I’ve enjoyed your content over the past few years and am now binge-reading from the beginning.. Curious if your methods for mapping your vision/strategies/tactics have changed over the past few years or do you more or less follow the same structure? Thanks,

Jeff

The one thought I had reading this though is, shouldn’t FI be more of a strategy/what as opposed to a vision/why? It’s certainly a huge paradigm shift from the average thinking and changes perspective, but making it the vision to me raises the question of what to do once you get there. It could be why some people feel lost once they reach FI: they’ve attained their vision, now what? Or maybe as we approach our visions we just replace them with new visions.

To me, FI is the ends to a mean. A higher level “what” to an ultimate “why” that I’m still searching for. The idea that those motivated enough to reach FI are too motivated to be satisfied simply retiring early resonates with me. Thanks for the thought exercise.

Thank you so much for the comment! I think a happiness mantra is a great idea. The simple act of writing something down or saying it has strange effects. Writing down goals gets into your subconscious mind and they start to happen 🙂

As part of a women’s professional development group that I belong to, we have to come up with business plans every year and present them to the group. A few years ago, I decided that instead of a business plan, I was going to come up with a happiness plan and use the group to keep me accountable to it. The first thing I did was come up with what I call my one sentence Happiness Mantra. I spent a few weeks giving a lot of thought to what really makes me happy and also what I wanted my life to look like. Here’s what I came up with: Living a disciplined, healthy, efficient, generous, financially secure life focused on God, personal relationships, service, and self-improvement that is sprinkled with creativity, adventures and fun leads to a happy Anne-Marie. I then made a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish that year and designated which part or parts of the happiness mantra each action served. I added or eliminated items based on whether they were going to help me achieve my vision as reflected in the happiness mantra. I’ve done this for several years now and it has worked pretty well. I must say that I have never been happier in my life. Spending the time for self reflection to come up with the vision, i.e. my happiness mantra, was the key.

Thanks again for your great blog. I look forward to reading your future posts.

I love this recent article by JD Roth about purpose after FI.

http://moneyboss.com/beyond-wealth/

Thank you! FI is such a great example of a vision and how to use this method. I chose it on purpose for how clear cut it is. It gets much messier for other topics! After reading your blog I think you will find this post of mine interesting.

http://thehappyphilosopher.com/why-you-should-find-your-freedom-first/

🙂