RPF0464-The_Seasons_of_Work
00:00:00.000 | As a parent, you know it's not just baby talk.
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00:00:16.000 | Children under 2 are at increased risk,
00:00:18.000 | but Prevnar 20 can help them develop more immunity to 20 strains of bacteria that cause IPD.
00:00:24.000 | Prevnar 20 is approved for children 6 weeks and older
00:00:26.000 | to help prevent infections from 20 strains of bacteria that cause invasive pneumococcal disease.
00:00:31.000 | Do not get Prevnar 20 if your child has had a severe allergic reaction to the vaccine or its ingredients.
00:00:35.000 | Those with weakened immune systems may have a lower response to the vaccine.
00:00:38.000 | Talk to your health care provider before vaccination if your baby was born prematurely.
00:00:41.000 | Side effects may include irritability, pain, redness, swelling at the injection site,
00:00:45.000 | drowsiness, muscle pain, decreased appetite, headache, and fever.
00:00:48.000 | For full prescribing information, please call 1-855-213-2138 or visit Prevnar20.com.
00:00:55.000 | Ask about Prevnar 20 for your baby. Visit AskForPrevnar20.com.
00:01:00.000 | Today's episode of Radical Personal Finance is brought to you by HelloFresh.
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00:01:20.000 | On today's episode, we tackle part two on the seasonality of life.
00:01:26.000 | Part one yesterday talked about the seasons of life, and today, the seasons of work.
00:01:33.000 | [Music]
00:01:49.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:01:52.000 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now
00:01:57.000 | while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less.
00:02:00.000 | My name is Joshua, and I am your host.
00:02:03.000 | Today, my goal is to help you make your work life a little bit more meaningful,
00:02:09.000 | give you a little bit of encouragement so that you'll do it better
00:02:12.000 | and get more results and more enjoyment out of the process.
00:02:15.000 | [Music]
00:02:21.000 | The world of work is changing in today's world, and this is nothing new.
00:02:25.000 | Work has always changed.
00:02:26.000 | It just seems that the change always seems new and fresh to us.
00:02:31.000 | I've never seen so many articles about the change of work, the robotics revolution,
00:02:36.000 | the fact that many of us, our jobs are going to be outsourced and replaced by robots
00:02:42.000 | and all kinds of new things, this universal basic income proposal.
00:02:47.000 | I've never seen so many articles on it.
00:02:49.000 | It's showing up as the theoretically new thing.
00:02:52.000 | It's nothing new, but I'm seeing it all over the place.
00:02:56.000 | And I want to wrap up this discussion of seasonality with an area of focus that I didn't get to in yesterday's show intentionally.
00:03:03.000 | I tried to keep yesterday's show focused on the philosophy as it applies to life.
00:03:07.000 | But I want to talk about the importance of seasonality because in our modern world,
00:03:11.000 | because of our ignoring of the seasons, we've lost some of the benefits of the seasons.
00:03:20.000 | If you think back just a little bit when life was more exposed to the coming and going of the seasons,
00:03:26.000 | you can see that external influences had a greater effect on the day-to-day hum,
00:03:31.000 | the day-to-day routine that most of us went through.
00:03:36.000 | And there were specific times of year at which you performed certain tasks.
00:03:42.000 | In an agrarian society, this judgment, this forcing of seasonality is even more acute.
00:03:56.000 | You don't go out and plant your seeds in the fall.
00:03:59.000 | You plant your seeds in the spring.
00:04:01.000 | And there are certain tasks that you do in the summer and in the fall and certain tasks that you do in the summer and the spring.
00:04:07.000 | In today's world, it's not quite so much that way.
00:04:11.000 | Most of us, our work is always there and we need to face it all year, all the time.
00:04:16.000 | And so we lose some of the benefits of the season.
00:04:19.000 | Worse than that, the appearance of our work changes.
00:04:24.000 | I remember a decade ago when I first read David Allen's book called Getting Things Done.
00:04:30.000 | I grasped the thesis of his reason for having to write such a book, which was this.
00:04:38.000 | In our modern world, we need a manual for how to get things done.
00:04:42.000 | This has not been the case traditionally throughout human history.
00:04:45.000 | Throughout much of human history, work was obvious.
00:04:48.000 | It was apparent. It was clear.
00:04:50.000 | If you were living in an agrarian society and needed to go out and plow a field in the springtime,
00:04:56.000 | you knew when you were supposed to plow because it was spring.
00:04:59.000 | You don't plow in the summer and you don't plow in the winter.
00:05:01.000 | You plow in the spring.
00:05:03.000 | And so when springtime rolls around, you have an external cue indicating to you that it's time to go out and plow.
00:05:09.000 | So you face your work. You know the order.
00:05:12.000 | In old days, my dad grew up on a farm and so there was a three-generational farm.
00:05:16.000 | Both my parents grew up on farms.
00:05:18.000 | There was three generations of farmers involved there.
00:05:21.000 | And so you had a generational transfer of wisdom and knowledge.
00:05:25.000 | You didn't have to go and read a bunch of books on how to plant.
00:05:28.000 | If you were a young boy growing up on a farm and your dad and grandfather were involved as well,
00:05:32.000 | they had the knowledge and the wisdom of when you did certain tasks and in what order you did certain tasks.
00:05:38.000 | So you knew when you were supposed to work and you also knew what that work looked like.
00:05:45.000 | You knew how to get ready for it.
00:05:47.000 | The task was straightforward. You get the plow ready.
00:05:49.000 | You knew how to do it.
00:05:51.000 | A little bit of instruction. Here's how you plow.
00:05:53.000 | And then you did it and you knew when you were done.
00:05:55.000 | If you were starting off on the 40-acre west pasture and you're plowing it from east to west,
00:06:01.000 | well, you start at the east and when you're halfway through, you're halfway done.
00:06:05.000 | And when you get to the west, you're done.
00:06:07.000 | When the sun comes up, you go to work.
00:06:08.000 | When the sun goes down, you quit.
00:06:11.000 | It was straightforward.
00:06:13.000 | But in our modern economy where many of us are knowledge workers, the lines are much more difficult.
00:06:21.000 | I face this challenge constantly.
00:06:24.000 | I frequently am totally ignorant as to what is the best thing for me to do next.
00:06:29.000 | I frequently sit down with a pad of paper and try to figure out, "Okay, where should I focus my time?"
00:06:35.000 | I don't know whether it's spring or fall and I don't know what you're supposed to do in spring and fall.
00:06:39.000 | I frequently don't know when I'm supposed to work.
00:06:42.000 | Night, day, morning, afternoon, much more challenging.
00:06:48.000 | And thus, it's only in the modern world, in the modern era that anybody could even write a book with a title like "Getting Things Done" and have it be relevant.
00:06:58.000 | Well, when we bring that to the concept of seasonality, I believe that you can draw some lessons from seasonality to apply to your work life.
00:07:07.000 | It's extremely important to me that we learn how to work effectively and we learn the value of work.
00:07:12.000 | In case you haven't picked up on the theme of – much of the theme of radical personal finance, although I encourage and pursue financial freedom and I encourage others to pursue financial freedom, I don't believe that financial freedom and work are mutually exclusive.
00:07:30.000 | I don't see work as something that should be sought to get out of.
00:07:34.000 | I don't see work as a curse.
00:07:38.000 | Work as a blessing.
00:07:41.000 | Work as a gift.
00:07:43.000 | And if we ignore work or we ignore the value of work, it often causes significant problems.
00:07:51.000 | And many people are pursuing desperately the concept of retirement, as in "I don't want to work anymore" because they have a poor relationship with work.
00:08:08.000 | Perhaps the fundamental reason would be – the most frequent reason rather than the fundamental reason – the most frequent reason would be if there's a poor fit between the type of work that you're engaged in and your unique skills, your unique abilities, the things that are uniquely you.
00:08:26.000 | If you find yourself in a situation where you're doing work that is not well-suited to you, you will find yourself deeply frustrated.
00:08:35.000 | I've been there.
00:08:37.000 | I think we've all been there.
00:08:40.000 | Now, just because you're there doesn't mean you immediately should leave.
00:08:43.000 | There are lessons that can be learned in that context.
00:08:46.000 | I intend to inflict work on my children that is not particularly well-suited to them at certain times so that they can learn the character lessons that they need.
00:08:58.000 | Well, if I'm going to inflict that on my children, then why should I escape those lessons myself?
00:09:05.000 | But there's a balance.
00:09:08.000 | In the same way that I wouldn't seek to consign my children to decades of hard labor and things that are not well-suited for them, that would not be helpful, I don't think that you and I should necessarily, if we have the opportunity, just simply tough it out and grind it out through decades of hard labor.
00:09:29.000 | You can learn your lessons more quickly.
00:09:31.000 | So a good first step in developing financial freedom is developing a little bit of work freedom.
00:09:37.000 | I find routinely – I do a lot of consulting calls – and I find routinely that my major financial advice is don't worry about the money right now.
00:09:46.000 | Go and find a better job.
00:09:48.000 | Build a better career.
00:09:50.000 | Transition to something that is better suited for you and your skill set than what you're doing now, and then come back to the finances.
00:09:59.000 | That's as far as I'll go on today's show about career selection.
00:10:04.000 | I have covered that and will cover it elsewhere.
00:10:07.000 | But today I want to remind you about seasonality.
00:10:12.000 | Because if you think back to a more agrarian lifestyle, one thing that you can appreciate is the impact of seasons.
00:10:20.000 | During the summertime, especially if you live in a northern latitude, your days are very long, and so your work during the summer is outside.
00:10:27.000 | It's heavy.
00:10:29.000 | It's hard.
00:10:30.000 | It's sweaty.
00:10:31.000 | And it's long, from beginning of the day to the end of the day.
00:10:35.000 | And yet it's only for a temporary season.
00:10:38.000 | Your work during the winter is different.
00:10:41.000 | It's slower.
00:10:43.000 | It's more tranquil.
00:10:44.000 | And it's shorter.
00:10:46.000 | The time at which you sit and perhaps read or write is not necessarily when the sun is high and the days are long and the weather is beautiful.
00:10:55.000 | The time at which you sit and you read and you write is when the days are short and the snow drifts are high.
00:11:06.000 | In a four-season climate, I've learned that most people in a four-season climate welcome the changing of the seasons.
00:11:13.000 | There's always something new to look forward to.
00:11:15.000 | There's always a change around the corner, something that you can anticipate.
00:11:20.000 | However, when your work takes place in an office in front of a computer screen, you don't quite get that same effect because your computer screen works well when the sun is high and the computer screen works well in the dark.
00:11:31.000 | And this can lead to an intense monotony, an intense boredom and sense of dullness.
00:11:41.000 | We live in a world increasingly disconnected from the ebb and flow of nature, from the ebb and flow of the seasons.
00:11:50.000 | It's to our own harm.
00:11:52.000 | Almost anything is bearable for a season.
00:11:57.000 | To put it even stronger, almost anything is enjoyable for a season.
00:12:03.000 | But almost anything is unbearable if it lasts forever.
00:12:09.000 | Think back to your school days when you had a school year and a summertime.
00:12:16.000 | At least my experience was that as I went through the school year, I eagerly anticipated the turning into summer vacation.
00:12:24.000 | And yet, by the end of summer vacation, I was eagerly anticipating the turning back to the school year.
00:12:31.000 | I found that with the change of the work from a time of vacation or differing kinds of work to intellectual work, I really looked forward to that.
00:12:42.000 | And I've seen this personally in almost every area of my life.
00:12:46.000 | Many people desire to travel, for example.
00:12:49.000 | And yet, that desire often comes when they've taken nothing more than a two-week vacation trip.
00:12:54.000 | At least my experience has been traveling for a few months at a time.
00:12:58.000 | Often after being gone for a few months, I'm looking forward to getting back home.
00:13:02.000 | And yet, if I'm at home without change, I quickly anticipate being able to get back on the road.
00:13:10.000 | I should state here that I don't know how much of this is personality.
00:13:16.000 | I know that my individualized personality craves consistent change.
00:13:21.000 | And I know other people like more of a sameness from day to day.
00:13:25.000 | So I don't know how much of this is seasonality.
00:13:28.000 | But I think the principle probably stands true for most of us.
00:13:32.000 | The most intelligent way I know of to handle this is to tackle it and to intentionally bring seasons into our work.
00:13:45.000 | And if we bring the concept of seasons and inject that into our work, I think there'll be a better outcome.
00:13:51.000 | I know that not all of you will be able to do what I'm about to describe.
00:13:57.000 | I know that there are some jobs where the primary job description is show up here at this time, be here at this station for this amount of time,
00:14:09.000 | do the same thing over and over again for a certain number of weeks per year.
00:14:15.000 | I know that.
00:14:17.000 | But if that's your job description, I encourage you to get out.
00:14:23.000 | Number one, you're likely to be replaced by a machine.
00:14:30.000 | The way to maintain your job and maintain your income in the forthcoming continuation of the robotics revolution around us is to be involved in something that a computerized machine cannot do.
00:14:43.000 | That means human creativity, human judgment.
00:14:48.000 | These are the types of skills that will weather the storm of the increasing roboticization, robotizing of our society.
00:15:02.000 | But more importantly, make a plan to get out of those types of jobs just for your own benefit.
00:15:07.000 | So here's the first way that you can harness seasonality.
00:15:09.000 | Think back, and I'm going to be drawing this metaphor to agrarian societies.
00:15:13.000 | Think back to an agrarian society and consider how there is one work, farming, raising crops, but yet there are many projects associated with that work.
00:15:27.000 | One project is plowing.
00:15:30.000 | Another project is planting.
00:15:32.000 | There's a time of harvest.
00:15:35.000 | There's a time if you're engaged in animal husbandry, there's a time of birthing.
00:15:40.000 | There's a time of breeding.
00:15:41.000 | There's a time of putting animals out to pasture.
00:15:43.000 | There's a time of branding or shearing or whatever is appropriate to the specific discipline you're involved in.
00:15:51.000 | The larger job is made up of many projects, and this makes the less pleasant projects more bearable.
00:15:58.000 | It allows you to wade into a job that you're not particularly looking forward to knowing that it's only for a short duration, a specific duration.
00:16:07.000 | You can tackle almost any unpleasant job if you know that it'll soon end.
00:16:12.000 | Almost any pleasant job becomes deeply frustrating if you know it never ends.
00:16:18.000 | So the way that you can apply this to your own job is seek to understand the different projects that are involved in your job and then apply them and stretch them out as projects that you can tackle with specific outcomes and specific – I hate business lingo, but I don't know another word – specific deliverables.
00:16:39.000 | You want to know what done looks like.
00:16:43.000 | If possible, try to make done something visual.
00:16:48.000 | Many of us face a deep challenge in the fact that you can't see the results of our work.
00:16:54.000 | You can't visualize it.
00:16:56.000 | It's so satisfying to look out over a freshly mowed lawn or a freshly plowed field or a freshly painted house or a freshly cleaned kitchen and see the effect of your work, to see what's done.
00:17:12.000 | No matter how beautiful my spreadsheets are, I very rarely get the same satisfaction out of a spreadsheet as I do out of a freshly mowed lawn.
00:17:22.000 | So try to arrange your projects in such a way that you'll be able to see something at the end, not necessarily physical, but at least to understand what done looks like.
00:17:33.000 | This requires work.
00:17:35.000 | No pun intended.
00:17:37.000 | One of the hardest things is doing the planning and building it out as a project.
00:17:42.000 | I find this so challenging myself, and yet it's also rewarding because it puts your creative juices to it.
00:17:48.000 | So try to make thematic projects and try to put milestones in place for yourself with your specific type of work, and I think you'll find a few better results.
00:17:59.000 | Now, just a moment, I want to talk about the rhythms of life, the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and multi-year rhythms of our life and how to harness them for maximum effect.
00:18:10.000 | Before I do, though, the sponsor of today's show, again, as I mentioned, is HelloFresh.
00:18:14.000 | If you're not familiar with HelloFresh, it's a super cool service wherein a company puts together the raw ingredients for food, and then they send them to you.
00:18:24.000 | A moment ago, I was talking about how difficult projects are to plan.
00:18:28.000 | One of the things my wife and I find super challenging is just staying on top of our meal planning.
00:18:34.000 | We have high aspirations of having a beautiful monthly calendar with all the meals planned in advance, but we have never, ever been able to make that happen.
00:18:42.000 | Much more than that, we go to the store, we get a bunch of stuff, and I do most of the food shopping, and I bring it home, and she does about half the cooking, I do half the cooking, and you just basically have to open up the refrigerator and kind of pick something and make something up.
00:18:57.000 | We find that, and especially my wife, she finds that really exhausting.
00:19:03.000 | You get to the end of the day, 5 o'clock, 5.30, 6 o'clock, and you want to get dinner on the table, and you just got to open up the refrigerator and see just stacks and stacks of stuff.
00:19:12.000 | It's really hard to be able to figure out what to make.
00:19:15.000 | Well, HelloFresh solves that problem.
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00:19:43.000 | But the cool thing is it's some of the fun work.
00:19:45.000 | It's the chopping.
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00:20:38.000 | Now, back to the rhythm of life.
00:20:41.000 | I really think this is something that if you want to experience financial freedom in your life, one way you can do it is by taking control over your work schedule and fitting your schedule to your life rather than you.
00:20:55.000 | Having to conform your life to the work schedule.
00:20:58.000 | As I've interviewed hundreds of successful, wealthy people and as I've interviewed dozens if not hundreds of retirees, one theme that I have learned is most of us crave control.
00:21:13.000 | The reason most many people desperately desire to retire is not because they don't like their work.
00:21:21.000 | It's the fact that their boss requires them to show up for a Monday meeting on Monday morning at 8 a.m. and they have to fight traffic and they'd much rather do it at a different time.
00:21:33.000 | Well, you may or may not be able to solve that immediately, but you can certainly work towards it by taking control of your schedule.
00:21:39.000 | Life flows well when you can get rhythms that work for you.
00:21:43.000 | Of course, the first thing is to tackle your daily rhythm.
00:21:48.000 | Consider when you work most effectively and work during your peak period.
00:21:53.000 | Consider when the work fits into your family schedule the best and do your work during that time.
00:21:58.000 | There are various techniques that will even help you get more out of a few hours.
00:22:02.000 | For example, many people use a technique such as the Pomodoro technique to great effect.
00:22:08.000 | You focus deeply for 20 or 25 minutes at a time.
00:22:12.000 | You focus on your work for 25 minutes, work in a burst, take five minutes off, come back, work in another burst.
00:22:18.000 | This burst effect is proven to be effective for many of us.
00:22:22.000 | So structure your daily rhythm.
00:22:24.000 | Structure your weekly rhythm very carefully.
00:22:28.000 | Here the key is to divide your days based upon the theme of the day.
00:22:36.000 | The most effective way that I know of to do this is something that's taught by a coach named Dan Sullivan.
00:22:43.000 | I mention him frequently on the program.
00:22:45.000 | He teaches people to divide their days into focus days wherein you do your most productive, most effective work and you focus exclusively on that to the exclusion of all else.
00:22:56.000 | A buffer day, which is wherein you do the tasks necessary to prepare for a focus day.
00:23:02.000 | You handle all the little errands and the little details and the little things that pile up if you don't get them done.
00:23:07.000 | And a free day wherein you do nothing with work, nothing related to work.
00:23:13.000 | I've used that theme to good effect in my own life and I've seen it recommended by many, many experienced people and many, many coaches.
00:23:21.000 | I've seen it in many books I've read.
00:23:23.000 | And so divide your days up and know when you're off and when you're recharging and rejuvenating and having a free day.
00:23:30.000 | And know when your focus time is.
00:23:32.000 | Know when you are working very, very effectively and don't waste any time on those days.
00:23:37.000 | Establishing that weekly rhythm can be extremely helpful to you.
00:23:42.000 | I don't know what to do with a monthly rhythm.
00:23:45.000 | I think perhaps that could be useful to some people.
00:23:49.000 | There are certain things that you can do on the first of the month every month.
00:23:53.000 | Check your oil, etc.
00:23:54.000 | But I don't particularly make a huge focus on a monthly rhythm myself.
00:23:59.000 | But I do try to focus on a quarterly rhythm.
00:24:03.000 | And this is the closest connection to the seasons.
00:24:07.000 | And I think it would behoove us to pay careful attention.
00:24:11.000 | I read a book years ago called "The 12-Week Year."
00:24:14.000 | The basic premise of the book was sensationalist title.
00:24:19.000 | But you can get more done in a focused quarter than in a year if you're focused on it.
00:24:23.000 | And a quarter is a really effective amount of time to plan with and to work on.
00:24:29.000 | A day is too short because many of our days often get away from us.
00:24:33.000 | Even a week is too short.
00:24:34.000 | I often find that my weeks don't go like they will go.
00:24:37.000 | But a quarter has enough variation, enough flexibility to really be useful.
00:24:43.000 | It's long enough to get a lot of serious big work done.
00:24:47.000 | But it's short enough to be able to press through.
00:24:51.000 | So I think that you should schedule your work, if at all possible, on a quarterly basis
00:24:55.000 | with specific projects, specific outcomes that you're committed to on a quarter.
00:25:01.000 | It's so convenient to have four quarters in a 12-month year.
00:25:05.000 | It's so convenient to have your quarters line up with spring, summer, fall, and winter.
00:25:10.000 | It just works really, really well in our modern world to work on a quarterly calendar.
00:25:17.000 | And the key is to schedule bursts of specific work and then schedule recreation and rest in between those quarters.
00:25:27.000 | For example, my--I think, I haven't actually done this yet, but I've been working towards it for a few years.
00:25:33.000 | My ideal annual calendar is to work three months, take one month off.
00:25:42.000 | So work January, February, March, take April off.
00:25:46.000 | Work May, June, July, take August off.
00:25:49.000 | Work September, October, November, take December off.
00:25:51.000 | That's my ideal schedule that I'm working towards.
00:25:55.000 | The benefit of such a schedule is twofold.
00:25:57.000 | One, you have a deadline to get your work done.
00:26:00.000 | Without a deadline, the work often doesn't get done.
00:26:04.000 | But two, you have a time of rest, rejuvenation.
00:26:08.000 | And in our modern world, recognizing the threat of obsolescence, recognizing the threat of being replaced by machinery, we have to increasingly feed our creative capacities.
00:26:24.000 | And that requires times of rest and rejuvenation.
00:26:28.000 | So when I talk about taking a month off, I'm not--for me, I'm not talking about spending a month doing nothing.
00:26:36.000 | Although certainly there's a place for vacation, travel, whatever happens to be the plan at that point.
00:26:41.000 | But that month off is so important to allow me to recharge my creative capacity.
00:26:47.000 | If you're engaged in an olive knowledge economy, you've got to recognize that your ability to produce work that's excellent is largely going to be based on your synthesis of unique ideas.
00:27:01.000 | And you can't always do that in a specific linear fashion.
00:27:06.000 | I've learned this the hard way in creating Radical Personal Finance.
00:27:10.000 | I've learned that I can't just sit down and crank it out, otherwise I quickly arrive at the end of my creative juice exhausted.
00:27:18.000 | The show that you're hearing today is coming--and in a moment I'll share kind of the direction I'm moving--but it's coming out of my own failure.
00:27:27.000 | Creative work requires you to be rested and rejuvenated.
00:27:31.000 | And creative work is where, increasingly, the rewards are, especially the financial rewards.
00:27:42.000 | Consider carefully how you can put in place a quarterly rhythm into your life or something close to that.
00:27:48.000 | You may not have a desire to take three months off a year, but consider putting little bursts into each of your quarters.
00:27:55.000 | Finish the quarter with a long weekend. Everybody can do that. It just requires planning and scheduling.
00:28:01.000 | And it doesn't have to be a long weekend away. Just finish it with a long weekend at home.
00:28:04.000 | Break up the monotony of the week, week, week, week, week constancy and break it up on a quarterly basis.
00:28:12.000 | Schedule something. Perhaps if you have three weeks of vacation, perhaps you schedule a week of vacation in June.
00:28:19.000 | You schedule a week of vacation in December. And then you take a four-day weekend at the end of each of the other two quarters.
00:28:26.000 | You'll have to figure out how to apply it, but give it a try if you haven't done it and consider what quarterly projects you can commit to and get done in those bursts in between.
00:28:36.000 | What about longer than a quarter? Well, of course, there's annual and there's an annual rhythm, but kind of collapsing here quarterly and annually.
00:28:43.000 | The other rhythm I really want you to consider is of multi-year rhythms. Here, the exact timing gets a little bit less precise, but I want you to think about a seasonal rhythm of something like five, seven, perhaps ten years.
00:29:04.000 | If you worked during your lifetime in chunks of five, seven, or ten-year projects with focused, planned changes in between those, think about how that could rejuvenate and revitalize you.
00:29:23.000 | Depending on the project, five, seven, ten-ish years is plenty of time for you to do just about anything. You can get a really solid business up and going in five, seven, ten years.
00:29:40.000 | You can get it sold in five, seven, ten years. You can transition from one career to another and become a leading expert in your field in five, seven, ten years.
00:29:53.000 | Then, if you want, you can make a strategic pivot from one thing to something else that connects to your previous experience but builds on it, and you can become a leading expert again in five, seven, ten years.
00:30:07.000 | The data on work indicates that most of us will change and adjust our work from many different jobs, companies, and even fields through the course of our working lifetime.
00:30:21.000 | The problem is most people do that by accident. It happens to them. That's not for you. Do it on purpose. Happen to it.
00:30:34.000 | If you do it on purpose and you plan and you work towards it, you can use the in-between time to launch you into a totally different sphere.
00:30:44.000 | Five, seven, or ten-year chunks of time are ideal. You can get a lot of work done in those amounts of time, and financially, you can save and handle really cool transitions.
00:31:00.000 | I encourage you to think about the concept of a sabbatical. Of course, the word itself, Sabbath, implies a period of rest.
00:31:11.000 | Sabbatical comes from Sabbath, which is traced to God resting on the seventh day after six days of creation.
00:31:18.000 | In our modern context, we just simply use the word to refer to the idea of an extended rest, perhaps a few months, perhaps a year, after some period of work.
00:31:27.000 | Yet, if you apply this concept to your own life, you can apply it to great effect.
00:31:33.000 | You can also use it for the purpose of getting some of the benefits of retirement that many people want to get from the old four decades of leisure at the end of their life.
00:31:52.000 | Let's say you took longer sabbaticals, a year or two years, and let's say you scheduled those on average each decade.
00:31:58.000 | Each decade, if you took a year or two off and used that time to really engage in a project that's important to you, whether that's a leisure project such as a year-long trip around the world,
00:32:08.000 | whether it's a personal project such as caring for an aging father or mother, whether it's a productive project such as writing your great novel or restoring a 1934 automobile,
00:32:21.000 | these times can be a tremendous source of rejuvenation, and you can plan for that financially very doably.
00:32:30.000 | Then you can use that time to pivot into something new.
00:32:36.000 | You can read and write your way into a new career, read and write your way into a new job, network your way into a higher position.
00:32:45.000 | There are all kinds of things you can do with a period of transition, and the mental energy that you'll have from that can be fantastic.
00:32:56.000 | By planning to constantly change, you'll stay on the cutting edge of your field instead of being made obsolete.
00:33:07.000 | That's your job.
00:33:09.000 | By recognizing that you're not going to do what you're doing now forever, you'll be able to transition into something better, which will keep you excited,
00:33:19.000 | and you'll be able to work harder at what you're doing today, knowing that it's not forever.
00:33:24.000 | Now, consider life planning, and consider the seasons of life that I described in yesterday's show.
00:33:31.000 | Using a time frame of five, seven, or ten years, think about the things that are open to you during this time period.
00:33:38.000 | Of course, we start at age zero, and I'm using the normal U.S. American path of advancement through our social institutions,
00:33:46.000 | but zero to about four is almost five years, but that's generally considered to be the time of intense childhood, babyhood, toddlerhood,
00:33:54.000 | and there aren't a lot of demands placed upon somebody.
00:33:57.000 | Normally, somebody goes into primary school at about the age of four or five.
00:34:02.000 | Primary school, first grade through middle school, depending on how it's defined, sixth, seventh, eighth grade,
00:34:07.000 | takes a child from age five to somewhere around age 11, 12, 13, about seven years,
00:34:13.000 | followed by secondary school, again, depending on how it's measured, perhaps seventh, eighth grade through twelfth grade,
00:34:19.000 | about five or six years, then four or five years of college, master's degrees on top,
00:34:26.000 | but right on about that five-year transition period.
00:34:30.000 | Let's say that somebody comes out of college in their early 20s, 21.
00:34:33.000 | Consider the transitions through their life of 21 to 30, and then just think about the decades, 21 to 30, 30 to 40, 40 to 50.
00:34:42.000 | 50 to 60 and onward, of course.
00:34:45.000 | Consider the natural phase of child rearing and consider if you were planning on a transition each five to seven years,
00:34:52.000 | how you could use that time to insert something really special with your children.
00:34:57.000 | It would seem to me like a bit of a waste if you're doing it for the benefit of the child to spend thousands of dollars
00:35:03.000 | taking your two-year-old all around the world.
00:35:06.000 | Of course, it probably wouldn't be a waste for the parents, but for the child's perspective,
00:35:09.000 | they're not going to pay much attention to the fact that they're riding an elephant in India.
00:35:15.000 | But add five years and all of a sudden, your seven, eight, nine, ten-year-old could make a significant difference
00:35:22.000 | and you really could harness that in your child's life.
00:35:24.000 | Let's say that your child has a unique talent or skill that you really want to hone,
00:35:28.000 | and so you take a year off as a sabbatical during middle, young to middle childhood to help them to really hone that.
00:35:35.000 | If they need a coach, you take them to the best coaches in the world.
00:35:38.000 | If they have an interest, take them on a traveling tour of the interest and feed that.
00:35:43.000 | Of course, you could do the same thing during the teen years.
00:35:46.000 | You have again that five to seven to nine-year gap to really harness something.
00:35:52.000 | And then as your children matriculate out of the household, then you can put the same thing into your own life.
00:35:57.000 | Now again here, I'm not trying to say exactly the form that it should take,
00:36:03.000 | and there's no precise science here of every five years, seven years, ten years.
00:36:06.000 | I'm just saying think in terms of that context and make a plan for it.
00:36:11.000 | Consider the opportunities that gives you.
00:36:14.000 | Now add up another phase of this thinking to something like financial cycles.
00:36:22.000 | If you are an astute student of financial cycles, you'll know they come somewhat regularly.
00:36:27.000 | Hard to predict, of course, and specifics, but if you see one coming, perhaps you can start a business that's going to ride a particular cycle.
00:36:35.000 | If it's a construction boom or a housing boom, maybe you build your construction company and you ride the financial cycle,
00:36:41.000 | and then when the boom ends and that industry goes back into recession, then you go ahead and sell out, take your sabbatical.
00:36:48.000 | Maybe it's simpler than that.
00:36:50.000 | You're working a job where you have a consistent salary, but maybe you can ride a housing boom.
00:36:55.000 | Try to buy in at the lower end of the cycle.
00:36:57.000 | You live there for five, seven, ten years.
00:36:59.000 | Sell out when you think you're near the higher end of the cycle.
00:37:02.000 | Take your profits in the United States, completely income tax-free.
00:37:05.000 | Have your nice reason for transition, long trip or new business or whatever your period for transition is.
00:37:18.000 | Go have your sabbatical and then come back at it and do it again.
00:37:22.000 | Line up your sabbatical with the recession.
00:37:25.000 | You get good deals on your travel if you travel during recession.
00:37:28.000 | Instead of fighting the market, you're moving with the market.
00:37:32.000 | Think about how you could apply that concept and get a fresh start.
00:37:37.000 | Many of us would look around at the things in our home and the clutter that's there and often wish,
00:37:44.000 | "Man, I wish I could just get rid of all this stuff and start over again."
00:37:50.000 | Many of us look around at the house that we live in and think, "If I were going to do this over again, I wouldn't do it like this."
00:37:56.000 | Sometimes we look at the job or the career. You get the point.
00:38:00.000 | But think about how you can harness this seasonal concept and apply it to your own life.
00:38:07.000 | Now, of course, I'm being quite idealistic here.
00:38:10.000 | I'm assuming that you can predict the business cycle, predict the housing cycle,
00:38:14.000 | that you have an awareness and a grasp of booms and busts and recessions and times of economic growth.
00:38:21.000 | These things are obviously very difficult to predict with any consistency.
00:38:26.000 | My hope is not to make everybody an economic forecaster.
00:38:30.000 | My hope is to open your eyes to the possibilities at hand and cause you to think more creatively about what you've got.
00:38:42.000 | The reason I'm doing this is I've learned that most of us are not very creative when it comes to planning our lives or considering the opportunities that are available to us.
00:38:54.000 | When I was working as a professional financial planner, I asked hundreds of people about retirement, and I said, "When would you like to retire?"
00:39:04.000 | And the standard answer that I heard is 65.
00:39:09.000 | There are, of course, two jokes that would come for about 10 percent of the people.
00:39:13.000 | 10 percent of the people would say right away, like yesterday, "Ha, ha, ha, yes."
00:39:17.000 | And 10 percent of the people would say never, and they meant it.
00:39:20.000 | But I would guess 80 percent of people would say 60 or 62 or 65 or 67, something that would line up with their age of normal retirement age for social security purposes.
00:39:32.000 | I thought to myself, "How in the world does everybody think that 65 is the ideal time to retire?"
00:39:38.000 | Almost nobody would tell me, "Well, in 11 years, I want to retire."
00:39:44.000 | Nobody would say, "At the age of 47, I want to retire."
00:39:48.000 | And I realized that it wasn't that people didn't necessarily want to retire.
00:39:52.000 | Of course, some people do, and they do want to make changes.
00:39:55.000 | But most of us aren't that creative about thinking about the possibilities and then making a plan for them.
00:40:03.000 | And it usually requires somebody else's story to say, "Wait a second. I could do that."
00:40:10.000 | That's been my secret agenda in trying to share various stories on radical personal finance.
00:40:14.000 | Story of somebody, I can travel is the easy thing to go to.
00:40:18.000 | Somebody buying an RV and traveling the country or buying a sailboat, sailing the world.
00:40:23.000 | Or the story of building a business or going and volunteering for a year in the local area, making some change in something that you see, or going into politics for a short period of time.
00:40:34.000 | So I want to inspire you to think about these and to make your own plan.
00:40:38.000 | For example, it's not a guarantee. I'm not guaranteeing that I'll do it someday.
00:40:43.000 | But someday, I intend to take my children around on at least a year-long trip to all the 50 state capitals.
00:40:48.000 | It's kind of a whirlwind trip to do in a year.
00:40:51.000 | It probably wouldn't be done in a year, but I think that would be to me a really valuable educational thing, and I'd love to do that.
00:40:58.000 | I'd love to show my children the United States.
00:41:00.000 | So at some point, as they start to get older and as we try to figure out when it'll work, we'll make the plan for that.
00:41:06.000 | And that's more exciting and interesting to me than the idea of a 40-year retirement.
00:41:12.000 | Now, final time period, and I'll wrap this show up.
00:41:15.000 | Think in terms of a 25-year time horizon.
00:41:20.000 | And what would be the consistent theme that you could focus on in 25 years?
00:41:25.000 | Now, I use that not because it's a precise number.
00:41:29.000 | Again, perhaps for you, you can think easily in terms of the decades of your life or 20-year increments.
00:41:34.000 | But 25 years focused on a specific theme with diligence is enough to make a major impact and contribution in some area that's important to you.
00:41:47.000 | Even if we idealize this and say from 0 to 25 is a time of learning and preparation, 25 to 50 is a time of very, very significant time.
00:41:59.000 | A lot of things that you could do from 25 to 50.
00:42:01.000 | And then from 50 to 75, and then what do you do in the fourth quarter of your life from 75 to 100?
00:42:08.000 | See, 5 to 7 years to 10 years is probably too short in some fields.
00:42:12.000 | It may take you 10 years to be an expert at something.
00:42:15.000 | But 25 years, you can make a huge contribution.
00:42:20.000 | So consider what the theme would be of the next 25 years.
00:42:24.000 | Now, work backwards into your 5 or 7 or 10-year increments, and then work backwards to your 1-year increments, and your quarter, and your month, and your week, and your day.
00:42:33.000 | And of course, nobody has this all charted out perfectly.
00:42:36.000 | I certainly don't.
00:42:39.000 | This is conceptual, philosophical, intended to stimulate your creative thinking.
00:42:45.000 | But don't think in -- who can think in terms of 40-year increments?
00:42:49.000 | That's probably much farther than any of us can consider.
00:42:52.000 | Just go back in your thinking 25 years.
00:42:55.000 | As I record this in 2017, that would put you back in 1992.
00:43:02.000 | President Bill Clinton coming into office.
00:43:06.000 | Think of how different the world was.
00:43:08.000 | You can't plan 40, 50, 60 years.
00:43:10.000 | But 25 years, thematically, you could probably make some adjustments.
00:43:17.000 | If you take this concept of seasonality and consider the information in yesterday's show, the seasons of life, then you line it up with a proper career selection, choosing an area of impact.
00:43:31.000 | Think in terms of some of these periods.
00:43:33.000 | Work on your daily schedule.
00:43:35.000 | Work on your hourly schedule.
00:43:36.000 | Work on your weekly schedule.
00:43:37.000 | Those are the low-hanging fruit.
00:43:39.000 | And then give some thought, just some dreaming time to five, seven, ten-year projects, quarterly rhythms, 25-year macro projects.
00:43:51.000 | I don't think you'll know exactly what it'll look like, but you can develop some themes.
00:43:57.000 | And while you're working on a major theme for the next five or seven or ten years, then you'll be able to look back and work on a minor theme that'll be the transition to your next decade of work.
00:44:10.000 | As we face an increasingly changing economy, this is more and more the skill that we've all got to implement to stay ahead.
00:44:20.000 | I'm going to close today's show with a poem.
00:44:22.000 | I don't promise to do poetry in every show, but I am going to close today's show with a poem by Henry Van Dyke.
00:44:27.000 | It's called "Work."
00:44:28.000 | Very famous poem.
00:44:29.000 | I hope you enjoy it.
00:44:30.000 | "Work."
00:44:33.000 | Let me but do my work from day to day, in field or forest, at the desk or loom, in roaring marketplace or tranquil room.
00:44:42.000 | Let me but find it in my heart to say, when vagrant wishes beckon me astray, this is my work, my blessing, not my doom.
00:44:52.000 | Of all who live, I am the one by whom this work can best be done in the right way.
00:44:58.000 | Then shall I see it not too great nor small to suit my spirit and to prove my powers.
00:45:13.000 | Then shall I cheerful greet the laboring hours and cheerful turn when the long shadows fall at even tide to play and love and rest, because I know for me my work is best.
00:45:22.000 | This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources.
00:45:28.000 | Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com.
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