A house with “good bones” is one with the potential to go from “frumpy-to-fabulous.” She is structurally sound, regardless of the missing shingles, broken windows, and peeling paint.
She may look beat, but like Tyson Fury in the 12th round against Deontay Wilder, she’ll weather the storm.
It doesn’t require a master architect to list the ingredients of a house with good bones: a solid foundation, a strong frame, put together with thought and care.
It made me wonder: what are the common ingredients of a good life? What does a life with “good bones” look like?
This is different than a life that just “looks good.” We don’t have to wander far to find examples where the shiny veneer of Instagram is just lipstick on the face of reality. This is the equivalent of a 4-bedroom colonial with vaulted ceilings and Italian marble countertops held up by rotting studs and strands of beaverboard.
How do we deliberately build a life that stands the test of time? What are the common ingredients? The good bones to a good life probably look different for everyone. Here’s how I think about it today:
Health
Ask anyone who’s sick: What would you give to be healthy again?
Most would reply: “Anything.”
When you’re sick, the smallest inconvenience becomes a mountain. Conversely, when you’re healthy and energetic, you can throw yourself at any Big Bad put in front of you in this season of life.
We are nothing without our health. While there may be an incalculable number of factors that lead to sickness, the science is out on what will keep you healthy:
- Eating right
- Sleeping well
- Exercising
According to the professionals, there isn’t too much to add here. Get these right and we should be good…
Yet as noted by Morgan Housel, the fitness industry alone is a $30 billion industry, but almost 40% of Americans are obese.
A $30 billion industry and many of us struggle to get the basics right. What’s going on here?
One of the problems: this industry and the marketing dollars fueling it have conditioned us to think about our fitness and health the wrong way. We’re led to believe you don’t need a solid foundation at all, that the problem is just this one thing (that they happen to have the solution for). Make that one tweak, and your life will dramatically improve.
Get on the right diet, sleep on the right mattress, buy the right equipment, and you’ll be good to go.
The best thing is to untangle ourselves from the tendrils of this industry, and focus on building good bones.
Love
Cheryl Strayed used to write for a terrific advice column called Dear Sugar. One letter has stayed with me through the years. There’s plenty you can take from it: it’s a letter about friendship, scars both physical and emotional, and suicide. Most of all, it’s a letter about love.
What I’ve taken from it is this:
Any level of success — personal, social, professional, monetary — is empty without people you love to share it with.
Who those people are is a matter of preference and circumstance. It can be love of a partner, love for your parents, for your kids or for your friends. I won’t pretend to understand how the intricacies of love function, or how one goes about finding it.
But I’m lucky to have learned a few things about how some good ways to express that love:
1. Respect
A colleague and his wife, Fran, have been happily married for 30 years.
“What’s the secret?” I asked.
Fran didn’t hesitate. “Respect. Never be disrespectful to your partner. Especially in public.”
Simple advice, but that’s what makes it so powerful. With “respect” as your modus operandi, it waterfalls to all the small behaviors that compound into a healthy relationship. A steaming cup of tea by the bedside. A hand on the small of the back. A goodnight kiss.
2. Grace
When it comes to your close relationships, I think of grace as always giving the person the benefit of the doubt. There are many ways to frame this idea: Assume Good Faith, or for the cynical, Hanlon’s razor.
My wife frames it this way, which I like best:
“Anytime they annoy or upset you, start with the assumption they had good intentions.”
If someone’s running late or didn’t get to the pile of dishes in the sink or forgot to return a call, first assume they did their best. Then react accordingly.
Contrary to what we’re led to believe by this 24-7 news cycle, most people have good intent. With our loved ones, it’s even rarer that they’d treat you with malice. We can make the world a better place, and our relationships that much stronger, by acting accordingly.
3. Give your best version
My wife and I used to live in Los Angeles, where she was an attorney at a firm in Orange County. One day, one of the partners of the firm explained his post-work routine to her:
He gets in his car during rush hour and makes the long commute home. He climbs out of the car, bag and jacket in hand and marches up the steps.
He pauses. Before he opens the door, he reminds himself that no matter how many hours he worked, if he lost a case or worse, lost a client, none of that matters. He has to cross that doorway like he doesn’t have a care in the world, because he owes his family the best version of himself.
Your family deserves the best version of you.
It’s funny how if we’re exhausted or hung over, we’ll fake our enthusiasm or force a smile for our colleagues, or even a complete stranger. But in the same state around the people we love the most, we’ll collapse on the sofa and complain about how tired we are.
The people you’re closest to will love you at your worst. Which is precisely why they deserve your best.
Mindset
Retired Navy SEAL Mark Divine coined the phrase “Unbeatable Mind”.
He wrote a book explaining how to cultivate an unbeatable mind, and Billy Mays infomercial-like copy aside, it’s a powerful concept.
How do you develop a resilient mind in the face of adversity, social pressure, and constant distraction? How do you build a life that does not sway in the face of these challenges?
I’ve written about tactics that help to keep a strong mind, but probably more important are these principles:
1. Gratitude
Gary Vaynerchuk had Tony Robbins on his show once. Tony gave a 4-minute explanation of his morning routine, and it included a plunge pool, deep breathing exercises, and mantras.
Then it was Gary’s turn. His routine was one-sentence long:
“I imagine someone I love was in a terrible accident.”
I’m paraphrasing here, but that was the gist of it. He imagines his parents are sick, his wife was in a car accident, or his daughter was in the hospital.
Then he remembers that they’re not, and goddamn, that means life is great. It means even if he loses a deal to a competitor, loses a great employee or millions of dollars, he’s already won.
“Whenever I’ve been in my loneliest place with my biggest headache, thank God I’ve been able to step away from it and remind myself of all the great things I’ve been given. It’s impossible to complain and get too down when I do that,” he says.
2. Clarity
A high-powered lawyer would take 20 minutes after lunch to go into his office and close the door. He turned off the light and kicked up his feet on his deck. Then he closed his eyes.
Was he meditating? Taking a power nap?
No. He was asking himself one question over and over again:
“What’s in it for me?”
I read this story about 15 years ago (I think it’s from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, apologies if I’ve misattributed) and I remember thinking how selfish that sounded when I read it. But now I get it.
It’s not about being selfish. It’s about getting his mind and behavior aligned so he can do his best work.
It’s about getting clarity.
Brendan Bouchard writes about the power of clarity in his book, High Performance Habits:
What makes the difference is that high performers imagine a positive version of themselves in the future, and then they actively engage in trying to be that. This part about actively engaging is important. They aren’t waiting to demonstrate a characteristic next week or next month. They are living into their best self now.
In other words, high performers get clear about who they’re trying to become, and actively become that person.
When you’re deep in the grind, don’t forget to pop your head up and ask, “What’s in it for me?”
3. Kill negativity
The best defense is a strong offense. To stop negativity, the best approach is to immediately stamp it out before it can take root.
That was Taylor Swift’s swift approach to her eating disorder, which she opened up about in her documentary, Miss Americana.
“There have been times where a picture of me where I feel like I looked like my tummy was too big, or… someone said that I looked pregnant … and that’ll just trigger me to just starve a little bit — just stop eating,” Swift says.
It’s something she’s put behind her, but it’s clear the struggle remains. She explains, in almost a manic tone, how she keeps these demons at bay:
“It would cause me to go into a hate spiral. I caught myself yesterday starting to do it.
I was like: Nope, we don’t do that anymore. We do not do that anymore, because it’s better to think you look fat, than to look sick.
We do not do that anymore, and we’re just changing the channel in our brain, and we’re not, we’re not doing that anymore. That didn’t end us up in a good place.”
Money
Money can’t buy happiness.
But having enough money (whatever “enough” means to you) makes life much easier.
This means figuring out two things:
- What is enough?
- What skills or resources do I need to have enough?
A life with good bones solves for both. How you do that is up to you (they call it personal finance for a reason).
Some ideas that may help:
1. “Enough” is about self-worth, not money
One thing I took from working in Hollywood: if you don’t figure out how much is enough early on, it’ll eat at you forever.
I’ve watched someone open up a $50,000 check and complain about getting screwed in the deal. How can you be so unhappy with a paycheck that is someone’s annual salary?
For so many people, there is no “enough.” The $2 million home in the Palisades is not enough. The Mercedes e20 is not enough. The fame and prestige is not enough.
The greater your self-worth (your opinion about yourself and the value you place on yourself) the easier it is to reach “enough.”
Great self-worth is correlated to what psychologists call “internal locus of control”, or the ability to control the outcomes of your life. When you believe you’re in control, you’re less likely to do things in order to impress others, like buying a bigger house than you need or leasing the car you can’t afford.
Similarly, the fewer “keeping up with the Joneses” behaviors you engage in, the faster you’ll reach enough, or a surplus beyond enough.
2. Money is a negative art
It’s not what you do with your money, but what you don’t do.
Like fitness and diets, there’s always a new shiny “money” toy to chase: real estate, cryptocurrency, angel investing, etc. However, for many of us, we’d be better off simplifying to a handful of decisions a year, then putting the rest on autopilot.
Key decisions include things like: what are the big expenditures I’d like to make this year? Do my savings goals still make sense? What does my asset allocation look like?
What should be put on autopilot? Paying bills, saving, investing.
I recommend Ramit Sethi’s book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich, for all the blocking and tackling of money automation. You can check out my book notes here.
H/t Morgan Housel for this “negative art” framing of money.
3. Get aligned with your partner
Divorce is expensive.
If you decide to commit to one life partner, ideally, get aligned on how you both view money in your lives. You both should have roughly the same idea of “what is enough” money and how you’ll collectively earn “enough.”
Other articles I’ve written about money:
- My brutally honest review of How to Win the Game of Advanced Personal Finance
- My brutally honest StashWealth review
Career
If you get a lot of your identity meaning from your career (I do) then here are ways to build a robust career:
1. Hard work is (still) underestimated
“I don’t need to work hard. I work smart.”
I don’t disagree with this. You have to work on the right things. It’s better to spend one hour on sales copy worth thousands of dollars than spend three hours tweaking your profile picture.
However, there are too many unknowns when it comes to working hard, especially early on in your career. How do you know if you’re working smart?
Either someone you trust with enough insight into your life tells you (rare) or you’ve savvy enough to recognize it for yourself (rarer).
On the other hand, there’s nothing more in your own control than your work intensity and the sheer number of hours you devote to your work.
2. One foot in the known, one foot in the unknown
Your work should live in the sweet spot where you spend most of your time doubling down on your strengths where you can provide disproportionate value.
The other half (or 30%, or 10%, whatever) should be spent on more “speculative” activities, where you have the opportunity to learn and improve your skills.
This is the formula to add value while developing your skills. H/T Brian Balfour
3. Your network is your net worth
Your next great career opportunity won’t come from the people in your immediate circle, e.g. your friends and family. It will come from friends of friends, from acquaintances of family.
Paradoxically, the best way to build up this circle is to focus on helping others and not on yourself. What this means tactically is learning to give without expectation of something in return.
This is what Zig Ziglar meant when he said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”
For more tactical advice, I’ve written everything you need to know about networking.
How do you build good bones?
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Will Durant
You build good bones the same way you build anything: one piece at a time.
First, pick one place to start. You can start with any one of these habits, but I’d recommend starting with Health. Decide whether you’re going to work on your nutrition, exercise, or sleep.
The goal is to make it a habit. It should be so automatic you don’t even think about it.
The next step is to plan. To paraphrase Eisenhower, “it’s not the plan, it’s the planning.” Plans are useless, but all the work that goes into them is invaluable: thinking about the goal you’re trying to achieve, prioritizing, examining your schedule and thinking about the obstacles you’ll encounter.
What are the chances your plans will go to shit? It’s likely.
The kids will get sick and you won’t make it to the gym. The fridge will break and you’ll have to rush out for fast food. A client will demand changes and you’ll be in the office until 11pm.
Expect this to happen, and then move to the third step.
Move life back to center. Restaurateur Danny Meyer was complaining to a friend about his employee. The friend put a salt shaker on the table in front of him, and told him to move the salt shaker in the center of the table.
Danny did. The friend moved it. “Put it back,” the friend said. He did, and the friend moved it again.
“Your employees are always moving the salt shaker. That’s their job. It’s the law of entropy.
Your job is just to move the shaker back each time and let them know exactly what you stand for.”
When you feel your life starting to derail, remember: that’s life. That’s what happens. Your job is not to get upset. Your job is to move life back to center.
