13 December

There are only a handful of ways to get rich. You can inherit a lot of money, or win the lottery (both very rare). Or invent something (a song, a car…) that is so popular that millions buy it. The hardest road is to play all of the work games you have to play to get ahead in your profession. To climb the greasy pole of management. There is another way, I think much less common, which has been my chosen way. To define ‘enough’ in your life. To have a hard conversation with yourself about what would be enough for you, in your life, and why you’d want to go beyond that. In an age of relative abundance, this opens things up in ways that don’t seem to get a lot of thought. For example, by far the simplest way to get enough, to be almost rich, is to be free of debt. Without debt every dollar you earn is automatically multiples of what people with debt earn. I chose to be free of debt by the age of 50, as a life goal. And got there too. I played the greasy management pole games to get there, and then dumped that life. A lot of people earn more money than us. A lot of them have big debts too. But I have a reverse ‘career’, in that I decided to go the other direction in my last 10 years of work, towards basic operational work. Free of of all the organisational games of management. Free to be me. We defined enough, and reached it. It’s very liberating. Statistics suggest this isn’t the path most Australians have chosen. If you don’t define ‘enough’, you will always be a slave to ‘more’.