A serious warning about your life & energy

It seems that your energy and financial well-being are juxtaposed. That is at your earlier years, say 20-40 yr old, you have an abundance of energy and a deficit of money.

I often refer to life in 4 quadrants: Emergence, Building, Acquisition and Twilight. Considering the average life expectancy of 80 years, this roughly represents 20 year increments. We live (typically) under the protection and wing of our parents in our first 20 years, but in subsequent quarters the "buck stops on our desks" so to speak. It is in these periods of life that we find ourselves burdened with life's challenges, but also the autonomy to choose who we want to be. The phrase "With great power, comes great responsibility" comes to mind.

Some of us are blessed to discover our identity early in life, and our calling. We know who we are and what our goals and aspirations are so that we can direct our lives to that end. Others find the endless static of the world making it nearly impossible to tune in to the frequency that has the true message of who we are and what our passion is. The more we delay the search for this - the longer we reward those that live in endless academic pursuits against their own human purpose, the more likely we continue to extend the confusion and anxiety that comes with not yet discovering our own purpose.

We've been able to avoid the downside of this for some time because human life has continued to extend longer and longer. Our technologies have created medicines and learning that makes it an ever increasing life experience, despite our planet having finite resources that are not growing with the population expansion. But within each of our lives, we are still seeking out the calling of who we are and what pursuit fulfills us and contributes to our happiness. The answer doesn't lie in a book, a professor, a teacher or a preacher. It lies in us to discover it and it requires us to become involved in the world.

Many of us are blessed to be able to travel at an early age - to see as much of the world as it has to offer us. It helps in our pursuit of our own identity when you can compare it with a wide and vast base. What you discover by physically seeing things speaks 20x louder than any book or lecture can.

Let's surmise that one has found one's passion and calling. Now it is a matter of survival. In quadrant 2 of life, we are tasked with building. Building security, a home, a career, a family, a life. This requires the largest amount of human energy. Energy invested in this phase pays off for the rest of one's life and often mistakes made in this phase taint one's life as well. Caution is important, but it is impossible to make an omelette without breaking some eggs. So one must have the wisdom and acceptance that decisions may not always turn out to be wise. Learning from mistakes is the key to the building phase and you have one saving grace in all of this - you haven't progressed that far through life's journey yet, so a change in course early can be accommodated. This is less likely to be the case in quadrant 3 and 4, unfortunately.

So what is the point of all of this? Well here's the warning that I want to give you...

In quadrant 3 and 4, you will have a deficit of energy as compared with quadrant 2. Meaning that if you discover your passion early, you should be taking advantage of this while you have the life energy to maximize your experience of it. If you do not, you will regret it. Big time.

Consider that in quadrant 3 and 4 of life, you are older. Maybe you have worked your life for someone else's passion & calling. You got a pay check, maybe saved some money. Maybe you were wise and have become financially independent and secure. But you are now 50 years old. You are not as young as you used to be. Your energy to work 24 hours straight at something is not there anymore. You don't necessarily have the same passions as you had at 25.

But your wise decisions to save money and build security paid off. However you have one major regret....

If you don't have the energy anymore, because you sold your soul to a paycheck, you will be left yearning. You have the passion to do something, maybe the interest, but you don't have the energy. Just know that the saying "It's never too late to...." is often pure BS. Time is not something you can roll back. Opportunities come and go, and you have to know which one is good and which one is bad. The context is not often clear, but consider this....

Every decision in quadrant 2 of your life that you make must be filtered with this question:

How does this decision affect my financial well-being but more importantly if I delay this decision now, will I have the life energy later to pursue and experience this to the same degree?

If the answer to this question sacrifices or delays gratification by a long time period and you feel that you are looking at an opportunity that won't repeat, you may have to sacrifice money in order to pursue it. Because if you only think that your job in quadrant 2 is to make money, then you may be missing the point. You will make 5x more money in quadrant 3 of life if you have assets to leverage, and asset acquisition can be done early in life thereby giving you an earlier start on pursuing your passions as you eventually come to realize them.

There is no path that is pre-determined for us. We all must follow life's journey on our own terms. But the one thing you can't argue is math and time. Both move for no man or woman and we have to respect them. Meaning that your decisions (particularly large ones) that you are forced to make in quadrant 2 of your life, should not sacrifice experience over conservative economic decisions. That said, if you are wise you would already have devoted your early years to acquire assets that generate money rather than selling your time by the hour for money. The best time to start that is while you are in quadrant 1 or at least able to leverage off the support of parents financially. If this means delaying moving out of home to get your own place (and the expenses that come with it), or choosing to move in with a number of room-mates to spread the burden of costs over a larger footprint, then if you take the surplus funds from doing this and invest it, you are creating a self-sufficient support mechanism that allows you to pursue your passions as you discover them.

Whatever you do, don't delay this thinking that "When I retire, I want to (fill in the blanks)" because you won't have the energy to do it in earnest then. You might think you will, but unless you retire before you hit quadrant 3, it is highly unlikely that you will ever avoid the regret of saying "I wish I did (fill in the blanks) when I was (younger age)".