Breaking the Paycheck Addiction and Retirement: a 6 Month Review

The photo is from our recent trip to Italy

Prewired!

I’ve heard it said before that most common addictions are drugs, alcohol, and the addiction to a paycheck. This blog is not about the first 2 addictions; I’ll leave that to the experts. However, I feel like I can speak with some authority about the last addiction; the addiction to a paycheck.

I grew up in rural Minnesota and could not wait until I was old enough for someone to give me a job. I didn’t care what: mowing lawns, detasseling corn, picking rocks, hauling bales, and shoveling manure out of barns and using for fertilizer. I could not wait to sell hours of my life to the highest bidder. I also recall competing with friends I grew up with as to who could get the primo jobs which paid the most.

After several years at the University of Minnesota working on my Civil Engineering degree I finally got paid to THINK! What a difference and shift in my life that created! However, I still couldn’t wait to sell hours of my life to the highest bidder to think for someone else who had a business and targeted a 3.0 multiplier on what they paid me!

That’s 40 years of working for a paycheck! Every 2 weeks: Pay me! Like clockwork. It didn’t matter if I had a good 2 weeks or bad, I still received a paycheck. After so many years, the brain has been wired to think if you’re not selling your hours you are not productive. Busy, busy, busy, just keep moving, calling, driving, acquiring, wheeling, dealing for a paycheck.

After 40 years that ended for me 6 months ago. I was addicted to a paycheck. Addicted to that beautiful ACH in my bank account. The security of having a job. A list of responsibilities that my employer paid me to accomplish with hours of my life in exchange for another ACH.

Breaking the Addiction

The first 6 months of retirement has been about rewiring my brain. Nobody is paying me for showing up at an office or on a Zoom call. No more ACH deposits! No more collecting a paycheck for “Passing Go”. My time, the hours I have remaining on this glorious earth, are now MINE. Weird how that this is so strange to me… isn’t it?

Now, for the first time in my life it actually matters just how “productive” I make each hour. Am I working towards my life goals and not just my career goals? The life goals are staring me in the face and there are no distractions. I didn’t expect this!

Thankfully about 15 years ago I became interested in “Passive Income”. I think it actually replaced my desire to sell my life hours to the highest bidder. As I sit here in Starbucks writing a blog while I watch everyone dash in for their Lattes before they head for the office I feel like I put the emphasis 15 years ago in the correct places.

In my first 6 months of FREEDOM, I have done a ton of traveling, skiing, playing golf, enjoying just being, connecting, reevaluating, praying, imagining, and morphing into the Chief Compounding Officer at Aviara Capital Investments. There are new habits and daily rituals to develop. It’s Halftime (in life), and I’m in the locker room getting reignited.

See Atomic Habits, An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, by James Clear. I love this book and I highly recommend it to anyone that is going through a “seasons of life” change.

I would consider myself retired from a day job but not retired from life. My focus now is investments; achieving the highest return I can on invested capital. I love this game similar to my love of Monopoly when I was young. The CCO’s position is to double the “book value” several more times in the next 10 years.

There is a ton of transforming left to do; I have only scratched the surface. A new period of self improvement and growth that I haven’t experienced since I was first paid to use my brain.

Please smash the “like button” or leave me a comment if you found this information useful.

Best,

Derek

Derek Petersen

Chief Compounding Officer

Aviara Capital Investments