You may (or may not) have come across Timothy Ferris’ book “The 4 hour workweek” and I have come across a number of comments about how realistic this is. However that’s not what I want to talk about.
The book’s subtitle is “Experiments in lifestyle design” and much of it is dedicated to considering how one can get more lifestyle for less money.
As an example, the author spends a lot of time in Buenos Aires – living well but cheaply in pesos, whilst he earns in US dollars. It’s not a new idea either: In his book “Guilt Edged”, Merlin Minshall (one of the men who Ian Fleming used as a blueprint for James Bond), starts his spying career by sailing a small yacht across pre war Europe along the Rhine and Danube. At that time yachting and foreign travel were the preserve of the very rich but by thinking around the problem (using a very small yacht and himself as crew), Merlin was able to approximate this lifestyle for a lot less. OK so it wasn’t the same as sundowners on the SS Rockefeller but it must have beaten the rush hour commute to (in his words) earn “money solely to buy things to impress people I don’t even like”.
Even he wasn’t the first as he cites an essay “The £200 millionaire” (published in 1921) as his inspiration.
Many people when faced with a problem start by deciding how much money to throw at it on the basis that the more expensive something is the better it will be.
The pointlessness of this was brought home to me a few years ago on a trip to Cornwall where I met an Australian family at Lands End. For me the holiday was fairly cheap but for them it was a trip of a lifetime yet the experience was exactly the same for both of us (at least objectively). Thinking about the number of Antipodeans I have met in the UK, living here can’t be all that bad and every time I travel around this country I make a point of trying to look at things with the eyes of a stranger.
The moral is, don’t ask: How much am I spending on this holiday (or any other experience or product), but ask instead: How much am I enjoying it. In other words: think what the value is to me rather than what’s the cost.
Same goes for business; the first question to ask is: will it solve my problem not how much do I have to pay for it.