Start with Your Values

The concept of “Afford Anything” is that you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice that you make comes with a trade-off. So if there’s something that you value, regardless of what that is, whether it’s travel, whether it’s food, regardless of how society judges it, if there’s something that’s important to you, you can have that thing. You just can’t have an endless series of and’s. You might not be able to have that thing and something else, and something else, and something else. So the notion of “Afford Anything” truly is the notion of trade-offs. What trade-offs are you willing to make in order to live the life that you want? And when we ask ourselves that question, we start from a place of what do we value?

Grow your money tree

The mistake that I see a lot of people make when they start asking questions about how to manage their money is that oftentimes people will ask a question about a product or a tactic. “Hey, do you think X, Y, Z is a good app? Should I be in cryptocurrencies?” Right? These are questions about products and about tactics. And that’s not where you start, that’s where you end.

For example, think of a tree. The most visible part of a tree are the leaves. The tactics and the products are like the leaves of a tree. That’s the outside surface, and it’s the most visible surface. So of course, it’s what people might ask about first. But first, let’s start with the roots of that tree. The roots of that tree are your values. It’s that question of what matters most. That’s the root of thinking about how to handle your money. And then from those roots stem the trunk of the tree, and the trunk is your philosophy of life, the type of life that you want to lead. And from that philosophy, then your objective or your goals — how does that philosophy of living translate into specific goals? Your personal goals, your professional goals, your timeline. And then from there, you go out into the branches of the tree, and those branches represent the strategies for how to obtain those goals. And then once you have that strategy in place, then those leaves, those outer leaves are the tactics and the products.

So if you’re starting with the question about tactic or product, then you’ve got a leaf in your hand, but you don’t have that root system built yet. And so yes, your values about how you want to manage, not just your money, but any limited resource, your time, your energy, your attention, that deep question of what matters most, that is the root of every subsequent answer. And so spending some time at that root level, that’s how you drill down to the core of what matters. And from that, the rest of the tree can grow.

Build your root system

In order to clarify your values, there are a few different exercises that I like to recommend. One is to think vertically about these major components of your life. So one vertical is your family. One vertical is friendships or relationships. One vertical is physical health. There’s emotional health. There’s spirituality. Career or legacy — what you want to leave behind. Think through each of these verticals, and under each vertical, first brainstorm a list: at the end of your life, what would you want that family vertical to look like? What would you want the friendship vertical to look like? Brainstorm a long list of everything that you might want to achieve in each of those verticals throughout your life. And then from each of those lists, circle the one that matters most. And that’s a very difficult exercise because oftentimes in each of those verticals, it’s hard to pick just one, but then you’ll know what’s most important across that top horizontal span.

The second step of that exercise is to look at all those verticals and say, wait a minute, is it the case that I want one answer per vertical? Or is it the case that there are certain verticals that are so important to me that I’m willing to throw a few of these others out? Reflect on the points in your life where you have felt a flow state, a state of joy, a state of meaning. Think into your past about what are those moments? Who were you with? What were you doing? What was the purpose behind that activity? What were the fundamental attributes of that activity that got you into that flow state or that got you into that space of joy and meaning and freedom? And sometimes it’s not the surface level of what you were doing. Sometimes it’s the peace behind it.

Take a restaurant meal for example. There might be two people who really strongly value an amazing meal at a restaurant, but one person values it because it enabled them to spend time with family or friends. A different person values it because they value the artistry or the culinary artistry of the food itself. So think back to those experiences that really stand out for you and what’s underneath that. Why did that experience matter? That’s another way that you can really get to what your values are.