Weekly Wisdom #285 - How to figure out what your ideal life looks like

Starting From Zero, Mental Time Travel, Putting Things in Perspective & Finding Awe

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Happy Monday!

An idea I've been thinking about a lot is the concept of zero-based budgeting.​

In the accounting world, the idea is you start from 0, and build out a budget from there, rather than what often happens, which is that you start from the previous budget and adjust.

The usefulness from a budgeting perspective is that you have to re-justify all expenses, instead of what normally happens, which is that old things continue whether needed or not, and new things simply inflate the budget.

It's been suggested as a tool that might help us be more disciplined in areas like government spending.

My interest in the concept, however, is a little more personal.

I like to think about the concept in a couple different ways:

If I had to zero-budget my personal spending, what would it look like? What's necessary, and what is extra? What could I do without?

If I had to zero-budget my time, how would I spend it? What would my days look like if I could do anything I wanted?

This helps with two things:

First, it helps me combat the sunk-cost fallacy and the fear of loss that many of us with steady jobs or paycheques offer. Just because I'm doing well at one thing, or have saved a certain amount, doesn't mean I shouldn't change jobs or try and start that new thing if that's what I think I'll enjoy most.

Second, it helps me avoid the trap that many of us fall into, which is having our lives taken up by routines and habits that we've absorbed over time, but don't really want.

In short, it helps me construct the life I want.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📖 Mental Time Travel: A Cheat Code for Success - Sahil Bloom - Mental time travel is one of the techniques I use most often: essentially, you transport yourself to some point in the future, and think about how you'll view the current moment.

Will you care? What will you want to have done at that point? What does the future look like depending on your decision?

It has a number of uses: helping put things in perspective, helping with delayed gratification and making decisions that will benefit us in the future, and recognizing which things you should or shouldn't care about in the moment.

📷 Woody Gooch - Some photos make the world around you seem calm and simple; these are those kind of photos.

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A post shared by Woody Gooch (@woodygphoto)

Tweet of the Week

Told here as the "Overview effect," I've also heard this technique described as finding a sense of "awe."

Whenever you're feeling overwhelmed or stressed out, finding a sense of awe, or some way to put yourself in the broader context of the world or universe, helps put daily life in perspective and calm things down.

Sam Parr-->

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@thesamparr

There's this thing called Overview effect.

Its a cognitive shift that happens when astronauts see the earth from space.

Astronauts who've experienced this say it makes things they thought important to feel less important because they see that we're just a bunch of animals… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1712266894890176546

8:40 PM • Oct 11, 2023

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