Living the Dream

We all have an idea of our dream lifestyle. It's something that you can think about, a crumb of comfort as you go about your work, treading water.

After I read Tim Ferriss' excellent book, "The Four Hour Work Week", I started to think about the route I was going down and where I wanted to be. The two paths weren't even close to each other.

Tim talks about the 'deferred life plan', the traditional western model where you work a job to save up enough money to eventually retire and live the life you want. Obvious downside: you have to wait until you retire to do all the crazy stuff, by which time you're old. Sure you can go on holiday, but if you want to take a longer period off you're going to have a tough time explaining this in a traditional career setting.

He talks about mini retirements, periodical breaks where you work and save then take time off. That's more like it. He also talks about automated income, where you set up a business that makes money with minimal input from you (after you set it up of course) so that you can fund your life of wild adventures. Now we're cooking with gas.

Actually putting this into practice hasn't been a piece of cake, but if it was we'd all be doing it. At least I know what I'm aiming at now.