I found myself thinking a lot today about General Motors announcing layoffs for over 14,000 employees – 6,000 hourly and 8,000 salaried workers. This affected the factory workers making the cars, engineers designing the cars, managers, and executives. I know one of those workers.

When you talk about the pursuit of financial freedom, often you may have a vision of sunny beaches and European cruises. Younger folks may be thinking instead about a cross-country RV trip with the entire family or spending a year hiking across Southeast Asia.

But instead of being aspirational, I have to admit that my pursuit started with a basis in fear. I am afraid of being broke, bankrupt, or having to beg someone else for help. I hate, hate, hate not being control. Most households do not have the ability to withstand a few months of unemployment without major disruption. I can’t stand that feeling of vulnerability.

Financial freedom is not a black and white thing. It is a gradual process of increasing your resilience to things outside your control.

• Once you save up $500, you can withstand a car breakdown or a broken appliance. You don’t pay for your rent in weekly increments. You can pay for minor things without starting a cycle of debt that eventually spins out of control.
• Once you have a couple of months of expenses saved up, you can withstand a decent-sized medical bill or a series of bad luck that would otherwise send you into high-interest debt.
• Once you have a year of expenses saved up, you can withstand a layoff and short-term unemployment. You have the ability to move to a better geographic location to pursue better opportunities. You have options. You are not stuck.
• Once you have a few years of expenses saved up, you can withstand a layoff and longer-term unemployment. You can train yourself for something different, something better, something more aligned with your values. With or without a primary job, you can take some risks, perhaps start a new business venture.
• Once you have more than 10 years of expenses saved up, honestly, you have more money saved up than most people ever will at any age. If you reach this point, you probably have a system in place where it is likely just a matter of time until your investments grow that amount ever higher.

GM says they are trying to save money while times are good. Individual workers may need to have the same idea. From the Reuters article Money disasters can derail retirement:

Contrary to popular retirement saving strategies that are based on the assumption that procrastination is the root of the problem, the Rand researchers think there should be more focus on the probability of money disasters, which are much more common than most people assume. That scare would get people to focus on saving more during good times.

Many of my friends are that mix of skilled and lucky that the last time they involuntarily ended their job, they quickly found another job that paid even more. Maybe you’re one of those people too. But in the next big recession, which may or may not arrive soon, things might not be so easy.

Karyn Golden’s income was approaching $200,000 as she lived a carefree single existence at the peak of her career in Chicago, 20 years ago. She brokered real estate deals, served on boards and lunched with political leaders. She never imagined she would be where she is now – 70 and down to her last $200 in savings.

I started sharing my net worth anonymously because it was so hard talk about it publicly. Even today, my site logo is a voice bubble with money inside. Fast forward nearly 15 years later, and it is still unlikely that you know your coworkers’ salaries, let alone their net worth!

Do you know what the average tech worker in Silicon Valley makes? You might be surprised to know that with 5-9 years of experience, the average total compensation is nearly $300,000 per year. I know this from Jackie Luo’s Medium article I Know the Salaries of Thousands of Tech Employees. Luo herself is a software engineer at Square with 3 years of experience, and her base salary is $130,000 with a total annual compensation of about $230,000 (depends on stock price). She asked for anonymous data and compiled the following chart:

Her data reveals that stock grants are a huge part of total compensation (and one that is negotiable). As such, she encourages people to talk about their compensation and create a new culture of openness will help make things more fair. I admit I’m skeptical about that part. You’re fighting against a lot of deeply-ingrained discomfort. Is there any culture on Earth that talks about their wealth (and thus wealth inequality) openly?

I think that the best you can hope for is a trusted, popular website that becomes a huge database of anonymous submissions. I’m not sure any site has reached that level, but the cited ones trying include Glassdoor, Comparably, and Levels. While poking around, I even found a site that compares PhD stipends.

As an aside, this chart also explains why a disproportionate amount of early retirees are tech workers. If you’ve got people making $170,000 right out of college, I don’t care if you do live in the Bay Area, that is still a lot of income. If you have even a small degree of self-awareness, you know that many people live on far less, and that you could too. If you’re a tech couple pulling in $300,000+ a year, financial freedom within 15 years is on the menu. Whether you pick that option or not, that’s up to you.

The power of mindset was popularized by psychology professor Carol Dweck in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and others including the bestseller Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. The fixed mindset believes that success is based on innate abilities like talent and intelligence. The growth mindset believes that success is based on effort, good teaching, and persistence. Importantly, a person with a growth mindset believes that they have more control over their own fate.

In an article in The Atlantic, Olga Khazan explores why “find your passion” is bad advice for similar reasons. O’Keefe, Dweck and Walton have a new paper in the journal Psychological Science about the ““fixed theory of interests” versus the “growth theory of interests”.

Are passions really “found”, as if they are a hidden gem in a pile of rocks? The fixed theory assumes that passions are pre-formed. The growth theory suggest that you must gradually develop a small interest into a burning passion through time and effort. This path won’t always come quickly or easily. I liked this quote:

“If passions are things found fully formed, and your job is to look around the world for your passion—it’s a crazy thought,” Walton told me. “It doesn’t reflect the way I or my students experience school, where you go to a class and have a lecture or a conversation, and you think, That’s interesting. It’s through a process of investment and development that you develop an abiding passion in a field.”

One danger of the fixed theory is that you’ll pick something up and if it doesn’t “click” right away, you’ll just give up on it and move on to the next thing. You might miss out on a lot of potential passions because you didn’t dig deeper. Alternatively, once a person with a fixed mindset believes that they have discovered their “true passion”, they are likely to stop developing your other interests.

How do you know when to give up and when to keep trying? This is always the difficult part with no simple answer. I still prefer this simple diagram as a general guidance mechanism:

• It’s easier to fail and still try again if you are really interested in something.
• It’s easier (or faster) to get better at something if you are naturally talented at it.
• You are more motivated to fail and still try again if you get paid a lot of money to do it.

I often feel like people believe that passions aren’t allowed to also pay well. In fact, financial rewards should be another incentive to help you develop an interest into a passion. You’re trying to find something that you don’t mind working at day after day.

If you asked me as a teenager, I would have told you that I wanted to be a professor or a scientist in a lab coat. I had little interest in money, and I had a mental image of becoming the stereotypical “absent-minded” professor. It may sound weird, but engineering ended up being the “easy” career path for me. Personal finance started out only as a small side interest, but eventually it developed into a passion where now reading investing books is my idea of a nice afternoon. Sometimes I wish I had pursued finance or computer science earlier.

Bottom line. Finding your passion is rarely something that just “clicks”. It takes time and effort to develop an interest into a passion, and the fact that it is practical should be seen as a positive, not a negative. Sometimes your side interest can turn into a successful career/business, and sometimes it ends up better left as a side interest. Keep developing your interests, but watch your downside risk.

Here is some career advice by longtime Silicon Valley executive Ben Fathi in his post What I Learned from Working for Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. An excerpt (bold added):

What I can tell you as a piece of career advice is to only work on things you are passionate about. As long as you’re learning, keep at it. There is so much to learn and this industry moves so quickly that you will fall behind if you stop learning even for an instant.

As long as you’re moving in the right general direction, I used to tell people, it’s all good. Don’t try to plan out your entire road trip from New York to LA before you start out. (If I’d done that, I would have lived an entirely different life — never having even signed up for that first computer science class.) Instead, on your way to LA, just make sure you’re driving in a generally westerly direction, then keep going. And keep learning along the way, course correcting as necessary. You’ll eventually end up in the right place; and you’ll have a lot of fun along the way. I know I did.

You could make parallels between career and financial advice. Keep yourself moving in the right direction. As long as you’re learning, your career will progress. As long as you keep saving and investing in quality productive assets, your portfolio will grow over time. If you find something you don’t mind working feverishly on for 60-80 hours a week (ideally when you are young and don’t have a family to ignore), go for it. Add in some luck, and both your career and finances will be zooming along. If you aren’t zooming right now, don’t worry. Just keep moving forward in the right general direction.