Secrets about us 🤫
Discoveries from 100+ conversations
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Upbeat.
I spent the last month talking with 100+ core Witty members (those who reply to these posts). In all, it was time well spent. I uncovered a unifying objective among us.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
What we want
For context, these conversations started open-ended and then drilled down to the root of what matters most to each person.
While we are all unique, the representative conversation can be synthesized like this:
While core Witty members have similar desires noted above, I found we want these things much more than the non-core members I talked with.
We want financial freedom so we can cover our basic physical needs forever. Then we want to control our time to follow our curiosity, fulfilling our mental needs. This gives us happiness and helps us reach our full potential before we die.
In hindsight, these conversations represented the same order of desires represented in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
The challenge we face
The conversations would then take a turn. Despite the strong desire behind these wants, achieving them can feel insurmountable.
Financial freedom is a lofty goal. I define it as having enough money to live how you desire for the rest of your life. This gives you the option to make decisions without having to consider financial consequences.
Want to leave your job? No problemo! Want to tell someone how you really feel? Go ahead!
So, what is the financial freedom number? I’ve heard at least $2M+ invested thrown around a bit. Charles Schwab did a survey and found the same.
That roughly translates to affording a home mortgage in a high cost of living city (SF, NYC, LA), having a comfortable (but not lavish) lifestyle, and putting the rest of your money into investments.
Now, achieving these numbers can be a lifelong challenge! Even at a $100k annual post-tax savings rate, it’ll take 20+ years to personal freedom.
Stuck in neutral
To give hope of making that happen, society has guided us to a monotonous path: keep your head down, get good grades, and rent your time to someone else.
Now on this treadmill, we feel the problems with it. Freedom is not guaranteed to reign, we feel held back, and we feel hollow.
What if we succeeded?
So, say if we had control of our time. What would we do with it?
We’d spend it in ways that gave us happiness and purpose.
What drives happiness varies from person to person. Yet, I repeatedly heard a similar set of responses. Core Witty members want to:
Follow their curiosity
Grow through learning
Belong to a group that understands them
Growth drives happiness.
The investing engine
Funny enough, those happiness drivers are the same things that propel us now.
With investing, we follow our curiosity. We look into the trends, businesses, and people that excite us.
As we dig deeper, we feel more convicted about certain opportunities, and are more likely to make a high conviction bet.
If that bet works out, we can use those earnings to gain more control of our time. Rinse and repeat on our path to freedom.
Investing is the engine to follow your curiosity and gain control over your time.
More secrets
In this post, we learned secrets about us. That said, those are not the only secrets worth discussing.
The investing world has shifted to a new normal in the past six months. If you’ve been paying attention to previous Witty posts, you’ll be able to surface some themes!
We’ll be discussing ‘secrets about investing’ in our next post. See you next week!
Note: This content is for informational purposes only. It should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Your use of the information contained here is at your own risk. Witty and its authors are not financial advisors.