Are you ready for Early Retirement?

I picked up the term organizational ambition from Taleb in his book Fooled By Randomness. He uses it in a different context, but I think it has definite significance to those thinking of early retirement.

Let's assume that every now and then, you compute your net worth and idly contemplate taking early retirement and living a life of leisure. Here's one question you have to ask yourself: Do you have any organizational ambitions? In other words, are you excited by the idea of your next promotion, a new title, more responsibilities and the accompanying pay raise?

Answer this Yes/No question honestly. There are many valid reasons to want that success. You will be making your parents, your spouse, and your children proud by getting promoted. You may also want to prove yourself to your colleagues, or even to yourself with future professional successes in your field.

If the answer is Yes (i.e. you do have org. ambitions) then there is no point in getting frustrated about the lack of a life of leisure, because the time for you to quit is not imminent. Give yourself time, say 2 years or 5 years to re-evaluate things.

If the answer is No, and you indeed have no organizational ambition left, then that is one more thing out of the way. A lack of organization ambition is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for early retirement.

Attachments

We just vacated our rented apartment after spending 45 days in Indore, MP, and I am heading out. I am keen to spend a few days with my parents in Chennai next, and to meet friends in Chicago following that. And yet, I experienced a surprising sense of sadness at leaving Indore.

I am going to miss the daily interaction with people here – the two ladies who run a tiffin service from their home kitchen (I bought one meal from them daily), the used-bookstore guy who waves at me in recognition from across the road, and Manak Seth, the grocer who always gives us an extra 5% off MRP. The friendly young man who fetches and packs the groceries at Manak Seth's shop asked me if I would ever come back to Indore again.

It is a little scary how quickly one gets attached to people, things and places.

The Need for an Affiliation

Here's a practical tip for those who are seriously considering quitting their jobs and trying other things for a while.

Not long ago, I was telling my friend SR about the difficulty I was having in responding when people asked me what I did. "So what do you do?" they'd ask and I would stumble and dance around in trying to give a clear answer. I also began to notice that my "Profession" gets asked in practically every form I filled out.

Often, saying "I don't have a job" or "I'm on a sabbatical" or "I'm just taking it easy for a while" is not appropriate. It also invariably leads to more questions that I might not be in a mood to entertain.

When my friend heard this, he said, "Man, what you really need is an affiliation. I fully get what you are trying to do, but an affiliation is very important in this society."

With each passing week, I saw that he was absolutely right. When responding to the what-I-do question I began to notice that I was always associating myself with some group or profession. I would tell some people that I was a freelancer or a part-time consultant or a volunteer. All of these were true but I was implying a greater affiliation than there actually was. Not because I wanted to lie or mislead, but mostly to stave off questions.

So here's my tip: Before you quit, and if at all possible, make sure that you still keep some professional affiliation going. Offering to volunteer (where you see ways you can add value) is the best way I know of to gain affiliations. It doesn’t have to pay, or be full time, but it will certainly make your transition a little smoother.

Skills for the survival of the civilization

Back when I was in grad school and a teaching assistant, my students would demand why they had to study "useless things which they'd never use anyway." I used to wonder about this myself sometimes and so I never had a good response.

Recently, in an welcome address by a professor, I heard something that I wish I had heard years back. It would have certainly given me a perspective I didn't have when in college. Let me explain.

As a student in engineering college, I had several courses where I had to learn esoteric things that I knew I would never ever even remotely use in my professional life. So why were they insisting that these things be included in the syllabus?

The best explanation that I could come up with was that in an attempt to make better engineers out of us, our engineering college was teaching us "problem solving." I told myself that even though we wouldn’t use the exact thing being taught, we were becoming better problem solvers. But that explanation always rang false and was never quite satisfactory.

Prof. M S Ananth of IIT Madras was giving a welcome address to a group of professors who were attending a workshop on NPTEL, the program I volunteer at.

He said that people should realize that there are two types of skills. One set is the skills needed for the survival of the individual. Vocational training institutions do a very good job of teaching these, and we can all readily see the value in these skills, because they help us earn a living.

The other set, he said, are skills for the survival of the civilization. These are equally important and shouldn’t be neglected. He felt that institutions of higher learning shouldn’t waver from teaching these skills. And those of us who are learners or researchers, no matter what our field is, should have faith that we are adding to this skill set in incremental amounts and continue our work.

Skills that are needed for the survival of the civilization – I had never heard it phrased quite that way. Wish I had heard this 20 years earlier.

Movable Feasts – A Behind the Scenes look

Managing the kitchen has been an interesting experience when moving from city to city every couple of months. A few people have asked me how we manage the cooking part. We do eat out frequently, but we mostly cook our meals. We can't eat out 3 meals a day, every day.

Back in our apartment in Chicago, we had lots of utensils and kitchen appliances. Since we are now restricted by luggage that we can carry by ourselves, we move around with a very limited amount of utensils. Our kitchen stuff fills about half of one suitcase.

We are forced to be very strict with what we can cart around: 2 dinner plates, 4 bowls, 2 cups and a few spoons. (It is sort of like what they hand you at the start of a week-long Zen retreat, or like going camping, but for a really extended period of time.) We have one small pressure cooker, 1 frying pan, a few stainless vessels, a knife and one flat griddle for dosas, and a few more microwavable plastic takeaway containers for heating and storing.

There's pretty much a checklist for the items in our first grocery shopping in each new place – rice, sugar, salt, cooking oil, instant coffee and a few ready mixes to start things off. We carry a small bag of spices which we refill as needed. Fresh vegetables are plentiful in India. We started out managing with long-life UHT milk cartons, but there's enough competition among milk vendors so now we get milk packets delivered to our door each morning.

What we now have is surely much less than 20% of what we once had in our kitchen. And what has been a revelation to me is that we are managing quite fine. I don’t feel the lack of those other things except on rare occasions. If we desire something fancy, we have to eat out. We have even hosted dinners for others (with some borrowed vessels and cutlery).

We are very Spartan about adding to our kitchen acquisitions now, which implies that we must have been inefficient before, buying lots of redundant stuff.

And the big lesson (to me) is that cutting back and adjusting to a having a simplified kitchen has not been as difficult as it once seemed from the outside. You just have to be mentally prepared.

Short Stay Rentals

We're now in Indore, having completed our stint in Chennai. The plan is to stay here for around 1.5 to 2 months.

In Indore, we wanted a furnished place to stay in. We tried to find something in Indore from Chennai, but nothing was working out. However, on our first day here, we learned of a furnished apartment. A couple, who are distant relatives of a distant relative were visiting their son in Singapore and we could rent their 2 bedroom apartment. And it worked out. So this is the fourth city where we were fortunate enough to be able to find short-term accommodation.

As someone who cares about optimized resource utilization, it occurs to me that there must be 1000s of such homes and apartments that are kept locked up and being under-utilized. At the same time, there is a decent sized demand for these apartments. Someone should be able to figure out a way to tap into this and create a marketplace.

GatesNotes - A site worth visiting

I recently found out about this site – TheGatesNotes. In it, Bill Gates shares the things he’s reading, viewing, working on and thinking about. It is sort of like a blog, but it has a lot more material.

The whole site is very aesthetically laid out – with his travels, his reading and even several of his conversations shared with the readers.

Under the title “What I’m learning” I found out about The Teaching Company. Bill Gates endorses them with very high words of praise. I plan to check out the “Big History” course and the two economics courses he mentions when I get to the US later this year.

We live in good times, where a good majority of the readers of this blog can have access to the same materials (books, CDs, DVD’s) that the richest of the rich also consume.

On the 5th of Feb, he has posted another article about The Teaching company.

Do take a look at the GatesNotes site and see if anything appeals to you.

Thanks to Nandita P. for the pointer.