I haven’t posted here in awhile, so I thought I’d wind down my Wednesday night dumping words into a cyberspace of no particular audience. . . . this post is definitely going to be a non-sequitur stream of consciousness as I approach the end of a long day of lots of driving through LA traffic in hot weather. 

A lot has happened since my last post – I just spent 21 days in Thailand and India with some of my close buddies and our significant others. It was a tremendous trip- no, adventure filled with wonderful food, bustling marketplaces, chaotic traffic, forts and temples galore, and culture to fill one’s brains with. It was a stark reminder of how parts of the world are, and for me, I took away that there are so many people who are completely happy living off of very little. It is the world they know. It is interesting to see how tech has pervaded this third world though – I found it cool that a dusty young boy who accosted me looking like he hadn’t bathed in a few days could tell me that Drake was at the top of the international pop charts because he listens to Spotify on his mobile phone. The juxtaposition of thousands of years of culture, poverty, wealth, and millions of people all coming together to form the world that is India was very profound to me. All this was a truly unforgettable experience, complete with CK as our hindi-speaking tour guide to lead us along.

All that said, I’m very glad to be back.

I could write here all the awesome things that we have back home that are not over there, but I’d be restating the obvious, so I’ll save the reader the effort of scanning extra words. Just know that we’ve got a lot, they don’t, and I missed these things, and now that I’m back, I’m back to enjoying these things. Like a burrito.

So after a week, I was back to Pacific Time, and adjusting back into my routine. Business has been going steady, albeit some changes that are going on (good ones). I’d been spending the last few days just catching up with various different people. One of the folks was a buddy who had a kindred entrepreneurial spirit, and shared my passion for finding weird ways to live life. He had been doing marketing for a non-profit, traveled the world, and made a living off of AirBnB real estate. He’s also quite a cook. Over some drinks over in Culver City, we discussed women, investments, travel, and the future. We’re both recent entrants to the late 30’s just this month as our birthdays had both just passed (although I contend that when you’re 37.5 years old, THAT’S when you’re officially in your late 30’s, but who’s counting). He said something to me that stuck with me. In our talks of the future, he mentioned that he aspired to retire 10 years from now. Not bad I thought, yeah it’d be nice to be done with trying to earn cash money at the age of 47, and live off of cash-generating investments. This friend of mine and I share a similar sentiment about the use of time and money, so naturally I understood this to mean that he just wanted to use the time freed up by financial independence to go do the things he really wanted to do in life.

That is retirement after all, right? The traditional sense of retirement states that one would spend their sunset years doing all the things they had dreamed all their lives of doing. However, I think my friend has the right idea. It’s not a good idea to wait until one is 62.5 years old to enjoy the good things in life.

I’d been reading “The 7-Day Weekend” by Ricardo Semler, by way of Tim Ferriss’ recent podcast. This guy Semler was a provocateur sort of a businessman who turned companies upside down and had a very unorthodox way of generating ludicrous profits. Yet the feather in his hat was not that he could turn a $4MM company into a $212MM company – it was the way in which he did it. He would allow employees to come in whenever they pleased, work on whatever they pleased, and had no 5-year roadmap, or any roadmap for the company for that matter. He sought to create a workforce of people who would empower themselves through their own organic passion, and then let them manage their own adult lives, rather than the adolescent 9-5 way the corporate world would needlessly (and ineffectively) dictate. He focused on making people ask “why” 3 times to drill in on the essence of anything, and classified all time as work time, personal time, and idle time – all of which could work in harmony (rather than what most of the modern world does). On the topic of retirement, he drew 2 graphs where one would be the effective physical condition of a person over time, which would typically peak out around their 20’s & 30’s, and the other graph showing financial independence over time, which would typically peak around one’s 50’s and 60’s. The sadness of this would be that when one is young, they don’t have financial independence, and when one is old, they don’t have the stamina to enjoy the fruits of their labor. It’s truly a sad state when one is old and doesn’t have financial independence – but this is a largely common (and becoming more common) case these days, very unfortunately.

So I thought about what my friend was saying as I sipped my Nikka Coffey Grain Japanese whiskey in the back bar of the Hatchet LA, a place known as the “Old Man Bar.”  It’s actually not far-fetched at all for one to actually believe they can retire at 47. Hell, it should be 27 if we could all do it right! Imagine that- to actually be able to enjoy what one would normally spend a lifetime trying to enjoy.

Of course, let’s come down to reality, yes that’s all nice to dream about, and wonder, and I feel that way too, sure. I’m no prodigy who created a blockbuster business in my 20’s, and I sure as hell am not financially independent yet. “We’re not out of the woods yet,” I said to my friend. “But we’re getting there,” he finished, raising his glass.

The timeliness of my reading that book and having this conversation was uncanny. So I did something crazy. I decided that I want to live that damn retired lifestyle RIGHT NOW. What is this retirement anyway? It’s an idyllic lifestyle that most people aspire to have someday but then are robbed of it when the time comes. And surprisingly enough, these things and activities that make up the stuff of retirement are things we can enjoy right now. They oftentimes don’t even cost as much as we might be afraid to think it might. At the end of the day, it’s a mindset, and that mindset can enable one to think big and audacious, or small and parochial.

One of my business partners suggested recently that I move into a larger place (larger than my dingy 1-bedroom apartment-turned-crazy-office). He mentioned that it has the uplifting effect of enabling a good “headspace.” It would enable one to be in the right frame of mind, consciousness, and spirit to conjure the next big ideas, and to think larger than a typical person does. After thinking about it for like 1 minute, I was like, yeah, I do need some headspace. Anyone who comes over to my place can easily see that I live in a tornado. It’s an organized tornado of post-its, documents, books, stationery, all surrounded by a file cabinet, shelves, and a whiteboard. But hell if I bring guests over, much less my newly minted fiancée. I feel bad that my little pup Lola has to endure this as well! At the present moment she’s curled up next to me on the floor on top of my old jeans that I piled onto the floor the other slightly drunken evening, the same ones I was wearing the other night when I met my friend. Yes, I’m a slob.

I evaluated my overall finances, cash flow, and balance sheet after this conversation. Then I thought about all the relationships I could help more effectively foster with a better place than my tornado. I thought about my fiancée. I thought about my health, and her health- physical, mental, and spiritual.  I thought that I could have friends over for a nice, healthy, delicious home-cooked meal. I could even fire up a hibachi grill and throw some skewers on there. I could have guests over and actually treat them like normal human beings instead of rolling out my air mattress as if I was still in college. And Game of Thrones night wouldn’t mean 15 people trying to cram onto my living room floor (and winter is coming…).

Sure, I might not be out of the woods yet if we’re talking about financial independence, but I sure as hell ain’t gettin’ no younger. I’m at the end of my physical peak damnit!! And I know I can be responsible with my money (most of the time, hehe). Hell, as my friend said, we’re getting there. And I have no doubt that we will.

Headspace.

Retirement.

Now. 

Why not. I’m moving to the Santa Monica beach condo I’ve always dreamed of this weekend, damnit. End of story.