Maximize Your Joyspan: A Life Philosophy for Balancing Success and Fullfillment
Make more money, time, and Joy
Are you an ambitious, hard-working, future oriented person?
Does the idea of financial freedom appeal to you?
Do you feel something is missing in your life, but you’ll worry about that after your rich?
I was the same way.
For close to 20 years I struggled with this nagging feeling I should be doing more.
I should be growing my career, building side businesses, and developing new skills. I knew money wasn’t the most important thing in life. But let me get rich first and then worry about that.
Now, pursuing wealth and career growth is not a mistake.
But I was over-calibrating toward my future. After reflecting on my need to do more, make more, and figure out the source of my pain, I’ve found it.
There is a better way through life.
One that balances the pursuit of financial success with living a satisfying life.
My new north star is to maximize my Joyspan.
What is Joyspan?
Joyspan is the sum of all the moments spent in Joy across your lifetime.
Joy is any moment when you lose track of time in the state of flow during a solo activity or in the company of others.
Maximizing your Joyspan means optimizing for the total time spent in Joy over a lifetime.
This is what I’m after.
Balancing Future with Present
Maximizing Joyspan requires a balance between future thinking and present focus.
Maximizing Joyspan is NOT:
Seeking pleasure at all costs.
Delaying pleasure until retirement.
Maximizing Joyspan is the optimal path right down the middle.
If we over calibrate to seeking pleasure today, that might be fun for a little while. But it’s the shallow, short term pleasure that fades fast. It’s the dopamine addiction with no lasting growth in relationships, skills, or wealth.
If we over calibrate to working for the future, we never learn how to live. By the time you retire you have no relationships, no hobbies, and no health. You can try to figure it all out when retired but good luck unlearning 30 years of bad habits by then.
Maximizing Joyspan requires both investing for the future and enjoying the pleasures of the present.
How To Maximize Your Joyspan
You can maximize your Joyspan by making more:
Money
Time
Joy
How you take action and what you focus on is a personal choice.
The path to Maximum Joyspan for me will be different than yours. The principles of more money, time, and joy will apply but the specifics of what we do will vary. It will depend on your unique blend of values, interests, and relationships.
Here is an outline of my path and what I will continue to write about.
Make More Money
Grow my career to grow my earnings. This is my writing on being a Staff Engineer and adapting to AI as a software engineer (Augmented Engineer).
Time Rich Investing. A way to build wealth that doesn’t cost much time or effort. A focus on avoiding the big money mistakes people make (WFHFIRE).
Side Projects that complement my career and provide scalable upside. These are projects that worst case help me learn something useful. And best case create an income producing asset. As a former trader turned engineer, for me these are DeFi Quant, automated trading, or app development for now.
Make More Time
Productivity. We are living in the AI revolution. Continue to take advantage of technology to save you time (Augmented Engineer).
Longevity. Improve your health span so you have more total lifespan to fill with moments of Joy.
Buyback Time. Invest your money in tools, services, and skills that give you more time.
Make More Joy
Find your Ikigai. Reflect, explore, try new things and keep looking for activities that let you enter flow. Find what you enjoy doing so you can say X is my hobby.
Nurture relationships. Spend quality time with the people in your life you care about. Be present, listen, and help them.
Cultivate mindfulness. Learn to get out of your own head and be present.
Most of my focus is on the make more money part still.
But I now do that within the framework of Maximizing my Joyspan. This helps me balance investing for my future and enjoying life today.
We are living in a remarkable time.
With remote work and AI, we can create a world where people are rich in time and money, able to Maximize their Joyspan.