SELF HELP 3
How To Be Happy
Hi Again. I was thinking that it’s important this newsletter be optimistic, and useful. What I don’t want to do is hit the same rage buttons that are being monetized across the ether. So I’m going to avoid writing about politics, at least for the moment, and stay with the self-help theme. Today’s topic is How To Be Happy.
There are two types of people. Those who just live out their time and those that want to leave the world better than they found it for the next generation.
It’s a shame, actually, that pleasure doesn’t equal happiness. It would be so simple.
Let me give you an example from my theoretical self-help book I was writing.
I’ve been interviewing real estate investors, which is a process that will get you pretty much nowhere. There are literally a million ways to be a real estate investor and the tragedy is that no matter how they do it inflation makes most of them look like geniuses. In other words, all real estate advice is good advice, and also the opposite.
It's like exercise. I’ve tried a dozen different workout regimens, every single one of them worked.
Here is the point I wanted to make. I was talking to an investor from Minneapolis. I think he had 20 or 30 properties. Mostly single family, if I’m remembering right, and it doesn’t matter if I’m not. He was still working, I think he had a realtor’s license so he was selling property, and maybe he was also a chiropractor. He told me he just wanted to get to 100 properties and then he could quit working, and manage his properties full time.
This person had so much more money than me. I know so little about investing, and working, and making money. But there were some things that did not add up. First, he already had enough property to quit his other jobs. And he made more from the property than he did working. And the money from the houses wouldn’t be passive income anyway unless he got a property manager, and even then, so what did he really think he was aspiring too?
I think it was Aristotle that said, “It’s easier to turn 1 million into 2 million than to buy a hamburger for 50 cents in San Francisco. Or maybe it was Jim Kramer or Warren Buffett’s daughter. But you get the idea.
What the realtor reminded me of was Binky Urban, the legendary literary agent, who complained to me once about her authors teaching classes. Why were they working jobs, that many of them complained about, when they made more money writing?
Of course Binky represents, in general, the type of writer for whom that’s true. But it’s a fierce question.
Why was the realtor setting goals just out of reach in order to retire, when he had already achieved them? Why do people continue to work when they already know or have the ability to make more doing something else?
It’s because people want to work. Which might sound crazy if you hate your job. Real estate is pretty easy, but most of the time there is nothing to do, so instead you wait nervously for the next crisis. In a way it’s like writing. For me, when I’m writing a book, I have to wait for the inspiration bus. That requires sitting quietly at the stop, maybe staring at the clouds and hoping the beast comes through despite not having a schedule. Hard to do when you’re on call.
Creativity and creative problem solving are the same thing. If you wake up comparing contractors, or arguing with your school’s committee in your head, it’s very hard to let your mind play. A poet knows the importance of fucking off, and also how painful it is, especially when a fully justified fear of poverty sneaks in to ruin the party.
That’s why people go on writer’s retreats. Why people keep jobs after they no longer need them. The only thing that really matters is loving what you do, and being compensated for it. If you can figure that out I’m pretty confident you’ll find happiness.
But if you don’t it’s Ok. We’re not meant to be happy all the time anyway.
Xoxoxo
p.s. This is originally how I opened this email. “First I wanted to marry a doctor. Then I wanted to marry a therapist. When it was already too late I faulted myself for not marrying a whore. Now, in my later years, I realize I should have married a philosopher.”
It’s interesting because the person that said that was an historian. Maybe he was talking about how the enmity between the two camps, historians and philosophers, had blinded him to the riches of humanity.
p.s. 2 Thank you for subscribing. If you missed the first two issues they’re online here.