#008: Maximize Satisfaction over a Lifetime
My recipe to prioritize long-term fulfillment over short-term gain.
Everyone needs to take important decisions once in a while: personal decisions, financial decisions, career decisions.
Most such decisions are somewhat indirectly related to improving your life and maximizing your satisfaction.
Taking a moment to think about the criteria you need to apply in order to improve the quality of your decision can have a tremendous impact on your future.
Unfortunately, most people don’t establish a crystal-clear prioritization structure when they face personal game-changing decisions.
Whenever I think about taking an important decision that implies a substantial time commitment such as how to choose which (side-) project to work on next, looking for a job or a new personal finance strategy, I inevitably ask myself the question
“What am I optimizing for?”
Possible answers could be maximizing experience, money, purpose or minimizing risk.
I like to set my decision criterion to be ‘maximizing satisfaction over a lifetime’.
In other words, I strongly prioritize long-term fulfillment over short-term gain.
In order to measure such a ‘thing’, I first need to define categories that describe what is important to me and what I consider a success in each category.
For myself, in order of importance these are
- health and happiness for my spouse and family;
- financial stability for my spouse and family;
- working on an inspiring and purposeful project;
- getting rich.
Above listing may or may not seem obvious to you but by no means everyone might prioritize the same way. That’s OK.
For example, depending on your lifestyle, age, career and personal situation category 1 and 2 might be less important than 3.
It is up to you to define what is important to you and in which order.
The point is, if you want to optimize, you first need to categorize.
Otherwise you’ll be confused when you prioritize.
Now, back to my categorization:
For category 1 and 2 it is straightforward to define what success means.
These 2 categories might not be directly related to my decision making but rather indirectly:
For example, my wife’s preferences on where we should or should not live (e.g. which country, city, area) as well as a certain amount of minimum income set the boundary conditions on options to consider regarding category 3 and 4.
Thus, having defined above prioritization helps me to set extremely clear boundaries when taking decisions.
It increases the quality of my own decision-making with respect to my own criteria.
Next, I need to understand the time frame to consider while optimizing.
By construction my time frame is a lifetime.
Today, I am 36 years old and I truly have the ambition to live a long life.
Thus, lifetime for me is equivalent to “until I am 85+ years old”.
Therefore, if I start today, I am optimizing over a time frame of roughly 50 years, hopefully more.
In order to fine-tune the time frame, I want to be more specific regarding category 4 as it is somewhat related to category 2.
I want to surpass $1M in personal assets at age 40 and $10M at age 50.
Becoming rich is only possible through ownership and not through (high) salaries.
This is because a salary is directly related to the amount of time spent at work and time only scales linearly.
However, getting wealthy requires exponential scaling and this is only possible through ownership of the right thing.
To that end it is perfectly fine to be many times wrong or having to wait long enough with a low income;
if only 1 time I am right.
Therefore, in order to fulfill my goal related to category 4, I need to own either a piece of a company, real estate, IP or any other valuable good (e.g resources).
I should not aim at having $1M in personal assets by 40 through exclusively focusing on a high salary, but instead aiming towards having ownership over the right thing.
Remember that thanks to my clear boundary conditions set by category 1 and 2, I exactly know how to navigate prioritization of category 4.
I may or may not achieve becoming rich but I want to set clear, ambitious and measurable goals.
Now I have set clear boundary conditions regarding category 1, 2, and 4.
From now on, whenever I need to take an important decision, I can evaluate all options that match category 3, which are within my boundary conditions given by the other categories.
Thereby, working on an inspiring and purposeful project is more important to me than getting rich; but if I can combine it, I will.
Clear thinking, clear prioritization — Let’s go!
What are your criteria to maximize satisfaction over a lifetime?
Key takeaways
- Define your criteria that you want to optimize for.
- Prioritize them.
- Increase the quality of your decision-making: Take decisions according to your own criteria.
Don’t miss the next newsletter to get more actionable insights on how I optimize my life.
