What life you want
You might ask: “But isn’t this a privileged way to live?” Yes, I do feel very privileged that for me happiness is relatively cheap. My ideal day doesn’t require me to be rich or powerful or important. It just requires that I be good enough at something to sell my services on the open market and strong enough to say no to things that are beyond my needs. That is a privilege, and it’s more accessible than we think. There are plenty of billionaires who don’t have it, plenty of ordinary people who have never lost it.
So it doesn’t take some enormous amount of money. Nor do you have to be famous or well-connected or wildly successful.
It takes discipline.
The discipline to figure out what you actually want your life to look like.
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
In the words of Andy Grove: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.” Resource allocation works pretty much the same way in our lives and careers.
[my classmates who inadvertently invested in lives of hollow happiness] prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children. And when those immediate returns were delivered, they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process. “I can’t devote less time to my job because I won’t get that promotion—and I need that promotion …”