The Simple Dollar (16 page)

Household chores follow much the same logic. I usually spend about an hour each day on household chores—doing dishes, doing laundry, cleaning the carpet, and so on. If I
don’t
do it, there are negative consequences. Dishes pile up, Sarah gets upset, and I don’t have adequate clean clothes. I don’t like it. It breaks a rule for how I live my life.

Our days are all filled with tons of these little patterns and rules. We treat others with courtesy. We mow the yard. We go to work following a certain route. We stop at the coffee shop and say hello to the barista. We give our mother a call on the way home from work. We plan a dinner party and invite our usual group of friends over. We get our hair cut at the salon. We can’t possibly miss NBC’s Thursday night lineup. We pick up our kids from daycare. We surf the Web for an hour or so every evening. It often feels unnatural to choose to disrupt these simple patterns, even though the chaotic nature of our lives often does disrupt them.

Yet, if we allow ourselves to be governed solely by these rules, we find ourselves missing out on countless opportunities for a better life.

I puzzled over the decision to leave my career behind for more than a year. I felt like I was breaking countless rules—leaving a high-paying job with children in the home, leaving a job where my skill set was valued, and not working a nine-to-five job like everyone else in my family and my immediate circle of friends. I’d also be throwing away my entire daily routine—the morning chat with my coworkers, the inside jokes, the lunch routines, the relative peace of the daily commute, and the regular stops at the library and my other regular haunts after work. All of those rules and safety nets and routines would be going out the door—and the thought of it held me back from making the leap.

Yet, the moment I finally walked out the door—breaking countless “rules” in the process—I felt nothing but relief and joy. It was the single best decision I made in my adult life. It reaffirmed my relationship with my kids. It gave me the time and space to engage in work I am deeply passionate about. It left me with a renewed energy and zest for life.

Yes, I faced the scorn and misunderstanding of many of the most important people in my life. I was breaking their rules as well. I confounded expectations and challenged their definitions of what it means to be an adult and a parent. That, too, is a cloud with an enormous silver lining, because they also began to see that the rules in their lives are made to be broken.

Your rules are made to be broken, too.

Fourteen months after setting that ridiculously audacious goal, I walked into a Barnes and Noble and saw a stack of copies of my first book,
365 Ways to Live Cheap
, sitting on the featured table. In fourteen months, I raised my profile high enough to get the attention of a book publisher, signed a deal, wrote the entire manuscript, ushered it through the editing process, and watched as my finished work went to press and appeared on bookstore shelves all across the country.

What I found was that by setting an enormous, life-changing goal—and, yes, getting that book published was a life-changer, as it’s much more impressive to be introduced as “bestselling author Trent Hamm”—my enthusiasm for the project was substantially higher. I was
much more likely to take big steps to make it happen, like contacting well-known people out of the blue and asking for help or editing my manuscript while cooking supper and rocking my infant daughter with my foot.

A truly audacious goal offers many advantages over an ordinary one.

Engagement in something wild and exciting gets our adrenaline flowing as we push our boundaries and personal expectations. Choosing something far beyond what’s expected offers the thrill of adventure and naturally piques our enthusiasm.

In my own experience, I found that setting an enormous, life-changing goal—and, yes, getting that book published was a life-changer, as it’s much more impressive to be introduced as “bestselling author Trent Hamm”—my enthusiasm for the project was substantially higher. I was much more likely to take big steps to make it happen, like contacting well-known people out of the blue and asking for help or editing my manuscript while cooking supper and rocking my infant daughter with my foot.

A daring goal is much more likely to attract the positive attention—and support—of people outside your inner circle, the very people who are likely to be able to help you make that goal into a reality. People are always inspired by a story of an individual bucking the odds and seeking to make their dream a reality, and it is the most incredible of goals that get their attention.

By wearing my large goals on my sleeve publicly at
TheSimpleDollar.com
(and, at the same time, committing to helping others in my peer community, as described in
Chapter 9
, “Cultivating People and Opportunities”), I was able to solicit help from many, many people in reaching my goals. If my goals were ordinary—just simply to make a few dollars—people would not have become engaged in what I was doing. Instead, my goal was to remake my life, share my successes and failures openly along the way, and become a published author in the process—and that sort of gumption attracted a great deal of support from many, many wonderful readers and supporters.

If you shoot for something truly audacious, you’re going to have to pass through some unexplored territory along the way, and there is often hidden treasure to be found here. New skills, new relationships, and new opportunities abound when you go beyond where your limits are and explore uncharted space.

When I sat at home poring over personal finance books at the lowest point of our financial meltdown, I would have never expected that I would wind up meeting, engaging with, and in some cases, building a friendship with most of the authors of those books. I would have never expected that producers would contact me soliciting my help on pilots and proposals for television series. I would have never believed that I would have the phone numbers of CEOs, chairmen, and other leaders within the financial industry. These rewards all came in the wake of setting enormous goals and moving toward them with passion and earnestness.

Tim Ferriss, author of
The Four Hour Work Week
, has been intimately involved in life design for more than a decade. He also advocates for enormous, audacious goals. “Small goals are paradoxically harder to achieve than big goals. If the potential payoff is small, your enthusiasm won’t be sufficient to get through the inevitable obstacles. Aim for the home run when everyone else is aiming for base hits. It improves your odds.”
¹

If you’re going to even bother stepping up to the plate to chase a dream, you might as well swing for the fences. Win or lose, it will bring out the best in you. Dreams don’t come true if you settle for something less, and even in failure, you can still succeed beyond your wildest imagination. After all, Flynn and Blake may have been the ones to actually get on base, but the poem is called “Casey at the Bat.”

Think big. Envision that secret dream you’ve always wanted. Write it down, make it real, and throw all of your energy toward achieving it.

For many people—myself included, not too long ago—thinking of such massive life-changing goals seems overwhelming and out of reach. In truth, those big goals are often much more reachable than the smaller goals we often set for ourselves. It’s much easier to get our own dream job than to get someone else’s dream job, after all.

Here are five simple steps to get you started on your journey:

1. Get your foundation in order.
   Understand why you make the decisions you make—and get control over those decisions. Live with a more frugal mindset. Eliminate your debt and build up a healthy emergency fund. Even if you never accomplish your big goal, getting this kind of foundation in place will make any life you choose to lead substantially easier and more fulfilling.
   
2. Know what
   you
   want.
   It is you—and you alone—who is always there when you close your eyes at night and when you open them in the morning. It is you who will be the driving force behind achieving your dreams. Chase the dreams that
   you
   have. The positive people around you will be on board with you and support you. As for the negative people, they’re doing nothing more than holding you back.
   
3. Envision the worst-case scenario.
   Often, the worst-case scenario for a truly transformative goal is much less painful than the worst-case scenario for a much lesser goal. Case in point: Making a film out of your own script, even if it’s a failure, is still a far more impressive result than never bothering at all, as it’s likely to build you connections and resources that you would have never otherwise had.
   
4. Look at the personal rules you use to govern your life—there are many of them.
   How many of them can be broken to your net benefit, without harming your reputation or harming those around you? There are countless seemingly “unbreakable” rules in our lives that are, in fact, just tired habits. Picking through these, evaluating them, and eliminating the ones that don’t actually benefit us can not only refresh our lives, but strongly weaken the barriers to an audacious goal.
   
5. Associate with people who are attempting audacious goals in their own life.
   You can use them for inspiration, foster a new relationship by helping them toward their goal, and perhaps find a foothold for you to make your own leap of faith.
   

You’re debt free. You’ve got a healthy emergency fund. You’re living the life you want to live, engaged in a career that fulfills you and surrounded by people who support you.

What’s next?

Financial stability is trickier than you might think. It’s tempting to backslide into bad spending habits now that you’re “safe.” It’s also tempting to simply inflate your lifestyle a bit and enjoy the material spoils of your hard work.

On the other hand, you can find incredible rewards by simply staying the course and maintaining the enjoyable lifestyle you already have. True financial independence—the ability to live your life without earning an income through work—is an attainable goal for everyone, as is the achievement of financial goals you once thought to be impossible.

Lifestyle inflation occurs when you make the choice to adopt a higher standard of material living, often as a result of an increase in income or a decrease in monthly bills (due to debt repayment). You’re convinced by advertising and by a desire to keep up with the neighbors that you need to “upgrade” the perfectly enjoyable and functional items you already have. The Toyota in the driveway becomes a BMW. The cell phone you mostly use to chat with your family and friends becomes an iPhone (with its requisite expensive service). A romantic candlelight dinner at home becomes a romantic candlelight dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town. That elegant, simple ring on your finger that you’ve worn happily for the last decade simply must become a diamond-encrusted extravaganza.

Before you know it, you’re right back where you were before—an empty life, except surrounded by a few nicer things. Your big dreams in life take a backseat to a higher class of stuff.

In our modern world, lifestyle inflation is incredibly hard to avoid. A person must be incredibly well-disciplined to overcome such material upgrade desires. In my experience, I’ve found only two techniques that truly help avoid lifestyle inflation, as follows:

•
Create an artificial sense of scarcity through automation.
At the end of each pay period, a significant portion of our family’s income is immediately and automatically locked away in investments and savings accounts for specific goals, such as our emergency fund, our automobile savings, our Christmas savings, and our savings for our dream home in the country. We simply do not allow a large checking account balance to build up. If one of us ever notices a large balance in our checking account and starts to use that as motivation for the idea that we now
deserve
some wholly unnecessary material item, we know it’s probably time to alter our savings strategy, likely by increasing our automatic savings a bit.