The Weekend Retirement Test Drive: Groundhog Day and the Rest of Your Life (Plus: Competition)

Tim Ferriss

16 years ago

Don’t be a groundhog [yes, I know this is a hedgehog, but I liked the shot]. (Photo: Anxious223)

There are a lot of rich and depressed groundhogs.

This is a critical concept, so let me introduce it with an e-mail I received from a reader and executive at a Fortune 500 company a few hours ago, edited for length:

Tim,

So I was out snowshoeing this morning and found myself completely taken in this moment thinking I was like the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale and that I was walking through the Black Forest. And I was there, at least in my mind, which, really, is all that matters. …Here’s how this is relevant to you – the problem most people are going to have with your book is that these people don’t know how to dream. I think your book is like the 2nd in a series… unless you can find moments of the sublime in whatever present moment, and unless you can dream about creating the next one, what does it really matter how much time you free up from work?

Here’s how we make this e-mail hit home for you and get you $720 in the process:

1) On a scale of 1-10, 10 being best, how life-changing or personally fulfilling have the last two weekends been?

2) Is retirement from the 9-5, 50-weeks-per-year routine one of your current goals? (Yes/No)

3) How confident are you on a scale of 1-10, 10 being best, in your ability to fill 20-40 years of retirement, whether in one stretch or spread out as mini-retirements?

If your answer to 2 is affirmative, here are two worst-case scenarios…

-The answer for 3 is low.

-The answer for 3 is greater than your answer for 1.

In both cases, there will be a serious depression in your future if you create time abundance without the skill and practice needed to fill that void, not to mention regret for having followed the “deferred-life plan” of slave-save-retire (if you choose that versus lifestyle design and its present-tense options).

The next 48 hours of your life — or this weekend — is a microcosm of your potential retirement. How you spend this time is reflective of how you would fill time once you cash in your chips for the good life after 10-30 years of accumulating capital and assets.

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day here in the US, and I want you to make the next 48 hours the opposite of the repetitive rinse-repeat life I associate with the classic movie of the same name.

Here’s the challenge and competition.

Pretend like the next 48 hours are the first 48 hours of your emancipation — you’ve done it and now all of your time is free time.

Prove to us and yourself that you can fill the void with something worthwhile. This could be one of the most telling experiments of your life, so I encourage you to treat it as a required exercise.

If you can’t fill the time, there are questions you need to ask and skills you need to develop before focusing 100% on finances, investments, nest eggs, etc.

Put your real “filling the void” experiment results in the comments of this post. Proof of some type (links to photos, video, etc.) is ideal but not required.

The best comment posted no later than 5pm PST on Friday, Feb 8th will win 36 copies of The 4-Hour Workweek from the original limited 1st print run. It’s now in it’s 29th printing and 36 new copies are worth $720 at retail. These 1st-edition versions are collector’s items and worth more with signatures, which 12 will have 🙂 First-edition original manuscripts have sold for upwards of $1,500 each on Ebay.

I’ll send you a collector’s edition talking action figure of Shaun from one of my favorite movies of all-time, Shaun of the Dead: