The quiet life is the most ignored way to succeed

I’m a millionaire, but most people in my life don’t know.

They call me boring. I don’t go on fancy holidays. I don’t own a loud car with a “f*ck you I’m rich” badge on it. My house is extremely basic (see my Instagram).

And I’m proud of my quiet life.

Today my 3 year old daughter went to daycare. She left the house before I had a chance to see her. This has never happened since she was born. I was heartbroken. I immediately drove to her daycare and parked right out the front of her classroom.

As I approached the building, I could hear her shouting “Daddy, daddy, daddy.” She was confused though.

“Why are you here? Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

I explained to her that she’s the most important thing. Work can wait. I stayed and played with her and her friends. We made a castle with two chairs and a blanket.

All the other parents were at work. Shining their shoes to impress clients. Missing key moments from their children’s lives while they chase a loud job title and strangers’ approval who couldn’t give a damn about them.

My daughter’s best friend is Olivia. Her dad works in a big tech company. If he died on Monday from a heart attack, his employer would have someone else in his seat by the end of the week.

None of his colleagues would likely attend his funeral.

That’s what the loud, flashy life buys you.

The quiet life is the most ignored way to succeed, mostly because the people living it rarely talk about it. They find it, fall in love with it, and keep quiet. If I weren’t a writer, I’d probably keep quiet about it too.

The me of 10 years ago would have been horrified by the quiet life I live now. I didn't understand it back then. Now I do, and I want you to understand it too.

Living someone else’s life

I’m obsessed with Hollywood. I love movies and actors.

I’ve realized after several decades that I love actors because most of us are actors in real life. We get great at thinking and acting how everyone else wants us to.

It’s not a conscious decision either. We just kind of fall into it.

On the surface this isn’t a problem. But it becomes a problem later on because when you live someone else’s life, you forget who you are.

That’s what happened to me. I became this banker-actor pretending to care about interest rates and transaction fees when deep down I knew it was all meaningless.

I fell into this life because I wanted my family to be proud of me. Banking sounded like a respectable field. That became my criteria for success.

But I learned to hate my life.

The worst part is I lived in denial. I pretended all the loud dinner parties, big swinging d*cks in big tech, and big bank bonuses mattered.

If you don't consciously choose your path to success in life, by default, you'll accidentally adopt someone else's. It won’t immediately lead to a crisis. Eventually it will though.

And by then it might be too late to change.

Online culture sells you the fake dream of being stinking rich

It’s hard to choose the quiet life when social media tells you to do the opposite.

Everyone is flexing. Everyone is making you feel like you could do and be more. The FOMO is a hangover you wake up to every day. Everyone else is doing better than you, you lazy slob.

But are they doing better?

Some people need status, money, and fame to feel worthy of success. That’s deep insecurity more than it is a roadmap to success.

I once heard someone say this: “Improving is quiet. Impressing is loud.”

The goal isn’t to impress others.

It’s to improve yourself quietly every day so that you can impress yourself. When you chase the quiet life, you develop quiet confidence. When you chase the loud life, you end up becoming arrogant.

You’ll feel no need to name and shame

My former boss put a post up about how he thinks R UK OK? Day is important.

It would have been a great post, except he left out the part about how he thinks mental health problems are for p*ssies. See, most people don’t know the truth about him. But I do. He was my boss.

And he treated humans worse than slaves.

In another post he had an indirect crack at me. He said people like me who talk about their toxic bosses and quitting the corporate ladder should have the courage to name and tag their bad boss in the post.

Not doing that meant I was a fake guru and a liar.

The stupid thing is I’m not afraid to tag him at all. My ego would love to warn every human on the planet to get the hell away from this guy. But I don’t do it.

Because when you live the quiet life, you don’t need to name and shame people. You don’t let your ego make decisions for you.

I’m fine with quietly knowing he is one of the biggest failures I’ve ever met and his life is absolute misery on the inside.

The quietness of that reality is spectacular.

Secretly, I actually hope he removes the giant pole from his ass and learns the hard way to treat people with love and respect.

Try out the loud rich life to see if you like it

I did.

You don’t have to be rich either. Go to a country club. Have some fancy dinners with rich folks. Go to an entrepreneur event in Silicon Valley. Do a workout at an Equinox gym. Rent a luxury car for a week.

The loud life full of status games seems alluring. I found it empty.

The country club was full of rich boomers making fun of people with dark skin and treating waiters like slaves. The fancy fine dining dinners were trash food full of salt, oil, and sugar. The main course was the same size as my 3 year old’s snack bar.

The entrepreneur event was full of trust fund kids who’d never built anything and wanted strangers to invest in their startups, so they could use the money to go take mushrooms in the jungle for a month.

The fancy gym ended up being full of Instagram influencers taking selfies of their steroid muscles instead of working out. And the luxury cars felt good for about a week and then quickly became no different to a Toyota Camry.

Jim Carrey said it best:

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

There’s hidden power in the quiet life

The loud life makes it hard to think.

Your brain is full of other people’s opinions, you buy useless crap to impress people who don’t even like you, and you become a consumer instead of a creator.

Paul Graham taught me (years ago) the power of the quiet life. “Quiet is good for thinking, and thinking is how you get rich.”

In a world of AI, those who can think for themselves will get rich.

I heard a story the other day that illustrates this. A business owner posted a video of a sales call with a lead. Every time he asked the lead a question, the lead typed it into ChatGPT and read out the answer. He had no idea his screen was visible.

That’s your competition. Thinking is now rare. People would rather ask a robot trained on Google SEO 101 content than think about answers to basic questions.

But if thinking can make you rich, you need a lifestyle and environment that can produce that type of thinking. Most people don’t have that.

It’s why I am rebelling.

No more than 10 mins a day of phone screen time. Phone off most of the day. No notifications. 4-hour flow states full of deep work. Lots of writing online (like this) because writing is thinking and it helps you join the dots of ideas.

If wealth is nothing more than solving problems, then the person who can live a quiet life and truly think is going to make the most money.

The quiet life is now a prerequisite for wealth.

Being boring is how you access the good life

The modern human hates to be bored.

It's why they need the slot machine in their pocket to entertain them all day. Then when the dopamine hangover hits, their brains are fried and they’re tired.

Boredom is powerful though.

Everyone knows the way to succeed is to do the boring things well. But when people apply that advice they become bored with life. On the surface, it looks like doing the same thing every day makes you bored.

That’s not it.

Doing the wrong thing every day is what creates bad boredom.

I live a pretty boring life. No one is writing a movie about it. Penguin isn’t getting Ryan Holiday to write a book about it, then selling the rights to Disney so Leonardo DiCaprio can play me in “Catch Tim if you can.”

I thought I’d never get married or have kids. Now I’m married with two kids.

It makes me feel more successful than any car I've owned, revenue number I've hit, or award I've won.

The main difference now is I don’t crave overseas holidays or weekends anymore.

Saturday and Sunday feel the same as Monday. Melbourne, Australia (where I live) feels the same as a beach in Hawaii.

I used to crave time off because I was quietly trying to escape my life. But it never worked because as soon as I came home from travel, I felt dead inside again.

The most depressed I've ever felt was when I went on a holiday to Hollywood.

I met movie stars, walked the red carpet, ate at the Seinfeld hamburger hot spot, etc. The day I had to go back to work felt like a samurai sword stabbing me in the boob.

I didn’t miss Hollywood. No. I just hated my life.

The deeper truth is I chased status symbols because everyone else did. And that’s what led me down the dark path I was on. I had to snap myself out of it.

Living a boring life seems stupid. It seems like you’re wasting your life. But that’s only true if you measure success based on someone else’s version. If you measure success by what you experience, you’ll realize you don’t need all the noise and distractions.

You have to live a quiet life to believe in it.

A quiet life isn’t boring. It’s different. It’s freedom-focused, not status-focused. It’s internal, not external. It’s feeling-based, not ego-based.

When you don’t need much, hitting your goal becomes easier

Half my friends struggle because they’re obsessed with becoming millionaires.

I used to be, too, so I don’t judge them. What I’ve realized is when I strip away all the noise, I don’t need much.

They need a double-story McMansion with a chandelier.

I only need a single-story home in a basic suburb. As a result, my home is almost paid off after 3 years, and they have a $5M loan that could bankrupt them if they lose their primary source of income (hence the added stress).

They need a flashy car, so they get a big car loan and pay it off over 5 years. Then at the end of 5 years they have a balloon payment to make and the desire to get the new model so they can stay relevant.

I drive a simple electric car that costs 1/5th of the price and was paid in cash on day one. I keep the car for at least 10 years because I don’t care how old it looks. So I need fewer cars over my lifetime. And I pay no interest.

They had a $100K wedding. I spent $1000 on my wedding. We spent most of the day in a beautiful park with family, which cost nothing.

Once you strip away all the unnecessary flexing and luxury purchases, you don’t need as much money. So you can get wealthier sooner and, most importantly, retire earlier.

This is part of the reason I was able to retire at 34 from my finance career.

I just hit financial freedom faster by giving up all the status games. Now, looking back, I crave freedom much more than I do looking fake-rich.

When you don’t need to spend as much time making money, it leaves a lot of free time for other things – family, journaling, reading, talking, podcasts, etc.

Those activities all add to the quietness.

And over time that quietness compounds into a level of peace of mind that is indescribable. Someone tell the Lambo bros.

Maybe society has it all wrong

Perhaps wearing a penguin suit every day to an adult daycare while commuting in peak hour traffic to impress people who don’t even care about you to then earn money to buy luxury stuff you don’t need is a bad idea.

It’s also possible I’ve become a 40 year old grandpa. I’ll let you decide.

The quiet life is a different life. Trying to be loud and play status games to get rich is actually a hard game to play. What I love about the quiet life is anyone can achieve it.

The most dangerous people in the world are loud people who are trying to be successful. They will crush you like a bug for a $5 bill.

It’s time to consider a quieter way to succeed.

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— Tim