Chipping Away
“The world gives you a formula for happiness: bust your pick, play by the rules, work really hard, get a little bit of good luck, bank it, die happy. And it is not right.”
Whilst in Costa Rica earlier this year I read a book that I have thought about a lot since. I haven’t written about it yet, I think because there were so many big life ideas in it that I didn’t know which one to take.
I just heard the author of the book, Arthur Brooks, on a podcast with Peter Attia (my latest obsession) and it focused my thoughts.
The book is called “Strength to Strength” and it’s a guide on how to find meaning and fulfillment in the second half of life. As we go through life, generally sometime in our 40s we slowly realise that the promise of money, power, pleasure and fame (or admiration and prestige), that we may have spent the last few decades chasing, is a false promise.
But, we are not sure what to replace that with. If we don’t continue to seek those things, what do we do? How do we find happiness?
Guy chipping away at Mt Kilimanjaro (2019)
Arthur asked himself the question, “Can the right formula for a happy life really be to add more and more, until I die?”
Obviously, the answer to that question is no.
To understand why the answer is no, we need to understand satisfaction – how we get it, and how we keep it.
We are taught by society that the formula for satisfaction is simple:
Satisfaction = getting what you want
And getting what you want comes from hard work and professional success. But we can never get enough success. We have to keep going, running and running on the treadmill, just to get the next dopamine hit.
It’s not really about getting what you want, but more about continually getting what you want:
Satisfaction = continually getting what you want
Evolutionarily it makes sense. Our cavemen ancestors only cared about survival and mating. Arthur writes, “a ‘rich’ caveman had a few extra animal skins and arrowheads, and maybe a few baskets of corn and dried fish to spare. Having more food stashed away than the caveman next door made him more appealing to the mate.” (Things were simple back then).
And here’s the next problem. It’s not just success that we chase, it’s relative success.
We only want to be a bit richer and a bit more successful than our neighbour. Even though we know it’s ridiculous, the urge to have more than others tugs at us relentlessly. It’s an upstream swim that we have to face every day.
To take the formula one step further:
Success = continually having more than others
AND
Failure = having less
Again, we know it’s ridiculous. But what else do we do?
Arthur teaches how we toss out all that bad maths in the formulas above and use a new equation:
Satisfaction = What you have / What you want
Satisfaction = What you have DIVIDED by What you want
Evolution and biology have us focusing on the numerator, the top of the equation – the haves.
What we actually need to focus on is the wants; the denominator of the equation.
If we don’t have a wants management strategy, as our haves go up our wants will go up by more – if the denominator of the equation is going up then satisfaction is going down, obviously making us less happy.
“I have seen this a hundred times. Someone sees tremendous material success but feels less and less satisfied, the richer and more famous she gets. The Mercedes brings her less satisfaction at age fifty than the Chevy did at age thirty. Why? Because now she wants a Ferrari. She doesn’t even know what’s going on – she always just gets back on the treadmill and starts running, running, running.”
We need to stop managing our haves and start managing our wants.
In his book Arthur talks about visiting a museum in Taiwan which houses the greatest collection of Chinese art and artifacts in the world. It was whilst he was there that he understood the difference between Western and Eastern art.
Western art starts with nothing – a canvas, say – and then adds to it – brush stroke by brush stroke. The artist keeps adding until the brush stroke does nothing more to the painting, and only then does she stop.
Eastern art on the other hand, Eastern art starts with something and chips away until the art is revealed. An Eastern sculpture of the Buddha started as an uncarved block of jade. The art always existed but it was not visible until the artist took away the stone that is not part of the sculpture.
The first half of our life is usually a canvas, but at some point in our 40s or early 50s, the canvas is full. The next brush stroke does nothing. It adds nothing.
In the second half of our life we need to work, not at adding things to our life, but at taking things away. “We need to chip away the jade boulder of our lives until we find ourselves.”
That is how we manage our wants and therefore increase our satisfaction and happiness.
“You can have a big fulfilling life that’s enviable by any outward standard, but at the same time, not be chained to it in this insidious success addiction that brings so many successful people so much unhappiness.”
When successful, wealthy people in their late 40s and 50s come to us for financial advice, often they have built wealth the ‘canvas’ way. They have added line after line after line to their family balance sheet – another house, another investment, another account. The brush never stopped!
Our job becomes the chipping away – the removal rather than the addition. We keep chipping away until we have a wonderfully simple financial life. A financial life where every line item is perfectly optimized and is a reflection of the life the family wants to lead.
Georgie
georgie@libertywealth.ky