8 Things You Should Give up If You Want to Retire in the Next 5 Years
I retired at 34
Society teaches you that retiring early is impossible.
The corporate world backs up this lie by designing a career that involves working for 45 years, retiring at 65, then dying. No wonder people have lost hope.
I always wanted to retire early. I wasted a decade chasing get-rich-quick schemes with guys who snorted coke off the desk and worshipped hookers instead of their wives, until I learned the real lessons of financial freedom.
Then I retired at 34.
It felt amazing. Best decision I’ve ever made. But I’ve never analyzed why this was possible (it wasn’t an accident). The more I think about it the more I’ve realized it wasn’t what I did but what I obsessively gave up.
Here’s what I gave up to retire early (and you should too).
One: Choosing fantasies
Let me give it to ya straight, chief.
You can forget the rest of this list because this point is the most crucial. You will never retire early if you choose the wrong vehicle.
This is where 99% of people go wrong. They convince themselves that the financial opportunity they’re chasing is good. Often it’s terrible.
To retire early you must have a solid plan and at least one good income stream (ideally 3 or more). If not, you end up putting in heaps of effort and hours into a fantasy. It then produces no results and you keep hoping it will.
That’s how a fantasy turns into a delusion.
I know a guy that bought a candle franchise. He has to buy their candles. They’re not great. The candle trend could slow down. Every month there are new distributors in his area. He has no control over costs. He doesn’t even like candles much.
Yet he plowed his entire life savings into it.
He has ~$100,000 of candles in his garage to sell. His wife did something similar and went all in on kale t-shirts. But if kale ever becomes boring again and hipsters stop wearing the t-shirts, she’s finished.
Telling yourself you’re on the right path when you know you’re not and the evidence is clear, is how you chase a delusion and end up either bankrupt or poor.
Society is built on these sh*tty shiny objects.
A big part of retiring early is being able to do your own research and not fall for common traps that never lead to money.
Approach income decisions with first principles and logic. If it looks like sh*t and smells like sh*t, it’s probably sh*t.
People who never retire early worship:
Gatekeepers
Overnight Hollywood success
Getting lucky or waiting for lucky breaks
Hope isn’t a plan. It’s being a lazy ass.
Two: 9-5 jobs (rat race)
People are gonna cut my throat for this one.
Let me be straight. I met thousands of wealthy clients over the course of my banking career. A decent percentage of them had retired early. And not one of those early retirees did it with a 9-5 cubicle job. Not one.
No one talks about this: 9-5 jobs aren’t a vehicle for freedom.
Don’t get me wrong, I love jobs as a way to start out and learn. But as a long term strategy for retiring early with a decent amount of cash, they’re laughable.
If you want to retire early you need multiple income streams. And you at least need a one-person business that one day you, perhaps, transition into a startup with employees.
Investing in stocks, real estate, bonds, gold, or crypto only leads to slow wealth.
You may make some money but the profits will arrive in decades (if at all). And when you finally get that money the true representation of what that cash can buy you will have shifted significantly thanks to inflation and currency devaluation.
The two best investments are in:
Your skills
A business
The other places you can invest money are mostly an illusion. They exist to dangle a carrot over your head and convince you to work a job for years and go slow.
Why don’t people focus on personal growth and/or start a business? It’s hard.
Once you see the value of starting a business and investing in personal growth, you can’t unsee it. But it’s unsexy which is why Dave Ramsay and other gurus stay quiet about it.
It’s easier to sell society “easy” sugar pills than it is to sell hard pills to treat hidden cancers.
Three: The belief in the 10,000-hour rule
Just show up.
That’s the oversimplified success advice that people who want to retire early follow. It sounds smart until you break it down.
If all you had to do was spend 10,000 hours doing one thing and you’d be guaranteed of success, then every person who ever spent 10,000 hours in the same cubicle job would be a billionaire.
What often happens, though, is the average person learns some skills in their first year of a job, then repeats these same skills in the exact same way for decades and calls it a career.
There’s zero iteration.
They refuse to get feedback. The hours they’ve spent at work turn into “experience,” and so they think they know better than the market.
And the market screws them up the butt as a result.
Doing the same thing over and over won’t make you successful, and it sure as hell won’t help you to retire early.
We must change and grow as we repeat habits. And the average person won’t change because it’s painful and they’ll likely have to face that they were wrong.
Four: Saving money, discounts, coupons, sales, shopping malls
Consumerism is a lie.
Saving money, discounts, coupons, sales, and shopping malls are all just representations of consumerism. If you believe in any of them, then you’ve been brainwashed and don’t realize it.
Consumerism doesn’t exist to make you smart or thrifty or good with money. It exists to make you desire sh*t you don’t need and go into debt for it. You justify these bad decisions with “Well, I got a good deal.”
Who cares.
If you got a good deal but traded your early retirement for it, then it was the worst deal in history.I never let a price or discount determine where I spend money – because I have free will and know better. Notice the traits of consumerism and use every cell in your body to ignore them.
Alternative mindset: make spending decisions based on ROI, not price.
Five: Needy networking
(Asking for things you haven’t earned)
When I interact with people online they often sound desperate. They’re needy. They start a conversation by asking for something like I’m their slave.
Or they introduce themselves by giving an Oscar speech about their achievements. They forget the world doesn’t revolve around them. Society is run by incentives. If you network to get what YOU want, you get nothing.
Needy networking is the norm and it has a terrible conversion rate. Just look at your LinkedIn direct messages. Absolute trash.
You can’t network your way to success if you haven’t actually done anything worth paying attention to. The idea of free mentorship died in the 1990s. Now people look at what you’ve done. Without social proof you have nothing.
So work on your social media profile more than sending cold DMs to strangers and asking for g*ngb*ngs on the first unsolicited coffee date at the back of an alley.
Examples:
“Tony Robbins will you please mentor me for free and suck me off in the back of your Rolls Royce every weekend. I promise it’ll be worth it. I love you long time. Here are links to all my websites that are under construction.”
“Hey Tony, I took one of your programs and used it to build this movement online. I’ve helped 50 people so far. Would be happy to share more of the story with you if it helps you in any way. Either way, thank you.”
Which email gets a reply? Definitely not the first one.
Six: Hiding from the world out of fear of judgment
If you live an introverted life and hide behind closed doors, guess what?
You still get judged. People will judge you no matter what you do. So you may as well have a crack at a big goal and see what happens.
Hiding isn’t the answer. Not showing up in google is hurting you more than it’s helping you. The boogie monsters you think exist are in your head.
No one pays attention to you because they’re drowning in their own problems. The boss at work isn’t sitting there every night studying your Facebook account to see if you’ve been naughty and had one too many beers at the footy, mate.
Once you realize 99.9% of people don’t care about anything you’re doing, the idea of hiding becomes illogical.
You’re hidden from the world just by living.
And even if you make a lot of noise, you’ll still be a zebra hiding behind a much bigger elephant. May as well be yourself in all your glory. Do the thing.
Seven: Short-term lollipop thinking
Politics rarely solves anything. It’s a sugary lollipop that turns into a fart.
Yet people vote like they’re about to start a revolution and rip down the Berlin Wall. The American election, for example, will solve nothing.
Same as the last one.
Why? Because U.S. presidents do 4-year terms. They’re only around for a short time. They have zero interest in solving multi-decade problems, because that won’t get them elected, and they won’t be around long enough to see it through.
Political thinking exists everywhere.
I gave up short-term thinking 10 years ago. I now build in multi-decade chunks. Not because I’m smart but because there’s no competitive advantage to try and be an overnight success and win a pot of gold in the next 30 days.
It’s unrealistic… even moronic.
If you by some miracle pull off short-term success, you won’t keep it because you didn’t learn the skills and wisdom for long enough beforehand. Just ask lottery winners. They lose everything, then later see their lottery win as a curse.
Eight: Streaming edutainment
A lot of content online feels like it’s education.
Really, though, it’s education disguised as cheap entertainment. There’s little to gain from it. I’d argue every streaming service fits into this category. What looks like education is a distraction that fuels other people’s business models.
From the age of 20 to 34, I watched hardly any TV or entertainment. While everyone else was streaming, I was learning real-world skills like public speaking and having a blast in the meantime.
It’s such a subtle shift.
Did not watching Netflix really help me retire early? Not entirely. But it definitely gave me more hours in the day that I used to read and write. And those two skills made me more money than I ever imagined.
What’s underneath this idea is that you can be a consumer or a creator of things. If you create more than you consume, you bend the odds of retiring early in your favor.
Without the currency of time you don’t have the bandwidth to develop the skills needed to retire early. You have to steal time from somewhere if you want to steal the retirement dream back off the corporate world.
Final Thought
Retiring early comes down to your view of the world.
If you’re closed-minded, you’ll be skeptical about everything and pick a bad way to earn a living… and accidentally become an exploited Uber driver.
If you’re open-minded and pay attention to what those who’ve retired early have done, you may pick up an idea or two that’ll get you on the path to financial freedom.
Choose the hard option to build an easy life.
Tell me in the comments which of these 8 things above you’re going to give up & why?
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Hey Tim, I just had a one-on-one Zoom call with a client. My first client. It feels like a big day. And I'm not scared anymore. The $100 I made from the session? I'll invest it.
Love your points. Hate the subtitle. Really, we need a better word or definition for 'retire'. I never want to retire. I want freedom. Which is what you've earned. Which is what your '8 Things' lead to. Freedom.