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.
Required reading:
- Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1992), and related review.
- Your Money or Your Life
Aspired reading: 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?!):
