In this episode, we discuss how we should strive for maximum enjoyment instead of accumulating the most stuff.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how we should strive for maximum enjoyment instead of accumulating the most stuff. Having the mentality of just acquiring stuff, just to acquire stuff is not a great strategy on how to live life. If acquiring the most stuff has a certain purpose, then it can be okay.
If you’re a player like Lebron James and love the game of basketball, then acquiring the most titles and earnings, is not a bad thing. He’s doing it because it’s important to him and he wants to see how much he can test himself as a person.
For myself, I’m trying to see how many good experiences I can get out of life. And for me to get the most experiences in life, it means that I can’t accumulate that much stuff. I’m not going to acquire cars, homes, and stuff to fill out my home to give me joy in life because I plan to be traveling for the next six years. And when I travel, I want to make sure that I’m having the right balance and spending my money on experiences. I rather have one amazing meal a week than 14 mediocre ones. It all depends on our situation and what we have to play with.
But in most situations, we should focus on quality over quantity. And something can be of high quality, even if it’s really cheap. I live here in Medellin and I love the Menu of the Day here and it costs me $3 to have that meal, which comes with your choices of steak, chicken, sausage, or fried pork belly, with a salad, rice, soup, and juice. I get this meal every day but it’s much higher quality than what I would make.
When I think about it, it’s about how much will this thing improve my quality of life compared to its alternative. If I was to buy a car, I’ll ask myself, how much will my life be changed by the type of car I drive. And then I would ask myself, what else could I do with the money. If I can have a higher quality of life, with a lower car price, then I’ll do that. If I could leverage my car into something else that would give me a higher quality of life, then I would choose that. I just need to know my goals in life and what are my opportunity costs for making a decision.
Life is not a simple question of choosing between Option A and Option B, there are many other options to choose from and this is why choosing the quality option to help us achieve our goals is the best path to take. It’s real easy to be distracted by chasing many different things, but what typically happens, is that we’re still going to have an empty feeling in our soul. So it’s best to fill up our soul with things that actually give us meaning. Do this and life will be good.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, quality over quantity. I recently had a meeting with a financial planning client and they were discussing remodeling options. They’re on track for their financial goals and were a little hesitant about spending too much money on their kitchen remodel. I ask them if this was going to be their forever home and they said yes, and they told me that they spend a lot of time in the kitchen. So I told them to go over quality over quantity and make sure the kitchen is a place they want to spend time in and not get frustrated. Now there is a line that can be crossed that goes into ridiculousness, but they’re good. There is no one right answer on how to go, but there is a perfect answer for ourselves if we know our goals and have a plan. So look at your life and see if you have the right balance, and see if any changes need to be made.
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