How I’m finding my new rich life
What if you had complete financial freedom? What would you do? Would you stay at your job? Go back to school? Retire?
In his book the 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris describes a lifestyle available to every person — one enabling a new kind of wealth for every person to live their wildest dreams. You and I can become newly rich, by using unconventional methods to achieve financial freedom, success, and freedom.
The vision for the New Rich lifestyle
The new rich lifestyle consists of maximizing the immense resources available to us today that have never been available to us before along with implementing a degree of lifestyle minimalism to ensure that those resources go as far as possible.
Gold is getting old. The New Rich are those who abandoned the Deferred Life Plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility. This is an art and a science we will refer to as a lifestyle design.
— Tim Ferriss
The best-selling book was originally published in 2008 I amidst the recession. The only option for most Americans to achieve this newly rich lifestyle was the internet. The Internet provided resources to the average person that normally only large businesses would have available to them. Zat Rana describes this well:
A big part of today’s culture is the internet. It’s not only democratized knowledge, but it’s made it so accessible that those who are curious enough can’t help but embrace the approach of a polymath.
Simply by providing the awareness of the availability of these resources, Tim Ferriss gives everyone the opportunity to achieve his vision of the happiest life.
One of the first things that Tim Ferris explains how most people equate large quantities of hard work for success and productivity. The typical 9-to-5 job, 40 hour work week, gives us a lot of comfort that we’re doing the right thing and performing at our best. But in reality we can all achieve much more by eliminating the nonsense and maximizing on what’s already most productive.
Social media, web browsing, distractions from colleagues, meetings, and checking email more than once a day should be eliminated, according to Tim Ferris. He even goes so far as reducing email monitoring to only once per week.
Several resources are provided to help readers achieved some of this minimalism but he describes including auto response email templates, suggestions for scheduling, and even internet-based software that will help automate redundant processes.
Once readers are able to say “no” to more in their life and eliminate the things that don’t matter as much, they can begin to develop their “muse” as a source for their newly rich income.
Developing on online business, Ferriss suggests is the least time consuming way to do this. Some of us may already have a product within ourselves that we can develop into it neatly packaged product. Others, may be better off selling merchandise with drop shipping.
Once the muse is found, a business can be developed with a simple website and a little bit of savvy market research. Eventually the automation of the business allows the new CEO and founder to quit their day jobs and live the life they really want to live.
How this looks in practice
I originally went to college for music in 2013 and left in 2015 to begin pursuing this type of freedom that Tim Ferriss describes. I was a very ambitious musician, which seems to imply that I’d be a very ambitious business person — and I am — but several things have slowed me down along the way.
Finishing my degree, parental “guidance”, societal pressure, and simply the process of personal development have been road bumps. Luckily, personal development has brought me closer to finding my muse — which is a perpetually ongoing process for me.
No person is free who is not a master of himself.
— Epictetus
Just now however, I’ve found it within myself to develop some sort of product that will be able to allow me to begin my pursuit of this newly rich life. I’m a bit of a polymath, which lends itself to adaptability and entrepreneurship. Polymaths tend to make great managers and executives. So in theory, Tim Ferriss’s New Rich lifestyle should be very attainable for me. And I’m confident it will, which is the reason I left music school.
A greater challenge for me though, is to develop, package, and sell a product of my own. In order for me able to do this, I should have a degree of expert status, according to Tim Ferriss.
In other words, people would need to want to hear what I say. In his book Money, Tony Robbins mentions that what you earn is the result of the value you provide.
The secret to wealth is simple: Find a way to do more for others than anyone else does. Become more valuable. Do more. Give more. Be more. Serve more.
— Tony Robbins
My problem isn’t that people don’t want to hear what I have to say. My problem is there are too many things that people want to hear what I have to say about. A typical problem for a polymath, I suppose.
In her book, The Renaissance Soul, Margaret Lobenstine describes how everyone has a different amount of passions varying from one, like Mozart, to several like Benjamin Franklin.
Picture a line representing the continuum of human interests. At one end, you have people like Mozart. To say that Mozart chose one interest and stuck with it is an understatement… Now look at the other end of the spectrum. There, with his multitude of changing interests, stands Ben Franklin.
— Margaret Lobenstine
I’m closer to the Ben Franklin and Aristotle side.
So, how am I supposed to make a product that’s going to be successful? It’s a challenge to find a niche to intersect with all of my experiences and interests.
Because of the amount of my interests, there’s no specific discipline that I’m necessarily an expert in. I’m very good at learning new things and I suppose that could be considered a discipline, but the average person probably won’t want to learn things as many things as I do, or at the rate. Moreover the people who do, are like me and don’t need the help.
I have friends from all over that are interested in certain skills of mine, but they all need to be marketed differently toward different demographics.
My contact book has the cell phone numbers of previous Jazz Messengers to United States Senators’ staff. What would a general manager of a car dealership or an operations manager at a children’s museum or the head lifeguard at a waterpark or federal agents want to do with a product marketed toward all of them?
So what I’ve been slowly making amends with, has been: probably anything that I can package and sell from my own personal experience and knowledge won’t be able to be marketed to anybody that I already know. If you’ve ever held a sales position, you know that your personal circles are one of the most important things to grow your customer base.
So my vision of the New Rich life, though nearly identical to the one painted by Tim Ferriss, is something that will take a little more skill and creativity to realize. My freshman year of college, I went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and participated in their marching band. They have the tradition there of playing one song at the end of every performance in respect of the late George N. Parks. The song, My Way, was a long-time favorite of George Parks, and had been popularized by Frank Sinatra. That song sticks with me today, because of its theme and lyrics.
Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall
And did it my way
I can’t help but feel that these lyrics describe my experiences and what seems to be the future of my New Rich pursuit.
One thing that I’ve learned so far: life doesn’t get any simpler if you try to do it someone else’s way.
