Bogleheads® Conference 2023 - Jordan Grumet on Living without Regrets

00:00:00.000 | Okay, thanks, everyone.

00:00:07.680 | We're about to get started.

00:00:09.120 | I'm Christine Benz.

00:00:10.480 | I am the president of the board of the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy.

00:00:15.720 | This is our closing session of the conference, and we wanted to end on something that's a

00:00:20.920 | little broader than these topics that we typically noodle on, and Bill Bernstein and Jonathan

00:00:27.220 | Clements I think set us up well for some of the topics that we'll be discussing in the

00:00:31.840 | course of this presentation.

00:00:33.880 | I am so thrilled to introduce to my right Jordan Grumet.

00:00:38.800 | He is a physician who is also a blogger and podcaster and has aligned himself with the

00:00:48.680 | FIRE community because he did achieve financial independence and has been pursuing some other

00:00:55.460 | interests since then.

00:00:58.320 | Jordan's book came to all of you as conference attendees, and we wanted to make it available

00:01:05.920 | because I thought it was just a fabulous book, and in interviewing Jordan, I had kind of

00:01:11.240 | a pinch-me moment in that, you know, I'm like, "I get Morningstar to pay me for this kind

00:01:15.940 | of stuff.

00:01:16.940 | This is a pretty good thing I have going here."

00:01:18.680 | So Jordan has a lot of insights about his work with patients in hospice and what they

00:01:28.620 | have regrets about, sort of their moments of clarity about what they wish they had done

00:01:34.640 | differently in their life, and Jordan feels passionately about this idea that we need

00:01:39.800 | to think about this earlier in our lives, to think about what we want our lives to be.

00:01:45.620 | So that's what I'm hoping we will discuss, or we will discuss during the course of this

00:01:49.700 | conversation.

00:01:50.700 | Jordan, thank you so much for being here.

00:01:53.700 | Thank you so much.

00:01:54.700 | It is a pleasure to be here, and I am humbled by the quality of both the participants and

00:01:59.860 | the speakers at this conference.

00:02:01.300 | It's been truly exceptional.

00:02:02.580 | Well, thanks, Jordan.

00:02:04.180 | And I wanted to mention Karen D'Amato is here.

00:02:06.700 | She will be collecting your questions for Jordan, so we'll leave room for some questions

00:02:11.820 | at the end.

00:02:12.820 | But Jordan, maybe we can start out by you sharing a little bit about your personal journey.

00:02:18.900 | I mentioned that you were a physician, but at one point you sort of had a moment where

00:02:23.020 | you decided that you wanted to do something a little bit different.

00:02:27.640 | So my life changed drastically when I was seven years old.

00:02:30.980 | My father died suddenly.

00:02:32.360 | He was a physician and an oncologist, which means he took care of cancer patients, and

00:02:36.380 | he had a Berry aneurysm, which is an aneurysm in the brain that bursts all of a sudden.

00:02:40.740 | And so one day I had a father, and the next day I didn't.

00:02:44.180 | And being a seven-year-old kid, I looked at everything really through the lens of it's

00:02:50.380 | all about me.

00:02:51.900 | So when my father died suddenly, I'm conscious of this now, I wasn't then, but I somehow

00:02:56.620 | felt like it was my fault, like I had done something wrong, or I wasn't good enough.

00:03:01.960 | And so I struggled for months, even years, trying to figure out, well, what does this

00:03:05.700 | mean?

00:03:07.320 | And eventually I came to a conclusion.

00:03:10.380 | I realized, or I thought, that I could psychically fix the problem of his death by becoming a

00:03:16.740 | physician like him, and walking in his footsteps, and doing the good deeds that he was doing.

00:03:23.860 | And that notion carried me.

00:03:25.580 | It created a sense of identity and purpose.

00:03:28.540 | At the time, I had a learning disability, so I was way below my grade level for reading.

00:03:33.420 | Everyone was passing me by.

00:03:35.380 | But somehow the certainty that I would be a physician carried me through, and I got

00:03:41.620 | past learning disability, I went through high school and college.

00:03:45.220 | I would be the guy who was at the library on Saturday morning at the University of Michigan

00:03:49.740 | while everyone else was at the football game.

00:03:52.900 | And I became a physician, and it filled me up somewhat.

00:03:59.300 | It became very, very clear as the years went on that my vision of what being a physician

00:04:04.900 | was, a vision of the physician my father was, didn't fit me.

00:04:10.220 | It wasn't rushing in and saving people's lives all the time.

00:04:14.200 | It was also the paperwork, and the burnout, and the not sleeping.

00:04:19.420 | And for me, realizing that this didn't feel like the purpose and identity that I thought

00:04:24.460 | it would, and I started searching for a way out.

00:04:29.740 | And I went to my accountant, and I asked my accountant, well, how much money do I need

00:04:33.020 | to retire, because if I can retire I can leave this thing that isn't filling me up anymore.

00:04:37.540 | And she said $10 million.

00:04:40.180 | Didn't tell me why, didn't give me any reasoning, but I didn't have $10 million.

00:04:45.380 | So then I went to my financial advisor, and he did all sorts of simulations, and he didn't

00:04:50.780 | ask me how much I wanted to spend every year.

00:04:55.740 | And when we finally started talking about it, I had never tracked my expenses.

00:05:00.020 | So he said, how much do you want to spend every year?

00:05:01.300 | I said $300,000.

00:05:03.940 | I had no idea how much money I was spending.

00:05:07.300 | And so he did the calculations and came up with a number close to $10 million, and of

00:05:11.060 | course I wasn't there, so I couldn't retire.

00:05:14.360 | And then something amazing happened.

00:05:16.360 | I was writing a blog about medicine.

00:05:18.540 | I had been writing about what it felt like to be a doctor, and in 2014, a person sitting

00:05:24.300 | in this audience called me and asked me to review his book, and that's Jim Dolley.

00:05:28.300 | And I have to tell you, I give Jim Dolley a lot of credit for where I am today, but

00:05:32.380 | up to this point, I've also made the mistake of not including his wife, Katie Dolley, who

00:05:36.020 | actually is a big part of the White Coat Investor platform, so I should be thanking her also.

00:05:48.860 | But I got his book, and I read through it in like one sitting.

00:05:51.340 | I mean, it took about three, four hours.

00:05:52.980 | I was so engrossed.

00:05:55.060 | And I realized that I was financially independent.

00:05:59.500 | His book gave me the vocabulary that my financial advisor and my accountant didn't.

00:06:04.620 | He helped me see a little bit of what enough truly looks like, at least when it comes to

00:06:08.220 | enough money, and I was elated.

00:06:11.600 | I could leave this job that was no longer fulfilling me.

00:06:14.880 | I could live the life I wanted to live, and then I had a panic attack, literally that

00:06:18.740 | same day, because I had no idea what the life I wanted to live was.

00:06:25.660 | The only sense of purpose and identity I ever had outside of family and getting married

00:06:29.060 | and having kids, the stuff we all have, but all I knew was being a doctor, and to let

00:06:34.900 | go of that was to step away from my identity, even if it wasn't fulfilling me, and to also

00:06:39.900 | step away from the little wisp of connection I had with my father.

00:06:45.300 | So instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and just stepping away from medicine,

00:06:49.160 | I was way too afraid to do that.

00:06:51.520 | I did what I always do when I face difficult things in life.

00:06:54.740 | I started writing.

00:06:55.740 | In this case, I started a financial blog because personal finance and fire and all that stuff

00:07:00.460 | is what I was enthralled with, and that eventually turned into a podcast.

00:07:05.580 | And when it comes to personal finance, I didn't want to talk about the how, and the reason

00:07:09.300 | why is we have so many people in attendance here who are better than that than me.

00:07:14.340 | I wanted to talk a little bit about something different.

00:07:16.300 | I wanted to talk about the why and what's next.

00:07:19.580 | So you now have a plan for making money, and that money will sustain you.

00:07:23.060 | How does that relate to happiness?

00:07:24.700 | How does that relate to purpose?

00:07:26.820 | What do you want to do with all this power you've gained?

00:07:31.700 | And so I had all these experts on my podcast, these entrepreneurs, these fire practitioners,

00:07:37.700 | these educators, and I found that they had some of the answers, but I found their answers

00:07:42.820 | were lacking.

00:07:44.640 | In the meantime, professionally, I'd realized that being a physician wasn't fulfilling me,

00:07:48.120 | so I started doing what I call the art of subtraction.

00:07:50.500 | I got rid of all those things that weren't fitting me because I had enough money.

00:07:54.340 | So I got rid of nights and weekends, and I eventually jettisoned my private practice.

00:07:58.060 | The one thing I kept was I loved to do hospice medicine, taking care of the terminally ill

00:08:03.300 | and dying.

00:08:04.620 | I would do that even if people weren't paying me to do it, and so I knew that was a part

00:08:08.700 | of my purpose.

00:08:09.860 | So it was something worth holding on to, but I could do that in such a way that I only

00:08:13.540 | spent 10 or 15 hours a week doing that, so what would I fill the rest of my time with?

00:08:18.620 | At this point, it was a podcast and a blog, but all those big questions that I was having

00:08:26.420 | with my podcast guests, all those huge conversations, I was finding the answers in a very unique

00:08:32.100 | place.

00:08:33.260 | I was finding them at the bedside with my dying patients.

00:08:37.540 | You see, when you're being told that you have weeks or months to live, it changes the lens

00:08:43.580 | in which you look at life.

00:08:45.780 | You are able to let go of all of those societal expectations and family expectations.

00:08:51.900 | For the first time in life, it gives you permission to ask, "What's really meaningful to me?"

00:09:01.860 | And that's what my patients were doing, and I had this epiphany.

00:09:06.680 | What if we didn't have to wait until we were dying to start thinking about these things?

00:09:10.340 | What if we could start thinking about these things in the young and the healthy, all these

00:09:14.620 | people who are listening to my podcast, who are trying to figure out what to do with their

00:09:17.820 | money and how to live a purposeful life?

00:09:20.780 | The dying had some of these answers, and that became the book, Taking Stock.

00:09:25.460 | Yeah, thanks, Jordan.

00:09:26.980 | That was a super helpful encapsulation.

00:09:29.820 | I want to go back to you talking about how being a physician was such a big part of your

00:09:35.580 | personal identity, and I think that's the case for a lot of us as we go through our

00:09:40.220 | careers.

00:09:41.460 | It becomes part of our identity, and that's very hard to step away from, whether you're

00:09:46.860 | making kind of a career pivot.

00:09:48.940 | Maybe you don't love some aspects of what you do, or maybe you're retiring, which requires

00:09:54.880 | you to step away from that work identity entirely.

00:09:57.340 | Can you talk about that?

00:09:59.480 | Because I think a lot of people are navigating that sense of purpose and identity that they

00:10:04.620 | get from work.

00:10:06.540 | How do you make changes to that?

00:10:08.420 | Well, here's the interesting thing.

00:10:11.460 | If that purpose and identity from work or whatever you're doing is filling you, you

00:10:17.140 | tend not to walk away from it.

00:10:19.140 | Jack Bogle, did he stop wanting to come to Bogleheads conferences?

00:10:23.660 | No, right?

00:10:25.140 | He was going to do that until he literally couldn't anymore.

00:10:28.900 | The reason why we have trouble is because many of us are realizing that that purpose

00:10:33.280 | and identity is no longer serving us.

00:10:35.900 | Let's say you're getting close to retirement or you're like, "I have enough money."

00:10:40.000 | If this thing you were doing was really filling you, you wouldn't even think about leaving

00:10:43.900 | it.

00:10:45.280 | But if you are thinking about leaving it, it means that maybe it's time to consider

00:10:49.200 | a pivot in your sense of purpose and identity.

00:10:52.600 | Maybe what was serving you before is not serving you now.

00:10:56.540 | The question is, will you have the courage to do that deeply difficult work of asking

00:11:03.120 | yourself, "Well, if I'm not this job anymore, if I'm not the thing that people recognize

00:11:09.240 | me for because it's not feeling good, what am I then?"

00:11:15.280 | And that's the question is, are you ready to start working on those things?

00:11:20.280 | Are you ready to pivot because your psyche is telling you that you should, right?

00:11:26.900 | If you're finding that you've had enough of work or you've had enough of doing this thing,

00:11:32.820 | then you probably have to start asking, "Well, what comes next and what part of myself am

00:11:38.820 | I not addressing?"

00:11:40.380 | I wanted to follow up on the conversation that Bill and Jonathan had where they were

00:11:47.260 | talking about happiness set point.

00:11:49.700 | And I mentioned to Jordan that was a new term to me, but I am familiar with the hedonic

00:11:55.480 | treadmill, and it sounds like there's a relationship.

00:11:57.820 | So maybe you can talk us through that.

00:12:00.180 | So happiness set point is key to the idea of the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaption.

00:12:05.220 | This idea that we have a set point of happiness, and we scuttle around and try to increase

00:12:10.720 | that by either buying things or maybe achievements and job titles.

00:12:15.500 | Or in my book, "Taking Stock," I talk about some of us actually try to increase happiness

00:12:19.320 | by saving a lot and getting a high net worth, and I call that overdrive in the book.

00:12:23.700 | But the point of it is we tend to get to that place, and then we adapt back to our baseline

00:12:30.580 | or we habituate.

00:12:32.060 | So it is very common for us to return to our baseline.

00:12:37.020 | Some of that is human nature.

00:12:38.540 | But I think when it comes to things like money, part of it is that we tend to make things

00:12:43.480 | like money a goal instead of a tool.

00:12:47.220 | And the reason that they don't fulfill us is when we get to that higher net worth or

00:12:51.420 | we make more money, we think it's going to fill us up, but it doesn't because money's

00:12:56.580 | a tool, and we want to use that tool to do the more important things.

00:13:00.060 | So if you don't have any idea of what your purpose and identity are, you don't know what

00:13:03.820 | those more important things are.

00:13:05.220 | So you get to that higher net worth, and you ask yourself a question.

00:13:08.740 | You say, "Well, what now?"

00:13:11.220 | And you're really happy for a moment, a week, or a month, but eventually you fall back to

00:13:16.820 | that set point, and you have to ask yourself, "Well, what comes next?"

00:13:19.460 | Now, I think the mistake a lot of us make is instead of doing the hard work of thinking

00:13:23.340 | about purpose and identity and what fills me up, we instead just double down.

00:13:28.300 | And we say, "Well, a million dollars was my net worth, and I got there, and I'm not feeling

00:13:31.860 | great anymore, so let's set a new goal of two million."

00:13:36.180 | I think that happens.

00:13:37.180 | Or the opposite happens.

00:13:38.540 | We get to a million dollars, and we were hoping upon hope we'd get to that net worth, and

00:13:42.980 | then we become petrified we're going to lose it.

00:13:46.620 | And that's loss aversion, right?

00:13:47.820 | The market's going to go down the next day, and all of a sudden we had a net worth of

00:13:51.060 | a million dollars, but now it's only $999,000.

00:13:55.540 | And some of us become so afraid of losing what we gained, it's actually doubly as painful.

00:14:01.460 | But all of this focuses on the point that things like money or even achievements are

00:14:06.160 | not particularly good goals.

00:14:09.400 | Money is a great tool.

00:14:11.440 | So I challenge all of you, you've been so wise and savvy about your money.

00:14:17.780 | Most of you here will die with far too much money.

00:14:20.480 | It's just, it's going to happen, statistically, we know this.

00:14:25.080 | The question is, did that money serve you to do the deeper, more important things in

00:14:30.200 | your life?

00:14:33.360 | So you have argued that one of the reasons that we tend to focus so much on money and

00:14:39.080 | our financial wherewithal is that it's something we can actually measure, whereas the other

00:14:43.360 | stuff you're talking about, it's like, oh, I can't measure that.

00:14:45.720 | So it's a little harder to latch on to.

00:14:48.560 | Can you expand on that?

00:14:49.560 | Yeah, I mean, money is the low hanging fruit.

00:14:53.680 | It is measurable.

00:14:55.160 | We can define it.

00:14:56.680 | We can decide I need to make more money, I can save more, I can get a more aggressive

00:15:02.040 | job, I can get a promotion.

00:15:04.560 | It may not be easy to become financially independent or get a high net worth, but we definitely

00:15:10.320 | know what the right steps are.

00:15:13.160 | And because of that, it's comfortable.

00:15:15.440 | But I think it creates a certain amount of mirage, it confuses us and makes us think

00:15:19.320 | that that's the most important thing.

00:15:22.000 | And it's an easy trap to fall into.

00:15:24.400 | The harder trap is to say, what kind of person do I want to be?

00:15:28.360 | And what's purposeful in my life?

00:15:31.240 | To figure that out takes a lot more brainpower, a lot more time, and the answers are not nearly

00:15:36.240 | as finite, they're ephemeral, and we are very uncomfortable with that.

00:15:40.720 | And I think even though it seems almost a touch distant, I think we're also afraid

00:15:47.040 | of dying.

00:15:49.920 | To look at your life and start thinking about those ephemeral things like purpose and identity

00:15:54.480 | is to recognize that life is finite, and if you don't start working on it now, one day

00:15:59.480 | it will be too late.

00:16:02.080 | We don't like to do that.

00:16:03.240 | It is much easier to focus on something not nearly as important, like our personal finances,

00:16:09.200 | our net worth.

00:16:10.840 | And so we reach for the low hanging fruit because it's comfortable.

00:16:14.720 | But what I always tell people like you is when a guy like me, a hospice doctor walks

00:16:20.700 | into your room and gives you that prognosis of six months or less, you're not going to

00:16:25.640 | be thinking about your net worth.

00:16:27.240 | You are not going to be thinking about whether you worked more nights or weekends.

00:16:30.900 | You're not going to be thinking about whether you made it to partner or not.

00:16:34.280 | And God forbid, I hate to say this, you're not going to be thinking about whether you

00:16:37.520 | did that 30-year tips ladder.

00:16:45.240 | But you will.

00:16:48.000 | You will be thinking about those things that you regret that you never had the energy,

00:16:52.680 | courage, or time to do.

00:16:56.600 | And my guess is, as I said, 90% of you here will die with more money than you'd ever need.

00:17:03.080 | But I'm going to also guess that probably 90% of you will also die with regrets.

00:17:08.680 | And yet we spend so much time talking about our money and so little time talking about

00:17:12.880 | purpose.

00:17:14.480 | Why is that?

00:17:17.560 | So let's dive into that, Jordan.

00:17:20.880 | You have spent a lot of time with hospice patients, and you've heard their regrets.

00:17:27.800 | Say you've also heard some fabulous insights from some of these people.

00:17:32.080 | So let's talk about some of the key things you've learned from people who are in their

00:17:36.380 | last days or months.

00:17:38.720 | So to say what are the most common regrets of the dying, we can't have this conversation

00:17:43.440 | without talking about Bronnie Ware, who was a palliative care nurse who wrote a book called

00:17:47.440 | The Five Regrets of the Dying.

00:17:51.840 | Basically she gives five things that people tend to regret, and they're not specific things.

00:17:55.680 | It's more generalizations.

00:17:57.360 | But the way I'd summarize it is we regret that we never had the energy, courage, or

00:18:01.400 | time to do those things that were important to us.

00:18:04.320 | And guess what?

00:18:05.600 | That's different for every person.

00:18:07.400 | Like for me, one of the big things for me was traditionally publishing a book, and I'd

00:18:12.240 | put it off forever and ever and ever.

00:18:14.960 | And God forbid I'd gotten terminally ill before I'd done this.

00:18:18.580 | That would have been one of my regrets.

00:18:20.160 | But for you, it might be something else.

00:18:21.840 | It might be building that business or pursuing that hobby or whatever it is that's important

00:18:26.440 | to you.

00:18:27.440 | It might have to do with relationships.

00:18:28.440 | It might be fixing that relationship that went awry.

00:18:32.260 | So for each of us, it's different, but most of us have something in our past that we'd

00:18:37.680 | like a do-over.

00:18:39.140 | We have something that we regret.

00:18:41.560 | And guess what?

00:18:43.280 | We call it regret when you're dying because most likely we don't have the agency to fix

00:18:47.680 | it.

00:18:48.680 | What do we call regret in a young person who has tons of life left?

00:18:54.820 | We call it purpose.

00:18:57.480 | I call it the fodder for something I call the climb, which is purpose in action.

00:19:01.600 | But it is an anchor to start deciding what kind of life we want to live today.

00:19:07.680 | So the dying very much taught me that.

00:19:09.320 | And one other thing I think is really important to mention is the dying also taught me that

00:19:15.160 | it wasn't the success or failure of that important thing.

00:19:21.180 | It was being in the arena and fighting the valiant fight.

00:19:24.440 | So in my book, I talk about a patient of mine.

00:19:26.600 | This is not his real name.

00:19:27.600 | The story's been changed slightly, but his name was Ernesto.

00:19:30.420 | And he was in his 20s, and he did something that everyone around him couldn't understand.

00:19:35.160 | He left his high-flying corporate job for a year to train and then to go climb Mount

00:19:39.640 | Everest.

00:19:40.640 | And everyone told him that he was getting out at the wrong time, and he was a rising

00:19:44.280 | corporate star, and if he left now, he would miss out on all these chances, and he would

00:19:48.360 | never make it up again.

00:19:49.800 | But this was deeply important to him.

00:19:51.720 | So Ernesto went.

00:19:52.720 | He left work at the age of 25.

00:19:55.320 | He trained and trained and trained.

00:19:56.620 | He went to climb Mount Everest.

00:19:57.620 | He made it about halfway up.

00:19:58.800 | The weather changed, and they had to come back down.

00:20:01.920 | I met Ernesto in his 40s when he was dying of leukemia, and all he could talk about was

00:20:07.760 | being up on Mount Everest.

00:20:11.280 | Those were the stories he regaled all the hospice nurses with.

00:20:15.800 | He didn't regret that he didn't succeed, but he would have deeply regretted if he had never

00:20:20.160 | tried.

00:20:21.840 | So a lot of people use the excuse that I don't want to go do this thing because I'm going

00:20:25.520 | to fall on my face, and boy, how horrible I'll feel then.

00:20:29.640 | I can tell you the dying don't regret what they failed at but tried deeply.

00:20:34.920 | They regret what they never had the courage to try.

00:20:37.920 | So keep that in mind.

00:20:39.080 | You already win the game if you go out and start pursuing these things.

00:20:42.680 | It actually doesn't matter the outcome.

00:20:46.160 | So one other thing that you said to me, we were talking about this at one point, and

00:20:50.840 | you mentioned that it doesn't have to be writing a book or trying to climb Mount Everest.

00:20:58.720 | There can be smaller things that we should tackle and pursue.

00:21:02.760 | It doesn't have to be that bucket list, super aspirational item.

00:21:06.800 | Can you talk about that?

00:21:07.800 | Sure.

00:21:08.800 | And I think we have to talk about the nature of purpose, and admittedly, this is a little

00:21:12.000 | bit controversial, but the feedback I got from my book, Taking Stock, after giving several

00:21:18.240 | talks and going to all sorts of conferences is people said, "Look, your book talks about

00:21:21.960 | purpose, identity, and connections.

00:21:24.240 | I've been trying to find my purpose, and it's making me anxious, and in fact, I've given

00:21:28.320 | up on purpose.

00:21:29.320 | Why do people keep telling me to find my purpose?"

00:21:32.440 | And it really made me go to the literature and think, well, how important is this idea

00:21:36.240 | of finding purpose in our life?

00:21:38.660 | And the literature shows us that it's actually pretty darn important.

00:21:41.480 | People who have a sense of purpose in life live longer, are healthier, and tend to be

00:21:46.800 | happier.

00:21:47.800 | On the other hand, I did more research and found that people, also 90% of us at some

00:21:52.180 | point in our life, have what's called purpose anxiety.

00:21:55.120 | This idea of purpose is so big and scary, it actually makes us feel worse and not better.

00:22:00.640 | So what we have here is a paradox, what I call the purpose paradox.

00:22:06.680 | And I think fundamentally why it can be the most important thing in your life, as well

00:22:10.280 | as the most anxiety-provoking, is we've done a horrible job of understanding purpose in

00:22:14.960 | our life.

00:22:15.960 | It's not just one thing.

00:22:16.960 | In my opinion, it's two things, and specifically, and here's where the controversy comes, I

00:22:21.360 | think one of them is good and one of them is bad.

00:22:24.000 | The bad type of purpose, believe it or not, is what I call big P-purpose, or the big audacious

00:22:29.680 | purpose like I want to change the world, I want to make a million dollars, I want to

00:22:33.520 | cure cancer.

00:22:35.180 | Why are these things bad?

00:22:36.720 | Ultimately, I have nothing wrong with the idea of having big goals, but a lot of times

00:22:41.000 | we don't have as much agency.

00:22:42.940 | No matter how hard you try, you probably will not become a billionaire.

00:22:46.320 | You probably will not cure cancer.

00:22:48.600 | So if you are setting your sense of purpose on these big, audacious goals that you have

00:22:52.880 | very little control over, you have to be the right person at the right time with the right

00:22:56.340 | knowledge and have a lot of luck, if you are going to base your sense of purpose and happiness

00:23:00.920 | on that, you're probably going to get a lot of purpose anxiety because you're probably

00:23:04.800 | never going to get there.

00:23:06.880 | But what if we change things around?

00:23:09.760 | What if instead of big, audacious purpose, we start looking at what I call little P-purpose,

00:23:14.080 | this idea that purpose actually is just doing something that's deeply meaningful and important

00:23:19.200 | to you and doesn't have to be goal-oriented.

00:23:22.960 | Instead what if we made purpose about doing the things that we enjoy doing in the moment

00:23:26.820 | and we don't care the outcome?

00:23:30.080 | If you change the way you start looking at purpose and look at it in that manner, then

00:23:34.520 | instead of being scarce the way big, audacious purpose is, only so many people are going

00:23:39.820 | to win the Nobel Prize or cure cancer, cure even one cancer.

00:23:44.480 | It becomes abundant.

00:23:46.280 | Think about all the million things we could find to do that fill us up and that we enjoy

00:23:50.600 | doing in the moment.

00:23:52.360 | And so I think we fundamentally have to look at purpose different.

00:23:55.120 | And I'll tell you, when I say this to people, they look at me and say, "Well, what about

00:23:58.620 | impact?"

00:23:59.620 | And certainly we can talk about impact if you want, but my belief is that you actually

00:24:03.600 | impact more people when you pursue what I call little P-purpose than you do when you

00:24:09.680 | pursue big, audacious purpose.

00:24:13.080 | I wanted to ask about some of the exercises in the book.

00:24:16.260 | You have some very tangible things that you can go through to help arrive at conclusions

00:24:22.020 | about your own purpose, small P or big P. But let's talk about the life review, what

00:24:29.280 | that means and how someone would go about doing it.

00:24:34.300 | So I think the life review is like the greatest answer to how do I find my purpose.

00:24:40.360 | So what a life review is, is a structured series of questions that often in hospice

00:24:44.080 | and palliative care, we go through with our hospice patients.

00:24:48.280 | So the first thing we make sure is that their pain is controlled, their nausea is controlled,

00:24:51.120 | and they're in a safe place, and hopefully they're dying where they want to die, whether

00:24:53.800 | that's at home or in the hospital or at a nursing home.

00:24:57.100 | But then a doctor or a nurse or a chaplain or social worker can sit down with them and

00:25:00.640 | go through a series of structured questions that helps them come to terms with their life.

00:25:06.180 | So it's, you know, what were those most important moments in your life?

00:25:09.320 | What were your biggest successes?

00:25:10.400 | What were your biggest failures?

00:25:11.980 | Who were those key relationships?

00:25:14.300 | What did you fail to accomplish?

00:25:15.960 | What are you most proud of accomplishing?

00:25:18.280 | What would you like to accomplish in whatever time you have left?

00:25:23.240 | And so by doing this, it's a really good inventory of our lives, and it might be the first time

00:25:28.800 | that someone actually systematically looks at their life and starts asking those questions.

00:25:33.920 | What was important to me, and now that I'm dying, what do I regret not having the time

00:25:39.600 | to do?

00:25:40.900 | And so again, this is the idea of the life review.

00:25:44.060 | You can go to Google and search "hospice life review" and find some very detailed questionnaires,

00:25:49.160 | but the one-second life review comes back to that most basic question.

00:25:53.480 | If I found out that I was going to die in the next six months, what would I regret never

00:25:57.160 | having the energy, courage, or time to do?

00:26:00.480 | And this is the place where you start to anchor your search for purpose.

00:26:05.360 | And I want to be clear here.

00:26:07.240 | I think we search for anchors of purpose, but we don't find purpose, we create purpose.

00:26:13.280 | So it's a very active pursuit, but most of us can look back at our lives and start thinking

00:26:18.800 | about what some of those anchors are.

00:26:21.000 | So the dying are very clear because they start thinking about, "Boy, I really wish I did

00:26:25.360 | X or pursued Y."

00:26:27.760 | I encourage all of you now to do the same thing.

00:26:30.520 | What are some of those anchors, those things that were important to you?

00:26:34.260 | A life review is one way to do it.

00:26:36.840 | There are several other exercises you can do to start working on them, but what are

00:26:40.520 | some of those anchors that you can then actively build a life of purpose around?

00:26:45.640 | Because ultimately, you're going to have to create purpose.

00:26:48.300 | You don't find it.

00:26:49.300 | You certainly don't find it on Instagram.

00:26:52.520 | That's basically trying to take someone else's sense of purpose and make it your own, and

00:26:55.920 | that almost never makes us happy.

00:26:59.200 | To follow up on that, I do think that the Instagram culture is contributing to this

00:27:05.720 | sort of live for today type mentality.

00:27:09.420 | Can you talk about that?

00:27:10.420 | How social media and trying to put out a certain persona for the public can influence some

00:27:17.120 | of the things that people do that maybe don't contribute to their personal well-being?

00:27:22.760 | I think we have a lot of societal ideas of what purpose should look like.

00:27:29.400 | I hate to say it, but it's really been sold to us.

00:27:31.640 | Look at the marketing industry.

00:27:33.320 | Look at the ad industry.

00:27:35.600 | That was before, and now look at the social media influencer industry.

00:27:40.280 | Basically, someone is trying to sell to you what purpose is, most likely to put money

00:27:46.520 | in their own pockets.

00:27:48.920 | All of these images that are bombarding us of people working out and wearing fabulous

00:27:53.720 | clothes and going to fabulous places sounds great, and if you are searching for purpose,

00:28:01.200 | it's really easy to co-opt someone else's sense of purpose and try to make it your own.

00:28:07.080 | The problem is, unless those things deeply speak to you, you may spend money on that

00:28:12.000 | course or take that expensive vacation, but it may not really fill you up.

00:28:18.040 | Big part of finding purpose is to let go of everyone else's purpose and to start looking

00:28:22.560 | inward at what lights you up, because for everyone, that can be slightly different.

00:28:28.080 | Two of us can both be lit up by the same thing, but for all the people in this room, each

00:28:35.280 | of us might have something different.

00:28:36.780 | My wife likes to buy coach purses on eBay.

00:28:41.720 | This is not going where you think it is.

00:28:45.340 | There's a problem, though.

00:28:46.380 | When you buy a coach purse on eBay, it could be a fake, so guess what?

00:28:52.580 | There's this guy who you can take.

00:28:55.600 | When they put the purse on eBay, they take a picture of it, and a lot of times there's

00:28:58.880 | some numbers on the tag, and they take a picture of that.

00:29:01.440 | There's a guy who, for free, you can send him those pictures, and he will authenticate

00:29:06.300 | it online for you, and then you can go buy it and know that it's authentic, and the guy

00:29:11.920 | doesn't charge a thing.

00:29:13.560 | You know why?

00:29:14.560 | Because the guy worked for coach for 30 years, loves the company, and loved what he did.

00:29:19.180 | That is purpose, and there's not a single other person in this room that's going to

00:29:22.300 | have that purpose, but that must light this guy up, right?

00:29:28.380 | You can't get that stuff off of Instagram.

00:29:31.980 | You can't learn about that kind of thing on Facebook.

00:29:35.880 | We are very unique individuals, and for one person, it might be collecting special, you

00:29:41.460 | know, rare metals.

00:29:43.500 | For another person, it might be writing books.

00:29:46.280 | For another person, it might be teaching people about finance.

00:29:49.140 | I don't want you to think you're here and it's not bringing purpose.

00:29:53.500 | For many of you out there, teaching finance or learning to help people with their money

00:29:58.380 | or teaching in general might be a big part of your purpose, so it's not like we're being

00:30:01.660 | frivolous by being here, but be brave enough to ask yourself what really matters to you,

00:30:08.740 | not what society tells you, not what Instagram tells you, but what really lights you up.

00:30:13.260 | When are you your best self, and what are you doing at that time?

00:30:16.580 | Jordan, maybe you can talk about your own path while you were still a physician, trying

00:30:22.220 | to figure out what was your purpose.

00:30:26.980 | What about what you're doing now really lit you up?

00:30:29.600 | Maybe you can talk about that sort of journey.

00:30:33.100 | So I'm 50 years old, and I finally have come to terms with my purpose, and the reason why

00:30:39.620 | is I Googled my name, and it said, you know, Google put some descriptive information, and

00:30:43.620 | the first thing that came up was "writer," and it filled my heart with joy at the age

00:30:48.540 | of 50 seeing this, and the reason why is I finally felt seen by Google a search engine.

00:30:57.380 | What does this mean?

00:30:58.760 | There was always a writer in me, there was always a communicator, but I had submerged

00:31:03.740 | that sense of purpose and identity, A, because my father died and I felt like I had to cosmically

00:31:08.960 | fix that, but B, because somewhere deep down inside I told myself that I could never succeed

00:31:14.540 | or that wasn't a profession.

00:31:16.180 | See, being a doctor is a profession, and you can do that, and you can make a lot of money,

00:31:19.620 | and you can get awards and accolades, but I never saw a path as a writer or a communicator.

00:31:26.200 | That was something I did in my free time.

00:31:27.860 | That was a hobby, and so I pursued it as a hobby.

00:31:31.380 | I spent all my time being a doctor, and I would fit writing a blog into that, you know,

00:31:35.900 | 30 minutes at lunchtime when I was grabbing something to eat, or I'd wait till the kids

00:31:39.380 | went to bed, and I was yawning because I hadn't slept in 30 hours, but yet I was scrolling

00:31:44.220 | down that blog post without editing it and hearing the next day about how many grammatical

00:31:48.340 | errors I made by the public who was then commenting on it, because I didn't have time or energy.

00:31:53.900 | I pushed these essential, important things away because I somehow convinced myself that

00:31:59.080 | they weren't good enough to be purpose.

00:32:01.860 | I had to become financially independent to finally give myself permission, and even then

00:32:06.980 | it was difficult to be the person who Google has clearly told me I should be.

00:32:15.400 | But what I'm realizing is maybe younger people don't need to do that.

00:32:19.540 | Maybe it's not all black and white, but there's shades of gray.

00:32:22.660 | Maybe we can do jobs that we don't love to make money and yet still build in a sense

00:32:27.100 | of purpose into our lives.

00:32:28.840 | The lucky ones of us might be able to find a job that also lights us up and builds purpose,

00:32:34.220 | but I'm not Pollyanna.

00:32:35.220 | I don't think it needs to be.

00:32:37.140 | But think about how much better off we would all be if we could start building our financial

00:32:42.100 | future, having an idea of what purpose looks like, and then incorporate it, realizing what

00:32:47.780 | the tradeoffs are, realizing what working those extra nights and weekends means, and

00:32:53.460 | then deciding whether it's worthwhile or not.

00:32:56.780 | The truth of the matter is we've mostly been doing this blind.

00:32:59.900 | We've convinced ourselves that some monetary goal is what should drive us, and we haven't

00:33:05.620 | looked past it.

00:33:06.620 | We haven't seen past the mirage.

00:33:09.060 | And so I had to give myself permission to see past the mirage, but the only way I could

00:33:13.220 | personally do it is I had to have tons of money.

00:33:16.140 | What I'm trying to convince younger people now is that we should actually look at purpose

00:33:20.420 | first and then build a financial framework around it.

00:33:27.060 | >> We're receiving some questions.

00:33:28.580 | Here's a good one.

00:33:29.700 | What are some of the common or specific regrets you've heard from your hospice patients?

00:33:34.220 | >> Oh, my God, I mean, they're various.

00:33:37.140 | I mean, they tend to focus on I never did that thing that was important to me.

00:33:42.060 | I never fixed that relationship that was broken.

00:33:47.380 | I didn't spend enough time doing things that were important to me.

00:33:51.540 | It's much easier to say what they don't regret.

00:33:55.760 | They don't regret not working more.

00:33:58.140 | They don't regret not having more money.

00:34:00.140 | They don't regret not having enough things.

00:34:02.140 | I mean, it is true.

00:34:04.060 | Sometimes I walk into a patient's room, someone who's on hospice, and they are surrounded

00:34:08.940 | by material things, but it's almost never those material things themselves that are

00:34:12.780 | important.

00:34:13.820 | It's the meaning behind them.

00:34:15.460 | It's the memories that they evoke.

00:34:18.820 | It's that these things happen to be an outer extension of who they are on the inside.

00:34:23.920 | And so, again, the number of regrets are as varied as the number of people.

00:34:29.500 | What I find more interesting is what people don't regret.

00:34:34.700 | What do hospice patients say about their spiritual goals or their faith goals?

00:34:39.620 | Again, that's incredibly varied, and it depends on the purpose.

00:34:45.220 | If religion and spirituality are important to you, make that part of your purpose.

00:34:50.600 | Engage in things which connect you to that religion or to that feeling of spirituality.

00:34:57.140 | I don't know if I said this clear enough in the book.

00:35:00.820 | Winning the game is not about getting to financial independence, and it's not about purpose,

00:35:05.140 | and it's not about identity.

00:35:07.260 | It's actually about connections and community.

00:35:10.280 | And almost everything we do ends up in service of that.

00:35:15.180 | So especially in the book, I talk a lot about how we find our sense of purpose.

00:35:18.740 | I talk a lot about how we think about identity.

00:35:21.180 | I talk a lot less about connections, and the reason why is connections and community naturally

00:35:26.820 | flow from the first two.

00:35:29.440 | When you start doing things that deeply interest you, and you get a better hold of who you

00:35:33.740 | are as a person, whether you mean to or not, you are going to create communities.

00:35:39.940 | And again, I would go back to Jack Bogle.

00:35:42.420 | Jack Bogle was doing something deeply, deeply purposeful to him.

00:35:47.820 | He wasn't doing it necessarily probably to create a community, but he created that community

00:35:53.580 | nonetheless, because we are drawn to people who are intentional and authentic about doing

00:35:59.680 | things that light them up.

00:36:01.580 | We all know people like this in our world, and we want to be around them.

00:36:06.660 | And if you can find someone who has something that lights them up that is similar to something

00:36:10.240 | that lights you up, that connection will be stronger and more enduring, and you will change

00:36:16.480 | that person, and that person will change you more.

00:36:19.360 | And if you multiply that by tens or thousands, you find, and this comes back to this idea

00:36:24.640 | of impact, the difference between big P purpose and little P purpose, if you pursue your little

00:36:29.240 | P purpose and find what lights you up, you will impact the people around you, who will

00:36:35.200 | impact the people around them, who will impact the people around them, and a hundred years

00:36:39.480 | from now, there will be thousands of people who are touched by your life, and they won't

00:36:43.320 | even know your name.

00:36:47.080 | Let's talk about parents and how they should think about this when they're talking to their

00:36:52.480 | children as their children are kind of picking a career path, or maybe they have picked a

00:36:56.640 | career path, how they should counsel their children to help, you know, find the right

00:37:02.180 | purpose.

00:37:03.180 | I was inspired listening to Michelle and Kevin yesterday talk about how they really looked

00:37:09.240 | at their kids and looked at what lit them up and urged them to pursue those career paths

00:37:14.480 | regardless of the remuneration that might be associated with them.

00:37:18.620 | Talk about that.

00:37:19.620 | Let me parrot a little bit about what I think Michelle and Kevin said.

00:37:25.120 | If you find your purpose, that's the hard thing, you'll find a way to make the money.

00:37:30.560 | There are countless ways to make money, there are countless ways to maximize a purposeful

00:37:34.880 | job, and there are countless ways to side hustle.

00:37:38.040 | The purpose is actually the hardest part of the equation, and again, I'm not Pollyanna

00:37:42.560 | about it.

00:37:43.560 | It's fine to say, "Look, I think I'm going to live a long life, and I can go into engineering,

00:37:49.880 | and I can work really hard for 10 years, and that's going to create enough money that I

00:37:53.960 | can then pull back from engineering and do something that's more purposeful for me."

00:37:57.640 | And if you are aware of that and thoughtful about it and authentic about it, I think that's

00:38:03.040 | a reasonable tradeoff to make, as long as you know that it's a tradeoff.

00:38:08.120 | Other people will say, "You know what?

00:38:10.440 | Life is short, I could die tomorrow like my father did, and I'm going to do something

00:38:14.080 | I love today, and maybe there are financial consequences.

00:38:17.120 | Maybe I may not be able to retire until 65 or 70, but I'm going to enjoy every moment

00:38:22.680 | of the life I'm living now."

00:38:24.720 | These are all choices, and none of them are bad.

00:38:27.880 | What's bad is going through life with blinders on your eyes and not even thinking about it.

00:38:34.440 | Have you encountered patients where that was a regret, where they felt like they were in

00:38:39.960 | that mode where they were just trying to maximize their earnings while they were young, and

00:38:44.720 | they just worked so hard at the expense of everything else they might have considered

00:38:50.200 | important?

00:38:51.200 | I mean, I tell a story in the book, and I refer to the person as the patriarch, but

00:38:56.720 | this was a gentleman who had a multibillion-dollar industry that he had created and had enough

00:39:03.680 | money to buy the hospital wing in which he died in, but his heirs were all busy fighting

00:39:09.320 | over his money and basically were just kind of counting the time until he died so they

00:39:12.820 | could move on.

00:39:14.100 | And I remember very clearly him having a sense of, "I did this all wrong because I'm sitting

00:39:19.200 | in a hospital room alone.

00:39:21.720 | Yes, my family members are doing the perfunctory visiting, et cetera, but they were more interested

00:39:27.720 | in the board meeting and who is going to end up taking over the company."

00:39:31.560 | And we often talk about Maslow's Pyramid, right, this idea that self-actualization is

00:39:37.320 | at the top and our economic needs are at the bottom, but I think we look at it all wrong.

00:39:42.940 | I think there are plenty of people who totally have their economic needs covered and are

00:39:46.800 | nowhere near self-actualization or understanding their purpose or what's important to them.

00:39:50.880 | And I've had patients who've died in poverty who had such loving and meaningful lives,

00:39:58.480 | and yet they couldn't afford the basics and were worried about paying for the heat.

00:40:04.040 | So I get it.

00:40:05.040 | I get this idea that we have to have enough money so that we can even start thinking about

00:40:09.080 | those other things, but I think we have to flatten the pyramid a little bit, and I think

00:40:13.720 | we have to think about all of them at the same time.

00:40:16.000 | I don't think you can afford to wait to think about purpose.

00:40:19.120 | I wanted to follow up on something Mike Piper's been talking about, this idea of how it's

00:40:26.560 | suboptimal for people to save and save and save and not, if they have more than enough,

00:40:34.880 | to die with a bunch of money and give their kids who are then in their 60s, you know,

00:40:41.300 | this inheritance, how it's ideal if you can try to find a way to do some lifetime giving.

00:40:46.400 | Do you have any reflections on that concept, Jordan?

00:40:49.520 | Yeah, I mean, part of living a life of purpose is to connect and make connections and community

00:40:57.720 | with the people around you.

00:40:59.200 | So you can wait till you die, obviously, to give away all your money, but what an amazing

00:41:04.720 | effect it has to do that while you're alive and can talk to those people and can be involved

00:41:10.600 | with them and can see your money doing well in the world.

00:41:14.240 | So, you know, I think either is okay, and I love this idea that people want to pass

00:41:19.200 | on their wealth and to do good with it.

00:41:22.880 | But why not do that now, like Paul Merriman, in fact, is doing, right?

00:41:26.600 | He just gave a huge amount of money to an educational institution.

00:41:31.280 | He will be able to live in that purpose now.

00:41:36.800 | And he will be able to go and teach at that institution.

00:41:39.520 | And not only did he then give the money, but will be able to continue in a sense in his

00:41:44.000 | purpose as he goes and gives lectures and interacts with people and changes lives.

00:41:49.720 | So I think you can wait.

00:41:51.840 | But if you can get to that point where you're comfortable with enough, which a lot of us

00:41:55.920 | still have trouble with that, but if you can get to that point where you're comfortable

00:41:59.120 | with enough, why not live some of those things out now?

00:42:04.340 | You have been aligned with the FIRE community, the Financial Independence Retire Early community.

00:42:11.020 | We had Brad Barrett here yesterday, who is also a FIRE guy.

00:42:17.220 | But let's talk about the evolution of FIRE, because I'm happy to see that it seems to

00:42:21.820 | have moved away from the RE, the retire early, to be more on the financial independence piece.

00:42:27.820 | Can you talk about your perspective on that issue?

00:42:30.260 | Yeah.

00:42:31.260 | Brad was interesting because he wanted to make sure at the beginning of his talk, he

00:42:34.180 | said, look, we don't really talk about FIRE anymore.

00:42:36.420 | We talk about F-I, financial independence.

00:42:39.240 | And the reason why is the movement really has evolved quite a bit.

00:42:44.220 | At the beginning of this movement, I call that, people have been talking about financial

00:42:47.220 | independence forever.

00:42:48.220 | I mean, go back hundreds of years, Benjamin Franklin, other people have been talking about

00:42:50.860 | financial independence.

00:42:52.220 | But it really caught hold in the 2000s.

00:42:55.300 | And at that time, a lot of people were involved in the movement were young, particularly men,

00:43:01.140 | often highly educated, like engineers, who did not like their jobs, and wanted to do

00:43:05.740 | what I call front loading the sacrifice.

00:43:08.160 | They wanted to work really hard, make a lot of money, even if they had to grind it out

00:43:12.020 | and not enjoy themselves, and then hit a retirement date and never work again.

00:43:19.220 | That was kind of the beginning vision of what FIRE, financial independence, could be.

00:43:24.000 | But it has evolved over the years.

00:43:26.880 | And it's really moved much more to lifestyle design.

00:43:30.600 | So this idea that I can grind it out and do something I don't like and retire early and

00:43:37.700 | then find freedom then, or I can start building freedom in my life now.

00:43:42.240 | And instead of thinking of work as anathema, we can start thinking about creating the work

00:43:47.340 | environment we can live with, and maybe prolong that period and retire later.

00:43:52.300 | So here's where we see these ideas like Slow-Fi and Coast-Fi, and we can go into what all

00:43:55.900 | those are.

00:43:56.900 | These are ways of building in the life you want to live today, instead of deferring it

00:44:01.540 | to some date 10 or 15 years down the road.

00:44:05.700 | And so I think this has been a really nice evolution to realize that we don't have to

00:44:10.840 | wait to some long-term plan to start pursuing purpose and doing the things we want.

00:44:16.840 | We can start doing those today.

00:44:18.680 | And in fact, it's okay to prolong your work life, because if you can create a situation

00:44:25.180 | in which you really like your life and still work, then you can do that for much longer

00:44:30.300 | periods of time.

00:44:31.300 | I often like to speculate what my life would have been if I had discovered hospice at the

00:44:36.500 | beginning of my career.

00:44:38.140 | I guarantee I would have made a lot less money, but I probably would have enjoyed myself more,

00:44:44.440 | and I wouldn't have been able to retire in my 40s, but I probably wouldn't have wanted

00:44:47.740 | to retire in my 40s because I would have been much more filled up by my job.

00:44:52.320 | And again, I think either way is okay, as long as we're thinking about it, but many

00:44:57.740 | young people today are opting for let's design a lifestyle that we enjoy both today and tomorrow.

00:45:05.680 | And I think it's a much softer, better version.

00:45:09.860 | And Christine and I have talked a lot about this idea of the conception of work.

00:45:14.140 | A lot of people think work is a bad thing, so fire was great because you get to escape

00:45:19.180 | work.

00:45:20.180 | But the truth of the matter is, I consider myself retired, but I do all the things that

00:45:24.000 | people would call work 40 hours a week anyway.

00:45:26.920 | I mean, I produce and create a podcast, which is a lot of work.

00:45:30.640 | It's more joyful for me, so I don't dread it, I enjoy it.

00:45:34.200 | I write books.

00:45:35.200 | I do things that even, God forbid, make me money.

00:45:37.960 | I don't do them because they make me money, I do them because they're joyful, because

00:45:41.280 | they feel purposeful to me.

00:45:43.160 | So if you imagine you're going to work your whole life, the question is, what type of

00:45:50.220 | work do you want to do and how important is getting paid for that work?

00:45:53.680 | And you can toggle between those things to design the lifestyle you want today.

00:45:58.820 | And so young people have been very savvy about taking what was a very stringent message about

00:46:04.200 | how to "fire," and they're turning it into something better, and I think it's fantastic.

00:46:10.260 | A related question is, I have friends in my peer group who really love what they're doing.

00:46:16.460 | They love their work.

00:46:17.580 | And it's sort of insulting, we've commented among ourselves, you have people saying, "When

00:46:22.220 | will you retire?"

00:46:23.220 | And you're like, "Well, I could retire, but I really like what I'm doing."

00:46:26.980 | There's sort of a thing in this culture that if you hit a certain age, it's time to go.

00:46:32.700 | Not necessarily.

00:46:34.140 | And that's why I love the term "financial independence," because financial independence

00:46:37.820 | says I am financially where I need to be, but then you get to choose what work looks

00:46:43.500 | like in your life.

00:46:44.500 | And for some people, that will be continuing doing exactly what they're doing now.

00:46:48.580 | And again, in a lot of ways, that's winning the game.

00:46:52.000 | Because you know what?

00:46:53.040 | If you take a job at the age of 22 that you love, and that supports your monthly needs,

00:46:59.420 | assuming you don't become disabled or have a problem, you're pretty much financially

00:47:02.840 | independent at 22.

00:47:05.340 | I mean, you're doing something that's purpose-filled, that makes you feel connected to the world

00:47:10.580 | and helps you build your sense of identity, and it's paying the bills.

00:47:14.700 | There is no reason to ever change until you have to.

00:47:18.940 | Now, does that mean we shouldn't save for retirement?

00:47:21.300 | No, because we know that the way you feel at 22 might not be the way you feel at 40.

00:47:25.380 | At 22, I couldn't even imagine doing anything but being a doctor.

00:47:29.420 | At the age of 50, I only want to be a doctor about 10 hours a week.

00:47:35.040 | But I didn't know that.

00:47:36.320 | So of course we should save for retirement.

00:47:38.500 | Of course we should build our net worth.

00:47:40.360 | Of course we should invest wisely.

00:47:43.180 | But don't be afraid to love your life.

00:47:47.140 | And if that includes the work you're doing, being employed and getting paid for it, that's

00:47:52.380 | fantastic.

00:47:53.380 | >> Well, Jordan, thank you so much for being here.

00:47:58.140 | We so appreciate your insights, love your book.

00:48:01.220 | I hope everyone else enjoys this.

00:48:03.380 | Please join me in thanking Jordan.

00:48:04.380 | >> Thank you so much.

00:48:05.380 | [ Applause ]

00:48:05.380 | >> Thank you so much.

00:48:06.380 | [ Applause ]

00:48:06.380 | >> Thank you.

00:48:07.380 | [ Applause ]

00:48:07.380 | >> Thank you.

00:48:08.380 | [ Applause ]

00:48:08.380 | >> Thank you.

00:48:09.380 | [ Applause ]

00:48:10.380 | >> Thank you.

00:48:11.380 | [ Applause ]

00:48:11.380 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Bogleheads® Conference 2023 - Jordan Grumet on Living without Regrets

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