There’s a wave of entrepreneurs known as the New Rich. They’re not all millionaires, but they live like kings and queens. They take mini-retirements throughout their lives rather than waiting for a post-65 golden era. They’ve found ways to work less while maximizing effectiveness and profit. They have a consistent cash flow without constantly attending to it. They work remotely, sometimes all over the world, and for far less than daily expenses they’d pay living in their home country. It’s not difficult to do; it just requires a different way of seeing the world. By upending assumptions about wealth and choosing the more effective path to financial freedom, you actually can have it all: not just income, but also time and mobility.

We’ve been duped. We’ve been taught to delay gratification, to defer the dreams and bucket list items we’ve collected and wait until we’ve earned enough money to get after them. We set our sights on a time, forty years down the line, when we can relax, only to realize that we’re old, past our prime, and that doing nothing is boring and unfulfilling. And with people living 30 years or more beyond retirement, they have to live a lower middle class lifestyle to get by. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is actually pretty underwhelming.

What good is income without time? People don’t want to be millionaires—they want the freedom to do all the things they believe only millionaires can afford. Far more important than the traditional wealth metric of actual income (which only measures dollars and cents) is relative income, which measures income relative to the time required to accrue it. So if you make six or seven figures a year working 80 hours a week, are you actually richer and freer than the person who makes $8,000 per month working only 8 hours a week to maintain that cash flow? Her annual income of 96K might be far less than your 600K, but she has time, mobility, and freedom to enjoy the wealth she accrues.

A new model of thinking is replacing retirement as the goal. There’s a cluster of people known as the New Rich who are operating by a very different set of rules than the ones we all learned growing up.

Deferrers (i.e., those postponing adventure, interests, and meaningful projects until retirement), see working for themselves as the ideal. For the New Rich, the goal is other people doing work for them.

Deferrers want to work when it suits them. The New Rich want to select their work carefully, doing as little as possible to get the greatest possible result.

Deferrers want to retire as young as possible. The New Rich find rejuvenation and adventure through mini retirements interspersed throughout their lives, so that their entire lives are enriched and shaped, rather than just the last third or quarter of it. They’re not trying to get away from activity but spend more of their time doing activities that matter to them.

Deferrers think the dream is purchasing all the things you want. For the New Rich, what they want to do and who they want to be matters far more than the things they accrue. Any trinkets and tools used along the way are means—never ends.

Deferrers want to be the ones calling the shots, telling employees what to do. The New Rich care less about being boss or employee than owner.

Deferrers want more quantity. The New Rich want quality and reduced clutter.

Deferrers want to get a huge pay-day, through retirement or acquisition. The New Rich think big picture, but think cash flow first, then a large pay-off after.

These may seem like insignificant distinctions, but they make a world of difference.

It’s not difficult to convince most people that delaying gratification until the bitter, brittle end is a dismal prospect. The harder sell is an alternative to what people have been conditioned to accept. This involves a radical change in thinking, but those who have done it can’t imagine going back to a 9-5 grind.

The path to join the New Rich is comprised of four fundamental changes. Each is a letter in the acronym DEAL: Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation.

Definition refers to the hard work of revisiting basic assumptions about life and business. It gives the rules and goals of an entirely new, exciting game.

Elimination refers to the process of purging your life of the clutter that encumbers you and distracts you from the things that are most important to you. Elimination frees your time.

Automation refers to the process of outsourcing tasks that keep you from the things you would like to do. Central to this is utilizing the growing array of virtual assistants around the world who can organize your life for cheap. Automation helps with another critical ingredient involved in developing a preferable lifestyle: income.

Liberation refers to the freedom to work (and move and have your being) outside the office environment. It’s for people who’d be more productive if not under the thumb of the boss and the ambient office noise and who wants to experience life beyond the cubicle—and maybe even the borders of the country. It’s about seamless control of your work from a distance, escaping your boss, and enjoying mini-retirements while doing the minimal amount of work necessary to achieve maximal effectiveness. Liberation delivers the third ingredient of the luxury lifestyle, which is mobility.

 The deferred-base life experience is bunk. It’s not a choice between fun now or security later. You can have both, but it requires unearthing an entrenched way of thinking about life and income and presenting a new, viable alternative. Working four hours a week is less the point than arriving at a place in your life where the majority of your time is spent doing what is maximally profitable, enjoyable, and meaningful.

You don’t have to quit your job; it’s okay if you’re risk-averse; you don’t have to be single and younger than 30. You need not have been born into wealth, or a graduate from a top university. You need a lifestyle adjustment. This book is about designing a lifestyle more aligned with who you are and what you’re about.

What did the author do when he quit his summertime job as a college kid? Naturally, he became a national kick-boxing champion in China. How did he do it? Instead of learning perfect technique and agonizing over form, he read the rules. One little-known rule in Sanshou kick-boxing is that if a fighter fell off the elevated platform three times, he would be disqualified. In addition to dehydrating himself to lose water weight and drop three weight classes, he tossed the conventional approach to winning matches and pushed opponents off the platform three times to win by TKO (technical knockouts). To the bewilderment and rage of many a competitor and coach, an American guy with little training grabbed the title of national champion by adopting an unorthodox approach that proved more effective.

Interestingly, the Sanshou fighting style has since been altered to accommodate this forgotten rule. Part of the reason it’s difficult to adopt a new paradigm is that our thinking has been steeped in an old one. So even if retirement seems like a raw deal, our old-model assumptions keep us from embracing something different—no matter how feasible and enticing. Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it.

Here’s one secret that has opened up new worlds for people: There are ways in which you can live like a king in other countries and still pay less than you would for expenses in the United States. Your money is generally worth three to ten times as much outside the United States. You can live like a millionaire without the millions. All you have to do is set up a consistent cash flow. The more W’s you control (what, when, where, with whom), the more you free yourself.

The new paradigm takes into account that interests come and go, and that the energy we have at our disposal can’t always be drummed up. Why get caught in a rut that sucks the life out of you? More regular cycles of work and rest are good and healthy, and lifestyle design helps you integrate rest and retirement into your life.

A note on laziness: Less work is not necessarily laziness, nor is doing more work necessarily a sign of productivity. Just because you do a task well, doesn’t make it important. Just because you worked really hard on it doesn’t mean it was time well spent. The New Rich find creative ways to work less, but they often achieve more meaningful results than the average office rat who toils for hours on tasks of dubious significance. Their yardstick for work is results achieved, rather than time expended. Busyness and productivity are not the same thing.

 It’s also important to remember that the timing will never be right to start making the switch. It’s like having a kid—if you wait until you think you’re ready, you’ll never actually have one. “Someday” and “eventually” never come.

Busyness is often a method of avoiding our dreams and the most important things in our lives. Learn to do more with less and you’re well on your way to a more optimally designed lifestyle. The what is far more significant than the how. The best mentor for helping you determine what to keep doing and what to stop doing is Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto was (and remains) an obscure nineteenth-century Italian economist who discovered a pattern in nature and human performance known as the 80/20 Rule or the Pareto Principle:

80 percent of outputs come from 20 percent of inputs.

So 80 percent of successes come from 20 percent of time and energy.

80 percent of profits come from 20 percent of customers.

The majority of problems and dissatisfaction come from a few root causes.

The majority of successes come from a small sliver of our activities.

What are those root causes? What are those activities?

Take a day to be by yourself and give a brutally honest self-assessment to determine your 20 percent of effective inputs and the 80 percent of ineffective inputs you can do without. Question everything from hobbies to friends to business practices to clients. Eliminate your inefficiencies and capitalize on your strengths. Shoring up your weak areas takes several lifetimes. There’s no time for that. Manage those, but focus on your strengths. This is where you will find the ideas and develop the cash flow sources needed to redesign your life and get you out of a W4W (i.e., Work for Work’s Sake) rut.

This will involve being selective about the information you fill your head with and learning the art of saying “no.” 

The poet Henry David Thoreau wrote that, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” We often hold on to too much—far more than we need to. Some of those things are the minutiae we mistakenly consider inevitable.  One of the most critical pieces of the redesigned life process is learning affordable ways to delegate time-sucking tasks. Thanks to the internet, this is no longer a luxury exclusive to employers, but available to employees, too. There are ways to do this—many of which are outside North America. You can outsource your menial—or even significant tasks to virtual assistants in developing countries for $4-15 per hour—depending on the complexity of the tasks. At the low end of the range are setting up appointments and arranging meetings; at the high end are tasks that require an MBA.

A writer for Esquire gave a virtual assistant a try and was pleasantly surprised with the results. He writes a series of glowing reports about a V.A. he hired from a firm in Bangalore, India, called Brickwork. Honey H K protects the writer’s time by filtering his emails and leaving him with only the emails that matter. When there are companies or individuals who won’t leave him alone, Honey is there. She runs interference, politely asking them to stop. She pays his bills and helps him research people he plans to interview. At his request, another V.A. he hired relayed a half-apology to his wife, making it a full apology—which allowed for actual reconciliation between the warring parties. He writes, “Damn! My outsourcers are too friggin’ nice! They kept the apology part and took out my little jabs. They are trying to save me from myself. They are superegoing my id.”

The value of hiring a virtual assistant is that it’s an inexpensive way to free up headspace and time. It creates humorous scenarios that add zest to life and to the lives of those who try to contact you. If you are someone who hates crunching numbers or researching suitable health care and auto insurance plans, V.A.s can help simplify things. Maybe even more critically, they give you an opportunity to spread your managerial wings, getting you used to delegating tasks, giving commands, and coordinating remotely.

So give a virtual assistant a try as an experiment. It doesn’t have to be just for professional life—it can also be for personal life. The distinction is fairly immaterial and has more to do with time freed up for other things. Whatever money you spend on a virtual assistant, the time you save will usually outweigh it. Let’s say you task your virtual assistant with putting your budget into excel spreads, setting up dentist appointments for your kids, and setting up job interviews for you. Let’s say she works on that for four hours at five dollars an hour. But if you make about $25 per hour, then four hours of your time is worth about $100. Subtract the $20 paid to a V.A. and you are still getting a win with the $80 worth of time you could give to more important things. It’s even more valuable if your V.A.s are proficient at tasks that would take you far longer to perform.

It’s a strangely comforting thought that someone on the other side of the world is working for you while you sleep.

The main goal of liberation is increased mobility. For the person who works 9-5 in an office, this can be a process. It requires building the boss’s trust and persuading him that you will be far more productive in an environment outside the office. This is not a ruse. You have to be genuine about it. What if you told your boss that on your sick day, you decided to do the work anyway, and you ended up getting far more done than at the office where there’s chatter and distraction? Would he be open to letting you work remotely Mondays and Tuesdays to see if that makes a difference?

 You will have to develop a track record of greater productivity to reassure your boss that he benefits as well. This process will likely be incremental and probationary while you prove yourself to your boss. Deliver on your promise to get more done, and give your boss the out of being able to revoke the opportunity whenever he wants.

If your boss doesn’t like it, you can always quit. It’s not as scary as many people suppose. It is part of the process of ending up where you need to be and achieving greater freedom of mobility. Just rip off the Band-Aid. It’s far better than enduring three or four decades of soul-shriveling at a job that’s a mediocre fit. You won’t be unemployed forever. You will be able to pay the bills. Line up a job as a source of cash flow ahead of time. If you’re fired, live on savings for a bit. It’s not the end of the world. A gap in your resume won’t be there if you come up with an interesting resume item in the interim that intrigues employers. It could become the talking point for future interviews.

But let’s assume your boss sees the light: “Wow, Timothy’s productivity has noticeably improved since he started working remotely. I’d prefer that he works in the office, and Tim knows I have veto rights, but I can’t argue with the results I’m getting right now.”   

Keep expanding your remote time until you have a desired level of mobility. But as you get more time away from the office, it frees you up to explore new avenues to make income on the side.

 It’s possible, for example, to enjoy five days on a private island in Panama, eating fish freshly caught and cooked by local fishermen, and getting tours of some of the most beautiful reefs in the Caribbean for under $300. It’s a simple story of a life-changing experience for just a few hours of work—or maybe just an hour, if you keep condensing effective work into smaller and smaller time increments. Or how about learning to dance salsa like a pro in Buenos Aires between luxurious yet affordable meals at a month-by-month apartment for far less than what you would pay in typical expenses in the United States? There are amazing possibilities out there for far less money than people realize. You don’t have to be a millionaire to join the New Rich.

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