And then he said, “If you work too much you won’t have time to make money”. My dad laughed but I kept thinking about that. A month later I doubled the number of people willing to read my book in one hour and my website hit a new record of views in a single day. But nothing of that matters because today I saw an adviser to help me with my curriculum and she said it was “too broad”. My life is written in there. Maybe my whole life is too broad. Am I doomed for that? Maybe I am, but it doesn’t matter either, because one year ago I was sitting at the edge of a fountain in front of the Buckingham Palace in a beautiful sunny day with my girlfriend, we were talking about our expectations for the future, and then I told her, “I feel that it doesn’t matter where I will go to. It doesn’t matter if I will be in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, or here in the UK, I feel that I will be successful wherever I go”. Then she kissed me and nothing else mattered any more.
In the film In Time people had watches in their arms. When they worked they gained time and things were priced in minutes, hours, days, etc. If they ran out of time they died. Awesome idea.
I don’t have a written book but I doubled the number of people willing to buy the book I’m thinking of writing. James Altucher said something pretty interesting. He said you should never work full-time, always part-time. Then you would have time to do other activities, and side activities always bring benefits to us. Actually, if these activities provide enough value to enough people you can make money with them. And this money has a potential to be much more than what you would get selling your work time to someone else. Because money comes in when you solve a problem, when you deliver value.
My book will be written in my free time (time I am not working or at University. There is no such thing as free time. Time is valuable), and I believe it will open a bunch of new doors for me. You see a lot of people who make their living with something that began as a hobby. Many of today’s huge companies started that way. Have you heard of Facebook, Digg, Youtube, Google, threadless, LinkedIn or eBay? Well, they all started as a hobby and then became a money machine. That happened because all of these hobbies created value to other people in some way.
We have this pre-conceived idea that we should get a job and work as much as we can so we can make more money and then we can buy more things. It looks like it’s all about buying more things, or better things. But it isn’t really about that, is it? If we stop for a minute and reflect on that, we will notice that the whole idea of it all is that, supposedly, if we have more, or better, things we will have more comfort, and then we will be happier. But look around you. Do you really need more? Aren’t you comfortable at your house? I have a proposal to you. Actually, it is a dare! Why don’t you try to live with less instead of with more?
Why don’t you throw away all these credit cards that only give you headaches? You always feel bad when you use them anyway. Why don’t you try spending less than what you make. Try spending only half what you get in a month. It won’t hurt if you try, you won’t lose any money if it doesn’t work. And if it works you will be saving a lot of money, and I bet that in the end you will, in fact, feel very good.
“Happiness is not having all you want. It is wanting what you have”. If you are trying to spend less, you will start to appreciate more the things you already have and stop thinking about the things stores have to sell you. In the end, you know you don’t really need most of them anyway. Liking the things you have is a big step towards a happier life. Not only material stuff, it is the same with friends, partners, etc.
When you spend less than you get, you start saving, and saving is never bad. Tell me, how often do you hear someone coming to you and saying “I shouldn’t have saved all this money, I really regret that” or “Saving money was the worst decision I ever made”? I bet you never, ever, heard anything close to that. But on the other hand it is quite common to hear people saying “Oh I spent too much”, “Ah I shouldn’t have bought it”. No one ever regrets having saved money, people regret spending it. Moreover, when you save money, you feel more secure, because you know that in an emergency you have money to back you up at the bank.
In the beginning it can be tough, but after some time you begin to notice that, as a matter of fact, you need much less than you thought you needed to live. In a post some months ago, when I was moving from Argentina to Brazil, I wrote “my books, my guitar, my Buzz Lightyear toy, the photos and songs in my hard drive and the picture frame my girlfriend gave me. If I can take that with me I will be satisfied”. These are the things I picked as must haves from everything I have ever had in all my life. In the end, I gave my Buzz Lightyear to my brother and left the picture frame with my dad in Brazil, so he doesn’t forget me. The reality is that I needed even less than I thought. And you too.
When you become unattached to things you become grateful and enjoy much more what you have. That makes you happier and attracts all kinds of good things. For instance, look at Bruce Willis and Nicolas Cage. Bruce Willis is an unattached guy, he is confident and grateful for what he’s got. When he noticed he was going bald, he didn’t go crazy for that. He understood it was time and let his hair go. Now, Nicolas Cage is totally different. He is attached to his hair, he don’t want to lose it, he can’t accept the situation. As a result, Bruce Willis still looks pretty badass and Nicolas Cage looks, at the very least, weird with this chunk of hair coming out of the back of his head.
Nicolas Cage looks like the Red Queen of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
Once you get used to using less money you may be able to reduce the amount of hours you work every day. “But then I will get less money, and then I’ll be saving less money than before”. Yeah, that’s true. But although you will not be making as much money, you will have more time in exchange, and during this extra time you can do whatever you want. You can do things like: living. I believe people work for two reasons: 1) to make money 2) to accomplish something , to be useful to society. If you spend your whole day home you will soon be into some kind of depression. We like to conquer, to accomplish, to build, to feel needed and useful. Grandma wasn’t wrong when she said “Work ennobles the soul”. Three things give pleasure to people: birth, progress and accomplishment. When you work you have these things going on, each to a certain degree.
Now, back to working less hours, when you have more free time you can dedicate yourself to personal projects. These can be nice things that add value to people’s life in some way, or just something that makes you give birth, make progress or accomplish things. Writing a book, taking on a hobby, spending more time with your family, these are all things that can be done in your newly free time — which is not free, you are paying to have it, but just because isn’t free it doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it. Making these things, you are improving your life. You are more relaxed, which makes you more creative, which makes you more productive, which makes you give birth, make progress or accomplish things, which makes you happier.
But what if it doesn’t work with me? What if it goes wrong? Well, if it goes wrong you get the money you didn’t spend and do whatever you were used to doing when you used your whole salary. No side effects.
Know the book audience I doubled? It went from one person to two. Know the website visiting record I talked about? It was 20 people. It’s kind of pathetic. But these things didn’t look so bad when you didn’t know the numbers. Maybe I will never be widely known. But what is wrong with being anonymous? A thousand visitors would be awesome, but the lack of them don’t make it bad. Writing relaxes me, makes me more creative, more productive, happier. And that’s the whole point of everything.