On Fuck You Money

CLII

[Swimming in Decorative Pools; DHH’s Slide Deck; Jack's Story & Raccoon Island; Post Scarcity Mindset; Post Scarcity Mindset; Outsource Yourself and Buy a Van; Be Un-purchasable; Don’t be a Gaudy AirBnB]

Thesis: Fuck you money is a mindset; when you have it, you cannot be bought.

[Swimming in Decorative Pools]

I don't like writing about money. I mean, I LOVE writing about money in the capital markets & business sense... but I really don't like writing about it in the personal sense.

I was taught by my parents that it's quite private thing and generally ill advised to share.

On top of that, I'm very wary of staying far, far away from the neighborhood of the 'internet guru' types who spend every dollar they have making you think they have more money than they do.

So if the hook made you think that is the direction of this post, I can assure you it's not.

The point of this post is more of a reflection of what 'fuck you money' is, and, how, in some ways, it's less related to any quantity of money and much more related to your mindset and the freedoms you have.

To be clear, I don’t have anywhere near the amount of money needed to have fuck you money in the sense you’re probably used to thinking about.

But, I also don't define “fuck you money” as the amount needed to be able buy a hotel for the explicit purpose of swimming in a decorative pool with European models, or the amount of money needed to fly private because you can't be bothered to wait at a public airport, although both seem like they'd be cool.

Rather, I have a working definition fuck you money as the money needed to believe if money is not an obstacle to getting what you want out of life. Resultantly, fuck you money implies you cannot be bought.

This is admittedly a weird definition, because, assuming you don’t want anything, you could literally have $0 and still have fuck you money; or, assuming you wanted to buy the United States of America, you could have $1,000,000,000 and maybe still NOT have fuck you money.

In other words, I do think, in a lot of ways, that a big part of fuck you money is a mindset. And, another big part is controlling the strings attached to your money related commitments.

Granted, if you want to party in Ibiza, and you have no money, it will be a lot harder without money than with it. And to be sure, even if you do have enough money and the fuck you money mindset, there are other things that can hold you back from doing literally whatever you want, but not money.

So yes, money matters; but this post is a reflection on how “fuck you money” really isn’t just about money.

[DHH’s Slide Deck]

DHH claims that half big of the fuck you money attitude is a mindset:

For context, this guy bootstrapped a SaaS comapny to $125M ARR. Assuming he owns 1/3rd of the company (is likely higher) and has even 50% net margins (is likely much higher), he would be making over $20M a year in straight cash.

In this podcast though, he thinks back to when he didn't have more money than god; he was basically running around doing technical gig work. Yet he claims that even then, he still had the 'fuck you money' mindset.

When he presented Ruby on Rails, a framework he made that now powers Shopify (yes, that one), at a conference with a bunch of developers, he literally had a slide that said "Fuck you."

This was before Ruby on Rails or DHH were successful at all.

In other words, DHH was literally saying fuck you before he had what most people would say fuck you money is. Hence, the claim that "fuck you money" is 50% a mindset.

[Jack's Story & Raccoon Island]

Take my co founder, Jack. He DOES NOT have the amount of money that anyone would think of when they say fuck you money, nor do I.

In some ways, Jack had the fuck you money mindset when he was still employed. Then, when he quit his very well paying job to go all in on BirdDog and make LESS MONEY, he seems to have gotten MORE of the fuck you money mindset.

Even when he was employed, he would travel quite a bit more than the average person to see his girlfriend and family and what not. All the while, he was building BirdDog with me AND received the fastest promotion his employer had ever given out.

He may have had doubts at different times of money or logistics as a blocker to doing what he wanted, but if they existed, in a lot of ways, his actions clearly overrode many of those doubts.

And then, when he did quit his full time job, he took a pay cut but got even MORE fuck you money. Yes, somehow less is more in this case.

He can go and golf in the afternoon on a Tuesday or spend a week in Mexico City with his family. Who's going to stop him? Certainly not me; I'm too busy playing with raccoons on an island in Miami or wandering into MIT on a Wednesday to watch Lupe Fiasco's class.

And to be completely clear here, neither Jack or I are making bank right now. I think if we each named 10 peers from the business school we went to, they would likely all be making more money than we are; some of them would be making more money than both of us combined!

And, to be even more clear, we both work like animals. But, that work is on our terms, not someone else’s.

I think being your own boss greatly lowers the threshold needed to have fuck you money. When you’re employed, there’s always an implicit threat that if you misbehave, you can be fired. Back to the definition above: Your source of income is contingent on someone else’s opinion of your behavior. So, in some ways, you are bought. If you ‘misbehave’ and are fired, you won’t have money, and you will have a harder time getting what you want.

For many, many things in life, there isn’t someone to tell Jack or I “no,” and we’re not even making that much!

[Post Scarcity Mindset]

A few weeks ago, I got one of the best compliments I have ever received.

I was out to dinner with friends from my hacker house and a guest, we'll call him Y.

We were at a pretty cool Thai place in Cambridge, and I ordered 3 different items because I like food a lot. I offered that anyone could try some of the items, and E said yes, of course, as she loves food as much as I do. I could tell Y wanted to but maybe wasn't comfortable saying yes because we had just met.

So, I looked at him, and said, "Y, try this," and simply put some on his plate.

Later, he asked me if I had what he called a "Post Scarcity" mindset, and went on to say that he thought I did.

What he meant by that was something similar to what I wrote in a pair of posts over 2 years ago now on surviving vs thriving. Basically, in a scarcity or survival mindset, every resource you have is hoarded and coveted. In an abundance, or thriving, or 'post scarcity' mindset, you have confidence and faith that even if resources are objectively scarce, it doesn't matter, you will figure it out and find more and be fine.

In other words, I think post scarcity / abundance attitude is close to, if not the same thing as fuck you money attitude.

The reason this was one of the best compliments I have ever received is because Y was one of the internet money types: 3 years younger than me and far more wealthy than I (not that he would've had said that; the information came from a mutual).

And, he indicated to me that this post scarcity mindset he noticed in me was a mindset he's been actively working on switching into.

So, this time, we have an example of someone having much more money than me AND the same sort of freedom as I do (no boss) but to an even great extent (he can stop working and be fine) feeling like I somehow have more of a 'post scarcity' or possibly even fuck you money mindset than he does.

Hence, why I’m very grateful for the compliment.

[Outsource Yourself and Buy a Van]

We'll throw out a third anecdote of a person with fuck you money. A friend of mine, J, who was gainfully employed by Microsoft.

Through clever means and systematizing his role, he got his workload down from the expected 40 to less than 10 hours a week.

In something like an Office Space like fashion, he went to quite and ended up getting a promotion and a pay bump.

Once he had collected what in his mind was 'enough' money, he quit, bought a van and traveled around the US for over a year, doing some gig work that interested him.

This is fuck you money. But, again, I know people with twice the amount of money he saved who feel like they don’t have anywhere near enough money to do that.

[Be Un-purchasable]

One of the most important things to evaluate around the fuck you money attitude is whether or not you can be bought.

And I don't mean literally bought.

I mean, is there something you value, some core belief or principal of yours, that you would give up in exchange for something else?

For myself, some very core items are:

• Preferring Rationality to irrationality and getting closer and closer to truth every day

• Spending time doing some meaningful, challenging work

• Spending some time present with people and fully focused on them rather than other things

I don't know what your items are. But, you do; and if you think you don't, I'd encourage you to ponder it for a little.

Once you do know these things, you can figure out quickly if you can be bought. If you're willing to compromise one of these things because someone buys you a fancy meal or pays you a salary or a bonus or sleeps with you or tells you you're a special snowflake, then you can be bought.

And, don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming I never compromise on anything I care about; but the more I refuse to compromise on these things, the more I feel as if I have that unstoppable energy--the power of both knowing who I want to be and the confidence of pursuing that whole heartedly.

The fuck you money attitude.

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[Don’t be a Gaudy AirBnB]

My hacker house and I recently took our first official retreat on the outskirts of Miami.

We stayed at one of those generic but nice looking houses that has obviously been optimized to just be rented out. $5K for 4 nights, 4 bed 4 bath.

Every room that is not the kitchen or the living room is a bedroom.

Each plant is fake.

The decor is meant to look expensive, like statues of heads abstract heads or strange shapes, but if you pick it up you can tell it's cheap plastic or plaster.

The wall art has that cheeky taste to it, saying things like 'Good vibes only.'

There are fake candles and battery operated accent lights that are all out of batteries.

Arcade and projector in the garage (I'm the one who booked it and didn't even realize that until someone told me a day into the trip).

Subtle design flaws that would be correct had a high agency or even attentive person been living in the home, like a towel hook being positioned so that when it is in use the light switch is blocked.

The place is offensive in that it is so carefully cultivated to be entirely unoffensive.

Oh, and most notable of all, a toilet that when flushed somehow resulted in the shit and piss water appearing in the bathtub.

To be clear, I'm not complaining--I've stayed at enough of this type of airbnb that I wouldn't expect anything else, barring the toilet issue.

I understand why someone would design like this. The house is not a home, it's an investment that's been optimized for cash flow.

All of the character and nuance and evidence of consistent life or growth has been stripped away. It's a frozen frame of what a nice place is supposed to look like.

The place has been bought and altered into what 'the market' thinks it should be.

Mind yourself, lest you end up like this house.

You are not someone else's investment. And you don't need a fortune to have the mindset of fuck you money.

No matter how much or what they're willing to offer, it's not worth selling yourself, or the things you most care about.

If DHH is write, the actual fuck you money will follow the fuck you money attitude.

Live Deeply,