Toughen up—it will be worth it

Toughen up—it will be worth it

In cycling culture, there is a thing called ‘Rule V’ that states, "HTFU" (Harden The F-word-of-your-choice Up). It means that even though the hill is steep, it is cold and raining and you are tired, you toughen up and ride hard. If you want to be fast, that is what it takes. The hard work you put in that day makes you stronger for next time.

That rule very much defines my approach to life.
Living in a studio apartment with one or two babies was a constant challenge to HTFU. As I stated above, living in a small space was tough—there were days I wanted to give up. The space was too small, the noise was too much, there was nowhere to go to be alone. But fighting through those days is how I would get stronger for the next day.

Why is that important?

We humans have a strong ability to adapt, sometimes that actually works against us. If we live with a certain amount of luxury, we will become accustomed to it. The trouble with getting used to an easy or expensive way of living is that none of us know what is next.

In the startup world, we talk about something called "runway." It basically means how much time you could keep operating if the money stopped coming in. For many companies, that time is very short. For many families, it is even shorter. That is an extremely vulnerable place to be.

The reason I think it is so important to always keep expenses down is that it has the dual effect of decreasing your burn rate and increasing your savings. The two of those combine to allow you more freedom.
When you have a lot of financial runway, it allows you to make decisions based on reasons other than money.

There is some sum of money that, under the right conditions, you could live the rest of your life on. At that point you would never need to work again, but certainly could. That is true freedom.
Not everyone has a chance at freedom. Some people have to work long and hard just to scrape by. But many people repeatedly sign away their freedom by choice.
And don’t forget about the importance of compound interest. I will remind you that $2,000 per month saved on rent for one year is $24,000. Invested for 50 years averaging 6% interest comes to roughly $450,000. Freedom. HTFU.

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When living on tight margins, the highs are the same, but the lows are much lower.

When living on tight margins, the highs are the same, but the lows are much lower
Thinking on all of our time in that apartment, I can recall many of my favorite times. None of them have much to do with the apartment—they all have to do with the people in it. Whether that was our family, my former roommate, visiting friends or extended family.
The highs we experienced were no different than any other family’s.
In contrast though, the lows were much lower.
Now, I don’t mean the personal lows one family might encounter: illness, strife, financial woes, etc. Those would likely be as low no matter where you are. I am specifically referring to the lows that are more directly tied to the living space.
In a small space, the typical day is ok, but there are such thin margins of free space and separation. There are times when all of this implodes. One thing going wrong can tip the next wrong domino and cause a chain reaction
For example, consider the weekend in which I built the loft bed. In order to assemble it in the room, I needed to move everything out of the way, start attaching pieces, and stand things up against the wall while I started on another. There were screws and planks and sawdust everywhere. It took more than one day which meant there was a night where we neither had a finished loft bed nor room for a regular bed. Unfortunately I overestimated how much I could get
done and had to leave for a business trip. Sunday night I took the red eye, leaving my pregnant wife at home with a toddler in a construction zone with no bed to sleep on. Not our happiest goodbye. (I had cleaned up most of the screws and some of the sawdust)

A final, and more humorous situation I would often find myself in was early morning meetings with nowhere to go. The 12 person startup I moved to San Francisco for has grown into an international software company. That meant I’d sometimes be needed for early morning meetings at 5 or 6a.m. My typical day, as is common with San Francisco tech companies, usually started closer to 9 or 10a.m. Rather than wake up at 4a.m. to get ready and head into the office before a 5a.m call, my strategy had been to take the call in my PJs and then get ready and commute afterwards.

That worked great when I was single, had a roommate, and even when my wife moved in. But once the babies came onto the scene, it was tough. You never want to wake a sleeping baby. I tried the bathroom, but the babies would wake up. The eventual solution was to take the call from my car in the garage. I am proud to say I’ve helped close million+ dollar software deals in my PJs sitting in a car parked in my garage. But there were definitely some days I would sit there thinking "What the heck am I doing right now?"

We had some really tough days, but in the end I live a life of many blessings. Reflecting on these days, however, has given me much more understanding for those living life with less. Whether rich or poor, a normal day is a normal day. When you’re wealthy and your car breaks down, you can get a rental. But when you’re poor, paid hourly, and your transportation fails—that sort of thing can just compound into a really bad situation. Sick days can mean extra expenses and lost earnings at the same time. I think there are a lot of misconceptions about poverty, and even lower-to-middle class working lives. If we better understood margin and variance, it would really help us become more sympathetic and caring people.


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Less house means less housekeeping

Less house means less housekeeping

Living in a studio apartment was hard. It took work, planning, organization, and commitment. But there was a silver lining. Having less house has benefits in reduced housework.
One of the most obvious is that there is less to clean. There are fewer shelves to dust and less floor to vacuum.

There also isn’t a need to furnish and decorate as much, which reduces stress, cost, and time spent planning.
There is also a decreased chance of clutter. Because everything happened in one room, if we didn’t clean up after ourselves, we couldn’t ignore the mess. We would put away the toys every night before my son went to bed so that we could sit in the living room afterwards and not stare at toys. As a strange side effect, our son loves cleaning up.

We didn’t lose things often. Living in a small space forced organization. Everything had a place and we all knew where that was. Even if you did misplace something in the house, there weren’t many places for it to hide. You would find it much faster than in a large space.

More house always comes with more house work. More yard with more yard work. In a world with finite time & money, reducing one thing allows you to increase another. Less time cleaning a house can mean more time living with the people in it.

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Home is more than a place to keep “stuff”

                                 Home is more than a place to keep “stuff”

The second limit of a living space is the need for storage of stuff (see: George Carlin). Consider that, by volume, your stuff occupies probably 50-200 times as much space as you do in your house.

 You would be able to get by fine with a smaller house if you either:

 increased the density of your storage space
 decreased the amount you needed to store

I already discussed the former point, but I’ll take a moment to reflect on the latter.
Our family had the constraint of an apartment that didn’t change size, even as we grew. Our adjustment into a small living space was gradual enough that we became accidental minimalists.

For three years, we donated at least one grocery bag per month to thrift stores, slowly paring down what we owned. As the space became tighter, the bar an object had to be above in order to earn a place in our house kept getting higher.
I started to really think about what I owned and why I owned it. I became a more conscientious owner of things. The possessions I own
now are such a reduced and fine-tuned representation of my current needs that it is hard for me to find want for anything else.

As things got harder, I also found ways to hack the system. I now use craigslist as something between a rental shop & storage facility. Buying things for a season of life and selling them when I won’t need them for a while. I have often even turned a small profit doing so.
I also found ways to hack myself. A lot of the things I owned were in my house with the purpose of "I might need this someday." I had to work hard to convince myself that I didn’t. In the end the compromise came down to this—"If you get rid of this and need it again, you have permission to buy it from Amazon with same day delivery"—so far that hasn’t happened.
Consider that you are paying rent for your stuff. That closet space, or worse yet, storage unit, is costing you money every month. Eventually you will spend more in storage than the contents ever cost you.

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