readwise:: The 4-Hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss (Readwise)
shortform:: 4-Hour Work Week - Tim Ferriss - Shortform
4HWW - Dan Silvestre

My takeaways

• Time is more valuable than money. Do not tolerate time wasters.
• Calculate your hourly rate, net worth, income and expenditures.
• Eliminate unhealthy relationships
• 80/20 everything in life
• "what would this look like if it were easy?"
• Operating with intent means you're not stuck in the tumble-dryer of life.
• Write, define, journal and express the noise in your head into coherent thought.
• Be a resource allocator, not a factory worker. You can hire for less than your rate.
• The people you most look up to - all create and share content (writing, videos, books etc.)
• Be successful in your writing and sharing/ mentorship.
• What is one decision that will make most other decisions redundant?

Resources

The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss: Summary and Lessons - Dan Silvestre

Principles of the New Rich (NR)

1) Be brutally honest with your life:

2) Allocate your time & energy:

3) energy and interest fluctuate, don't be distracted by shiny object syndrome

4) minimum effective load

Less Is Not Laziness.
To prevent work for work’s sake, and to do the minimum necessary for maximum effect (“minimum effective load”).
Be effective (not efficient)

Being Effective vs. Being Efficient
EFFECTIVENESS IS DOING the things that get you closer to your goals.
Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible.

Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

1. Doing something unimportant well does not make it important.
2. Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.
   What you do is infinitely more important than how you do it.

80/20
Which 20% of sources are causing 80% of my problems and unhappiness?
Which 20% of sources are resulting in 80% of my desired outcomes and happiness?
Slow down and remember this: Most things make no difference. Being busy is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.

Have others work for you.
To be neither the boss nor the employee, but the owner. To own the trains and have someone else ensure they run on time.
Recall our mantra: eliminate before you delegate.

The Timing Is Never Right
Quit your job you hate!
the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time.
Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
Just do it. Correct course along the way

Retirement Is Worst-Case-Scenario Insurance.
To distribute recovery periods and adventures (mini-retirements) throughout life on a regular basis and recognize that inactivity is not the goal. Doing that which excites you is.

Things in Excess Become Their Opposite.
Too much, too many, and too often of what you want becomes what you don’t want.
eg quit cannabis
Lifestyle Design is thus not interested in creating an excess of idle time, which is poisonous, but the positive use of free time, defined simply as doing what you want as opposed to what you feel obligated to do.

Money Alone Is Not the Solution
The problem is more than money.
eg: I have £300k in crypto in nov 2023 - whats stopping you?
“If only I had more money” is the easiest way/excuse to postpone the intense self-examination and decision.
making necessary to create a life of enjoyment - now and not later. By using money as the scapegoat and work as our all-consuming routine, we are able to conveniently disallow ourselves the time to do otherwise
Busy yourself with the routine of the money wheel, pretend it’s the fix-all, and you artfully create a constant distraction that prevents you from seeing just how pointless it is.
Deep down, you know it’s all an illusion, but with everyone participating in the same game of make-believe, it’s easy to forget.
The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort.

Relative Income Is More Important Than Absolute Income
What's your hourly rate?
relative income has to add up to the minimum amount necessary to actualize your goals.

Distress Is Bad, Eustress Is Good.
There are two separate types of stress, each as different as euphoria and its seldom-mentioned opposite, dysphoria.
Distress refers to harmful stimuli that make you weaker, less confident, and less able.
eustress, on the other hand, is a word most of you have probably never heard. Eu-, a Greek prefix for “healthy,” is used in the same sense in the word “euphoria.” Role models who push us to exceed our limits, physical training that removes our spare tires, and risks that expand our sphere of comfortable action are all examples of eustress - stress that is healthful and the stimulus for growth.
The New Rich are equally aggressive in removing distress and finding eustress.
eustress is antifragile

Why do you live?

1. To have more quality and less clutter. To have huge financial reserves but recognize that most material wants are justifications for spending time on the things that don’t really matter, including buying things and preparing to buy things.
2. To make a ton of money with specific reasons and defined dreams to chase, timelines and steps included. What are you working for?
3. To think big but ensure payday comes every day: cash flow first, big payday second.
4. To have freedom from doing that which you dislike, but also the freedom and resolve to pursue your dreams without reverting to work for work’s sake (W4W).
5. To do all the things you want to do, and be all the things you want to be. If this includes some tools and gadgets, so be it, but they are either means to an end or bonuses, not the focus.
6. The luxury I advocate has nothing to do with money. It cannot be bought. It is the reward of those who have no fear of discomfort

Recovering from 9-5 employee syndrome
After years of repetitive work, you will often need to dig hard to find your passions, redefine your dreams, and revive hobbies that you let atrophy to near extinction. The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

Freedom Multipliers
Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W’s you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it. I call this the “freedom multiplier.”

Emphasise strengths
Emphasize Strengths, Don’t Fix Weaknesses
It is far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.

Fear Setting (Process)
Why don’t I decide exactly what my nightmare would be - the worst thing that could possibly happen as a result of my trip?
The Power of Pessimism: Defining the Nightmare Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
Conquering Fear = Defining Fear Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?”
As soon as I cut through the vague unease and ambiguous anxiety by defining my nightmare, the worst-case scenario, I wasn’t as worried.
I realized that on a scale of 1–10, 1 being nothing and 10 being permanently life-changing, my so-called worst-case scenario might have a temporary impact of 3/ 4.
On the other hand, if I realized my best-case scenario, or even a probablecase scenario, it would easily have a permanent 9 or 10 positive life-changing effect.
I was risking an unlikely and temporary 3 or 4 for a probable and permanent 9 or 10, and I could easily recover my baseline workaholic prison with a bit of extra work if I wanted to.
There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, so don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.” Either way, nothing happens.
Do you really think it will improve or is it wishful thinking and an excuse for inaction?

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.
a person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.
If you don’t pursue those things that excite you, where will you be in one year, five years, and ten years?
How will you feel having allowed circumstance to impose itself upon you and having allowed ten more years of your finite life to pass doing what you know will not fulfill you?

Never overestimate the competition as an excuse for inaction
(Tim Ferriss lecture challenge story)
one real reason (for inaction), however, repeated over and over again in different words: It was a difficult challenge, perhaps impossible, and the other students would outdo them. Since all of them overestimated the competition, no one even showed up.
Do not overestimate the competition and underestimate yourself. You are better than you think.
If you are insecure, guess what? The rest of the world is, too.
Aim huge! Think BIG!
It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.

Having an unusually large goal is an adrenaline infusion that provides the endurance to overcome the inevitable trials and tribulations that go along with any goal.

Doing the Unrealistic Is Easier Than Doing the Realistic
from contacting billionaires to rubbing elbows with celebrities—the second group of students did both—it’s as easy as believing it can be done. It’s lonely at the top.
Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre.
The level of competition is thus fiercest for “realistic” goals, paradoxically making them the most time and energy-consuming. It is easier to raise $1,000,000 than it is $100,000.
It is easier to pick up the one perfect 10 in the bar than the five 8s.
Get Unrealistic

Doing big things begins with asking for them properly.
Ask well. Ask better questions

the opposite of happiness is boredom
Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase. It is the cure-all. When people suggest you follow your “passion” or your “bliss,” I propose that they are, in fact, referring to the same singular concept: excitement.

its not what you know, its who you know
People are fond of using the “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” adage as an excuse for inaction, as if all successful people are born with powerful friends. Nonsense!

success can be measured in the number of uncomfortable conversations you’re willing to have. - especially with yourself!
overcome the fear of rejection - push yourself in 30 day challenge
I deal with rejection by persisting, not by taking my business elsewhere:
Stay at the table. Burn it to the ground - politely!
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
You won’t believe what you can accomplish by attempting the impossible with the courage to repeatedly fail better

Target monthly income (TMI)
What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?
What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?

I’m not a big believer in long-term planning and far-off goals.
I generally set 3-month and 6-month dreamlines.
The variables change too much and in the future distance becomes an excuse for postponing action.

First, let’s focus on those critical first steps. Define three steps for each dream that will get you closer to its actualization.
Set actions—simple, well-defined actions—for now, tomorrow (complete before 11 A.M.) and the day after (again completed before 11 A.M.).
The best first step, the one I recommend, is finding someone who’s done it and ask for advice on how to do the same. It’s not hard.

Reach out to someone as step one.
Other options include setting a meeting or phone call with a trainer, mentor, or salesperson to build momentum. Can you schedule a private class or a commitment that you’ll feel bad about canceling? Use guilt to your advantage. Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!

Parkinson's law
There are two synergistic approaches for increasing productivity that are inversions of each other:

1. Limit tasks to the important to shorten work time (80/20)
2. Shorten work time to limit tasks to the important (Parkinson's law)
   If you haven’t identified the mission-critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for their completion, the unimportant becomes the important.
   Whats the critical path and most important?

Use Parkinson’s Law on a Macro and Micro Level
On a micro task level, limit the number of items on your to-do list and use impossibly short deadlines to force immediate action while ignoring minutiae.

Too much information is useless
Increased output necessitates decreased input.
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
If your focus and attention is poor. Life is poor.
Most information is time-consuming, negative, irrelevant to your goals.
Allocate attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
It is imperative that you learn to ignore or redirect all information and interruptions that are irrelevant, unimportant, or unactionable. Most are all three:
I challenge you to look at whatever you read or watched today and tell me that it wasn’t at least two of the four?
Develop the habit of asking: Will I definitely use this information for something immediate and important?
How much of what you consume is actually applied and useful vs having to rediscover sources because you forgot what you read?
It’s not enough to use information for “something”—it needs to be immediate and important. If “no” on either count, don’t consume it. - perhaps create a bookmark in Obsidian for later 'just-in-time' consumption
Focus on what digerati Kathy Sierra calls “just-in-time” information instead of “just-in-case” information.
just-in-time learning
just-in-time information not just-in-case information - Kathy Sierra

information diet
Just as modern man consumes both too many calories and calories of no nutritional value, information workers eat data both in excess and from the wrong sources.
Lifestyle design is based on massive action—output
take massive action
Increased output necessitates decreased input.
I consume a maximum of one-third of one industry magazine (Response magazine) and one business magazine (Inc.) per month, for a grand total of approximately four hours.
Identify professional journals, sources and actionable information. Use tweet deck for better focus of X feeds.
identify your information sources

Where focus goes, energy flows
Income is renewable, but some other resources—like attention—are not. I’ve talked before about attention as a currency and how it determines the value of time. For example: Is your weekend really free if you find a crisis in the inbox Saturday morning that you can’t address until Monday morning? Even if the inbox scan lasts 30 seconds, the preoccupation and forward projection for the subsequent 48 hours effectively deletes that experience from your life. You had time but you didn’t have attention, so the time had no practical value.

attention for appreciation and gratitude
Attention is necessary for not only productivity but also appreciation.
Attention is required for appreciation, burn attention fuel, run out of attention, and gratitude fuel.

Don’t provoke deliberation before you can take action.
One simple example:
Don’t scan the inbox on Friday evening or over the weekend if you might encounter work problems that can’t be addressed until Monday.

analysis paralysis
Too many choices = less or no productivity
Too many choices = less or no appreciation
Too many choices = sense of overwhelm

To find better information from reliable sources:

1. cultivate your network of trusted advisors
   e-mails/outreach to educated friends
   judge people based on actions and not words - quality sources?
   let other dependable people synthesize hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of media for me. It was like having dozens of personal information assistants, and I didn’t have to pay them a single cent.
   Who is the best at synthesising this info who i can trust and can replace the hours of content consumption for me?
   only consume the sections of the book that were relevant to immediate next steps, which took less than two hours.
   use: How to work a book MOC

speed reading
[[Speed-Reading-Essentials-Slides.pptx]]
Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
Learn How to Triple Your Reading Speed in 5 Minutes (Seriously) [VIDEO] - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

contact important people
(see Tim's blog for more)
contacted 10 of the top authors and agents in the world via e-mail and phone, with a response rate of 80%.
Craft educated questions to send to a batch of intelligent players in the space. Use Tims direct message approach on less crowded channels.
People love being asked about themselves and their knowledge - and when you have your own brand this is easier. Key Person of Influence

The 3 Alarms - Eric Partaker - adapted to: 3 questions on alarms
At least three times per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active?

easy to do, easy not to do
ToDo List Formula
not-to-do list
Define a to-do list and define a not to do list
Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?
Am I inventing busy work to avoid the important?

calendar to-do list
GTD
I don’t recommend using digital to-do lists, because it is possible to add an infinite number of items. Use paper notes for todo lists.
There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact.
There should be a limited number of high impact tasks if they're actually high impact.
see also:: Sam Corcos and Sam Corcos + Tim Ferriss

If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?

Simplicity requires ruthlessness.
Be honest with yourself, as we all do this on occasion. What are your crutch activities?
Learn to ask: If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?
To counter the seemingly urgent, ask yourself: What will happen if I don’t do this, and is it worth putting off the important to do it?

Do not multitask
If you prioritize properly, there is no need to multitask. It is a symptom of “task creep”—doing more to feel productive while actually accomplishing less. As stated, you should have, at most, two primary goals or tasks per day. Do them separately from start to finish without distraction.
not-to-do lists are often more effective than to-do lists for upgrading performance.

What gets measured gets managed

Highlight tactics
Pre-plan and schedule what you will do.
Do not go to war without your weapons.
Don’t ever arrive at the office or in front of your computer without a clear list of priorities! - what's important now?

evening planning
Compile your to-do list for tomorrow no later than this evening.
Use the evening unplug to create a Hemingway Bridge and make it easy to pick up where you left off.
Starting and overcoming inertia is the hardest bit.

you are the average of the five people you associate with most
Five people I associate with most
Who is causing me stress disproportionate to the time I spend with them?
It is often the case that you have to fire certain friends or retire from particular social circles to have the life you want. This isn’t being mean; it is being practical.

the art of non-finishing
Practice the art of nonfinishing
Starting something doesn’t automatically justify finishing it.
Whats the balance of choosing to drop something vs. choosing the next new shiney thing?
If you are reading an article that sucks, put it down and don’t pick it back up. If you go to a movie and it’s worse than Matrix III, get the hell out of there before more neurons die. If you’re full after half a plate of ribs, put the damn fork down and don’t order dessert.
More is not better, and stopping something is often 10 times better than finishing it. Develop the habit of nonfinishing that which is boring or unproductive if a boss isn’t demanding it.

independant thinking
Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.
monthly review as CEO of board
CEO of your own life
It is your job to train those around you to be effective and efficient.
If you must play, decide on three things at the start:
the rules of the game, the stakes, and the quitting time.
Whats the exit plan?

be assertive
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
Be friendly but assertive and find the answers you're looking for.
Doing the important and ignoring the trivial is hard because so much of the world seems to conspire to force crap upon you.
From this moment forward, resolve to keep those around you focused and avoid all meetings, whether in person or remote, that do not have clear objectives.
Hard feelings pass. Don’t suffer fools or you’ll become one.
It’s not that I go out of my way to irritate people—not at all—but I recognize one critical fact: Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen. This is a skill we want to cultivate.

if, then actions
Get into the habit of considering what “if … then” actions can be proposed.
In any form of communication, layout the if/then options you see.

Batching
task switching
setup time
overcoming inertia
Batching is the solution to our distracting but necessary time consumers, those repetitive tasks that interrupt the most important.
There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted. More than a quarter of each 9–5 period (28%) is consumed by such interruptions.
Think: Setup time and switching costs.
Batch activities to limit setup cost and provide more time for dreamline milestones.
Set or request autonomous rules and guidelines with occasional review of results.

empower your team
empowerment failure refers to being unable to accomplish a task without first obtaining permission or information.
Do not work harder when the solution is working smarter.
Give people a chance to prove their skills.
People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.
As Sam Corcos says: don't rob your employees of the chance to do tasks and prove themselves to you, and themself. Let them learn.
Realize that bosses are supervisors, not slave masters. Establish yourself as a consistent challenger of the status quo and most people will learn to avoid challenging you.

interruptions
Learn to recognise and fight the interruption impulse. This is infinitely easier when you have a set of rules, responses, and routines to follow.
It is your job to prevent yourself and others from letting the unnecessary and unimportant prevent the start-to-finish completion of the important.
Find your focus and you’ll find your lifestyle.
The bottom line is that you only have the rights you fight for.

From 694 — Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go - The Tim Ferriss Show (Readwise)

1. Athena - An agency out of the Philippines that is described as being on the higher end and more expensive, but potentially offering higher-quality options for sourcing talent.
2. Shepherd - Another agency mentioned as being on the cheaper side, but it is noted that working with them might require more overhead due to a lack of a management structure

Commit to memory the following - never use the new hire.
Test the new guy with low risk stuff. Never trust the new guy.
Prohibit small-operation VAs from subcontracting work to untested freelancers without your written permission.
The more established and higher-end firms, Brickwork in the below example, have security measures that border on excessive.

Contract outsourcing companies that specialize in one function vs. freelancers whenever possible so that if someone is fired, quits, or doesn’t perform, you can replace them without interrupting your business.
Hire trained groups of people who can provide detailed reporting and replace one another as needed.
Ensure that all outsourcers are willing to communicate among themselves to solve problems, and give them written permission to make most inexpensive decisions without consulting you first (I started at less than $100 and moved to $400 after two months).
Give them permission and agency as you build trust and ask them to report on what the solution was.

automate tasks
In the world of automation, not all business models are created equal.
How do you assemble a business and coordinate all its parts without lifting a finger?
How do you automate cash deposits in your bank account while avoiding the most common problems?

trial virtual assistants even if you don't need them yet
Identify your top five time-consuming non-work tasks and five personal tasks you could assign for sheer fun.
Keep in sync: scheduling and calendars. If you decide to have an assistant schedule appointments and add things to your calendar, it will be important to ensure what you both see is updated.

muse business
Our goal is simple: to create an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time. That’s it. I will call this vehicle a “muse”.
Test marketable ideas with content first. Paint a picture of a solution and get leads.
Reduce the likelyhood of competing duplicates and managing multiple retailers.
The more competing resellers there are, the faster your product goes extinct.

muse math
total accessible market (TAM)
I determined the market size of a recent product, see “Muse Math” on this book’s companion site.
brainstorm or find products with these two markets in mind.
The goal: come up with well-formed product ideas and spend nothing.
Margins: Aim for an 8–10× markup, which means a $100 product can’t cost me more than $10–12.50.
Should Be Fully Explainable in a Good Online FAQ.
Information products are low-cost, fast to manufacture, and time-consuming for competitors to duplicate. (courses, SaaS, apps)

become an expert
expert status can be created in less than four weeks if you understand basic credibility indicators. It’s important to learn how the PR pros phrase resume points and position their clients.

How do we go about acquiring credibility indicators in the least time possible?
Emulating the client-grooming techniques of some of the best PR firms

• Join two or three related trade organizations with official-sounding names. In her case, she chose the Association for Conflict Resolution
• Read the three top-selling books on your topic - summarise into a page/ resources to share with your audience.
• Give one free one-to-three-hour seminar at the closest well-known university, using posters to advertise. Then do the same at branches of two well-known big companies
• Offer to write one or two articles for trade magazines related to your topics, citing what you have accomplished in steps 1 and 3 for credibility. If they decline, offer to interview a known expert and write the article—it still gets your name listed as a contributor.
• Join ProfNet, which is a service that journalists use to find experts to quote for articles. (help a reporter out HARO) Help A Reporter |

niche down
How can you tailor a general skill for your market?
what I call “niching down” - or add to what is being sold successfully in your target magazines?
Think narrow and deep rather than broad.
Create narrow niche content - see Justin Welsh

• What skills are you interested in that you—and others in your markets—would pay to learn?
• Become an expert in this skill for yourself and then create a product to teach the same. Key Person of Influence
• Do you have a failure-to-success story that could be turned into a how-to product for others? Consider problems you’ve overcome in the past, both professional and personal.
• What experts could you interview and record to create a sellable audio CD? These people do not need to be the best, but just better than most.

To get an accurate indicator of commercial viability, don’t ask people if they would buy - ask them to buy.
Create a lead page and MVP (per Lean Startup)

Time Audit
Quantify current productivity. If you have applied the 80/20 Principle, set the rules of interrupting interruption, and completed related groundwork, your performance should be at an all-time high in quantifiable terms, whether customers served, revenue generated, pages produced, speed of accounts receivable, or otherwise.

getting past no
practice using the following magic questions when people refuse to give it to you. “What would I need to do to [desired outcome]?”
“Under what circumstances would you [desired outcome]?”
“Have you ever made an exception?”
“I’m sure you’ve made an exception before, haven’t you?”

2023-12-07
getting fired
Getting fired, despite sometimes coming as a surprise and leaving you scrambling to recover, is often a godsend: Someone else makes the decision for you, and it’s impossible to sit in the wrong job for the rest of your life.
Most people aren’t lucky enough to get fired and die a slow spiritual death over 30–40 years of tolerating the mediocre.

failure modes
There are two types of mistakes: mistakes of ambition and mistakes of sloth.
The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold.
(You tried and it didnt work out this time)
The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.

The decision not to act is still a decision
it takes two to three months just to unplug from obsolete routines and become aware of just how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.
I know too well that it’s easier to live with ourselves if we cite an external reason for inaction.
Kill your excuses. The choice not to act is still a choice

doing things you hate is corrosive
It became clear that the biggest risk in life wasn’t making mistakes but regret: missing out on things. He could never go back and recapture years spent doing something he disliked.

too much idle time is an energy killer
The retired and ultrarich are often unfulfilled and neurotic for the same reason: too much idle time.
Too much free time is no more than fertilizer for self-doubt and assorted mental tail-chasing. Subtracting the bad does not create the good. It leaves a vacuum. Decreasing income-driven work isn’t the end goal.
Living more and becoming more is!

behaviours change by feeling good
Tiny Habits
life exists to be enjoyed and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.
to live is to learn. I see no other option. This is why I’ve felt compelled to quit or be fired from jobs within the first six months or so. The learning curve flattens out and I get bored.
If you're not learning and growing - what are you doing?

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. —VIKTOR E. FRANKL, Holocaust survivor; author of Man’s Search for Meaning

Getting started
Here is a good sequence for getting started that dozens of NR have used with success.

1. Revisit ground zero: Do nothing. Before we can escape the goblins of the mind, we need to face them. Principal among them is speed addiction. It is hard to recalibrate your internal clock without taking a break from constant overstimulation.
2. Take a learning mini-retirement in combination with local volunteering. Take a mini-retirement—six months or more if possible—to focus on learning and serving. The longer duration will permit a language focus, which in turn enables more meaningful interaction and contribution through volunteering.

no complaints experiment
30 day experiment
Condition yourself to notice complaints and stop making them with a simple program like the “21-day no-complaint experiment” made famous by Will Bowen, where you wear a single bracelet and move it from one wrist to the other each time you complain. The goal is 21 days without complaining and you reset to 0 each time you slip up. This increased awareness helps prevent useless past-tense deliberation and negative emotions that improve nothing but deplete your attention.
see also:: Neil Strauss

Questions

How has being “realistic” or “responsible” kept you from the life you want?
eg: Being realistic with/for Kat felt stifling

How has doing what you “should” resulted in subpar experiences or regret for not having done something else?

Look at what you’re currently doing and ask yourself, “What would happen if I did the opposite of the people around me?
What will I sacrifice if I continue on this track for 5, 10, or 20 years?”

Do you really think it will improve or is it wishful thinking and an excuse for inaction?
Are you better off than you were one year ago, one month ago, or one week ago?
If you were confident in improvement, would you really be questioning things so?

what is the desired outcome that makes all the effort worthwhile?

What would excite me?
What would you do, day to day, if you had $100 million in the bank?
What would make you most excited to wake up in the morning to another day?

being effective with time & energy
Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?
Am I inventing busy work to avoid the important?

If you had a heart attack and had to work two hours per day, what would you do?
If you had a second heart attack and had to work two hours per week, what would you do?
If you had a gun to your head and had to stop doing ⅘ of different time-consuming activities, what would you remove?
What are the top-three activities that I use to fill time to feel as though I’ve been productive?

If you had to stop ⅘ of time-consuming activities: (YouTube, Twitter, scrolling, email)
what would you eliminate to keep the negative effect on income to a minimum?
Used even once per month, this question alone can keep you sane and on track.

Who are the 20% of people who produce 80% of your enjoyment and propel you forward, and which 20% cause 80% of your depression, anger, and second-guessing?