“I hate to give so many caveats, but this does not mean that you take your whole life savings and blow it on whisky and whores, okay? Just so we’re clear. That’s not what I’m recommending.”
Tim Ferris
Around 500 Words From the Tim Ferris Podcast: How to ‘Waste Money’ to Improve the Quality of Your Life (#181)
I’ve modified my older behaviors that were survival behaviors to be more abundance mindset behaviors. I can always make more money. I can’t create more time. At this point, I can’t necessarily fix my health if I ruin it.
So the question that I ask now is okay, my old self would view buying a business class ticket as a waste of money. What other ways can I “waste” money to improve my quality of life? Maybe that’s hiring someone to clean. Maybe that’s taking Uber instead of having a car to deal with for maintenance and insurance and parking and parking tickets and all of that bullshit. Maybe it’s who knows? Fill in the blank.
So I will do journaling exercises where I’ll write down, okay pick a number. Let’s just say – I’m making this up – you have $5,000.00 of disposable income per month, all right? I’m putting aside how much you need to save for whatever you want to save for. So if you have college tuition to save for and so on, you need to do those calculations on your own.
But let’s just say you have $5,000.00 you can do whatever you want with and you’re currently only spending $500.00. You have all these things that are driving you crazy. Well, let’s say I wanted to go crazy and spend $2,000.00 per month. You want to “waste” (so-called waste) $2,000.00 a month to improve your quality of life. What would that look like? What are some crazy things that you could do?
Just journal. Start making a list. Start writing it out. Don’t edit. It’s incredible what you will come up with.
You can then test it on a trial basis for a week or two. That is how I’ve identified some of the smallest changes with the largest quality of life outputs imaginable by doing this very simple exercise. I hate to give so many caveats, but this does not mean that you take your whole life savings and blow it on whisky and whores, okay? Just so we’re clear. That’s not what I’m recommending.
It does mean, however, that you don’t, when you’ve reached a certain level in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, that you don’t make decisions based on a survival mindset that has traveled with you from the sort of shelter/food basis, if that makes sense. It’s taken me a long time to realize that. This type of questioning and these types of journaling exercises and overall a focus on effectiveness and not efficiency, I think, are the drivers behind – long story long – how I decide what to do myself or what to delegate.
