Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

Learning must become a habit (see Ergodicity and destiny) that is applied to all aspects of life before it can be said that a person is truly an educated person. This means that learning never stops.

Focus on developing skills rather than on passive entertainment.

It also won't depend on successfully starting your own business. You won't need to develop a particular specialized skill such as real estate flipping. In fact, if you have a job, keep it.

Such solutions often rely on intuitive "insights." Intuition is a result of complex neural connections in the brain suddenly firing in a way that connects with a real problem. This requires two ingredients. The first ingredient is the network itself, which can be established by studying many other similar problems. The second ingredient i

think that a good guideline per person for living arrangements is $200-350/month/person or about 10-15% of your net salary. If anyone tries to convince you to spend more, they're trying to sell you into a lifetime of wage work (see this figure). In some places this buys more than in other places. As far as I'm concerned, the percentage is absolute.

Barriers represent a cost which must be paid. The willingness to pay depends on a combination of dissatisfaction with the present situation, vision of the future situation, and the practicality of changing from the present situation to the future situation. This will to change can be represented by the volume of the pyramid in the figure.

Don't worry about whether you can eventually become an expert (see Gauging mastery). Rather, try to constantly improve on the subjects you already know and seek out useful things to learn.

For our modern purposes, the fields can perhaps be grouped into seven generic fields--physiological, economical, intellectual, emotional, social, technical, and ecological.

The design presented in the rest of the book rests on three pillars. First, reduce waste and increase efficiency. It's possible to live with the same benefits as the rest of society for one quarter of what the average consumer spends. Many of these expenses are eliminated by only owning what is actually used, and maintaining what is bought.