Inspiration

Every journey needs some inspiration!  Here are some things I’ve loved and things I’m thinking about:

Stories I love.  Here are some people that have had the same realizations I have — that life on earth is about more than an unfulfilling job; that the mind needs space to reach its creative potential; that the most common work model might not be the best:

  • Jim Koch, who started Sam Adams, took the Greener Pasture$ journey long ago.  In 1984, he quit his cushy corporate job as a management consultant for Boston Consulting Group to start a brewery — way before craft beer was in vogue.  I love his whole story, but I often come back to this shred of wisdom:  “I had this epiphany…  after 6 years at BCG, I asked myself, ‘Do I want to do this the rest of my life?’  And the answer came back, ‘no.’  And the next sort of corollary to that was, well, if I don’t want to do it for the rest of my life, I probably don’t want to do it … tomorrow.”
  • Stephen Sagmeister’s TED talk about how taking a sabbatical can feed your creativity.  I’m a big believer in the idea that the mind needs space to roam to come up with new ideas.
  • Atlantic article on dual-income households raising families.  It’s super common for us to feel that there’s never enough time in the day!  What if there were a better way?!?!
  • Nick Offerman’s Paddle Your Own Canoe is a call to get out of your screen-focused bubble and DO things that make you happy — work with wood, for example, or make a hand-made card for your loved one’s birthday.  I first heard him talk about these things during a standup routine, and I felt like I was in the presence of a kindred spirit (/curmudgeon)!

Other financial independence blogs I enjoy:  I’m pretty new to this community, so you won’t be surprised to find I spend time on some of the most well-known blogs, especially Mr. Money Mustache.  I also like Living a FI, Financial Panther, and Our Next Life.

Reading list:  All the stuff I want to read up on related to the Greener Pasture$ journey, but haven’t had time to do yet (perhaps because I’m… at work?!):