Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Fully Revised and Updated for 2018

Endless desire is one of the pitfalls of human nature, and one of the first things you need to cure if you want to get ahead more quickly.

People in industrialized nations used to be called “citizens.” Now we are “consumers”—which means (according to the dictionary definition of “consume”) people who “use up,” “waste,” “destroy,” and “squander.”

the three sirens of consumerism—comfort, control, and convenience—are

The people I found had already incorporated the broken promise of the old American Dream into their lives and were designing their lives not around a ladder of success but around meaning, creativity, flexibility, and a sort of rapid prototyping not just of jobs but of entire careers.

Enter the concept of “standard of living.” A new art, science, and industry dubbed “marketing” was born to convince Americans that they were working to elevate their standard of living rather than to satisfy basic economic needs.

Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time. The hours of your life.

Defining “enough” requires you ask yourself some crucial and pertinent questions: What makes you happy? What’s most important to you? What values will you never compromise? If you had $1 million right now, what would you do with your time? What’s one thing you could get rid of to make yourself happier? (A person doesn’t count.) Will you ever have e

we now meet most of our needs, wants, and desires through money. We buy everything from hope to happiness. We no longer live life. We consume it.

Financial Independence has nothing to do with rich. It is the experience of having enough—and then some.