The Good Life and How to Get It

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A blueprint of one's own
I've been thinking hard about how to answer your question, which I could maybe restate as, How can it be easy to put one foot in front of the other, walk out your company's door, and not look back once, while you go do something else for three months?

For many businesspeople, the idea that leaving can be that easy -- not only easy but also good for them and for the business -- is so far from their own personal experience that they will assume it's a lie or at best a careless exaggeration. As you so gently pointed out, the answer I gave before, "simply, physically, leave," just doesn't cut it.

You need a buffer of like-minded people around you.

I think I can give you a satisfactory answer. It's not an answer that's going to bring real satisfaction, though, because I'm afraid it might make the goal seem even further out of reach.

If the question is, How can it be easy to walk out the door? then the answer is, It's easy when every facet of your life has been chosen or designed to make it easy. No exceptions. When all your choices are made with freedom and simplicity powerfully in mind, then freedom and simplicity are not only easy but also inevitable.

It really is easy for Laura and me, and always has been. I'm not saying there has never been a tug-of-war -- those feelings are common -- but there's never been any question which side pulls strongest. I touched on some of the reasons earlier, such as structuring the company from top to bottom to support freedom of motion and building an organization of people who thought like us. The systems match, the people match, and right there you've avoided a huge hurdle that you would've had to get over if your company hadn't grown up from scratch around freedom as a vision.

If I list the choices that we've made, the list may only serve to make freedom and simplicity look unachievable or even undesirable. But still such a list may be worth making. A person glancing down our list of choices might be able to identify things in his or her own life that make leaving harder than it needs to be.

Our list is only an example of the kinds of things that work. Someone in another part of the country, with different personal loves, would take a different path -- but if he or she kept choosing freedom at every turn, it would probably work just as well.

One thing, though, before I do the list. There are certain questions that you should never ask, because they throw your brain into a looping pattern, and you have to completely reboot. Questions like, What was it like before the universe began? or, What does God look like? or, Which came first, the chicken or the egg? or, How long will my life be? or even, What happened to this day? They are essentially unanswerable. Relax, enjoy life, don't worry about them.

How can it be easy to walk out the door? When every facet of your life has been designed to make it easy.

The granddaddy of such questions is, How do other people do it? Over the years we've learned, the hard way, never to ask that question. It leads to the worst kinds of mental short circuits. As proud businesspeople ourselves, we don't know how CEOs of the biggest corporations can find the time to reproduce, much less buy Christmas presents for their young. As hard workers ourselves, we don't know how other people can put in 72 hours a week, week after week, and volunteer on the side and be so cheerful. As parents ourselves, we don't know how people making a third the money we do can send twice as many kids to college. As runners, we don't know how the best marathoners can run 26 miles at amazing speed, one race after another, and not have their knees and ankles unhinge.

We've trained ourselves to be fully at peace with that unanswerable, universal question. So here we are, taking more time off, working fewer hours than anyone else we know in our position. And still, surprisingly perhaps, it's a challenge for us to keep our refrigerator from running empty; let's not even think about the challenges of putting up our Christmas tree. So read this list for whatever you can get from it, but forget trying to use it as some kind of recipe.

List of things that make freedom and simplicity come easy for us

• We avoid debt like poison. Our first house cost $5,000 -- and that was with 10 acres. Our whole life we've bought everything with cash. Only three times can I remember signing to a note, and all three times we could have paid it off the same day it was signed, from our own savings. I frankly don't know why we had those notes; we prepaid every one. We paid them off quickly because even if you have $1 million in the bank, a simple little car payment will ever so slightly enslave your thinking.
• Our company is private, and we own 93%. Anybody can put a trip on us, anytime, but would fail to get purchase. We just plain run it how we want.
• In the business, we are always aware of our two hats. We are employees, and we are also stockholders. We never get the two mixed up. It's OK to swap hats as needed and as appropriate. It's not OK to forget which hat we're wearing. Our relationship with the business is carefully, almost fanatically, businesslike.
• We're very rural. Our house is eight miles outside of Dillon, Montana, a ranching town of 5,000. Sixty miles outside Dillon, in any direction, is basically empty except for ranches. There's no pressure in a place like this to be any way except exactly how you want to be.
• We get outdoors -- a lot. Every single day we're out in the weather for at least a couple hours. Where we live, it's completely quiet except for birds and things. Weekends, we hike, ski, or camp.
• Our only newspaper is the Dillon Tribune. It comes out on Wednesdays and never prints a single word of world or national news.
• Our TV plays only videos. We haven't had regular TV in our house since college, 30 years ago. Our daughters grew up with no TV at all.
• Laura and I both write in our journals, on average, an hour-plus per week. We've been doing that almost as long as we've had the business. Our journal work is almost exclusively about being the people we want to be, living the life we want to live.
• We run or lift weights for an hour or two every day, generally alternating six- or eight-mile runs one day with weights in our yard the next, with hiking or skiing on the weekend. We do all our exercising outdoors, no exceptions, in our yard for the weights, on gravel roads for our runs. We know how to dress comfortably for every kind of weather Montana has. Being out in strong weather is one of our loves.
• We are completely surrounded by animals at all times. That's important, because animals think differently. Right now we have four cats, two llamas, one old horse, and Kona, our dog who visits occasionally. We live in perhaps the "cowiest" place on the planet. There are cows and horses in all directions, all the time. We see baby calves and baby colts born alongside our driveway every spring. Even at work, our entire building is so pigeon infested it's like a prize-winning photo from National Geographic. Sheep drives come right down the main street through town. Yesterday we saw a herd of antelope close up and two deer you could have tossed a rock to. In fact, right at this moment as I dictate this sentence I'm driving between Butte and Dillon, and there are seven cow elk skylined on the hill to my right.
• Our house is 1,300 square feet, not including the basement. It's a simple white farmhouse with a porch and a porch swing. Our bed is smaller than most, a simple full-size, which still allows room for cats. The one bathroom has one sink, one toilet, and one very short tub, maybe the shortest real tub you've ever seen. No shower. It worked fine for us even when our daughters were going through high school. Sometimes, in the morning, all four of us were in there.
• We are surrounded by a thick windbreak of trees we planted ourselves. We can't see our neighbors. Even if we could, the closest is a quarter of a mile away. The trees are full of birds most of the year.
• We have compelling, constantly evolving personal loves, totally unrelated to our work. Favorite magazines include The Bolivian Times and others whose titles few would recognize. We buy books like crazy. I just noticed that Amazon is keeping track of us and has sold us more than 200 books. Even so, we are lucky to own a magic bookcase that never gets full. I would say less than 25% of our reading is even remotely related to our work. Because of our small simple house and our magic bookcase, we aggressively prune anything we aren't going to use.

We almost never multitask. We start something, do it, stop it, pause, start the next thing.

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