The Freedom to Stop Keeping Score

When most people think of financial independence, they think of freedom from work.

Or at least, freedom to choose how much you work, what type of work you do, and whether you still need to sit through pointless meetings or answer to a boss.

And that’s definitely a big part of it.  But there’s another aspect to all this that not many people think about: the freedom to stop keeping score.

I don’t really mean that in the financial sense.  It’s bigger than that.  This benefit is harder to pin down, but it’s become one of my favourite parts of freedom.

So that’s what I want to dig into here.  Just how deep our habit of scorekeeping goes, why it’s a game you can never really win, and how much better life starts to feel when you stop taking it so seriously.

Let’s get into it.

A habit turned into an obsession

I said this isn’t really about numbers.  And it isn’t.  But the numbers are the easiest place to see this habit of tracking and measuring everything.

Consider for a moment all the things people track nowadays…

We track our savings rate and our net worth.  We track our daily steps.  We track our spending, our screen time, our heart rate and calories burned, our follower count, our productivity, and more.

There’s an app to measure basically every single thing you do now, and a neat little chart that makes you feel bad when you did too much or not enough.

And the one that gets me the most – we track OUR SLEEP.

We strap a thing to our wrist, go lie down for 8 hours and then wake up to a score of how well we did at… being asleep.  This blows my mind – and research is now finding the results of these trackers are woefully inaccurate and misleading.  Well, no shit.

Regardless, we’ve taken something our body does with zero effort, and turned it into a performance you can succeed or fail at.

Look, I’m sure they’re useful in some specific situations.  But why do you need a device to tell you how your sleep was?  If you don’t sleep well, you’ll feel it and there are usually obvious reasons why.  Stress, late eating, alcohol, temperature, and so on.  If you do sleep well, you’ll feel good.  The ‘score’ is irrelevant either way.

Think about the person who’s hyper-conscious of their sleep score.  Do you think they’ll sleep better?  Of course not!

And I’m not making this up.  There’s a growing condition called Orthosomnia.  Being so anxious about getting the perfect sleep score that you can’t sleep.  So the thing people buy to help them sleep better becomes the reason they can’t.  Incredible.

But, as usual, we become convinced products will solve our problems.  They rarely do.

Anyway, the main thing I’m pointing out here is the mindset and obsession with tracking everything.  It just gives us more and more to worry about.

Why this matters

The darker side to all this scorekeeping is that it’s a game you can never actually win.

You see this in finance all the time.  People hit ‘their number’ and what happens?  The number moves.

A million bucks suddenly isn’t as thrilling as you thought.  And life’s getting more expensive, so maybe you need two.

It happens with lifestyle too.  You buy the nice car, and within a few months it’s just a car – a more expensive and slightly more enjoyable version of what you already had.

It also happens with incomes.  Your friend is making $200k a year, and suddenly your $100k feels insufficient.

There’s always a higher number, a better thing, or someone doing more.  This is the hedonic treadmill in action, and I’ve spoken about it plenty of times before. 

The reason there’s no finish line is because there’s no limit on human desires.

It’s why people who could have retired years ago are still working, chasing a target that magically keeps expanding.   It’s why people earn more and somehow feel the same, or poorer.   They’ve shifted the goalposts.  And it’s why people buy things they don’t need to make their sacrifice feel worth it.

Now, I’m not judging anyone here.  I did the car thing above, and my mind also thinks, “Oh, wouldn’t a bigger portfolio be nice.”

This is just the way society works, and how our minds tend to work too.  But once you realise this game never ends and it’s built on marketing and mental trickery, you get to stop pouring your life’s energy into it.  And that’s exactly what financial independence can give you.

Let’s talk about what this means in practice.

Freedom from your own scoreboard

There are really two scoreboards you can opt out of.  The first one is the metrics you set for yourself.

A lot of people have asked me: “So Dave, what’s your next big goal?”

People assume that because I hit a big goal, I must have automatically made a new big goal to strive for.

But to be honest, I don’t have one.  In fact, I don’t really do goals anymore.  I know that sounds extremely odd in a community built around a major goal, but it’s true.

There’s no new target I’m aiming for.  I mean sure, I could aim for a net worth of $5m by a certain date.  But what for?

If I make the goal soon, that would mean doing a lot more work than I want to, and living in a way I dislike, just to get additional money I don’t really need.  If I make the goal further away, I’ll probably reach it over time without even making it a goal.  So I don’t see the point.

Instead of making goals, I just focus on the handful of things I care about and move in a certain direction.  The specificity of a goal is just not useful to me anymore.  In fact, it would detract from what I’m doing.

One thing I’ve learned about living well – at least for me – is you want to do things for the sake of the thing itself.  Not for the outcome, the reward, or for the recognition.  And certainly not for a number on a screen.

When you put an arbitrary target on something you enjoy, the target slowly takes over and becomes the thing you obsess over, which ends up eating away at the thing you love.  You become future-focused at the expense of enjoying today.

The turtle volunteering I do is a good example.

As many of you know, there’s a wetland near my house, and every year the turtles leave the lake to lay their eggs – somtimes in our garden.  We then cover the nests to protect them from crows, check them through hatching season, and carry the little ones down to the water when they surface.

I’ve released 377 hatchlings from 2018 to now.  I tally it up over time because I find it motivating – but there’s no ‘goal’ or target attached to it.  I do it purely because it warms my heart, whether it’s 1 turtle or 1,000.  And that’s the entire point.

Much the same with this blog, the podcasts, and the books.  I don’t do any of these things because I have to.  There’s no income target I’m trying to hit.  I produce all this stuff because I like being helpful and believe it’s useful for the world.

Instead of trying to accomplish certain things, I just spend time on things I care about and things end up getting ‘accomplished’.

It also changes how I approach day-to-day life, which is one of the best parts of being free.

If I wake up feeling crappy, I don’t need to force myself to be ‘productive’.  I can just take it easy and rest.  Or if it’s a beautiful day and what I really feel like doing is going for a big walk and having a coffee at the beach, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I DO.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t have goals.  They can be very useful for the right person at the right time.  I’m saying that once you’re free, you can just do things because you love them – even if it’s not productive, and even if it doesn’t come with a pretty metric you can track.

It’s just another form of optionality.  You don’t have to keep score forever.  And for a lot of people, that’s incredibly freeing.

But there’s another scoreboard you can free yourself from.  Society’s scoreboard.

Freedom from everyone else’s scoreboard

Every country in the world has its own unwritten scoreboard that people follow.

In Australia, people are measured by whether they own property, how big that property is, which postcode it’s in, and how many rental properties you can amass.

Then there’s what kind of brand your Simply Unnecessary Vehicle (SUV) is.  Interestingly enough, this property obsession is how a whole country ends up equity rich, cashflow poor with very little freedom relative to their ‘wealth’.

But when you’re financially independent, you remove yourself (at least partly) from society’s treadmill.  You can turn down the noise on that game.  It’s not that it doesn’t exist, but you are no longer so embedded in environments where that’s the focus.

You don’t have to keep climbing the ladder because that’s just ‘the thing to do’.  You don’t have to pretend to like your brown-nosing petty-minded colleagues just to get along.  You don’t have to get the new car, or the nicer clothes, or the bigger home because that’s what’s expected of you.

You CAN do any of these things, but your ability to choose what you value and get involved in skyrockets as you become financially independent.  Because you no longer need to have conversations around things you don’t care about.

In essence, you get to stop giving a shit what everyone else is doing, and buying, and talking about.   I don’t mean this in a cold “fuck the world” kind of way.  I mean that society’s scoreboard becomes irrelevant to you.  The pressure to fit in and be liked and measure up is a weight you no longer carry.

And if you’re anything like me, you were already half-out of this game to begin with.  Because to reach FI, you have to approach life differently to the masses.

To save when others were spending.  Invest when others made excuses.  Educate yourself when others couldn’t be bothered.  And take action while most people were still procrastinating.

By definition, you already opted out of trying to look and act wealthy, in favour of becoming wealthy.  

One of the best side effects of freedom is that all the noise fades away into the background.  The comparisons become less frequent and habitual.  And it all becomes a game you no longer even pay attention to.

I’ve met many people who’ve reached FI since starting this blog.  And they all share one thing in common: they’re content.  They don’t care what everyone else is doing.  They’re happy following their own path.

And quite often, there is no next grand mission.  They spend time on small projects (or part-time work), with family and pets, doing hobbies, travelling, learning, looking after their health and their money.

And while the numbers keep ticking higher in the background, they don’t bother with arbitrary new targets.  Because their whole motivation now is to enjoy and appreciate life, rather than trying to track it, measure it, and conquer it like some made up achievement.

And isn’t that the ultimate goal – to stop treating your life like a checklist to complete?

By the way, if you like these sorts of articles, I send out content like this once each fortnight.  I’m absolutely dying to reach 20,000 subscribers – it keeps me awake at night.  Please join otherwise my life has no meaning:

In all seriousness, none of these things actually drives what I do.  The checking is just a curiosity reflex.  The funny thing is, I know full well that me doing so is a waste of time and makes no difference, lol.

If I write something good, people will read it.  If I keep investing sensibly and leave them alone, the portfolio will grow.  As I like to say, your money doesn’t work harder just because you’re watching it.

But the reason I do things is for the purpose of enjoyment and satisfaction.  And I’ve noticed that when I stop focusing on measuring success by metrics or goals, I enjoy activities – and life itself – much more overall.

I’m not looking down on anyone keeping score.  It’s just that at some point, if you’ve done well, you can free yourself from these scorekeeping games.  You can loosen its grip and focus on the things that are hard to measure but light you up inside.

Final thoughts

So, what is freedom, when you boil it right down?

The money is what facilitates it.  And for most of us, the free time aspect is the biggest payoff.  But behind both of those things is something internal: the mental freedom to stop keeping score.

To stop obsessively measuring.  To be okay with not optimising.  And to live with a bit more loose direction, and enough space to explore what genuinely interests you.

You get to define your own version of success.  And I think a good way to judge success is how much you enjoy what you’re doing.

At some point you realise that every hour spent chasing an arbitrary metric, trying to fit in with your peers, or proving something to people who probably don’t even care, is an hour spent playing a game that can never be won.

It’s not that goals are bad and measuring isn’t useful.  But you’ve got a finite amount of days on this earth and constantly keeping score tends to eat away at them.

The things I do don’t need trackable metrics to be worthy of my time.  I just need to find them personally valuable.  And the only thing I’ll compare them against is what else I could be doing.

The whole point of all this is financial, physical, and mental freedom.  True wealth is reaching the point where you no longer need to keep score at all.

Resources you might find helpful:

 Financial Advice
If you want help to implement your FI strategy, optimise super, or plan your retirement, I can connect you with someone I trust. Find out more.

 Mortgage Broker
My personal broker for the last 10+ years. They’ve helped me with buying, refinancing, and debt recycling. Check them out.

 Strong Money Australia Book
Your complete guide financial independence in Australia. Amazon, Audible and Spotify.

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