“Work to live, don’t live to work. If you wake up every day to do something you love, you will never work a day in your life.” — Unknown
DEFINE WORK AS MEDICINE
For thousands of years, individuals within societies have worked to achieve their purpose; hunting, gathering, worshiping, healing, honoring, protecting, creating, preserving, providing, constructing and inventing plus so many more callings that created human history. As societies connected we bartered with one another, exchanging items we deemed “valuable,” from shiny metals to coins and then lighter, more effectual notes. These items gave us a sense of tangible value and security for survival.
Most of our “value exchange” now occurs online
in fact;
“92% of the world’s currency is digital in 2020. This means that most of the money you earn, transact with, use to buy goods/services and so on exists only on computers and hard drives. Only an estimated 8% of currency globally is physical money.”3
It's probably why ATMs are being removed in the USA. If everyone tried to take out all the hard-earned money they had, the banks would have less than 8% of it and would have nothing physical to give them. What an interesting truth. It's another reason why banks might be making it hard to withdraw large sums of money during the pandemic. The truth is, they don't have it.
Today our concept of money is just mental energy and it doesn’t actually exist. It has become a mental construct for the agreed value of the work we do that appears as numbers on a screen. Money exists in virtual reality more than it does in our physical reality. It is healthy to understand this disconnection so you don’t give it more thought than it deserves.
Having said that, this virtual “construct” to connect and share information can be used to the advantage of our health and well-being. Technology can now help us free our time and location to work in a way that suits our ideal lifestyle. An accountant can do their work sitting on a beach in Bali, or sitting in office minutes away from their place of birth.
CAN MODERN SOCIETIES BE TRULY FREE?
This knowledge can free people from their modern western working lives that are often simply presumed to be a means to an end; they continue to choose to live to work; to work to survive and ultimately to build someone else’s dream that is not aligned with theirs.
I want you to reconsider your work and the value of your irreplaceable time. Are you working like a dog for a large salary and a stomach full of stress? Are you working for a pittance and can’t get ahead in your dreams? Are your dreams aligned with your inner self or are they society’s “dreams” and “expectations” on the material ladder?
Work as Medicine highlights the value in finding meaning in your work of choice weighing up everything you’ve learned thus far in this book. Consider your work and how it relates to your inner values and ideals and direction in life. Do you believe in the work you do or in your employers’ mission and principles? Ask yourself how can you get where you want to go and importantly how do you want to feel along the way?
There are opportunities nowadays for people to learn to work smarter not necessarily harder, while still exchanging value, solving problems on big and small scales, and freeing up more of their time.
WHY DO YOU WORK?
Irrespective of working hard or working smart, contemplate exactly what it is you’re working towards. Is it;
- To cover your basic human needs?
- To cover all your personal debts and basic needs?
- To live debt-free and in personal abundance?
- To live with an abundance of resources and an ability to meet the needs of your family?
- To live simply, with just enough to have the breathing space to truly live a life of choice?
- To live in a meaningful way with enough resources to self-fund your own passion project and have a positive impact on the world?
- To live with enough resources to buy all the “wants” that you feel you need to live the lifestyle of your dreams (houses, cars, boats)?
- Value yourself in a way that you can attract more, earn more, receive more and have the ability to share and circulate more.
- Just don’t do it at the expense of others, your health, or what truly matters to you
For those that follow leading entrepreneur Robert Kiyosaki, he suggests there is a “cash flow quadrant” to how we work.
Quadrant 1: Employee:
You have a job. 90-95% trade their time for money, trying to follow strategies like that of Scott Pape, The Barefoot Investor. Having a job means using employee wages to get ahead in 20 years’ time. Often working a “job” that we don’t enjoy or find fulfillment with.
Quadrant 2: Self Employed:
You are your business. Thanks to technology, Peter Diamandis suggests that there will be over 1 billion people freelancing, consulting, and working for themselves. If you do it well, you may even be able to live the 4-hour workweek as Tim Ferris suggests.
Quadrant 3: Business owner:
People work for you, and hopefully, you can pay yourself. However, the hard reality is that 95% of businesses fail in 10 years due to a lack of cash flow, poor financial management, or an inability to sustain growth. Business owners who don’t automate their business or learn to delegate, end up creating expensive hobbies that rob their time, lifestyle, and even their wellbeing.
Quadrant 4: Investment:
Passive and residual income. This is nice in theory, but the harsh reality as mentioned previously is that 80% of people live on less than $10 a day, with not much left over to meet their basic needs, let alone, invest. We are also taught strategies like debt reduction and negatively geared properties, where ultimately the banks win with the compound interest you pay. We need to shift to positively geared systems like decentralized finances; utilizing compound interest, force multipliers, and Metcalf’s law in our favor. Investing at the right time. Timing is everything.
We suggest a new WORK TO LIVE quadrant.
Quadrant 1: Selfcare, lifestyle medicine and living your ideal day.
Working to live, rather than living to work. Enjoy the journey, rather than leaving it on your vision board for some future day. Live it now, even in small steps!
Quadrant 2: Sleep, rest, and rejuvenation.
Learn to rest well and slow down so that you can speed up when needed.
Quadrant 3: Have enough cash flow to meet your 7 basic human needs.
Notice if you can work to cover your basic living expenses in 1 hour or 80 hours. We all need to find a strategy to ensure that our basic needs to thrive are met. Otherwise, we will always live in scarcity. This number will differ depending on where you live and how you live. On $250 per week, most people can live a great lifestyle in places like South East Asia. In Europe, that may not even cover your weekly food bill.
Quadrant 4: Abundance.
Imagine having a bank account that automatically fills each week with enough money to cover your basic human needs for you and your family, with some leftover
CALL TO ACTION
We each get 168 hours in a week. Self-assess your own cash flow (moneY) and lifestyle (time) quadrants.
If your strategy is not free, positive-sum, or abundant. Then find the WHO, that knows the HOW. Stay aligned make it meaningful and work consistently and persistently. Building your ideal lifestyle 1% a day.
As an example, 11 years ago, you could have bought a daily coffee for a month. Or a daily Bitcoin at $3. Maybe those "weird" tech friends you didn't understand, were angels trying to tune you into the abundance that is readily available. It's time to listen and reassess. You could have had 30 coffees, or 30 bitcoin. The 30 bitcoin would be worth over 1 million USD today, perhaps 10 million in the next 10 years ;)
SUMMARY.
Whatever you are working toward, know that there is a strategy and pathway to get you there. There is someone like you, with similar values (internal compass) and a similar true north (vision) that needs someone who is hungry and coachable to help them get there. Seek, find and surround yourself with more people like that, and with a consistent work ethic, you can create the life of your dreams. Once you start on this path, you’ll find it opens up doors and possibilities that you had never imagined.
The empowerment you feel from working in a meaningful way, doing something you love flows onto your whole human experience. Filling your own needs this way allows you to share from abundance with your local community and beyond.
Work to live and serve from an abundant overflow of time, money, and resources.
REFERENCES
This is directly referenced from the amazon best-selling SelfCare Book "Lifestyle Medicine For the People" by Rory Callaghan. If you would like to read more content like this. Grab the free online chapters of the book or a hard copy.
We have done our best to reference everyone’s expert opinions, peer-reviewed science, and original thoughts, all references available here and referenced in the text.
We also understand that most thoughts are not our own and there is a collective unconsciousness, unconsciousness, and universal mind stream of energy that is always at work. How are references are sorted and filtered is here.
