What Is This Blog For?

Poster from my Facebook Feed.  If you know who originated it,
please let me know so I can give them credit.

An attention-grabbing link came through my Facebook Newsfeed the other day. The link was to a New York Times article by Thomas L. Friedman titled, "Need a Job? Invent It." In the article Friedman says, "My generation had it easy. We got to "find" a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to "invent" a job. (Fortunately, in today's world, that's easier and cheaper than ever before.)" You can read the article here. I added the emphasis.

This article is the truth!  I'm also excited about it being out there because it has affirmed that, indeed, I am not crazy. I am dumping my expected life to create a life I never imagined I could live. It it turns out that that is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing. That is the future.

I'm not ahead of the curve, either. Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, got there before a lot of us did.  He introduced the idea of life-style design to me. Before *that*, however, there were the hippies. They are, to me, the true pioneers of intentional happiness lifestyle design. (So, now I'm asking myself, am I a hippie? I see a blog post about hippies in the near future.)

I was raised with the conventional admonishment: Go to school, work hard, get a job, work hard, retire, have fun. Most of us were. My parents lived it for most of their lives. And then, one day, our neighbor from across the street had a chat with my dad. Her husband had recently passed away.  He had been a doctor. He had worked very hard for all of his life.  Just when he was about to reach part three (retire) he suffered a debilitating stroke. He never got to see part four.

Our neighbor told my dad about how disappointing this was and warned him not to wind up the same way. My dad is a smart man and my mother is brilliant. The moment my parents found that running their pediatric practice negatively impacted their health, they were out of there.  Currently they reside on a farm in South Africa.

My parents immigrated from South Africa to the United States with three children in tow. They came, initially, so that my father could go to school. The plan was for him to complete a Masters in Public Health then return to South Africa to teach health classes for our church.

One of my earliest memories of my mother is waking up to the sound of her typing a paper for my father. It must have been less than a month after we had arrived. I had been asleep on the floor in the living room and the slow "clack, clack, clack" of the typewriter invaded my dreams. It must have been about four a.m.

We arrived in Loma Linda, California, in December, about eight days before Christmas.  To save money on heat, my parents shut the doors to the bedrooms and we all slept on the floor in the living room. I think the carpet was a green shag at the time. Our house had been damaged during a flood in the sixties so the floor in the living room sloped downward enough to make rolling on it fun for my sister and brother and me.

Our house did not have central heating. Instead, an in-floor furnace placed at the junction between the living room and dining room provided warmth.  In the evenings we could sit around the furnace toasting our feet and drinking Soyagen as we read our books. That early morning, however, my mother sat at the dining room table a few feet away from where we slept, methodically pecking away, typing that paper one letter at a time. She had never been taught to type. White out was in full effect.

When my father discovered that he was actually taking pre-med courses in order to complete his MPH, he expanded his horizons and went to medical school. He simultaneous enrolled my mother in nursing school (she says he "threw" her in) and I spent the rest of my childhood watching my parents study and work their behinds off. I followed in their footsteps.

I got my first job when I was eleven. I cleaned my piano teacher's house in exchange for piano lessons and some cash. Her house was quite small and she wouldn't let me clean the bathroom. Basically I swept and scrubbed the kitchen and dining room floors, dusted the living room and vacuumed the house.  And then we would have our lesson. I never felt prouder and more accomplished, knowing that I was doing something so grown up.

I cleaned house for my next piano teacher, too. By the time I finished high school, I had two  housekeeping jobs plus a (very) part time after school office job. I was well on my way to the American dream.

Working hard, loving school (and having great parents and teachers and classmates) got me into Princeton for undergrad and then into Columbia Law School. By the time I started my law firm job, I had been working for nearly 20 years. It was starting to get old. I had also been married for about seven years and things started to get funky with that, too.

Just then, I discovered Tim Ferriss's book. It was like a revelation from the sky! I devoured the book not so much for its practical suggestions (at the time I believed they were truly impractical for most people) but for its philosophical premises: Live now! Invent yourself! Aim for happiness! The one lesson I remember best is how Tim applied the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 rule, to his life.  He said, 20 percent of your life causes 80 percent of your problems. You know what? It did! I identified that 20 percent and I was divorced almost exactly one year later.

Tim's book is called the 4-Hour Work Week because it truly intends to be a step-by-step guide to creating a lifestyle in which one works for only four hours per week. The tag line is, "Escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich." I dismissed the four-hour part as poppycock and focused on the general principles. I've changed my mind a bit about whether it is practical. It can be practical if one decides to make it practical.

I still don't ever see myself doing just four hours per week mainly because I would miss doing what I do! Perhaps it depends on how one defines work? Whatever the case, I find myself at a new stage of designing my life. And that (finally!) is what this blog is for. Exploring Intentional Happiness Lifestyle Design. The details are in the next blog post.