final_id
07-18-2007, 07:36 AM
I wonder if this sub-forum is the right place to post this. Well, here goes. Maybe it belongs under "Liberation" but I'm already typing.
1. I love the book. I recommend it everywhere. The best part about it is, that Mr. Ferriss (Tim?) really "gets" what it means to want OUT of work precisely BECAUSE it is work which is preventing fulfillment, contribution to society, living a productive healthy worthwhile what-cha-ma-call-it GOOD life. This is a new paradigm. For years we've assumed "work is a good thing." From the Protestant Work Ethic right down to people as enlightened and enlightening as Richard Bolles (author of "What Color Is Your Parachute") the assumption has always been, that "idle hands make for the devil's work." Even the fellow who contradicted Tim on the "Today" show said, "The happiest people in the world work really hard all day at things they love." Well, I say, if it's things they love, then IT'S NOT WORK. And working in an office, with a boss, and a dusty computer keyboard, and bad coffee, and getting there at dawn, and staying later than they pay you to stay, IS NOT WORTH LOVING. And Tim gets this concept. (I wish my mom did. Boy, the LOOKS she gives me when I say to concerned people who ask, "What kind of work do you WANT to do?" that their question sounds to me like asking "Would you rather be hanged or shot by firing line, Mister O'Connell?")
2. I recommend the following book, which also "gets" the whole project, about the fact that working forever is really idiotic.
Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence
# ISBN-10: 0140286780
# ISBN-13: 978-0140286786
by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
This is more a money- and time-management scheme, than a whole world view. You plot your expenses, learn to live within your means, make some long-term investments, and figure out how you can retire early. They tell you how to graph "life energy" versus the money you're making or spending -- like, do you really want to lose two hours of work at the office for that seat at the rock concert? And other "math chart" type tricks. There's a lot of frugality and skin-flint scrimping in this one, so it doesn't exactly coincide with jetting off to Rio for a weekend. But it's been around for about thirty years, now, so it's stood the test of time. Recently an uneducated immigrant non-English-speaking chamber-maid-type cleaner at a hotel was interviewed on national TV, as having "retired" to a comfortable home after seven years of work in the hotel. All on the basis of the book.
3. I can't stand work. I just thought I'd repeat that. :) Part of the trouble, for me, is the whole concept of "working hard FOR SOMEONE ELSE." All my life I've wanted to be famous, to do or be someone, to really hit it big. I recently found out that one of my heroes, the chanteuse Francoise Hardy (French, 1960s), started auditioning for record companies when she was 16 years old. This surprised and shocked me. I couldn't possibly get back to 16 years old to start my music career over -- I'm 41 now, and I've always wanted to be excellent at music, but I never had the opportunity or the "right" to touch an instrument until I was 24, because I was strongly encouraged against it and I FOOLISHLY listened to other people. Since then, I got started, but I'm just not as fast a learner with the muscle memory that kids have. Well, two things come to mind from this self-bemoaning piece of biography:
A. Maybe I'm learning it all wrong. Can Tim's suggestions about learning languages fit learning instruments? I want to be a hot sexy pop star, get all the girls, and play my music for the world. Really, I do mean that. I put it kind of flippantly, but honestly, who DOESN'T want to be famous and playing at music all day? :)
B. I can't apply the whole "get more productive at work" thing, because all I ever do at work is someone else's work. File this, chart that. "Don't you want to be productive at stuff?" I'm often asked. I do my work quite well, what little of it I can suffer before someone notices "you're not happy here" and fires me again. People always say I'm super smart, but no, I'm not impressed with the work I've ever been allowed to do. It's trivial. It's make-work, the sort of thing that nobody will ever put in a history book. "And many many other people did their daily jobs, had children who were raised to do the same, and eventually died." I don't want to be one of those people. I want to be Michael Jordan, or Mohamed Ali, or Francoise Hardy, or Erik Satie, or Winston Churchill, or Charles Dickens, or heck I'll settle for Nathan Lane or even just Eva Gabor. Put ME in the history books. Let ME be ME, not someone else's lackey. Business bores me. Products, sales, advertising, research ... so what? I CAN do it, I'm quite bright, adept at a computer, etc. etc. But so what? Who puts that in a history book?
Business, money, a Muse -- that's all well and good for getting some independence so that you can go about chasing your real dreams. But really, it's just a means TO an end, isn't it? And what do you do about not having access to the REST of the means required to get to that end? I'm not young and female and beautiful, so I can't be Francoise Hardy, and I didn't know back when I was 16 that if I didn't audition for record companies when I was 16 then I wouldn't be 16 ever again and it would be too late to audition! Nobody led me by the hand like they did for her, I just wandered a bit and then discovered unhappily that I was on no path at all and by the time I knew that, IT WAS TOO LATE to get onto a path.
So, I'm adding all this up in here because, although I'm quite excited about the potential for a Muse-type business to help me to get some time and financial independence, I still will know what's missing. I wonder why others don't have similar concerns. We all want greatness, excellence, tip-top experiences. Why are we settling for less? Why is any one of you willing to sell someone else's music on the internet, instead of making your own? Isn't it possible that, just as watching TV is a type of escape for the typical office worker who lives in hell most of the day and really ought to shift his paradigm to the point that he escaped that hell for real rather than just through TV, so too watching your Muse grow is a type of escape for anyone who is still interested mostly in money and who really ought to shift his paradigm to the point that he escaped that money for real rather than just through a Muse?
How are YOU going to break the sound barrier? What are you going to do to be great? Not just a profitable entity, but a WORTHWHILE one?
Me, I've had to give up on music. I can't ever, really, DO that. It will always stick to me like tar. But I'm thinking maybe I can write drama. Follow Arthur Miller's footsteps. I don't actually DO it, though I do sometimes have the time to do it. Usually I'm just so exhausted from rat-race-work style life that I can't possibly consider flexing my creative muscles TOO. I guess, setting pen to paper on that sort of project would have to be, admitting that the musical dream is dead. But then I see another Francoise Hardy video on YouTube and I am drawn right back into it stumbling and screaming ...
1. I love the book. I recommend it everywhere. The best part about it is, that Mr. Ferriss (Tim?) really "gets" what it means to want OUT of work precisely BECAUSE it is work which is preventing fulfillment, contribution to society, living a productive healthy worthwhile what-cha-ma-call-it GOOD life. This is a new paradigm. For years we've assumed "work is a good thing." From the Protestant Work Ethic right down to people as enlightened and enlightening as Richard Bolles (author of "What Color Is Your Parachute") the assumption has always been, that "idle hands make for the devil's work." Even the fellow who contradicted Tim on the "Today" show said, "The happiest people in the world work really hard all day at things they love." Well, I say, if it's things they love, then IT'S NOT WORK. And working in an office, with a boss, and a dusty computer keyboard, and bad coffee, and getting there at dawn, and staying later than they pay you to stay, IS NOT WORTH LOVING. And Tim gets this concept. (I wish my mom did. Boy, the LOOKS she gives me when I say to concerned people who ask, "What kind of work do you WANT to do?" that their question sounds to me like asking "Would you rather be hanged or shot by firing line, Mister O'Connell?")
2. I recommend the following book, which also "gets" the whole project, about the fact that working forever is really idiotic.
Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence
# ISBN-10: 0140286780
# ISBN-13: 978-0140286786
by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
This is more a money- and time-management scheme, than a whole world view. You plot your expenses, learn to live within your means, make some long-term investments, and figure out how you can retire early. They tell you how to graph "life energy" versus the money you're making or spending -- like, do you really want to lose two hours of work at the office for that seat at the rock concert? And other "math chart" type tricks. There's a lot of frugality and skin-flint scrimping in this one, so it doesn't exactly coincide with jetting off to Rio for a weekend. But it's been around for about thirty years, now, so it's stood the test of time. Recently an uneducated immigrant non-English-speaking chamber-maid-type cleaner at a hotel was interviewed on national TV, as having "retired" to a comfortable home after seven years of work in the hotel. All on the basis of the book.
3. I can't stand work. I just thought I'd repeat that. :) Part of the trouble, for me, is the whole concept of "working hard FOR SOMEONE ELSE." All my life I've wanted to be famous, to do or be someone, to really hit it big. I recently found out that one of my heroes, the chanteuse Francoise Hardy (French, 1960s), started auditioning for record companies when she was 16 years old. This surprised and shocked me. I couldn't possibly get back to 16 years old to start my music career over -- I'm 41 now, and I've always wanted to be excellent at music, but I never had the opportunity or the "right" to touch an instrument until I was 24, because I was strongly encouraged against it and I FOOLISHLY listened to other people. Since then, I got started, but I'm just not as fast a learner with the muscle memory that kids have. Well, two things come to mind from this self-bemoaning piece of biography:
A. Maybe I'm learning it all wrong. Can Tim's suggestions about learning languages fit learning instruments? I want to be a hot sexy pop star, get all the girls, and play my music for the world. Really, I do mean that. I put it kind of flippantly, but honestly, who DOESN'T want to be famous and playing at music all day? :)
B. I can't apply the whole "get more productive at work" thing, because all I ever do at work is someone else's work. File this, chart that. "Don't you want to be productive at stuff?" I'm often asked. I do my work quite well, what little of it I can suffer before someone notices "you're not happy here" and fires me again. People always say I'm super smart, but no, I'm not impressed with the work I've ever been allowed to do. It's trivial. It's make-work, the sort of thing that nobody will ever put in a history book. "And many many other people did their daily jobs, had children who were raised to do the same, and eventually died." I don't want to be one of those people. I want to be Michael Jordan, or Mohamed Ali, or Francoise Hardy, or Erik Satie, or Winston Churchill, or Charles Dickens, or heck I'll settle for Nathan Lane or even just Eva Gabor. Put ME in the history books. Let ME be ME, not someone else's lackey. Business bores me. Products, sales, advertising, research ... so what? I CAN do it, I'm quite bright, adept at a computer, etc. etc. But so what? Who puts that in a history book?
Business, money, a Muse -- that's all well and good for getting some independence so that you can go about chasing your real dreams. But really, it's just a means TO an end, isn't it? And what do you do about not having access to the REST of the means required to get to that end? I'm not young and female and beautiful, so I can't be Francoise Hardy, and I didn't know back when I was 16 that if I didn't audition for record companies when I was 16 then I wouldn't be 16 ever again and it would be too late to audition! Nobody led me by the hand like they did for her, I just wandered a bit and then discovered unhappily that I was on no path at all and by the time I knew that, IT WAS TOO LATE to get onto a path.
So, I'm adding all this up in here because, although I'm quite excited about the potential for a Muse-type business to help me to get some time and financial independence, I still will know what's missing. I wonder why others don't have similar concerns. We all want greatness, excellence, tip-top experiences. Why are we settling for less? Why is any one of you willing to sell someone else's music on the internet, instead of making your own? Isn't it possible that, just as watching TV is a type of escape for the typical office worker who lives in hell most of the day and really ought to shift his paradigm to the point that he escaped that hell for real rather than just through TV, so too watching your Muse grow is a type of escape for anyone who is still interested mostly in money and who really ought to shift his paradigm to the point that he escaped that money for real rather than just through a Muse?
How are YOU going to break the sound barrier? What are you going to do to be great? Not just a profitable entity, but a WORTHWHILE one?
Me, I've had to give up on music. I can't ever, really, DO that. It will always stick to me like tar. But I'm thinking maybe I can write drama. Follow Arthur Miller's footsteps. I don't actually DO it, though I do sometimes have the time to do it. Usually I'm just so exhausted from rat-race-work style life that I can't possibly consider flexing my creative muscles TOO. I guess, setting pen to paper on that sort of project would have to be, admitting that the musical dream is dead. But then I see another Francoise Hardy video on YouTube and I am drawn right back into it stumbling and screaming ...