Rule 1: Earn A Good Income

I have a friend who is passionate about everything.  Whatever he is working on is vitally important.  His hobbies are endlessly fascinating.  His every thought is profoundly insightful.  It's like, every bone in his body is oozing with passion.

Me?  My bones are  filled with "meh."
 

Anyway, this friend of mine has no plans to retire.  He loves work so much, he wants to do it until he dies.  If you are like my friend, by all means, pursue your passion.  And stop reading early retirement blogs.

But if you are like me, you never really found your calling.  When I was in school, everything sounded somewhat interesting, but I could never get truly excited about anything.  They all had downsides:

Career	Upside	Downside
Engineer	Problem solving	Endless minutiae
Teacher	You get to help people	You age every year, the students never do
Lawyer	Interesting cases	Lawyers
Accountant	None	Accounting
Consultant	You get to be tall and good looking	You have no value
Doctor	You get to help people	You have to touch people
Blogger	You can write whatever you want	Nobody reads what you wrote

I had wasted a lot of time trying to find my passion.  Then I began to realize that the problem wasn't the career.  The problem was my personality.  I am not a passionate guy.  Just ask my wife.

So my strategy changed.  Instead of seeking something I was passionate about, I looked for something that would allow my time at work to pass relatively quickly; a job that was interesting enough.  And one that would pay enough for me to retire early from my passionless, meaningless, unfulfilling, wretched career.  (Sigh.)

(Oh, come on, I'm kidding.  I actually enjoyed my career, all the way to the end.  And that was one reason I knew it was time to leave, curiously.  I'll write about that in a future blog.)

Okay, so what does "pay enough" look like?  No magic answers.  It depends a lot on what you spend (another future blog topic).  But a household income in the six figures is a good start.  Two aging school teachers can swing that.  Or one worthless consultant.