I have spent the last year in what some would call an awakening. I have stepped outside of myself consciously and looked at my life, my relationships, my values and how do I determine if I’m living the way I want to live or if I’m living how others want me to live. Society, culture and even family can have a lot of influence and pressure on how you should appear, act and live your life. I put this together as a guide that I’m currently working on myself and may adjust as I go. I want to share with others as they may think like I do and benefit the same way I have. While exploring what my picture of what I want my life to be, I have decided that for at least a few years of my life, I’d like to get away from the rat race and just travel around the world. This may include living in a foreign city and taking in the culture and seeing how it’s different from how I live. I believe that would be a very profound experience that would enrich my life. I am now in the process of finding out how I can get the means to do this. In doing so, I’ve been reading some books and just trying to put together a plan to actually do this instead of sitting around dreaming about it. I also want to be responsible, plan when I feel it’s appropriate and do my best to make it a great experience.
Here is what I have so far and maybe there is no order on these but this is what came to mind for me. Please comment on your life experiences and what has and has not worked for you. Although, keep in mind sometimes we just get lucky and try to correlate it to something that may not be a real correlation.
Analyze your values and try to determine where you got them from. Are they your own or someone else’s? Do the reporter’s mantra: Why, what, when, who and how. No need to dwell on it too much, values can even change during your life, but this is why they changed. Because you learned new information about the world and you made an adjustment. You may have used to spend a lot of money and time working on your lawn. You valued something to do that, either taking pride in showing your off your house, or maybe you like to have a nice lawn for your kid to play on. The point is values can and will change during your lifetime. This is why this part of analyzing your values occasionally is important. We mostly likely change our values because new experience and knowledge changed your mind (Bayesian inference is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available). This is why it’s important to have an open mind. Don’t lend your mind to institutions. If you don’t determine your values, someone else will. You ever have friends, or maybe you still do, that are always defending a political party no matter what they do? Do they have their own values or are they just following the party line?
Find out what you would be doing with your time if you didn’t have a job. I know this sounds like the lame “what would you do if you had a million dollars?” question but with this one, try to remove what you would buy and more what would you like to be doing. Would you be traveling around the world roughing it a bit or in luxurious style? Maybe you’d just like to live in the city or up on a mountain. Some of us have more responsibilities than others, like children, and may just want to spend more time with their kids. This is your pick, you pick what you would enjoy. Maybe you love your job and you have no desire at moment to make a change. This step is really just about figuring out what you truly want to do with your time. It doesn’t have to be one specific thing. It could be a variety of things.
How much money do you need to achieve #2? I’m not sure you can escape the need for income or a lot of savings to just quit your job and start something different. There may be ways to compromise. If you have several years in your current job, you have hopefully amassed new skills in life. This is where being creative by determining what you can do and how you can get revenue from that. For me, this is the most difficult. This takes some creativity and though. Think of all the skills you have. How can you turn them into revenue, or maybe you have a good paying job now and you just need to determine how to live on 50% of your income and save the rest? You can then have a good end date to your job. Is it too far out? Do you need to save and create sources of passive income? This brings me to the most important point #4.
Develop a system that contains your values (they can change along with your system) and how you can do what you really want to do in life. Everyone has a system of survival, they just may not know it. This is where you need to figure out what your current system is. Maybe it’s just do what work says, sit in traffic, come home and watch TV, repeat. Take some time and think about what you can do to adjust your system to live the life you want to live. I am currently working on this. One of the best books I’ve read on developing a good system is the book “How to fail at almost everything and still win big” by Scott Adams. Not a necessary read for this but I did enjoy reading was "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll. This book had a section on realizing we are bias by nature and can use Bayesian inference to update your beliefs and values.
I will be updating my blog on my progress with the hope that others can learn from my experience. Learning from failures is a big part of my system. Please share!