How to Reverse Engineer Your Life:

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

My friends don’t get it. They can’t understand my passion, and my drive. I tried to encourage them to stop playing computer games or watching tv – and to work towards financial freedom, but they don’t listen. How can they? They don’t have the same crystal clear vision of what they want. 

Most people it seems are lost. Trying to get through the day without looking out the window at tomorrow. It doesn’t seem to me to be very productive. Working at a bank, I have watched real life drama unfold as people slowly lost their grip on their finances and spiral out of control. Every time I’ve seen it I’ve noted one important fact. Their economic turmoil was a caused by a combination of events, but the common thread is a failure to plan ahead. A failure to save, a failure to act accordingly. 

I’ve been there. When I was originating loans and commission only, I watched my credit card balances sky rocket and it went from being able to pay off my card with half of one big loan to needing at least 5 loans to them off. I was in denial. 

What I’ve learned is, life is like a boat tossed out at sea. Either you can point the boat in the direction you want to go and start paddling – wind be damned, or you can kick back with your feet up and let the current take you wherever it wants.

Successful people define their lives, while most people let life define them. 

If you want to be successful you need to come up with a plan and work backwards. You need to be able to see it, picture what it feels like to be where you want to be, and be able to almost live it when you close your eyes. It has to be real to you. In my mind I’ve already done it, all I have to do is duplicate it. 

You build your plan by really considering what it is you want to do with your life. You have to spend a lot of hours unwrapping yourself and understanding who you are and what is important to you and what you feel is necessary. For me personally, I’m a minimalist. Antoine De Saint-Exupery said “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” That is something that I agree with my entire heart, soul, and body. I measure success in time, not money and feel that my real goal is to need as little money as possible.

For each of us it is different, but a mature point of view is needed to be able to reverse engineer your life. I recommend taking out a notepad and writing straight from your heart about where you want to go and who you want to be.  Some people just wind up in a wonderful place but I believe most people in great places intentionally put themselves there after figuring out things along the way. I don’t think you can know where you want to go unless you know yourself and your spouse. You have to know what principles guide you. Why do you do what you do? What gets you out of bed in the morning? If you’re having trouble figuring it out, it’s a good indication that you need to make a significant change.

We spend 1/3 of each day sleeping and another 1/3 working so that leaves us 1/3 of the rest of our lives to do whatever want with, unless you cut hours from work. I read a statistic yesterday that made me want to puke. It said the average household leaves the television on for 5 hours a day. So how much time are you spending living life if you work for 8 hours, sleep for 8 hours and watch tv for 8 hours? That hardly leaves you enough time to take a dump and cram some junk food down your throat. So you wake up, zone out throughout your dull, boring job, and then come home, eat some sort of pre-prepared meal, and then zone out in front of the tele for another 5 hours before your fat, lifeless body passes out on the couch and somebody has to wake you up so you can then drag yourself to bed, so you can wake up and do it all over again.

There’s more to life than cubicles and paying bills and living on somebody else’s time frames. 

Let’s take some comments (if anybody’s reading this yet) on any tips people have for meeting their goals.

“You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” -Tyler Durden

“You