Investing in Experiences

Your life is the sum of your experiences.

• This just means that everything you do in life—all the daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences you have—adds up to who you are.
• When you look back on your life, the richness of those experiences will determine your judgment of how full a life you’ve led.
• So it stands to reason that you should put some serious thought and effort into planning the kinds of experiences that you want for yourself.
• This is not rocket science.
• Bill is not saying we should not delay-gratify. He just wants to point out that our culture tends to overemphasize the virtues of the ant—of hard work and delayed gratification—at the cost of other virtues.
• You can visualize your experience in the diagram above. Think of it as a game and you are gathering experience points. As you look back at year 7, what you rememeber are numerous experiences.

The Memory Dividend

Bill lets us know that dividends is not just monetary but also what we remember.

When you teach your daughter to swim or to ride a bike, it’s not because you think she’ll get a better-paying job with those new skills.Experiences are like that: When you spend time or money on experiences, they are not only enjoyable at the moment—they pay an ongoing dividend, the memory dividend.Experiences yield dividends because we humans have memory. We don’t start every day with a blank brain, like characters in so many sci-fi movies. We wake up every morning preloaded with a bunch of memories that we can access at any time—mainly to get around and navigate the world.

Khi bạn dạy con gái mình bơi hoặc đi xe đạp, không phải vì bạn nghĩ con bé sẽ kiếm được công việc lương cao hơn với những kỹ năng mới đó. Kinh nghiệm cũng giống như vậy: Khi bạn dành thời gian và tiền bạc cho những trải nghiệm, chúng không chỉ thú vị vào lúc này—họ trả một khoản cổ tức liên tục, khoản cổ tức trí nhớ. Trải nghiệm mang lại lợi tức vì con người chúng ta có trí nhớ. Chúng ta không bắt đầu mỗi ngày với bộ não trống rỗng, giống như các nhân vật trong rất nhiều bộ phim khoa học viễn tưởng. Chúng ta thức dậy vào mỗi buổi sáng với rất nhiều ký ức mà chúng ta có thể truy cập bất cứ lúc nào—chủ yếu là để đi lại và khám phá thế giới.

Once you start thinking about the memory dividend, something becomes really clear:

It pays to invest early. The earlier you start investing, the more time you have to reap your memory dividends.

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Life-Cycle Hypothesis

• Back in the 1950s, an economist named Franco Modigliani, who went on to win the Nobel Prize, posited something that came to be known as the Life-Cycle Hypothesis (LCH)