The Pursuit of Happiness

This whole thing started as an idea.  The idea was to find happiness.  

When my journey started a few years ago, I was NOT happy.  In fact, I was a wreck.

… but before I get into why I was such a mess, let me back up a bit.  

HI, I’m Mr. Dollars & Smiles!  Mr. DS for short.  I am currently a thirty-something dad, husband, and engineer. 

In college I started dating the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.  Luckily she thought I was OK too.  🙂  After college I got a job in a big city as an engineer, and my wife eventually started working as a teacher.  

We had a great time learning to rock climb together, traveling, and focusing on our careers.  We never planned much for the future because we were having such a great time right now.  We were extremely busy, but enjoying ourselves.  

Eventually the constant hurried nature of our lives, combined with the terrible commutes we dealt with caught up to us and we decided to move out of the giant city. 

In 2011 we moved to a mid-sized city.  We bought a house with a white fence.  We got a dog.  We got another dog.  We had a kid.  We were living the American Dream.  

Then in 2014 (the same year our son was born), work started to get busy.  No problem, I was willing to put in some extra time.  I had worked many a big week or two leading up to a deadline before . . .

. . . Fast Forward 2 years . . .

In 2016 work was still crazy busy.  It had been that way continuously for almost 2 years.  I was regularly working 60-80 hours per week.   Hell, I couldn’t remember the last time I only had to work 40 hours in a week. 40 hour weeks sounded like a vacation! 

My 2-year-old son was growing up and I was missing it.  I would typically leave for work before he woke up, and get home after he was already in bed.  Occasionally I’d get home in time to say goodnight.   On a really good day I’d get to play with him for a few minutes and give him his bath before bed.

My wife, who was also working a demanding full time job, was picking up my slack at home since I was never there.  For some reason she has always supported me, and yet during this time I could feel the strains on our marriage.  

My health was suffering as well.  I had formerly loved to get outside and challenge myself physically.  From climbing to ultra marathons, I loved anything that would get me into the mountains.  Yet during this period I dropped out of all my races and pretty much stopped exercising entirely.  

Worse, even after putting in all that time and sacrificing everything dear to me for my career, I was failing at work anyway.  Projects were completed late, and balls were dropped on things that I’d promised to do.  I had so many projects, so many clients, and so many people working for me that I just didn’t know how to keep track of it all.  Every day felt like 10 to 14 hours of making excuses for why things weren’t done, and frantically working as fast as I could on the hottest or most late item in my court.  I couldn’t get caught up to the point where I could work on something before it was due.

I was depressed and exhausted.  I wanted the world to just pause.  I wanted to rest.  I used to fantasize about hanging myself in the garage from a bicycle hook using an electrical cord.  The scariest thing about these thoughts, when they came, was that they did not elicit a feeling of fear. Instead they seemed to be pleasant daydreams, akin to imagining myself taking a nap in the shade of a an elm tree at the park on a sunny day.

I suppose I could have summed all of this up nicely by just saying that, at the time, I was fucked up.  

Then it happened.  The straw that broke the camel’s back.  I’d been on a real work-bender.  It seemed I hadn’t even seen my son awake in a couple weeks.  It was a Sunday around 6pm and I thought, “Fuck this, I’m going home so I can see my son.”  I got home in time to give him his bath before bed.  When I went to take him downstairs for his bath, he looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me, freaked out, and started screaming for mom.  I was a stranger to my own child. 

Something HAD to change.  I didn’t yet know what, but I knew I was going to figure it out.  

The Awakening

As fucked up as things seemed to be at the time, I didn’t know where to start to change it. 

Someone recommended I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosake.  The concepts of passive income and Financial Independence went off like a 4th of July firework in my head!  I’ve never wanted anything so bad!

The concept was simple . . . invest in assets that pay you!  Why hadn’t I thought of this before???  I could use math to find a way out of my job (which I blamed for all my problems)!

The first problem with this plan was that I had no savings.  My wife and I had always spent everything that we earned.  No matter though, I resolved then and there to get our spending under control and invest in real estate with the goal of moving towards financial independence as quickly as possible.  The only problem was, I had a lot that I needed to learn, and I felt like I had no time to learn it…

Goal: Create Space to Learn

I read a book called Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod.  I started waking up really early.  My alarm usually went off at 4am.  This created the time I needed.

Every morning I meditated.  I recited a list of affirmations that became my daily commitment to the things that were important to me.  I visualized what financial independence would be like.  I visualized myself taking the steps to get there.  I wrote one thing I was grateful for, one thing I accomplished yesterday, and what I would accomplish today in a journal.  I ran or lifted weights.  I read.  I read A LOT.

With some free time now available, it was time to turn my attention to the goal of financial independence. 

Goal: Financial Independence

The first step in investing is saving money to invest.  Most conventional websites and books seem to recommend a 10% savings rate, so I set that as our initial goal.  At the time this seemed like a huge challenge, but all it really took was packing lunches and making coffee at home instead of buying those from restaurants and coffee shops each day.

I stumbled onto Bigger Pockets, and started voraciously consuming all of the information they had to offer.  The site is like a free encyclopedia for real estate investing.  It has everything you could want to know.

After saving a little money, and also figuring out how to use a HELOC to access the equity in our house, we purchased a multi-family residential property (specifically a mobile home park).

Then one of the guests on the Bigger Pockets podcast started talking about a website called Mr. Money Mustache.  This website changed my life.  I started at the beginning and read every post.  It was just the right combination of showing the big picture of financial independence, but also explaining the nuts and bolts of exactly how to get there.  One of the key takeaways is that saving a huge amount of money does not have to mean suffering.  He explains how to be happier at a 50% savings rate than when you were spending it all.  In fact, focusing on happiness is actually the means of achieving such a high savings rate, and a high savings rate is the ticket to early financial independence.

We started attacking our savings rate with a vengeance, and cut our spending way down.  Yet the most immediate impediment to my happiness was my supposed hatred for my job…

Goal: Improve at my job

Around this time I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Steven Covey.  Habit number 1 (Be Proactive) really resonated with me.  I realized that I had to take responsibility for my situation.  I had to own the fact that my unhappiness was my own fault.  Not my job’s fault.  Not my boss’s fault.  My fault.  After all, I had made all the choices that got me into this situation.  This felt horrible at first, but then it felt liberating!  If I had the power to get myself into this situation, that meant that I also had the power to get myself out!  I was no longer a helpless victim!

I did some soul searching on my career.  Why did I work such long hours?  I felt like I had to . . . but I wasn’t chained to my desk.  I could go home.  Why did I feel that I hated my job?  Did I hate what I do?  No, the content of what I do is fun and interesting.  Did I hate the people I work with?  No, I am actually lucky to work with a fantastic group of people.  Did I hate my boss?  No.  We sometimes clash on how to do things, but his intentions are good, he’s passionate about what he does, and we’re even friends outside of work.

What I hated about work wasn’t the work itself.  It was the other things in my life that I had to give up due to the huge amount of time I spent working.  What I hated was the hours. 

The reason I worked such long hours wasn’t because someone was forcing me to.  I realized that I had grown into a role at work that I was not yet competent at.  After more than a decade of excelling, I was sucking at my job.  Projects were being finished late, balls were getting dropped, and the quality of my work had declined.  In a vain attempt to make up for my own incompetence, I was throwing as many hours at the job as I could.  However, the reason I wasn’t succeeding was not due to a lack of hours on the job.  The extra hours weren’t helping.  The problem was that I sucked . . . and this realization was great!  This meant that if could find I could find a way to suck less, than I would work less AND be happier!

I started reading a bunch of books on organization, productivity, managing people, etc.  I read books and took steps to try to suck less at my job.  My performance improved.  I was able to manage more people, and handle more projects with less time.  Then a funny thing happened . . . once I no longer felt like I was failing at my job, I actually started to enjoy it!

Past, Present, & Future

Where I’ve Been

I was a miserable workaholic who didn’t make time for my family, or even for myself.

Where I am

I am pretty darn happy right now!  I do my best to make time for my own self improvement and for my family.  My mornings belong to ME.  My days belong to my WORK (for now).  My evenings belong to my FAMILY.  

My kids (we have two now) know who I am.  When I come home from work my older son screams at the top of his lungs, “Dad, dad, DAD!” and runs up to hug me.  My younger son just learned to say the words, “Da da”.  There is nothing better in the world than coming home to 2 kids who make it seem like seeing you is as exciting as winning the lottery.  🙂

Where I am going

My goal is to reach financial independence while my kids are still young.  While I have gotten back into a good place with my career, I have visions of 3 month long family road trips in the summer, and skiing on the weekdays with my kids.  I have visions of traveling, and going for long trail runs on a Tuesday afternoon.

This journey started as an idea.  The idea was to find happiness through financial independence.    I now realize that I had the steps backwards.  Why wait to be happy?  By focusing on happiness first, life is already better.  As a bonus, it turns out that by focusing on happiness I am moving down the road to financial independence too.

In future posts I’ll be diving into the details of specifically how I am going about pursuing happiness, financial independence, stress-free productivity, and other self improvement ideas. 

Keep smiling!

Mr. DS