Happiness
- Health
- Wealth
- Time
- There are certain activies that you can only with others at a certain time in their lives. You can’t have story time with your kids when they are thirty. You can’t go on a father son trip when your father has passed away.
- There are seasons of your life that you cannot recapture. Bill discusses his friend taking a summer backpacking in Europe just out of college. Bill took a similar trip many years later when he was older but just wasn’t the same.
- Find the time for maximum utility for your resourcess throughout your life. Why would you wait to give your children money in your will at the cost of a trip together earlier in life.
Excellent advice for creating a happiness memory book.
Every few months, take at least one panorama photo of your kid’s room. At least annually, secretly record your kid talking for at least ten minutes. I promise you’ll treasure both, and then you will curse yourself for not having done each way more often.
f(health,wealth,time) = maximum fulfillment
Dr. Peter Attia, a doctor focused on longevity and maximizing our lives, recently interviewed Bill Perkins about his book Die with Zero (Affiliate). In his book, Bill focuses on the ways to maximize your personal life fulfillment by focusing on three key inputs:
Too often we focus on wealth as a key value driver in our lives, but Bills points out that there is a maximum utility to the wealth we have and that peaks sometime in the middle of our lives like a bell curve.
For example what is the value of $1 million on your deathbed to you? Probably not much. What’s the value of that same $1 million to you when you are 1 year old. Not much, you have very little needs at that age. $1 million in the middle of your life, now that can make some real impact. So the value of money/wealth changes as you age, but we must also consider our health. What if we had $1 million so that we could take a month long hike along the rim of Grand Canyon, but we were too old to make the journey.
Perkins point is that we need to focus on fulfillment which is a function of age, wealth, and health and that finding the proper order and balance in our lives is the key to fulfillment.
Key Lessons
Of course, everything has it’s limits or extremes, but are you deferring fulfillment for a future that never may come to pass?