Jacob Lund Fisker > Quotes

“For instance, why do we still work eight hours a day, 50 weeks a year, when we're twice as productive as we were 50 years ago?”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything? Do you want to spend most of your life paying off the interest of a 30-year mortgage and working so you can fill increasingly bigger houses with increasingly more stuff while being stuck in your daily commute in increasingly nicer cars? Or are you prepared to give up the stuff so that you can do whatever you want, whenever, and wherever, within reason? What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were?”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“If you have debt, you're not a free person. You're explicitly owned by your debt and implicitly owned by the creditor.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Health is thus a condition of well-being and an ability to appreciate life. It's not necessarily optimizing or conforming to a set of measurable quantities like life expectancy or blood pressure, nor is it removing all symptoms using drugs. Health is the presence of something positive, rather than the absence of something negative.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“What will your legacy be--what you owned or who you were?”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“To paraphrase Einstein, you can't solve your problems with the same mindset that created them.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Walkers easily travel three miles by foot. Drivers get in their cars to get from one side of the parking lot to the other. Neither quite understand why the other is so crazy, when it's so easy to do things their way.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence

“The question you need to answer is what you want to do with your life given that you don't have the time to do everything?”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Complexity, therefore, results in flexibility. Increasing complexity always increases capability and adaptability.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence

“The real problem is not how much we earn; it's how much we waste, perhaps to demonstrate our supposed wealth, when we spend it.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“The mass education in high schools reflects the mass production of the real world. The teaching style has one teacher (supervisor) lecturing (leading) 20-25 students (workers) sitting in rows, much like a manager and his employees.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“In other words, money is paid and gas is burned to make one's possessions as comfortable temperature-wise as the inhabitants”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Any connection with nature and most connections with technology are lost. There's a belief that nature is irrelevant and that anything can be solved using the current methods--now technology; previously magic or praying.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence

“Doing something that is considered very difficult at least once in your life is highly recommended.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“People with more money than time buy $3,000 road racing bicycles with ultralight carbon frames to shave two pounds off the bike, regardless of the fact that they themselves are probably at least 10 pounds overweight.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosophical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence

“Don't mention that you also happen to manage a six-figure portfolio to your "voluntary simplicity" friends and don't mention that you only have one bedroom to your investment friends unless you're prepared for the resulting discussion.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Many profit-driven corporate strategies are based on fashion, planned obsolescence, unneeded upgrades, and masterful emotional manipulation --marketing--causing people to continuously replace goods which are still in good working order.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“this case it's sensible to develop a skill to just before the point that it begins to require maintenance, continued practice--beyond this point, replacing skill and time with capital assets makes more sense.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“The Dark Ages gradually ended six centuries ago with the Renaissance, which seeded new ideas for a different world. The Renaissance ideal dominated our culture until three centuries ago, from the 14th to the 18th century, when it was superseded by modernism. Not surprisingly, this human ideal has almost been forgotten in our culture. The Renaissance, literally "re-birth", was a revival and rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman culture following the decline of culture, trade, and technology during the Dark Ages.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker

“Nobody thinks of using improvements in technology and productivity to allow people to work less and require fewer assets to achieve the same standard of living. Instead, while everybody is richer, at least in terms of stuff, no one is any wealthier. Their wealth is "safely" out of reach. If it weren't, how many would still show up for work the next day?”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“In that regard, our society is more akin to a highly developed insect colony where specialized members work for the greater whole.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“If information is simply accumulated (compiled), one should expect at some point to be forgetting practically as fast as new things are learned--it is just the brain's way of being efficient on its own.37 This is particularly true when the focus is on compiling facts instead of reducing facts to principles and synthesizing more general theories (see Gauging mastery). The same principle holds when accumulating things without learning new and better ways to use them, or when building relationships without connecting them into a community.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“High-intensity workouts generate more than 1000W (see High intensity interval training), which is comparable to a small space heater. For room-heating purposes you can substitute the company of 10 friends with one intensely exercising person.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“The reason is that, other than working faster, most people really don't have a lot of freedom in terms of strategies for reaching their goal, since their strategies are locked in”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“When renting, you're usually not responsible for breakdowns. This is a winning proposition if you don't have the skills to fix it yourself and a losing one if you do have the skills or could cultivate them.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“In the same vein, tally up the sum total of your earned income so far, subtract your savings, and compare the difference to your pile of stuff. Was it really a good deal?”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“no-stick treatment for pots and pans only lasts a couple of years and that it can't, as far as I know, be replaced, get stainless steel, iron, or copper the next time.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Many houses increasingly serve not only as living quarters but also as storage areas for toy collections, personal libraries, galleries of art and other assorted knick-knacks, small supermarkets (massive refrigerators), home cinemas, and restaurant-sized kitchens which seem proportional in size to the time the owners spend away from them,”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“Changemongers thus have the following four variables to play with: Increase your dissatisfaction with present situation. Strengthen your vision of future situation. Build a plan to get from the present to the future. Lower the perceived cost of the plan.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence

“During the day, professionals attend to their jobs. During the evenings, they vegetate in front of their TVs, thereby prevented from learning anything, and this effectively keeps them in their jobs.”
― Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence