Episode 257: Giorgio Ugazio (Mr. RIP): Life Design, In Progress
What are your guiding philosophies on work and life? And how do they influence your daily decisions and the trajectory of your career? If these questions feel somewhat daunting, and you aren’t sure how to answer them, then this episode is a great place to start! Joining us today is Giorgio Ugazio, a self-described content creator, startup founder, and father. Giorgio is a software engineer by training, with a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence and robotics, and spent over seven years working at Google. He is the founder of Retire In Progress, a blog where he shares his thoughts on life, work, achieving financial independence, and retiring early. The platform has amassed a dedicated following thanks to Giorgio’s many unique insights on life, design, and living intentionally. In today’s conversation, we talk with Giorgio about the underpinnings of his philosophies, the excellent book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, and how his interpretation of it clarified his perspectives on life and work. We discuss the key tenets in Designing Your Life along with how you can use its many tools and exercises to determine your current position, assess your value, and define your compass. Giorgio goes on to share the thinking behind his foundational beliefs, like why you shouldn’t play the status game, before reflecting on who he believes would benefit most from reading Designing Your Life. To hear all of Giorgio’s fascinating insights and how to incrementally build your model of life, be sure to tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
A quick recap and review of episode 100 with Professor Ken French. (0:02:57)
Introducing Giorgio Ugazio, aka Mr. RIP, his website, Retire Your Life, and how you can access his extensive notes on the book Designing Your Life online. (0:05:16)
An overview of Designing Your Life, guidance on how to classify problems, and a breakdown of what it means to prototype solutions. (0:08:49)
Insight into the tools, exercises, and processes that the book offers: how it helps you determine where you are, assess your value, and define your compass. (0:13:05)
How to do the Odyssey Planning exercises. (0:16:22)
The four key areas covered in the book, why Giorgio added the categories learning, money, and creativity, and how he incorporates lessons from the book into his life. (0:18:18)
Determining your views on life and work, and how the two interact. (0:21:54)
The Pomodoro technique: what it is, and how to use it. (0:23:12)
Giorgio’s perspective on work: why we do it, the purpose it serves, and the criteria he uses to assess his position. (0:25:11)
What you learn when you take money out of the equation, why you should ignore the status game, and the importance of finding ways to enjoy your life. (0:29:46)
Giorgio’s view on life, the philosophers that inspire him, and his guidelines for what he thinks a good life should be. (0:36:41)
Some of the misalignments between Giorgio’s ideal life and his actual life. (0:42:29)
How life and work both drive and complement one another. (0:44:16)
Giorgio’s advice on applying lessons from Designing Life and who he thinks will benefit most from reading it. (0:48:51)
Our thoughts on the movie Air, some of the wonderful reviews we’ve been getting from listeners, and news about upcoming meetups. (0:51:26)
Read The Transcript:
Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.
This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.
Cameron Passmore: Welcome to Episode 257. We have an excellent and unique episode this week. Typically, as people know, on the last episodes, you kick it off with a deep dive into something, and then a book review. Then of course, a past episode, look back. So we're going to do the past episode, look back with Ken French, Episode 100. But for the book review, we're going to review the book, Designing Your Life, which was recommended in your interview in February with Giorgio Ugazio on the site, Retire in Progress. The book was so good, we decided to invite Giorgio to join us. Anyways, the conversation with Giorgio was so good that we're going to let the conversation run. That's going to be the bulk of today's episode. I think it's really cool. Then after that, we will do the typical after-show.
Ben Felix: To be clear, it's not Giorgio's book, but Giorgio has taken that book and applied it very thoughtfully and deliberately to his own life. He's got a large following in Europe. His content talks a lot about stuff like this, about life design, and living intentionally. His thoughts are incredible. The large following he has is very clearly justified as people will hear when he talks about this.
Cameron Passmore: What's cool about it as a book review, it's the application what he did with the book and other books, but to apply it to his life was really insightful.
Ben Felix: I thought so too.
Cameron Passmore: So we've continued to get people reaching out to us about working with PWL since we started talking about it more freely on the podcast.
Ben Felix: It's kind of obvious when you think about it. What did you expect to happen? We didn't really know what to expect to be honest. But since we've been more conscious about talking about PWL, and the fact that we run this business, that manages portfolios, and gives people financial advice, we've had more people reaching out for portfolio management and financial advice. Kind of obvious when you think of it.
As a reminder, we have relaxed our minimum asset threshold, which used to be kind of high, it used to be two million dollars, which I think deterred a lot of people from getting in touch, but we've relaxed that pretty significantly. We still have some criteria for the type of client we want to work with, but it's much, much softer. We're happy to hear from anyone who may be looking for financial advice and portfolio management, anyone in Canada, resident in Canada.
Cameron Passmore: Exactly. With that, let's go to Episode 257.
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Ben Felix: Welcome to Episode 257 of the Rational Reminder Podcast.
Cameron Passmore: Let's quickly jump into this, look back on an episode, and then we'll get to Giorgio. So this week, just a bit of a backstory. Professor Ken French was an incredible interview, Episode 100. I think it's safe to say, Ben, that really helped our little experiment here. Ken is a complete legend in the world of financial economics. We were super lucky to get him on. It was actually early in the pandemic it was in spring of 2020. The conversation was absolute gold. Ken is a total class act. This conversation is a must-listen. I think it should be shared widely. I've downloaded on my phone. I've listened to it many, many times. So if you've not listened to this episode, it is a must. You should go back and check it out, it's Episode 100. With that, let's go to my quick, hopefully, one-minute review.
So to celebrate reaching Episode 100, we had the good fortune of interviewing Professor Ken French, who is an absolute giant in financial economics and is brilliantly clear communicator. We kicked off the conversation with his explanation of what an asset pricing model is, and how research has evolved in understanding more factors that cause differences in expected returns. So much has been learned, that Ken argues that there's no longer good reasons to invest in actively managed portfolios. This also goes for hedge funds. Since we recorded this in early – during the pandemic, he argues, trying to time the market is not sensible. However, your potential reaction to severe downside risk may be information you can use a bunch of future portfolio decisions. You learn more about you than you do about asset pricing.
His view on large money flows in indexing causing negative impact on markets was interesting. He also feels it depends on who is moving from active to passive. We also talked about his research and of the factors. And how even though the value factor didn't perform as expected over the past 28 years, there's still not enough data to say that it does not exist. These outcomes are possible. Talked about home country bias, stock buybacks, ESG, and why he has a financial advisor. That was Professor Ken French in Episode 100.
Okay, Ben, let's jump over to our incredible conversation with Giorgio. We will do the book review of Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life written by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. All right. So we're going to do a book review this week, and it's a book that had a huge impact on me. It's called Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. For this book review, we thought we'd welcome a special guest, and we think this is going to be super fun. Giorgio Ugazio, Mr. RIP, welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast.
It's an immense pleasure for me to be here. It's an honour. Like I've been your followers since the beginning, probably.
So where are you right now, Giorgio?
I’m in Zurich, Switzerland, Europe, for those who think Switzerland and Sweden is the same stuff.
So you and Ben go back now a couple months. Ben was a guest of yours on your Retire in Progress event. It was incredible conversation. I think, Ben, you're still up on Giorgio's homepage, retireinprogress.com.
But that's my fault, because I'm not blogging much, so still the latest news on my blog.
Backstory is longer than a couple months, though, goes back much further. He's mentioned my videos and stuff in his blog for much further back than that. I've seen those blog posts, even though we weren't communicating with each other directly. There was indirect communication going on for I would say years before that.
I was watching every video you published, so I thought it was a one-way conversation, but I realized, you were also reading.
That conversation was incredible. It's over two hours long, and it's masterful. Both of you were just terrific on it. Off the top, Giorgio, can you describe like what you do and what is your website?
That's a bit complicated. I'm 46 years old. I'm Italian. I live in Switzerland. By education, a software engineer. I've been working in the video game industry, and machine learning, and maybe most notably, eight years at Google as a software engineer. But then, I kind of get a bit consumed by software engineering. I also started blogging back in 2016, about financial independence and early retirement. That blog took off a bit, it took a while. In modern-day standards, it took a while. But for me, it was a regular progression. At one point, I launched a YouTube channel, and also Twitch streaming channel. Now, I also do live streams and upload videos on my channel. On the side, I'm still a software engineer, I have a startup. And most importantly, I have three daughters, which is the main job. So yes, I have three jobs, being a father, startup founder, and content creator.
Now, when you had Ben on with you, you mentioned a book in that conversation, Designing Your Life. That really caught my interest, so I went and dug up the book, and I was just blown away by this book. It is so good. If you're mentioning it on that conversation, it's probably worth reading and you were spot on. So I find out from you this morning that you have over 7,000 words of notes from this book.
From the first three chapters.
Incredible. So if you're interested, listeners can go check it out at mr.rip/dyl. The notes are incredible. So congratulations on the work you've done on this.
Thank you.
As people will hear, you put a lot of thought into this subject. I'd like to set it up by just quickly stating the authors have pedigree in this. Bill Burnett is an Adjunct Professor, and Executive Director of the Life Design Lab at Stanford. And Dave Evans is a lecturer at the Product Design Program at Stanford, and also co-founder of Electronic Arts. Giorgio, give us your very quick summary of the point of the book.
It's a bit tough to condensate in a simple summary of viewpoints. But I would say that the thing that hit me the most is that I'm a software engineer, I'm a nerd, I love mathematics, I love numbers, I love finance. So I used to think that every problem in life is a kind of engineering problem. So something you have a function to maximize, or to minimize, or a clear goal, or a lot of data metrics to be driven by. But many, many, I would say, like the vast majority of problems in life are not engineering problems without design problems. I always heard this word design as most likely like, okay, the people that make a project, like they design the next Apple iPhone or whatnot. Design is something that I always avoided facing directly.
But the book was really, I would still say, like life-changing. Because many problems, I try to face like by maximization approach, but the same problem is a problem where there's no clear objective metric to measure the solution quality. Should I stay in Switzerland or move back to Italy? Or should I keep this job, or change job, or change career? Those are the kinds of questions that the book will help you face, not solve, address. Not directly solve. That's how the book most impacted my life.
But of course, there is much more than that. For example, I would say that – as I say, design problems are problems we try to face with a different approach. The book, Design Your Life, try to elevate this a bit further and talk about how to bring the same thinking to your life. What does it mean? It means defining problems that will usually involve some iteration and reframing how they like to say. So you might think you're solving problem A, but then you decide that it's not the actual problem you're solving. So you need to see from different angles, try to classify problems that are problems you can't solve. Those are called gravity problems, that are problems which are weak in their nature, so they are trying to resist a solution.
So essentially, you learn how to classify problems, you learn a new set of tools that you can use to try to face those problems. You learn also, that one of the best ways to approach your problem is to try to prototype a solution, and then iterate on it, test it, and change the solution, change the problem. It's a nice mix of abstractions and practical aspects that I really love. For example, I would like to give an example. You think you want to be a biologist? Why don't – instead of just going to university for 10 years, and then discover you don't like it, why don't you prototype this life? Why don't you volunteer to go and offer your time for free and shadow somebody who's already doing this, or chat with people who are already in this dream career that you think it's a dream, but maybe it's not? So prototype, not just plan, and then execute.
That example is what really hit home with me, as opposed to saying, "I love dolphins, I want to be a marine biologist." And you go through school, and you find out after, "Well, maybe you don't like it so much because of certain aspects of the work." So you're absolutely right, go and prototype that lifestyle. You could do that earlier in your career. I see, Ben, you're nodding a lot.
I mean, I agree. Of course, it makes a ton of sense. It reminds me a little bit about, what we talked about with Ralph Keeney, that you kind of got to make sure that you're making the right decision.
In the book, there is also like some practical chapter for people who are trying to look for a job or applying for positions. That is like concrete examples. I think it's chapter eight or nine, like couple of chapters, with specific concrete suggestions on how not to get a job, like sending applications randomly. But go on LinkedIn, find some people who are in the same area. There are also like concrete example, especially for the work life. I think they also wrote other books like Designing Your Work Life. That is now like a family of books. I don't know if it's worth like exploring in deep each subject.
Can you talk about in a little bit more detail some of the tools and processes that the book offers?
The first part, the first few chapters are about self-assessment. We say that how to approach a design problem, but how to get a design thinking mindset in your own life. It means that you need to know yourself a bit more. There are several exercises. For example, the first one that I remember of, define where you are. So they asked you the basic questions. Where you are and how is it going? Where you are, you need to do a self-assessment. They offer for aspects in your life that they want you to go deep with a self-assessment, and try to grade the quality of your life. This is just the health, work, play, and love as a simplification. I'm a bit more nerd, so I've already added four or five more. You need to get a dashboard of your life. That's a nice idea.
I love these exercises in general, not just this one, but this family of exercise. Not because I then get some actionable insight, but because they forced me to sit down, and think, and make a checkpoint in my life. I used to do like regularly, once per month, or like a quarter life review, or I have a series of not blog posts. I don't blog this, but personal notes, which is called where I am. When I start writing – but I actually am, physically, I'm sitting at this desk, and doing this. Today, I just did that, and then I'd zoom out and say, "Okay. This week has been like this, then this month, then my life, where it's going. What are my plans?" I think if you abstract even more, it's like stoic meditations. The exercises suggested by Evans and Burnett are a bit more simple, more concrete. Try to define the quality, your life satisfaction in several areas. That's the first one, is where you are.
The second nice exercise is assessing your value. They suggest you shoe verticals, which are your work view and your life view. What is work and what is life? Since I'm more nerdy, I also added more other verticals. For example, I brought like money. As you know, I used to blog about personal finance, how this interacts with life and with work. I think it's part of the equation. You sit down, you take your time, and you write your assessment, what is work for you, what is life for you, and what is money for you. Then, they say, define your compass, so something that guides you through life, and then you try to see how those aspects clash each other, or how if they are aligned, and this should be used as a guide.
Another concept that Dave writes several times is that in designing your life, nothing is permanent. So you acknowledge that maybe, here, and then you want to review this thing. So it's not something you wrote at age 15, and then your composite still guiding you at age 50. You probably want to review that every few years. I don't know. That's something I was already doing in an unstructured way. The book gave me a framework to operate with. Those are the main basic tools to start with. We are not designing anything yet.
Then, there are like a set of other tools that are just meant for facing individual problems. The most notable one for me is the Odyssey plans. Those are amazing. When I read this book, it was like four years ago, then I organized like a book club around it. We also shared with my readers, I was still not having a YouTube channel. We shared the Odyssey plans. It was like an amazing exercise. I really suggest that you propose this to the Rational Reminder community.
What are Odyssey plans? Essentially, those are amazing for people who are struggling with their career, they don't know what to do, or they are too comfortable in their careers, and they say, "Hey, should I be that comfortable, or try to push me a bit outside the comfort zone." The authors suggest, you do write three plans for your next, let's say, five years, or even shorter view, like two years, or you decide. It's not written in stone. One plan is, how you see yourself if everything goes like if nothing changes. What are the risks of not changing? What are the benefits of not changing? Then they suggest you to write a second plan that says, what if tomorrow, you will be forbidden to do what you're doing today like you get fired, or you lose your main activity tomorrow, what would you do?
The third one is, usually, go crazy. Write an optimistic, but not exaggeratedly optimistic, ideal future next two, three years, where you do what you love, and how this could work out. They seem like three unrelated plans, but then the actual exercise is trying to take some aspects from one to another. And you end up like, "Okay, I'm keeping this job. But then in the meantime, I'm going to start a blog about scuba diving because I like it. Then maybe, this will at some point in life help me. Well, those are like life-changing exercise for me.
So many questions. In the beginning, to Ben's question, in the book, there's four areas. You said you added some areas. Can you talk about what you did add?
I added learning, I added money, and I added creativity in general. I think those three areas. And maybe curiosity, but I don't see it here, while learning. So yes, I added money, because it's not in the list. My finance, how am I doing? How satisfied I am with my financial situation. So I added, like curiosity and creativity, which is learning and creativity is like making stuff which are not necessarily to work. Because I think like creativity and curiosity for me are like the basement of everything. I'm driven by those true aspects, like those true drivers.
What is your hack, Giorgio? You're clearly very passionate about this as a model. We can talk about how you live this. You dedicate a certain time or is it a daily activity? How does your brain work along with your calendar to do this?
Okay, let's say that up until two years ago, I used to be way more self-reflective. I don't know how to say it. I used to journal a lot. I used to take notes on everything, and read many more books, or interesting articles, essays, or whatever, whatnot. These days, it's a bit more difficult. I have too many jobs and too many kids. I have our time, so I can tell you about the me in the past. Because the me in the present, the Giorgio in the present is a bit struggling these days to find the same amount of undisturbed time to do the same things. I think it's temporary because my youngest daughters, I have sibling daughters, which are like 20 months old. Maybe one day, I will have more undisturbed time.
How I used to work? Essentially, I love time blocking. I try to use the calendar to plan things. I think I'm really good at not letting myself be distracted too much. So when I focus, I really focus, I shut down everything. I'm a huge fan of Cal Newport's book. Deep Work or Digital Minimalist. So these kind of books helped me a lot. Yes, the process is like, I try to sit down, I let my brain dump, so I don't try to overthink too much, and let the hands go. I never had like writer's block, so it comes easy to me.
That was my next question. Is it easy for you with an engineering background to kind of let go and move towards the design part of this equation?
I must admit, it was not easy at all, but it's getting easier over time. Maybe it's also age or whatnot. I'm taking life more holistically now. I used to be very focused on metrics. I still am, but it's getting easier. I'm starting to appreciate more problems, which are not easily solvable by maximizing a function. I think value is there. The more we move on with humanity, the more problems which have solutions, which can be algorithmically solved, will be solved algorithmically by not people. So value creation will be eventually in try to solve problems, which are not easily defined, and thrive in ambiguity. Which was like the googly word for googliness. I mean, I used to work at Google, so I was like also showered with this.
So we're going to jump into your thoughts, which are pretty incredible. A big part of the book, and you mentioned these talks about to understand your life view, your work view, and then how the two interact. So you had the idea of us sharing our own. Then when you shared yours, frankly, I was completely blown away by how much thought you've put into this. It really is impressive. I think it's worth taking some time to understand more about the process you went through and what your realizations are. So work for you are basically the critical issues related to what work is and what it means to you, not necessarily what you do. It's what you want to get out of work. Correct?
Yes, exactly. I mean, the answer is like a thousand words, which is like half an hour of like writing. I set up a Pomodoro timer, maybe 30 or 25 minutes, so I remember. I think it was 30. Then, I just wrote down and allow myself like last five minutes to review, and edit a bit, just a bit. I usually don't edit much. So it's a lot philosophical, and it's the result of years of thinking about that. I can read it or –
Real quick, because I don't know if people will have understood what you mentioned. Can you talk about what a Pomodoro timer is, because I think that's super valuable?
Pomodoro technique is like one technique to try to set boundaries of how you use your time productively. It's like, 25 minutes, you work deep with no interaction, with no distractions. Then, you allow five minutes break. I don't like this technique in general, because it's like too rigid, or like every YouTuber talking about productivity, they idolize this. For me, I don't know. But I wanted to set a timer, so I said Pomodoro, just because in the tool I'm using to write notes. I don't know if you know about it. You have like an API to just set up Pomodoro timer. Essentially, I just wanted to set a boundary, and say, allow myself like 30 minutes to write this.
So that's the work view. Explain what a life view is, and then pick which one you want to talk about first.
Life view is essentially; I interpret it this way. Try to write your philosophy of life. So what do you want to get out of life? I mean, I expanded a bit too much. Going to what I think is the meaning of life, which is like a bit too much for this episode. But essentially, what the others wanted you to write down is try to find, what do you think happy life – I don't like to use happiness in general. What do you think happy life should be lived? So if you think you want to focus on spending more time with your relatives, and your family, or find something that gives you true purpose. In general, I have a hard time separating work and life. So people will talk about work-life balance. I don't understand that. If you need to survive the work life, you're doing a job that you don't like, which like many people are doing, I understand. But only when work is aligned with your goals, it no more feel separated to life to me That's something I aim doing.
We're both nodding. We agree with that, big time.
If I need to say, "Okay. No, I need to separate work and life." I probably need to find a better job.
Oh, what a line.
For me, my work view and life view are a bit merged. The meat is under my work view. I don't know like, if you want me to read it, or try to interpret it a bit. It's easier if I kind of read it and comment on it.
Sure, please do.
Yes, okay. Then people can actually find the actual wording in the link you just mentioned. So sorry if this is going to feel personal or too philosophical, but I wrote it for myself. So don't think I'm trying to patronize anybody or whatnot. What is work? For me it is doing stuff with the purpose of building something that lasts. I know it's a very generic definition, it doesn't require getting paid, for example. For me, work, it's disconnected from money at this moment. It does require doing, so it can just be thinking. Even though thinking is probably the most important part of what you do. But thinking alone, it's not work for me. For me, work is like you produce some artifacts, it required producing some output. It suggests that building stuff is an incremental process or something that improves over time your skills, your products, your knowledge, life of others, and so on. That's my definition of what work should be for me. So doing stuff with the purpose of building something that lasts.
Why do we work? We work because in my opinion, we are genetically built to hedonistically adapt to current circumstances. A caveman would time travel to today's time, and maybe this person would say, "Hey, you have machines that produce food, clothing, clean water. Why are you busy all the time? You just sit down and relax." But probably, this is also true if we travel 1000 years in the future, we will meet an advanced civilization, hopefully, and that have cured all the diseases. Then we would say, "Hey, you've done everything, you live in the mansions. Why do you still do things?" That's because every time the situation is relative to your present life, so we are not okay with just sitting down and relaxing, a life that even the poorest human being is living better than Julius Caesar.
We adapted and then we started from – it's a new zero and you want to do something. That's why we work in my opinion. We are built this way; we want to do stuff. I personally cannot even sit and relax for a short time. That's another problem. But I think as human beings, we are not wired to just sit and relax for a long time. I think it's a life not worth living. Should just – okay, we've done everything, you just wait, you're waiting to die, essentially. We work to satisfy our needs to give life some meaning.
Here, I get a bit more philosophical, and people can be pissed off a bit. I think work give us the illusion of having an impact, of being useful, of being remembered. I say the illusion, because I think a bit more life has not much meaning, but we get to decide what's the meaning to life. The illusion of immortality, we work because we want to build something that lasts because we have some illusion of immortality, and kind of purpose. The collective dance we play since the dawn of civilization, it's this one. It hasn't always been like this, it used to be a necessity, a matter of survival, but it's not I think anymore the case.
Today, most of the work we do is kind of bullshit. It's irrelevant, nothing to improve the quality of life or solve huge problems. This collected dance, in my opinion, is mostly a status game. So people play status, and this is something that I realized that I see in the world, it's not my ideal work view, of course. For me, try to achieve what I said at the beginning. So build something that lasts and whatnot, it's built off out of three things. One is, get the money out of the equation as soon as possible. Don't play status games. Three, prioritize your engagement in your work activity. Don't do things that you wouldn't do anyway if you weren't getting paid. So that's essential. Those are the three main criteria to achieve my work view.
Get the money out of the equation, it means finding a way to become wealthy without neglecting your values, and overall happiness along the way. I came online talking about financial independence and early retirement. That's part of how I view the work. It means that I aim one day to not have to work anymore, which doesn't mean, I wouldn't work. I will keep working as I said before, because work and life will be indistinguishable at that point. It will only do the things that I want to do anyway.
How to achieve this? Learn how to spend a lot less than what you earn. Those are the basics. Save and invest the difference. How to invest? We have experts in the field. Aim for passive source of income. That slowly frees your time and your agenda. You won't have to accept too many trade-offs. If you need the money, it will be hard to achieve satisfaction. That's the goal. It's not black and white, it's a spectrum. So doesn't mean, either I have zero freedom or under percent freedom. We all know that like also defining 100% freedom is a bit fuzzy, and fire might be broken a bit. And if you listen to Ben calculus, it's like the safe withdrawal rate is dropping too much, too much below the 4%. But it's always a percentage, you can be partially free.
To get the money out the way, you need to make some temporary trade-off, of course. But with the awareness that it's just a temporary, and partial solution. The goal is to become 100% intentional, I would say, more than free with money. That's the first aspect. So get the money out of the equation. As Mr. Money Mustache says, "Work is much better if you don't need the money." It's for everybody, in my opinion, because even if you are not like a high-skilled worker, you can still learn how to save some of your salary, invest it slowly, and maybe takes like 10, 20, 30 years, but you get some freedom. Don't just spend all your money.
Then, as I say, don't play this game. This is probably the most important part, in my opinion, don't play those games, it means don't work just to keep up with the Joneses or to fight a status battle. The opposite of this is try to aim to improve the life of others. That's at the opposite part of the spectrum. Either you play this game for yourself or try to improve life of others. Of course, it can be anything in between, but those are just the extremes. So find work that's useful for other people, donate yourself to others as much as possible. Ideally, if money is completely out of the question, you should maximize the positive impact on the world. That's my philosophy. Yes, I say that it's maybe an illusion, everything. Everyone is going to die at some point.
In my writings, I did some calculus and say, the sun takes 177 years to do a second-degree rotation around the center of the Milky Way. A second degree is 136 hundredths of one degree. It takes 177 years at the time. The sun rotates a bit around the center of the galaxy. You and all the people you know, and all your family will be dead, so sorry. I'm also, I'm Mr. RIP, so I need to be a bit dark. We don't matter much, but we are here for this short trip. It's better if we have fun, better to enjoy it while it lasts. So helping others for me, it's the ultimate, evolutionary, biological, anthropologically backed way to live a fulfilling life. Then we die and stay dead for eternity.
The third aspect of my philosophy is, try to have fun while you need to carry on with this game. So it means you should want to work, you should get up in the morning excited to start working. If it's not the case, at least most of the times, you have a problem. So you should decide to not even stop working, it will be controversial, but give me a few minutes. You should want to perceive like breaks, even the weekends, or vacation as a way to recharge your batteries to get back and do the stuff you really care about, which is improving the life of others or doing something that's fulfilling to you. I said with an uncomfortable desire to get back to work.
How to achieve this? For me, I put four ingredients, which resonates a bit with the Ikigai. I don't know if you know the Ikigai metaphor, but it's a bit different. You guys are oriented to the whole picture, so also something that people would want useful to the world, and getting paid. I made my own Ikigai just in terms of meaning, which is like mastery, autonomy, creativity, and curiosity. I put them together and focus. Autonomy, of course means that your have power to decide what to work on. Mastery, you're good at it. So if you're doing something you feel you're not good at it. Get good at that, or focus on what you're good at, or get good at more things.
Autonomy, it means, you should be kind of free to some degree to implement, to give an output to your creativity and to your curiosity. Creativity and curiosity, as I say, the basic pillars of my life. I think what gives me a good career or everything in my life is about creativity and curiosity. So curiosity, just be open, and just go wild, and try things, and don't just stop at your own biases. So don't just say, "Oh, this is stupid. Nobody does this. Just try, just whatever." It's like legal.
Creativity means, do not stop thinking, but produce an output. I started blogging, I wanted to get interested in personal finance. Why not produce artifacts on the way while I'm learning? So I started blogging, and you never know where your creativity will lead you. The last one is focus, which I think, maybe I said many times, I think it's the most important because in this era, our capacity to focus has been destroyed. Train your focus ability, just deep work. Just read the book, Deep Work by Cal Newport. It's perfect for this. Try to be able to stay three hours working on something, and that will bring you in the flow state, if you're also doing something that you are good at, and you like it, and it leverages on your creativity and curiosity.
If you reach the flow state, flow state for me is the closest thing that I know can be called like happiness. When I'm in flow state, I'm creating, I lost track of time. That's for me when life is lived at the fullest. That's more or less my work view. I know it's a bit philosophical, it's a bit convoluted, but that's brain dump that lasted 30 minutes. It was a nice trip.
It was fantastic. You created that practically speaking by sitting down for 25 or 30 minutes, or is it's been refined over time?
This one, it's been a bit refined. The original one was written when I read the book in 2019, I think. It came up almost in this format in 30 minutes.
Fascinating.
But it's the integration of 40 years of thinking.
So now let's shift to your life view.
Okay, the life view as well, it's even more philosophical.
Great.
Let's go through that. This is my life view. It's a lot personal. I'm okay if people disagree with my view. It's my view. It's important you have your own view. So if you are listening to this, or watching us, try to do the same exercise. You will find maybe some insight, or you will find – the most important thing is that you will find incoherencies or like, "Hey, I think this, but they also think that, and they are a bit in contrast to each other." To internally fix, and be more consistent, or accept that I'm a multitude, so sometimes I'm not coherent. That's okay, but it's good to know.
My life view, I started from the philosophy. There is an amazing – I would say blog, but it's just a PDF. It's a guy who updates every here and there. The PDF of his life view is called a philosofer123, and he has a long PDF of all the beliefs, and it's very good, but that's not me. But I got a bit inspired by that. So I said, I'm an atheist, I'm a non-believer. So that's an important point, or better, I'm an existentialist. Let's say that I'm really passionate about existentialist philosophers. I don't believe in anything pre or afterlife. I think we are just matter. That's my point.
Why are we here? By chance. Me, I don't know. It's a very long sequence of random events that I think helped all my ancestors not dying before they met, and mate, and they eventually procreate, and then I'm here. The question, and you believe all this incredibly long sequence of events happen by chance? For me, it's a silly question. It's like asking, "Ha? Do you believe like randomly shuffling this deck would produce this sequence out of the 52 factorial possible sequence of cards by chance? Yes. As the entire species, I think there's a random set of events that brought us here, and then shaped our genes, and our beliefs and whatnot. Of course, maybe we live in a similar way. I don't know. Just keep through the philosophical part.
Having said that, I think we are evolutionary driven toward the selfishness. So we want to maximize our own happiness, our own survival chances, our own reputation ability. Luckily, thanks to the conditions that we had to face as a species. We are also biased toward cooperation, and I like to leverage this part. I think cooperation is the main driver. We are here because we are a social species. This caring for each other is sometimes called love, or other like love have several forms, blah, blah, blah. The highest form of love for me, it's not the romantic one, but it's the love for the mankind, love for the human species, and for the survival of the species. For me, this is my view, but I'm not there yet. This is my thoughts, but my actions don't actually represent that in full at this moment.
There are true pushes, so the selfish and try to love the mankind. Those true, I call, gentle pushes make my personal own receipt for happiness at the intersection of caring about my own interest and caring about my circles like family, then community, then human species. How to live a good life? According to these true pushes, it's changing over time. It's like an equilibrium that's not constant on one life. I tend to be more selfish on some areas and more altruistic on others. But that's something everybody can try to ask themselves and to get that answer. I have a set of guidelines for what I think a good life should be. One is like taking care of my own health is a no-brainer. That's physical and mental health. Those are like the basic building blocks. Help the people in the inner circles is another no-brainer. So a prerequisite is to cultivate the inner circles of some kind.
I'm a family person, but doesn't have to be like this, but you need to have an inner circle. I think, even though I'm a strong advocate of get to be happy with yourself, and love to spend time with yourself, I think you need to have an inner circle of some kind. Apart from that, accumulating knowledge for me, and try to develop for some sort of wisdom is another no-brainer. For me, I live by the quote, I don't remember in English, I'm an Italian, but it's the, an inspected life is not worth living. I think it's Socrates. There is also leisure. So play, have fun is also another aspect of how I think life should be lived.
As I said, creativity and curiosity are also my drivers, so try to get surprised, explore things which are like think out of the box and go lateral sometimes. Then create, build something that didn't exist before. And yes, those are the main ingredients. Then, I went even more philosophical. I would say that, yes, for life, I have guidelines. I don't have a clear idea. Probably, it shouldn't be like a clear formula, because I think situations change over time. You have your teenager self, your young man self, your family, your old age. There are guidelines that might also change over time, but there's no formula. You will find a longer version if you follow the link that Cameron shared before.
You mentioned, as you're speaking that these are your ideas, but you're not necessarily living them as you've articulated them. Can you talk more about that?
For example, on the work aspects, I have an ideal, I usually try to define ideal situation, and then try to move toward that. I still do things for money. Money are not out of the equation, even though maybe I'm more advanced on the spectrum of freedom. I cage myself in an earlier stage. So I say, "No, I need to do this, even though I don't want because I need the money." Well, I probably don't need them. That's where my thinking and my actions are a bit misaligned. Also, on the selfish, altruistic scale, sometimes I find myself subconsciously doing things or thinking things, which are a bit misaligned with my greater idea of trying to be more altruistic. Those are main misalignments from my thinking and acting.
Do you do anything when you see those misalignments to try and correct them or do you let them persist?
I note them down. So I tried to do some regular review and say, "Hmm. Okay. Why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this?" I have a hard time correcting them. I don't think it's a huge misalignment, but I tend to anchor myself to some ideas. Or, you know, let's get back on the monitor. Even though my net worth is growing, maybe I still remember when I was not that wealthy. So I still make decisions based on that level of perceived wealth, even though I have hard time adjusting on some aspects of my life.
Where your views on work and life complement one each other?
As I said, I want to be as intentional as I can. I also want to be as altruistic as I can. I think those two aspects are where they align. As I said, the more you move toward the freedom, the more work for me is just one part of life. It's not something that needs to fight the rest of life. So I think they're most aligned in this, is just to being less willing to grind for money or less willing to accept too many compromises. I think that's the part. Also, trying to be productive with my time is something that it's of course work-related, but also life-related. Let's say that in the ideal world, when money is out of the equation, working life are pretty aligned. The problem is that, you never know when the money are really out of the equation.
Can you talk about how your life and work values drive each other? Or does one drive the other?
I think that the view on life, even though they might be as aligned as possible, life is something which is a superset of work. So life is more important, and more abstract, but more important. It's the view of life that drives the view of work. That's probably the arrows is in this direction. My philosophy of life that I articulated before that I have everything else. Not just work also health, love, money.
I would say that one of the areas where my life view impacted the most, or drives the most the work views, for example, locality. Where do I live? That's something that I look at my life view, to define where should I live or what kind of work I will never do, for example. I said that the life view helps defining your deeper values, something you don't want to compromise too much, even for money or for everything else.
You've put so much thought into this, Giorgio. I'm curious, as a father in your family, how do you teach? How do you even think about this in a family setting?
At the moment, I am a bit postponing teaching too much, because I have three daughters. The eldest is five years old. She's starting asking tough questions, and I try to give her more questions back. Probably not the best thing. I love questions more than answers in general. Actually, my tagline on my YouTube channel, I wanted to set it as, instead of Dante's Inferno entrance, which is, it's like, "Leave your hope." I wanted to call it leave your certainty before entering instead of leave your hope. I like questions more than answers.
I try to incentivize my daughter to ask more questions and I don't just make up answers. I would say, when I don't know the answer, I just try to, "Oh, let's look it up together. Maybe we come up with more questions. Let's try to ask people and get different views on the subject." I think I'm not very good at helping five years old. I'm aiming to teach teenagers, that's the age where people need the most guidance these days. I love the concept of critical thinking and that's something I want to spend the next few years studying much more in detail and in depth. I also have several books piled up. The Great Mental Model Library by Farnam Street, if you probably know that. The one I'm reading right now is called The Scout Mindset, and I think we've been through that.
We did.
So yes. Those are the driver for how I want to teach my daughters to get more questions, and answer, and be curious, and be open.
What about your wife?
Yes, my wife. What about my wife? We are aligned on most things. She's a linguist, she study languages. At the moment, with three young daughters, she's not working. She is in the time of her life with less free time ever. We have a lot of dialogues, and we discuss many things. At the moment, we are focusing on how to grow our family. I mean, to do a family, I mean, not more people, but how to better grow up our children.
So someone listening to this, Giorgio, I think they might be inspired to dive into the book. What lessons, what final advice might you have for someone in applying what they learned from this book?
I think there are not many people who I would not recommend this book. It's very well the books I recommend the most. I think the people who can benefit the most from this book are those who are either struggling with their career, or struggling with some important question. One recommendation is to not think that you will get a book even this one or another book and you will find a lot of answers. The goal should be, try to live well with a lot of questions, and try to incrementally build your model of life, your map of how the world works.
So yes, we all have a lot of questions, even though you might go to people who are experts in your field. Like people come to me asking, "Hey, is ChatGPT going to kill my software engineering career?" I have no idea. But it's a nice question, just keep that in mind. It's a design problem, because we don't know. It never happened in our life that we had such a threat to your career, and let's try to approach it as a problem with design. So prototype a life with or without this experiment. We will ask, try to make a plan and whatnot. So yes, read it. It's an amazing book. Again, do not try to hope to find definitive answers to your life problems. It's an ongoing process, you will always have more questions than answers.
Giorgio, it's been a blast to have you and I can't think of a better way to attend a book review, this incredible application. So thanks for sharing. Again, people can check out all your notes at mr.rip/dyl. Giorgio, thanks.
You're welcome. Thank you for having me here. I hope that you will also interview the authors of the book, so I will feel less an imposter here.
Not a bad idea. Anyway, thanks again. It was it was so much fun. You're not an impostor, you have an interpretation of the work that they've done, which is totally different from hearing them speak about their work. Your work, and your writing, and what you've done with your content channels, and the way you're impacting people's lives, you've got a great perspective. I think that's separate and apart something great that you're able to provide.
Thank you so much.
***
Cameron Passmore: Incredible conversation with Giorgio. So grateful he could join us.
Ben Felix: Incredible, very thoughtful.
Cameron Passmore: And I must say, your conversation with him just to reiterate it, it's really worth watching just over two hours. It's a great conversation. Speaking of worth watching, I don't know if you've watched this yet. I don't think so. The movie, Air on Prime. Incredible story about how Nike was able to get Michael Jordan to sign like Nike back in the early eighties was really nothing like they are today. This is a movie about how they convinced him and he decided to sign with Nike. It was the first time that a shoe manufacturer negotiated a clause for percentage of sales. I should say, the athlete got a percentage of sales. That's the first time. Their first-year target sales for shoes for Air Jordans was $3 million. They did $160 million in sales. It's reported that Jordan earns $400 million per year now from the sale of Air Jordans. The movie is an amazing, amazing, amazing film to watch.
Ben Felix: Cool.
Cameron Passmore: So nice reviews. This one, you got to read the first time because it's about what you did. You might want to give a bit of a backstory about your premium t-shirt.
Ben Felix: The review from Quio Tang. The review is titled excellent podcast, make the t-shirt. They say fantastic summary in discussion of research without dumbing things down. Much easier than reading the papers myself. But mainly, I'm writing this review to encourage you to make the premium t-shirt. The premium t-shirt is a shirt that I ordered. I haven't received it yet. Otherwise, I'd be wearing it. But it has the short form for the factors in the five-factor model printed down in the front of it in big white letters. It's a black t-shirt. It's a premium t-shirt. Companies always call it like a premium t-shirt because it's made with, I don't know, premium materials or something, but it's premium t-shirt because it has the factor premium. It's printed across the front. I tried to convince you, Cameron, to make this Rational Reminder brand.
Cameron Passmore: I missed the joke, I'm sorry. I was wrong. Angelica and I were both wrong.
Ben Felix: There we go. So this reviewer thinks that we should print the premium t-shirt because mine is not Rational Reminder branded. I just went and did it t-shirt.
Cameron Passmore: Print it myself.
Ben Felix: Yes, I made my own premium t-shirt.
Cameron Passmore: Had some nice contacts lately on LinkedIn. Jeff, who was a scientist in Halifax said, "Hey, Cameron. I'm a longtime listener to the podcast, and occasional lurker in the community. Just want to say what a great job you and Ben are doing, with all the content you put out from beginner through the advanced topics and personal finance. Your style, attention to detail and attitudes are second to none. All the episodes, and happiness, and goal setting are also a fantastic way to round it all out."
Also heard from Shawn, who's an adjunct professor, finance professor in Washington DC said, "I find your content refreshing. Keep up the good work." Also had a great phone call this week from an advisor with a big bank in Toronto, who was looking for feedback on his plan to move to the brokerage part from the banking part of the business in order to offer a service and investment options that are similar to what we do. I suggested that it might be much easier to do inside the bank environment as striking out on his own at this stage in his career. But really great conversation, really good person. I applaud him and I love hearing from people.
Meetups coming up. So we're at the future proof festival in Huntington Beach on the afternoon of September 11th. So any advisors that are going to that, and of course going to be joined by our good friend, Professor Hal Hershfield. We're looking to set up a breakfast when we're down there for advisors who are there, so drop us a note at info@rationalreminder.ca. Toronto meet up the evening of September 20th. We're also recording an episode at the CFA Toronto event on September 21st. Hope to see Some CFA members there. I'm also going to be giving a short presentation at the Ottawa Book Expo on Saturday morning, July 15th. Tickets are available at ottawabookexpo.ca.
In the store, did you hear, Ben, that they're no longer going to be making the Talking Sense cards. They're migrating to a digital type of application, I believe.
Ben Felix: Yes.
Cameron Passmore: So I think Angelica is working to try to get some still printed. But as of right now, we have 27 decks in stock. So if you're thinking about ordering a deck, please do. If you're an educator and would like one for your class, we are offering them for free. So again, reach out if you'd like one for that.
Guests coming up, Professor Meir Statman is next week. Two weeks after that, Professor James Choi is up. For those who might recognize that name, he was on Freakonomics Episode 518 called, Our Personal Finance Gurus Giving You Bad Advice, which was a sensational episode. For book reviews coming up, we have author Jill Schlesinger coming here to talk about her book, The Great Money Reset. Matthew Dicks, we have coming on to talk about his book, Storyworthy, which is fantastic book. And also, Brittany Hodak is going to join us to talk about her book, Creating Superfans. So if you're in business at markets at all, that's a great book. This is someone that Angelica saw at a conference and she recommended the book, and Brittany is going to come on and join us.
Anything else on your mind, Ben? I think getting over your recent cold, recent illness.
Ben Felix: Nope.
Cameron Passmore: So much like going around. I've been sick for a week. James here has been sick for over a week. Beautiful weather and still get sick. First time in three years, I think.
Ben Felix: Really?
Cameron Passmore: Yes, I haven't been sick in a long time.
Ben Felix: Lucky you. You don't have enough young kids, I guess.
Cameron Passmore: No, I do not. I had enough young kids.
Ben Felix: Fair.
Cameron Passmore: As always, you can reach us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. We're all over the place and easy to reach. And of course, if you want to book a time with Ben, or me, but mainly Ben, you can go to his Twitter profile and the Calendly link is there. You actually had someone book in this week, didn't you?
Ben Felix: Someone heard you say that a couple of weeks ago and they did indeed book a time to talk with me. People do listen to the last minute apparently.
Cameron Passmore: Excellent. Well, as always, thanks for listening and have a great week.
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Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life — https://amzn.to/3N5Xp57
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Episode 100: Prof. Kenneth French: Expect the Unexpected — https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/100