True wealth is not only about achievement and the accumulation of money, it’s about holistically building the life that you want to be living.
In the latest Unmistakable Creative + SoulPancake instalment, Tim Ferriss teaches us the importance of appreciating what we have by living in the present.
Transcript
What makes someone truly wealthy, I think, is a combination of not just achievement, because it’s easy to default to racking up, sort of, feathers in the cap, and more money, and obsess on those types of measurables by focusing as an a-type personality on achievement. Right? Just doing more and earning more.
The bigger challenge for people who are hard-wired that way, and I’m certainly this way, is balancing that with appreciating what you have. If you don’t appreciate what you have now, you’ll never appreciate what you get later.
So what is the end goal of all this achieving, achieving, and amassing? So I build in a gratitude practice and journaling in the morning and the three things that I’m grateful for, and so on, to make a habit of present-state awareness of things that I already have.
Reach out to someone and express gratitude. Say thank you to someone that you haven’t said thank you to in a long time, or ever. Right? It could be a childhood friend. It could be someone you went to college with you haven’t talked to in ten years. It could be a co-worker you see every day.
I would also put in that basket of rituals that I find very helpful [is], every day, doing something that you fear. Like, every day – one thing, whatever it is. Approaching a cute girl and just saying “hi’. It could be that simple. Laying down in Starbucks. Having that uncomfortable conversation you’ve been putting off. Calling, maybe, a parent that you’ve grown a little distant from, and saying “I love you”. Something really vulnerable like that. I mean, it could be any of these things, but like, every day, do one thing that makes you nervous – makes you fearful.
And those tiny micro-changes, cumulatively, can just produce monsters – in the best way possible. Like, monsters of productivity and just breakout successes. It’s the little things that we do repeatedly that make us focus on how to engineer those things, because there are recipes that work.
And just, model world-class performers who exemplify the characteristics that you have. And ideally, model people who not only have the success in a given field that you want, but also who have, holistically, the life that you want. Because you can find people with hundreds of millions of dollars, who yell at their kids, whose wives or husbands hate them, who do a lot of drugs on the weekend or [in] the evenings just to live with themselves.
You need to keep in mind what the total picture is. But what can you do if you missed it? I don’t think it’s too late. I mean, there are too many examples of people who start multi-million dollar companies in their 50’s or 60’s who manifest this type of outsized, incredible success in multiple areas. I’m hoping to help people do the same thing. Where it’s like, come on, if you’re putting someone on a pedestal, it’s not because they deserve to be on the pedestal, it’s because you don’t want to take the responsibility for the fact that the excuse you’re giving is total BS. I’ve just seen too many outliers, too many, seemingly, freaks of nature, do things that it turns out you can replicate with the right recipe.
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Tim Ferriss is an author, entrepreneur, investor, and public speaker. He has written three New York Times bestselling books and continues to push himself to new limits on his TV show, The Tim Ferriss Experiment.
Find him online Four Hour Work Week | TimothyFerriss.com | Twitter |Facebook
