieving the life you dream of is assembling a solid foundation that not only ensures your basic needs, but protects them over the long haul. Here are six essential pieces of that foundation:

1. Self-understanding.
   Why do you make the choices you do? Why do you choose to make impulse buys? What criteria do you use before making a purchase? Why do you choose to go into debt? Why do you choose to associate with certain people? The answers to such questions are a key part of understanding yourself and why you make the choices you do. The greater your understanding of your internal decision-making, the more likely you are to change how you make choices—usually for the better. Self-understanding leads directly to self-control, which is the key to personal and financial success.
   Begin by spending time contemplating every poor choice you make in a given day, from drinking one soda too many or hanging out with someone who is demeaning to you to spending extra money or choosing not to exercise. Keeping a daily journal is a good way to push this journey along.
   
2. Freedom from debt.
   Debt is a prison, as we so thoroughly discussed in
   Chapter 6
   , “With or Without You.” It foists unnecessary monthly payments on you, which in turn require you to have a high income just to maintain the status quo. Eliminating those debt payments eliminates the need for that income, vastly widening the scope of possible life and career choices you can make. Implementing a debt repayment plan, committing significant effort to it, and following through with it to the end will free you from the shackles of debt.
   
3. Frugal sensibilities.
   As discussed in
   Chapter 7
   , “Minding the Gap,” this doesn’t mean subsisting on ramen noodles and avoiding anything fun. Instead, it means cutting back hard on the things that matter less in your life so that you have the resources to reach your dreams in the areas you do care about.
   
4. A substantial emergency fund.
   As discussed in
   Chapter 2
   , “What’s Missing?,” and
   Chapter 3
   , “A Visit from the Black Swan,” life is incredibly chaotic. A large cash emergency fund greatly reduces the effect that this chaos can have on your day-to-day life, making it much easier for you to ride through the bad events and take advantage of the opportunities.
   
5. Retirement planning.
   Note that I did not necessarily say retirement saving. What’s important is that you think ahead to what your needs will be in your later years and take whatever measures
   are necessary to ensure that future. It never hurts to save more now so that you can put away less later on.
   
6. Insurance.
   Insurance is a final protection against uncertainty. Term life insurance (because you just want the insurance, not any sort of investment product), health insurance independent of employer, and long-term disability insurance are all strongly worth considering if you have dependents who rely on your livelihood. I won’t go into the specifics of each type of insurance, as insurers are constantly changing policy standards and numerous products are currently in the market. Use the Internet to research your options in each area and choose the plan that fits your needs.
   

One of the biggest challenges that many people have when they begin to think outside the box in terms of their overall life choices is the sense that things simply aren’t done this way. It’s not how everyone else does it, so there must be something inherently wrong with it.

This impression is a reasonable one. As we discussed in
Chapters 2
and
3
, our minds deal with all the random events in our life by creating the impression that our lives are incredibly orderly. We remember the general pattern we’ve established, but we forget the countless unexpected good and bad events that disrupt that pattern all the time.

In short, all of us have a set of “rules” for how we expect our lives to go—and how we expect the lives of our friends and associates to go. Most of us go to work. Most of us earn a paycheck. Most of us do similar things on weekdays and on weekends. When we actually think of our lives significantly changing from that pattern, it can seem really uncomfortable because it involves breaking that pattern that we’ve established in our minds.

Here’s a perfect example. Every single morning, like clockwork, I wake up, spend an hour or two uninterrupted with my children, and eat breakfast with them. Whenever that pattern of quality time in the morning with my children is interrupted, I get uncomfortable. I don’t like it. It breaks a rule—and it happens to be a rule that I cherish.