Author Topic: Audacious goals in FIRE  (Read 3199 times)

bobble

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 346
Audacious goals in FIRE
« on: July 23, 2022, 11:17:12 AM »
Are you doing something audacious in FIRE? Taking on a big challenge with a risk of failure? What is it, and why are you doing it?

I worry that I have become too soft and content post-FIRE. I don't strive for hard goals with the risk of failure as I did before. But why not? I think that I should! I want my pre-FIRE mojo back.

I returned to old MMM blog posts to look for inspiration. I started reading the book on Stoicism that he recommended and this part felt like a slap in the face:

Quote
Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won't be able to fulfill. Your other desires should confirm to this desire, and if they don't, you should do your best to extinguish them. If you succeed in doing this, you will no longer experience anxiety about whether or not you will get what you want; nor will you experience disappointment on not getting what you want. Indeed, says Epictetus, you will become invincible: If you refuse to enter contest that you are capable of losing, you will never lose a contest.

This describes the way I have been living post-FIRE, but I hate that!

No, I don't want to be the quiet hermit who ventures nothing for fear of disappointment. I want to be the man in the arena:

Quote
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Are you the (wo)man in the arena? What exciting, hard, and risky (in terms of disappointment) project are you working on? Why?

Wadiman

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 213
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #1 on: July 24, 2022, 12:52:35 AM »
Hi Bobble - I am FIREing in October and in the first week of November I'm heading over to New Zealand to do an introductory mountaineering course.  Mountaineering is something that i've wanted to try for decades but work always seemed to get in the way!  I'm increasing my fitness activities now to prepare.  If it turns out that I really like it then I plan to do a fair bit more while still physically up for it.

brooklynmoney

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 707
  • Location: Crooklyn
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #2 on: July 24, 2022, 12:57:27 AM »
I am not FIREd yet but I just walked past of my first camino de Santiago (le puy chemin) in France and I now want to walk ALL the Caminos when I FIRE

Expatriate

  • 5 O'Clock Shadow
  • *
  • Posts: 55
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #3 on: July 24, 2022, 01:30:34 AM »
Are you doing something audacious in FIRE? Taking on a big challenge with a risk of failure? What is it, and why are you doing it?

I worry that I have become too soft and content post-FIRE. I don't strive for hard goals with the risk of failure as I did before. But why not? I think that I should! I want my pre-FIRE mojo back.

I returned to old MMM blog posts to look for inspiration. I started reading the book on Stoicism that he recommended and this part felt like a slap in the face:

Quote
Your primary desire, says Epictetus, should be your desire not to be frustrated by forming desires you won't be able to fulfill. Your other desires should confirm to this desire, and if they don't, you should do your best to extinguish them. If you succeed in doing this, you will no longer experience anxiety about whether or not you will get what you want; nor will you experience disappointment on not getting what you want. Indeed, says Epictetus, you will become invincible: If you refuse to enter contest that you are capable of losing, you will never lose a contest.

This describes the way I have been living post-FIRE, but I hate that!

No, I don't want to be the quiet hermit who ventures nothing for fear of disappointment. I want to be the man in the arena:

Quote
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Are you the (wo)man in the arena? What exciting, hard, and risky (in terms of disappointment) project are you working on? Why?
Not an answer to your question, but…

Are you not confusing with “life post-FIRE” with “generally getting older”?

I mean, I fully recognize the lacking urge to do something new, contrary to 10 years ago. But then without the FIRE ;-)

reeshau

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 2510
  • Location: Houston, TX
  • Former locations: Detroit, Indianapolis, Dublin
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #4 on: July 24, 2022, 01:50:55 AM »
FIRE'd 2 1/2 years, now...

Exciting?  Yes.  Hard?  Yes, in the sense that I am learning and doing new things.  Risky?  No, why would I seek that, necessarily?  Being FIRE'd, in itself, decreases the risk because I don't have to divide my attention between passions and work.  So, I guess it would be harder to do.

Are you specifically seeking physical challenges, or would mental ones suffice?  Try a new language, and/or living in another country, if you haven't done so.  You would be surprised how thrilling and risky it can be to go grocery shopping, or do the laundry.

(Facetiously)  Start a new business, particularly a restaurant.  90% of them fail within 5 years, and it takes a lot of money and will redefine your definition of a long day.

I very much agree with seeking out your first two criteria.  No sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch for me.  The third, I think, is in your head.  No need to seek it out, specifically.  Don't be ashamed if you find a way to make your passion bloom.

swashbucklinstache

  • Pencil Stache
  • ****
  • Posts: 626
  • Location: Midwest U.S.
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #5 on: July 24, 2022, 09:14:14 AM »
Not FIRE but I have these goals for during RE. Things risked will be opportunity cost and disappointment or embarrassment.

-learning to play and instrument and get a public gig.
-learning several languages and do immersive travel
-try to get into med school or PA/nursing school, just to practice part time as a way to give back
-get into the best shape of my life and qualify for a big marathon
-start a company or join an existing one with a goal of making the local community better and actually do it
-go from hobby coder to good enough to make an app that will have a positive impact on the world

Any of these are very hard goals, require tons of effort, and are high risk of failure. They'd also come before "was a generic middle manager in a consulting company" in a telling of my life story. And even in failure I think I'd have a lot of fun and better myself.

These are RE goals because the opportunity cost right now is being present for my friends and family. In RE I honestly plan to structure a lot of this for 4-5 days a week between 9 and 5, just like a J-O-B. Then opportunity cost will be at best missing out on couch time and at worst missing out on ... other things from the list.

Metalcat

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 17394
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #6 on: July 24, 2022, 11:41:52 AM »
Lol, I don't think there will ever be an issue with me getting soft or my life getting more boring. I don't seem to be programmed that way.

I can't stay in one place or do one thing for very long and I'm literally never *not* considering new adventures to take on. I basically can't hear about anything without asking myself "hey, do I want to do that?" Like literally anything.

That means every person I speak to, everything I read, every tv show or movie I watch, whatever I see, I immediately start wondering if I want to do it. I consider literally anything and everything to be a possibility worth considering.

Essentially, I never ever default to whatever I'm doing as what I should be doing, not in terms of work, hobbies, location, anything. It's always all subject to change if a better option comes up. I have zero attachment to the status quo unless it's legitimately the better option. And how can I know that without considering other options??

I'm also married to someone whose reply to almost anything I suggest doing is "Sure, why not?" Which is how I ended up buying a house in rural Newfoundland despite neither of us having ever been here. That was a great decision, we're having an AMAZING time.

I'm severely disabled at the moment, so a few things have to wait, such as doing work up in the arctic in Iqaluit, which is very high up on the priority list. But in the meantime, I'm getting yet another graduate degree because I'll be in recovery from orthopedic surgeries for the next 2+ years and might as well get something useful done while I'm otherwise useless.

That will produce a credential that will allow me to do volunteer/humanitarian work all over the world if I end up physically able to. DH, is already figuring out what kind of NGOs he can work once he retires. Our list of global destinations for work/volunteer contracts is MASSIVE.

I already have good friends in Nepal, Ghana, and Peru who run schools and women's charities that I can easily do work with.

I have another degree I'll likely do later in life, plus a long list of certifications, and both of my professional licenses will require extensive continuing education, so I'll never not be busy with that.

Retiring has only made my goals more lofty, because I have more bandwidth for them, and I no longer have a clear delineation between work I have to do to live and work I want to do.

So no, I have no concerns about getting complacent in retirement. I've frequently been described as "terrifyingly motivated" and "freakishly energetic" when it comes to my utterly relentless drive to always be taking on new adventures and challenges.

As I've often said, I basically *need* to have some sort of project, or combo of projects to keep me busy, otherwise I can get into a lot of trouble.




MustachioedPistachio

  • Stubble
  • **
  • Posts: 224
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #7 on: July 24, 2022, 12:30:36 PM »
Retiring has only made my goals more lofty, because I have more bandwidth for them, and I no longer have a clear delineation between work I have to do to live and work I want to do.

Echoing Malcat here.

I am studying to (hopefully) become an astrophysicist. My expectation is to learn and give it my best; thus, as Epictetus said, can't lose the contest. It may or may not result in my achieving the "risky" outcome of a title / research position / etc. Entering the arena and participating is the goal; winning or losing is not.

sui generis

  • Magnum Stache
  • ******
  • Posts: 3104
  • she/her
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #8 on: July 24, 2022, 06:44:33 PM »
Yeah, it feels like in FIRE those two things (being protected from disappointment and being the "woman in the arena") have sort of merged.  I am both protected from disappointment and risk because no matter what I attempt to learn, try, do, etc. I have nothing riding on it.  I'm insulated from most risk almost completely.  But that doesn't mean I'm not doing things that aren't hard or unlikely to succeed in some sense.  In my old life, unlikely to succeed might mean the same thing as realizing disappointment.  But not now.  Or at least not as much.  Which is nice. 

Someone might say I could still risk my physical safety and that is true to some extent, but again less than it was before FIRE.  Why?  Because I have more time to reduce the risk of any given activity because of my FIRE status.  So one of the first things I did when I FIREd was a 3 week solo backpacking trip in the wilderness.  If I wasn't FIREd I might have done it in a more risky way (less preparation for the physical demands, less training for emergency preparedness, etc.).  So it's actually less risky for me, because I'm FIREd, than it might seem to others. 

I do sometimes feel like I tried to avoid failure too much in my younger life and I could have learned a lot, earlier, had I allowed myself to fail more.  But now I can't just make up for that since failure doesn't have the same valence or meaning as it would have when I could have learned some real lessons out of how to bounce back after failure, etc.  Now when I fail (or something just doesn't turn out to be awesome like I hoped), I might try to learn lessons, but there's not a lot of emotional resonance.  I just shrug and move on.  And I do really believe it's the lack of urgency behing me needing to learn any lessons from it, for my safety, security or well-being.  I guess it's a sort of tradeoff, but that's what life is like, no matter how crazy the next thing is that I try each time.

2sk22

  • Handlebar Stache
  • *****
  • Posts: 1489
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #9 on: August 01, 2022, 10:15:48 AM »
I still have a bunch of audacious goals in retirement, but whether I am making progress towards them is another story :-)

The main thing that I have not done as much as I expected in retirement is computer programming. My goal is to build an app for the Mac in Swift using SwiftUI. The main challenge that has slowed me down is that the barrier to entry is pretty steep - new language, new API and new IDE, all in one shot. When I get stuck, I have a tendency to switch to something easier. If my livelihood depended on this, I am sure that I have forced myself to slog through the hard spots. But to be honest, since I'm comfortably retired, I just don't pressure myself as much as I used to when I was still working.

It also doesn't help that I have way too many hobbies and interests. In order to make some progress towards my programming goals, I will have to put some of these other hobbies on hold. I think I'll be productive in the new tools by the end of this year but its taken a lot longer than I expected.


Slow road to freedom

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 288
  • Location: UK
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #10 on: August 02, 2022, 03:11:29 AM »
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of weeks. I’m around 6 weeks from leaving my paid employment and launching myself into the great unknown (FIRE). My work has centred around business plan objectives I.e. big goals, of which we’ve achieved a lot. Similarly I’ve driven myself for lofty personal goals.

Now I’m thinking about the next decade: do I want to be prescriptive about goals to achieve, or do I want to focus on habits that will lead to an overall improvement of whatever I focus on?

We’re all different, and I suspect what will work for me - I reckon one or two goals each year as well as working on habitual improvements - would be different for the next person. I’m trying hard not to establish big goals as the only ‘thing’ to focus on; for example, improving my musical talent (low base) will take consistent practice, and setting a goal (for me) would be less relevant.


Metalcat

  • Senior Mustachian
  • ********
  • Posts: 17394
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #11 on: August 02, 2022, 07:14:35 AM »
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last couple of weeks. I’m around 6 weeks from leaving my paid employment and launching myself into the great unknown (FIRE). My work has centred around business plan objectives I.e. big goals, of which we’ve achieved a lot. Similarly I’ve driven myself for lofty personal goals.

Now I’m thinking about the next decade: do I want to be prescriptive about goals to achieve, or do I want to focus on habits that will lead to an overall improvement of whatever I focus on?

We’re all different, and I suspect what will work for me - I reckon one or two goals each year as well as working on habitual improvements - would be different for the next person. I’m trying hard not to establish big goals as the only ‘thing’ to focus on; for example, improving my musical talent (low base) will take consistent practice, and setting a goal (for me) would be less relevant.

If you're someone who is naturally a self-motivated, then chances are the best thing for you to do is to decompress and get to know wo you are without goals being set for you.

After that, what you *should* do becomes quite intuitive.

It was quite the adjustment for me to go from feeling the need to push myself towards a goal, to those goals naturally becoming self evident. But first, I needed to learn to stop pushing. And that required me to get pretty comfortable with doing very little for awhile.

I'm so glad I did, because I'm infinitely more in tune with what I should be doing rather than what I tell myself I should be doing.

Slow road to freedom

  • Bristles
  • ***
  • Posts: 288
  • Location: UK
Re: Audacious goals in FIRE
« Reply #12 on: August 02, 2022, 07:37:59 AM »
Thanks @Malcat. I have so many things that *could* become a goal, taking the time out to decompress feels hard already. You’ve previously described how you pretty much get curious about something and find it natural to start thinking about what you might like to do in that area. I feel the same about an increasing number of things - curiosity almost gets the better of me, and I disappear into a subject. (I think you seem to be more focused than I am in that respect.)

One example: I’ve been approached for another paid role (it’s not public I’m ‘available’) and I’m naturally flattered. This happens a fair bit. I turned down one role earlier this year because I wasn’t interested. This latest one might be interesting, and I’ve agreed to an exploratory call. Despite me knowing I need some time out. Just can’t help myself.

Sorry OP, I almost need the answer to how *not* to set/have audacious goals for a few months!