How you write a program can have a dramatic impact on its performance. I once wrote a query against geospatial data that took several hours to complete. After searching extensively online for ways to speed it up, I discovered an optimizer hint, one tiny piece of code, that effectively reduced the time to complete from hours to minutes. I was stunned.
How you make decisions can also have a dramatic impact on the quality of your life. It can affect the enjoyment you experience. It can affect how rested you feel. It can affect whether you find yourself looking back on empty and wasted time or time of great depth and fulfillment. It can’t solve everything, of course. But it can make a world of difference.
This is why money means so much to me. This is why I’ve kept writing here. Sometimes you have to look at things differently, to step outside the mold, to challenge what you see around you. And sometimes you have to challenge your own assumptions.
Some people are born into wealth. They followed a standard path, and that worked for them because they already had all the money they needed to move the pieces into place. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had that situation. You can always try to “brute force” life, and maybe you’ll even be successful at that. But long ago I asked myself…is there a better way? Do I know what I really want in life, and do I know the best way to get there? I think we all need a few optimizer hints from time to time.
I’m not winning any frugality awards. And I don’t believe that frugality for its own sake really has any value. But when you have a clear-cut goal and you don’t have an unlimited fire hose of money, you start to ask, “How can I reach this goal?” Which often leads to another question, “What is the best way to reach this goal?”
It helps to naturally be interested in money and have a knack for thinking in terms of opportunity cost. But I’m always surprised people don’t put more effort into thinking about money. Too often they just want more of it so they can buy more stuff, end of story. Which is boring, but common. People sometimes think I’m obsessed or think I go too far, but really I’d just say that I’m driven. My parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, have really nothing to attract me to their way of life. The big houses, filled to the brim with unused things. Credit card debt. Big expensive cars. Stress and hypertension. A victim mentality, or a god complex. Obviously that’s not everyone, but that was the portrait I’ve always seen in society. Do I want that? Hell no. So why would I follow the advice they passed down to my generation? I wouldn’t. But so many people do. I didn’t want that life, so I decided to engineer a different path.
I recently made what I feel was sort of a bold statement: The most expensive thing you own should not be something you’re ignorant about. I was, and kind of have been, concerned how people might react to that. But it’s something new that I really believe is worth living by. Again, society has sort of painted this picture that ignorance is good and learning anything even remotely blue collar is bad. I once offered to teach a friend how to change a tire, and their response was, “No! I don’t want to learn!” Not trying to pick on them too much, but that’s the general attitude. Why learn when you can pay a professional? And they certainly have a point…if you have that endless fire hose of money. But most of us don’t. The moment you become wholly dependent on those paid professionals, your life becomes that much more fragile. If times are tough, and we all have tough times, you better be sure your hose has enough water to put that fire out. So I think it’s a good principle to live by: The most expensive thing you own should not be something you’re ignorant about. If you own a house, you need to understand it. If you own a car, you need to understand it. If you are unfortunate enough to own a boat, you should understand that, too! Not everyone has the interest or the skill to do the work themselves (hell, I may never change a pan gasket again), but if you can make it through high school, you can sit down with the internet and educate yourself. Now, that doesn’t mean I think you’re horrible if you don’t – not at all. But it’s advice worth following, in my opinion. It’s something I will definitely be keeping in mind.
Mind you, after writing that post, I now feel this also extends to your body, which is why I will be slowly learning more about health. It seems a bit foolish when your body is you to neglect to understand it. You don’t need an advanced degree, but you should understand the important things you can control.
With money, you want to be careful that it doesn’t own you. It shouldn’t be the highest priority in your life. But it should still be a priority. It can affect your relationships, your work, your levels of stress, your future. Money is not the root of all evil; the love of money is. It’s a real shame understanding the caveats of money is so widely ignored or cheapened. Too often, people who get serious about money do so in a get-rich-quick scheme. [Side note, I see this a lot in people who buy investment properties. That rant may still be posted some day]
I’m still trying to discover how to write vigorously without being a complete jerk, but I do pick on high earners a lot. It’s because they’ve built fragile lives for themselves, fragile systems. They have lots of new cars, often a house with expenses, they spend a lot on food, extra toys, and status items (sometimes expensive hobbies), then they complain or play the victim. Wake up! Everybody told you that you had to follow the script, but you don’t. It’s one of the saddest things in the world to see somebody who has so much money but who is convinced that life is terribly difficult and the money isn’t enough. I want to grab them by the shoulders, shake them, and say, “Wake up! You were given the golden ticket, but you can’t even see it! You can live the good life, right now!” But it does take a shift of perspective. If I have any compassion for those people, it’s that shifting perspective often takes awhile, and I understand that.
And what ever happened to creativity? I don’t see much of it these days. There’s no shortage of ways to save, or more efficiently use, money. I’m not a huge fan of frugal tips and lists, but what about strategy? The people who are bold enough to know what they really want in life, to find an efficient way to live that life? It’s not a competition, it’s an invitation to something better.
I try to engineer better decisions into my life. I won’t always succeed, but that won’t stop me from being curious, from learning from mistakes, from putting thought into my actions, behaviors, and patterns. You don’t need that endless fire hose to strategize a better life.