My Life: Spreadsheet Version

Let me start by saying, I have an MBA - so am by nature an analytical dork.

Last week, someone asked me what I wanted to do aka job and career. I gave a decent MBAish answer.

This article is the answer that I didn't speak out loud. This is the real me.

• Define the end - I calculate 40 years left of functional brain and body. When you consider the end point, you define the ways you construct your use of that time. (NOTE: The 40 is not real, just a reflection on changing lifestyle habits in the last year to preserve brain and physical acuity.)
• Increase productivity - As a highly successful corporate warrior who built businesses from 0 to $100s of millions for Symantec, Intel and others, I used to live on a plane, have back to back meetings and scroll emails 24/7. I used to consider those things something to brag about and reflected my importance. For many of us, activity/appearance (attending meetings, swiping a badge in and out of the "factory" = productivity. As the CEO of Betsy Inc., productivity is redefined on how to best leverage my time. More on that in a future hopefully marvelous post.
• Create greater voids - Voids allow deliberate choices of how to use the waking hours I have in a day give me options to do things that are important, not urgent. Important is giving my demented dad love. Cooking for him to prevent him from leaving the gas burner on in attempting to cook. Urgent is calling his credit card company to get a handle of his demented financial situation. I can outsource the latter, only I can do the former.

This is where the spreadsheet comes in.

This morning I spent some happy hours (MBA remember?) pulling together a cash flow spread sheet. Here is what I did:

• Step 1 - Calculate simple or "just the basics" as defined by critical life expenses (mortgage, utilities, food, health insurance, etc.). I considered the bare minimum. The great news for me is the bare minimum is small.
• Step 2 - The sum of the basics is what I need to accrue monthly. I call this the gap. Understanding the gap showed me that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Filling the gap is very very doable and I don't have to give any of my next 40 years to PowerPoint to do it.
• Step 3 - Calculate safety net/passive income. My whole life I worked on getting to a #*%&)^ level of wealth. Over the last few years I realized, have NO idea what a real #*%&)^ amount of wealth is. Through the years, the more money I made, the bigger that number grew.So I considered how to shift from the actual dollar to creating the emotional state - backed by data. Doing the spreadsheet on my current state passive income, reserves, assets, debts showed me I don't need to be a W-2 unless I choose. As someone playing circus clown to my father who is in early stage dementia, the flexibility is marvelous. For me this means no need to commute, to be on Zoom or otherwise present to anyone else's schedule, deadlines or timelines. Even if you don't have my luxury, the purpose of this line of thinking is to plan for optionality.
• Step 4 - Focus on the delta. This is the number that puts how I afford optionality in stark relief.

Today I set myself the goal to build a business (Betsy, Inc) with sufficient cash flow to cover my basics. The privilege I have is my basic number is not huge. It is less than a day's salary at Intel. The other privilege I have is I don't need to prove myself anymore with title, corporate brand, or a unicorn start up founder. Instead, Betsy Inc., can be funded in a sustainable way and with the goal of creating increasing optionality for its shareholders (me), employees (myself) and customers (I) in the short and long term.

Over the next few weeks I will be white boarding options, doing the A/B testing and so forth on different revenue generation strategies for Betsy, Inc. The great news is I have spent the last three months defining what makes my life significant and my must haves and must nots. With this morning's cash flow analysis in hand, I now know the cost of the life I want to lead.

Because these days if you don't make an idea public it isn't real, I am putting my thoughts down here. I hold me accountable for putting my brain to producing. I also want to shoutout to Rebecca Speer Shani H. Susan Wittliff Tim Ferriss Adrian Jones John Song Jamie Rigden for the ways their words helped me get to this place.

Let me know in comments if you need help defining your life in numbers. Happy to share.