Merry, Merry, Quite Contrary

Your friendly neighborhood blogger is a member of a few book clubs. One FIRE-/personal finance-related, and another not. We’ll call the latter The Normie Book Club . . . cuz we FIRE people are probly a bit nuts.  

One of The Normie Book Club’s members knows the author (we’ll call this person The Author) of a book we recently read and arranged for us to talk to him during our meeting. During our discussion, The Author discussed his writing process. He said he writes every day. I’ve heard of some writers doing this, so the technique wasn’t new to me. A big part of the rationale is that writing is like working out. The more you do it, the easier it becomes and the stronger you get. I don’t do this, but I think it’s good practice. 

Word up

But what The Author said next surprised me. He explained that he writes 1,000 words every day. Never less, and only a bit more if and as necessary. That fascinated me. I mean, why would you stop writing if you’re in a flow state or in the middle of working through some thought/scene/conversation/etc.?! You’d lose so much, I thought. 

The Author explained that it allows for his brain to stop and process the output over the course of many hours, including overnight during sleep, when all sorts of amazing brain processing happens. Also, that every day he essentially must rev up the writing engine from 0 mph, which is sorta like throwing his brain into a pool of icewater. That is, it kinda functions as a shock to his brain and creative juices. 

The Author cited the prolific and successful (and, um, dead) author Graham Greene, relating that Greene wrote EXACTLY 500 words every day. Surprised, we asked him to clarify that meant that if Greene was in the middle of a sentence, he’d stop dead cold. The Author said “Yep!” Wow!, I thought. That, I’d never heard of anyone doing, much less done myself.

I’ve since researched the veracity of the Greene story. The evidence is inconclusive, but I was glad to have heard someone discuss these techniques. 

I relate this story because I think the process (whether The Author’s iteration or Greene’s) is so cool. As to writing, but beyond that, too. 

My original intent for this post was to write some lofty prose focusing on how the process could be helpful/beneficial for those on the path to FIRE. The tl;dr being to temper one’s pace and proceed at a sustainable rate.

But the more I wrote in that regard, the more I found myself wrestling with that thesis and coming back to my longstanding belief that moving faster rather than slower to FIRE is often (as it was for me), the better approach. Sure, a slower pace allows one to, you know, uuummm, enjoy life along the way. But there’s a slight zero-sum game going on. Dollars spent on living life are dollars not invested to buy financial freedom. Put another way, reaching FIRE will happen later than it otherwise might’ve.

I ultimately conceded defeat to the forces of cognitive dissonance.

I hear you asking, Dear Reader, “Well, then, what’s the point of this nonsensical post of yours then?!”

Fear not, Dear Reader, for I started furiously looking for ways to salvage at least part of what I’d written asking the same question. Following is what I settled upon realized. 

While I don’t necessarily think that a slow, methodical approach is (always) the best approach, as I’ve written previously, I do think that thinking differently is bigly beneficial, both for those pursuing FIRE and, just as much, those who’ve achieved it. And the 1,000- or 500-words-per-day approaches are certainly (to me at least) thinking differently. 

I think [differently], therefore I am [FIREing]

For those pursuing FIRE, thinking (radically) differently often is important to break scripts we’ve been given by others as to conventional personal finance and living. That’s sometimes no easy feat. I mean, telling yourself that most of humanity has it all wrong can understandably seem unnerving. Uncomfortable. And maybe just plain wrong. But it’s necessary. 

We in the FIRE community earn, save, and invest differently. This personal-finance-on-steroids approach’s attending financial consequences—i.e., saving more and living on less, if temporarily—often result in us living differently. Maybe fewer (or, for the more hardcore, no) dinners out, drinks on the regular with the boys/girls, and new cars. Or renting instead of buying. Or house hacking when everyone else in your peer group or family lives and breathes owning a single-family home and living in it with no one outside the nuclear family unit. And so on and so on. 

We do these things because we know that this thinking and living differently can have outsized benefits. Outsized benefits that can come in a hurry for those more hardcore. 

Likewise, for those who’ve reached FIRE, having former peers, friends, and family thinking you a deadbeat layabout can be intimidating. That is, if you’re not comfortable with thinking differently. 

Those former peers, friends, and family might want, and try mightily, to draw you back into their “conventional” working world. They not only think they know better, but maybe also are sure that you’re the one who’s off his or her rocker. If you’re (comfortable with) your thinking differently, tho, you’ll think the same about them. 

Imma take a hard stance as to who’s right: it’s most likely you. They think they know personal finance and what to do to retire (they all but certainly have no conception of financial independence). But you know you know it. Of course, you need to be humble enough to admit that you don’t know everything, and that it’s possible you’ve not gotten everything right. But you can take comfort in the fact that you (likely/hopefully) really did make a major effort to educate yourself, and know that those trying to suck you back in likely did no such thing.

So, this thinking differently not only will help you get to where you wanna go, it’ll help you mentally see off the conventional thinkers who’d set you back on your progress and/or suck you back in to the “less-than” life to which you’re defiantly putting up the hand. 

That’s no bad trade off if you ask me.

And in the end . . . 

Just as I don’t think that those authors with more conventional writing processes than The Author and Greene are necessarily doing it wrong, I likewise don’t think everyone not pursuing FIRE and necessarily thinking differently is doing it wrong. To each his or her own. Cuz it takes diff’rent strokes to move the world.